“They are often a last resort for parents struggling with children with behavioral problems, suicidal thoughts, and substance abuse issues. Depending on the state, these rehab centers—a multi-billion-dollar industry—have few regulations, and there are no overarching federal standards governing them. Many are faith-based facilities designed to convert teens into born-again Christians and are therefore exempt from regulation in some states.”
If anybody wants to read a comic with the perspective of someone that went through one of these places and spent the years after fighting against them, I stumbled upon this one a few years ago: https://elan.school/
I am not in any way affiliated with the author, it's just one of the few books with real content that I've read in a long time.
I had no idea about Elan School. The comic is absolutely amazing and I've just spent the last several hours reading the first half of it. Absolutely amazing and hard to just imagine the horrific physical and psychological abuse that occurred at this "school."
This is horrifying. "There oughtta be a law" is my first reaction... What a useless thought. This is one of those examples of "the details matter". "Tough love", or "tough on crime", or other such empty utterances are useful only to give catharsis to a subset of people, and always the subset who are not subject to this torture. Society needs ritual sacrifice, I guess... How depressing. If the details are made obvious, I suspect meant would think twice about such treatment.
Might take a karma hit for this, but whatever. Its the truth.
Christians are more concerned about *causing* extreme child abuse, and then turning around and claiming its to "save them", so the abuse isnt reallllly abuse.
Most of these camps cited are christian. And the people running them? Dogmatic christian fundamentalists. And these are the same types that run "pray the gay away" camps too.
And my inflammatory, albeit true comment also goes right back to the heart of the article:
"Reformatories were institutions where girls and young women who refused to conform to the Franco regime's Catholic values were detained - single mothers, girls with boyfriends, lesbians. Girls who'd been sexually assaulted were incarcerated, assuming the blame for their own abuse. Orphans and abandoned girls might also find themselves living behind convent walls."
Extremist Roman Catholic "values", demonization and imprisonment of 'unruly women', anti-LGBTQ. Same damned thing, again and again.
When are we going to actually look at these issues dispassionately and realize that religion itself is the problem?
So we're supposed to simultaneously discuss the article (General Franco's extremist Catholic task forces), but not identify the religious tropes behind this?
I read the article, and discussing the article. And as hackers, im curious as how to fix the problems.
I mean, of all the many, many talking points from the article 'This particular religious / cultural group is a global problem and must be eradicated, and (all of? Seems like it meant all of) its many billions of members are enthusiastic supporters or perpetrators of child abuse' is not one that leapt out to most people.
And even if it did, they didn't say it here. This is not the place for religious ideology.
I passionately hate my neighbours who listen to music really loudly in their garden all the time, but I don't call for their eradication on public fora unless there's a really, really specific relevance (like here, for example) and I also don't campaign against them on GitHub, my local supermarket, local government meetings, or other places where people are trying to do other things.
There are places for me to rant about my neighbours. There are entire discussions about noisy neighbours, my vicinity, local customs and manners etc. If I wanted to rant about them, those would be the place to do it.
But I don't, because I wouldn't actually gain anything from it. I'm not going to single handedly change the law on nuisance, and all a hate campaign could achieve would be, well, more hate. I want solutions, or quiet, and I won't achieve either of those by telling random strangers how terrible my neighbours are.
I'm sure you can think of the easiest solution to the hypothetical neighbour problem. It's not ideological and doesn't involve changing the hearts and minds of hundreds of people, none of whom are currently concerned about my neighbours.
It might look like I'm trivialising your point, but I promise, I'm not. Noisy neighbours, or an itchy foot, or even a literal broken fingernail, are a more immediate problem than 'we must rid the world of Christians', unless they are currently holding you hostage.
And the reason I'm bothering to write such a long-ass reply at all is because there is currently far too much intolerance and ethno-religious hatred being propogated and spread around the world. We know where this leads. It always leads the same way, there is no possibility of a happy ending. We have tried 'that religion is the problem, let's persecute them' repeatedly and we end up in the sort of fascist dystopia we were reminded of literal moments ago in the article.
It's not ok to do it to Jews or Muslims, which means it's not ok to do it to Christians.
And it's not ok to let people spread those messages in bad faith, which means I've got to call out those spreading the same message in presumed good faith.
My neighbours are just annoying me, I can deal with that. Christians are just kinda weird but whatever, we've all got our foibles. Racists, dogmatics and puritans can believe whatever they want, I just won't listen to it.
And I invite you to step away from the brewing culture war too. It's more fun discussing tech and stuff.
> When are we going to actually look at these issues dispassionately and realize that religion itself is the problem?
Because it's not.
I've been interrogating this sort of question for most of my life. I am a queer agnostic who grew up in a religious part of the South and saw shades of this kind of abuse firsthand, mostly around queerness.
At first, I did blame religion, but with the benefit of hindsight, I realized something. In the context of queerness, almost nobody I ran into growing up hated queer people because they heard their preacher say so and thought it must be true. They hated them because they were massively insecure. They were terrified of being labeled gay. They were terrified of guys hitting on them. They were terrified of hitting on a woman who turned out to have been born as a man.
Religion isn't the problem. Instead, religion gives these sorts of insecure people a trump card that requires very little interrogation. However, if these folks weren't Christian or weren't even religious, I have no doubt that the underlying insecurities would remain, and simply manifest in a different way.
Once I realized this, it was actually a massive weight lifted off my shoulders. In particular, I was no longer confused as to why my friend groups that were majority Christian continued to be nice to me and treated me with respect, despite me being a atheist queer at the time. It opened the door to connecting with them on a deeper level of understanding, as well as leading to me dabbling with my own forms of non-Christian spirituality.
So yeah, religion isn't the problem. It's merely a mechanism that allows shitty people to be shitty.
You don't have to wonder. I have been hearing about several recent church schisms over certain folks thinking the church had become too accepting.
This is literally an example of individuals choosing their religion based on their own values. Folks on one side of the schism might criticize folks on the other side of the schism for not being true Christians, but it's ultimately a dispute over "Thou shalt not lie with another man," versus "Love thy neighbor."
Not directly, but people find ways to believe in a manner analogous to religious beliefs. Faith doesn't have to be directed only at traditional theist objects. Religious or not, people can believe things by faith and by logic.
To give an example, science is not a replacement for philosophy, nor is it implemented perfectly, but some people elevate it far beyond its means to answer certain inquiries. That is irrationality, or faith.
> science is not a replacement for philosophy, nor is it implemented perfectly,
Yes, but it is far better than a fraud. Therefore it is the best we have to understand the world. And fairy tales invented by illiterate people thousands of years ago aren't a path to understand the world. They're a fraud, plain and simple.
I think you're being uncharitable towards religion. While I agree that a belief such as "the Earth was made 6000 years ago" is ridiculous, a belief like "God wants us to love our neighbors" is not. I think "good beliefs" (a very loaded term, mind you) get rediscovered constantly, in religious and nonreligious contexts alike. These are beliefs attained through philosophical inquiry. The beliefs provided by science are complementary.
> I think you're being uncharitable towards religion.
You are correct. I am, deliberately, "being uncharitable towards religion". I had far too much Catholicism in my upbringing to be respectful of any religion. If you want to know what I mean by Catholicism read the story linked by the title post, about Catholic parents in Catholic Spain. My story wasn't that bad but I saw a lot of that prejudice, arrogance and intolerance. It isn't surprising that in 50 years the country of Spain went from majorly Catholic to majorly agnostic.
> a belief like "God wants us to love our neighbors" is not.
You don't need "God wants" in that. Empathy doesn't need "God". Unlike what church people think, non-religious people have empathy and decency, too. Human beings are social animals, doing empathy is a common trait that doesn't need "divine" justification.
I agree that religion isn't necessary, but it's not necessarily bad. You're making a big generalization. There are plenty of people who abuse religious beliefs, but I'm more concerned with calling out people who abuse principles from any cut of cloth, and religion is only a part of that.
It’s true. The supposedly “secular people” I know are always prattling about “human dignity” and stuff that sounds very religious. They don’t think of humans as walking meat like a non-religious person would.
> Even bonobo monkeys and elephants understand empathy for others.
Empathy is an emotion. Emotions are real. You can see emotions in brain scans. But anger, desire for revenge, disgust, in-group affinity, etc., are also real emotions! It's rational to use people's emotions to guide what society should do. But most putatively secular people disagree with that approach! They're constantly telling people to put aside their emotions in favor of supposed universal principles that sound suspiciously similar to religious beliefs.
> They're constantly telling people to put aside their emotions in favor of supposed universal principles
Yeah, sure! Those evil "putatively secular people" that burned tens of thousands of women during the witch hunt in Europe, killed hundreds of thousands of other people during the Crusades and the European religious wars of the 17th and 18th century, that condoned with the fascist and authoritarian regimes in Argentina, Spain and Portugal because they were against the scourge of communism, that blessed the slavery of Latin American indigenous peoples because it was meant to spread the blessing of Christianity... that was all made by "putatively secular people", like the Catholic Church, right?
I am so impressed by how well and deep you know and understand "putatively secular people"... Are all church people smart like that? /s
But what’s your non-religious basis for saying that those actions were bad? You pointed to empathy above. But empathy in humans is mainly directed to one’s own community. Animals and humans alike will happily take over the territory of rival clans. Which is why empathy didn’t prevent Europeans from colonizing the indigenous people of America. So what’s your basis for saying that, e.g., colonization was bad?
I have no problem with housecats hunting, but playing with their prey seems unnecessary (as in gratuitous harm). Still, I won't try housecats in a criminal court, because my understanding of them is too alien to make me confident in my judgement.
I have no problem with humans hunting, or defending themselves, or whatnot. I accept that some degree of violence is necessary, and a lot more can be plausibly justified. However, I draw the line at, say, humans killing each other for bad reason. If it is to be believed that I and these other humans are of the same species, of the same kind, and whatnot, I feel secure in judging them as I would judge myself, and those more familiar to me. Killing indigenous people on the basis of merely not converting to Christianity, and even burning them, is entirely unnecessary. A modern-day analogue would be roundly condemned, or so I should hope.
> empathy in humans is mainly directed to one’s own community.
Speak for yourself. I won't confuse empathy with tribalism, as you do. I'll take humanism [1], the notion that every person is equal in rights. This is my moral basis.
> humans alike will happily take over the territory of rival clans.
Tribalism, again. You don't get past that, do you?
> Which is why empathy didn’t prevent Europeans from colonizing the indigenous people
Yep, but neither did religion and those countries were very, very Christian. And, btw, even today the U.S. is the most religious among rich countries and, at the same time, the most imperialist. If religion is so good how come the most Christian country is so bad to the rest of the world? (I am from South America, btw).
They seem to be one of those individuals who cannot possibly comprehend the idea that many people simply find murder and rape to be horrible, awful acts that shouldn't be inflicted on others and hold that belief without needing to have the fear of god or an ancient collection of texts constantly reminding them to not rape and murder people.
The very idea of a person believing murder and rape to be horrible without a convoluted and often contradicting spiritual belief system is preposterous to them. Hence "rayiner"'s insistence that not treating people like shit simply must be a religious concept because "it sounds religious". These people genuinely believe someone not treating people like shit can only happen if you're terrified of going to hell or something.
They're somewhat rare but not rare enough. They're extremely dangerous people because, after all, the only thing keeping their desire to harm others in check is a fear of an ever elusive supernatural entity punishing them, instead of just simply not having such a desire.
Maybe the above isn't applicable to "rayiner" but people who say not treating people like shit "sounds religious" are almost always that type.
> They seem to be one of those individuals who cannot possibly comprehend the idea that many people simply find murder and rape to be horrible, awful acts that shouldn't be inflicted on others
I’m not denying that some people feel that way. Feelings are real, they’re chemical signals in your brain in response to stimuli. But we agree it’s not more than a feeling, right? And nothing makes the chemical signals in your brain more legitimate than the ones in someone else’s brain? Say we gather up our tribe, clan, nation, whatever. We take a vote based on people’s feelings. And 40% feel like you do, and 60% feel rage at the neighboring tribe/clan/nation and want to violently conquer them and take their resources. We tallied up two sets of chemical signals, and we should pick the more numerous feeling, correct?
Not sure why you're so insistent on avoiding the multiple questions people have asked you that are inconvenient for your narrative.
Why does believing something is right or wrong require religion or is in any way religious?
Why does someone having signals in their brain making them a believer of religion make their beliefs more justified than someone who does not?
Have you ever asked someone why they believe in god or do you just immediately stop questioning the "legitimacy" of their beliefs the moment you realize they believe in religion so they must be right?
People have explained to you why they believe x is wrong, you refuse to accept their answer and insist they "sound religious"
Why, in your opinion, must nonreligious people constantly justify their belief in x being wrong if you don't demand the same of religious people? Double standards.
> I won't confuse empathy with tribalism, as you do.
I’m just following your logic. You pointed to empathy as something even animals have. Empathy is a real thing in nature, you can see those feelings in brain scans. But so is tribalism or pack behavior. Why do you privilege one type of feeling or instinct over another? What’s the basis for that distinction?
> I'll take humanism [1], the notion that every person is equal in rights.
What is the nature of this assertion? Is it a falsifiable scientific fact?
> I’m just following your logic. You pointed to empathy as something even animals have. Empathy is a real thing in nature, you can see those feelings in brain scans. But so is tribalism or pack behavior. Why do you privilege one type of feeling or instinct over another? What’s the basis for that distinction?
Please be transparent on your own beliefs too, if you demand this of others. On what basis do you stake your beliefs? Are you being empathetic? Are you being tribal?
> What is the nature of this assertion? Is it a falsifiable scientific fact?
Science alone is insufficient to answer all questions. Do not overextend its powers. None of us in this thread are mainly relying on science, for good reason. If someone poses the question "should humans do [thing]?" as a scientific one, they are a charlatan and a fraud.
> Why do you privilege one type of feeling or instinct over another? What’s the basis for that distinction?
