Behold the third in a series of Comments of the Day on the post about the woman who started screaming as her measure response to a speaker whose opinions she didn’t want to hear, and has ordered out of her “gayborhood.” This one is by Sarah D (the others are here, and here); the inspiration was the post, “Perplexed Ethics Thoughts On This Video…”:
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Assuming that this man is preaching peacefully on a street corner, even if he is stating things this woman disagrees with, and she came up and accosted him (perhaps not fair assumptions), her screaming like this seems to me to be res ipsa loquitor on the matter.
As for how we can engage people like that, well, I think what we need to do is treat them the way I treat my four year old when she engages in such behavior. However, I do not believe the law allows me to ask a person over the age of eighteen (I refuse to call this woman an adult) to stand in a corner, be grounded, scrub baseboards, or be spanked. If my eldest, still in single digits, acted like this, I’d never have to clean my house again.
This gives a perplexing spin on how to deal with those over the legal age of majority that act like preschoolers. EC’s rules of dialogue are useless with people who act like this. This afternoon, my preschooler stole ice cream, flooded my bathroom, and soaked the bedroom carpet to the floorboards. I took away family movie night and all electronics of any sort (such as her favorite cartoons) for a week. She started acting somewhat like this woman. I tried speaking with her, calmly, and she behaved much as the overgrown child in the video did.
There is no talking at this point. If someone starts down this path, you must wait until they calm down to dialogue. At four, my child calms down comparatively quickly. I don’t know about this woman.
Perhaps the only hope is that adults, when shown their behavior in a mirror, can be so ashamed of how it looks that they would actually have a moment of revulsion, where they are so disgusted by their own behavior that they would voluntarily seek to change. However, I fear that this behavior has become so applauded in certain circles that there is no ability to feel any shame, and that it is possible that they have a sense of pride that they can act in such an infantile manner and force people to give up just to quiet them.
Ethics Alarms 
Thank you!
An in-law of mine spent years throwing temper tantrums whenever something went wrong. I’m talking about slamming things, stomping off, snapping at people….and it did not seem to bother her where these outbursts occurred or who witnessed them.
This is learned behavior. Children will behave this way as long as works. Unfortunately, some people never get the message that this is unacceptable and continue it into adulthood. Years of family members that didn’t want to rock the boat and total strangers shocked into giving her what she wanted just to get rid of her instilled these unhealthy habits in my in-law.
It needed to stop working.
It took several years of establishing and enforcing firm boundaries, but the tantrums ended.
Society needs to start setting and enforcing boundaries for what is considered acceptable behavior. Or, rather, needs to start setting and enforcing them again.