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sabotabbyI'm not going to embed or link to it, because it's all over the intertubes today, and I don't actually want this inbred doucheberet to get more hits than he already has. But I'm pretty sure you can find it if you want to see it and haven't already. If you're triggered by such things, don't. Just don't.
I'm so horrified. I'm horrified by the guy's behaviour, and the fact that the Children's Aid Society has not swarmed his house and gotten his child the hell out of there, and the thought that this girl has had to live in the same house as an armed thug for fifteen years. I'm also deeply horrified by the comments—not just on YouTube, where one expects a high level of douchebaggery—but on ostensibly feminist sites like Jezebel, supporting this person's behaviour.
I almost didn't watch it because, having gotten some idea of the content, I figured I'd be highly upset. The girl in question is the age of most of my students. Sure, 15-year-olds can be entitled little brats. But, you know, I've rarely seen a kid act like a complete and utter irredeemable jerk without some sort of family problem lurking in the background. If this kid is a brat (and I'm not sure she is; the post he read sounded like typical teenage venting, meant for a private audience of friends, and I feel that this is probably healthier than spouting off to her parents) perhaps it's because she's had some very poor role models. If she swears, well, one only needs to listen to her father to see where she gets that from.
But regardless of how bratty a child is or is not, it's no excuse for abuse. And what is demonstrated in that video is classic, unambiguous abuse. This man should not be allowed to parent. This man should not be allowed a firearm license. He is clearly violent and dangerous. The abuse depicted in the video isn't physical, but I wouldn't be surprised to hear that he beats his kid as well.
Also, how pathetic can a grown man be? Publicly rebutting his teenage daughter's "arguments"? He's ridiculous.
I try not to judge people for smoking, but I'll throw that one in too. If you want to destroy your own health, you certainly have that right, but if you have kids, quit smoking for fuck's sake.
The other day, I was talking about The Breakfast Club with a co-worker and one of our kids. I was saying that, while I had a few problems with the movie, the one line that always stuck with me was Allison's: "When you grow up, your heart dies." I don't think it's true in my case (the kid, bless him, didn't think so either) but it's certainly true that the vast majority of teenagers are surprisingly good people, until they're warped into submission by adults.
Anonymous should find out where he lives and do their thing to his computers.
I'm so horrified. I'm horrified by the guy's behaviour, and the fact that the Children's Aid Society has not swarmed his house and gotten his child the hell out of there, and the thought that this girl has had to live in the same house as an armed thug for fifteen years. I'm also deeply horrified by the comments—not just on YouTube, where one expects a high level of douchebaggery—but on ostensibly feminist sites like Jezebel, supporting this person's behaviour.
I almost didn't watch it because, having gotten some idea of the content, I figured I'd be highly upset. The girl in question is the age of most of my students. Sure, 15-year-olds can be entitled little brats. But, you know, I've rarely seen a kid act like a complete and utter irredeemable jerk without some sort of family problem lurking in the background. If this kid is a brat (and I'm not sure she is; the post he read sounded like typical teenage venting, meant for a private audience of friends, and I feel that this is probably healthier than spouting off to her parents) perhaps it's because she's had some very poor role models. If she swears, well, one only needs to listen to her father to see where she gets that from.
But regardless of how bratty a child is or is not, it's no excuse for abuse. And what is demonstrated in that video is classic, unambiguous abuse. This man should not be allowed to parent. This man should not be allowed a firearm license. He is clearly violent and dangerous. The abuse depicted in the video isn't physical, but I wouldn't be surprised to hear that he beats his kid as well.
Also, how pathetic can a grown man be? Publicly rebutting his teenage daughter's "arguments"? He's ridiculous.
I try not to judge people for smoking, but I'll throw that one in too. If you want to destroy your own health, you certainly have that right, but if you have kids, quit smoking for fuck's sake.
The other day, I was talking about The Breakfast Club with a co-worker and one of our kids. I was saying that, while I had a few problems with the movie, the one line that always stuck with me was Allison's: "When you grow up, your heart dies." I don't think it's true in my case (the kid, bless him, didn't think so either) but it's certainly true that the vast majority of teenagers are surprisingly good people, until they're warped into submission by adults.
