Hamilton Saint

That's your characterisation - and an unfair one. It's not an obsession. We're not talking about "a slight tap". And noone is suggesting that that will lead in one small step to violent abuse.

No, I wasn't arguing for that. The essence of the points I've made: - smacking is not "wrong", but it is unnecessary - and it can be counter-productive and lead to other problems; - parents do not have the unfettered right "to bring up their kids in whatever manner they deem fit", if that includes physical and mental abuse and neglect; - society (at several levels) has a moral and legal requirement to intervene, in order to protect children from abuse. And I'll leave it at that!

Oh, I don't know if they use saline solutions in pools used for competitive swimming. Your question is an interesting one. Probaly not, for the reason you suggest.

Well, if these sensible parents you speak of are not crossing the line - are not smacking the child hard enough to leave a mark - then they are not breaking the law, right? In which case the law is not "criminalising the majority" - which sounds so dramatic - it's actually attempting to protect the small minority of abused children.

A lot of people here, who have outdoor pools in their back garden, have switched from chlorine to a saline solution. When I swim in a pool that has been too-heavily chlorinated, I break out in hives.

So, therefore, we do nothing about the problem? Or do we establish legal sanctions that allow us to intervene? That's what this debate is about, as far as I see it. Because a few on here have expressed the view that parental rights are sacrosanct, without acknowledging the need, occasionally, to protect children from outright abuse. I'm not pretending that the intervention of the State is not a tricky and disturbing situation - as I explained earlier.

I realise that. Don't you pay attention to the qualifiers I put in my writing? I wrote "a small proportion" - and put it in italics to emphasise the point! Those parents who are unable to make distinctions, and unable to recognise the divide between a slap of rebuke, and physical cruelty, will just use the toleration for the former as a justification in moving on to the latter. A small number of parents ...

Don't they have those already in the Paralympics?

I don't think so; I think you are being disingenuous in pretending that there is no link at all. A small proportion of those parents who have no ideas in discipline, beyond just whacking their kids, will escalate the level of their physical punishment because they get more and more frustrated at their failure, and cannot fathom any other method.

They could have separate events for men and women and then a combined team. In the combined team evennt, when the women get to the top, they have to eject a wad of eggs; when the men reach the top they have to find and fertilise the eggs belonging to their own team!

Does species extinction concern you at all? And which particular humans are you pro for? What happens when rampant exploitation threatens the survival of some human groups? Are some groups more important than others?

You forgot to divide by the reciprocal of the coefficient of their country's population density and then multiply by the square-root of their country's GDP.

This is not the way narcissists operate. EVERYTHING is about them.

You do, apparently.

A few Vidal quotes I like: "As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests." "By the time a man gets to be presidential material, he's been bought ten times over." "I never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television." "The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity - much less dissent." "What is in question is a kind of book reviewing which seems to be more and more popular: the loose putting down of opinions as though they were facts, and the treating of facts as though they were opinions."

He used to be on the TV - the "chat shows" - quite often. He had quite radical political views and liked to take on arch-conservatives like William Buckley. Sometimes it seemed as though he was being deliberately provocative - just to be entertaining and challenge the consensus-view (what we'd call now a "wind-up merchant").

The issue is those parents who "struggle with the difference" between discipline and abuse.

The issue is what you do about it. Who is responsible for intervening?

Or the man who had been prescribed a month's-worth of suppositories to deal with a medical condition. After a few days he went back to the chemist to complain: "These things are useless - for all the good they do me I might as well shove them up my ar*e."

In this country teachers are legally obliged to report situations where they have a strong suspicion that a student of theirs is being abused or neglected. If they do not report, and it emerges later that a serious case of abuse could have been stopped if they had responded quickly, they are liable to prosecution. It can be a difficult call sometimes. Cuts and bruises would seem straight-forward, right? But what about a child saying that they "get bashed about by their Dad"? That would require reporting. The consequences can be traumatic. Teachers and parents can be dragged through horrible ordeals because of bureaucratic bungling. The system doesn't always process these cases wisely. But, all things considered, there have to be legal safeguards set up to protect vulnerable children.

In your opinion, perhaps, but there are some parents who just don't get it. For them, discipline = abuse. Children need protection occasionally from those who have no idea how to bring up children. Parental rights, therefore, cannot be absolute.

Yes, granted, but the state does have a duty - a legal obligation - to intervene when children are being abused.

"Nothing works better than Advil" - so, use nothing!

The word film pronounced as though it were a two-syllable word - filum. Where did that come from?

Yet another irritating example of using one part of speech as another - using a verb, here, as a noun.