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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   31065 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024

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Stealing a comment in a subthread from @Samizdata that I liked a lot:

I posted this in the Weekly Culture War Roundup, but I think I got filtered out as a new user. I’ve deleted and reposted, so apologies if you’re seeing this twice!

There’s a recurring juxtaposition of views on /r/parenting that I find interesting. For context, the parenting subreddit, like most of Reddit’s forums, skews left-wing. There are periodic posts where parents try to determine what to do after their child engages in some kind of undesirable behavior. The typical suspects are drugs and alcohol, with most of the posts looking similar to this one.

https://old.reddit.com/r/Parenting/comments/1fc70nm/appropriate_stance_on_alcoholdrugs/

This parent is worried about their 17-year-old daughter, who admitted to turning off her Life360 before going to a house party and having several drinks. Most commenters recommend clemency, with the top comment saying:

“Honestly, I think you are going to have to let go a little bit or she might go crazy after she gets out yalls house. All of her behavior was appropriate for a 17 year old. I was doing these things at 17. Almost all of my high school and the high school down the road were doing these things. And worse…. The way you go forwards is going to determine whether you are in her adult life.”

There’s a significant attitude of “Teens are going to engage in risky behaviors no matter what, your punishments and restrictions will have zero deterrent effect, and the best course of action is some kind of harm reduction.”

In contrast, there are periodic posts with parents hand-wringing about their son “being radicalized” by YouTube. This is a fairly typical example:

https://old.reddit.com/r/Parenting/comments/1dqk7fs/son_caught_the_andrew_tate_bug/

Some of comments just suggest alternative influencers to watch, but many are out for blood, one saying:

“If I caught my kid looking at extremist material it would be a two prong 'congrats you just lost ALL media privileges' and a 'instant therapy or else'.”

If it’s not clear, I think both of these approaches are wrong-headed. Andrew Tate, while execrable, is reasonably widespread and popular among teenage boys. I don’t think treating him as an irresistible gateway drug to the alt-right is useful or true; most of the teens that watch him manage to do so without falling down some rabbit hole of extremism.

In contrast, I think even moderate drinking or drug use is fairly risky for developing brains, and I think the laissez-faire attitude towards it is dangerous.

When I search my own heart, I come to the exact opposite conclusion of the /r/parenting hivemind, both in practical and moral terms. Even if I banned my kids from watching or listening to a particular influencer, and set up bulletproof content blockers on every device in our house, it seems pretty futile; they’re around other teens with smartphones 30-40 hours a week while they’re at school. Surely there will be plenty of opportunities to watch whatever they want on a friend’s phone?

In contrast, I honestly think reasonable restrictions on a teen, like curfews, are more likely to curtail behaviors like drinking and drug use. I know that some teens can get around these restrictions, but these are the kind of obstacles that legitimately stymied me when I was a semi-wayward teen. Maybe I wasn’t a sufficiently motivated delinquent, I don’t know.

But the bottom line is: Isn’t it kind of convenient that my moral inclinations and my opinions of the practical difficulties of implementing a ban line up so well for different activities?

It’s easy to practice gentle, permissive parenting with a nonchalant “Teens will only rebel harder against strict rules” attitude when your child isn’t actually doing something you have strong feelings against.

So, my question for the forum would be: how do you balance letting your child(ren) make their own mistakes and take the consequences in a controlled environment, even when you disagree with their choices? When do you step in?

“Honestly, I think you are going to have to let go a little bit or she might go crazy after she gets out yalls house. All of her behavior was appropriate for a 17 year old. I was doing these things at 17. Almost all of my high school and the high school down the road were doing these things. And worse…. The way you go forwards is going to determine whether you are in her adult life.”

There’s a significant attitude of “Teens are going to engage in risky behaviors no matter what, your punishments and restrictions will have zero deterrent effect, and the best course of action is some kind of harm reduction.”

I'm more of the opinion that it is preferable to not be in their life when they aren't your responsibility anymore, than being present in their funeral when they still are. That sub sounds like a bunch of childless kidults with a "hello, fellow kids" attitude.

I had an initial very strong negative response to the mother saying that finding Tate stuff on her son's devices would result in immediate media lockdown and therapy.

But, in an act of enormous charity, I have reversed the situation to one I would care about equally. The reddit "egg" communities are devoted to convincing children that they are actually trans. Getting a kid to come out as trans is "cracking their egg". A prominent mod in these subreddits brags about meeting with kids and giving them hormones. Google strangely won't show me the relevant links.

I'm a father. If I found this or equivalent on one of my kid's devices I'd throw away the device and our very nice wifi router. There's a level of brain poison seeping in to make me decide no one in my family needs a personal PC or a smartphone.

I'm a father. If I found this or equivalent on one of my kid's devices I'd throw away the device and our very nice wifi router.

This, too, would be an overreaction though. I understand your concerns, but I don't think they justify going nuclear right off the bat. You might need to go nuclear in the end! But I think starting there is bad.

Agreed. But it would be a very rapid escalation in this case. I wouldn't throw away my router as step one. But it would be on death row unless this immediately stopped.

Fair enough, I wouldn't blame you at all for doing so.

Trans is a special case because the trans social contagion encourages permanent harm to themselves. If they're just swerving to the right (or are gay, or a furry, or a Goth, or pretty much anything else that a parent would likely worry about) they can change their mind later and no harm will be done aside from having spent a year being Goth or whatever.

Thoughts on both your post and @gorge’s reply.

My parents were (and are) ex flower power hippies who fucked, drank and smoked their way through the late 70s before becoming respectable yuppies. They’re the parents from Easy A. The most they told their three children about sex was to use protection, don’t do anything you don’t want to do, and have fun. If I had brought home an older boyfriend (or girlfriend) at 15, they’d have made him coffee in the morning and asked him if he wanted to come back for dinner the next day. My mother opposed ‘MeToo’ because she thought that new sexual harassment policies would ‘take the fun out of’ the workplace. My dad got stoned with my brother and I in our late teens and reminisced about doing business with a women he was 85% sure he’d hooked up with in a bar bathroom as a student, then asked us if kids these days still do that kind of thing or if the whole AIDS crisis really did ruin sex.

Both my siblings and myself are huge prudes. My younger sister was the only person who brought home a partner at high school, and that was her long term boyfriend when she was 17. There was some light experimentation with drugs, and I got (not very) drunk a few times in high school, but that was it. I don’t think any of us have ever been promiscuous by any modern colloquial standard.

