Instead of saying "lol people in this thread," how about those who are okay with spanking provide some non-anecdotal evidence on its effectiveness?
Like this from Cornell.
the problem with most research is no line at straight up abuse.
"The view that detrimental child outcomes invari-
ably follow from nonabusive spanking is contradicted
by several patterns in these results. First, the stronger
the causal conclusiveness of the studies, the more
likely they are to detect beneficial outcomes of spank-
ing, not detrimental outcomes. Second, causally rele-
vant studies (e.g., controlled longitudinal studies or
better) have never found detrimental child outcomes
under any one of the following conditions: if abusive
parents were removed from the spanking group, if
spanking was measured as a back-up for milder disci-
plinary tactics, or if the sample were clinically defiant
children."
basically, spanking is effective/non-detrimental if it is:
mild
used as a backup after other methods have failed
motivated by concern for child (ex. not out of frustration)