domain:themotte.org
Tree
7m ago
Raising a good, happy, productive human. People have been looking for this magical parenting style that explains why Joe is good and Jack Y is bad for centuries, and they haven't found it. It's genetics or it's random.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
9m ago
, and those who did were either immigrants, bohemians, or men old enough to have been around the last time beards were in fashion.
I'll add another to this list, from what I know about my own state from that time period: backwoodsmen. The Alaskan "sourdough" is pretty much never clean-shaven.
In fact, AIUI, facial hair has pretty much always been more common on (non-Native) men here in AK as compared to the rest of the US. And maybe it's that we're a "red state" on top of that, but I don't recall facial hair ever being particularly "left-coded" here, at least within my lifetime — it was more that being clean-shaven was often the sign of a Cheechako (newcomer) and/or military.
stuckinbathroom
11m ago
Hard cases make bad law. Bad law makes easy cases. Easy cases make good law. Good law makes hard cases.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
22m ago
And from adoption studies we know that parenting does not matter much.
Prima facie, this sounds absurd. Does not matter much for what?
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
26m ago
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A company owns a nine-acre (four-hectare) piece of land (comprising three lots) that straddles the boundary between two municipalities, Allentown and Bethlehem. (This Google Maps link shows the location. This screenshot of the county's GIS map shows the municipal boundary.) The company wants to build a complex of four apartment buildings on the land. On this piece of land, Bethlehem's zone allows apartment buildings, but Allentown's zone does not, so the company is getting all the zoning approvals through Bethlehem.
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More specifically, Bethlehem's zone allows an apartment building to be built only if there is a commercial use on its first floor, but this requirement is waived if the apartment building faces a "local street" rather than an "arterial street". The company asks the Bethlehem zoning board to rule that all four buildings in the complex count as facing North Wahneta Street in Allentown, which is a local street, even though building 4, when considered individually, actually faces West Broad Street in Bethlehem, which is an arterial street. Bolstering this argument, the complex's main entrance will be on North Wahneta Street, while there will be a fence blocking access from West Broad Street.
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The Bethlehem zoning officer recommends that the petition be rejected, but the Bethlehem zoning board approves it anyway. Since the piece of land counts as a "corner lot" (indeed, it adjoins five different streets), the zoning code allows the company to choose whichever street it wants as the street that the entire lot faces, without considering individual buildings. And judicial precedent states that a zoning board can acknowledge the existence of land in a different municipality without being guilty of exercising its jurisdiction outside its own borders.* The Bethlehem government appeals**, along with several disgruntled single-family-residential neighbors who don't want to live next to an apartment complex, but the trial court affirms.
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The appeals panel reverses. (1) Under the unique circumstances of this case, the Bethlehem zoning board actually is exercising its jurisdiction outside its own borders, because it is giving the nod to an apartment building that "faces" an Allentown street and sits partially on Allentown land but would be forbidden in Allentown's zone, enabling an end run around Allentown's zoning code. And (2) the designation of building 4 as facing a street that actually lies behind building 4 would run afoul of other parts of Bethlehem's zoning code (e. g., a prohibition on putting an apartment building's parking lot between the building and its front lot line), which the zoning board completely overlooked. Finally, even if those first two points were not valid, (3) there is not even any evidence in the record that North Wahneta Street counts as a local street under Bethlehem's zoning code in the first place! Therefore, building 4 must be considered to face West Broad Street in Bethlehem, not North Wahneta Street in Allentown.
*In that case: A company owned a 43-acre (17-hectare) piece of land straddling the boundary between two municipalities, Cheltenham and Springfield. Cheltenham's zoning code required a 100-foot (30-meter) setback from the property line. The Cheltenham govt. argued that this setback should also apply to the municipal boundary in the middle of the piece of land, but the Cheltenham zoning board rejected this argument**, and the trial court and the appeals panel affirmed. "Hamilton Hills is clearly distinguishable because it pertained to [whether a developer could count open space in one municipality toward another municipality's open-space requirement], not setback provisions. The zoning board simply found that the municipal boundary line was not a property line for measuring setbacks. In so concluding, the zoning board did not exert any control over land located in another municipality."