The basis is the context, is globalization. In prehistoric times a tribe where the people you'd physically meet. In a globalized world the tribe is much bigger, because of communication, commerce and transportation technologies broke the limitations of physical connections.
> Is it a falsifiable scientific fact?
No, it isn't. But it is something that mostly works. Life just feels better when you treat others the way you want to be treated by them, when you and them share the same rights. You see, Karl Popper (the "falsiable" guy) wasn't 100% correct. We actually have a lot of stuff in science that is just a convention and isn't "falsiable". E.g. how cold you possible demonstrate to be false the basic geometric elements: a point, a line, a plane. They don't really exist physically, they're just abstractions.
The general rule is that, in general, cooperation is better than war. War is too destructive and is even more destructive when it targets a complex society (because there is more to destroy). With cooperation, in general, you avoid the destruction of war.
> The basis is the context, is globalization. In prehistoric times a tribe where the people you'd physically meet. In a globalized world the tribe is much bigger, because of communication, commerce and transportation technologies broke the limitations of physical connections.
Is the difference in setting forceful? If the significant change is in the social environment, principles such as empathy would not be impacted. Or would you say the principles that apply to tribal life are different from those that apply to global life?
> You see, Karl Popper (the "falsiable" guy) wasn't 100% correct. We actually have a lot of stuff in science that is just a convention and isn't "falsiable". E.g. how cold you possible demonstrate to be false the basic geometric elements: a point, a line, a plane. They don't really exist physically, they're just abstractions.
Karl Popper is completely correct. He defines "science" as a narrow art, not the study of truth as a whole. Science is one discipline among many in pursuit of the truth.
> Life just feels better when you treat others the way you want to be treated by them, when you and them share the same rights.
My model is that truth is a matter of consistency, and that truth is related to good. Therefore, what one should do to be good is being consistent to one's beliefs. Beliefs are influenced by perception/experience, manifest in thoughts and actions, can be recorded in statements (accountability!), and so on. In practice, (a variation of) the Golden Rule is derived from this.
> Whenever you try to remove religion the void fills up with something, and that something is demonic.
I've heard that exact type of comparison before, and it's from those fundamentalist christians. You find out quickly, that "everything is the devil or demonic" that wasn't written down in a bronze-age book and interpreted and translated the snot out of, over a game of telephone played over 2000 years. Most of which was done by illiterates.
Better yet, lets look at what the opposite of this demonic is - judeo-christian values.
1 Samuel 15:3 "Now go, attack Amalek, and proscribe [kill and dedicate to YHWH] all that belongs to him. Spare no one, but kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings, oxen and sheep, camels and asses!"
That god sounds like a petty tribal warlord. Really? Genocide? Even kill the infants and animals?!? And this is what's being accepted as good and holy? And when Saul (king) spared the Amalekite king and some animals, even that benevolence was rewarded with destroying Saul.
Petty. Tribal. Warlord.
And yeah, I've actually read the Torah and New Testament and Koran. I know what I disagree in, and I see how our culture are still afflicted by all this historical religious baggage.
So, you can find a few isolated quotes in a series of documents written over thousands of years that support the idea that religion is the problem.
Have you read these works considering historical and cultural context? Can you find anything in the New testament that supports this? Do you know about the history of how Christianity shaped European culture? There are excellent books on the subjects (Dominion by Tom Holland is brilliant on the lats of these).
I work in IT, but I also do stuff in historical studies. I dont want to dox myself, cause I just want to chat here anonymously.
In the Americas and Europe, Christianity is the fundamentalist scourge. We all know of Israel, of fundamentalist Judaism. Middle East? You guessed it, 4 of the 5 major sects of Islam are fundamentalist. And moving further East, we see extreme caste-ism and Fundamentalist Hinduism.
China rooted out Fundamentalist Buddhism with Tibet. In 1953, 700,000 of an estimated total population of 1,250,000 were serfs - effectively enslaved peoples on the land attached to the land-lord. Usually a lama, or a priest in Buddhism. This is a case where an oppressive fundamentalist religion was rooted out, and almost a million people were freed.
Im also well aware of all the damage Christianity and Islam did through the millennia in Europe. The priesthood collectively held back science, arts, literature, and countless other things because of "demons, devils, satan". And that only got worse with Dante's Inferno, which somehow got collapsed as bible stories, but really is a fanfiction.
We also see fundamentalist christian hatred flood everywhere with <GASP> more anti-woman sentiment with Witch Trials held basically everywhere. Even had executions up in Holmavik Iceland, to of which a museum was made to commemorate their witch trials. And everyone knows of Salem Massachusetts. Estimates of 30-60000 women were executed in these sham trials, and was predominantly women targeted here.
Perhaps it was too narrow to just blame christians, although the USA is a "christian nation" and what I'm most exposed against my will. No, the problem is fanaticism and fundamentalism. Its one thing to say "My religion says I cant do (action)." and a whole different thing to say "My religion says YOU cant do (action)". All the fundamentalists demand both.
> We also see fundamentalist christian hatred flood everywhere with <GASP> more anti-woman sentiment with Witch Trials held basically everywhere.
Which happened in early modern times.
> Its one thing to say "My religion says I cant do (action)." and a whole different thing to say "My religion says YOU cant do (action)".
I agree. On the other hand secular ideologies are often worse. Look at the history of the 20th century.
> > In the Americas and Europe, Christianity is the fundamentalist scourge.
yes, those horrible Christians. Doing things like abolishing slavery, improving the status of women and demanding marital fidelity from men as well as women. Do you have any idea what pre-Christian Europe was like? The Roman Empire, for example?
What epic creation, I probably couldn't stomach reading or viewing this material in any other format.
This is the original programming. You might visualize it complete with a bug tracker, version control, patches, feature updates and programming languages. We can only see it when absurd enough but it gets much more absurd than this and the software may run for thousands of years.
I remember reading and seeing videos about training child soldiers. The weak or injured ones were killed as hunting targets and the more they killed the higher their rank. In the final ceremony that completes the training they had to shoot their parents. It was a great honor and they truly enjoyed it.
We have to remember death is nowhere near the worse punishment. It might be the nicest thing on the list.
Perhaps it is even worse if people don't notice they are in a similar program because it has been refined to such extend.
Imagine if you left the house without clothing. Like a default human, like any other species, or if you like, how god put you on this earth.
Or say, who decided you must use language? Not just that, you must say the correct things at the correct time.
If you get the dress code wrong, fail to speak or construct the wrong sentences well conditioned people from all over the world will come to beat you back in line.
We force the little ones to sit on designed to be uncomfortable chairs the whole day, the entire week. They must sit, not move, shut up and listen.
Someone once "rescued" a small child living on a garbage heap. Gave him foster parents and put him in school. The kid escaped, he went back to playing in the garbage. When asked why he said he wanted to play with his friends. With a look on his face as if he was talking to a crazy person. It was obvious he didn't want to sit, shut up and not move.... forever?
Seems to me we have many bug reports to fill and that patches are welcome. Our cult is far from perfect.
Meanwhile, we have a crisis in the U.S. of people sleeping and dying in the streets because we shut down all the mental hospitals and involuntary commitment. Every system will have some percentage of adverse outcomes. Approaching the issue emotionally instead of dispassionately and with a view towards typical outcomes is an anti-social and dangerous approach.
... I mean, on what are you basing this assumption? Mass psychiatric institutionalisation has been phased out pretty much everywhere at this point; if your thesis is correct, how do you explain differing rates of homelessness (and in particular unsheltered homelessness, where the US more or less leads the developed world) between the US and other developed countries? Like, it seems more likely to be some other factor.
Ireland, for instance, had the highest rate of psychiatric institutionalisation in the western world in the 60s (some Warsaw Pact countries were likely higher). It was rapidly phased out in the 80s and early 90s. Homelessness (though a persistent problem since the 19th century) remained rather low until the early tens, then rose rapidly. I've never heard of anyone attributing this to the mental hospitals closing 30 years previously (this seems to be a uniquely American belief); it is generally attributed largely to _shortages of housing_ (itself due to the near-total collapse of the construction industry for a decade after the financial crisis).
The issue in the US isn't lack of institutionalization, per se, it's the lack of mandatory mental health treatment. That is, it's very difficult and rare to require the mentally ill in the US to take medicine, even after repeatedly demonstrating an inability to control their conditions or even to take basic care of themselves. For one thing, there was an overcorrection in civil rights law that makes it difficult to establish a mandatory treatment plan. Secondly, because of lack of institutional beds and a will to use them, there's little backstop even for the few patients that are on court-ordered treatment and fail to comply.
While most countries have deinstitutionalized, they still make it much easier to force treatment on an out-patient basis. (This is true of drugs as well, which is part of the reason "harm reduction" often works better in Europe--a credible threat of involuntary hospitalization.) This was the original plan in the 1970s in the US, to transition to out-patient care, but it didn't pan out. The mental hospitals were closed, but rather than shift the funding to out-patient clinics and treatment, the funding was simply pulled altogether. And because of the civil rights law overcorrection, addressing this is more than simply re-establishing the funding. California, for example, restored hundreds of millions of funding in the past decade, but for various legal and inertial reasons, cities and counties simply won't force treatment plans on even the most desperately ill patients, even when they're harming themselves or others. Sadly, we're slipping back into using the penal system to house the mentally ill; there's much less political and institutional pushback than increasing the use of conservatorship and civil commitment.
The problem has been well understood for more than 40 years. Here's a 1984 piece from the NY Times that could be written the same today: Richard D. Lyons, "How Release of Mental Patients Began", https://www.nytimes.com/1984/10/30/science/how-release-of-me...
> While most countries have deinstitutionalized, they still make it much easier to force treatment on an out-patient basis.
Where are you getting that? Which countries? Certainly in Ireland and the UK, I'm pretty certain that it is all but impossible to force outpatient treatment, and I think this is generally more or less the case in Western Europe as a whole. Involuntary admission to psychiatric hospitals is still, marginally, a thing, but very rare.
If you're wondering why human rights treaty organizations are so involved with these laws, and with the similar laws concerning children, look up how the holocaust started. But ... you don't really want to know the connection there.
I'm sorry, but you are completely strawmanning the parent. Nothing they said is typical of an "authoritarian lap dog". The point being made is rather modest: that sometimes involuntary commitment is necessary to help someone when their brain is working against them. Obviously this kind of power can be abused, but the current approach leaves those who need that kind of help to fend for themselves.
But I guess involuntary commitment makes people feel icky so fuck those guys, right?
You seem to believe that these are adverse, uncommon, and unintended outcomes rather than part of the machinery of the troubled teen industry, the school-to-prison pipeline, poverty, and capitalist/protestant propaganda in general. Involuntary commitment would be a threat and weapon in the current political environment, as in the thread OP where the same was used in Francoist Spain.
Perhaps you should investigate your own biases and emotions toward the people chewed up and spit out by society before calling out a comment as "emotional" and "anti-social".
I actually have (and a few of his other articles besides).
If we were to involuntarily take someone into society's care, the process must be benign with a good outcome. As things currently are, the exact opposite (or a system so thoroughly financialized as to be almost the same) is present. The capacity to reverse this seems non-existant.
Most calls right now to reinstitute involuntary commitment are the same thought process that results in the societal rot present in how we deal with poverty, homelessness, and addiction; they just want them even further removed from themselves so they don't have to witness it.
Yesterday a popular post here advocated that your kids finding porn means you are guilty of 'neglect.' That's a serious criminal charge and accusation. People will take drastic steps to avoid prison.
Natural result of that is catch-22, parent can't actually stop teenage kids from such activity except through what amounts to torture. As always either way, the parent is damned.
Sounds like either someone with very young kids or else someone with a dismissive/naive parenting style. For kids born since the mid-80s “hiding the porn” has been a lot harder than locking magazines in a closet. It’s not a matter of if, but when. And however you feel about porn, it’s infinitely more important to help your kids feel safe talking to you about it than to try and prevent them ever seeing it. Kids who don’t feel safe or tolerated will lie almost 100% of the time, at which point you can no longer help them. I say this as someone whose parents would rather have believed I wasn’t watching porn and therefore didn’t make the effort to normalize talking about sex at all. My wife and I do limit our kids’ access to the Internet quite a bit, but we aren’t naive to the fact that they’ll all see something at some point either.
>Sounds like either someone with very young kids or else someone with a dismissive/naive parenting style.
Increasingly this is what the tyranny of the majority is in the western world. People who don't have kids, or only limited experience with kids, declaring that parents are neglecting or abusing their children because they don't behave the way the hypothetical ideologically pure parent would. Almost every single one of them has a cell-phone and the second they see something they disapprove of they can call CPS at the drop of a hat and make your life a living hell, even if you are 'innocent' of even whatever BS they made up.
As always, it's just a smug attempt at moral superiority. They want the intoxicating power rush from threatening and imposing on parents, with none of the responsibility, and the state is all too happy to provide it to them. Just punish and then rest soundly knowing you have no kids of your own for which you could be prosecuted.
> People who don't have kids, or only limited experience with kids, declaring that parents are neglecting or abusing their children because they don't behave the way the hypothetical ideologically pure parent would.
From what I've witnessed, the most common complainants were authoritarian mothers who treat their own child(ren) as helpless irrespective of biological age, and teachers, usually with families of their own, who treat non-violent "quirks" beyond their comprehension as a sign of malfeasance. In both cases, lack of familiarity with children is not the issue. Instead, their previous "successes" with raising/teaching children cement a narrow and selective expectation for how children must or must be made to behave. The motivation in either case is a desire for control. The ideological/cultural angle is, at best, a sincerely held rationalization, but is more likely an instinctual employment of thought-terminating cliches/kafkatraps to justify getting their way or make dissenters look/feel unreasonable.
Based on the relative numbers, how would this be possible? People who don't have kids can only turn into people who have kids, and as people grow older, they are more likely to have kids. Surely the parents aren't a minority that are being surrounded and cut off.
Lol this is the USA. I've been interrogated when a stranger drove past my rather remote property, in the middle of nowhere, and saw that my child was walking about 50 feet "by herself" on her own fucking property(I was actually watching her, just from further away, so I was able to intervene before they called CPS).
