"Parents aren’t the only ones yearning for solutions. Last fall, I gathered with students to talk about mental health and loneliness. As often happens in such gatherings, they raised the issue of social media.... 'I just don’t feel good when I use social media,' [a young woman named Tina] said softly.... Her confession opened the door for her classmates.... There was a sadness in their voices, as if they knew what was happening to them but felt powerless to change it.... Why is it that we have failed to respond to the harms of social media when they are no less urgent or widespread than those posed by unsafe cars, planes or food?... Students like Tina... do not want to be told that change takes time, that the issue is too complicated or that the status quo is too hard to alter.... Now is the time to summon the will to act...."
WARNING — THE QUESTION THAT FOLLOWS MAY AFFECT YOUR BRAIN. How dare the government slap its message on the writing and photography of its free citizens?
Whenever I hear a government official say something like "Won't someone think of the children??", I think a better statement would be "Why aren't parents doing their job?" Also: "Trusted Experts"? Vetted by some government bureaucrat, no doubt. Whatever could go wrong!?
'I just don’t feel good when I use social media,' [a young woman named Tina] said softly.
I'd tell Tina the same thing that i wish people had said to ME, when i was dating a physically and mentally abusive blonde girl: If it doesn't feel good.. DON'T DO IT!
Instead, they ALL said: "you HAVE TO STICK WITH HER! We ALL like her!!"
I thank my lucky stars that when our kids were most vulnerable to this cancer, we lived in a neighborhood out of Rockwell - no fences, kids roaming in packs from yard to yard all day in the summers and ding-dong-ditching all of us parents in the evenings. They had the childhood I had instead of sitting in the dark staring at a little screen that tells them their not good enough.
I have spoken with them explicitly about the advantage that childhood gave them, in hopes that they'll try to find, or create if necessary, that environment for their own kids one day.
The solution is parents have to parent: shocking I know.
You know my people managed to not smoke, even when every advertisement and celebrity said it was the coolest and healthiest thing a person could do. Act! Don't be acted upon by people who have other motives that do not have your, or your children's best interest in mind.
It's not just the kids. Parents should stay off social media. Social media will validate a parent's beliefs about themselves and their parenting choices no matter how messed up those beliefs are.
And I say this as a mom with experience in this parenting environment. My kids don't get phones until 14. Those phones are limited in what they can do and no social media. The phones don't go in their bedrooms and are plugged in at 10:30pm every night. We also go to a school that doesn't allow phones. I've often thought my kids are going to rule the world because of this. We'll see.
There's no helmet or seatbelt because psychology isn't a real science. We can observe that too much internet seems to be bad for kids, but we can't really know how much is too much and what specific parts are bad and bad how.
But the people saying "parents need to be parents" are being simplistic. Social media is so central to every child's life that to take away the phone is to make your child a social pariah. It will exclude them from most conversations and activities. It has to be done broadly, at least at the school level.
"For the children" the phrase that has launched a hundred crusades of "well-meaninged" adults to tell us what is good / better for our children. Don't worry everyone, they'll get it right THIS time.
Physical safety is an easier metric to measure and that is already badly abused when GP's are asking if you have a gun in your home but not if you have a swimming pool in your backyard. It's bad enough that they try to apply "pandemic science" to things like violence but ignore the impact of government programs on the nuclear family.
Again, don't worry, they'll get it right THIS time...
"Social media is so central to every child's life that to take away the phone is to make your child a social pariah. "
As my parents used to ask, "if all your friends jump off a tall cliff are you going to jump too just to be part of the crowd"? My parents taught me that being a part of the crowd was not always the right thing to do and to think of the possible consequences of my actions before agreeing to something just because everyone else is doing it. I listened to them. As a result I was one of only few in my group of friends that wasn't suspended from school and prevented from attending the junior/senior prom due to alcohol slipped into a school-sponsored event. I had proof I wasn't part of it.
My eldest grandson received his first cell phone at 15. His use of it is carefully monitored by his parents. He is a lot better for it.
But the people saying "parents need to be parents" are being simplistic. Social media is so central to every child's life that to take away the phone is to make your child a social pariah. It will exclude them from most conversations and activities. It has to be done broadly, at least at the school level.