**Yes, in each of these two cases the government and the zoning board of the same municipality were opponents. Apparently, a zoning board is considered a quasi-judicial entity that is independent of the government that appointed all of its members.
georgioz
33m ago
Is there any solid evidence of this psychological damage?
Yeah, take any study for results of children in orphanages vs children in intact families. Putting infants and toddlers into daycare is nothing short of part-time orphanage.
And from adoption studies we know that parenting does not matter much.
This is only partly true, limited to rationalists trying to raise some supergeniuses. Parenting obviously matters especially in negative way - malnutrition, abuse and other negative effects matter very, very much and can have huge consequences. I'd argue that daycare for infants and toddlers is such a case.
Tree
41m ago
Is there any solid evidence of this psychological damage? A lot of parents, starting from month 6, try to ignore their kids crying, so that they cry less and become less of a burden (they are far more coddled now than they used to be). And from adoption studies we know that parenting does not matter much.
This is horrible. Putting any child younger than 3 years into such a facility is equivalent to putting them part-time into orphanage. Infants and toddlers do not have emotional regulation to handle that and they need regular skin-to-skin contact with mothers and to lesser degree with fathers. Otherwise they can develop similar symptoms to those of institutionalized children with all the baggage - learned helplessness, closing into their internal world as they know outside help is not coming even after hours of crying etc.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1hr ago
WTF are you doing. This is crazy talk. GTFO ASAP.
Acronyms aside, there is a whole non-crazy world out there, and you do yourself a disservice by associating with this particular flavour of deluded crazy. Whatever it is you end up losing by categorically rejecting this business, it's not worth getting dragged into it. If a friendship breaks over this, then what kind of friendship was it? Rhetorical question.
Get out of there. Don't go along with it. Sticking one's dick in crazy is one mistake one can make, but sticking the whole of you into crazy for weeks on end is another.
Agreed, there is moderate social stigma around putting children younger than 3 years into any facility (as it should be in my opinion). During socialism, there was a program for daycare for children 1-3 years old called jasle - and they still exist, but are generally frown upon. There is also incentive structure put in place where the government provides assistance to stay-at-home mothers up until the child is three years old, which gets cut if the mother returns to work or the child is put into daycare. Preschool is generally accessible only for children three years old or older with some rare exceptions.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
1hr ago
DSM-5 diagnostic criteria for BPD:
A pervasive pattern of instability of interpersonal relationships, self-image and affects, and marked impulsivity beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts, as indicated by five (or more) or the following:
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Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment (Note: Do not include suicidal or self-mutilating behaviour covered in Criterion 5) ✅
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A pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships characterised by alternating between extremes of idealisation and devaluation ✅
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Identity disturbance: markedly and persistently unstable self-image or sense of self
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Impulsivity in at least two areas that are potentially self-damaging (e.g. spending ✅, sex ✅, substance abuse ✅, reckless driving, binge eating) (Note: Do not include suicidal or self-mutilating behaviour covered in Criterion 5)
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Recurrent suicidal behaviour, gestures, or threats, or self-mutilating behaviour
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Affective instability due to a marked reactivity of mood (e.g. intense episodic dysphoria, irritability or anxiety usually lasting a few hours and only rarely more than a few days) ✅
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Chronic feelings of emptiness Inappropriate, intense anger or difficulty controlling anger (e.g. frequent displays of temper ✅, constant anger ✅, recurrent physical fights)
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Transient, stress-related paranoid ideation or severe dissociative symptoms
cae_jones
1hr ago
At this point, it's down to my friend calling me frequently to try and convince me to attend "The Awakening" (the $7500 retreat that takes the better part of a month and which was described as kinda like the workshop I went to, but even more so), while I'm trying to figure out what I can do to get her out. She is at least still doing unrelated things with her family, including some traveling soon, which is more non-cult activity than I witnessed when I was there.
Also, after consulting Chat GPT and Wikipedia, I think I need to start referring to it as "Large Group Attitude Transformation" instead of a cult, just in case lawyers get involved. This guy claims inspiration from Werner Erhard, whose ideological successors have been known to sue people for calling them cults. So I am legally encouraged to describe it as not a cult, just an emotionally exploitative money sink of a style that has been condemned by the American Psychological Association for their practices worsening mental health. (This back before the APA became politically captured and started producing therapists who act as money sinks and worsen mental health.)
