Half the time I'm not even sure what the hell is so bad about what I said but if you acted like those people you would think I had kicked a kitten or something. People today are big babies. I think a big part of this mindset was born from the idea that everybody's ideas are just as valid as anybody else's. They're not.
I'm only tangentially aware of AH through osmosis on various sister sites but I posit the boldfaced is the issue, and not just limited there, people, in general, are less mature.
I want to point to this deeply disturbing Reddit thread where a person asked about their parrot calling a transgender member of the family by their deadname (Name they used before transitioning). Now after getting some horrifically bad press when this went viral, Reddit removed the most offending comments and locked the thread. However, you can still get the gist of it and there are pictures online
Being fair some people who actually understood parrots also gave some reasonable advice on how to get a parrot to quit using the name, the same way they can be trained to quit using profanity. But for the posters urging the parrot (a member of the family of several years) to be killed because it's using the wrong name for a transitioned person are going off the theory that hearing a word you don't like is lethal, even if there are no bad intentions behind it and it's coming from a beloved family pet.
I would point to a trend in non-discipline that began in the 40s and continued to increase ever since. It was quite common and professed by experts like
Dr. Spock (No, not from Star Trek). No spanking, no discipline, no trying to instill values in your child, just let them be free.
Imma link to some excerpts from the highly influential text
The Unfree Child to give some idea of the levels this kind of thinking has in academia.
A. S. Neill said:
Once, when I lectured in a seaside town in England I remarked, “Do you mothers realize that every time you spank your child, you show that you are hating your child?”
This kind of sets the stage.
A. S. Neill said:
It may be no exaggeration to say that all children in our civilization are born in a life-disapproving atmosphere. The time table feeding advocates are basically anti-pleasure. They want the child to be disciplined in feeding because non-timetable feeding suggests orgastic pleasure at the breast. The nutriment argument is usually a rationalization; the deep motive is to mold the child into a disciplined creature who will put duty before pleasure.
Feeding your child at mealtimes is oppression, also babies apparently have orgasms from breastfeeding. You'll find this obsession with heavily sexualizing kids, toddlers, and even, as in this case, newborn babies quite common in this line of thinking. It's also notable that she's
literally saying putting duty ahead of personal and immediate pleasure is an innate bad, which explains a lot.
A. S. Neill said:
His natural functions were left alone during the diaper period. But when he began to crawl and perform on the floor, words like naughty and dirty began to float about the house, and a grim beginning was made in teaching him to be clean.
Terrible, evil parents prevent children from wallowing in feces and teach vile wicked cleanliness.
A. S. Neill said:
The lies about life became combined with fears when at the age of five his mother found him having genital play with his sister of four and the girl next door. The severe spanking that followed (Father added to it when he came home from work) forever conveyed to John the lesson that sex is filthy and sinful, something one must not even think of.
My god, how horrible a parent do you have to be to spank a child for something as wholesome as fingerbanging his 4-year-old sister?
A. S. Neill said:
The nursery training is very like the kennel training; the whipped child, like the whipped puppy, grows into an obedient, inferior adult. And as we train our dogs to suit our own purposes, so we train our children. In that kennel, the nursery, the human dogs must be clean; they must not bark too much; they must obey the whistle; they must feed when we think it convenient for them to feed.
I saw a hundred thousand obedient, fawning dogs wag their tails in the Templehof, Berlin, when in 1935; the great trainer Hitler whistled his commands.
Discipline leads directly to becoming Nazis. Nazis also tend to show up in their reasoning, a lot.
I realize this has been a roundabout bit of reasoning, and if people want to discuss it in detail (I'm dramatically condensing some of the stuff in these books for space so there's lots and lots to unpack, but this is the gist) we can start a new thread for it. But the point I'm working towards is that there is a subset of the population whose parents were
deeply influenced by this line of teaching, and thus the children were raised with minimal to no discipline and encouraged to seek their own gratification above all else. These people tend to think
disagreeing with them, or
saying words they don't like, are the
evilest things ever because they have been so lacking in discipline, so sheltered, and so protected from the consequences of their own actions that nothing worse than someone disagreeing with them has ever happened to them. They've been taught that not only is it bad to have self-discipline, or even to put off immediate self-gratification, putting off said gratification
leads directly to becoming a Nazi. So needless to say, they react with extreme harshness to people saying anything they don't like, after all, mean words = Nazi so directly attacking anybody who disagrees with them can only be a net good as it keeps down Nazis.
TL;DR, these people act like babies because certain trendy forms of childcare ensured they never actually developed past the phase of self-centeredness, lack of any control, and demand for immediate gratification of every whim common to babies.
