It’s hard enough being 14 or 15 without needing to panic about some embarrassing Instagram pic or discovering too late that something stupid or awful you wrote on Facebook or Twitter at 16 comes back to haunt you at 20.... We owe it to the kids to shield them from creating public records of their own indiscretions and idiocies. Life will come roaring at them soon enough. I say no social media till they’re old enough to vote, smoke and maybe even buy a drink. Full-frontal stupidity should be left to the grown-ups — like us!
You can see he thinks he's cute... just delightful. So blithely depriving teenagers of freedom of speech. Not even a word about freedom, just safety and protection, and no insight whatsoever into what you are teaching young people these days or awareness of what they will think of you and your repression of them and the values you crudely imposed.
Speaking of wearing blinders... in another part of this rambling but short conversation, they talk about the accomplishments of Jimmy Carter, and Stephens says, "Made air travel affordable to middle-class America for the first time," then barrels on to the next subject. I know this column is supposed to be jaunty, moving swiftly from one topic to the next, but it made me stop and think of the topic the good-thinkers always think about except when they don't: Global warming.
Isn't Jimmy Carter a major villain in the story of anthropogenic climate change?
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Bruce Bawer has the cogent rundown of the real crimes of Jimmy Carter at frontpagemag. His lifelong anti-semitism, support of tyrants, domestic terrorists, and dictators through The Carter Center, how he despised America and admired communists who murdered their own people. He has been an insane, destructive tyrant his entire life. His passion for North Korean dictatorship is the key to his soul.
When someone needs to tell you repeatedly how moral they are, look twice. And some of us remember how he treated blacks before it wasn't a good look for his ambitions.
I suppose they are correct to a point, but my thought is that if my auntie had bollocks, she'd be my uncle instead. Water runs downhill for a reason. Human nature is depressingly consistent over the centuries. Fighting that takes more energy that most humans can summon up.
Unless, of course, one believes in the concept of the New Man. Look what that got us. Some things are easier to change than others. Changing really difficult things usually requires lots of killing and stuff. I'd like to say no to that.
Isn't Jimmy Carter a major villain in the story of anthropogenic climate change?
As an engineer, Carter should know that so-called environmental scientists have never been able to relate increased carbon dioxide to atmospheric warming. He and his cohorts have always ignored the science that proves the direct correlation between CO2 level changes to Sol's solar storms. And somehow he hasn't figured out that live-giving carbon dioxide is a requirement for continued life on Earth.
So blithely depriving teenagers of freedom of speech. Not even a word about freedom, just safety and protection, and no insight whatsoever into what you are teaching young people these days or awareness of what they will think of you and your repression of them and the values you crudely imposed.
Oh, it doesn’t stop at young people.
Jimmy Carter had a hard on for shale oil that is considered very uncool by warmies.
I guess that he wasn’t as big on sending American boys into combat on the other side of the world over a resource that is abundant in North America as modern Democrats are.
I'm talking about the carbon emissions from airline travel.
https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-sheet-the-growth-in-greenhouse-gas-emissions-from-commercial-aviation
Now protect children from puberty blockers and sex change surgery.
The connection between cigarette use and social media seems pretty strained. Similar to the "if we can put a man on the moon" line, it sounds profound so long as you don't think about it too much.
That said, I don't find the "free speech" objection persuasive. We don't fully recognize most rights with minors because their brains aren't fully formed and they need help making smart decisions. With adults, we are comfortable saying, they made their choice, they can live with the consequences. It would be cruel to do that with children.
I didn’t give my son a cellphone until 13. Last in his group of friends to have one. He used video games with chat functions to text his friends. Cute that the grownups think they can outfox the kids.
I don't have serious disagreement with the (mostly fair but L leaning) ranking of Presidents on some sort of Greatness scale.
Abe Lincoln still is in First Place..although he authorized the first federal tax on beer.
Jimmy Carter is still near the bottom....although by legalizing home/micro brewing he improved the lives of us all.
T
Jimmah brought us Zbignew Brzezinski, who gave us Mika, who partnered with Scar-Bro ..... voilà ... the the stars of MSLSD are birthed.