So ... I would rather not spend $7.5k and request another couple weeks off work for more of that. But everything I've found suggests that being openly negative about it would be counterproductive, and providing a supportive alternative that is outside the group is the best option. The trouble is I'm too much of a coward to just say "Yeah, I'm not going. Can we still be friends?"
rayon
waifutech enthusiast
1hr ago
I only really came to appreciate how many of the boxes on the diagnostic check list she ticked when I entered psych training.
Post check list? Uh, asking for a friend.
FWIW, the "nazi by association" rule has been strongly enforced by leftists and the leftist-dominated mainstream for a long time, has been weaponized, codified in rules and even law, has been a defining aspect of the German political landscape for generations (still being called the "Firewall" here). It's absolutely the water that most media swim in, classical as well as social, and the preferred weapon of SJWs and SJW-influenced useful idiots everywhere.
Anecdote: I used to discuss politics with my mother. Once, as she was mid-rant about the nazis ruining society, I told her that I had gotten to know an AfD voter and that they were an actual human being. Since then we never have spoken about politics again. Her way of eliding the issue that, by the rule of association and a failure to apply the rule correctly, I was now on the wrong side.
This isn't some new or poorly-observed phenomenon (just to be clear; I'm not implying that you see it that way), but a core doctrine of the left in the culture war.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
2hr ago
Is there a reason the counterproductive effect of leptin in the obese isn't more common knowledge?
Many things about basic biology aren't common knowledge! I don't see a specific reason for why this isn't better known.
Is there research being done on "fixing" leptin behavior? Or is semaglutide basically that fix?
There's a single drug called metraleptin, which was once considered immensely promising for treating leptin resistance. Didn't work, failed miserably in trials.
It does, however, work excellently in a rare genetic condition called congenital leptin deficiency, and is occasionally used for lipodystrophy. The difference is that CLD patients lack leptin in the first place, which is giving them the recombinant version helps, whereas obese people have bodies that ignore leptin levels, regardless of how much more we can throw in.
GLP-1 drugs sidestep the whole problem by using an entirely different pathway (I did say I was simplifying! Keeping my head straight about how exactly Ozempic works gives me a headache)
I know some people have been able to stop being obese via surgeries like stomach constriction, but that sometimes it doesn't work and they still feel compelled to overeat. Is there a separate mechanism in action for people where reducing stomach size also reduces inability to feel satiety versus those where it doesn't help?
We don't really know how bariatric surgery works.
I'm not kidding here, we genuinely are rather unsure about the mechanism of action. Most of the commonly advanced suggestions were found to be wrong or inadequate at best.
If they are hungry no matter how much they eat, does "fake" eating offer any help? Eating extreme low calorie high fiber foods? Chewing gum? I know another poster already said drinking water didn't help him
Yes, these do help a little bit, but nowhere near as much as Ozempic does.
Hunger is surprisingly complicated, and has multiple mechanisms behind it.
The act of chewing and tasting sends signals to the brain that prepare the body for food (this is the "cephalic phase response"). This can satisfy the "oral fixation" component of hunger, the simple desire to be chewing on something.
The stomach wall contains mechanoreceptors that sense stretch. When you eat a large volume of food (like a huge salad or a bowl of broth), these receptors are activated, regardless of the calorie content. Trying to fill yourself with low calorie food is an approach known as "volumetrics", and it works okay.
I don't think just drinking water would work as well, because you'd need an uncomfortable amount to fill your stomach, and the body would quickly realize that it's just water, without calories. The ancestral environment definitely had water, and didn't have diet coke (citation hopefully not needed). If starving people tried to keep themselves content by going to a pond, it was probably weeded out quick.
