2nd Banality of Sounding Smart Award

This deserves another Banality of Sounding Smart Award.

First, the facts:

The Guardian, Wednesday March 21 2007: A "sadistic" foster mother was found guilty yesterday of subjecting three children in her care to a horrifying catalogue of physical and mental abuse over 20 years.

Eunice Spry, 62, beat the children with sticks and metal bars, scrubbed their skin with sandpaper and forced them to eat lard, bleach, vomit and even their own faeces.

Now, I don't know about you, but I find that conduct evil and that woman evil (unless she is insane rather than psychopathic). Hold the applause, please. It takes no rocket scientist to see that ;-)

But if you want to sound smart, like an intellectual, you must pull this stunt (See the 9:09 anonymous comment). Like David Wilson, professor of criminology at the University of Central England in Birmingham and author of Serial Killers: Hunting Britons and Their Victims, 1960-2006:

The Guardian, March 21, 2007: We are all child-haters

Sadistic foster mother Eunice Spry is no different to the rest of us - she reflects a culture that despises young people. ...Children in this country are routinely battered, raped, abused and all-too-regularly murdered. ...Yet, in the same way that Spry's case seems to be being reported to exonerate the rest of us, so too these simple, awful criminological realities get hidden in notions of "stranger danger" (surely the worst ever aphorism in our public policy), and predatory paedophiles stalking playgrounds waiting to abduct our children. And whilst this does - very occasionally - happen, we consistently choose to ignore the all-too-banal source of the overwhelming reality of child battery, abuse and murder - parents.

Hear that echo? It's the old "banality of evil" buzzword being used to make both evil and the evildoer not evil...just banal = trivial and commonplace, like us the unwashed masses.

This banal intellectual closes thus:

Eunice Spry is no different to the rest of us - she merely reflects a culture which has increasingly become, at best, intolerant of young people and at worst child-hating.

Via Normblog in No different from hot air in which he responds to Wilson's "fatuous" statement:

I assume that the academic discipline David Wilson professes in contains intellectual resources which would have enabled him to make his point about parental violence against children without the absurd overstatement and the slur on all those who love and cherish their children.

This nonsense is part of the poisoned fruit of the condependency tree. The monstrous theory has been stretched into the widespread belief among the "experts" that child abuse is banal because nearly all parents abuse their children, making virtually everyone codependent, which is the cause of any negative emotions we experience in adulthood.

Otherwise, we'd blithlely never feel a slight or offense, you see. Nothing would make us feel sad or angry. So, whatver some jerk just said to you isn't what makes you angry today: it's your mother several times having been too busy to read you a story when you were four.

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