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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   30912 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024

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I'd take fear mongering around Tate a lot more seriously if they didn't condemn in the same breath Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, Trump, and virtually every man who displays any masculinity what so ever. The only form of masculinity that the average redditor on /r/parenting is probably comfortable with is one totally subservient to Wonderful Women. A demoralized abuse victim in waiting.

As for the drinking and drugs, well, drinking is what it is. Young men risk profound bodily injury when they get too drunk, young women risk making very poor decisions (at best) about young men. Maybe you just need to see a friend make a life changing mistake due to alcohol to earn a healthy respect for it. And with fentanyl poisoning everything, drugs are a whole different ballgame than when we were kids.

That said, we've all got our red lines. I'm profoundly sensitive to demoralization and trans propaganda in children's programming. We basically have a rule in our house that our daughter doesn't read or watch anything newer than 2000, with older generally being better. She's still little, I don't know how well this will hold up. She's starting to ask if we can get Paw Patrol like all the other kids at school. We've heard through the grapevine from other parents with concerns like ours that "the first few seasons" are fine. But we aren't interested in playing whack-a-mole with a franchise our daughter grows to love trying to sneak bullshit past us. We know this isn't sustainable forever, but god damn. The media put out there for children just keeps getting worse and worse.

Sometimes I think back to my own childhood watching G.I. Joe and Transformers, wondering if there were sneaky bit of propaganda snuck into them. I do remember some pretty on the nose storylines from G.I. Joe about the drug war, the government defunding G.I. Joe because some senators were working for Cobra, run of the mill American Exceptionalism, etc. That said, I'm not exactly against a cartoon talking up our national values... or at least our national values circa the 80's and 90's. I guess now that our "national values" are that children should choose their own gender, and if you disagree the government should take them from you and facilitate them sterilizing and mutilating themselves I feel significantly differently about it. But then again, that takes for granted the illusion of consensus control of the institutions granted trans activist. All the same...

I donno. Once upon a time in highschool I met a girl who's family didn't have a TV. I almost couldn't wrap my mind around it, but she was the smartest most original girl I ever met back in school. So presumably it's not impossible.

I'm profoundly sensitive to demoralization and trans propaganda in children's programming. We basically have a rule in our house that our daughter doesn't read or watch anything newer than 2000, with older generally being better. She's still little, I don't know how well this will hold up. She's starting to ask if we can get Paw Patrol like all the other kids at school. We've heard through the grapevine from other parents with concerns like ours that "the first few seasons" are fine. But we aren't interested in playing whack-a-mole with a franchise our daughter grows to love trying to sneak bullshit past us. We know this isn't sustainable forever, but god damn. The media put out there for children just keeps getting worse and worse.

A quick online search reveals that the Paw Patrol spinoff Rubble & Crew features a nonbinary character, River, in its first season. So, good call.

But I think your first mistake was sending your daughter to school. It's not going to stop at TV shows. Everything that your family does differently from the mainstream is going to be something that she learns is not normal from her peers, and become something she pushes back against. If you think it's bad now, wait until she hits 15 and she is yelling that she hates you and you are ruining her life because you won't let her go out to a date or party unchaperoned like her friends. You cannot send your children to Caesar for their education and then be surprised when they come back as Romans.

From "Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out" by AntiDem:

First, as the leftists used to say, “Kill Your Television”. I am not one who generally thinks that machines are inherently evil. Television is an exception. It is no more and no less than a hypnotic mind control device. Don’t believe me? Sit a hyperactive toddler in front of a television and watch what happens. They freeze, turn away from everything they were doing, and stare at the screen. Gavin McInnes once noted that the “on” switch of his television was an “off” switch for his kids, and so it is. Do you think this device does not place ideas in the minds of those who fall into a trance in its presence? And what ideas do you think the Hollywood/New York axis wishes to place there? I recall reading one account of a father who, tired of his two under-10 daughters’ bratty attitudes, limited their television viewing to a DVD box set of Little House on The Prairie. The change in his daughters’ behavior was dramatic – within a couple of weeks, they were referring to him and his wife as “Ma” and “Pa”, and offering to help with chores. The lesson is obvious: people (and especially children) learn their social norms from television, far more even than from the people around them.