If it wasn't clear in my original post, I'm a willpower skeptic, I think it's profoundly stupid to assume obesity is a willpower problem, even if I don't know how to imagine the experience of what it feels like to fight the urge to eat without using willpower as a proxy for the challenge
My apologies for giving you the impression that was targeted at you. It was meant entirely for the people who think the usage of Ozempic is some kind of moral failing, and they're not an imaginary strawman, at least not on Twitter. I don't seem to recall much in the way of pushback against Ozempic here, barring people who still have reservations about its safety profile (it's remarkably safe, we have evidence for that claim, and loads of it).
Clementine
2hr ago
Thank you!
- Is there a reason the counterproductive effect of leptin in the obese isn't more common knowledge?
- Is there research being done on "fixing" leptin behavior? Or is semaglutide basically that fix?
- I know some people have been able to stop being obese via surgeries like stomach constriction, but that sometimes it doesn't work and they still feel compelled to overeat. Is there a separate mechanism in action for people where reducing stomach size also reduces inability to feel satiety versus those where it doesn't help?
- If they are hungry no matter how much they eat, does "fake" eating offer any help? Eating extreme low calorie high fiber foods? Chewing gum? I know another poster already said drinking water didn't help him.
(If it wasn't clear in my original post, I'm a willpower skeptic, I think it's profoundly stupid to assume obesity is a willpower problem, even if I don't know how to imagine the experience of what it feels like to fight the urge to eat without using willpower as a proxy for the challenge)
Well if you can't trust a man like Himmler regarding the necessity of burning Jewish bodies en masse, whom can you trust?
Can you trust the Soviet investigators who "investigated" Auschwitz? The authors of the Soviet investigation of the Katyn massacre, which falsely blamed the Germans for a crime that they had actually committed, submitted their report as evidence in the Nuremberg trial (USSR-54), and they were the same as the authors of the Soviet report on the investigation of Auschwitz (USSR-8), with the addition of that biology quack Trofim Lysenko as a signatory to the Auschwitz investigation.
Can you trust the confession of someone that was extracted through physical torture, under duress with no access to legal representation and no access to documentary evidence? It's not about trust, it's about weighing the quality of the evidence against the nature of the claims being made. Himmler's denial is relevant because Himmler's explanation for the conditions on the Eastern Front aligns with an enormous body of documentary evidence, whereas the documentary evidence for gas chambers disguised as shower rooms performing executions of millions of people is completely nonexistent.
Does Hoss getting one thing wrong mean he got it all wrong? Does being tortured on the outset of his capture thereafter mean nothing he ever said could be taken as factual? Even if corroborated?
Hoess did not get "one thing wrong." He also claimed there were gas chambers at Dachau and Mauthausen, which is known not to be true. His confession also claimed 3 million people were killed in Auschwitz, a wildly inflated number that aligned with Soviet propaganda. He identified "Wolzek" as an extermination camp, but there is no "Wolzek" camp at all it doesn't exist. The lack of corroboration for these claims is what stands out. There's no documentary record or physical evidence to corroborate the claims of millions of people gassed in secret extermination facilities.
But more importantly, it's not that Hoess got "one thing wrong" it's that the sequence of events described are impossible.
Far as I can tell, Treblinka I was active in summer 1941 and Treblinka II, the extermination camp, was opened in 1942. The fact you seem totally ignorant of the difference between Treblinkas I and II would seemingly cast doubt on you actually having done your homework here. If you had, you'd presumably head some amateur like me off from pointing that out.
According to mainstream historiography, there were no gassings at all, ever, in Treblinka I, which was a penal/labor camp. Treblinka II, the alleged extermination camp, did not open until July 1942 and nobody was gassed at Treblinka before that date. As you pointed out, gassings in Auschwitz allegedly began in August 1941 and construction of the alleged "extermination camp" began shortly after that. So this confession claiming Hoess visited Treblinka in 1941 and observed gassings and therefore decided to use Zyklon B is not possible. It's not that a date was mixed up, it's that the sequence of events is not possible. The Treblinka Extermination camp did not exist in 1941, there were never any gas chambers at the Treblinka I penal camp.
So the easy explanation here is that when Hoss said "extermination camps" as of 1941, he meant "concentration camps primarily for labor that were also doing exterminations at the time"; not "camps/facilities that had been built explicitly for mass extermination." Those efficiency upgrades came in 1942. There's no contradiction.