It's a real head-snapper when the professor talks about "freedom" regarding teenagers and social media in her original posting, then advocates restricting "freedom" in the comments section when it comes to air travel. Combine that with Gadfly's correct comment regarding scientists being unable to connect atmospheric CO2 levels to AGW and I had a double head-snap! Never thought I would see Gadfly challenge the lefty dogma!
Anyway, I'm surprised my head is still sitting on my shoulders.
Regarding teenagers and unrestricted 'free speech' -- Those under 18 or 21 often face restrictions. Fuzzy rules for adulthood apply across many domains so social media should be no exception.
Draft at 18: https://www.military.com/join-armed-forces/everything-you-need-know-about-military-selective-service-system.html
Amendment to change vote from 21 to 18: https://www.thoughtco.com/the-26th-amendment-4157809
The often-bumbling CDC says that raising drinking age to 21 "saves lives:" https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/fact-sheets/minimum-legal-drinking-age.htm
Handguns (and more recently "assault weapons") sold only to age 21+: https://thehill.com/changing-america/3493244-the-legal-ages-for-buying-a-gun-in-the-us/
Legal marriage age varies by nation and era: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriageable_age
Air travel is fine with the woke. Also whatever the Pentagon. CIA and FBI want to do, as long as they speak woke. I think they have JFK dreams about space. Although this may change if they turn on Elon.
Deregulation of inter-city bussing was anything but conservative and was a kick in the teeth to rural Americans. People born in the seventies probably have no idea that it used to be possible to buy a bus ticket in almost any small town and to flag down a Greyhound bus on any notable highway in almost any hamlet.
Remember that scene from Hair where he flags down the bus from the mailbox of his daddy’s farm? But now you can buy extremely cheap tickets between Boston and New York City, so I guess that it was worth it.
Don’t get me started on freight rail, which is so much less polluting than trucking, that’s another thing “conservatives” allowed to rot to a shadow of its former self.
Isn't Jimmy Carter a major villain in the story of anthropogenic climate change?
Of Course NOT! Things are Bad! Unless they were done by a democrat.. Then, they are GOOD!
see (American Wars in Europe)
"[I]f we were able to more-or-less end teenage cigarette smoking over the last 20 years, it shouldn’t be out of the question to try to do the same with social-media use."
No, because today’s elites aren’t good enough to accomplish that goal, or nearly any other.
I'm talking about the carbon emissions from airline travel.
Yes, we got that. Let me know when and if the mathematical models that drive the anthropogenic global warming hoax ever match objective reality.
If we stopped smoking?? Is he high?
The kids vape now. It's everywhere in school and the nic juice they use is strong.
So, wrong right out of the gate.
In my lifetime, we've gone from repression of teens to maximum freedom. So it is not surprising that adult self-promoting social moderators like NYT staffers are now moving back to repression.
There are flaws in both modes. When you get sufficiently disturbed by, and about, some of those flaws, you look to the other mode. Pendulum kettle black. I would assume growing repression for quite a while into the future as we shift from recent freedom. I don't think they're wrong. How much is total freedom for teens on social media worth, compared to girls chopping up and ruining their bodies? For one example.
He's probably correct that most teenagers would be better off without social media. However, just because X would be better off without Y does not justify a law. We already had the experiment with banning alcohol on the (correct) assumption that many people would be better off without it, and it failed miserably. Social media, given it is not a physical thing, would be nearly impossible to enforce in any meaningful way, barring a totalitarian state. I'm not sure Stephens would be disappointed with that outcome.
If you want to preach the gospel of no social media, feel free. Not sure all the cool kids are reading the New York Times these days, but maybe someone will pay attention.
"Isn't Jimmy Carter a major villain in the story of anthropogenic climate change?"
No. The sun is.
There has rarely been anything as addictive as cell phones are to our youth (and many of the rest of us). They now grow up with social media. The later you can start them, the better?? I don't know. I think whenever it starts, it goes full out for years to come. I don't know how you put those horses back into the barn without major clamps on who is allowed to read what at a given age. And once you step into that pile, how far does it move, and what other avenues does it take?