Exactly this. That's why I said I thank my lucky stars that we lived in the right neighborhood to foster a largely social media-free youth: it wasn't by design, just luck. My oldest is part of the first generation to have smartphones available during his adolescence and no one knew yet what the effects of these things were going to be; his younger siblings got them earlier than he did, but - again, fortunately, not through our foresight - their lives were very much in the real physical world.
It was pretty much during my younger two kids' middle school years that the damage started to come to light, but even so, their schools didn't go phone free (kids couldn't have them out in class, but they could have them on their person), and my generation of parents didn't demand it. We should have.
It's fantastic that parents are now. Crossed fingers that we don't lose the generation of kids - like mine - whose parents didn't think hard enough about this problem. And again, I'm so grateful that my own kids were spared the worst of it by an accident of location, since my parenting wasn't up to the task.
cfs said...As my parents used to ask, "if all your friends jump off a tall cliff are you going to jump too just to be part of the crowd"?
Most parents say that, even though it's dumb. Argumentum ad absurdum. And it has no applicability to this situation. We're not talking about a single extreme event.
Sorry Tim, my kids have plenty of friends without social media. They're on summer swim this year and spend a lot of time with friends after morning practice. My 15 year old thinks his friends that talk about girls on Instagram are weird. "You don't even know her."
“The solution is parents have to parent: shocking I know.”
The problem is knowledge. When my daughter was in maybe 9th grade, she opened a Facebook account. That night, when her mother came home from work, she told her daughter to shut it down. What? The account was only a couple hours old. Mother, with 3 CS degrees, the latter in data communications had forgotten more than her daughter knew about social media. At the time she was managing an international network for a company. So, she had been monitoring her daughter’s online presence for some time by then. An extreme example, but none of her friends from her private school were allowed that much access to social media. Her senior year, she was allowed to reopen a Facebook account, but with her name (mid)spelled more normally. Last Thursday, she had her first kid, and I asked for more pictures. The recipients were reminded that they were not to go up on social media. Period.
Parents do have to step up and be parents, however obvious it is to say. My kids are strictly limiting all screen time with their 2 year-old, even though the temptation is very strong to keep it in the toolkit. The toddler only gets around 10-15 minutes per day - sometime Disney, sometimes Miss Rachel or Peppa.
When my daughter was in High School, we allowed her to have a Facebook account, supervised. And her school required them to park the phones on school grounds, so access was eliminated during the school day. I think this is also a healthy requirement. Limited-capability phones, too.
Unfortunately social media and the internet in general have become very sophisticated at the psychology of attention-holding. There is an insidious power to this, including the power to replace normal psychological development, and younger brains don't have the self-protecting filters they need, yet. These kinds of outreach have their place, yes. But the position of trusted authority must always reside primarily with the parent.
I saw kids playing in a river Sunday. No parents or guardians in sight. Later on I did see a father sitting in the edge of the stream. I also heard kids playing up on the banks of the river. It was alarming. They sounded happy.
In fact, the conflicts of America seemed thousands and thousands of miles away from the cornfields of Lancaster county yesterday.
Birches said... "My kids don't get phones until 14. Those phones are limited in what they can do and no social media. The phones don't go in their bedrooms and are plugged in at 10:30pm every night. We also go to a school that doesn't allow phones. I've often thought my kids are going to rule the world because of this."
I just imagined you steepling your fingers saying 'Excellent' to yourself a la Montgomery Burns.
How dare they, indeed, though it seems a case of closing a barn door long after the livestock have flown, or noticing the camel's nose long after the tent has been demolished.
It's been a long time coming, this reversal of roles. The Fram... No! I refuse and reject the woke-approved shorthand. Those men weren't carpenters. They didn't just ticker together a rough skeleton from oddments like the first paleontologists, who didn't know that word, did with the first dinosaur, another word they didn't know, fossils -- a tail from this one, legs from that one, with a head they just dreamed up because a skull was nowhere to be found. The Foundation Fathers (there!) also clothed their framework with clay and embued it with power, like a golem -- a servitor and protector perpetually without a will of its own, perpetually dominated by its creators. The Founding Fathers created a nation of citizens, not subjects -- stewards, not wards.
