Administrative Snorlax

Also unfortunately I do believe a tornado, which had the power to lift an oil rig weighing 800+ metric tons, could probably lift a 100 ton dinosaur.

I could see my driveway when the tornado sirens began. I cut across the back lawn to get inside. The tornado/funnel tore apart trees all down the road I had walked. Branches littered the street and caused road closures. It did not hit my apartment but left debris at the edge of my apartment complex where I had just been walking (and where all the birds bolted from.)

I suspect even hundred ton dinos would be spooked of something that can throw a tree. And that's somewhat evidenced in the bird flight I saw.

Several of the world's most famous fossil-bearing rock formations preserve what would've been "grass"lands* and deserts, ample flat land- but, crucially, the Earth as a whole was much warmer than it is today (the polar ice caps would've covered one-third of their modern extent, no major glaciers, what're now Antarctica and Alaska would've only seen sparse snowfall in the coldest winters) meaning the cold air-warm-air interactions needed for tornado formation would've been a lot rarer to come by. Therefore, tornadoes in general would've been rare occurrences during the Mesozoic, and ones powerful enough to pose a threat to a large dinosaur would've been even rarer. However, regular storm activity still would've occurred, and the posited "maybe they just laid down/lowered their heads" speculation above is indeed a theory for how sauropods might've avoided getting struck by lightning in such conditions- I strongly doubt they sat on their heads due to how heavy their bodies were**, but they absolutely could lower their heads closer to the ground.

Before I answer that question, I think it's important to be really clear what we mean when we talk about "consequences".

Because here's the thing: "consequences" usually means "the results of previous events", but when adults use the word "consequences" in relation to children, much of the time what they actually mean is "a negative experience inflicted deliberately by an authority figure in response to perceived wrongdoing". A more accurate term for that would be "punishments", but adults like to cloak our nastier invocations of power over children in euphemisms.

If we want to get technical about actual consequences, we can break that down further into "logical consequences" and "natural consequences"; those are terms that have been written about both in the realm of parenting and in broader studies of social order. Logical consequences are outcomes that are clearly related to someone's conduct, but still require deliberate exercise of authority to implement. Natural consequences are things that just happen as a direct result of what someone does.

So, a concrete example:

A group of kindergarten kids are building towers with wooden blocks. Alice throws a block at her classmate Bob and hits him in the head.

Punishment: Alice doesn't get to go outside for playtime later that day. This has basically nothing to do with what happened. The basic lesson is "don't do this thing because someone with the power to make your life worse said so".

Logical consequence: Alice isn't allowed to use the blocks for a while. The connection to the problematic act is clear: "you used this thing to hurt someone, so we don't trust you with the thing".

Natural consequence: Bob doesn't want to play with Alice anymore. No one had to make this happen; it just happened because getting hit in the head by a wooden block is unpleasant, and makes you not want to be around the person who hit you. Bob isn't an authority figure invoking any kind of power over Alice, he's just a fellow kid who has the right to choose his own friends.

So, to bring us back around to your original question: if someone goes their entire life and never experiences punishment, I'm genuinely 100% all for that. Punishments serve mostly to reinforce social orders and power structures. If they're successful in changing behaviour - which they're often not! - it's through fear, not by helping people to internalise principles that make them better members of the community. My bro Michel Foucault and I both say fuck that noise.

On the other hand, if someone goes their entire life without experiencing a logical or natural consequence? That's more likely to be a problem, because it's consequences that actually teach us something. It's important to learn that if you hurt someone they won't want to be around you anymore. It's important to learn that breaking people's trust means you might not be trusted again.

The thing is, being insulated from consequences is not something that can just happen. That takes effort from people around you constantly working to prevent anything bad happening to you as a result of your actions. On some level, we do that to children all the time! Alice and Bob from earlier? What are the odds their teacher not only enforces a punishment on Alice, but also then directly intervenes to avert the natural consequence by forcing Bob to accept an apology and be friends again?

There are certainly parents who take this to an extreme. The ones who'll pay $5000 an hour for a lawyer to make sure their teenage kid gets half an hour of community service for setting a bus on fire or some shit. Thing is, odds are those parents are actually punishing that kid severely in private, which is why calling the kid "spoiled" is still kinda fucked up in my book. It's not that nothing bad ever happened to them, or that they never wanted anything they didn't get; it's just that all the bad things that ever happened to them were arbitrary, punitive, and totally useless for learning how to live as an equal member of a society. All they ever learned about was power - that with enough power, you can avoid consequences and inflict punishments as you please. And the moment no one is holding power over them anymore, the rest of us are all fucked.

It might be the case that punishing *children* is always wrong. I don’t know. Never had a kid, so never been in the situation where I worried the kid needed an impose consequence to teach them, but chose not to do so, and observed the results. So I can’t say.

But punishing grown ass adults misusing power isn’t always wrong.

Or at least, I don’t think people argue very well for it.

