Merry Christmas, if you’re into that sort of thing!

Alright Valentin, you flat out used my name when you were speaking “generally”, but if it was a mistake, then let’s consider it all water under the bridge and start over.

Speaking generally, there is no “general speaking” when it comes to parenting. Every situation is unique, with a million variables, and a million details that onlookers don’t know. Unless something is clearly harmful to children regardless of the circumstances, it’s very shakey ground to ever say that a particular bit of parenting is generally abusive, or makes children fearful, or whatever negative thing you want to say. If you have children someday, and letting them have complete cyber freedom from a young turns out to be best for you and your family, then that’s what’s best for you and your family. There aren’t hard rules. After all, you are ok. 🙂

“and it not excuse for myself – excuse for tone of others and if they feel you are troll then they will not be so polite.”

You’re making this into a tone argument. Yes you were polite Valentin, but that was never the issue. Unjustifiably calling a parent “abusive” politely is just as bad as unjustifiably calling them “abusive” in a mean manner.

I’m not phased by swearing or “rudeness”, or whatever you mean with your tone defense. I’ll hear more swearing on a bad commute than I’ll hear in months here. The issue here, is that two people came into here looking for a fight. Don’t you think that severe accusations based on assumption, not evidence, is “trolling” itself? And then they jumped all over Mish, who is always a class act, and said all kinds of stupid shit to her.

The problem with “mrex is a troll” is that it removes responsibility from everyone who is not me. People can say whatever they want, and they will have no accountability for how they act, because well, “mrex is a troll”. The problem with “mrex is a troll” is that I am not just a bag of meat behind a computer screen. I woke up today with a severe headache, I’m puking, sweating, and I’m wondering if I’m sick or dying or if it’s just panic attacks, again. This is always the flip side of anger, at least for me, panic attacks. I’ve been pushed into dissociation by these fights before. And all for what? So two people can feel good about themselves for “sticking it to me”?

And they can both go sit on a cactus for what they said to Mish.

“mrex I remember you said before sometimes you even start arguments on here – that little bit like trolling.”

No I hate arguments. I hate getting angry, I hate everything that comes with it. But I do like to debate, and it took me a while to figure out that’s generally not the culture here. Every once in a while I slip into “debate mode”, but I try to stay out of it now, especially since Trump won.

@Mish

“@mrex, I want to apologise. I had no right to jump in on your behalf before you’d even responded.”

No apology needed. I’m sorry that people were shitty. Sorry that I’M so shitty.

@Lea

“If you think there’s something wrong and you need to check up on her, do it. If you’re wrong, she’s angry at worst. If you’re right and do nothing, she might be talking to my son. Several girls did. That did not go well for them.”

Thank you. It’s hard not to feel guilty whenever she’s upset at something. It’s hard to know what’s right, sometimes.

I enjoyed your metaphor with the piano. And this;

“It’s the same thing. Online activities are not the equivalent of a dairy. Predators don’t stalk kids in diaries. Kids don’t kill themselves for being bullied in their diaries.”

This is clear, and brilliant, and thank you so much for it.

“If something happened and you didn’t find out until it was too late instead of being called paranoid you’d hear a chorus of: ” How could you not have known?” “Where were you?” “Why weren’t you paying attention?” Why did you leave her unsupervised?” ” Don’t you know what a sewer the internet is?” “I mean, you wouldn’t just drop her off in a strange city alone.” “Don’t you read the news?”, maybe not from here, but from all over and it would go on and on and on.”

So true. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

And it is nice how I am supposed to wait for something drastic enough to happen to mkid before I gain the “right” to be “paranoid”.

@mildlymagnificent

“I reckon you’re doing the best you can given the circumstances, the children you have in the circumstances they find themselves in, your own parent and all the rest of it. We never get it perfectly right, but so long as we aren’t abusive or bullying ourselves, we’re in the best position to step in when we can.”

Thank you!