Welcome to America where you must watch the kid every second until they turn 18, except at the moment they turn 18 they must be booted from the house to figure everything out all at once with nothing more than a minimum wage job, a gun, and rents that reach the stratosphere.
>Welcome to America where you must watch the kid every second until they turn 18
This must be a regional thing?
I live in New England and I always see kids out and about with no adults around supervising. Especially from 1-3PM on weekdays when school lets out. Maybe a side-effect of walkable infrastructure.
What happened? And please, make sure to demonstrate your position empirically, specifically drawing a causal relationship between shutting down torturous mental institutions and whatever outcome you think that has.
"Soon, Mariona joined her new friends on "raids": a few of them would block off a street, throw Molotov cocktails, hand out leaflets, and when the police turned up, scatter in every direction."
okay she threw molotov cocktails, she was lucky she wasn't imprisoned.
I find this a profoundly odd response to the story. Is your intent to excuse her abusive treatment by the religious, medical, and government authorities of a totalitarian regime?
Your comment is treating her with full agency (i.e. "she shouldn't have done anything bad or disruptive") and completely ignoring the agency of the institutions that harmed her (i.e. "what did she expect in response?").
A) She was still a child.
B) She was imprisoned, repeatedly, and tortured, as the article discusses.
C) Is it your opinion that everyone was "lucky" to live in 1968 Spain under Franco. Or just her?
Please don't call a 17-year old person a child. It's not as if on the night between 17 years, 11 months and 30 days, and 18 years humans undergo some sort of metamorphosis.
Yes I agree, which is probably why we should treat 18-year olds more as children than adults (although obviously they are in-between the two). Brains continue to develop to the age of about 25.
Brains continue to develop through our whole lives.
The study that appeared to show them stopping development at 25 did not have any participants older than 25.
The difference between an 18-year-old and a 24-year-old is much more comparable to the difference between a 24-year-old and a 30-year-old.
We should be treating teenagers much more as adults-in-training, in the sense of meaningfully giving them the tools to succeed as adults, rather than treating them like pure innocent children who must be sheltered from absolutely everything hard, scary, or taboo.
However, as it stands we generally do not do that—hence, in this case, she was indeed a child, and should have been given compassion, better tools, and better chances, not locked up.
The brain does not fully develop until 25, 18 is simply one of many thresholds where we've decided (in the US) to start officially transitioning children into adulthood. Others include 14-16 (driving), 21 (drinking), and 25 (car rental).
So if 17 can't be called a child, what can? You have to draw the completely arbitrary like somewhere. Do you chose the legal 18 (in the US)? The Hebrew 13? Some other metric?
| Nobody wanted her tortured except the criminals torturing her.
Oh, word? It's dope you know the inner thoughts of everyone involved.
| Throwing Molotov cocktail is trivially an criminal offense.
Article didn't say she threw them herself, 'a few' of a group she was part of did.
Glad you're taking the maximalist, guilty until proven innocent, position on conviction by association in the Franco Regime.
I don’t think she’s guilty of anything. If I had a daughter that was engaging in violent political uprisings as a young teen, I’d try my best to get her help. That’s presumably why her parents sent her to a reform program.
My point is the story is disjointed and sad, but there is little cohesive theme aside from pure tragedy, and the narrative presented makes no sense.
You: "help", "That’s >- presumably <- why her parents sent her to a reform program."
The article:
| [her parents] were so conservative they wouldn't even let Mariona wear trousers.
| "For them, it was a scandal, a stain on the family," she says. "After that, they wouldn't let me out."
| [after she ran away] They immediately reported her as an underage runaway to the authorities, and the moment Mariona was about to board a boat back to Barcelona, she was arrested.
| Mariona wasn't given any explanation [for sending her away] - she only remembers her parents' rage.
| her [second] escape was short lived. Within hours she was bundled into a car with her father and an uncle, and driven back to Madrid.
| Now aged 20, she vowed to never live with her parents again.
| "We suffered a lot too," [her father] told her when she asked him about the family decision to have her locked up in Madrid.
Her parents only care about themselves, 50 years ago and today, if you can't see that, there's something wrong with you.
~~
You: "My point is the story is disjointed and sad, but there is little cohesive theme"
The purpose of the article and the film, as written in the article, which you did not read:
| Reformatories were institutions where girls and young women who refused to conform to the Franco regime's Catholic values were detained - single mothers, girls with boyfriends, lesbians. Girls who'd been sexually assaulted were incarcerated, assuming the blame for their own abuse. Orphans and abandoned girls might also find themselves living behind convent walls.
| The film has contributed to a groundswell of calls for the interned women to be formally recognised under the law as victims of Spain's dictatorship.
| "Women come and tell their stories – it's like a door opened to something unknown, and that's very powerful," says Marina. "People think what happened in their own home was an isolated incident. We try to say: this history isn't individual, it was systematic."
| Her mother Mariona still doubts her memory sometimes.
| But, she says, "seeing it all reflected in the film, that gives it the weight of truth."
When asked why they captured and locked up their daughter, twice, they replied "We suffered a lot too". They expressed only rage at their loss of status when confronting her initially.
Based on disclosed facts, actions taken (that are not in dispute), and statements by the perpetrators themselves before and after the fact, we can conclude that her parents do in fact care more about their own 'suffering' and 'status', more than their daughter's physical and emotional well-being.
You, on the other hand, just made shit up from whole cloth, but are too pathetic to stand on business and disagree directly.
If I could assign remedial reading comprehension lessons to anyone on Earth, today, I would choose you.
> Throwing Molotov cocktail is trivially an criminal offense.
This is a protest against a fascist regime we're talking about. I don't know the exact context of any of this because I'm not Spanish, don't speak the language, and don't really know all that much about the nuance of 1968 Spain. I'm fairly sure you're just as ignorant of this as I am but the difference is that I'm withholding strong judgement one way or the other instead of jumping on one detail.
I do know that throwing a bunch of tea you don't own in the sea is also trivially a criminal offence. Kicking the shit out of an SS-officer is also trivially a criminal offence. etc. etc. You can have a long discussion about when violence is or isn't justified. I don't know enough about this specific situation to have a strong opinion. But pretty much everyone agrees that at some point you need to look beyond the law and trying to reduce this to just a matter of the law is massively naïve at best.
As someone who takes insulin every single day and lives in mild fear of an overdose, the idea that it was once used to intentionally induce hypoglycemic comas as an “psychiatric treatment” is a terrifying concept to me.
Was there ever a relatively peaceful and prosperous period in Europe for a non elite average person? Maybe only the 1990s and only in France, (Western) Germany, Spain, Italy, and Switzerland?
Greece is in Southern Europe ;-) Italy is a complex case because of the great disparity between the North and the South. You're totally right about Portugal, though!
I'm not going to comment on the words chosen by BBC to portray the case - I think there are a lot of other better entries on HN where BBC bias (or the lack of it) can be discussed.
But I see a lot of comments here about what Fanquismo was and wasn't, and I believe it comes out of ignorance about Spanish history. Many comments here make it look like this was a choice between Franquismo/Fascism and personal freedom and democracy. It wasn't. It was a brutal struggle between Fascists and Communists, and good people that wanted freedom were caught in the middle right since the beginning. The choice wasn't between Fascism or Democracy, the choice was just between two major evils: Fascism or Communism and that's why it divided Spanish society
It can be argued that when this happened (1968), the bloody and brutal Spanish Civil War (that started with major violent acts from the communists' side after fair elections, BTW) was long over and the country should already be way on the path to democracy (and I agree if that was the point being made), but let's not pretend that she joined good company and proper people that just wanted to liberate Spain.
People commenting here really need to read about the Spanish Civil War to understand how it went down. Communists were so destructive that in the middle of the war, they started fighting and killing each other instead of fighting against the Fascist forces. Major atrocities were committed on both sides. POWs were routinely rounded up and executed, both by the Communists and by the Fascists.
The only group that seemed to have some sense when it came to defend basic humanity were the anarchists (although they did have a lot of other issues). Read Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell for a beautiful and sad description of a small part of this conflict.
"that started with major violent acts from the communists' side after fair elections"
This is simply false. The Spanish Civil War started in 1936 with Franco's fascist coup against a democratically elected government. Check your own ignorance before accusing others.
As you might understand (or avoid to). Franco didn't wake up one day and decided to start a civil war out of nowhere. In the period of 1933-1936, there was major violence against the legitimately elected Right-Wing government from Marxist groups that adopted a revolutionary approach to take power in Spain:
"The defeat in the elections and its consequences led to disenchantment with parliamentarism and radicalization within the Socialists. The increasing militancy within the Socialist workers was followed by Francisco Largo Caballero's adopting a revolutionary Marxist rhetoric which justified revolutionism as a way to combat rising fascism, uncharacteristic of European social democratic mainstream and the reformist traditions of the PSOE.[69] The CNT adopted a similar rhetoric in the wake of the elections, threatening with a revolution if "Fascist tendencies" would win the elections.[70] Open violence occurred in the streets of Spanish cities, and militancy continued to increase,[71] reflecting a movement towards radical upheaval, rather than peaceful means as solutions.[72] A small insurrection by anarchists occurred in December 1933 in response to CEDA's victory, in which around 100 people died.[73]
[...]
Fairly well armed revolutionaries managed to take the whole province of Asturias, murdering numerous policemen, clergymen and civilians, destroying religious buildings including churches, convents and part of the university at Oviedo.[75] Rebels in the occupied areas proclaimed revolution for the workers and abolished the existing currency.[76] The uprising was crushed in two weeks by the Spanish Navy and the Spanish Republican Army, the latter using mainly Moorish colonial troops from Spanish Morocco."
I would have never thought to see a Franco apologist with my own eyes. Wow, thank you for this unique moment.
Anyhow, Franco was a fascist trash and allied with Hitler and Mussolini. Revolutionaries were mainly anarchists (NOT communists). In fact it's because of Stalin and the communists following him starting an infighting with the anarchists led to the fascist victory.
If the revolutionaries have won, Spain would have been an experimental socialist/anarchist republic. We don't know if ot would have been ended up like USSR. Maybe.
In 1968 though the flight was pretty much about fascism vs democracy.
> "If the revolutionaries have won, Spain would have been an experimental socialist/anarchist republic."
I tend to agree with that, because nothing shouts "experimental socialist/anarchist republic" like "murdering numerous policemen, clergymen and civilians, destroying religious buildings including churches, convents and part of the university".
Anybody imagining themselves as alive during the Franco regime and not considering throwing a Molotov cocktail or two doesn't believe in freedom, equality, or democracy. It's disturbing to see how many fascists seem to comment on Hacker News. Begone, you contemptible Francoists!
Kind of on brand for this site these days, tbh. A brand of anti social that believes disruption done for anything but monetary gain deserves extreme punishment, regardless of circumstance.
I don't know why you're surprised. This place is primarily about making money.
Businesses are set up like tiny little fascist dictatorships. They are always trying to pay less taxes, evade regulations, layoff workers, monopolize, destroy competitors etc. They don't know anything about the public sphere, or common good, or government, or democracy, or rule of law etc. They suck at that, it goes against all their training and instincts.
You're not wrong about the strong emphasis on money making and profitability in HN comments (it was started as much as a forum for startup or wannabe startup founders as a tech forum), but it's also had a significant libertarian (little-l) streak. It's kind of hard to square that libertarianism with the apparent support of Franco's regime seen in the comments here today.
Study your history, because that’s an old story. The Puritans who fled England and settled in Massachusetts Bay did not try to establish religious freedom in the modern, pluralistic sense. They just wanted freedom to practice their own religion. They were intolerant of dissent and quickly established their own orthodoxies. Individuals who challenged their religious and civil authority, such as Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, were banished. Quakers who arrived later were brutally persecuted, with some being executed.
There's very little little-l libertarianism here. It's always anti-Communist Reagan-Greenspan style Objectivism disguised as little-l libertarianism.
They can seem like libertarians because they believe that they themselves should be able to do whatever they want whenever they want, but any activism is of the consumer-rights variety i.e. "I can do whatever I want with my property!"
Under Franco, the mean HNer would be upset that they couldn't buy (or create) whatever book they wanted or any piece of art they wanted. That's it. They'd even preface that objection with an "admission" that most of the books or art that Franco would ban were terrible and shouldn't be read or looked at.
Franco himself was weak, soft, and like the 3rd choice to rule fascist Spain. His position and his government was due to the tacit support of people very similar to HN users today. At least he's keeping the Russians away...
You’re reading people, like myself, who are upset with the articles framing, because it has created a causal link between the reasonable concern that a parent would have with a child engaging in political violence, with the result of a corrupt reformatory program.
Yes, being raped and given electro-shock treatment IS BAD. It’s also very much not what her parents signed her up for by turning her into a reformatory.
Nobody here is defending a fascist regime. We’re just complaining about horrible editorializing.
There are five photos in the article and I can’t for the life of me figure out which one you’re talking about. Or what you’re talking about at all for that matter. Care to elaborate?
Ugh! This is so disgusting. Look! Fascists are even seeing women as their enemy. But that makes Fascism everyone's enemy, they're actually in the minority but the way they are staying in power is by making everyone hate on each other more than hating on them. Be aware of people spreading hate on one group of people after another, it's their takeover plan. Divide and conquer.
I think you're right that the BBC is being irresponsible in putting "my mum was a 17-year-old free spirit" in the headline -- even though it's a quote, it does imply a level of BBC editorial agreement with the characterization. It makes her sound like she was just an innocent hippie or something.
On the other hand, this wasn't vandalism for vandalism's sake. It was political protest against a dictatorship. It's not like she was engaging in criminal acts for the fun of it or for personal gain, so the snippet you choose is similarly misleading without the context of why.
How do you think Franco got in power? By peacefully using his free speech rights and persuasive speeches? How do you think he stayed in power for all those decades? Do you think some people's free speech rights and avenues of protest might have been a teensy tiny bit curtailed?