Anonymous should find out where he lives and do their thing to his computers.
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Date: 2012-02-11 12:33 am (UTC)Needless to say, I agree; that man is dangerous and needs to be parted from both children and firearms.
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Date: 2012-02-11 12:36 am (UTC)In general, I feel that children and firearms are not a good combination. I like guns, and I like kids, but they are just two great tastes that don't taste great together.
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Date: 2012-02-11 12:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-11 12:44 am (UTC)This said, the few times I've been target shooting were ridiculously fun, and I'd do it more often if I could. I was all responsible and with licensed people in a controlled environment, though.
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Date: 2012-02-11 02:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-11 03:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-11 01:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-11 01:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-11 10:41 am (UTC)I am confused
I suspect I am going to need to ship someone to Mars
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Date: 2012-02-11 01:53 am (UTC)But yeah, shooting a computer? That's just petty and stupid. Unless the whole thing is staged, and the guy just had a computer he wanted to get rid of and constructed a plot-line around it. In that case, it's just stupid. If you're going to shoot a computer, you definitely need to use a high-speed cam for good slow-mo.
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Date: 2012-02-11 02:00 am (UTC)This looks like it possibly could be staged, but something in the guy's demeanour suggests otherwise.
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Date: 2012-02-11 02:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-11 02:01 am (UTC)and thank god for that.
I dont think id be able to function if i still had to deal with having a heart. Fuck that noise.
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Date: 2012-02-12 02:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-11 02:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-11 02:05 am (UTC)Seriously. No sarcasm. Good for him.
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Date: 2012-02-11 02:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-11 02:41 am (UTC)Hes an IT guy. They have a friggin HOUSEKEEPER.
That kid was just a spolied fucking brat. Shes like one of those monsters on MTV screaming about how their ferrari sucks.
So he shot her laptop. So what?? She wasnt even THERE.
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Date: 2012-02-11 03:08 am (UTC)Okay, property issue first: one could argue that a 15-year-old owns nothing, except I was working at 15, and maybe the laptop came from her grandparents or her mother, or maybe it was a reward for doing well at something. Fact is, she wasn't there, but she left expecting it to be there in working condition when she got back.
Wow, I hope she didn't have a hugely important essay on that hard drive and nowhere else.
All that aside, he's an IT guy; he knows what goes into laptops. If he doesn't want her to have the laptop (or sounds like some blog post set him off—change the Internet password, maybe), give it away. That laptop is made of conflict minerals and inhumane working conditions. Don't just destroy it. Give it away, donate it to charity—anything but turning it into a piece of junk that's going to moulder in a landfill.
He's supposed to be the adult. She has the excuse of hormones messing with her. What's his?
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Date: 2012-02-11 03:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-11 04:26 am (UTC)My dad used to tell us that he walked to school and back, uphill both ways.
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Date: 2012-02-11 04:13 pm (UTC)I never thought I'd be one of those adults with uphill both ways stories, but—I totally am, as it turns out. Though I mostly do it to entertain the kids. Like yesterday I showed them a picture of an 80s computer and told them a story about how when I was a kid, programs ran on cassette tapes and took hours to render simple graphics, and we were GRATEFUL, dammit.
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Date: 2012-02-12 02:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-12 02:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-11 05:03 am (UTC)Did you read her facebook post? If shes like that all the time im suprised her parents havent strangled her yet.
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Date: 2012-02-12 02:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-14 03:52 am (UTC)That makes perfect sense and shows a great degree of maturity.
/snark
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Date: 2012-02-11 02:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-11 02:27 am (UTC)And Jezebel's fucking horrible.
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Date: 2012-02-11 03:07 am (UTC)She wasnt even THERE. He took a laptop into a field and shot it. Whats the big deal?!?
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Date: 2012-02-11 03:28 am (UTC)It doesn't matter if she was there; he filmed it and posted it online so hundreds of people could see what he did to intimidate and humiliate his daughter.
But looking at your other comments you clearly Aren't Getting It, so I'm not engaging any further.