Somehow it's got to come from the kids themselves. They've got to just say "Enough! I'm not going to be led by this stuff." and on and on. Like Nancy Reagan's "Just say No". It sounded naive and lame, but honestly, its the only way to cut the drug market (which we've never done).
Want social media to go away. Quit using it. Just say no. Good luck. I'll check back in 20 years.
Say, I've got an idea: How about we use Parents?
Althouse pokes Stephens for his blithe assumptions about air travel, and here's mine: Let's not accept that less cigarette smoking is a good thing. Everyone nods their heads at that bromide, and then bemoans the obesity epidemic.
He also stopped fuel reprocessing, leaving a forward-looking burden for America's unPlanned "burdens", and, generally, people who do not embrace the Green blight as a intermittent/unreliable solution with renewable profits.
Adolescents are wildly insecure. Those at the margins get bullied. Those a little more secure join in because they don't want to be at the margins. There's that girl that got beat up in the school hallway. That's traumatic enough, but some thoughtful souls took the trouble to post a video of the beat down so that all the other kids could get to view it. The girl that got beat up committed suicide...I don't think that's the end of the story. In the fullness of time the kids that posted the video or those who enjoyed looking at the video will come to realize that they acted like absolute shits and that knowledge will haunt them.....There are a lot of incidents from high school that I'd just as soon forget and that I would not like to see posted for everyone to see. There's that time I ran for daylight in the championship game. I'm sure if it were posted and everyone saw it, I would have become egotistical and conceited. I'm sure many here have the same experience of incidents in high school that they wish were not widely shared with classmates.
What's good for you and what other people think is good for you isn't always what you want, especially if you are a teenager, and change always has unanticipated consequences. Fewer teen smokers -- more fat kids. If that was the exchange, maybe it was a good one, but somebody in the old media wanting to limit and control the new looks a little like a cookie and donut lobbyist campaigning against smoking. In spite everything that's wrong about the new media, it's still a good thing that people have alternatives to the Establishment media.
Teen smoking now is less than half of what it was in the 1990s, but vaping is on the rise. Big government tells us that every day in America 1,600 teens smoke their first cigarette. Maybe that doesn't happen in the circles Bret Stephens moves in, or maybe he just doesn't see it. But why did teen smoking fall? What changed in the last quarter century? Maybe it wasn't all cookies and donuts, chips and fries. Everybody has a cellphone now, and it's in their hand instead of a cigarette. Teen smoking fell, I conjecture, because social media replaced it. What does Stephens have to offer to replace social media?
Carter was a horrible president. He was the worst president in my lifetime -- until Biden. But US presidents cuddling up to dictators and repressive regimes is a recurrent chapter in American history, so I don't entirely buy Bawer's critique.
None of my kids get a cell phone until 16. Gaming chat was also banned. If they chatted at all it was with a select few on non-sharable platforms so that did not allow your posts to be shared with anyone else and you could not expand the social net. So far all of them have survived the teen years without the angst.
The biggest problem with teens is not social media, per se. it is the transfer of their well being from the nuclear family to the the state run institutions run by people who do not care about your child and suffer no consequences for their actions in regards to damage done to the children.
The relentless assault on the nuclear family is the root of many of our evils, but the people who advocate it are unwilling to accept the responsibility, always coming up with another "cause" that makes the problem worse, not better. And our people willingly sacrifice their children to Moloch hoping for a better life.
William at 8:50 is correct. Add to that the issue of how everything to a teen seems like all there is. They have no understanding of how little importance things that happen while they are in their teens is. They have no concept of the long view, and their frontal lobes are under-developed. The best thing a parent could do for their teen is take away the phone and keep them out of the public high school, and probably most private ones as well.
Isn't Jimmy Carter a major villain in the story of anthropogenic climate change?
Wasn't the perceived issue back then global cooling?
"...a NYT conservative columnist..." An oxymoron. "...a NYT liberaI columnist." A redundancy.
