Just went down the youtube rabbit hole of WWE wrestlers getting hit by cars. Good times.

I remember this from high school - male soap opera at its finest

Big deal, people get run over during altercations all the time.

So, it's only domestic abuse if there is an end goal by the abuser... got it. When my dad got drunk and hit me just to take out his anger on me, I wasn't being abused because he wasn't doing it to get me to conform to anything. Got it.

That's so cute, that you want to turn "heavily muscled professional athlete knocks his fiancee out cold" into "hey, she hit him first!". The term domestic violence is less about the gender of the abuser, and more about the dynamic of two people in an intimate relationship. Tiny little women can be domestic abusers…

What are you fools talking about? From Merriam-Webster:

Retaining Mike Tirico after countless complaints by female employees about sexual harassment, even following them home, adding drug snorting jerk-offs like Michael Irvin and Chris Webber to the payroll, we could go on and on.......

hey jackass, I think you're late for a Men's Rights meeting.

Fair point, paleskin.

If you read this post, you'll see that my problem is as much with people who treat the narrator of this fiction as though he's a hero as it is with the narrator himself.

I agree with your take, though if your mom was actually telling the truth and not revising history to put her parenting into a better light (parents, especially mothers, seem prone to this, both my wife and my mother included), you likely "knew better" for a reason; because it happened.

"IN YOUR LITTLE FACES!"

Well, for starters the odds that this story is fake or at least highly doctored are pretty high. It's quite possible that in reality the kids tantrum didn't in fact last that long and include profanity and that this guy didn't in fact buy up all these pies.

I concur entirely with the sentiment here, and suggest only the stipulation that it is perfectly acceptable to act like a triumphant imbecile after a dunk on a hoop of any height, provided you are not actually taunting the child for whom the hoop was lowered. That's just stupid.

What really happened:

It's up to men to enforce the written and unwritten rules of society.

Cool guys take pleasure in triumphing over small children. They probably celebrate with wild dancing (or immediate fleeing from the scene) whenever they slam dunk on hoops lowered for 6 year olds.

distinct from the prolonged emotional and intellectual childhood that characterizes the Ew gross, kids! crowd

They sell you on idealism, all those noble tropes about speaking truth to power, standing up for the little guy, changing the world for the better, etc.