At the same time, this is far from a perfect strategy, since I knew at least a few people with similarly small-l liberal parents who became complete degenerates (some still are). Likewise, there were children of more conservative families who stayed true to that belief system, and those who rejected, subverted and rebelled against it at every turn. My guess, though, is some part of us saw casual sex and hedonism as inherently uncool because our parents were so open about it (and were, and are, openly flirty with each other, which on balance is a good thing). But I’m not really sure.

(I do think a big part of Gen Z’s alleged prudishness is the result of lib Gen X parents, though).

I think that the problem with both of the examples you cited is the extreme nature of the response. Like no, going out and drinking behind your parents' back is not an appropriate teenage activity. It's perfectly reasonable to be upset that your kid did that and try to impose consequences to deter them (though I do think that it's not reasonable to have omnipresent tracking of your kids at that age). And on the other hand, it's fine to be upset that your kid is soaking in a media environment you think is bad for them, but it's not reasonable to flip your shit and impose harsh consequences. Just have a talk about how you don't want them to be watching those things and why, before you escalate things.

But... Reddit is full of crazy people who have no maturity whatsoever and just do extreme knee jerk reactions to every situation presented. There's a reason that people joke about stuff like the relationship advice subreddit and how their "advice" is always to break up with the person. So I guess it probably shouldn't be a surprise that parenting advice is similarly retarded.

So, my question for the forum would be: how do you balance letting your child(ren) make their own mistakes and take the consequences in a controlled environment, even when you disagree with their choices? When do you step in?

It seems to me that the line where you should get very involved and upset is permanent consequences. Things like STDs, pregnancy, bodily injury, criminal records etc. It's fine for kids to make mistakes and take consequences in a controlled environment, but some things aren't up to you as the parent. They are dictated by things above your head and you probably are going to have to use a firm hand to keep your kids from going down that road.

First off, /r/Parenting is not the only game in town. I personally prefer /r/Daddit, largely due to earlier members posting actionable advice like the concept of 20 second hugs. There is some reee'ing as the sub has grown (e.g. "Why do people default to moms as the relevant authority?!", relationship troubles above the paygrade of Internet Strangers) but it generally upvotes posts displaying agency so I lurk there more often.

To answer your question, I only have experience with toddlers so my perspective is limited. Right now the majority of the behavior work we do is picking up toys, tantrum mitigation & risk management during playtime. For the latter, partner & I have settled into classic gender roles: mother's "safety first" vs. father's "she'll succeed or she'll learn something".

Generally, daughter isn't doing enough yet to put herself at enough risk (as I perceive it) where I have to intervene much. I'm sure that will change, but I don't know when or how that will be. Maybe drugs, maybe content diet, maybe choosing her friends - hard to say. But I know I'll have to draw lines eventually.

I tried to check out daddit today, lot of dead kids under "top". Ruined my evening!

But the bottom line is: Isn’t it kind of convenient that my moral inclinations and my opinions of the practical difficulties of implementing a ban line up so well for different activities?

Eh, I think a teenage daughter becoming a party girl, a slut, or even a fornicator is bad, but I think figuring out how to ban it is a very difficult problem. I think the optimal strategy is to control the peer group years ahead of time by selecting locations and activities -- but that itself is very difficult, because there are few communities that are aligned on these kind of values any more.

There’s a significant attitude of “Teens are going to engage in risky behaviors no matter what, your punishments and restrictions will have zero deterrent effect, and the best course of action is some kind of harm reduction.”

It's wild to me that according to the hive-mind, the only thing you should teach your child about sex is 1) the importance of proper consent and 2) birth control. There is never anything on /r/parenting about teaching your the importance of discerning proper character of the person to have sex with; nor anything about teaching your child how long to wait or under what circumstances to have sex (waiting for love, waiting for marriage, etc.). The idea that "consent" is the all-important thing, and marriage or even "love" doesn't matter at all seems like a complete shift from the Zeitgeist 30 years ago. I mean, 30 years ago was a pretty loose time, but at least there was a debate about the proper time to have sex, now it is just assumed that parents should not give any guidance about it.

Eh, I think a teenage daughter becoming a party girl, a slut, or even a fornicator is bad, but I think figuring out how to ban it is a very difficult problem.

No it isn't, the problem has been solved multiple times.

I think the optimal strategy is to control the peer group years ahead of time by selecting locations and activities -- but that itself is very difficult, because there are few communities that are aligned on these kind of values any more.

There are plenty of filter bubbles where teenagers don't fornicate or drink all that much.

teenage daughter becoming a party girl, a slut, or even a fornicator is bad, but I think figuring out how to ban it is a very difficult problem

Going nowhere without a chaperone was the traditional solution.

teenage daughter becoming a party girl, a slut, or even a fornicator is bad, but I think figuring out how to ban it is a very difficult problem

Going nowhere without a chaperone was the traditional solution.

Yeah, this. It's how Muslims solve the problem. It's how Christians solved the problem until very recently.

I was watching ¿Qué Pasa, USA?, a bilingual sitcom from the 70s, and one of the big conflicts between the Cuban immigrants and their American daughter is the need to have a chaperone on her dates, as in episode 7, "The Super Chaperone". That's because America had already gone through the sexual revolution, but Cuba hadn't.

There is only one thing a woman wants to be alone with her date for. Chaperones are how we kept girls from becoming sluts.

I don't know as much about latin America, but in Spain the chaperone thing is often solved for with a double date, where one of the couples are older and generally married, and the other couple are youths. The older couple are often family, but usually not the parents. You want them to be a couple that the younger people will respect to some degree. An older married cousin and their spouse in their 20s is usually pretty good, or the older child of a god-parent and their spouse etc. An aunt/uncle who is quite a bit younger than the parent is good too, and more common in a Catholic country. I'm not sure how much this is still done now; my mother is Spanish and used to talk about doing this in the 60s/70s.

BDSM is a fetish and participation in it motivated presumably by lust. DV, while superficially similar in that both involve violence (simulated vs. real) seems to come from a completely different place than BDSM. Anger, low impulse control, and both intensified by alcoholism in most cases. Presumably no one wants to be the target of DV, but it would not surprise me if the BDSM community contained more subs than doms.

Edit: I've caused quite a ruckus with misplacing my comment it seems. That's what you get for posting on mobile. But I'm still on my phone and at work so I will move this later when I find the time

I just had this comment in the "The Motte needs your help" report queue. Obviously it's in the wrong spot, but also I can't flag it as "this needs a moderator to move it maybe" because the report queue doesn't show context, and on its own this is a perfectly normal comment. Bit of a weakness, idk.

I think maybe you meant to reply to a different comment?

