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Just before our server shut down (which was actually a ‘false flag’ attack by Mossad and the CIA acting under direct orders from the Bush Nazi regime in collaboration with a secret cabal of oil bankers working in cahoots with their Zionist paymasters) one of our readers, Simon Austin sent me this reminiscence of childhood in ages now gone by:
According to today’s regulators and bureaucrats, those of us who were kids in the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s probably shouldn’t have survived, because…
Our baby cots were covered with brightly coloured lead-based paint which was promptly chewed and licked.
We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, or latches on doors or cabinets and it was fine to play with pans.
When we rode our bikes, we wore no helmets, just flip flops and fluorescent’ clackers’ on our wheels.
As children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags. Riding in the passenger seat was a treat.
We drank water from the garden hose and not from a bottle – tasted the same.
We ate dripping sandwiches, bread and butter pudding and drank Fizzy pop with sugar in it, but we were never overweight because we were always outside playing.
We shared one drink with four friends, from one bottle or can and no one actually died from this.
We would spend hours building go-carts out of scraps and then went top speed down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. After running into stinging nettles a few times, we learned to solve the problem.
We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back before it got dark. No one was able to reach us all day and no one minded.
We did not have Playstations or X-Boxes, no video games at all. No 99 channels on TV, no videotape movies, no surround sound, no mobile phones, no personal computers, no Internet chat rooms. We had friends. We went outside and found them.
We played elastics and street rounders, and sometimes that ball really hurt.
We fell out of trees, got cut and broke bones and teeth, and there were no lawsuits. They were accidents. We learnt not to do the same thing again.
We had fights, punched each other hard and got black and blue – we learned to get over it.
We walked to friend’s homes.
We made up games with sticks and tennis balls and ate live stuff, and although we were told it would happen, we did not have very many eyes out, nor did the live stuff live inside us forever.
We rode bikes in packs of 7 and wore our coats by only the hood.
Our actions were our own. Consequences were expected.
The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke a law was unheard of. They actually sided with the law. Imagine that!
This generation has produced some of the best risk-takers and problem solvers and inventors, ever. The past 50 years have been an explosion of innovation and new ideas. We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned how to deal with it all.
And you’re one of them. Congratulations!
Pass this on to others who have had the luck to grow up as real kids, before lawyers and government regulated our lives, for our own good.
→ Continue reading: Childhood’s End
I think my relationship with the BBC is finally settling into something quite satisfactory. Having been through the stages of disillusion, mistrust, contempt and loathing I now find that I have reached the point where I now regard the BBC as reasonably reliable reverse indicator.
For example, whenever the BBC presents an event as a spontaneous outburst of public feeling, I immediately turn my mind to the possibility that it is anything but.
A case to consider is this series of nationwide anti-war protests by schoolchildren:
Hundreds of children are among crowds protesting at Westminster.
School children have been played a big part in many demonstrations across the UK while others have staged their own protests at their schools.
Sixth-former Sam Beste, from Fortismere School in north London, has organised many protests against the war.
He is staging a demonstration with dozens of others in Muswell Hilll before heading for Westminster.
In Carlisle, the police were called to a school after hundreds of pupils staged an anti-war demonstration.
There were two separate demonstrations in Belfast with more than 1,000 students and schoolchildren mounting a sit-down protest, blocking the road outside Queen’s University.
In Nottinghamshire, more than 100 pupils walked out of lessons at West Bridgford School to stage a demonstration on a nearby playing field.
In Manchester, about 200 school children joined a big demonstration.
The article makes no specific claims but first impressions would lead one to believe that these pre-pubescent protests are just breaking out everywhere like typhoid. Who knows, maybe they are. I certainly cannot prove anything but, for me, this wave of teenybopper discontent bears all the hallmarks of orchestration. And, if that is so, who are the conductors?
Far be it from me to point the dirty end of the stick at their teachers and lecturers, but it would not be an entirely unreasonable inquiry to make. Just don’t expect anyone at the BBC to make it.
