From: Randall Randall (randall@randallsquared.com)
Date: Sat Jul 05 2003 - 20:06:14 MDT
On Saturday, July 5, 2003, at 09:08 PM, Lee Corbin wrote:
> Randall writes
>
>> Let me get this straight. You're aware that people who are sent [to
>> Tranquility] have committed nothing except resisting being told what
>> to do? One person was sent here for having the wrong boyfriend.
>
> I must hasten to add, again, that there is a huge diversity of
> cases, and that I am choosing to address only the fraction in
> which were I to understand the situation much more fully, I would
> sympathize with the parents.
You appear to be assuming your conclusions. :)
> We agree totally in those cases that the parents would be
> unable to get sympathy from family councilors and experienced
> judges of human character. I hope that you are, as I am,
> entertaining the most extreme cases that you can think of.
Actually, I was entertaining the cases I thought most likely. It
seems to me that kids sent here are more likely to have parents
that are distracted, impatient, and wealthy than kids who are not.
Further, I do not necessarily, given the above selection bias,
believe that those kids are more likely to be "problem children"
than others of their parental situation.
That is, I'm more likely to believe bad parenting is the root cause
than an intrinsically bad kid. Some kids may, in fact, be harder to
raise well than most, but I think those kids are more likely to be
in juvenile prison than at Tranquility.
> Sorry to repeat---I do grant that you probably acceded to my
> request in the previous paragraph. But the custodians are being
> paid by the parents, so you really mean, 'How stupid could it be
> for the parents...', and I contend that there are cases in which
> what the parents are doing is not unreasonable.
No, I don't really mean that. :) The parents are not without moral or
ethical guilt, perhaps, but my scorn is mostly reserved for those who
actually perform actions, rather than those who only condone or request
that such actions be performed.
>> I would imagine (though I'm not a psychologist or doctor) that this
>> is equivalent to "Stockholm syndrome". If you allow the process to
>> continue to completion, you get a model serf. If you rescue the
>> individual halfway through, you get an angry victim who'd love to
>> press charges. In a free society, rescuing these people halfway
>> through would be a fine business opportunity.
>
> So far, you have restricted yourself to criticizing the actions of
> the parents and their employees, and for that I commend you. By
> now, most commenters on your side would be proposing that force be
> used to prevent parents from taking these steps. As I hinted in
> my reply to Eliezer, this induces a great irony: the state may be
> permitted to apply force, but not the parents.
As an anarchist, I don't agree that the State should be permitted.
My own principle is that for legal action to be justified, a harmed
party must be willing to demand restitution. Therefore, while I'm
saddened by what happened to most of the ex-inmates of Tranquility,
I expect that nothing much should be done about it (I assume that the
brainwashing worked). My own feeling is that something should be
done to save the current inmates, insofar as they want to be saved.
In the current political and legal environment, however, I'm not
sure that it is possible to do anything about it. :(
> Also, I do not think that you can produce, even considering all of
> history, an example of a functioning society in which children's
> legal rights equaled those of adults.
That's okay; someone (dunno who) said recently that history is a
guide to how far we are, but not a guide for how far we can go.
-- Randall Randall <randall@randallsquared.com> "Not only can money buy happiness, it isn't even particularly expensive any more." -- Spike Jones
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