I believe this same dynamic applies to "harm reduction" policies more broadly, like safe injection sites where they give drug users free clean needles and promise not to arrest them for drug usage. People only accept "harm reduction" when it's something they really don't have a problem with to begin with, so the whole framing is dishonest. Would they accept "harm reduction" centers for domestic violence? Perhaps we could offer boxing gloves and have doctors on hand so you could bring your wife and beat her up in a safe way that didn't cause any serious or permanent damage. I don't need to poll leftists to know they would be opposed to this no matter how many studies I had.

The thing that bothers me about harm reduction is the absolute refusal to grapple with the fact that such policies (like any other policy) have two sides. Specifically, the insistence that they don't increase drug use. In my opinion that's a crock of shit. Even if it's only .01% of the "clientele", there's going to be some non zero amount of people who would not be using drugs if they couldn't get the paraphernalia these facilities offer. And honestly, I'm fine with that. What I want is for the proponents to act like adults and say "yes we acknowledge this downside, but we think the benefit is worth it", not to claim that there's no downside at all. As the old adage says, don't piss on me and tell me it's raining.

That's a great point, but I think aesthetics and branding still matter for people's acceptance. I expect there are plenty of people who would be opposed to the "safe domestic violence site", but would enthusiastically support the presence of a "bdsm dungeon" in their town.

It's simultaneously profound and trivial that BDSM is a safer way to satisfy the same urges that lead to domestic violence. Too much of the "community" is tied up in consent ideology and PR to really dig into the implications of this.

It is worth noting that every cop who has dealt with DV says that the vast majority of DV is just mean drunks, and that the "research" suggesting otherwise comes from an ideologically compromised part of academia. I don't think mean drunks and bad doms are the same category of thing.

There’s a lot of studies showing reciprocal intimate partner violence, which is not the preferred feminist finding.

Findings regarding bidirectional violence are particularly controversial because, if accepted, they can serve to undermine one of the most commonly cited reasons for female perpetrated IPV; self-defense against a controlling male partner. Despite this, many studies have found evidence of high levels of bidirectionality in cases where women have reported intimate partner violence. Wikipedia

Ehhh… I see the point you’re trying to make with this, and in one sense it is valid (namely, that “harm reduction”-ists don’t see drug use as an inherent evil), but I also don’t think “safe DV sites” are equivalent. One could, with perfect moral consistency, be in favor of safe needle sites and against “safe DV sites” on the grounds that using drugs does not intrinsically and non-consensually harm anyone else, while DV definitionally does.

Of course, one can object to the framing that drug use only affects/harms the user, but that’s a difference of values, or of how you define “harm”, not a matter of moral or logical inconsistency.

That's merely the distinction between why they think it's wrong in the first place, not the harm reduction variable.

That is, a general form of the "Harm Reduction" argument says that if thing A is bad because it leads to bad outcomes, then a decriminalized harm reduction environment where it can be done more safely with fewer negative outcomes is good because, although the thing is still bad, it's less bad here and they were going to do it anyway.

The tradeoff is that you are implicitly endorsing the behavior in exchange for this harm reduction. This argument doesn't really depend on the type of harm involved. If someone is being non-consensually harmed by DV, and this is extra bad, then the harm reduction is even more good, and the implicit endorsement and incentives are more bad, and presumably these are proportional so it should still be worthwhile or not for the same reasons as with drug use.

I suppose you could try to make specific mathematical arguments about the tradeoff values where harm reduction facilities for DV would be less effective at reducing harm and more legitimizing to DV such that the net effect would flip signs for this but not for drugs, but we've never tried it before, nobody has that data, and nobody who advocates for harm reduction for drugs seems to do any math or acknowledge tradeoffs in the first place.

Exactly as I would have said just much more intelligent and coherent. Thank you for elucidating my point!

OK, I guess we have two different notions of “harm reduction”-ism in mind.

The one I was thinking of is internally consistent, because it is as follows: Call an act personally risky if it is performed with the consent of its actor, and poses a risk to life or limb of that actor, but not to any other party. Call an act evil if it harms (or threatens to harm) another party without that party’s consent. We should endeavor to reduce the harm/risk of harm faced by people who engage in personally risky activity, without requiring them to refrain from the act entirely, but we should not tolerate evil activity.

Drug use should be made safer by safe needle sites and the like because it is personally risky. Domestic violence must be cracked down on with the full force of the law because it is evil.

In other words, my imagined “harm reduction”-ist is not a pure utilitarian/consequentialist. His consequentialism is conditional on the acts in question not nonconsensually harming anyone.

Drug use should be made safer by safe needle sites and the like because it is personally risky.

Wait, you just converted that "personally risky" activity to "evil" by imposing the cost of safe needle sites and the like on other parties (taxpayers) without their consent.

This argument is like "eating sugar harms society because of health care costs". It's the taxation that imposes it on other parties, not the needle sites.

I’m not a “harm reduction”-ist myself, but if I had to provide a steelman here I would point out the various arguments for why taxation is not theft (the Rawlsian veil of ignorance, for example).

The Rawlsian veil of ignorance, which says one must privilege the slightest improvement in the situation most miserable cuss in the society over any improvement to anyone (or everyone) else? I think I'll just reject that one. Anyway, I'm not arguing taxation is theft, I'm arguing that it is harm.

Arguments that taxation is not theft generally advance the view that the “harm” caused by taxation is, in some sense, consensual*, and therefore not evil per the definition above. So, my imagined “harm reduction”-ist would say, we face a tradeoff between two personally risky things (namely, drug users using drugs and taxpayers having to pay taxes—both of these are consensual, but have their downsides). How we optimize between both sides of this tradeoff is a matter of administration, an implementation detail; there’s no fundamental inconsistency here.

Look, this is all my attempt to pass an ITT, to steelman a view that I don’t even hold. I just happen to think that this particular case is a values difference, not an instance of one side or the other being irrational/inconsistent.

*There are better and worse arguments out there for the “implicit consent”/“social contract” views of taxation, and I agree with you that the Rawlsian one is not without its shortcomings. FWIW I am in reality much more libertarian than the median American, so it’s hard for me to give more than a halfhearted defense of this take.

Drug use should be made safer by safe needle sites and the like because it is personally risky.

....and all the externalities caused by strung-out junkies are just an unrelated random happenstance? Like, the part where they are using drugs is entirely unrelated to all the other stuff they do because they're a person addicted to drugs?

A consistent harm reduction-ist would say yes_chad.jpg; if a junkie robs a convenience store to get his fix, the crime is the robbery, and the drug addiction is irrelevant.

A consistent harm reduction-ist would say yes_chad.jpg; if a junkie robs a convenience store to get his fix, the crime is the robbery, and the drug addiction is irrelevant.

People care about cause and effect. If junkies commit wildly disproportionate amounts of crime, people are going to converge on the explanation that they commit crimes because they are junkies, and they are going to recognize that preventing people from becoming junkies is clearly consistent with harm reduction.