We priced cigarettes out of reach of kids with onerous tobacco taxes. Kids vape now. I don’t expect the NYT columnists to keep up with current events but to blithely assert we convinced kids to shun cancer sticks is not a strong basis for the “let’s ban social media” endeavor. To wit, the two writers should read up on the success of antismoking efforts towards teens up until vaping appeared as an option.
I'm taking the liberal position here: the only speech that is constitutional is that which was known at the time of the signing of the constitution.
So you can stand on a street corner and talk. Or you can write a book. Or you can get something printed on a press.
That's it.
You don't have a right to posses an iPhone or an app, neither of which existed in 1776...
We'd be better off weaning the country from the output of the leftmediaswine who have created a false, alternative history and a looney tunes nation.
Blogger Temujin said...
"Isn't Jimmy Carter a major villain in the story of anthropogenic climate change?"
No. The sun is.
Yes. Carter was a fool but global warming/climate change is a scam.
"Carter was a horrible president. He was the worst president in my lifetime -- until Biden."
Correct, if competence is the issue. I would, however, argue that Obama did more to dismember the Republic through corruption and division than either Carter or Biden. Obama's Communist mentor Frank Marshall Davis would have been very proud.
Biden is just icing Obama's cake.
"Isn't Jimmy Carter a major villain in the story of anthropogenic climate change?"
You are only supposed to think about "climate change" in certain contexts. In other contexts, it is OK to blithely assume that the world is infinitely resilient and your upper-class NYT lifestyle has no impact on anything. Those kids digging in that pit in Africa do it for fun. Your iPhone is just a serendipitous byproduct of their healthy pastime.
"Carter was a fool but global warming/climate change is a scam."
Well, that's an interesting point. It is certainly a scam as far as current political expostulation goes. But the climate record derived from ice cores indicates that the Earth's climate is a bi-stable system. It has a cold setting, and a hot setting, and it alternates more or less randomly. We are 12,000 years into the current hot era, which is about the average length of hot eras. So, the problem that worries me is Global Cooling. If the Earth were to return tomorrow to the conditions that obtained 20,000 years ago, there is no way it could sustain 10 billion humans with our technology. That bears pondering.
But he idea that air travel contributes significantly to atmospheric carbon is far-fetched.
'You don't have a right to posses an iPhone or an app, neither of which existed in 1776...'
Or the year when the constitution was written...too lazy to look it up : )
"Isn't Jimmy Carter a major villain in the story of anthropogenic climate change?"
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When I read stuff like this, I wonder if our Blogmistress has EVER in her life looked at WhatsUpWithThat.com, Judith Curry , JoNova, or any of the other science blogs that destroy the idea that humans are doing damage to our atmosphere and threatening our future through the use of fossil fuels.
Or is it...ick...SCIENCE...and therefore too tough to wade into?
(sez I, pulling the cord on the Barbie doll that bleats, "Math is hard!!")
“In my lifetime, we've gone from repression of teens to maximum freedom. So it is not surprising that adult self-promoting social moderators like NYT staffers are now moving back to repression.”
For many, the freedom is for other people’s kids, not your own. My daughter’s childhood was far more restricted than was ours.
“I didn’t give my son a cellphone until 13. Last in his group of friends to have one. He used video games with chat functions to text his friends. Cute that the grownups think they can outfox the kids.”
“None of my kids get a cell phone until 16. Gaming chat was also banned. If they chatted at all it was with a select few on non-sharable platforms so that did not allow your posts to be shared with anyone else and you could not expand the social net. So far all of them have survived the teen years without the angst.”
Same here. Maybe 15. She ended up graduating Summa Cum Laude from a small liberal college, then got a STEM PhD from a major research university, and a 6 figure starting salary - actually doing real environmental work. Not the primary goal of her employer, but rather a nice side benefit.
At about 15, she joined FaceBook. That night she got a lecture about the dangers, and an order to delete her account. Huh? How did her mother figure it out so quickly? Parents are supposed to be clueless about tech. The clueless one was my daughter, whose mother had worked in that area from before she was born. And that naturally meant setting alarms for when her daughter’s name popped on the Internet. Daughter opened a new FB account, with deliberate misspellings of her name, as a senior in HS, and immediately got a Friend request from her mother, which she felt compelled to accept.