Ideally, one would cut oneself off from it totally. Many find this rather difficult (I must admit, myself included at times). Some keep a television set, but make sure it is disconnected from broadcast channels and use it only as a monitor for a carefully-selected library of DVDs. Others (myself included) don’t own a set, but download a few select programs from torrent sites and watch on laptops or tablets. My total viewership of television programs tops out at perhaps 3-4 hours per week during particularly good seasons. Any traditionalist should strive to do the same. In fact, traditionalists should reject – should “drop out” of – all popular culture (especially that produced after, say, 1966) to the greatest degree possible, and make sure their children are exposed to it as little as possible. Music, video games, even the web – either drop out of it completely, or, at very least, carefully limit the time and scope of it in your life and the lives of your children.

While we’re on the subject of children: DO NOT send your children to a public school. “Drop out” here too; by which I do not mean that your children should go uneducated, but that you should – you must – homeschool. To do otherwise is pure child abuse. Perhaps fifty years ago, this was not the case, but these times are not those times. The failures of the public schools need not be repeated here, but they are undeniable, and any reasonably smart ten-year-old whose attention span hasn’t been destroyed by television can learn more by being left alone all day with a stack of books than they can in any public school classroom anyway. As for the universities, there are not quite any suitable replacements for them yet, but some lurk just over the horizon and will appear before long.

To say that one should “drop out” of – not bother listening to and not ever trusting – the mainstream news media goes without saying.

I have kids, plural, and it sounds more or less correct to me. I would be interested in hearing what "costs" you believe homeschooling imposes on the kids involved. My wife and I have zero interest in our kids attending public school, ever.

Captain Planet was never particularly subtle about being political agitprop for kids: I think I understood that even at the time, and I'm not even one opposed to rational environmental protection laws. I think this to some extent merits the Ohio meme: "Wait, all kids shows have some element of propaganda to them?" "Always has been."

I remember my parents looking down at Power Rangers because it was kinda violent (dunno, haven't watched much because of that, although kids really do act out scenes from TV shows and such). And The Simpsons because the humor was often lowbrow, which I have more complex thoughts about.

Although I would highly recommend Bluey if you're looking for something modern.

Sometimes I think back to my own childhood watching G.I. Joe and Transformers, wondering if there were sneaky bit of propaganda snuck into them.

Did you ever recognize what was snuck into Scooby Doo?

TV networks, because they reach so many people, are always being sued and/or protested, often over things you could never imagine would create problems. Most of the time, the network position is defensible and the outrage falls into the "nuisance" category…but even nuisance suits and protests can be a nuisance. And expensive to defend against. In kids' television, the stakes seem higher. A protester yelling, "This show is poisoning our children" will usually get more traction than someone bitching about a show for general audiences. The sponsors of kidvid are especially frail and known to atomize over very little negative feedback.

Censorship of broadcast television has declined greatly in the era of HBO, Showtime and DVDs…but in the early eighties, if you were creating a show for CBS, NBC or ABC you usually found yourself in the following dilemma. You had to please the Programming People who bought the show and prayed for ratings. They wanted your program to be edgy and sexy and full of action and excitement. And then you had to please the Standards and Practices People. They wanted your show to be nice and quiet and non-controversial. The two divisions rarely spoke with one another. In fact, in some cases, they hated each other too much to converse. Either way, they fought their battles by playing tug-o'-war with you and your show.