Would they accept "harm reduction" centers for domestic violence? Perhaps we could offer boxing gloves and have doctors on hand so you could bring your wife and beat her up in a safe way that didn't cause any serious or permanent damage

Woah this is a brilliant and spicy framing. Thanks for showing that.

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.

Once you've got a 17-year-old on Life360 (Slogan: "Family-proof your family"), you've pretty much fouled up completely anyway. If you want your children to achieve independence, making lax rules for them is insufficient; you need to actually allow them some actual independence. Or at least enough that they don't know you're still watching.

In contrast, I think even moderate drinking or drug use is fairly risky for developing brains, and I think the laissez-faire attitude towards it is dangerous.

Drinking, at least, has been done by people possessing developing brains more or less forever. The "developing brains" meme is mostly an excuse for infantilizing younger people anyway -- look in the past at what young people were capable of and compare it to now for evidence. I'm not saying that drinking is GOOD for teenagers, but I'd be willing to bet it's less harmful than keeping them in a cybernetic panopticon.

Once you've got a 17-year-old on Life360 (Slogan: "Family-proof your family"), you've pretty much fouled up completely anyway. If you want your children to achieve independence, making lax rules for them is insufficient; you need to actually allow them some actual independence. Or at least enough that they don't know you're still watching.

This is good advice for a son. Not so much for a daughter.

Giving your daughter independence is how you ensure she gets her cherry popped by a fuckboy.

Since we do not, in fact, live in a society where women are transferred from the custody of their father to the custody of their (arranged and vetted) husband, it is as necessary for daughters to grow up as it is sons.

Then you don't let her go to sleepovers at all. You don't let her go then track her every second.

See, the trick in that situation is that he doesn’t actually have the power to stop his adult daughter from doing that. And he knows it. She can trivially acquire a boyfriend that can support her and physically defend her from her father when required.

Parents are naturally anxious about that, because if you’re going to pay the bills for the kid you are owed power (and power used to make true what just ain’t so is still power), hence the obsession with chaperoning (virtual or physical in times gone by).

Chaperoning isn't a practice of times gone by, it is still very much practiced in religious communities. My cousins all "courted" that way. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, it's much better than Life360.

But I will say that any restriction you can think up, there's a daughter I knew that grew up under than restriction and turned into a slut. It's life. Having kids is a gamble. The obsession is with trying to pin down outcomes that are ultimately random, and only mildly related to your actions as a parent.

Monitoring your teenage daughter out of the house is lindy and normal.

Finding out from other parents what your teenage daughter has been up to is lindy and normal. Keeping an electronic leash on her is anything but.

That’s because electronic leashes are new technology, like air travel or dishwashers. If people in 100 AD had the ability to track their unmarried daughters electronically they would have done so.

But they could not, so they did not, so it is not lindy.

Correct, they used 24/7 chaperoning. One of these things is less invasive than the other.

Sometimes, as with laparoscopic surgery, newfangledness is an improvement.

There are societies with social classes which had 24/7 chaperoning. But certainly not many; it's far too expensive a luxury.

My kids are far too young for these particular topics, but it's pretty simple in principle: You decide beforehand where your red lines are (which should be mostly concentrated on whether something is time-consuming/expensive/impossible to undo) and communicate that as clearly as possible. If you get the impression they're trying to skirt the edges and/or rules-lawyer, you may let them get away with it the first time but with a warning, after the second you put your foot down. As usual when it comes to social topics, the trouble is in the specifics.

On drinking, I'll probably, like my own father (I literally had fights with my dad since I wanted to stay home and play video games, he told me "what are you doing on a friday night at home? Go out and get drunk!" - I was annoyed, but imo he was mostly right), actively push them towards going partying & drinking early-ish, but in environments I trust such as local fairs or the CVJM (I'm not religious, but I've had good experience with these kinds of organizations as a teen). Ideally I'm also present & available if they need me, but where it's too large and crowdy to have them in my sight all the time so they can goof of with friends, as they should. Also, imo as a parent you deserve knowing your kids friends, and they should only go partying with friends they've known for a while and which I know as well. So I know that somebody is looking after them and I know who to ask if they don't come back at the agreed time. Obviously, going to an entirely different place without telling me would include a strict punishment, since that's how teens go missing.

On internet usage, I really don't care much as long as it's age-appropriate, and I'm already even quite laissez-faire on what is "age-appropriate" to begin with.

On reddit, it is extremely lopsided towards the ultra-online with very large amounts of free time and has a strong tendency for circlejerks by basic design, and very biased towards progressive by moderator action. I wouldn't be particularly surprised if half or more of the frequent posters are young women without children, but some child-related degree/occupation that makes them feel like they know what they're talking about. So tbh I'd discount pretty much all opinions there as neither good nor representative of the average parent.

I literally had fights with my dad since I wanted to stay home and play video games, he told me "what are you doing on a friday night at home? Go out and get drunk!"

There's always a relevant xkcd....

I wouldn't be particularly surprised if half or more of the frequent posters are young women without children, but some child-related degree/occupation that makes them feel like they know what they're talking about.

Or possibly having been a child....

Or possibly having been a child....

When it comes to children, most parents are Last Thursdayists- that they believe they sprang into existence as a fully-formed adult and, while they might have distant memories of childhood, have never actually been one. Sometimes they might even say the words "when I was a child" but their subsequent behaviors tend to suggest they [believe they] have never, in fact, been sullied by the experience- either that, or they are forgetting on purpose to prove a point.

Part of this might also just be typical mind fallacy. I was a weird introvert who liked reading books and playing videogames more than going out partying with friends. I never even befriended party friend people anyway because they didn't like me and I didn't like them. I never did drugs as a kid, I never had sex as a kid, I never drank as a kid, and I considered myself morally and intellectually superior to all the degenerates who did.

I had issues, got into fights, got in trouble, but typically it was either spats with my brothers when they annoyed me or I annoyed them, or being lazy and then getting angry and lashing out when I had to do boring, time consuming, and unfulfilling things like clean my room or waste hours going to a museum that could have been spent reading or playing videogames.

I would be great at raising a kid who was exactly like kid me. I know me, I understand me, I'm pretty introspective and, above all, I really really like me and respect me and my values. And I think I would emphasize and know how to explain the importance of things that little clone me wouldn't want to do. I would be able to explain game theory way earlier which would make social things make so much more sense to little me's brain.