I liked the story you told about your mom and grandmom. I’ve always heard that you either become your parents, or you become their exact opposites. I don’t that’s very true a lot of the time, but I think it’s at least somewhat true some of the time. 🙂

@everyone else *hugs if you want them*

RE:mkid

1. I think I’m not saying anything, and letting her come out to me on her own time. I haven’t mentioned it to her yet. I’m still feeling a little unsure here.

2. I’ll come out to her maybe when it’s a better time. I’m sure she’ll be fine figuringbthings out, and asking me for advice either way. 🙂

3. Thank you for confirming that it was ok to avoid the drama that would go along with talking with this girls parents. I don’t think it’s necessarily anything like “abuse” yet, but I still felt kinda weird for not saying anything.

Thank you everyone.

I made up my mind, long ago, to avoid commenting on anyone’s childrearing skills/decisions. A big part of that decision is that I have no children.

It doesn’t mean I don’t have opinions and beliefs…I try to keep them to myself, tho.

Of course, if I believed a child’s parents were abusing them, I wouldn’t stand idly by.

Hello Troubelle, it’s nice to hear from you. Your poem brought up a good point – that of trust. I didn’t trust my parents, especially my father, because they proved themselves untrustworthy. More than that, I believe they didn’t feel their children’s trust in them was important.

Guess what? I felt no scruples whatsoever about lying to them.

Back up a little, mrex, I’ll hit these in reverse
I’ll scroll up bit by bit as I write many a verse
First off, if your kid trusted you, then maybe you would know
The way she wanted to go

And more to the point, something that I should have hit first time
Children’s rights are human rights, now isn’t that sublime?
You wouldn’t like it much if someone demanded your phone from you
Regardless of what they planned to do

And kindly define the metric that we measure “trouble” by
That’s nebulous by itself, a trifle pie-in-the-sky
Not to mention slightly troub’ling, if it’s left so undefined
So tell us, if you’d be so kind

Children’s rights are human rights, I’ll say it all again
She has the right to privacy, you treat that like a sin
If she trusted you she’d come and tell you trouble when need be
The implications are easy to see

You may want to review your rules and see if they ain’t fair
If one of them keeps making things become shaped like a pear
Maybe it’s law, not populace that the fault is truly with
Let her chatter with her kith

And you’re less condescending to me
But that’s not all I see

Second off, that’s real classy, the “oh-I’m-so-horrible–”
That’s pity-baiting, ego-masturbating, and a load of bull
I’ve dealt with this before, why jack off your pride?
It’s just my view of you that’s died

And little implicit threats add up quite an awful lot
Leering at your daughter and everything she’s got
Distraction from you may just be the thing she needs
And you’re giving me leads

In short, why do you do this?
Is it self-worth?
Is it pride?
Are you empty inside?
Do you want control?
Or is it just jealousy?

You don’t make sense to me

I’ve been following WHTM for a bit less than four years. It has been a great site, but not as great as it was before half the most interesting people left after the Thread of Doom 2. (There were two mods at that point; one left immediately and the other quickly faded away, which may be one of the reasons David is reluctant to take on a collaborater(s).) Another factor is that satirizing the dangerous delusions of the MRA crowd was a lot more interesting than pointing and laughing at the deranged ravings of people like the incel crowd or the shell of a person who used to be Roosh.
There is one problem that has always been part of WHTM. There have always been a few regular commenters who have superhypersensitive troll-dars, and are very quick to seize on minor issues of expression as evidence of trolldom — rather than looking at the whole of a person’s comments and giving some benefit of doubt. And unless a new commenter who has said something amiss immediate abases themselves and apologizes profusely, promising never again to speak their mind plainly, they are labeled “troll” with indelible ink. This is what has happened to mrex, who is a quite reasonable person and not in any way a troll. I have seen one new commenter driven away for the horrible sin of defending another new commenter who was unjustly labeled a troll and dogpiled for that. As a very outspoken person myself, it was pure blind luck that I did not say anything particularly offensive in my first few postings and thus escaped being labeled a troll — though there was one person who found something wrong with almost all of my comments; she disappeared due to the Thread of Doom 2.