Sadly, like the rabbi of Prague, we've lost control of our monster. A mutinous minority has stolen it bit by bit over the span of a lifetime and more, while the majority just shrugged and looked away. Historians who bothered to look first concluded it was Franklin Roosevelt and his interventionist cabinet. Lately, they tend to accuse Woodrow Wilson, but it doesn't matter beyond the fact that both were Democrats, and every Democratic administration and every Democratic governor and legislator since has advanced the agenda to the point they don't bother to disguise themselves or their aims; the monster is loose. Frau Blücher is fiddling and cackling. Chaos reigns. By Chaos, I mean the Administrative State. We got into these dire straits not by poor navigation, but by not navigating at all -- by letting everything drift with the tide, by not reading the fine print or the 30-point boldface. What did Nancy Pelosi say? “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.” Sign now, read later?! Who would agree to such terms? Faustus at least knew what he was in for, Mephistopheles even tried to dissuade him, "Why this is hell, nor am I out of it." Idiots, obviously. Idiots and willing slaves.
We must stop being idiots. We must stop being slaves.
Another fake crisis, to be used to regulate, censor, and gatekeep. No doubt the ADL and various leftwing and/or jewish censorship organizations are behind this. They usually launder their views through the media and get their trained seals in Congress to do address their concerns.
A governing regime of mortal gods and goddesses, involuntary voluntary behaviors, a modern religion under experts we share/shift responsibility. Let us bray.
When did this phrase come to the fore? Why is there a need to add the word "trusted"? Do we have non-trusted experts? How about self-proclaimed experts? Do non-trusted experts need to be silenced by the self-proclaimed? Of course! Silenced, censored, jailed and/or disbarred.
First, let me state I strongly dislike social media and don’t use it. However, as a social scientist researcher, recently the negative affect impact of social media is questionable. The literature on the matter is somewhat contradictory, especially post Covid. More real, unbiased and honest inquiry about its social effects needs to be done. We all have positive and negative anecdotes about people and events, more truly objective data is needed to determine if it requires regulation for minors.
Well, now that the Feral Gummit has destroyed the Family. Now that kids waking hours are mostly: ..ignored and over controlled in a prison-like school or day care; ..hovered over and over controlled by hectic helicopter parents; ..ignored and left alone with their phone by parents afraid to let them out of the house unsupervised...
Who will write S.M.A.A. with William Griffith Wilson gone?
What a bizarre spectacle. Fake news, fake piousness. Al "Release My Chakra" Gore and the rest of those lechers surrounded by excited scolds who - you just know - had their own sexual kinks. Well, maybe not Tipper.
It was the rock music in the 50's with the black influence and the hip-swaying. Then dope in the 60's, rock lyrics in the 70's and 80's, rap and video games in the 90's, and the internet today. Same arguments that the yoots will be corrupted.
But the kids are alright. The rest of us are screwed up.
I have to admire the current crop of 21st Century censors. They know how to manipulate 'muricans to let them gatekeep and censor.
"What about the children?!" and "Dont you want everyone to be safe?" -totalitarianism and fascism disguised as "Concern" and "Protecting people".
I'm just about to visit a local University and was forced to sign a statement that I wont "Bully" anyone and will "treat everyone with respect" before I will be given a visitor badge. God knows, what this fake concern over Bullying and "respecting people" is actually used for. No doubt to enforce some leftwing dogma and controlling your speech. Since Christmas was labeled "Winter Closure" on their University calendar, I'm sure that I can blaspheme, swear, and be as Anti-christian as I like but will have to walk on eggshells when it comes to anything the Left holds dear.
BTW, the driving force behind banning Tick-tock was the ADL and various Jewish organizations. They did a little victory dance after Biden signed the bill. It seems Tick-tock had too many people on it questioning Israel's genocidal actions in gaza. "SHut it down" was the order given to Congress.
Zappa was a brilliant man. Doesn't mean he wasn't wrong about some things. As can be seen in the vid, he had no problems being hyperbolic. One thing he didn't experience is the overt targeting of children that's going on now.
As if the wearing of bike helmets is a good solution to anything. Well, maybe: perhaps Rich wears one in his everyday wanderings. I would not have worn one. Period. If my parents insisted, I would have told them to give my bike away, as I wouldn't ride my bike with one. Keep the government out of our lives as much as possible. THEY are NOT our rulers.