There is no claim anywhere by mainstream historians of any gassings in Treblinka I ever. The gassings are unanimously claimed to have started in July 1942. So the claim from Hoess's "confession" that he visited Treblinka in 1941 to observe gassings, and therefore decided to use Zyklon B for gassings at Auschwitz, is not a possible sequence of events.
But Yankel Wiernik's pamphlet on Treblinka had already been published by this point. So Hoess describing a visit to the Treblinka extermination camp, rather than being an independent account of the "Treblinka Extermination camp", was likely derived from Wiernik's work and intended to provide corroboration from a much more reliable witness than an anonymous escapee who wrote the pamphlet.
There is aerial photography showing evidence of the dismantled structures, and the allowed archelogy and ground radar has found evidence.
There have been no excavations of any mass graves on the site. The ground radar has not "found evidence", or any more evidence than the same ground radar evidence at Kamloops Indian Reserve found evidence for the mass graves of children. The ground radar results essentially disprove the narrative as there were no ground disturbances found consistent with the size, shape, or location of the graves allegedly used to bury 800,000 people.... before they were all supposedly unburied and cremated on open-air pyres over 120 days. It's an absurd story.
FtttG
3hr ago
It's not quite the same thing, but the article by Kevin Mims I linked above contains some fairly detailed statistical analysis of novelists whose novels get nominated for the National Book Awards. He argues that, contrary to the National Book Foundation's claims that its nominees are increasingly diverse, they've actually become less diverse over time, in the sense that the majority of nominees are people who studied English lit at undergraduate level before completing an MFA in creative writing - whereas many earlier winners and nominees for the award had no formal training in creative writing and in many cases no third-level education. It'd be interesting to see if this is also true of screenwriters.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3hr ago
To be fair, my own brother, and most of my family, did strongly encourage me not to date her.
You're not the only one affected, and that's the point of the saying. What's impossible to recognize when you've been targeted, is fairly easy when you look at the situation from the outside
I personally also subscribe to something in my head I've termed the Total Media Hypothesis: as society progresses, but old media sticks around in easily accessible form, the best of the older media is still excellent quality capable of delivering enjoyment and increasingly competes with new offerings. Naturally, there will always be a place for newer media due to network effects and recency bias, but on the whole eventually new media will get squeezed asymptotically to almost exclusively fit into the maximum capacity of this recency segment in the long run, because the quality simply can't otherwise compete. As to what exactly this asymptotic number is, that's up for debate, and depends on media type, but I'd hazard a guess at about one quarter at most. Meaning, that in the next few decades, total new release movie and TV consumption will account for at most a quarter of all total media consumption in any given year.
We already see this happening with video games: the old games are, quite often, still pretty fun, and the graphics are decent enough in many cases. This limits opportunities for newcomers. It's also magnified by a segment of 'evergreen' games that have reached a critical community/fun/variety threshold such that they consume many hours and effectively never die, such as League of Legends and Counterstrike, and maybe even Minecraft. These suck up so many gamer hours that new (especially multiplayer) entrants struggle to get enough oxygen. Of course although many people like to rewatch movies, there isn't anything quite like the evergreen multiplayer games, but still, in terms of hours played current-year releases only account for like 10 to 15 percent ish of playtime (source). For books, it's more like one third of sales are new books, but that's sales; if we count reading library books which are mostly older books, and count only books not retail pricing value, that number surely drops significantly and I wouldn't be surprised if it ended up being a similar percentage. So maybe my asymptote guess is high and 15% is more realistic.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
3hr ago
My man, I dated a woman with BPD, who was arguably the love of my life. I was a doctor by that point, though I only really came to appreciate how many of the boxes on the diagnostic check list she ticked when I entered psych training. It can be very hard to tell when you start dating, including by the time you fall in love :(
Until that point, it's manic pixie dreamgirl paradise.
(To be fair, my own brother, and most of my family, did strongly encourage me not to date her. But that pussy game too strong for me, a man of the flesh.)
self_made_human
C'est la vie
3hr ago
This article in particular presents people who lost weight, noticed immediate massive benefits in their life they're desperate to keep, and yet still can't keep the weight from coming back. It is just the satiety setpoint being set so high it's torture for them to not eat to the point of overeating?