Recommend that they avoid such ridiculous non-advice as this lot of BBC rubbish (thanks Natalie Solent) which I fisked today over here, and tell them this:
The war in Iraq will happen in Iraq, not in Bromley, Guildford or Kansas City. If it’s anything like the last gulf war, it will kill far few people than Saddam has since the last gulf war. But it might kill fewer people. And anyway, the world already contains some disgusting countries where people are killed by their own governments for no reason, which is why the war in Iraq is happening: to reduce their number, and improve things.
You might not want to talk about many of the actual specific evil things Saddam has done, in case they are upset by such details. Children don’t always want to see pictures of innocent mothers and babies gassed to death by their own government in their home villages, for instance. But you could say that Saddam is a vicious thug who has murdered many, many human beings, and the world will be better off once he’s out of power.
If they are having nightmares about terrorist attacks, you can explain how incredibly unlikely it is that one of these will affect them personally or anyone they know, and that you personally do not waste time worrying about it. Tell them terrorist attacks will be reduced once the governments that fund terrorists have been changed to better ones, which is why the Iraq war is happening.
And of course, find out whether they have been subjected to irrational antiwar nonsense from teachers or anyone else they know. My view, since watching a TV documentary about how British children ‘felt’ about 9/11, is that something very unpleasant in the current political climate is actively encouraging kids to feel personally bad and anxious about world events in coercive, irrational ways. For most children- still trying to learn how to read, play football, write stories and get on with their friends- people they never met being killed thousands of miles away should be no more upsetting than people they never met being killed in WWII.
But it’s easy to induce hysteria. “Oh dear, how awful! Isn’t it shocking, little Jimmy! Those people could bomb our home next! Now, how do you feel…?” Well, if the people you rely on for help tell you fairly clearly that you should worry, then you worry. A lot of antiwar propaganda consists of scaremongering, and our children are unfortunately very vulnerable to it. This BBC advice doesn’t address that: it’s part of the problem. Parents: protect your kids from antiwar propaganda: talk to them rationally about the war.
…or how to ensure your kids are more technologically literate than you.
One of the best ways to motivate someone is to present the person with a challenge. For children, forbidding something works equally well, if not better. So when I came across this product in one of those little catalogues that come with Sunday newspapers, I immediately realised its potential to do an amazing service in further advancing the technological awareness of the young generation.
Achieve total control over TV time
Worried about the hours your children spend watching TV or playing computer games? This remarkable new British invention hands back control to parents. Using the electronic Parent Key, you program the child’s daily viewing allowances into Screenblock – say, 7-8 am and 5-7 pm. As the TV mains cable is routed via the locked compartment, Screenblock controls the power supply, turning it on and off at the times requested. But here’s the best bit! It also comes with two electronic cards which act like a football ref’s cards. Wave the yellow one at Screenblock and today’s allowance is reduced by 15 mins – and red means the TV stays off until tomorrow. The all-important Parent Key also overrides all settings when the kids are in bed and it’s time for grown-up viewing.
So far, so good. But if parents led by the desire to curb their children’s TV-viewing habits succumb to the advertising and purchase such devices en masse, pretty soon many a technologically gifted whizkid will be popular, spots or no spots. Not only ways to disable the screenblock will be devised, but kids will be ‘instructed’ in how to do that themselves without their modifications being detected. Part of the solution will have to be the inability of parents to notice the ‘adjustment’. Aren’t you just grateful to the screenblock inventors for broadening your children’s technological horizons?
The Raelians are a truly weird cult, that is for sure, and the fact they are claiming to have produced the world’s first cloned human is hardly going to calm feelings about the technology. However even if their contention to have done so is true (not surprisingly I am disinclined to just take the word of a group which claims humans are the descendents of bio-engineered clones created by space aliens), I must say that I find it hard to get all that excited about the whole matter.
Although I do have worries that the technology and underpinning science is sufficiently immature that there is cause for concern for the health of a cloned child, the principle itself does not bother me at all… a child is a child is a child, and the manner of its creation does not give it any less worth or intrinsic rights.
However the issue of how to assign paternal and maternal responsibility for the child is, of course, going to keep a small army of lawyers busy for quite a while! I would be quite interested to see what people’s views are as to “who is left holding the baby”, if you will forgive the expression 
Sundon Lower School in Bedfordshire has banned video and digital cameras from its nativity play this year, because it is worried that the images may get into the hands of paedophiles.