I would have absolutely now idea how to raise an extrovert, or a sports jock, or a depressed goth, or a slut. My explanation for why not to do drugs is because "drugs mess with the health and integrity of your body, and they're expensive, and don't accomplish anything you can't get from videogames, and worst of all, you'd have to hang out with the kinds of icky people who do illegal drugs, and you're better than them." And a lot of people would not find that convincing and in fact might rebel harder because it makes me sound like a jerk. But it's how I convinced myself. And while I'm confident on illegal drugs, I'm not sure how to handle other things like sports. What if my kid wants to play football? Football is stupid and gives you head injuries, also the equipment is expensive, but everything has tradeoffs. How can I tell how important that is in comparison to the potential positive value (both extrinsic as a form of exercise and financial opportunities if they're good, and intrinsic via letting them do a thing they enjoy), when my own valuation for it is negative. It seems stupid and boring and pointless to me even without any injury risk, but obviously a kid asking to do it doesn't see it the same way and I don't know how to evaluate that. My instinctive response is "don't play football, it's stupid" and I can't disentangle all of the legitimate reasons from my instinctive gut response.

I think a lot of the "not knowing what it's like to be a kid" is actually typical mind fallacy in disguise. There are lots of different types of kids, and each parent was only one of them. If they think that's how kids are then they won't understand when their kid diverges from that, and the reasons in their own head that convinced them to not be that way won't be convincing to their kid.

you'd have to hang out with the kinds of icky people who do illegal drugs, and you're better than them.

'Drug addicts are low lives and you should shun them' is in fact a convincing argument. It happens to be an unpopular argument because of the zeitgeist.

"Convincing" is a subjective property, a function that varies based on the listener, as opposed to something like "correct" which is mostly objective. I certainly find it convincing, but if people are not convinced by it then tautologically it's not convincing.

This is literally how my dad raised me to be more straightedge than him. He introduced me to all his brain fried retard friends from his San Francisco days, and from the age of 4 told me stories about his lawyer friend who ended up in prison for cross-border drug smuggling, emphasising how embarrassing it was he married a fat druggie bitch from jail rather than "crime bad."

Grew up with more "winners don't do drugs" messages than a 90s arcade.

I do not understand where the issue is here. Interpreting it in a Schmittian way;

  • Restriction against dangerous behaviour is rightwing and enemy-coded, so it is bad
  • Restriction against extremist consuming behaviour is leftwing and friend-coded, so it is good

There is no principle or morality here, only that one restriction is good because friend and the other is bad because enemy.

I think the main problem, when here we try to talk about the reason behind certain behaviours motivated by ethics, is that we always try to rationalise problems and find where is the source, intellectual or moral, behind actions. But often there is no one, it is simply behaviour motivated by friend/enemy distinction.

I think the principle cause of the difference in behavior in the two linked posts is simply that reddit has a strange fixation on the idea that underage drug use and sex is okay. Not merely that punishing kids for those things can go too far, but that these behaviors are always a good thing that isn't any of a parent's business, ever, and it's weird that any parent would make a big deal of it at all. They don't think these are bad things, period. They will claim that any effort to monitor this behavior is an intrusion on the kids' lives, which can only harm their development.

By contrast, they do have reservations towards political youtubers, at least, those of a persuasion they disagree with. And so, any heavy-handed intrusion on kids' lives is not only justifiable, but mandatory. It's a case of "no bad tactics, only bad targets" but applied to parenting. The only difference in the two behaviors is that they think one thing is bad and not the other, everything else was thought of in light of that consideration.

Because most people on Reddit were friendless shut-ins who stayed indoors and played video games all the way through the end of college. They still seeth with envy at their more socially successful peers, and hatred for the helicopter parents that they blame for their poor social skills and emotionally impoverished lives. Since they never partied hard they also have zero frame of reference for all the ways that kind of lifestyle can go sideways or backfire.

This doesn’t strike me as a plausible account at all.

I think the principle cause of the difference in behavior in the two linked posts is simply that reddit has a strange fixation on the idea that underage drug use and sex is okay.

Yeah I agree. I'd say not even Reddit just our culture at large. It's really shocking how seriously people believe this.

Disclaimer, I don't have kids yet, so this is all hypothetical, and people are famously bad at predicting what they would do in a hypothetical.

I did a moderate amount of drinking and drugs (and in fact I still do!) and I turned out fine, so setting hard limits for my kids here would be hypocritical and seemingly unnecessary.

I also personally know a couple people who either died or fucked up their lives pretty significantly due to drug-related issues. So I know that there can be serious consequences and I don't take the issue lightly. But at the same time, I know that outcomes this severe are uncommon, assuming no exacerbating circumstances. Everything carries risk. I'm not going to ban my kids from driving just because they might get in a car accident.

As for the political content that reddit is worried about, that's just the stuff I myself watch/read anyway, so stopping my own kids from watching/reading it would be even more bizarre and hypocritical.

As for the political content that reddit is worried about, that's just the stuff I myself watch/read anyway, so stopping my own kids from watching/reading it would be even more bizarre and hypocritical.

So you'll need to signal flip the political content in the thought experiment to stuff you profoundly disagree with.

Right. Well, if my kids are going to become woke Maoist third worldists, then I can't really stop them, nor do I have any desire to. The whole point of being anti-woke is that people should be free to think for themselves. If I set limits on what my kids are allowed to think, then I'm no better than the wokeists.

I think the influence of external propaganda on political belief formation is not quite as big as is generally supposed anyway. Many years ago I stumbled on /r/shitredditsays when it was relatively new. The whole concept of "SJWs" was quite new and I was like, hey this seems kinda fun, I could get into this. You get to call other people racists and sexists and then feel morally superior to them. You're doing a good thing AND earning social credit in the process. That seems like a great deal. I imagine that's how most people initially get involved in social justice.

So I genuinely tried to be a leftist and integrate myself into the community for like a month, but I just couldn't do it. I was too viscerally disgusted by the behavior I saw there and I quickly turned on them. I tried to make myself believe in the content I was reading, but I couldn't. There was something about it that intrinsically disagreed with me.

I think that if someone is intelligent and independently-minded, they're going to believe what they're going to believe. And if they're not, they're just going to get swept up by the socially dominant ideology regardless, so why fret?

I think that if someone is intelligent and independently-minded, they're going to believe what they're going to believe. And if they're not, they're just going to get swept up by the socially dominant ideology regardless, so why fret?

Your guess is correct.

Heritability of political ideology goes up as a person becomes more informed about politics.

Basically, normie teenager who only gets her news from Instagram will follow whatever her friends/the algorithm decides, even if she has the genes of a conservative.

But her identical twin sister who starts reading more broadly will see her own innate beliefs/preferences manifested in what she reads. The more informed she becomes, the greater the pressure to align her beliefs with what feels instinctively right to her.