We quarrelled often and usually unproductively with these folks over what we called "action" and they called "violence." Sometimes, their definitions were insane. You'd write a scene where the good guy grabbed the fleeing bad guy and held onto him until the police could arrive and the Broadcast Standards people would react like your hero had chopped off someone's head. Criminals could rob banks and cops could stop them but neither could brandish weapons. One time, a writer friend did a script (a pretty good script, I thought) where the climax depended on the hero cutting a rope at a precise moment. The hero, it had been established, was a former Boy Scout…so my friend had the hero whip out his Boy Scout pocket knife and use it to cut the rope.

Well, that couldn't be allowed. Encouraging children to carry knives, even though the Boy Scouts do? You might as well have them packing howitzers and blowing bodies away on the playgrounds of America. There was much arguing and the scene ended up being staged with the rope being cut by the edge of a sharp rock, which was just silly. The rope was being used to lower a car. Given how sturdy it would have to be to do that, it was already stretching reality for it to be cuttable with a pocket knife. A sharp rock was ridiculous.

At times though, the bickering went beyond Broadcast Standards trying to prevent the network from being sued or having its advertisers shrink from advertising. Every so often, someone there got it into their heads that childrens' television could mold the youth of today into the good citizens of tomorrow. That's a questionable premise but let's say it's so. The question then becomes what you teach, how you mold. I found that those who approached the arena with that in mind had some odd ideas of what we should be trying to impart to impressionable viewers. Acts of extreme violence — like carrying a pocket knife — weren't as big a problem as what they called "anti-social behavior" and what I called "having a mind of your own."

Broadcast Standards — at all three networks at various times — frowned on characters not operating in lockstep with everyone thinking and doing as their peers did. The group is always right. The one kid who doesn't want to do what everyone else does is always wrong. (I rant more on this topic, and show you a cartoon I wrote years later for another show just to vent, in this posting.)

Scrappy Doo was intended, as per his name, to be scrappy — scrappy and feisty and in many ways, the opposite of his Uncle Scooby. Faced with an alleged ghost, Scooby Doo would dive under an area rug and you'd see the contours of his doggie ass shivering with fear beneath it. Scrappy, as I wrote him in his first script, would go the other route: He'd say, "Lemme at him" and go charging after the bogus spirit of the week.

Shortly after the last of many recordings of "The Mark of the Scarab" (that first script), it dawned on ABC Broadcast Standards that maybe Scrappy was a bad role model for the kiddos. He was — and one person in that department actually used this term to me — "too independent."

Transition to break quote blocks...

That said, I'm not exactly against a cartoon talking up our national values... or at least our national values circa the 80's and 90's. I guess now that our "national values" are that children should choose their own gender, and if you disagree the government should take them from you and facilitate them sterilizing and mutilating themselves I feel significantly differently about it. But then again, that takes for granted the illusion of consensus control of the institutions granted trans activist. All the same...

This strikes me as a possible rationalization for retro-future genre IPs, like the Fallout Series.

In the Fallout universe, why might the 2077 USA have embraced the cultural aesthetics and appearances of the 1960s? Well, the story is very vague about what happened in the century between WW2 and the Great War that led to the nuclear apocalypse...

You need a community which agrees with you on these kinds of key questions. Unfortunately there’s no alternative; you will never be able to shelter your daughter from peer influences more than you are now. People are designed to grow up to become members of a tribe and not clones of their parents- pick a tribe.

Sometimes I think back to my own childhood watching G.I. Joe and Transformers, wondering if there were sneaky bit of propaganda snuck into them.

You could certainly make a case that the jinogist and glorification of war that was common in all media from 1900 to 2005 or so, was it's own egregore that was interested in propagandizing your sons and feeding them into the meat grinder. Is a media diet of the Union Jack which results in your son volunteering charging a machine gun in World War I actually all that much worse than a media diet of something that risks turning your son gay or trans? It seems there are always powers and principalities who wish to chew up, use, and discard your children for their own purposes -- defending against these is the difficult and never-ending job of a parent.

I hope to be able to teach my own sons the proper balance between having a healthy desire for cultivating manly valor, but also not jumping to volunteer for stupid wars for stupid and evil leaders.

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