Where did I say anything about speech? Were you under the impression that protests are inherently non-violent? Violent protests are absolutely a thing. That's why "non-violent protest" is a term.
And of course it's armed conflict. But the point is that it's armed conflict against a fascist dictatorship killing over 100,000 civilians by most estimates -- which is what makes it considered legitimate violent protest by many people.
Do you think "My mum was a 17-year-old free spirit - so she was locked up and put in a coma" could perhaps be the words of the person they interviewed? Could this perhaps by why it is written in the first-person? Where in the article does the BBC claim she was an "ordinary free-spirited girl"?
What do you believe the purpose of this article is? Do you think it is advancing a policy agenda, in which case which policies is it advocating for? Or is it perhaps just documenting what happened and the impressions of those effected by what happened?
The BBC has editorial control over their headlines. The wording in the article is unclear and it may not be a mischaracterization. But, assuming that it is, 'someone lied to us and so we put it into our headline' is not a defense that turns bad journalism into good.
It's an obvious quote, unless you think people are going to misunderstand and think that the BBC as a publication is talking about it's mother somehow. Quotes are generally well understood to be the view of the person giving it, not the publication.
I think people are going to expect the BBC to validate the correctness of quotes that they elevate into headlines. The interviewee didn't decide that that quote should be a headline, that's a creative choice by the BBC. By putting it there, they are implying that it is an accurate description of the story that follows. Is that incorrect?
Yes, it's incorrect. You seem to be under the impression that headlines need to be dry facts, which is just... not what they are or have ever been. Using a quote that draws you in to read is a normal, common thing to do.
2. Is by definition of an accurate representation of the words of the person they are quoting
3. Is a reasonable overview of a complex story, given we understand that "free-spirited" is subjective and that, again, this is a human interest story and conveying the feelings of the people involved is part of the point.
I don't know what you're getting at with 1 and 2. If the person they were quoting claimed to have been abducted by sasquatch, you could still make these two points. Would you still be arguing that it doesn't reflect poorly on the BBC to put that false claim into a headline?
If you would, that is probably the heart of our disagreement. If not, I guess it comes down to an agree to disagree on whether the subjective window of the personality trait 'free-spirited' can include 'active participant in violent resistance against a dictatorship'.
> If the person they were quoting claimed to have been abducted by sasquatch, you could still make these two points. Would you still be arguing that it doesn't reflect poorly on the BBC to put that false claim into a headline?
No? That’s a very good headline for an article about someone who believes that they were abducted by a Sasquatch. It would be a missed opportunity for a newspaper to NOT do.
Its not that simple. I do not know about Franco's Spain, but violent rebellion does not usually make things better. Most violent revolutions end up replacing one dictatorship with another.
Choosing to substitute a general principle instead of reading about the particular event as it happened 50 years ago... that likely informed the formation of that principle...
A Wikipedia article would not give me sufficient knowledge to judge the effect of violent resistance. There was a fairly peaceful transition. Would teenagers throwing Molotov cocktails have helped or hindered this? Would peaceful protest or passive resistance have been better? I do not know.
The general principle is more than adequate as a counter to the comment I replied to. You should not assume that is what you would do if you lived in a dictatorship.
Shorter you: I'd rather not learn things, even a little, before commenting. Did you even read the entire article?
| You should not assume that is what you would do if you lived in a dictatorship.
No, one cannot. That said, there are people here that have made those decisions, and that are making them right now. It's strange that you have assumed of me that this could not be true. I will only say that I've made my decisions and my conscience is clear.
What you can decide right now what your principles are.
One of mine is that resistance against a violent authoratarian state, including violent resistance, is morally justified.
Whether it is most effective or not is a matter for organizers, historians, and arm-chair quarterbacks like yourself.
What you are missing is that it could actually be harmful. You may have noticed that "fighting terrorism" often provides governments with an excuse for greater repression.
Have you read the comment I replied to? it was saying that violence was definitely the right thing to do.
> One of mine is that resistance against a violent authoratarian state, including violent resistance, is morally justified.
Without even considering the consequences? I believe that one of the criteria for morally justifying violence has to be that the consequences or using violence as better than any available non-violent alternative. I think that is a fundamental different of values.
> and arm-chair quarterbacks like yourself.
I have lived in a country where 1) multiple groups of people were using violence to do what they considered to be fighting oppression, 2) I have come pretty close to bombs they planted, and 3) the end results not only included huge numbers of deaths, but also let the government get away with things such as disappearing journalists who opposed them. I am a lot less of an arm-chair observer than I guess you are.
| often provides governments with an excuse for greater repression.
Fallacious assumption. They don't need an excuse. They will invent one if they feel it is required.
"Look what you made me do" is the logic of abusers, large and small.
No amount of conspicuous rule-following will stop them from calling you a genetically violent degenerate, unworthy of compassion when it suits their ends. Nothing will stop them from revoking your right to exist at a moment's notice.
This isn't to say that we shouldn't do what it takes to survive, but harm-reduction and resistance are different things altogether.
Solidarity and primarily non-violent resistance are my preferences, and I believe they are also the preference of most people, until circumstances drastically deteriorate.
However, I'm not going to second-guess a molotov thrown by a teenager's friend 50 years ago in Franco's Spain. Especially when the response to that incident was 3 years of psychological and medical torture. The scales are not balanced, and our focus should be on the people that actually wielded power for great evil, rather than ahistorical hypotheticals.
| [I]t was saying that violence was definitely the right thing to do.
| I believe that one of the criteria for morally justifying violence has to be that the consequences or using violence as better than any available non-violent alternative. I think that is a fundamental different of values.
You are demanding that individuals who are being harmed by ongoing state violence see all possible futures and choose the optimal one for most people (themselves excluded).
In so doing, you hold individuals living under unceasingly violent regimes to a much higher standard than the regime itself, which is free to act in arbitrary ways. This is an utterly unbalanced position that demands passivity or flight.
| I am a lot less of an arm-chair observer than I guess you are.
I will not discuss my situation online, probably not for a decade. That said, I am sorry you had to live through what you did, and I am glad you made it out. I still weep for those who we've lost, even as I write this. We all deserve a better, kinder world.
As a point of reconciliation, and without pulling directly from current conflicts. I think that if every British agent in Sri Lanka perpetrating the ‘Divide and Rule’ Strategy had been exiled or killed in 1815 (with violence and malice aforethought), the history that you had to endure would have been orders of magnitude less bloody, do you disagree?
The Russian Revolution you are probably thinking of is the October Revolution of the Bolsheviks. But the tsar had already been overthrown by the February Revolution earlier that year, and some of the initial steps towards improving Russian literacy like the drafting of an orthography reform were already accomplished under that regime. Russia may well have seen major strides regardless, and the Bolsheviks are widely seen as one of those revolutions that did more harm than good.
No, I mean the whole thing. I mean that the revolution was necessary.
I don't think reforms of orthography were what mattered. What mattered was actually forcing people people to learn to read and also sending people out to teach them.
I don't see pre-1918 Cryllic as much more complicated that post 1918 Cryllic, but then I am of course literate and a Swede, so the only thing I find unusual is the symbol of softness, which is probably much less of a problem if you actually speak Russian.
> Most violent revolutions end up replacing one dictatorship with another.
Don’t those new violent dictators also tend to be more aligned with the people revolting?
Anyway, it kinda makes sense to me that the people advocating for change through violent means don’t suddenly stop being violent when they get to power.
>>>>> Don’t those new violent dictators also tend to be more aligned with the people revolting?
Empirically, no.
"Popular dictator" is an oxymoron. The dictator is always focused on their own survival. They are never able to completely wipe out their opposition, and end up collaborating with the powerful, and repressing the weak, in order to retain power.
Parents don't want their kids executed or sentenced to life in prison because they ended up burning people to death. And there is no way to ensure arson only burns fascists. They were probably desperately looking for a way to save her from that.
Can't say I'd have done the same choice, but it makes it more understandable.
Isn’t that relatively normal? They’re really easy to make.
The ‘throw molotov cocktails’ are mentioned in the same sentence as ‘hand out leaflets’, which makes me feel the surrounding people were generally not panicking about the fire. Hard to say without reading the book though.
Yes, not normal in a normal context. However if you're fighting against a dictatorship it fully qualifies as heroism. When dictatorship comes to your country (madness is growing everywhere so be prepared) you'll be grateful for anyone fighting against it, or one day you'll be the one writing "... then one day they came for me, but there was no one left to fight for me".
I spent some time in Northern Ireland in 2001 (Derry mostly). At one point there was a sudden fire in the back yard of the youth hostel I was staying at. When I mentioned it, the owner of the youth hostel said "it's just a Molotov cocktail".
Note, the article doesn't say that she threw molotov cocktails. She was put into induced comas, tied to a bed, kept in social isolation, etc. because she didn't want to live under her parents' control.
Perhaps the modern world has softened the term fascist dictator by using it for regimes to which it only partially applies.
The generalissimo used forced labor not unlike the DPRK, made widespread use of concentration camps, and was quite fond of executing dissidents. All religions other than Catholicism were outlawed and all political parties were outlawed.
Why would opposition to a murderous dictator be a bad thing? It isn’t as though the protestors/rioters/rebels were the ones escalating the situation. The government was already killing people. This could easily be viewed as justified violent opposition in the pursuit of stopping more murder.
> Just the continued normalization of antisocial people as somehow being the victims of society instead of being the ones perpetuating harm on society.
Opposing an actual fascist dictatorship isn't particularly "antisocial". Unless your definition of "social" is blind obedience even as your family members and friends are harmed, killed, or disappeared by the government.
Yeah I don't think anyone thinks this was a good program, but saying someone performing acts of terrorism is just 'a free spirit' is a bit... BBC of them.
A familiar story even today in the U.S:
https://time.com/6997172/teen-torture-max-abuse-documentary/
“They are often a last resort for parents struggling with children with behavioral problems, suicidal thoughts, and substance abuse issues. Depending on the state, these rehab centers—a multi-billion-dollar industry—have few regulations, and there are no overarching federal standards governing them. Many are faith-based facilities designed to convert teens into born-again Christians and are therefore exempt from regulation in some states.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turn-About_Ranch
https://helpingsurvivors.org/troubled-teen-programs/turn-abo...
If anybody wants to read a comic with the perspective of someone that went through one of these places and spent the years after fighting against them, I stumbled upon this one a few years ago: https://elan.school/
I am not in any way affiliated with the author, it's just one of the few books with real content that I've read in a long time.
I had no idea about Elan School. The comic is absolutely amazing and I've just spent the last several hours reading the first half of it. Absolutely amazing and hard to just imagine the horrific physical and psychological abuse that occurred at this "school."
This is horrifying. "There oughtta be a law" is my first reaction... What a useless thought. This is one of those examples of "the details matter". "Tough love", or "tough on crime", or other such empty utterances are useful only to give catharsis to a subset of people, and always the subset who are not subject to this torture. Society needs ritual sacrifice, I guess... How depressing. If the details are made obvious, I suspect meant would think twice about such treatment.
Amazing read! Thanks for this
Great comic and there's a documentary about that place. Very messed up that's it's a whole child abuse industry.
Might take a karma hit for this, but whatever. Its the truth.
Christians are more concerned about *causing* extreme child abuse, and then turning around and claiming its to "save them", so the abuse isnt reallllly abuse.
Most of these camps cited are christian. And the people running them? Dogmatic christian fundamentalists. And these are the same types that run "pray the gay away" camps too.
And my inflammatory, albeit true comment also goes right back to the heart of the article:
"Reformatories were institutions where girls and young women who refused to conform to the Franco regime's Catholic values were detained - single mothers, girls with boyfriends, lesbians. Girls who'd been sexually assaulted were incarcerated, assuming the blame for their own abuse. Orphans and abandoned girls might also find themselves living behind convent walls."
Extremist Roman Catholic "values", demonization and imprisonment of 'unruly women', anti-LGBTQ. Same damned thing, again and again.
When are we going to actually look at these issues dispassionately and realize that religion itself is the problem?
> Christians are more concerned about *causing* extreme child abuse
> religion itself is the problem
Religious flamewar isn't allowed here, so please don't post like this.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
---
Edit:
It also looks like your account has been using HN primarily for ideological/political/religious battle. That's not allowed here (see https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... for more explanation), and we ban accounts that do it.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use HN as intended, we'd appreciate it.
So we're supposed to simultaneously discuss the article (General Franco's extremist Catholic task forces), but not identify the religious tropes behind this?
I read the article, and discussing the article. And as hackers, im curious as how to fix the problems.
You can discuss things like that without denouncing entire groups of people and without inflammatory rhetoric.
It's not hard to understand where the line is if you've reviewed https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and genuinely want to use HN as intended.
[flagged]
I mean, of all the many, many talking points from the article 'This particular religious / cultural group is a global problem and must be eradicated, and (all of? Seems like it meant all of) its many billions of members are enthusiastic supporters or perpetrators of child abuse' is not one that leapt out to most people.
And even if it did, they didn't say it here. This is not the place for religious ideology. I passionately hate my neighbours who listen to music really loudly in their garden all the time, but I don't call for their eradication on public fora unless there's a really, really specific relevance (like here, for example) and I also don't campaign against them on GitHub, my local supermarket, local government meetings, or other places where people are trying to do other things.
There are places for me to rant about my neighbours. There are entire discussions about noisy neighbours, my vicinity, local customs and manners etc. If I wanted to rant about them, those would be the place to do it. But I don't, because I wouldn't actually gain anything from it. I'm not going to single handedly change the law on nuisance, and all a hate campaign could achieve would be, well, more hate. I want solutions, or quiet, and I won't achieve either of those by telling random strangers how terrible my neighbours are.
I'm sure you can think of the easiest solution to the hypothetical neighbour problem. It's not ideological and doesn't involve changing the hearts and minds of hundreds of people, none of whom are currently concerned about my neighbours.
It might look like I'm trivialising your point, but I promise, I'm not. Noisy neighbours, or an itchy foot, or even a literal broken fingernail, are a more immediate problem than 'we must rid the world of Christians', unless they are currently holding you hostage.