Basically, normie teenager who only gets her news from Instagram will follow whatever her friends/the algorithm decides, even if she has the genes of a conservative.

But her identical twin sister who starts reading more broadly will see her own innate beliefs/preferences manifested in what she reads. The more informed she becomes, the greater the pressure to align her beliefs with what feels instinctively right to her.

This could be true. I don't even necessarily disagree with it. The question however, is what life altering decisions that can't be taken back will "normie teenager" get talked into by the relentless tide of propaganda?

I know you’re worried about trans, but at least for the moment drugs and promiscuity are still the main ways teenagers wreck their own lives.

As for the political content that reddit is worried about, that's just the stuff I myself watch/read anyway, so stopping my own kids from watching/reading it would be even more bizarre and hypocritical.

So you'll need to signal flip the political content in the thought experiment to stuff you profoundly disagree with.

It's hard to think of content that arouses in the anti-woke right the sense of a priori absolute evil that Tate does to the feminist left. Maybe MAP advocacy? Children-targeted sissy hypno?

Sure, righties "hate" BreadTube, but it's not quite the same hate.

When I listen to clips like these from Diane Ehrensaft or Johanna Olson-Kennedy I absolutely get a sense that The Adversary is in the room.

The entire trans memeplex. Cheerios ads featuring miscegenation. Razor ads that are perceived as anti male. Christmas ads that are insufficiently religious.

But there's my point. The right wing "hates" that stuff, but they would not send their son to therapy (or I guess, Bible camp) and remove their access to a phone/all media if they caught them watching those.

Vaush and Tate are comparable poles of youth-targeted far-left and far-right influencerism, but the chud dad reacts to Vaush with a contemptuous snort, not like the /r/parenting folks above.

My parents weren’t even that religious and they would’ve sent me to Bible camp(or something like it; possibly a summer on a farm with a fundamentalist family) for trans stuff. Possibly for gay stuff, too.

But there's my point. The right wing "hates" that stuff, but they would not send their son to therapy (or I guess, Bible camp) and remove their access to a phone/all media if they caught them watching those.

If I thought my child was actually being influenced by trans-influencers, there is no limit to the drastic action I might take, and many on my side feel the same way. Ideally, I would be able to get them off of it just by explaining how dumb and wrong the influencers are, but if that was not enough, and I had to remove them from a peer and school and institutional situation that really had the tentacles wrapped around my child, God grant me the courage to do any action necessary, including selling my house and moving to a different state.

I do think there’s something to the “right and left have switched polarities” theory. The people who go the hardest for wokeness today would have been the strictest Christian moralists if they were alive in the 1600s.

I am anti-disapproving-schoolmarm. Back in the 90s and 2000s that means Focus on the Family style religious right. Fretting about sex in movies, bad music and the evils of DND.

Nowadays the culturally dominant disapprovers are progressives. Fretting about Tate and Jordan Peterson and making it a felony to deface a rainbow crosswalk by putting scooter tiremarks on it.

You must have had very different experiences of Evangelical parents than my friends had growing up. The question of "worldly" things which were a bad influence infected all questions of music, books, movies, friendships.

I can attest to the same, a LOT of media was disallowed due to my evangelical parentage. But I think most people answering this question do not think of evangelicals first, especially since they don't seem to be as numerous as they were 20 years ago. How many parents are banning Spongebob in 2024?

Damn, that makes me think that I will be compared to the evangelicals if I keep my kids from watching modern Blues Clues due to the pride parade segment they showed several years ago. There's a secular basis for my restrictions, damnit!

I think the most logical comparison is probably the right wing Boogeyman of online groomers, turning your kid gay or trans.

The Evangelical treatment of knowledge about homosexuality as inherently seductive towards homosexuality has been widely examined and derided already.

I remember when this forum discussed Cuties, and there was no shortage of right-wingers who aired out their righteous seething fury about it.

In contrast, I think even moderate drinking or drug use is fairly risky for developing brains, and I think the laissez-faire attitude towards it is dangerous.

Teen drinking is universal outside the US, near-universal in the US, and lindy. "Moderate drinking at 17 damages developing brains" is only relevant if you think everyone was brain-damaged in a relevant way back in the day. Unless you are trying to raise your kids teetotal for religious reasons, you are raising them in a culture where drinking is ubiquitous, and the distinction between "drinking sensibly" and "drinking too much" is far more important to teach than the one between drinking below and above an arbitrary cutoff age. The punishable misbehaviour in that anecdote was travelling to a secondary location without informing the parents, which is a basic safety issue, particularly for girls.

Andrew Tate, while execrable, is reasonably widespread and popular among teenage boys. I don’t think treating him as an irresistible gateway drug to the alt-right is useful or true; most of the teens that watch him manage to do so without falling down some rabbit hole of extremism.

This is the classic religious indoctrination problem, and it would be helpful if the Reddit mums grokked this. If you want your children not to adopt the lowest-common-denominator version of the locally prevailing culture, you either need to present them with a better (by their light, not yours) alternative, or control their information diet by heavy censorship. (This can be done - fundies in the US seem to do it successfully until the kid is 18 and goes off to university or gets a job at a non-fundie-owned business). And unfortunately it is hard to present civilised behaviour as a better alternative to what Tate is selling until he is finally convicted and jailed.

My sons are too young for this to be an issue yet, but I am reasonably clear that the product I am selling is a working marriage (and children), that In This House We Belive that Andrew Tate is a gypsy's prison bitch, and that part of men raising men is letting them know the well-known true facts about women that the RedPill crowd present as a new and subversive discovery. The reason why people like Tate have an audience is that both mainstream red-tribe Christianity and mainstream blue-tribe feminism are lying about what women want. The rest of the culture need to find a non-toxic way of sharing the truth if they don't want to be outcompeted. I used Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynmann when I was a kid.

"Moderate drinking at 17 damages developing brains" is only relevant if you think everyone was brain-damaged in a relevant way back in the day.

Factually, they were. From the 20th century via leaded gasoline & lead paint, & as far back as Babylon with lead glassware, flatware, pipes, etc.

you either need to present them with a better (by their light, not yours) alternative...The reason why people like Tate have an audience is that both mainstream red-tribe Christianity and mainstream blue-tribe feminism are lying about what women want. The rest of the culture need to find a non-toxic way of sharing the truth if they don't want to be outcompeted.

I agree with these bits, that essentially you need to offer a more persuasive product. I think for parents that are intelligent and informed it is not so difficult to do this. For example my father always gave me a sort of "redpilled" view on HBD, and being a geneticist it wasn't hard for him to make a more convincing case than netflix and my grade school teachers. For parents that are stupid and don't lead exemplary lives (as arguments can be made by words or by examples) I think unfortunately for them their children are at the mercy of the broader culture.

