According to Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanking

"Spankings were however also, especially in the past, administered to other persons considered as legal (and/or moral) minors (sometimes illegally still treated as such), including:

*Wives

*Servants

*Slaves"

(I've abreviated the original)

This seems quite revealing to me about what spanking is really about. It's for asserting your property rights and as a deliberate humiliation of the victim. In today's society we don't even tolerate beatings of prisoners.

I'm sorry, but I just don't buy the argument that it's done for the good of the child.

Dusty,

I think people are trying to have a debate here. If you want to call me names- you have my email address.

If people want to judge whether I was dishonest in representing the Lamott article- they can read my comments themselves. They're still on the page.

I'm not going to write anymore to you.

Bravus, with all respect, I urge you (and everyone else) to read the blog page referenced in the article by the mother who tried 'a little tap' that left no bruises using plastic tubing to see what it felt like.

"It's Just A Little Plastic Tubing..."

http://onorach.blogspot.com/2006/04/its-just-little-plastic-tubing.html

As for the rationality of the posters. Studies have shown that people tend to think other people make decisions based on emotion, whereas they generally perceive their own decisions to have been made based on rational choices. (See Michael Shermer, 'How we believe')

And to be facetious- are you saying that slippery-slope arguments are a slippery slope? It's difficult to meaningfully criticize other people's arguments in this sort of way. Almost any statement of opinion can be categorized as 'the famous X logical fallacy' (insert X here).

By the way, I dealt with the perceived conflation of more serious forms of abuse with slapping in my earlier letters. I don't think that anyone is trying to minimize serious abuse on these pages.

You raised an important point. These people are talking about thrashing toddlers (and below).

I have to say that if I ever saw someone applying rubber tubing to a 6 month old I would be seriously considering smacking the teeth out of the person doing it.

Let's be clear on this.

As many posters on Amazon have pointed out-

The Pearl's book is an abuse manual.

We're not talking some delicate left-wing niceties here. 'To Train a Child' gives clear instructions on how to keep your children in terror from the age of a few months onwards.

I'd take the prophets of the apocalypse a little more seriously if they didn't seem to be looking forward to it so much. I'm not turning my apartment into a compound just yet.

I'm Irish, and in TX doing postdoctoral research on a H1B.

Here is the news- there are few American graduate and post-doctoral students left in physics and chemistry. All of your MITs and Harvards and Caltechs are popultated by Asian and European workers.

Here is the news- without us H1B's, American research would collapse in a week.

I'm not saying Americans can't make good scientists. However, science is international and a good scientific community generally includes people from many nations working together.

By the way, I'm also going to steal your girlfriend!

What we really want to know about is:

Snakes on a Plane

As someone on a H1B..

I'm not suggesting that foreign students work harder- or are smarter or whatever.

I am pointing out that especially in science, it is not possible in any country to compete internationally without having experts from all over the world to choose from. It's the same story in Britain and Ireland- we also need diverse departments.

Let's leave the borderline racism out of this discussion OK? If a Chinese student gets a PhD or a postdoc- then he/she probably deserved it. It's not anything to do with a Chinese robotic work 24 hours a day gene.

Gee- if you're a foreigner- you're either too stupid to be paid the same as everyone else for equivalent work, or you're cheating the system by being too smart and productive.

Science and technology are always done best by a racial mix of more diverse people than you would find in the most San Francisco carnivals.

The group that was most responsible for breakthroughs made in US science over the past century is in my opinion the immigrant European Jews.

make me feel about as welcome in your country as bird flu.

I'm not an economist, and I'm sure there's a lot of good arguments against the H1B visa.

Let's stop with the nationalist and the quasi-racist remarks though...

Science in this (or any) country would collapse without (to name a few) Indians, Chinese, immigrant Jews, Koreans, Americans and Russians.

Maybe you can make cars or build bridges using only Americans. I don't know- but you sure can't do internationally competitive science that way.

I'd love to stay in the states. I'll see what happens.