And the reason I'm bothering to write such a long-ass reply at all is because there is currently far too much intolerance and ethno-religious hatred being propogated and spread around the world. We know where this leads. It always leads the same way, there is no possibility of a happy ending. We have tried 'that religion is the problem, let's persecute them' repeatedly and we end up in the sort of fascist dystopia we were reminded of literal moments ago in the article.
It's not ok to do it to Jews or Muslims, which means it's not ok to do it to Christians. And it's not ok to let people spread those messages in bad faith, which means I've got to call out those spreading the same message in presumed good faith.
My neighbours are just annoying me, I can deal with that. Christians are just kinda weird but whatever, we've all got our foibles. Racists, dogmatics and puritans can believe whatever they want, I just won't listen to it.
And I invite you to step away from the brewing culture war too. It's more fun discussing tech and stuff.
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> When are we going to actually look at these issues dispassionately and realize that religion itself is the problem?
Because it's not.
I've been interrogating this sort of question for most of my life. I am a queer agnostic who grew up in a religious part of the South and saw shades of this kind of abuse firsthand, mostly around queerness.
At first, I did blame religion, but with the benefit of hindsight, I realized something. In the context of queerness, almost nobody I ran into growing up hated queer people because they heard their preacher say so and thought it must be true. They hated them because they were massively insecure. They were terrified of being labeled gay. They were terrified of guys hitting on them. They were terrified of hitting on a woman who turned out to have been born as a man.
Religion isn't the problem. Instead, religion gives these sorts of insecure people a trump card that requires very little interrogation. However, if these folks weren't Christian or weren't even religious, I have no doubt that the underlying insecurities would remain, and simply manifest in a different way.
Once I realized this, it was actually a massive weight lifted off my shoulders. In particular, I was no longer confused as to why my friend groups that were majority Christian continued to be nice to me and treated me with respect, despite me being a atheist queer at the time. It opened the door to connecting with them on a deeper level of understanding, as well as leading to me dabbling with my own forms of non-Christian spirituality.
So yeah, religion isn't the problem. It's merely a mechanism that allows shitty people to be shitty.
Agreed. I've long thought that it's much more the case that a person's religion is a function of their values, not the other way around.
Or, put another way, if a person's religion conflicts with their values (including prejudices), which one is more likely to give first?
You don't have to wonder. I have been hearing about several recent church schisms over certain folks thinking the church had become too accepting.
This is literally an example of individuals choosing their religion based on their own values. Folks on one side of the schism might criticize folks on the other side of the schism for not being true Christians, but it's ultimately a dispute over "Thou shalt not lie with another man," versus "Love thy neighbor."
As a resident of the bible belt: Their values go first, and it isn't even close. There is no hate like christian "love".
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It's possible to be moral without religion. Your assertion stands stronger with tribalism than religion.
Atheism doesn't turn into worship of anything. That's the point of atheism. It is clear to me that you have never met an atheist.
Not directly, but people find ways to believe in a manner analogous to religious beliefs. Faith doesn't have to be directed only at traditional theist objects. Religious or not, people can believe things by faith and by logic.
To give an example, science is not a replacement for philosophy, nor is it implemented perfectly, but some people elevate it far beyond its means to answer certain inquiries. That is irrationality, or faith.
> science is not a replacement for philosophy, nor is it implemented perfectly,
Yes, but it is far better than a fraud. Therefore it is the best we have to understand the world. And fairy tales invented by illiterate people thousands of years ago aren't a path to understand the world. They're a fraud, plain and simple.
I think you're being uncharitable towards religion. While I agree that a belief such as "the Earth was made 6000 years ago" is ridiculous, a belief like "God wants us to love our neighbors" is not. I think "good beliefs" (a very loaded term, mind you) get rediscovered constantly, in religious and nonreligious contexts alike. These are beliefs attained through philosophical inquiry. The beliefs provided by science are complementary.
> I think you're being uncharitable towards religion.
You are correct. I am, deliberately, "being uncharitable towards religion". I had far too much Catholicism in my upbringing to be respectful of any religion. If you want to know what I mean by Catholicism read the story linked by the title post, about Catholic parents in Catholic Spain. My story wasn't that bad but I saw a lot of that prejudice, arrogance and intolerance. It isn't surprising that in 50 years the country of Spain went from majorly Catholic to majorly agnostic.
> a belief like "God wants us to love our neighbors" is not.
You don't need "God wants" in that. Empathy doesn't need "God". Unlike what church people think, non-religious people have empathy and decency, too. Human beings are social animals, doing empathy is a common trait that doesn't need "divine" justification.
I agree that religion isn't necessary, but it's not necessarily bad. You're making a big generalization. There are plenty of people who abuse religious beliefs, but I'm more concerned with calling out people who abuse principles from any cut of cloth, and religion is only a part of that.
> people who abuse principles from any cut of cloth, and religion is only a part of that.
That's true, fair point. It happens also in a lot of secular political ideologies.
> Humans are always religious, no exception.
You should get out more.
It’s true. The supposedly “secular people” I know are always prattling about “human dignity” and stuff that sounds very religious. They don’t think of humans as walking meat like a non-religious person would.
> stuff that sounds very religious
Sounds very religious? Oh well then, you've clearly put some serious thought into this.
> They don’t think of humans as walking meat like a non-religious person would.
What a truly weird thing to write.
Are you being satirical?
> “human dignity” and stuff that sounds very religious.
Even bonobo monkeys and elephants understand empathy for others. Should we then assume that monkeys and elephants are very religious, too?
> like a non-religious person would.
Oh, I see you took a lot of care in trying to understand what a "non-religious person" is. Are all church people this smart, too? /s
> Even bonobo monkeys and elephants understand empathy for others.
Empathy is an emotion. Emotions are real. You can see emotions in brain scans. But anger, desire for revenge, disgust, in-group affinity, etc., are also real emotions! It's rational to use people's emotions to guide what society should do. But most putatively secular people disagree with that approach! They're constantly telling people to put aside their emotions in favor of supposed universal principles that sound suspiciously similar to religious beliefs.
> They're constantly telling people to put aside their emotions in favor of supposed universal principles
Yeah, sure! Those evil "putatively secular people" that burned tens of thousands of women during the witch hunt in Europe, killed hundreds of thousands of other people during the Crusades and the European religious wars of the 17th and 18th century, that condoned with the fascist and authoritarian regimes in Argentina, Spain and Portugal because they were against the scourge of communism, that blessed the slavery of Latin American indigenous peoples because it was meant to spread the blessing of Christianity... that was all made by "putatively secular people", like the Catholic Church, right?
I am so impressed by how well and deep you know and understand "putatively secular people"... Are all church people smart like that? /s
But what’s your non-religious basis for saying that those actions were bad? You pointed to empathy above. But empathy in humans is mainly directed to one’s own community. Animals and humans alike will happily take over the territory of rival clans. Which is why empathy didn’t prevent Europeans from colonizing the indigenous people of America. So what’s your basis for saying that, e.g., colonization was bad?
I have no problem with housecats hunting, but playing with their prey seems unnecessary (as in gratuitous harm). Still, I won't try housecats in a criminal court, because my understanding of them is too alien to make me confident in my judgement.
I have no problem with humans hunting, or defending themselves, or whatnot. I accept that some degree of violence is necessary, and a lot more can be plausibly justified. However, I draw the line at, say, humans killing each other for bad reason. If it is to be believed that I and these other humans are of the same species, of the same kind, and whatnot, I feel secure in judging them as I would judge myself, and those more familiar to me. Killing indigenous people on the basis of merely not converting to Christianity, and even burning them, is entirely unnecessary. A modern-day analogue would be roundly condemned, or so I should hope.
Why are you favoring religious beliefs? What is your basis in doing so?
> empathy in humans is mainly directed to one’s own community.
Speak for yourself. I won't confuse empathy with tribalism, as you do. I'll take humanism [1], the notion that every person is equal in rights. This is my moral basis.
> humans alike will happily take over the territory of rival clans.
Tribalism, again. You don't get past that, do you?
> Which is why empathy didn’t prevent Europeans from colonizing the indigenous people
Yep, but neither did religion and those countries were very, very Christian. And, btw, even today the U.S. is the most religious among rich countries and, at the same time, the most imperialist. If religion is so good how come the most Christian country is so bad to the rest of the world? (I am from South America, btw).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secular_humanism
They seem to be one of those individuals who cannot possibly comprehend the idea that many people simply find murder and rape to be horrible, awful acts that shouldn't be inflicted on others and hold that belief without needing to have the fear of god or an ancient collection of texts constantly reminding them to not rape and murder people.
The very idea of a person believing murder and rape to be horrible without a convoluted and often contradicting spiritual belief system is preposterous to them. Hence "rayiner"'s insistence that not treating people like shit simply must be a religious concept because "it sounds religious". These people genuinely believe someone not treating people like shit can only happen if you're terrified of going to hell or something.
They're somewhat rare but not rare enough. They're extremely dangerous people because, after all, the only thing keeping their desire to harm others in check is a fear of an ever elusive supernatural entity punishing them, instead of just simply not having such a desire.
Maybe the above isn't applicable to "rayiner" but people who say not treating people like shit "sounds religious" are almost always that type.
> They seem to be one of those individuals who cannot possibly comprehend the idea that many people simply find murder and rape to be horrible, awful acts that shouldn't be inflicted on others
I’m not denying that some people feel that way. Feelings are real, they’re chemical signals in your brain in response to stimuli. But we agree it’s not more than a feeling, right? And nothing makes the chemical signals in your brain more legitimate than the ones in someone else’s brain? Say we gather up our tribe, clan, nation, whatever. We take a vote based on people’s feelings. And 40% feel like you do, and 60% feel rage at the neighboring tribe/clan/nation and want to violently conquer them and take their resources. We tallied up two sets of chemical signals, and we should pick the more numerous feeling, correct?
What makes religious beliefs more legitimate than secular beliefs?
Not sure why you're so insistent on avoiding the multiple questions people have asked you that are inconvenient for your narrative.
Why does believing something is right or wrong require religion or is in any way religious?
Why does someone having signals in their brain making them a believer of religion make their beliefs more justified than someone who does not?
Have you ever asked someone why they believe in god or do you just immediately stop questioning the "legitimacy" of their beliefs the moment you realize they believe in religion so they must be right?
People have explained to you why they believe x is wrong, you refuse to accept their answer and insist they "sound religious"
Why, in your opinion, must nonreligious people constantly justify their belief in x being wrong if you don't demand the same of religious people? Double standards.
> I won't confuse empathy with tribalism, as you do.
I’m just following your logic. You pointed to empathy as something even animals have. Empathy is a real thing in nature, you can see those feelings in brain scans. But so is tribalism or pack behavior. Why do you privilege one type of feeling or instinct over another? What’s the basis for that distinction?
> I'll take humanism [1], the notion that every person is equal in rights.
What is the nature of this assertion? Is it a falsifiable scientific fact?
> I’m just following your logic. You pointed to empathy as something even animals have. Empathy is a real thing in nature, you can see those feelings in brain scans. But so is tribalism or pack behavior. Why do you privilege one type of feeling or instinct over another? What’s the basis for that distinction?
Please be transparent on your own beliefs too, if you demand this of others. On what basis do you stake your beliefs? Are you being empathetic? Are you being tribal?
> What is the nature of this assertion? Is it a falsifiable scientific fact?
Science alone is insufficient to answer all questions. Do not overextend its powers. None of us in this thread are mainly relying on science, for good reason. If someone poses the question "should humans do [thing]?" as a scientific one, they are a charlatan and a fraud.
> Why do you privilege one type of feeling or instinct over another? What’s the basis for that distinction?
The basis is the context, is globalization. In prehistoric times a tribe where the people you'd physically meet. In a globalized world the tribe is much bigger, because of communication, commerce and transportation technologies broke the limitations of physical connections.
> Is it a falsifiable scientific fact?
No, it isn't. But it is something that mostly works. Life just feels better when you treat others the way you want to be treated by them, when you and them share the same rights. You see, Karl Popper (the "falsiable" guy) wasn't 100% correct. We actually have a lot of stuff in science that is just a convention and isn't "falsiable". E.g. how cold you possible demonstrate to be false the basic geometric elements: a point, a line, a plane. They don't really exist physically, they're just abstractions.
The general rule is that, in general, cooperation is better than war. War is too destructive and is even more destructive when it targets a complex society (because there is more to destroy). With cooperation, in general, you avoid the destruction of war.
> The basis is the context, is globalization. In prehistoric times a tribe where the people you'd physically meet. In a globalized world the tribe is much bigger, because of communication, commerce and transportation technologies broke the limitations of physical connections.
Is the difference in setting forceful? If the significant change is in the social environment, principles such as empathy would not be impacted. Or would you say the principles that apply to tribal life are different from those that apply to global life?
> You see, Karl Popper (the "falsiable" guy) wasn't 100% correct. We actually have a lot of stuff in science that is just a convention and isn't "falsiable". E.g. how cold you possible demonstrate to be false the basic geometric elements: a point, a line, a plane. They don't really exist physically, they're just abstractions.
Karl Popper is completely correct. He defines "science" as a narrow art, not the study of truth as a whole. Science is one discipline among many in pursuit of the truth.
> Life just feels better when you treat others the way you want to be treated by them, when you and them share the same rights.
My model is that truth is a matter of consistency, and that truth is related to good. Therefore, what one should do to be good is being consistent to one's beliefs. Beliefs are influenced by perception/experience, manifest in thoughts and actions, can be recorded in statements (accountability!), and so on. In practice, (a variation of) the Golden Rule is derived from this.
The absolute projection of “it’s like this for me therefore it must be true for you” is astounding here
This is an observation of history, not a one-person-projection. The amount of kneejerk denial is surprising.
> Humans are always religious, no exception.
I'm absolutely not religious. So, therefore, am I not human?
Most non-religious people aren't in cults.
> Whenever you try to remove religion the void fills up with something, and that something is demonic.