As a general rule, the more warning labels the government puts on things, the less that people will pay attention to them.
California passed that famous Prop 65 cancer warning label mandate and now so many products have that warning label on them that almost everyone ignores them.
A few years ago, an online auto parts store bought the contents of a giant warehouse where the owner had gone out of business. They had a fire sale and sold the stuff at a massive discount. I ordered a bunch of auto parts but half of my order was cancelled because they couldn't ship to California because those parts didn't have the Prop 65 cancer warning label.
Yeah, like I was planning on eating those spark plug wires.
There is on/off switch on the computer device. There is on/off switch on the WiFi router. There are parental controls on computers and routers. Children lack the funds to purchase platforms to consume social media and afford internet plans.
Like seat belts and helmets, if you don’t use the safety devices, then they won’t work for you.
Narr - providing their name would not "Shame them". From talking to others, these sort of speech codes are common in elite universities and not so elite universites.
We don't say "the government can't prevent kids from getting tattoos or alcohol, that's up to the parents." Social media deserves the same consideration as other potentially damaging things we legislate away from kids or provide for gradual exposure at an appropriate age (e.g., driving). If you want to take an extreme libertarian view, have at it, but don't expect the rest of us to agree that nothing about kids can be regulated because "it's up to the parents".
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Whenever I hear a government official say something like "Won't someone think of the children??", I think a better statement would be "Why aren't parents doing their job?"
Also: "Trusted Experts"? Vetted by some government bureaucrat, no doubt. Whatever could go wrong!?
'I just don’t feel good when I use social media,' [a young woman named Tina] said softly.
I'd tell Tina the same thing that i wish people had said to ME, when i was dating a physically and mentally abusive blonde girl:
If it doesn't feel good.. DON'T DO IT!
Instead, they ALL said: "you HAVE TO STICK WITH HER! We ALL like her!!"
I thank my lucky stars that when our kids were most vulnerable to this cancer, we lived in a neighborhood out of Rockwell - no fences, kids roaming in packs from yard to yard all day in the summers and ding-dong-ditching all of us parents in the evenings. They had the childhood I had instead of sitting in the dark staring at a little screen that tells them their not good enough.
I have spoken with them explicitly about the advantage that childhood gave them, in hopes that they'll try to find, or create if necessary, that environment for their own kids one day.
“trusted experts”.
The solution is parents have to parent: shocking I know.
You know my people managed to not smoke, even when every advertisement and celebrity said it was the coolest and healthiest thing a person could do. Act! Don't be acted upon by people who have other motives that do not have your, or your children's best interest in mind.
It's not just the kids. Parents should stay off social media. Social media will validate a parent's beliefs about themselves and their parenting choices no matter how messed up those beliefs are.
They could take about an hour on the tower of power.
Shorter gilbar:
“Whip me… beat me, baby! Make me write bad checks”.
"If it doesn't feel good.. DON'T DO IT!"
I agree.
Also there's the reverse, the old hippie motto: "If it feels good, do it."
And I say this as a mom with experience in this parenting environment. My kids don't get phones until 14. Those phones are limited in what they can do and no social media. The phones don't go in their bedrooms and are plugged in at 10:30pm every night. We also go to a school that doesn't allow phones. I've often thought my kids are going to rule the world because of this. We'll see.
There's no helmet or seatbelt because psychology isn't a real science. We can observe that too much internet seems to be bad for kids, but we can't really know how much is too much and what specific parts are bad and bad how.
But the people saying "parents need to be parents" are being simplistic. Social media is so central to every child's life that to take away the phone is to make your child a social pariah. It will exclude them from most conversations and activities. It has to be done broadly, at least at the school level.
"For the children" the phrase that has launched a hundred crusades of "well-meaninged" adults to tell us what is good / better for our children. Don't worry everyone, they'll get it right THIS time.
Physical safety is an easier metric to measure and that is already badly abused when GP's are asking if you have a gun in your home but not if you have a swimming pool in your backyard. It's bad enough that they try to apply "pandemic science" to things like violence but ignore the impact of government programs on the nuclear family.
Again, don't worry, they'll get it right THIS time...
Birches said...We also go to a school that doesn't allow phones.
This is why your program works. We need every school to do this.