She was lucky, in that we could afford to send her to a private school, with mandatory athletics after school every day, and plenty of accelerated classes to keep her busy studying in the evenings.
Joe Smith said...
I'm taking the liberal position here: the only speech that is constitutional is that which was known at the time of the signing of the constitution.
So you can stand on a street corner and talk. Or you can write a book. Or you can get something printed on a press.
That's it.
You don't have a right to posses an iPhone or an app, neither of which existed in 1776...
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You could not be more wrong. Everything in the Bill of rights is meant to MAXIMIZE freedom and restrict the pwoer of government. Your crabbed interpretation flies in the face of hundreds of Supreme Court cases.
You might as well argue that the 4th Amendment prohibition against "unreasonable search and seizure" doesn't apply to wiretaps or other forms of electronic surveillance, since they didn't exist in the 18th century.
Is that your position?
Isn't Jimmy Carter a major villain in the story of anthropogenic climate change? "
No. The crime he committed in air travel was to turn airlines into bus lines.
1. Tobacco: Vaping got me off Drum. Nicorette got me off vaping.
2. Social Media: Kill 'Likes' and the numbers will cool.
The one achievement of the Carter admin., the deregulation of the airlines and trucking industry.
'You might as well argue that the 4th Amendment prohibition against "unreasonable search and seizure" doesn't apply to wiretaps or other forms of electronic surveillance, since they didn't exist in the 18th century.
Is that your position?'
You clearly haven't read too many of my posts : )
I thought the /s was glaringly obvious...
So blithely depriving teenagers of freedom of speech.
The Supreme Court has already ruled that you can limit the freedoms of teenagers in the interests of public education. We limit the freedoms of teenagers by not allowing them to buy cigarettes or alcohol. Indeed one of the foundations of public law is that children cannot consent or sign contracts because they are unable to fully exercise their rights.
Joe Smith was challenged to defend his inane position on the Constitution.
Even the crickets have gone silent.
Effinayright,
You need to stop and look at his post at 2:22. Sometimes sarcasm or parody doesn't evince itself in the written word.
As an engineer
Jimmy Carter was not an engineer.
'Joe Smith was challenged to defend his inane position on the Constitution.'
It's painful to explain sarcasm to low-IQ individuals.
What I wrote was clearly based upon idiot lefties who claim the second amendment only applies to muskets available in the 1700s.
Thank you for conceding that private ownership of AR-15s is perfectly constitutional.
I rest my case...
In case you haven't noticed, effinayright has a habit of missing the point by a mile and getting indignant about non-existent issues. The sarcasm couldn't have been more obvious.
"Joe Smith was challenged to defend his inane position on the Constitution."
Joe Smith was joking.
Lighten up, Francis.
Old and slow said...
In case you haven't noticed, effinayright has a habit of missing the point by a mile and getting indignant about non-existent issues. The sarcasm couldn't have been more obvious.
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Riiiight. I'll have to run out and buy an nanovolt-meter-sensitive sarcaso-meter to detect ultra-weak sarcasm.
As for that absent but "glaringly obvious" /s : it's not the reader's job to figure out what you HAVEN'T written.
Temp Blog said...
"Joe Smith was challenged to defend his inane position on the Constitution."
Joe Smith was joking.
Lighten up, Francis.
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Yes, I should have lightened up. Joe's comment was a real laff riot, a true thigh-slapper.
Am I allowed to leave my Struggle Session now?
effinayright, I have noticed that you very often are arguing with points no one has made because you simply didn't understand what was said. Perhaps you should pause a moment before firing off indignant responses. It could prevent people from thinking that you are a slow learner.
'As for that absent but "glaringly obvious" /s : it's not the reader's job to figure out what you HAVEN'T written.'
Did you start reading the comments on this blog yesterday?
I'm not in the business of hand-holding.
Did you think that 'Animal Farm' (assuming you've read it) was really about pigs, dogs, and horses?
Apparently you've never heard the phrase 'reading between the lines...'
But how will the kids learn where to get their sexual reassignment surgery without social media?
Oh, that's right...their public school teachers will pass on that info to them.
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