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Date: 2012-02-12 02:07 pm (UTC)My stepfather used to throw away my belongings while I was out at school. Sometimes he used to gather lots of my clothes and books and things and hurl them over the balcony, so I'd come back form an awful day at school and have to gather what remained up in front of all the neighbours. It was devastating and traumatising, and that didn't involve guns!
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Date: 2012-02-11 03:14 am (UTC)I don't think he's outright "abusive" towards her (i.e. he doesn't hit her), but he perpetrates psychological abuse in a way that is clearly *not* appropriate, and someone who would do that in front of their kids is clearly not in the right frame of mind to own a gun. Like you, I think guns can be OK, but this guy gives gun-owners a bad name, and the people who defend him? Fuck them.
Our new office assistant was going on about how it's ok to spank your kids and blah blah, and I'm like, fuck me. (plus she listens to country music) -- why do I have the feeling that she would go rah-rah with this video? *sigh*.
I don't wanna watch it, because while I don't think it's like the judge who beat his daughter, it's still bad enough and I know what i think about it from hearing the description.
:(
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Date: 2012-02-11 03:47 am (UTC)If a kid came to me and told me that this kind of thing happened to her, I would be legally bound to report it to CAS. The fact that the police investigated and told him he was a great dad to me suggests that none of the authorities in their community can be trusted.
Gotta defend country music, though! Actual country music, not the shit they try to pass off as country nowadays.
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Date: 2012-02-11 05:17 am (UTC)First off, I think the incident was real & genuine. A little bit of staging went into making the video, of course. From the father's later comments, he wasn't expecting nor wanting all the media attention - but he's got a good chance at being elected for something, thanks to attitude and a little charisma.
I am personally not comfortable with handguns, absolute parental authority, expensive gifts, "uphill both ways" exaggeration, filming family strife, smoking, or cowboy hats. But if we're going to critique this father's parenting skills, it should be for not teaching the kid earlier to be a contributing member of society. I am totally in favour of "if you want things, get a job and save money to buy them yourself". I also think people should do their own job-hunting!
Given the context of American gun culture, the daughter may think her Dad's shooting objects is a normal part of life, and not a threat to her. Her quoted reactions indicate that she is coping just fine. The father made it very clear that he was destroying the laptop to follow through on a previous threat of punishment. He did it while speaking calmly, after some thought - not in a scary rage.
Yes he should have hidden away the hard drive and donated the laptop, but I guess we would never have heard about the incident then, would we?
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Date: 2012-02-11 03:48 pm (UTC)Certainly, kids should get jobs if they want expensive stuff. So why does she have expensive stuff and no job? He can hardly complain that she's spoiled if he's the one doing the spoiling!
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Date: 2012-02-12 02:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-11 06:20 am (UTC)I don't think it's ok to use guns to discipline a kid, like others here have said. Violence of any sort, really. If he had any sort of problem with his daughter's behaviour, then there would have been better ways of dealing with that - maybe confiscating her computer temporarily except for school work, or temporarily blocking her access to Facebook (if he's a IT guy, then that shouldn't be too difficult, so it's not even like he doesn't know how to do that). This is an extremely unreasonable reaction.
What she posted wasn't too bad. It's what millions of kids do everyday. It's understandable that a parent would be upset that they'd be posting bad stuff about them, but it's still not enough to warrant this reaction. Punishing her for it would be similar to punishing her for keeping a diary about it, or for telling her friends. Frankly, teenagers are teenagers. They're always going to rant about what their parents do, whether it's reasonable or not. I know I would have been out of my mind if I hadn't been able to use the Internet to rant to my friends when I was a teenager - ofc, I did it in things more private than Facebook (and it sounds like it was a public post?), but still. I think it's healthy for kids, as they grow up, to have some privacy to vent their feelings and cool off. Especially when they're teenagers.
If it weren't true, he could be upset about her telling lies but still get on with his merry life - because yes, teenagers are prone to exaggeration, the horror! He says it's true, though, so he's basically just angry that she dared criticise him and comes across as completely moronic by completely blowing it out of proportion.