I have four children; the youngest will be 30 in April. I did not intend to be the primary person raising them, but the mother of the older two turned out to be schizophrenic and her condition deteriorated quickly when my son was 8 and my daughter 2, and I had to assume more parental responsibility than I had planned on. After the divorce — her parents decided that it would be better for her to live with them than me, and that worked pretty well for about a year — I expected to remarry to somebody who already had children, but then I met my wife, who had never been married and wanted children, but without having to give up her career. So I ended up being a SAHD for my two younger ones.

Some of the people commenting on mrex here are not parents and thus have never had to deal with the responsibility of parenthood. They have a right to their opinions, but they tend to see everything from a child’s point of view — which is a valuable point of view, one that parents need to take into consideration, but the fact is that they have not had to face the decisions a parent has to make on a daily basis. I do not think anyone who has not been a parent can fully understand that — basically their opinions tend to be ‘splaining. As a parent (IMO, anyway), your job is to protect your child until they are old enough to protect themselves (which hopefully you have helped to guide them toward) from death and serious harm, the latter including life-altering traumatic experiences such as a young teenager being raped/sexually exploited by a much older man. I am gobsmacked that right now — with the Roy Moore business so prominent in the news — people are claiming it was abuse for mrex to closely monitor her daughter’s activities. Her job is to keep as close a watch as she can on the girl until she is satisfied that the girl has acquired enough judgment to handle the sort of situations that she might have to deal with. NOT watching her carefully would be abuse, or at least neglect.
One of the hardest decisions a parent of a teenager has to make is when to give the CHILD more freedom and privacy. We operate with the knowledge that when our children go off to college they will be able to make a lot of choices; many of them we will never know about. Our job is to prepare them to make the choices wisely, which means that you have to gradually replace your judgment with theirs. We need to show an appropriate degree of trust to them, but commensurate with their demonstrated ability to handle freedom wisely. The interesting thing about teenagers is that they almost always demand more freedom than they are ready for, with the expectation that parents will protect them by setting reasonable limits.
I was extremely lucky as a parent — my children spoiled me rotten. I doubt I would have the capacity to deal with problems like those Lea faces. The sad truth is that abusive parenting in the early years can damage a child so badly that s/he will never be able to trust or count on love from anyone. The worst thing that any of my children did (that I know of) was my older son got caught shoplifting a pair of gym shorts when he was 13. Every time I read people’s stories, here or elsewhere, I am reminded of how absofuckinglutely lucky I have been.

One time when my older daughter was 16, I picked her up at her grandparent’s/mother’s house, and to make small talk on the way home I asked her if she was still visiting with Debby, her beast friend from when she lived with her mother. She told me she hadn’t seen her for two years (though she visited her mother and grandparents’ town regularly). She said that the last time she visited Debby, Debby (14) was dating a divorced man in his mid-20s without her mother’s knowledge, and my daughter was uncomfortable with that situation because her friend expected her to participate in deceiving her mother. I don’t know how I would have reacted if I had found out about one of my daughters being involved in a situation like that, my I hope I would have been thoroughly ashamed of myself for having been blind and neglectful.
mrex is doing her job and deserves encouragement, not abuse. And those who jumped on mish for defending mrex — well, I wouldn’t be able to stay within the comments policy, so

Texas college warns students against working at Hooters

Lot to unpack here.

In the red corner – Hooters. Tacky, completely exploitative, total control freakery as far as the waitresses go, terrible food.
In the blue corner – Christian college getting all up in it’s students business. The economy is supposed to be better, but jobs for students still don’t grow on trees, tuition is high, and a college (unlike, you know, a parent) getting involved in a students personal life is not on.

No matter who wins – the students lose.

Troubelle

That post crosses so many lines that I don’t know where to start. So I’ll just mention one:

You said it yourself, you seeked out the help
And the therapist said as much

That’s a low blow. If people have mentioned their therapy here, don’t throw it back at them.