I've heard that exact type of comparison before, and it's from those fundamentalist christians. You find out quickly, that "everything is the devil or demonic" that wasn't written down in a bronze-age book and interpreted and translated the snot out of, over a game of telephone played over 2000 years. Most of which was done by illiterates.
Better yet, lets look at what the opposite of this demonic is - judeo-christian values.
1 Samuel 15:3 "Now go, attack Amalek, and proscribe [kill and dedicate to YHWH] all that belongs to him. Spare no one, but kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings, oxen and sheep, camels and asses!"
That god sounds like a petty tribal warlord. Really? Genocide? Even kill the infants and animals?!? And this is what's being accepted as good and holy? And when Saul (king) spared the Amalekite king and some animals, even that benevolence was rewarded with destroying Saul.
Petty. Tribal. Warlord.
And yeah, I've actually read the Torah and New Testament and Koran. I know what I disagree in, and I see how our culture are still afflicted by all this historical religious baggage.
So, you can find a few isolated quotes in a series of documents written over thousands of years that support the idea that religion is the problem.
Have you read these works considering historical and cultural context? Can you find anything in the New testament that supports this? Do you know about the history of how Christianity shaped European culture? There are excellent books on the subjects (Dominion by Tom Holland is brilliant on the lats of these).
I work in IT, but I also do stuff in historical studies. I dont want to dox myself, cause I just want to chat here anonymously.
In the Americas and Europe, Christianity is the fundamentalist scourge. We all know of Israel, of fundamentalist Judaism. Middle East? You guessed it, 4 of the 5 major sects of Islam are fundamentalist. And moving further East, we see extreme caste-ism and Fundamentalist Hinduism.
China rooted out Fundamentalist Buddhism with Tibet. In 1953, 700,000 of an estimated total population of 1,250,000 were serfs - effectively enslaved peoples on the land attached to the land-lord. Usually a lama, or a priest in Buddhism. This is a case where an oppressive fundamentalist religion was rooted out, and almost a million people were freed.
Im also well aware of all the damage Christianity and Islam did through the millennia in Europe. The priesthood collectively held back science, arts, literature, and countless other things because of "demons, devils, satan". And that only got worse with Dante's Inferno, which somehow got collapsed as bible stories, but really is a fanfiction.
We also see fundamentalist christian hatred flood everywhere with <GASP> more anti-woman sentiment with Witch Trials held basically everywhere. Even had executions up in Holmavik Iceland, to of which a museum was made to commemorate their witch trials. And everyone knows of Salem Massachusetts. Estimates of 30-60000 women were executed in these sham trials, and was predominantly women targeted here.
Perhaps it was too narrow to just blame christians, although the USA is a "christian nation" and what I'm most exposed against my will. No, the problem is fanaticism and fundamentalism. Its one thing to say "My religion says I cant do (action)." and a whole different thing to say "My religion says YOU cant do (action)". All the fundamentalists demand both.
> The priesthood collectively held back science, arts, literature, and countless other things because of "demons, devils, satan"
You mean this priesthood? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Catholic_clergy_scient...
> We also see fundamentalist christian hatred flood everywhere with <GASP> more anti-woman sentiment with Witch Trials held basically everywhere.
Which happened in early modern times.
> Its one thing to say "My religion says I cant do (action)." and a whole different thing to say "My religion says YOU cant do (action)".
I agree. On the other hand secular ideologies are often worse. Look at the history of the 20th century.
> > In the Americas and Europe, Christianity is the fundamentalist scourge.
yes, those horrible Christians. Doing things like abolishing slavery, improving the status of women and demanding marital fidelity from men as well as women. Do you have any idea what pre-Christian Europe was like? The Roman Empire, for example?
What epic creation, I probably couldn't stomach reading or viewing this material in any other format.
This is the original programming. You might visualize it complete with a bug tracker, version control, patches, feature updates and programming languages. We can only see it when absurd enough but it gets much more absurd than this and the software may run for thousands of years.
I remember reading and seeing videos about training child soldiers. The weak or injured ones were killed as hunting targets and the more they killed the higher their rank. In the final ceremony that completes the training they had to shoot their parents. It was a great honor and they truly enjoyed it.
We have to remember death is nowhere near the worse punishment. It might be the nicest thing on the list.
Perhaps it is even worse if people don't notice they are in a similar program because it has been refined to such extend.
Imagine if you left the house without clothing. Like a default human, like any other species, or if you like, how god put you on this earth.
Or say, who decided you must use language? Not just that, you must say the correct things at the correct time.
If you get the dress code wrong, fail to speak or construct the wrong sentences well conditioned people from all over the world will come to beat you back in line.
We force the little ones to sit on designed to be uncomfortable chairs the whole day, the entire week. They must sit, not move, shut up and listen.
Someone once "rescued" a small child living on a garbage heap. Gave him foster parents and put him in school. The kid escaped, he went back to playing in the garbage. When asked why he said he wanted to play with his friends. With a look on his face as if he was talking to a crazy person. It was obvious he didn't want to sit, shut up and not move.... forever?
Seems to me we have many bug reports to fill and that patches are welcome. Our cult is far from perfect.
Meanwhile, we have a crisis in the U.S. of people sleeping and dying in the streets because we shut down all the mental hospitals and involuntary commitment. Every system will have some percentage of adverse outcomes. Approaching the issue emotionally instead of dispassionately and with a view towards typical outcomes is an anti-social and dangerous approach.
... I mean, on what are you basing this assumption? Mass psychiatric institutionalisation has been phased out pretty much everywhere at this point; if your thesis is correct, how do you explain differing rates of homelessness (and in particular unsheltered homelessness, where the US more or less leads the developed world) between the US and other developed countries? Like, it seems more likely to be some other factor.
Ireland, for instance, had the highest rate of psychiatric institutionalisation in the western world in the 60s (some Warsaw Pact countries were likely higher). It was rapidly phased out in the 80s and early 90s. Homelessness (though a persistent problem since the 19th century) remained rather low until the early tens, then rose rapidly. I've never heard of anyone attributing this to the mental hospitals closing 30 years previously (this seems to be a uniquely American belief); it is generally attributed largely to _shortages of housing_ (itself due to the near-total collapse of the construction industry for a decade after the financial crisis).
The issue in the US isn't lack of institutionalization, per se, it's the lack of mandatory mental health treatment. That is, it's very difficult and rare to require the mentally ill in the US to take medicine, even after repeatedly demonstrating an inability to control their conditions or even to take basic care of themselves. For one thing, there was an overcorrection in civil rights law that makes it difficult to establish a mandatory treatment plan. Secondly, because of lack of institutional beds and a will to use them, there's little backstop even for the few patients that are on court-ordered treatment and fail to comply.
While most countries have deinstitutionalized, they still make it much easier to force treatment on an out-patient basis. (This is true of drugs as well, which is part of the reason "harm reduction" often works better in Europe--a credible threat of involuntary hospitalization.) This was the original plan in the 1970s in the US, to transition to out-patient care, but it didn't pan out. The mental hospitals were closed, but rather than shift the funding to out-patient clinics and treatment, the funding was simply pulled altogether. And because of the civil rights law overcorrection, addressing this is more than simply re-establishing the funding. California, for example, restored hundreds of millions of funding in the past decade, but for various legal and inertial reasons, cities and counties simply won't force treatment plans on even the most desperately ill patients, even when they're harming themselves or others. Sadly, we're slipping back into using the penal system to house the mentally ill; there's much less political and institutional pushback than increasing the use of conservatorship and civil commitment.
The problem has been well understood for more than 40 years. Here's a 1984 piece from the NY Times that could be written the same today: Richard D. Lyons, "How Release of Mental Patients Began", https://www.nytimes.com/1984/10/30/science/how-release-of-me...
See also, Natasha Tracy, "In Defense of Mental Illness Conservatorship—Despite the Britney Spears Case", https://natashatracy.com/mental-illness-issues/mental-illnes...
> While most countries have deinstitutionalized, they still make it much easier to force treatment on an out-patient basis.
Where are you getting that? Which countries? Certainly in Ireland and the UK, I'm pretty certain that it is all but impossible to force outpatient treatment, and I think this is generally more or less the case in Western Europe as a whole. Involuntary admission to psychiatric hospitals is still, marginally, a thing, but very rare.
UK: Mental Health Act 1983, so yes forcing outpatient treatment (under the threat of getting locked up) is possible
https://www.nhs.uk/mental-health/social-care-and-your-rights...
Easy to find stories people being threatened with these laws into accepting treatment:
https://www.mentalhealthforum.net/forum/threads/threatened-w...
If you're wondering why human rights treaty organizations are so involved with these laws, and with the similar laws concerning children, look up how the holocaust started. But ... you don't really want to know the connection there.
I think GP has a fair assessment of the reality today, not a distant extrapolation or hypothesis based on emotions.
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I'm sorry, but you are completely strawmanning the parent. Nothing they said is typical of an "authoritarian lap dog". The point being made is rather modest: that sometimes involuntary commitment is necessary to help someone when their brain is working against them. Obviously this kind of power can be abused, but the current approach leaves those who need that kind of help to fend for themselves.
But I guess involuntary commitment makes people feel icky so fuck those guys, right?
The purpose of a system is what it does.
You seem to believe that these are adverse, uncommon, and unintended outcomes rather than part of the machinery of the troubled teen industry, the school-to-prison pipeline, poverty, and capitalist/protestant propaganda in general. Involuntary commitment would be a threat and weapon in the current political environment, as in the thread OP where the same was used in Francoist Spain.
Perhaps you should investigate your own biases and emotions toward the people chewed up and spit out by society before calling out a comment as "emotional" and "anti-social".
You should read: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/you-call-that-compassio...
I actually have (and a few of his other articles besides).
If we were to involuntarily take someone into society's care, the process must be benign with a good outcome. As things currently are, the exact opposite (or a system so thoroughly financialized as to be almost the same) is present. The capacity to reverse this seems non-existant.
Most calls right now to reinstitute involuntary commitment are the same thought process that results in the societal rot present in how we deal with poverty, homelessness, and addiction; they just want them even further removed from themselves so they don't have to witness it.
Yesterday a popular post here advocated that your kids finding porn means you are guilty of 'neglect.' That's a serious criminal charge and accusation. People will take drastic steps to avoid prison.
Natural result of that is catch-22, parent can't actually stop teenage kids from such activity except through what amounts to torture. As always either way, the parent is damned.
Sounds like either someone with very young kids or else someone with a dismissive/naive parenting style. For kids born since the mid-80s “hiding the porn” has been a lot harder than locking magazines in a closet. It’s not a matter of if, but when. And however you feel about porn, it’s infinitely more important to help your kids feel safe talking to you about it than to try and prevent them ever seeing it. Kids who don’t feel safe or tolerated will lie almost 100% of the time, at which point you can no longer help them. I say this as someone whose parents would rather have believed I wasn’t watching porn and therefore didn’t make the effort to normalize talking about sex at all. My wife and I do limit our kids’ access to the Internet quite a bit, but we aren’t naive to the fact that they’ll all see something at some point either.
>Sounds like either someone with very young kids or else someone with a dismissive/naive parenting style.
Increasingly this is what the tyranny of the majority is in the western world. People who don't have kids, or only limited experience with kids, declaring that parents are neglecting or abusing their children because they don't behave the way the hypothetical ideologically pure parent would. Almost every single one of them has a cell-phone and the second they see something they disapprove of they can call CPS at the drop of a hat and make your life a living hell, even if you are 'innocent' of even whatever BS they made up.
As always, it's just a smug attempt at moral superiority. They want the intoxicating power rush from threatening and imposing on parents, with none of the responsibility, and the state is all too happy to provide it to them. Just punish and then rest soundly knowing you have no kids of your own for which you could be prosecuted.
> People who don't have kids, or only limited experience with kids, declaring that parents are neglecting or abusing their children because they don't behave the way the hypothetical ideologically pure parent would.
From what I've witnessed, the most common complainants were authoritarian mothers who treat their own child(ren) as helpless irrespective of biological age, and teachers, usually with families of their own, who treat non-violent "quirks" beyond their comprehension as a sign of malfeasance. In both cases, lack of familiarity with children is not the issue. Instead, their previous "successes" with raising/teaching children cement a narrow and selective expectation for how children must or must be made to behave. The motivation in either case is a desire for control. The ideological/cultural angle is, at best, a sincerely held rationalization, but is more likely an instinctual employment of thought-terminating cliches/kafkatraps to justify getting their way or make dissenters look/feel unreasonable.
Based on the relative numbers, how would this be possible? People who don't have kids can only turn into people who have kids, and as people grow older, they are more likely to have kids. Surely the parents aren't a minority that are being surrounded and cut off.
> People who don't have kids can only turn into people who have kids
This isn't quite true. A person's adult child isn't going to be taken away by CPS.
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Damn, my whole country must be guilty of neglect then!
Lol this is the USA. I've been interrogated when a stranger drove past my rather remote property, in the middle of nowhere, and saw that my child was walking about 50 feet "by herself" on her own fucking property(I was actually watching her, just from further away, so I was able to intervene before they called CPS).
Welcome to America where you must watch the kid every second until they turn 18, except at the moment they turn 18 they must be booted from the house to figure everything out all at once with nothing more than a minimum wage job, a gun, and rents that reach the stratosphere.
Free Range Kids organization has been fighting against this, and a number of states have passed laws around it.
>Welcome to America where you must watch the kid every second until they turn 18
This must be a regional thing?
I live in New England and I always see kids out and about with no adults around supervising. Especially from 1-3PM on weekdays when school lets out. Maybe a side-effect of walkable infrastructure.
Interestingly the same America were teenagers end up with Epstein. Or were you can "homeschool" your kids.
She threw molotov cockatails I don't think it's similar at all.
she was lucky she wasn't imprisoned or executed
Why do you keep saying she wasn’t imprisoned? She was imprisoned in a convent and then in a mental institution.
Edit: clarification
Similar stories were used to shut down mental hospitals in the U.S. and look what happened after that.
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What happened? And please, make sure to demonstrate your position empirically, specifically drawing a causal relationship between shutting down torturous mental institutions and whatever outcome you think that has.
