When AP talks about his childhood it’s clear he wasn’t shown affection and that he faced consistent harsh discipline. It’s also clear he believes this helped make him into the man he is now. A person raised like that quite frankly might be fundamentally incapable of forming the psychological foundation to understand why this type of discipline is wrong. I’ve know people who weren’t shown much love as kids. They rough, to say the least. AP isn’t disciplining his kids this way because he’s an Old Testament embodiment of evil. He does it because that’s how he was raised and that’s what he feels works.. and he fundamentally doesn’t understand why it’s wrong.

To be clear, I’m not condoning this at all. He should be punished each time he gets caught and preferably sent to some type of educational classes. But human beings are incredibly, almost unfathomably complex. And it is not black and white, that is all I’m really saying.

Also, slavery is a terrible example and entirely unrelated. Slavery was the violently enforced mass subjugation of a group of people that is irredeemable on every imaginable level. It was violently enforced labor in which the subjects were seen as less than human. Physical discipline of children, at its core, was meant exactly as that.. discipline. Ways to prepare young children for a very harsh world that awaits them. These are completely different things.