That and... I don't think OP (at least not in this post, this is probably not all they have to say on this topic, they seem pretty aware of research on child development so I suspect they're somewhat of an expert) has fully thought through how well natural consequences work how often.

Like.

As a kid I was bullied by a neighbor boy. His parents saw him behave cruelly toward me and my friends but never punished him. Why this is, I can't say I'm sure, but the scuttlebutt locally was that his parents had anxieties about being seen as lower class than other people, so they lowkey approved of their kid pushing people around/gaining the status they feared they didn't have.

Bully knew that because I'm disabled, I had deep anxieties about the idea I was physically weak and people who didn't like me could hurt me if they really wanted. Bully took to taunting me challenging me to a fight, knowing that I was afraid I would lose and would never take me up on it. So he called me names for my cowardice.

One day he happened to do this while I happened to be playing with a very large, very heavy toy sword. This also happened to be the day I was so sick of his bullying that I reasoned (not even thinking about the fact that I was armed and he was not) that whatever humiliation he'd inflict upon me for failing to win the fight would be preferable to the humiliation of his taunts.

As I mentioned: I was armed. He was not.

He went down like a stone. In one hit. I distinctly remember the loudness of the sobbing, and the guilt I felt for hurting and scaring someone THAT much, even if it was him and he earned it.

Now. If punishment is inflicted by an authority figure and natural consequences are not, that was a natural consequence. Bully learns that if you challenge Fierce to a duel you get the crap beaten out of you.

And, indeed, he stopped fucking with me.

But here is the thing:

He stopped fucking with me for ABOUT SIX MONTHS. Whereupon it dawned on him that I felt guilty and ashamed for hurting someone/resorting to violence.

Which meant I would be very unlikely to do it again.

I think OP means:

Random punishments are the worst, nonrandom punishments are a little less bad, but natural consequences are the only *good* training tool

Not that logical consequences are literally not punishments.

Look, I don't want to speak for OP, here, but in general, those of us in the youthlib community are very much aware of this, and this is, in fact, one of the key aspects of coercive schooling to which we object.

But punishing grown ass adults misusing power isn’t always wrong. Or at least, I don’t think people argue very well for it. Should we not punish Stephen Miller?

Who is "we"? Who has the power to punish the powerful? Someone even more powerful? Who watches the watchmen?

I would say that in a democratic society where power is derived from the consent of the governed, the natural consequence for leaders who abuse their power is that the populace will revoke its consent to be governed by this person -- i.e., revoke the person's power.

The U.S. is not a democratic society, so we the people don't actually have the power to strip the power from Stephen Miller.

I have difficulty managing the stresses of daily life without becoming overwhelmed and debilitated by anxiety. That is disabling. A drug that blunts my anxiety response is an adaptive tool I choose to use to manage my disability.

I don't have to use that tool. I didn't always use that tool. When I choose to forgo that tool or don't have access to it, I just Am More Anxious.

I also choose to wear eyeglasses to improve my eyesight. I could choose not to wear them, but then I wouldn't be able to see very well. It's okay not to see very well (plenty of people don't), but especially in a highly visually-oriented society, I would rather wear glasses and see things.

Without diminishing the reality of vidism and systemic oppression of people with vision disabilities, the fact is that people with vision disabilities and Mad/neurodivergent people are treated very differently.

An adult who doesn't want to wear their glasses generally has the legal right to make that choice.

When someone commits a murder, the public's reaction is not "This must have happened because the killer wasn't wearing his glasses. We need laws to force people to wear their glasses, or else they'll become murderers."

If you called the police and said "My 18 year old daughter ran away from home and refuses to wear her glasses," the police would probably say "That's not our problem."

If you said "When I was growing up, my mom was nearsighted but never wore her glasses, so she mostly navigated by sound and touch," the reactions would probably be negative and judgmental (because, again, vidism is a very real form of ableism), but most people would probably not say "No child should live through that kind of trauma, obviously she should never have had you!"

If I want surgery for something unrelated to my eyes, no one is going to turn me away because I also happen to be myopic.

If I take off my glasses to have sex, no one is going to accuse my partner of rape because nearsighted people can't consent to sex.

*and therapists, nurses, pharmacists maybe etc. you know, people likely to understand chemical interactions in the brain more than your average person on account of several years of training

But also... sure, I guess? But it doesn't actually have that much to... do with anything?

Bastian of the Neverending Story is fat and weird-looking, in the movie he's a perfectly photogenic all-American kid.

Hermione is buck-toothed and unpretty, in the movies she's a perfect little girl who grows into a very attractive woman.

Carrie is fat and unpretty, in the movies she's a supermodel in slightly unflattering clothes.

Don't even talk to me about Ugly Betty.

The latest Frankenstein adaptation continues a long trend of trying to convey the message of "this monster is not inherently evil" by making the monster look good. Because obviously if the monster did look bad, it would be evil and people would be justified in shunning it.

