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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   26274 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 1, 2024

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As far as the teenagers go, of course, you're past the point of realistically controlling them especially if they've inherited enough of their parents disagreeableness to find other ways; general purpose computers that can trivially bypass these blocks are easily-concealable and generally within teenage budgets.

This is exactly where I get stuck. The lack of theory of mind for teenagers that the geezers seem to have is absolutely remarkable. Do they not recall being a teenager? Were they actually just weird, broken-brained teenagers that didn't act the way the rest of us did? People seem to believe that teenage males aren't the horniest human beings on the planet. The lengths that a teenage guy would go to for a half-hearted handjob from a girlfriend are legendary. Somehow, I'm supposed to believer that political boomers are going to implement policy that will prevent them from accessing pornography? Come on, this is so obviously stupid that it makes the TSA seem like a pretty good plan for security by comparison.

This is one of those traits where there's really massive variance, and it's likely both genetic and cultural. I have been in groups where nearly everyone had an extremely low baseline level of horniness as a teen (this includes people I am close enough to that I know they are not lying for social reasons) and within groups where everyone admits they were psychotically horny as teens.

These two types of people tend to self-sort pretty strongly from a young age, and they tend to understand each other poorly.

Yep. I sorted into the group where romance was interesting, but sex was pointless and unappealing at our stage of life. At one point I asked my mother (in the context of abortion), "Why do people have sex if they don't want to have a baby?" and she stuttered, "Some people find it pleasurable."

I was aware of the people who talked about sex while playing Truth or Dare, but I had long ago labeled these people as "not friend material" before I even knew what sex was. They were the kids who thought Bs were a good grade, or didn't listen to adults when they forbade us from doing things, and being near these kids made me uncomfortable.

I've seen the phrase "time preference" thrown around here, I think it correlates strongly to the two groups.

Do they not recall being a teenager? Were they actually just weird, broken-brained teenagers that didn't act the way the rest of us did?

Evidently yes, but they might also be lying or otherwise acting in bad faith.

You can typically and trivially differentiate the people who don't or won't remember from the people who do/will because the people who won't remember typically use some form of the phrase "raging melanin hormones" as an excuse.

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