"Soon, Mariona joined her new friends on "raids": a few of them would block off a street, throw Molotov cocktails, hand out leaflets, and when the police turned up, scatter in every direction."
okay she threw molotov cocktails, she was lucky she wasn't imprisoned.
I find this a profoundly odd response to the story. Is your intent to excuse her abusive treatment by the religious, medical, and government authorities of a totalitarian regime?
Your comment is treating her with full agency (i.e. "she shouldn't have done anything bad or disruptive") and completely ignoring the agency of the institutions that harmed her (i.e. "what did she expect in response?").
A) She was still a child. B) She was imprisoned, repeatedly, and tortured, as the article discusses. C) Is it your opinion that everyone was "lucky" to live in 1968 Spain under Franco. Or just her?
> A) She was still a child.
Please don't call a 17-year old person a child. It's not as if on the night between 17 years, 11 months and 30 days, and 18 years humans undergo some sort of metamorphosis.
Yes I agree, which is probably why we should treat 18-year olds more as children than adults (although obviously they are in-between the two). Brains continue to develop to the age of about 25.
Brains continue to develop through our whole lives.
The study that appeared to show them stopping development at 25 did not have any participants older than 25.
The difference between an 18-year-old and a 24-year-old is much more comparable to the difference between a 24-year-old and a 30-year-old.
We should be treating teenagers much more as adults-in-training, in the sense of meaningfully giving them the tools to succeed as adults, rather than treating them like pure innocent children who must be sheltered from absolutely everything hard, scary, or taboo.
However, as it stands we generally do not do that—hence, in this case, she was indeed a child, and should have been given compassion, better tools, and better chances, not locked up.
> Brains continue to develop through our whole lives.
After 50 years, they seem to decline.
The brain does not fully develop until 25, 18 is simply one of many thresholds where we've decided (in the US) to start officially transitioning children into adulthood. Others include 14-16 (driving), 21 (drinking), and 25 (car rental).
So if 17 can't be called a child, what can? You have to draw the completely arbitrary like somewhere. Do you chose the legal 18 (in the US)? The Hebrew 13? Some other metric?
25. You said it yourself
So, people should only be allowed to drink and to vote at 25?
(And probably also drive, it always stuck us in Europe pretty weird you allow minors to drive in the USA as the car can be a very lethal tool).
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Nobody wanted her tortured except the criminals torturing her.
Throwing Molotov cocktail is trivially an criminal offense. OP is making it clear that framing it as she was a “free spirit” is ridiculous.
| Nobody wanted her tortured except the criminals torturing her.
Oh, word? It's dope you know the inner thoughts of everyone involved.
| Throwing Molotov cocktail is trivially an criminal offense.
Article didn't say she threw them herself, 'a few' of a group she was part of did. Glad you're taking the maximalist, guilty until proven innocent, position on conviction by association in the Franco Regime.
I don’t think she’s guilty of anything. If I had a daughter that was engaging in violent political uprisings as a young teen, I’d try my best to get her help. That’s presumably why her parents sent her to a reform program.
My point is the story is disjointed and sad, but there is little cohesive theme aside from pure tragedy, and the narrative presented makes no sense.
You realise Franco was a fascist dictator?
I would sure as hell hope people start throwing Molotov cocktails when someone like that comes into power.
You did not read the article, and it shows.
You: "help", "That’s >- presumably <- why her parents sent her to a reform program."
The article: | [her parents] were so conservative they wouldn't even let Mariona wear trousers.
| "For them, it was a scandal, a stain on the family," she says. "After that, they wouldn't let me out."
| [after she ran away] They immediately reported her as an underage runaway to the authorities, and the moment Mariona was about to board a boat back to Barcelona, she was arrested.
| Mariona wasn't given any explanation [for sending her away] - she only remembers her parents' rage.
| her [second] escape was short lived. Within hours she was bundled into a car with her father and an uncle, and driven back to Madrid.
| Now aged 20, she vowed to never live with her parents again.
| "We suffered a lot too," [her father] told her when she asked him about the family decision to have her locked up in Madrid.
Her parents only care about themselves, 50 years ago and today, if you can't see that, there's something wrong with you.
~~
You: "My point is the story is disjointed and sad, but there is little cohesive theme"
The purpose of the article and the film, as written in the article, which you did not read:
| Reformatories were institutions where girls and young women who refused to conform to the Franco regime's Catholic values were detained - single mothers, girls with boyfriends, lesbians. Girls who'd been sexually assaulted were incarcerated, assuming the blame for their own abuse. Orphans and abandoned girls might also find themselves living behind convent walls.
| The film has contributed to a groundswell of calls for the interned women to be formally recognised under the law as victims of Spain's dictatorship.
| "Women come and tell their stories – it's like a door opened to something unknown, and that's very powerful," says Marina. "People think what happened in their own home was an isolated incident. We try to say: this history isn't individual, it was systematic."
| Her mother Mariona still doubts her memory sometimes.
| But, she says, "seeing it all reflected in the film, that gives it the weight of truth."
>Her parents only care about themselves, 50 years ago and today
>>Oh, word? It's dope you know the inner thoughts of everyone involved.
When asked why they captured and locked up their daughter, twice, they replied "We suffered a lot too". They expressed only rage at their loss of status when confronting her initially.
Based on disclosed facts, actions taken (that are not in dispute), and statements by the perpetrators themselves before and after the fact, we can conclude that her parents do in fact care more about their own 'suffering' and 'status', more than their daughter's physical and emotional well-being.
You, on the other hand, just made shit up from whole cloth, but are too pathetic to stand on business and disagree directly.
If I could assign remedial reading comprehension lessons to anyone on Earth, today, I would choose you.
> Throwing Molotov cocktail is trivially an criminal offense.
This is a protest against a fascist regime we're talking about. I don't know the exact context of any of this because I'm not Spanish, don't speak the language, and don't really know all that much about the nuance of 1968 Spain. I'm fairly sure you're just as ignorant of this as I am but the difference is that I'm withholding strong judgement one way or the other instead of jumping on one detail.
I do know that throwing a bunch of tea you don't own in the sea is also trivially a criminal offence. Kicking the shit out of an SS-officer is also trivially a criminal offence. etc. etc. You can have a long discussion about when violence is or isn't justified. I don't know enough about this specific situation to have a strong opinion. But pretty much everyone agrees that at some point you need to look beyond the law and trying to reduce this to just a matter of the law is massively naïve at best.
it's Francoist Spain. people were imprisoned for much less (hence the molotovs)
As someone who takes insulin every single day and lives in mild fear of an overdose, the idea that it was once used to intentionally induce hypoglycemic comas as an “psychiatric treatment” is a terrifying concept to me.
Was there ever a relatively peaceful and prosperous period in Europe for a non elite average person? Maybe only the 1990s and only in France, (Western) Germany, Spain, Italy, and Switzerland?
Actually, most of Western, Northern and Central Europe since the 1960s. Notable exceptions are Spain (under Franco) and Ireland (until the 1990s).
Greece and Portugal weren't particularly prosperous or safe either. Italy was only rich-ish, but unsafe.
Greece is in Southern Europe ;-) Italy is a complex case because of the great disparity between the North and the South. You're totally right about Portugal, though!
What do you mean Portugal wasn't safe?
I wholeheartedly agree it wasn't prosperous, but not being safe? Where did you take that from?
Enormous child mortality, colonial war, persecution by the political police, hunger.
I'm not going to comment on the words chosen by BBC to portray the case - I think there are a lot of other better entries on HN where BBC bias (or the lack of it) can be discussed.
But I see a lot of comments here about what Fanquismo was and wasn't, and I believe it comes out of ignorance about Spanish history. Many comments here make it look like this was a choice between Franquismo/Fascism and personal freedom and democracy. It wasn't. It was a brutal struggle between Fascists and Communists, and good people that wanted freedom were caught in the middle right since the beginning. The choice wasn't between Fascism or Democracy, the choice was just between two major evils: Fascism or Communism and that's why it divided Spanish society
It can be argued that when this happened (1968), the bloody and brutal Spanish Civil War (that started with major violent acts from the communists' side after fair elections, BTW) was long over and the country should already be way on the path to democracy (and I agree if that was the point being made), but let's not pretend that she joined good company and proper people that just wanted to liberate Spain.
People commenting here really need to read about the Spanish Civil War to understand how it went down. Communists were so destructive that in the middle of the war, they started fighting and killing each other instead of fighting against the Fascist forces. Major atrocities were committed on both sides. POWs were routinely rounded up and executed, both by the Communists and by the Fascists.
The only group that seemed to have some sense when it came to defend basic humanity were the anarchists (although they did have a lot of other issues). Read Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell for a beautiful and sad description of a small part of this conflict.
There's this old 6 episodes TV Series from 1983, that really gives a good perspective of how awful it all was: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_I6C-VbFvI
> There's this old 6 episodes TV Series from 1983, that really gives a good perspective of how awful it all was
Playlist of the miniseries from the same channel:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxZAPogJjW_h2JbgYOgO3GZiI...
The Spanish Civil War (1983)
https://imdb.com/title/tt1718608/
"that started with major violent acts from the communists' side after fair elections"
This is simply false. The Spanish Civil War started in 1936 with Franco's fascist coup against a democratically elected government. Check your own ignorance before accusing others.
As you might understand (or avoid to). Franco didn't wake up one day and decided to start a civil war out of nowhere. In the period of 1933-1936, there was major violence against the legitimately elected Right-Wing government from Marxist groups that adopted a revolutionary approach to take power in Spain:
"The defeat in the elections and its consequences led to disenchantment with parliamentarism and radicalization within the Socialists. The increasing militancy within the Socialist workers was followed by Francisco Largo Caballero's adopting a revolutionary Marxist rhetoric which justified revolutionism as a way to combat rising fascism, uncharacteristic of European social democratic mainstream and the reformist traditions of the PSOE.[69] The CNT adopted a similar rhetoric in the wake of the elections, threatening with a revolution if "Fascist tendencies" would win the elections.[70] Open violence occurred in the streets of Spanish cities, and militancy continued to increase,[71] reflecting a movement towards radical upheaval, rather than peaceful means as solutions.[72] A small insurrection by anarchists occurred in December 1933 in response to CEDA's victory, in which around 100 people died.[73]
[...]
Fairly well armed revolutionaries managed to take the whole province of Asturias, murdering numerous policemen, clergymen and civilians, destroying religious buildings including churches, convents and part of the university at Oviedo.[75] Rebels in the occupied areas proclaimed revolution for the workers and abolished the existing currency.[76] The uprising was crushed in two weeks by the Spanish Navy and the Spanish Republican Army, the latter using mainly Moorish colonial troops from Spanish Morocco."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Civil_War
I would have never thought to see a Franco apologist with my own eyes. Wow, thank you for this unique moment.
Anyhow, Franco was a fascist trash and allied with Hitler and Mussolini. Revolutionaries were mainly anarchists (NOT communists). In fact it's because of Stalin and the communists following him starting an infighting with the anarchists led to the fascist victory.
If the revolutionaries have won, Spain would have been an experimental socialist/anarchist republic. We don't know if ot would have been ended up like USSR. Maybe.
In 1968 though the flight was pretty much about fascism vs democracy.
Oh, last point: Torture is torture.
> "If the revolutionaries have won, Spain would have been an experimental socialist/anarchist republic."
I tend to agree with that, because nothing shouts "experimental socialist/anarchist republic" like "murdering numerous policemen, clergymen and civilians, destroying religious buildings including churches, convents and part of the university".
That is historical context, not justification for 39 years of fascist dictatorship.
> "We suffered a lot too," he told her when she asked him about the family decision to have her locked up in Madrid.
Ah yes, good old "it hurts me more than it hurts you".
what is this thread
people supporting a totalitarian fascist regime, blaming the victim...
"Shouldn't fight against the regime, violence is bad mmmkay"... "she threw molotov cocktails, she deserved it"...
what is happening, i feel like i'm taking crazy pills
Anybody imagining themselves as alive during the Franco regime and not considering throwing a Molotov cocktail or two doesn't believe in freedom, equality, or democracy. It's disturbing to see how many fascists seem to comment on Hacker News. Begone, you contemptible Francoists!
Kind of on brand for this site these days, tbh. A brand of anti social that believes disruption done for anything but monetary gain deserves extreme punishment, regardless of circumstance.
I don't know why you're surprised. This place is primarily about making money.
Businesses are set up like tiny little fascist dictatorships. They are always trying to pay less taxes, evade regulations, layoff workers, monopolize, destroy competitors etc. They don't know anything about the public sphere, or common good, or government, or democracy, or rule of law etc. They suck at that, it goes against all their training and instincts.
You're not wrong about the strong emphasis on money making and profitability in HN comments (it was started as much as a forum for startup or wannabe startup founders as a tech forum), but it's also had a significant libertarian (little-l) streak. It's kind of hard to square that libertarianism with the apparent support of Franco's regime seen in the comments here today.
Study your history, because that’s an old story. The Puritans who fled England and settled in Massachusetts Bay did not try to establish religious freedom in the modern, pluralistic sense. They just wanted freedom to practice their own religion. They were intolerant of dissent and quickly established their own orthodoxies. Individuals who challenged their religious and civil authority, such as Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, were banished. Quakers who arrived later were brutally persecuted, with some being executed.
There's very little little-l libertarianism here. It's always anti-Communist Reagan-Greenspan style Objectivism disguised as little-l libertarianism.
They can seem like libertarians because they believe that they themselves should be able to do whatever they want whenever they want, but any activism is of the consumer-rights variety i.e. "I can do whatever I want with my property!"
Under Franco, the mean HNer would be upset that they couldn't buy (or create) whatever book they wanted or any piece of art they wanted. That's it. They'd even preface that objection with an "admission" that most of the books or art that Franco would ban were terrible and shouldn't be read or looked at.
Franco himself was weak, soft, and like the 3rd choice to rule fascist Spain. His position and his government was due to the tacit support of people very similar to HN users today. At least he's keeping the Russians away...
