Don't allow the brainless, subversive Sesame Street type propaganda to come into your house. Your children's thinking should be molded by the word of God and Christian example, not by sex perverts and socialists.
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Hey! I grew up watching Sesame Street and I tell you, I ended up becoming a think for yourself kind of liberal! Of course I was also force fed christianity until my 20s, but I finally woke up when I realized just how hypocritical and, well... how NASTY christians can be. It's people like YOU who make people like me see the light (can we get an amen!) and do a quick 180 degree turn.
Pagan & Proud, baby!
Yes, and decent people really care what some nasty, sexist, child abusing cuntrag has to say about well, anything. I'm sure.
Strange, my brother and I grew up watching Sesame Street, and we didn't grow up to be socialists or sex perverts
I most certainly grew up to be a sex pervert.
Now, what's all this about Sesame Street.
Yes, we should all take child-raising advice from people who think it's a good idea to hit small children with PVC piping. Gee, between that and Bert, Ernie, Elmo, and Oscar the Grouch, I sure know which I'd rather have around my kids.
Rant over. These people just make me so pissed off.
"42 And they continued stedfastly in the apostles' doctrine and in fellowship ... 44 And all that believed were together, and had all things in common; 45 And sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need."
"32 And the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul: neither said any of them that ought of the things which he possessed was his own; but they had all things common. 33 And with great power gave the apostles witness of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus: and great grace was upon them all. 34 Neither was there any among them that lacked: for as many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them, and brought the prices of the things that were sold, 35 And laid them down at the apostles' feet: and distribution was made unto every man according as he had need. 36 And Joses, who by the apostles was surnamed Barnabas, (which is, being interpreted, The son of consolation,) a Levite, and of the country of Cyprus, 37 Having land, sold it, and brought the money, and laid it at the apostles' feet."
I think those verses can be used to argue that Jesus and co. were Communists/socialists (and they're from the King James Version of the Bible that the fundies hold so dear).
Something tells me your definition of "sex perverts" include people who learned how to share from Sesame Street and actually care if both people ENJOY sex...
Concern for others is something Jesus really did believe in, along with not being all about the benjamins. Dare I say he may even have been a socialist? What was that? Jesus only believes in America?
Is anyone else perplexed by the title of the site? How do you "Train Up" a child?
Sesame Street is evil. It was better when I watched it in the 70's and 80's.
I wasn't happy when I saw this either.image
Looks like Bert was interested. :p
Mabe this will work?
image
With the regard to the accusations of socialism, perhaps he's referring to the blacklisting of the late Will Lee (who played kindly shopkeep Mr Hooper) during the McCarthy Red Scare.
That doesn't explain where the sex pervert angle comes from though, unless he knows something that the rest of us don't...
Strange: I'm a grade-A perv' and I vote communist, yet I never watched Sesame Street... :P
As for the Pearls, whate the fuck are the Child Protective Services doing!!?
@Sapphire Wolf - I wouldn't treat my dog the way they treat kids. Over here, (Don't know where you are, mind you!) if that got out, they'd find their kids taken into custody before they knew what was happening.
Christ said "suffer the little children" and Michael Pearl took him at his word.
Fundies say atheists don't have morals. No, fundie, we don't have your morals, because yours are the morals of sick, twisted, perverted little minds.
The morals of hitting babies with sticks so they don't 'spoil', of punishing curiosity and initiative so they don't question, of teaching them the absolute minimum so they don't wonder. Fundies like Pearl don't want children, they want human pets, child-shaped lap-dogs who will perform on queue to the amazement of their friends.
A fundie is what is left when you drive the humanity out of a child.
@szena: Meh, probably true. (mind you, cruelty to animals sickens me too.) Though as we have an all-out ban on smacking on the way, religion carries less weight than it used to.
Nice, Raven.
SapphireWolf: If they treated dogs like they recommend treating children, they'd have the ASPCA climbing up their rectums with animal abuse charges.
Since when was "Christian" the opposite of "socialist"? "Jesus said unto him, If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me. " Matthew 19:21.
His instructions aren't for raising Christians - they're for raising right-wingers.
@Nonprophet: "David B., can I use that last line in my sig? Pretty please?"
What? And risk having fundies die of apoplectic fits?
Be my guest! :-)
Someone please send Michael Pearl to a dark alley near me. I have a length of steel pipe that needs crunch testing.
Dun dun dun da dun
"TRAINING NOT TO TOUCH
Try it yourself. Place an appealing object where they can reach it, maybe in a "No-no" corner or on an apple juice table (That's where the coffee table once sat). When they spy it and make a dive for it, in a calm voice say, "No, don't touch it." They will already be familiar with the "No," so they will pause, look at you in wonder and then turn around and grab it. Switch their hand once and simultaneously say, "No." Remember, you are not disciplining, you are training. One spat with a little switch is enough. They will again pull back their hand and consider the relationship between the object, their desire, the command and the little reinforcing pain. It may take several times, but if you are consistent, they will learn to consistently obey, even in your absence."
I am reminded of the part in "Brave New World" where the head of the Conditioning Center leads the group of people on a tour of the place to an area where they were conditioning some Delta babies against anything that was pleasurable to them by letting them crawl on the metal floor. Every time the babies approached the flowers and books the trainer would let off a loud siren and shock the babies through the floor.
So hence, "Brave New World" award?
Weather
Oyvind (sorry, can't get that letter right on a Windows box):
I think it's Sesame Street's seamless and uncompromisingly accepting attitude towards multiculturalism that offends most such people, as well as the diminished stratification of generations and the willingness to promote curiosity and silliness as perfectly normal and healthy.
