Hamilton Saint

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.

This oft-expressed argument that 'My parents hit me and it never did me any harm is nonsense' - especially when it's followed by the statement 'So now I hit my kids, too.' The harm it did you was to persuade you that it was a legitimate and effective method of discipline. Think about it; the worst experiences you had in childhood with ineffective teaching were the ones where you were physically abused. [some of you may be too young to have had teachers who hit you, pulled your sideburns, threw chalk at you, etc.] The best discipline you received was not based on punishment and hitting at all, it was based on love, respect and knowledge. Good teaching and good parenting is based on respect, not fear and punishment. And, of course, pyschological abuse is even worse than physical abuse.

I suggest you begin and end those two paragraphs with quotation marks; that way, we know immediately that they're a quote from The Telegraph, rather than opinions of your own.

Another complaint about using a noun as a verb. "Hemingway's advice impacted on the writing of Martha Gellhorn." Impact is a noun. Write it this way: "Hemingway's advice had an impact on the writing of Martha Gellhorn."

If I may quote Monty Python: "You're a cruel man - but fair!"

"In the real world". You hear that phrase a lot in educational institutions - schools, colleges and universities. It usually accompanies a criticism or insult!

And, of course, when someone begins a statement with the phrase "to be perfectly honest", you know they're about to lie or disimmulate; and when they start an opinion with "to be perfectly frank", you know they don't actually believe a word they're saying. Honestly.