You’re reading people, like myself, who are upset with the articles framing, because it has created a causal link between the reasonable concern that a parent would have with a child engaging in political violence, with the result of a corrupt reformatory program.
Yes, being raped and given electro-shock treatment IS BAD. It’s also very much not what her parents signed her up for by turning her into a reformatory.
Nobody here is defending a fascist regime. We’re just complaining about horrible editorializing.
Edit: these downvotes… SMH
Some of you in here blaming the victims of a fascist regime couldn’t make your sexism any clearer
Any discussion about Franco always attracts cool heads and reasoned discussion
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There are five photos in the article and I can’t for the life of me figure out which one you’re talking about. Or what you’re talking about at all for that matter. Care to elaborate?
So tell what has mixed-race to do with going too far in the opposite direction?
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Ugh! This is so disgusting. Look! Fascists are even seeing women as their enemy. But that makes Fascism everyone's enemy, they're actually in the minority but the way they are staying in power is by making everyone hate on each other more than hating on them. Be aware of people spreading hate on one group of people after another, it's their takeover plan. Divide and conquer.
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I think there are points on both sides.
I think you're right that the BBC is being irresponsible in putting "my mum was a 17-year-old free spirit" in the headline -- even though it's a quote, it does imply a level of BBC editorial agreement with the characterization. It makes her sound like she was just an innocent hippie or something.
On the other hand, this wasn't vandalism for vandalism's sake. It was political protest against a dictatorship. It's not like she was engaging in criminal acts for the fun of it or for personal gain, so the snippet you choose is similarly misleading without the context of why.
Violence isn’t speech. Calling Molotov cocktailing a street “protest” is absurd. It’s effectively armed conflict.
> It’s effectively armed conflict.
How do you think Franco got in power? By peacefully using his free speech rights and persuasive speeches? How do you think he stayed in power for all those decades? Do you think some people's free speech rights and avenues of protest might have been a teensy tiny bit curtailed?
Armed conflict against fascist dictators is a good thing.
Where did I say anything about speech? Were you under the impression that protests are inherently non-violent? Violent protests are absolutely a thing. That's why "non-violent protest" is a term.
And of course it's armed conflict. But the point is that it's armed conflict against a fascist dictatorship killing over 100,000 civilians by most estimates -- which is what makes it considered legitimate violent protest by many people.
Do you think "My mum was a 17-year-old free spirit - so she was locked up and put in a coma" could perhaps be the words of the person they interviewed? Could this perhaps by why it is written in the first-person? Where in the article does the BBC claim she was an "ordinary free-spirited girl"?
What do you believe the purpose of this article is? Do you think it is advancing a policy agenda, in which case which policies is it advocating for? Or is it perhaps just documenting what happened and the impressions of those effected by what happened?
The BBC has editorial control over their headlines. The wording in the article is unclear and it may not be a mischaracterization. But, assuming that it is, 'someone lied to us and so we put it into our headline' is not a defense that turns bad journalism into good.
It's an obvious quote, unless you think people are going to misunderstand and think that the BBC as a publication is talking about it's mother somehow. Quotes are generally well understood to be the view of the person giving it, not the publication.
I think people are going to expect the BBC to validate the correctness of quotes that they elevate into headlines. The interviewee didn't decide that that quote should be a headline, that's a creative choice by the BBC. By putting it there, they are implying that it is an accurate description of the story that follows. Is that incorrect?
Yes, it's incorrect. You seem to be under the impression that headlines need to be dry facts, which is just... not what they are or have ever been. Using a quote that draws you in to read is a normal, common thing to do.
The quote:
1. Indicates this a human interest story
2. Is by definition of an accurate representation of the words of the person they are quoting
3. Is a reasonable overview of a complex story, given we understand that "free-spirited" is subjective and that, again, this is a human interest story and conveying the feelings of the people involved is part of the point.
I don't know what you're getting at with 1 and 2. If the person they were quoting claimed to have been abducted by sasquatch, you could still make these two points. Would you still be arguing that it doesn't reflect poorly on the BBC to put that false claim into a headline?
If you would, that is probably the heart of our disagreement. If not, I guess it comes down to an agree to disagree on whether the subjective window of the personality trait 'free-spirited' can include 'active participant in violent resistance against a dictatorship'.
> If the person they were quoting claimed to have been abducted by sasquatch, you could still make these two points. Would you still be arguing that it doesn't reflect poorly on the BBC to put that false claim into a headline?
No? That’s a very good headline for an article about someone who believes that they were abducted by a Sasquatch. It would be a missed opportunity for a newspaper to NOT do.
I can only hope I would have done the same in Franco's dictatorship. But I'd have expected prison rather than a convent.
Its not that simple. I do not know about Franco's Spain, but violent rebellion does not usually make things better. Most violent revolutions end up replacing one dictatorship with another.
Choosing to substitute a general principle instead of reading about the particular event as it happened 50 years ago... that likely informed the formation of that principle...
When you have nothing to add, say nothing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_transition_to_democrac...
Or have the courtesy to do the reading.
A Wikipedia article would not give me sufficient knowledge to judge the effect of violent resistance. There was a fairly peaceful transition. Would teenagers throwing Molotov cocktails have helped or hindered this? Would peaceful protest or passive resistance have been better? I do not know.
The general principle is more than adequate as a counter to the comment I replied to. You should not assume that is what you would do if you lived in a dictatorship.
Shorter you: I'd rather not learn things, even a little, before commenting. Did you even read the entire article?
| You should not assume that is what you would do if you lived in a dictatorship.
No, one cannot. That said, there are people here that have made those decisions, and that are making them right now. It's strange that you have assumed of me that this could not be true. I will only say that I've made my decisions and my conscience is clear.
What you can decide right now what your principles are. One of mine is that resistance against a violent authoratarian state, including violent resistance, is morally justified.
Whether it is most effective or not is a matter for organizers, historians, and arm-chair quarterbacks like yourself.
What you are missing is that it could actually be harmful. You may have noticed that "fighting terrorism" often provides governments with an excuse for greater repression.
Have you read the comment I replied to? it was saying that violence was definitely the right thing to do.
> One of mine is that resistance against a violent authoratarian state, including violent resistance, is morally justified.
Without even considering the consequences? I believe that one of the criteria for morally justifying violence has to be that the consequences or using violence as better than any available non-violent alternative. I think that is a fundamental different of values.
> and arm-chair quarterbacks like yourself.
I have lived in a country where 1) multiple groups of people were using violence to do what they considered to be fighting oppression, 2) I have come pretty close to bombs they planted, and 3) the end results not only included huge numbers of deaths, but also let the government get away with things such as disappearing journalists who opposed them. I am a lot less of an arm-chair observer than I guess you are.
| often provides governments with an excuse for greater repression.
Fallacious assumption. They don't need an excuse. They will invent one if they feel it is required.
"Look what you made me do" is the logic of abusers, large and small.
No amount of conspicuous rule-following will stop them from calling you a genetically violent degenerate, unworthy of compassion when it suits their ends. Nothing will stop them from revoking your right to exist at a moment's notice.
This isn't to say that we shouldn't do what it takes to survive, but harm-reduction and resistance are different things altogether.
Solidarity and primarily non-violent resistance are my preferences, and I believe they are also the preference of most people, until circumstances drastically deteriorate.
However, I'm not going to second-guess a molotov thrown by a teenager's friend 50 years ago in Franco's Spain. Especially when the response to that incident was 3 years of psychological and medical torture. The scales are not balanced, and our focus should be on the people that actually wielded power for great evil, rather than ahistorical hypotheticals.
| [I]t was saying that violence was definitely the right thing to do.
| I believe that one of the criteria for morally justifying violence has to be that the consequences or using violence as better than any available non-violent alternative. I think that is a fundamental different of values.
You are demanding that individuals who are being harmed by ongoing state violence see all possible futures and choose the optimal one for most people (themselves excluded). In so doing, you hold individuals living under unceasingly violent regimes to a much higher standard than the regime itself, which is free to act in arbitrary ways. This is an utterly unbalanced position that demands passivity or flight.
| I am a lot less of an arm-chair observer than I guess you are.
I will not discuss my situation online, probably not for a decade. That said, I am sorry you had to live through what you did, and I am glad you made it out. I still weep for those who we've lost, even as I write this. We all deserve a better, kinder world.
As a point of reconciliation, and without pulling directly from current conflicts. I think that if every British agent in Sri Lanka perpetrating the ‘Divide and Rule’ Strategy had been exiled or killed in 1815 (with violence and malice aforethought), the history that you had to endure would have been orders of magnitude less bloody, do you disagree?
Even when it's gone really badly, like the Russian revolution, the revolution was a huge improvement.
80% illiteracy. I think revolutions almost always go well because you usually have to be really terrible to cause one to happen.
The Russian Revolution you are probably thinking of is the October Revolution of the Bolsheviks. But the tsar had already been overthrown by the February Revolution earlier that year, and some of the initial steps towards improving Russian literacy like the drafting of an orthography reform were already accomplished under that regime. Russia may well have seen major strides regardless, and the Bolsheviks are widely seen as one of those revolutions that did more harm than good.
No, I mean the whole thing. I mean that the revolution was necessary.
I don't think reforms of orthography were what mattered. What mattered was actually forcing people people to learn to read and also sending people out to teach them.
I don't see pre-1918 Cryllic as much more complicated that post 1918 Cryllic, but then I am of course literate and a Swede, so the only thing I find unusual is the symbol of softness, which is probably much less of a problem if you actually speak Russian.
I would not characterize the Russian revolution as 'better.'
Under the czar successful farming resulted in high taxes.
Under the communists, successful farming made you a kulak, you died / starved to death, and then everyone else did too.
Under the Tsar's total system 80% of the population were illiterate. Keeping normal people illiterate requires immense oppression.
With the revolution Russia became much closer to a normal country.
> Most violent revolutions end up replacing one dictatorship with another.
Don’t those new violent dictators also tend to be more aligned with the people revolting?
Anyway, it kinda makes sense to me that the people advocating for change through violent means don’t suddenly stop being violent when they get to power.
>>>>> Don’t those new violent dictators also tend to be more aligned with the people revolting?
Empirically, no.
"Popular dictator" is an oxymoron. The dictator is always focused on their own survival. They are never able to completely wipe out their opposition, and end up collaborating with the powerful, and repressing the weak, in order to retain power.
Parents don't want their kids executed or sentenced to life in prison because they ended up burning people to death. And there is no way to ensure arson only burns fascists. They were probably desperately looking for a way to save her from that.
Can't say I'd have done the same choice, but it makes it more understandable.
Isn’t that relatively normal? They’re really easy to make.
The ‘throw molotov cocktails’ are mentioned in the same sentence as ‘hand out leaflets’, which makes me feel the surrounding people were generally not panicking about the fire. Hard to say without reading the book though.
no
throwing molotov cocktails is in NO way "normal"
Yes, not normal in a normal context. However if you're fighting against a dictatorship it fully qualifies as heroism. When dictatorship comes to your country (madness is growing everywhere so be prepared) you'll be grateful for anyone fighting against it, or one day you'll be the one writing "... then one day they came for me, but there was no one left to fight for me".
Under a dictatorship it ought to be.
"Killing people I don't like is ok" is not a very nice line of thinking
Wow, didn't know that teenager's protesting Franco is actually worse and has a higher body count than... checks notes... the Franco Regime.
Any other insights you'd like to add?
> Killing people I don't like is ok
it's so sad that the allies killed so many Axis soldiers in WW2 right? wasn't very nice :(
Sadly the article doesn't paint them as heroic:
> and when the police turned up, scatter in every direction.
Whoever they set out to burn alive was very likely defenseless.
A fascist dictatorship is not a very nice goverment.
I hope you never experience living in a fascist society.
I spent some time in Northern Ireland in 2001 (Derry mostly). At one point there was a sudden fire in the back yard of the youth hostel I was staying at. When I mentioned it, the owner of the youth hostel said "it's just a Molotov cocktail".
A) She was still a child. Her parents had full control over her.
B) She was imprisoned, and tortured, as the article discusses.
C) What POV would you prefer?
D) This was Franco's Spain, what do you imagine yourself doing at a time like that?
Note, the article doesn't say that she threw molotov cocktails. She was put into induced comas, tied to a bed, kept in social isolation, etc. because she didn't want to live under her parents' control.
Perhaps the modern world has softened the term fascist dictator by using it for regimes to which it only partially applies.
The generalissimo used forced labor not unlike the DPRK, made widespread use of concentration camps, and was quite fond of executing dissidents. All religions other than Catholicism were outlawed and all political parties were outlawed.
Why would opposition to a murderous dictator be a bad thing? It isn’t as though the protestors/rioters/rebels were the ones escalating the situation. The government was already killing people. This could easily be viewed as justified violent opposition in the pursuit of stopping more murder.
She was a child who resisted the fascist Franco regime and was subjected to torture. Is that better for you?
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Gaddafi was not a communist.
The Chinese State's actions w.r.t. the Uyghurs in undoubtedly a genocide. The Tankie angle misleading, "Han supremacist" would be more accurate.
Calling anyone supporting Franco a 'tankie' is so ahistorical it beggers belief.
Please try to understand the words you use, lest you rob them of all meaning.
I'd suggest replacing 'tankie' with 'partisan'.
fair enough.
I used it as a synonym for "Westerner (or West resident) supporting authoritarian regimes (of all colors)"
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> Just the continued normalization of antisocial people as somehow being the victims of society instead of being the ones perpetuating harm on society.
Opposing an actual fascist dictatorship isn't particularly "antisocial". Unless your definition of "social" is blind obedience even as your family members and friends are harmed, killed, or disappeared by the government.
Yeah I don't think anyone thinks this was a good program, but saying someone performing acts of terrorism is just 'a free spirit' is a bit... BBC of them.
One person's terrorist against the Franco government is another person's freedom fighter against the Franco regime.
"Mr Bin Laden was just a bit of a free spirit, until the Americans decided to kill him in the middle of the night"