Brave New World Award seconded. I don't like the idea of children becoming unquestioning idiots that will probably develop ludicrously irrational phobias thanks to base and demeaning forms of Pavlovian conditioning. You'd think Michael Pearl would encourage subversive behavior and trying to get away with as much as possible in order to combat the New World Order or whatever conspiracy's out to get us now, but whatever.
Jesus was a socialist and that's part of why I dislike Christianity so much. (The other reason has to do with the fact that certain Christians are gargantuan hypocrites.)
Jesus was a socialist and that's part of why I dislike Christianity so much.
Sorry, Angel Kaida, but by that do you mean that you dislike socialism and thus dislike Christianity for following Jesus as a socialist, or do you mean that you hate Christians for not following Jesus' socialist example?
The whole problem with this guy's philosophy is his complete lack of understanding of the connection between what he thinks he's teaching the child and what the child is actually learning.
I remember someone talking about trying to teach a dog not to sleep on the couch. They would yell at the dog every time they caught him on the couch, and sure enough, as soon as they came into the room, the dog would jump off the couch. The trainer explained: you haven't taught him it's wrong to get up on the couch. He's perfectly happy on the couch as long as you're not in the room . All you've taught him is you're the problem, not the couch.
How can this guy imagine that doing stuff like pushing a child into a pond will teach the child to fear water? No. It will teach the child to fear that its parent is a hateful person who can't be trusted not to push it suddenly into the water for no reason. All this guy's teaching method is guaranteed to teach children is that their parents are weird sadists who unpredictably hurt them when they don't follow some arbitrary, mysterious, oddball rules. It's a method for raising a child who either cowers in a corner drooling on his shoe or gets a gun and blows his parents away.
@Evergreen, NonProphet. I would never hit a dog I assure you I love animals and would be one of the first to beat the crap out of a person who was being cruel to an animal. The dog reference was toward the message of the article/book/pile of crap on how children need to be trained the right way to be a human/nut case. it was sick.
@Not_You I can't believe he pushed her in. It's like "I don't want you to explore your surrounding at all, but nature says you will. So rather then let you go at your own (cautious) pace I'll just speed up the process for you. Because building a two foot high wire fence and supervising my children is clearly too time consuming for me"
@John if you read the part about "training" the four month old not to climb the stairs they hit her with a switch during four or five stair climbing instances until they realized it wasn't working because she was only afraid of the switch and not the stairs so they ended up leaving the switch on the bottom step as a deterrent, it worked. Do you know what also would of worked??? A baby gate.
"Brave New World" nthd
I weep for anyone who thinks Sesame Street consists of sex perverts and socialists.
The website and the entirety of their "No Greater Joy" website makes me want to vomit. Every picture of them and every advice and article they give out feels creepy (for a lack of a better term) to me.
SapphireWolf:
Just been reading Pearl's website with a growing sensation of horror and nausea. Are these people serious? You should beat your children for every tiny little "sin" even if they're less that one year old. He pushed one of his daughters in their pond when she was a toddler to teach her to respect water, how sick is that? :(
I dislike Christianity (as taken from Jesus's actual teachings) because it promotes socialist (and related) ideologies. However, I would prefer socialist Christians to these creepy right-wing ones because at least socialist Christians would have some integrity. Christian Conservatives are utterly hypocritical.
@SapphireWolf
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply I thought you'd hit an animal, not at all. Them, I'm rather less sure about!
Ahahaha! I knew it!
Elmo's a dirty pinko communist. Why else would he be red all over?
And Oscar the Grouch is clearly a symbol of the oppressed classes - I mean, heck, he lives in a trashcan. He's a sympathiser for the bourgoisie.
And the snuffelufagus? He's a mammoth, and therefore is part of the evolutionist conspiracy.
So is Kermit - I mean, a frog? Frogs develop from tadpoles to four legged creatures. This is a clever ploy used by the evolutionists to get its audience used to a change in species.
Ernie and Bert are obviously, sleeper cells for the gay rights movement.
The Count is parody of an evil capitalist - he likes numbers and is a vampire, so he's been put there to portray capitalists (and possibly European heritage)as evil.
Miss Piggy is subtly there as a powerful female character, with her own rights and influence. She must be stopped - she's even initiated amorous pursuits with Kermit. Evil I say.
.... Shh. Don't let on that this post was an idiot trap.
Actually I agree with them, sort of oppositely. I think that Sesame Street had a horrible side-effect that the right-wing has played on to propagandize. Sesame Street, to me, led directly to Rush Limbaugh, FOXGOPNEWS, and those media hype types by encouraging kids to have short attention spans with the boom-boom frenetic pace of the show's segments. These kids grew up prey to the short and quick news blurbs and talking points of electronic media(right-wing controlled) instead of the more time-consumong and deeper print media journalism(more moderate and unbiased or at least easier to catch the bias).
And this is the guy who, in 10 years from now, will be working 3 jobs to feed his family, wishing he hadn't been such a right-wing nutcase.
@Evergreen and NonProphet
Now, in the Pearls' defense (I can't believe I just said that...), an instinct towards sharing and empathy, as promoted by Sesame Street, does represent a departure from (and a possible threat to) capitalist order. A good television program for children in a capitalist society should be promoting continual competition and the building of hierarchies, not the anarchist "gift-economy" implied by mutual -- or, worse, unconditional -- "sharing."
Hmmmm...
I could be argued that Jesus was a socialist.
There are also a number of perversions described in the bible....
[This post was brought to you by the number 616 and the colour fundie.]
OMG he hit a four month old with a switch.They talk about these punishments as if they were training dogs.
@SapphireWolf: Actually, the religious fundamentalists' view of human beings isn't much better than that, either.
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
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