Did you read the posts from people who agreed with mrex? It doesn’t seem like it. In particular, did you read what Lea wrote? Do you get that balancing a kid’s right to privacy with their need for safety is both essential and really, really difficult? Do you actually think that none of us had ever considered this before?

When I was 12 or 13, we discovered that one of my best friends had been sexually abused by her adoptive parents, for years. The father abused, and the mother enabled and encouraged it. There was a trial, during which my friend disappeared. I never saw or heard from her again.
Meanwhile, the mother had left town. My mum and stepdad (who were running a church) decided that the good, christian thing to do was to allow the father to live with us until the trial resolved matters.
My friend’s abuse was only discovered because a teacher, increasingly concerned about erratic behaviour and mood swings, read my friend’s diary. Her privacy was sacrificed over concerns for her wellbeing. It was not done lightly.

@Mish
No apology needed.

You’re a long-time peacemaker. If you decide to share your candid point of view, I’m not going to criticize.

Woman run over with her own car trying to escape cat attack, troopers say

Sad and funny at the same time.

I am happy Mish made some peace now. I want to apologise because I said something which upset anyone. also GoM you make some really good arguments about what is perspective. I think about parents, if you are child or parent – everyone is passionate and it is complicated to talk about.

anyway

I have one question…little bit related…

what is The Thread of Doom 2?

edit: about Rose McGowan I seen on Twitter the black community is annoyed with her because they believe that she taken centre stage in #metoo which started by a black woman originally, I forget her name.

Shadow

thanks. I read mammoth before but I never read any comments until maybe 2016 I think so I missed this one.

and thank you for her name! I don’t know what I should think about Rose McGowan but she did some very good things. maybe she can help other women even if she did not help directly Tarana Burke the black women who started this movement.

Since it’s easy to forget the net isn’t all bad – Sarah Silverman fucking rocks.

@Troubelle

“And more to the point, something that I should have hit first time/Children’s rights are human rights, now isn’t that sublime?”

It is sublime.

“You wouldn’t like it much if someone demanded your phone from you/Regardless of what they planned to do”.

Right, I wouldn’t. In fact, treating an adult like a child is a raging red flag for abuse and control issues.

But that’s for adults. Treating a child like a child is not a red flag, because of the same reason why it would be psychologically abusive for me to use my daughter to talk out problems like I would with a friend. Or because of the same reason why it would be psychologically abusive for me to expect my daughter to contribute financially to the household like I would for an adult roommate. Children generally do not have the maturity, or the mental reserves that adults have. Part of being parent is easing them into responsibiliy (and yes, making safe decisions on the net IS a responsibility, not a right).

@People concerned that my snooping is “abuse”

I don’t hide the snooping from anyone. Don’t worry, if I am being abusive, CPS will be getting involved.

@Everyone

Lots of good points to chew on here. I especially appreciate the POVs from the other parents.

@GOM

“…with the Roy Moore business so prominent in the news — people are claiming it was abuse for mrex to closely monitor her daughter’s activities.”

What gets me is that I flat out said that this was TEMPORARY until mkid grew into her britches a little more. What abusive control freak ever gives up control? (Guess they could assume that I was lying).

But… this isn’t the first time that I’ve been singled out for saying the same things that other people are saying. That, and also the fact that some people want to rehash the past and list all my “sins” more or less EVERY time they start seeing my name pop up, makes me think that this is more personal and less anything rational.

I’m a stubborn asshole, and I don’t give up easily, but it’s getting pretty clear that this is the role that I have. Typically, I drive everything into the ground when I’m being railroaded, but I’m starting to ask myself whether it’s worth dragging everyone down, just so I can give the finger to the assholes trying to run me off.

I think what’s best for everyone is this. I’m going to dump whatever articles I have around, take a break, and the come back under a new name, and ignore the same people that are on my “don’t want to talk” list that I have going now, and stay in my lane.

But I must start with this.

” Kitchens and laundry…”

First I understood this as “kittens and laundry”, and then I was sad.