Coming from the censorer in chief no thanks
What happened to Tipper Gore?
She married manbearpig who sold out to aljazeera and had his chakras released
Once I stuck a few Tipper stickers in appropriate places on a high school essay. The teacher was amused…
Was married to skydragon promoter sequioa gore
"Social media is so central to every child's life that to take away the phone is to make your child a social pariah. "
As my parents used to ask, "if all your friends jump off a tall cliff are you going to jump too just to be part of the crowd"? My parents taught me that being a part of the crowd was not always the right thing to do and to think of the possible consequences of my actions before agreeing to something just because everyone else is doing it. I listened to them. As a result I was one of only few in my group of friends that wasn't suspended from school and prevented from attending the junior/senior prom due to alcohol slipped into a school-sponsored event. I had proof I wasn't part of it.
My eldest grandson received his first cell phone at 15. His use of it is carefully monitored by his parents. He is a lot better for it.
But the people saying "parents need to be parents" are being simplistic. Social media is so central to every child's life that to take away the phone is to make your child a social pariah. It will exclude them from most conversations and activities. It has to be done broadly, at least at the school level.
Exactly this. That's why I said I thank my lucky stars that we lived in the right neighborhood to foster a largely social media-free youth: it wasn't by design, just luck. My oldest is part of the first generation to have smartphones available during his adolescence and no one knew yet what the effects of these things were going to be; his younger siblings got them earlier than he did, but - again, fortunately, not through our foresight - their lives were very much in the real physical world.
It was pretty much during my younger two kids' middle school years that the damage started to come to light, but even so, their schools didn't go phone free (kids couldn't have them out in class, but they could have them on their person), and my generation of parents didn't demand it. We should have.
It's fantastic that parents are now. Crossed fingers that we don't lose the generation of kids - like mine - whose parents didn't think hard enough about this problem. And again, I'm so grateful that my own kids were spared the worst of it by an accident of location, since my parenting wasn't up to the task.
Tipper and Al are still married and only separated. She’s rich! Al should have divorced her when he was less rich!
cfs said...As my parents used to ask, "if all your friends jump off a tall cliff are you going to jump too just to be part of the crowd"?
Most parents say that, even though it's dumb. Argumentum ad absurdum. And it has no applicability to this situation. We're not talking about a single extreme event.
Sorry Tim, my kids have plenty of friends without social media. They're on summer swim this year and spend a lot of time with friends after morning practice. My 15 year old thinks his friends that talk about girls on Instagram are weird. "You don't even know her."
The friends they hang out with in the summer are not at our school.
ANTIFA found the true fascists but they were on the inside.
“The solution is parents have to parent: shocking I know.”
The problem is knowledge. When my daughter was in maybe 9th grade, she opened a Facebook account. That night, when her mother came home from work, she told her daughter to shut it down. What? The account was only a couple hours old. Mother, with 3 CS degrees, the latter in data communications had forgotten more than her daughter knew about social media. At the time she was managing an international network for a company. So, she had been monitoring her daughter’s online presence for some time by then. An extreme example, but none of her friends from her private school were allowed that much access to social media. Her senior year, she was allowed to reopen a Facebook account, but with her name (mid)spelled more normally. Last Thursday, she had her first kid, and I asked for more pictures. The recipients were reminded that they were not to go up on social media. Period.
Parents do have to step up and be parents, however obvious it is to say. My kids are strictly limiting all screen time with their 2 year-old, even though the temptation is very strong to keep it in the toolkit. The toddler only gets around 10-15 minutes per day - sometime Disney, sometimes Miss Rachel or Peppa.
When my daughter was in High School, we allowed her to have a Facebook account, supervised. And her school required them to park the phones on school grounds, so access was eliminated during the school day. I think this is also a healthy requirement. Limited-capability phones, too.
Unfortunately social media and the internet in general have become very sophisticated at the psychology of attention-holding. There is an insidious power to this, including the power to replace normal psychological development, and younger brains don't have the self-protecting filters they need, yet. These kinds of outreach have their place, yes. But the position of trusted authority must always reside primarily with the parent.
I saw kids playing in a river Sunday. No parents or guardians in sight. Later on I did see a father sitting in the edge of the stream. I also heard kids playing up on the banks of the river. It was alarming. They sounded happy.