I also think that she's right to dislike what he's doing. I can understand wanting kids to help with chores around the house if that's your thing. But it sounds like she's being unable to balance everything, and frankly, I can't imagine having to do all the tasks she mentions *every single day* and school work on top of it, and getting punished for failing. The thing about getting things dirty after she's cleaned it also comes across as off - not particularly bad, but it's not very kind.
Sorry about the rant. I think this is ridiculous, wtf.
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Date: 2012-02-11 03:59 pm (UTC)Still, if you are old enough and mature enough to reproduce, you should know that teenagers complain about their parents! It's a no-brainer. It's part of growing up.
I feel like he's not unreasonable to make her do a bunch of chores—I probably had to do more chores than that at 15, got up at a similar hour, and was expected to pull high grades. I was expected to work, but very rarely on school nights. I remember finding it unmanageable at times, and my mom likes to remind me that I complained about the chores (though not about the work) at great length, but I got through it and now I have a work ethic. :)
Snooping on private FB posts and obviously the gun thing, however, are completely unreasonable, and like I said, abusive in the latter case. If she's a brat in general, there are tons of non-violent ways to deal. It's obviously a different situation, but my kids like to think that the school computers are "theirs" and go on FB. I think it's important that they learn to stay on task and that what they do on the school computers is not private, so I sometimes take this opportunity to remotely hijack their computers and change their status to "[student] is in class and shouldn't be posting on FB." The kids get the message, everyone has a good laugh, and no one is hurt or humiliated.
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Date: 2012-02-11 05:57 pm (UTC)Yes, exactly -- I think if you're raising a kid you should know that teenagers are going to be bitchy and overdramatic! It's normal.
Oh, I don't think it's unreasonable either, but I think it's unreasonable if she's being unable to manage. I think people are different, so some kids might do just fine like that and others might need a lighter workload (especially if they need to study more/are struggling with school). I think I may have been influenced by the video as well, because this guy sounds creepy and for all we know he might not be as "nice" about it as regular parents.
Bahahhaa I love that strategy! Yes, you're right, there are lots of non-violent ways of dealing with the situation. I don't know wtf went through his head to make him shoot the computer over a rant.
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Date: 2012-02-14 03:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-12 02:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-11 09:54 am (UTC)Of course, I wouldn't have children if you paid me a million dollars, so there you go.
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Date: 2012-02-11 04:08 pm (UTC)Certainly I agree that teenagers should have chores and jobs; I managed to do a considerable amount of both at that age, without physical or emotional coercion. I wasn't an angel either, and I bitched and whined about it, but part of good parenting is explaining why unpleasant things are necessary and dealing with conflict in a non-violent way. Parents can get angry, sure (but if he hadn't been snooping in the first place, he wouldn't have found anything to be angry about!) but they are the adult in the situation and ought to act like it.
You couldn't pay me to have children either, but I work with them, and I don't see anything particularly awful or unusual about her behaviour. She posted a rant to Facebook on a filter that excluded her parents. If that's a sin, most of us are guilty, and the rest of us are orphans.
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Date: 2012-02-13 04:43 pm (UTC)I actually don't believe that teenagers should have a right to or an expectation of privacy when it comes to their online activities. Whenever a teenager becomes addicted to drugs, commits suicide, or shoots up a school, the first thing people say is, "how could the parents not have known?" Parents have a responsibility to know what their kids are doing online, who they're hanging out with, and where they are, both online and in real life. How could you expect a parent to have any idea how to help their child make better choices if the kids spend 99% of their lives online (and teenagers do, don't they?) and the parents have no idea what they get up to while they're on there? How can a parent look for early warning signs if they're blocked off from the most important part of a teenager's life?
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Date: 2012-02-15 01:28 am (UTC)Good parents establish boundaries, trust, and communication with their children, and allow their children more privacy as they age and prove themselves worthy of that trust. The idea that a child's life should be an open book to his or her parents is disturbing. Everyone has a right to privacy, even teenagers.
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Date: 2012-02-18 06:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-13 05:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-18 06:56 am (UTC)