For parents that are stupid and don't lead exemplary lives (as arguments can be made by words or by examples) I think unfortunately for them their children are at the mercy of the broader culture.

Perhaps that, then, is the fundamental horror of raising teenagers for most parents- especially the ones who are just intelligent enough to know this happens, but are unable to stop it. It's especially important for parents who want to retain beliefs that are more incompatible with local reality [as contrasted with simply 'untrue', which is how the wise-to-wicked pipeline works] to be much more intelligent/capable than the general population such that their child retains them.

Hence the attempts to ride the ever-decreasing amount of power they have into the ground.

My parents were normal, middle class people. I remember being warned that certain discussions about race did not leave the family- although they didn’t use the word ‘HBD’.

It's interesting that everyone here is ignoring the sex of the child in question.

Teen drinking is universal outside the US, near-universal in the US, and lindy. "

Teenage drinking is lindy for teenage boys ... but not for unmarried, unchaperoned girls.

What the heck is "lindy", anyways? I've only ever seen that in the context of swing dancing and I'm pretty sure that's not what @MadMonzer meant.

It refers to the Lindy Effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect

The basic idea is that something that has been going for a long time is probably going to go on for a long time.

When I was a teenager, I was allowed to drink at parties as long as I didn’t drive back. For my sister(one grade below me), I had to be there and in a state cognizant of what was going on. Even at the time, we both understood the reason well enough to never break the rule.

The reason why people like Tate have an audience is that both mainstream red-tribe Christianity and mainstream blue-tribe feminism are lying about what women want. The rest of the culture need to find a non-toxic way of sharing the truth if they don't want to be outcompeted. I used Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynmann when I was a kid.

How would you share the truth about What Women Want?

I haven't seen "grok" in at least forty years!

I remember seeing it in an issue of Wired from like 20 years ago.

You might start hearing about it a lot.

It's the name of X AI's product. Apparently, they made some pretty big advances in networking large numbers of GPU's together and have now built the world's largest computer which they are using to train Grok3.

I feel I see it fairly regularly.

Should be less than forty. I’m not that old.

I'm not that old either, it was definitely a popular term on the net in the nineties.

"Moderate drinking at 17 damages developing brains" is only relevant if you think everyone was brain-damaged in a relevant way back in the day.

...which is, IMHO, not that far-fetched of a hypothesis.

Looking at people nowadays they seem neither happier nor smarter. Is the take here supposed to be "brain damage good, actually"?

I read speculation along those lines once somewhere in the SSCverse, that when you look at the behavioral symptoms of CTE in football players, veterans, and boxers they look more or less like severer and maladaptive versions of the traits that we view modern men as lacking. Aggression, risk taking, etc.

And the theory was, the human brain is actually adapted to getting a few concussions. If you look at history, most men would get a few growing up. The human brain essentially comes from the factory with too much risk aversion and doesn't reach optimal broken in condition until getting whacked a few times.

I find it wild speculation, but then I look at my own life and I suffered a severe concussion, and more or less contemporaneously I snapped out of my doldrums and started acting with a bit of ambition.

Sometimes it hard to know where your limits are until you get your bell rung a couple times.

My instinct is that the substitute activities people are engaging with are actually even worse than what happened to teenagers before for your brains.

I’m actually fine with teenagers drinking beer and wine in moderation, I learned to do so because I reached legal drinking age outside of the USA and I had a parent who was very modest in their alcohol consumption. Basically all of my bad alcohol habits I picked up when I came back and lived in the burbs and attached myself to the local party scene.

It may have some negative consequences, but as stated above it’s one of lindy-est things to ever lindy.

Internet brain rot, social media obsession, binge video gaming, and a sedentary indoor life style seems much much worse to me in terms of damage to young people’s brain. Massive spikes in youth depression, anxiety and isolation seem to bear this out.

Pick your poison, I imagine every generation since the first has had to deal with this issue.

Teen drinking is universal outside the US, near-universal in the US, and lindy.

This. In my town, it was normal to start drinking beer around 12-14, and to start drinking hard alcohol (up to blackout drunk) around 14-16. And I'm not talking about poor white trash, this is a prosperous, unusually high TFR conservative & religious farmer's region in western germany.

where do kids there go to drink? Do they just openly drink with their parents?

I think the most sketchy thing about it for teenagers in America is there just really isn't a good place to drink. Bars won't serve you of course, or even allow kids to enter. They don't own their own house so they can't host a party. You could maybe drink get away quickly in the car or outside, but that's highly illegal and risky. Going to the house of some strange adult who's willing to host an underage drinking party is... suspicious at best, and can lead to really bad things happening.

this might have been different in the past, when it was more common for parents to work late or go out alone and leave the kids home alone.

A quick google says that the drinking age in Germany is 14 if a responsible adult is buying the drinks, and 16 if the kids are buying beer or wine for themselves (18 for spirits). I'm not sure about Germany, but teens openly drinking with parents including in bars and restaurants is normal in France and Italy, even when it is technically illegal (which it now mostly is - France raised their drinking age to 18 in 2009 and Italy in 2011). I used to travel round France a lot with my parents, and I was noticeably younger than 14 (at that time the legal drinking age for wine with a meal) when waiters at respectable French restaurants started offering me a glass of my parents' bottle of wine.

where do kids there go to drink? Do they just openly drink with their parents?

It's complicated and not just about alcohol, but generally yes, or with their tacit acceptance. I'll use the example of a specific festivity, "Maibaum pflanzen" ("planting the May-Tree"), because it's a nice progression from young to old, but just our small town would have a low double-digit number of festivities like these (for the interested germans, the others I remember in my town were: Straßenfest, Dorffest, Gemeindefest, Wursteball, Osterfeuer, Schützenfest, Karneval, Vaterstag). Once you're 16, you'd also be allowed to drive over to other towns, which meant that there was something going on every weekend.

End of April, we would celebrate the start of spring by going into the nearby forest, cutting down a birch, and setting it up in our local neighbourhood. All neighbourhoods around would do this, with around 20 people per tree, so you would have something like 10 trees up in walking distance, and of those everyone would know literally everyone else. You'd sit down in a circle around a fire and the tree would be some meters away so that it's hard to see from the fire in the dark. There would be a game of stealing the trees from others, mostly played by teens and young adults, and next day the captured trees would be chopped into small pieces and distributed among the group, some keeping their piece as a celebration to commemorate the number of trees stolen, but usually just for burning wood.