So let me get this right… The head teacher of a state school has banned parents from recording their children in a play. How can it be okay for a woman in authority to be instilling fear of sexual predators into small children, clearly implying their own parents are collectively under suspicion?
This is the toxic paranoid psychology of the witch hunt. The world is not packed full of paedophiles hunting for pictures of nativity plays but it suits some people to act as it that was the case… powers must be expanded to ‘protect’ children after all and who better than a pettifogging head teacher to do that?
I suspect that this head teacher must be a fifth columnist for the Home Schooling Movement in Britain because no one is really that idiotic and paranoid, right? Right?
Alice Bachini looks at parenthood without any rose coloured glasses.
I moan a lot about having children. This sometimes makes me feel really mean, and I certainly wouldn’t do it in the presence of my dear friends who have wanted children for years and been unable to conceive so far. But maybe I should.
Of course, children are wonderful. The problem is, they are likely to be only slightly more wonderful than the treatment they get from you, the parent, and we parents have an incredibly difficult time trying to do things right.
Let me take the hypothetical example of, say, a one-year-old baby. This is what a day is like with a one-year-old baby. You wake up, with the baby in your bed, and breastfeed, for maybe an hour. Then you get up, carrying the baby. Then you try to get dressed, while the baby plays with something, if you’re lucky. Maybe you get interrupted a few times. An hour later, you can attempt to get some breakfast.
Entertaining one-year-olds is not easy; there isn’t much they can do, and their attention-span is zero. Another hour later, you can maybe go out, carrying the baby yourself or pushing it in a buggy for maybe fifteen minutes before she gets bored again.
Where will you go? A friend’s house, or a playgroup, where you will follow your baby around trying to make sure she doesn’t eat any live wires or spiders, and constantly looking for anything that will occupy her for ten minutes so you can have a cup of tea and some conversation. About feeding babies, entertaining babies, baby illnesses, and how to get any housework or cooking done.
I won’t bore you any further. It’s not much intellectual stimulation for a person with an adult-sized brain. → Continue reading: The consequences of convenience
Dr. Jan Fortune-Wood is a freelance writer and home educator. She is a supporter of Taking Children Seriously and writes on home education, autonomous education and non-coercive parenting from a libertarian perspective. Her third book, Bound To Be Free deals in depth with the hidden costs of so called ‘free’ education, including further discussion of the issues below
According to last week’s Independent on Sunday a new mental health campaign sparked off by the fear that parents may face jail over compulsory drug orders for their children if a new Bill becomes law. Not content with collecting personal and private data on parents and children via the Orwellian Connexions scheme, the Blairite regime is now proposing to parent our children for us still further by accusing parents who do not favour drugging their children of being negligent and denying their children medical treatment.
The use of the ADHD drug, Ritalin, continues to rocket – 208,000 in 2001 compared to 2,000 a decade earlier. Compulsory treatment orders are a symptom of a culture which treats children as products and an adjunct of administering a brutal, centralised ‘free’ education system. Those who do not conform to this ‘one size fits all’ educational machine are ‘bad’ and/or ‘dysfunctional’ and can be diagnosed and treated. The more the system feels threatened, the more aggressive the intervention. In a collapsing state education system so-called hyperactivity disorders such as ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) are popular tools of control and neatly shift the focus of failure away from the non-individually responsive institution and onto the child.
There are an increasing number of doctors and psychiatrists who consider that there is no objective difference in the behaviours of so called ‘normal’ and ADHD children. There are even some, like Thomas Szasz, who put these objections vigorously, pointing out that feeding children what is effectively ‘speed’ in order to curb what is not a disease, but a ‘catch all’ for troublesome behaviour, is a matter of adult convenience and control, not of medicine.
Formerly, quacks had fake cures for real diseases; now, they claim to have real cures for fake diseases.1
When big brother is threatening to drug your children so that they can be more suited to the homogenised environments of state schools perhaps its time not only to fight back, but to ensure that more and more people are aware that they can opt out of the system entirely and choose the freedom of home education. The hidden costs of so called ‘free’; state education are on the increase – not only through massive taxation, but also via services delivered with increasing menaces to civil liberties.