Even supposedly more serious media does it. Imre Kertész's Holocaust novel Fateless has a minor character, a wimpy weird-looking member of the group of boys who got deported together. The other boys don't really like him, and disdainfully agree when he's deemed not fit for work - of course they don't yet know that it's a death sentence. In the atrocious movie he's not weaker just younger, a photogenic little boy, and him being sent to his death is played as a sentimental tearjerker for the audience instead of forcing us to grapple with the complexity of the original, where mundane teen boy cruelty continues to exist in boys who are currently victims of a genocide.

A written text says: this person is ugly, this affects how people treat them, this affects how they feel about themselves, how they behave, how they live in the world. This might just be an incidental part of their story, or it might be its entire point of the whole fucking book. And then the movie sweeps in and says: oh, but they aren't ugly! They have always been beautiful! They are being bullied and shunned for no reason! So unfair!

And the unintentional but very obvious implication arises that if they *were* ugly, of course they would deserve the bullying, the audience would agree that they deserve the bullying, the audience would want to join in, kick spit point laugh. The idea of empathizing with an actually ugly person doesn't compute. (Maybe it's clear by now that this has done low-grade but long-lasting damage to me as a person: weird ugly people are simply not allowed to exist, not even in stories about being weird and ugly.)

right so there’s

- people who have kids

- childfree people

- people struggling with infertility

but there’s a secret fourth thing right. people who want to have kids but can’t because of some other reason, eg no partner (and couldn’t handle it alone), or disability that you’ve judged would impact your childrearing ability more than you can compensate for, or lack of family support, or poor mental health or executive dysfunction, or lack of financial resources, or lack of a job or housing or stability, or living too far from family support… just like…

the experience of any number of the myriad reasons a person might not be able to have kids (or have them now) other than literal infertility, but wanting them. childless-not-by-choice.

like. Yeah my partner is not down to raise kids with me and I got disabled by long covid, but even aside from and before that, I, as a big old lesbo, did not have a dude I felt comfortable asking for an old-fashioned sperm donation, and did not have the money to go to a sperm bank. It costs a fair amount of money to get knocked up if you're not doing it the traditional way! And if you're a gay guy who wants to hire a surrogate I imagine that's expensive and complicated too! And if you're not set on being biologically related to your kid and would be happy to adopt--well. Adoption agencies tend not to be super great about queer couples.

And I think that yeah there's a growing demographic of people with access to birth control and family planning who are barely scraping by saying "we can't afford to have kids," but also I think

people who have sex with the opposite sex (whether or not they're purely straight) can have accidents so much easier. And a lot of couples who end up accidentally pregnant might go "no we did the math this is impossible" but some of them go "we're gonna make this work somehow we want it too much."

and those kinds of accidents are much less common among queer people, so fewer of us get put in the position of "we said we couldn't but now I'm pregnant and I don't want to give it up, what now."

So overall the proportion of childless-not-by-choice people is much queerer than other segments of the population

and there's resistance to talking about it from both sides. Like. Homophobes don't want drag queens to read to kids at the library, let alone have and raise kids of their own, obviously. But on the flip side, there's a vein of queer culture that rejects the cultural norms of sort of, "cookie cutter" straightness. Like there's an idea that to come out and be properly queer you have to reject not only the idea of a traditional marriage to a partner you're not attracted to but also everything that goes with it, the picket fence and the 2.5 kids. So I think many queer people feel like if they talk about wanting kids, they'll be labeled as "too normie" or something.

I hope that'll change, that as same-sex marriage gets (and hopefully stays) legalized in more places, there will be more room for queers who want to raise families.

and i hope that all the other shit, the people who are getting worked to the bone and can't afford to take care of a kid even if they want to, I hope to see that particular societal ill get fixed in my lifetime.

And disability and mental health stuff--well case by case, everyone is different, but to be honest money would solve a lot for a whole lot of people.

Conservatives don't want poor people (or queer people, or disabled people, or single people -- but really, all those difficulties can be overcome with Money, so fundamentally this is an economic issue even when it intersects with other issues) to have children, so as much as they bleat about birthrates and the evil feminists, they don't want any policy changes that would actually enable people to choose to have children.

And progressives... well. Progressives are deeply eugenicist.

They might give some lip service to the current party line on birthrates, which is "Well, actually, the problem is that people can't AFFORD to have children! Wages and cost of living!" but they're not actually thinking of anyone except like, Hetero Jessica and Brad, Normative Lower-Middle-Class Couple. They don't mean disabled people, or unhoused people, or actual below-the-poverty-line poor people, or people who didn't go to college. Because those people are Stupid, and Stupid people shouldn't have children.

And the further left you go on the political axis, the worse the eugenicist antinatalism gets. The average Gavin Newsom voter thinks anyone who wants to have children without an IT job and a master's degree means you're Stupid and shouldn't breed, but the average anarcho-leninist thinks wanting to have children at all means you're Stupid and shouldn't breed.