Before you're 12, you'd generally just help decorate the tree, eat Bratwurst, play games with the other kids, maybe visiting some other trees with a group of kids. Some neighbourhoods would put up a "kid's tree" which was just a branch from the larger tree, and which would be small enough for the younger kids to steal without needing an axe. Once you're around 12, you'd be allowed to help cut and carry the tree in earnest and drink your first beer (obviously, cutting the tree was itself a beer drinking game) and help protecting the adult tree. Around 14, you'd be allowed to join the older teens when stealing adult trees (which is mostly done between 2-6 in the morning when the majority of the adults went to bed, and the few left over to protect the tree will be drunk or even sometimes fell asleep), and the older teens would let you drink your first hard alcohol with them. This would often also be the first time when you get REALLY drunk once, and you (as well as the older teens that supplied you) would be lightly punished or at least reprimanded by your parents to be more careful next time.

Around 16, you'd be strong enough to carry a tree with a group of other teens, which meant that you'd be allowed your own tree altogether. Whether you actually did this depends on whether you can organize a group of older teens/young adults large enough, a place where you'd be allowed to put up the tree, and food & drinks for everyone, including visitors. This would be the time when getting REALLY DRUNK will be fully tolerated. When I was around 17, we'd set up a tree with 6 teens my age at my parent's house (since they were away for the night at the neighbourhood's tree) and vowed we'd protect our tree by putting a nail in the tree for every finished bottle of hard alcohol and hang the bottle there, and when we woke up the entire tree was decorated fully with more than 20 bottles. We've had a few visitors, but even accounting for that it means everyone drank at least 2-3 full bottles of hard alcohol (and we also drank at other trees we visited), in addition to copious amounts of beer which is generally not even counted (we literally have the saying "you can't get drunk on beer") and which we obviously didn't even bother putting on the tree. We all had such a bad hangover that we didn't go out drinking the next day, which you'd usually do as it is worker's day with lots of bigger festivals. My parents just laughed and made fun of us.

So you usually don't drink much hard alcohol directly with your parents as a teen, it's expected of you to help organize events with friends which then allow you to get drunk. Most parents directly help supply some amount of alcohol for every celebration you throw or join, but usually you have to organize some on top of that (which isn't difficult). Drinking alone or at any time that isn't a designated known event is heavily frowned upon(except beer, since, again, it doesn't count). Some teens would only join events with their parents, and correspondingly drink much less, much later.

Interesting! Thanks for the detailed discription. It sounds fun, and also uniquely German in an interesting way.

So you were mostly drinking outside in the forest? Who bought the drinks, the older teens or the parents?

As an American, the laws for liquor were very strict, so it was hard to get any. We would occasionally have "field parties" where you drive out to some random rural location, sit around a circle, maybe a fire if someone was prepared enough to bring supplies, and pass a bottle around (usually bought by someone with a "fun" older sibling). Really a miserable experience all around I think. The more common way was that we'd go to the house of our friend who had an alcoholic single mom, wait for her to fall asleep, and then raid her liquor cabinet. Yeah... not good times. We'd also have to think of a cover story to tell our parents.

So you were mostly drinking outside in the forest?

Uh, no. For may-tree planting it varied wildly since you needed lots of space, but never in the forest since you want to make a camp fire, and a camp fire in the forest while drunk is how you get forest fires. Typically it would be something like a paddock, or a large roundabout, or in someone backyard if it's large enough. For other events it would usually be some large communal building, such as the old school building.

Who bought the drinks, the older teens or the parents?

The parents usually supply whatever is on the high end of acceptance for your age, older teens whatever is on the low end. So for, say, a 14yo, parents would supply beer and older teens would supply harder alcohol (and it would be expected of the older teens to look after him, and this can be enforced since the parents know exactly who the older teens are). But it also varied a lot depending on the parents opinion.

As an American, the laws for liquor were very strict, so it was hard to get any. We would occasionally have "field parties" where you drive out to some random rural location, sit around a circle, maybe a fire if someone was prepared enough to bring supplies, and pass a bottle around (usually bought by someone with a "fun" older sibling). Really a miserable experience all around I think. The more common way was that we'd go to the house of our friend who had an alcoholic single mom, wait for her to fall asleep, and then raid her liquor cabinet. Yeah... not good times. We'd also have to think of a cover story to tell our parents.

Yeah sounds sad. I used to believe in the idea that some things can't be enforced, such as limiting alcohol, since it fit very with my experience and we were taught in school how badly prohibition fucked up. But nowadays I think it all is just secretly revealing your preferences, or at least of society at large - limiting alcohol can't be enforced if people don't want to. But if they do, it works.

i went to highschool in the USA in the 90s: there were mutiple parties every weekend at various houses of kids whos parents were out of town, when the weather was good we'd sometimes have huge keg parties just out of town in a sort of nature area. something like the moon tower party in dazed and confused. not infrequently, people would get a hotel room to hang out in. pretty typical to go to multiple stops on a friday or saturday night.

even i, described once by a friend of my girlfriend as being a "cool nerd", knew multiple people who could get me weed, beer or liquor. friends of a friend would rarely show up with cocaine or acid, and i knew of older people using heroin but never saw any.

this type of partying was by far the main highschool social scene, i would guess 40% of kids were part of this including most of the athletes and popular types.

looking back, it seems like a major factor was parents constantly going out of town and leaving the kids in charge of nice single family homes, kind of surprising how much that was happening

Same experience i had at an expensive private school in a western german city

prosperous, unusually high TFR conservative & religious farmer's region in western germany

Sounds lovely. Is it still like this? I was a surprised at the number of closed Gaststätte / Wirtshaus in towns in rural Germany on a recent trip. Reminded of all the towns that lost their pubs in Ireland and the UK. ☹️

For better or worse, we've went through that process before my time; In our Bauernschaft of 500 people, there used to be 5 Kneipen, of which only a single one was still open when I was a kid (an I never went there myself, it was oly old people). I have been told that during covid, one secretly opened again though that has stopped once the measurements had been lifted.

During my teen years, it was typical to first meet at someone's place with a group to get drunk except for the designated drivers, and then you drive to wherever is the nearest current fair (usually a Schützenfest) at that weekend, which could be 20 kilometers or more. My friend group was with more than 20 people of both genders pretty large, so we would often just get drunk together and skip the part of driving anywhere.

From what I've heard, the region hasn't changed much culture and living standard-wise; It's not comparable to the pitiful misery that is the contemporary british countryside. In terms of TFR it's still among the highest in germany, but unfortunately it went through the same 2022 post-covid crash as the rest (up to that point, it had actually slowly been increasing for nearly a decade).

It's a small world indeed; I responded to that comment just now. Here's the original:

https://www.themotte.org/post/1286/smallscale-question-sunday-for-december-8/275626?context=8#context

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