Dr. Jan Fortune-Wood
1 = Chemical Straitjackets for Children by Thomas S. Szasz
© 2001 The Foundation for Economic Education
Blogger Alice Bachini rejects yet another collectivist ‘one size fits all’ approach to the problem of juvenile crime
If a certain group of people is identified as causing particular kinds of crime, is it OK to legislate against the rights of that group? Say, black men were proven to be responsible for 90 percent of stabbings. Would that make it OK to ban black men from buying or owning knives? What if white men between twenty and forty were responsible for 95 percent of all drink-driving deaths? Should we make a law banning them from pubs except between certain hours of the morning, say?
Obviously not. Which is why it is a good thing that plans to bring in an ageist curfew in Corby have been shelved. But of course, no-one there is concerned about the civil liberties of people under fifteen. The argument seems to be between those who want something done about certain kinds of crime perpetuated by this age group, reasonably enough, and those who think more football and youth clubs are the answer to immoral behaviour, which, they aren’t. And I don’t have any easy answers either, but I do think some kind of intelligent understanding that young people are human beings like the rest of us would be a good start.
My other main suggestion is to make it easier for young people to do proper, money-earning work. As long as the system continues to ban kids from doing honest mornings on low-paid milk rounds on the grounds that this interferes with their totally pointless unpaid days of school, it is actively preventing many of them from finding a good way forward with their lives.
Alice Bachini
Alice Bachini is a blogger in her own right and supporter of Taking Children Seriously
I read in The Telegraph the depressing statistic that even when the police know a child has been killed by one of his parents, they still only convict 27 percent of murderers, as opposed to 90 percent when the murderer is a stranger.
“This failure to convict arises when parents blame each other or refuse to disclose any details about the injuries and there is no independent evidence.”
So the law against murder doesn’t exactly guarantee children’s safety. And I’m not sure giving them guns is the answer. The trouble goes deeper than anything libertarianism is qualified to solve, because it is about what goes on behind closed doors, and libertarians are only interested in protecting the rights of door-owners.
Except that I don’t think this is true. I think there are some libertarians who believe in right and wrong, and who think that the reason freedom matters is that it is morally a good thing, and that children benefit from it just as much as adults do.
At the moment, the family, or the parent/child relationship, is a largely private institution. This benefits those of us who want to improve on the norm in radical ways without being scrutinised, but those who want to do evil to their children sometimes abuse this private freedom in the most horrible ways imaginable.
Libertarians are right, I believe, that subjecting all families to more state interference would, even on this kind of balance, be wrong. But this does not mean that murdering children should be more legal than murdering adults. Nor does it make hitting kids OK. It just means that legislation is too flawed and clumsy a mechanism for improving children’s lives.
What’s the real answer? You really need to ask?!
Alice Bachini
Alice Bachini is a blogger in her own right and supporter of Taking Children Seriously
Think about this: your husband decides that you need to go to the dentist. He drags you there against your will, and orders you to have a tooth extracted. You don‚t want the treatment. He threatens you, then strips half of your clothes off, in full view of everyone in the waiting-room, forces you down onto your front, and starts hitting you painfully on the exposed parts of your body.
The wrongs of the case of the man who was convicted for smacking his daughter as mentioned by Natalie Solent on her blog go much deeper than smacking and whether it should be prosecutable. Of course, I think that violence against children should be illegal if violence against adults is illegal, which it is. But I don’t know how much laws about it will help children in the current climate. A law change might even damage children more than they are being damaged already, if it results in people they want to have around being forcibly removed from their homes, for example.
There is a correlation between bad coercive parenting and smacking, but it is perfectly possible to be extremely damagingly nasty without smacking, and (theoretically, at least) above (the not-very-impressive) averagely useful to your kids while habitually tapping them lightly on the wrist if they do something you don‚t like (although IME this kind of pointless exercise is not actually the most of it).
→ Continue reading: Violence is violence
You lucky kids! Those cool people at the BBC don’t just know what’s good for you, they even know what you want. All of you. Despite anything you might say to the contrary. If you have forgotten what you want and need to be reminded, just check out this website from children’s news programme “Newsround”. See, it’s telling you: “Kids Want Tougher Air Rifle Laws.”
Adult readers seeking a more detailed rundown on this topic, including details of which of the BBC’s own guidelines are being ignored, might like to see my post at Biased BBC.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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