Yes.
The mechanism via which the body "hungers" is somewhat complex, but can be usefully simplified down to the action of ghrelin, a hormone produced in the stomach which makes you hungrier, and leptin, which does the opposite.
Surprisingly, obese people have more adipose tissue, which produces leptin. However, it ceases to have the usual satiety inducing effect, as the body becomes resistant to its action. The way this is perceived is the body interpreting the lack of signal for being full as a sign of starvation.
And starvation sucks. Other than disease, it's probably what's killed the most humans in all of history, and you can imagine that it's a very unpleasant state that the individual feels compelled to rectify. The easiest solution being to eat more, till the pain goes away.
They're also being struck with a double-whammy. In lean people, eating causes suppression of the levels of ghrelin, in obese people, it doesn't. So they feel less full, with the same amount of food, as compared to those at a healthy weight. Hence they feel compelled to not just eat, but eat excessive amounts for the sake of relief.
I can only reiterate that starving sucks, and the body will drive you crazy in order to avoid that feeling. It's too dumb to know or care that you are, objectively, perfectly well fed. Waterboarding feels just as bad as actual drowning despite the ~nil risk of death.
While doctors usually feel compelled to tell their patients to watch their weight and diet, this almost never actually works. I consider myself a pragmatic one, and advice that isn't actioned in practise is about as useless as advice that doesn't work at all. I was on the Ozempic hype-train well before it was cool.
My mother is very obese, and has been for over half her life now. She's diabetic, and has developed fatty liver with hepatic fibrosis. Her own commitments to working out and dieting never held. She's a doctor herself, so she knows, on an intellectual level, what the risks are. She's been driven to tears by the scolding she gets from my grandpa or my dad who genuinely care for her and want her to lose weight, and after gentle suggestions failed, were driven to tough love.
None of it worked. She loved to eat, and reducing her caloric intake was pure agony. For a long time, I was resigned to the seeming inevitability that she'd head into cirrhosis, and I'd have to steel myself up for a liver donation. It's a nasty, nasty surgery, nothing like giving away a kidney. It leaves a grossly disfiguring scar, leaving aside the significant risk of death during and after the procedure. I'd do it for my mom, because I do love her.
Eventually, when Ozempic, or oral formulations of semaglutide, became available in the Indian market, I badgered her into seeing her endocrinologist and getting it prescribed. Despite the initial nausea and diarrhea, she eventually adapted, and lost the lost weight she's ever managed, and kept it that way. Right now, my priority is hounding her into going to that gent again and getting that dose upped, it's well overdue.
Exhortations to exercise failed. Asking her to watch her portion size and not snack failed. Driving her to tears failed.
The pill didn't.
When people get on their high horse and claim that using drugs to solve your problems is a crutch, it takes everything I have to not tell them to go fuck themselves with a rusty pole. It saved my mom, fuck you. Nothing you have to offer, including your empty words, comes close.
To hell with willpower. A world where we can power through our problems with pills is a better one as far as I'm concerned.
I'm a doctor for many reasons, but ranking highly among them is that I have an urge to find solutions to problems that actually work. Telling people to use their will to get over depression or diabetes doesn't, and the same is true for obesity. Claiming the moral high ground and virtue signaling? Doesn't beat adding years of healthy lifespan.
CertainlyWorse
No one is coming. It's just you.
3hr ago
Seems like the guy is removing the wife from his and his kid's lives with the help of an aunty that is a lawyer.
Further to your point though, I believe that such reckless endangerment of her family should be a criminal offense. Horrible horrible betrayal. I feel sorry for the family.
If there's one area I would support a certain type of vigilantism, its where the safety of children is concerned. I don't have kids myself, but I'm surprised that fathers don't take matters into their own hands more often. I guess they're smart enough to know that they could lose custody themselves if they didn't let the justice system take care of things and then where would the kids be?
I don't think those underfed, diseased romanian orphans can tell us much about the effect of letting your kids cry. I do agree that extreme malnutrition, physical trauma, lack of hygiene do matter to kids' outcome. I don't think modern daycares are anywhere near that level.
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