In fact, the conflicts of America seemed thousands and thousands of miles away from the cornfields of Lancaster county yesterday.
The shells are stupid for kids but murthy and other diviners dont deserve a hearing
Birches said...
"My kids don't get phones until 14. Those phones are limited in what they can do and no social media. The phones don't go in their bedrooms and are plugged in at 10:30pm every night. We also go to a school that doesn't allow phones. I've often thought my kids are going to rule the world because of this."
I just imagined you steepling your fingers saying 'Excellent' to yourself a la Montgomery Burns.
And I think you are probably right.
How dare they, indeed, though it seems a case of closing a barn door long after the livestock have flown, or noticing the camel's nose long after the tent has been demolished.
It's been a long time coming, this reversal of roles. The Fram... No! I refuse and reject the woke-approved shorthand. Those men weren't carpenters. They didn't just ticker together a rough skeleton from oddments like the first paleontologists, who didn't know that word, did with the first dinosaur, another word they didn't know, fossils -- a tail from this one, legs from that one, with a head they just dreamed up because a skull was nowhere to be found. The Foundation Fathers (there!) also clothed their framework with clay and embued it with power, like a golem -- a servitor and protector perpetually without a will of its own, perpetually dominated by its creators. The Founding Fathers created a nation of citizens, not subjects -- stewards, not wards.
Sadly, like the rabbi of Prague, we've lost control of our monster. A mutinous minority has stolen it bit by bit over the span of a lifetime and more, while the majority just shrugged and looked away. Historians who bothered to look first concluded it was Franklin Roosevelt and his interventionist cabinet. Lately, they tend to accuse Woodrow Wilson, but it doesn't matter beyond the fact that both were Democrats, and every Democratic administration and every Democratic governor and legislator since has advanced the agenda to the point they don't bother to disguise themselves or their aims; the monster is loose. Frau Blücher is fiddling and cackling. Chaos reigns. By Chaos, I mean the Administrative State. We got into these dire straits not by poor navigation, but by not navigating at all -- by letting everything drift with the tide, by not reading the fine print or the 30-point boldface. What did Nancy Pelosi say? “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.” Sign now, read later?! Who would agree to such terms? Faustus at least knew what he was in for, Mephistopheles even tried to dissuade him, "Why this is hell, nor am I out of it." Idiots, obviously. Idiots and willing slaves.
We must stop being idiots. We must stop being slaves.
Another fake crisis, to be used to regulate, censor, and gatekeep. No doubt the ADL and various leftwing and/or jewish censorship organizations are behind this. They usually launder their views through the media and get their trained seals in Congress to do address their concerns.
Foundation Fathers? How did that happen? May I blame AI again? ...Thank you.
**ahem** Artificial Intelligence is to blame for all my mistakes, now and forever. Amen.
A governing regime of mortal gods and goddesses, involuntary voluntary behaviors, a modern religion under experts we share/shift responsibility. Let us bray.
" 'I just don’t feel good when I use social media,' [a young woman named Tina] said softly....
Bob Newhart would like a word with you. Two words, actually.
3rd world "You are proles and we are not"
Ambrose said: "Trusted experts"
When did this phrase come to the fore? Why is there a need to add the word "trusted"? Do we have non-trusted experts? How about self-proclaimed experts? Do non-trusted experts need to be silenced by the self-proclaimed? Of course! Silenced, censored, jailed and/or disbarred.
"If it feels good, do it."
Yeah. Until you got to go to the clinic and get shots.
First, let me state I strongly dislike social media and don’t use it. However, as a social scientist researcher, recently the negative affect impact of social media is questionable. The literature on the matter is somewhat contradictory, especially post Covid. More real, unbiased and honest inquiry about its social effects needs to be done. We all have positive and negative anecdotes about people and events, more truly objective data is needed to determine if it requires regulation for minors.
Well, now that the Feral Gummit has destroyed the Family. Now that kids waking hours are mostly:
..ignored and over controlled in a prison-like school or day care;
..hovered over and over controlled by hectic helicopter parents;
..ignored and left alone with their phone by parents afraid to let them out of the house unsupervised...
Who will write S.M.A.A. with William Griffith Wilson gone?
What a bizarre spectacle. Fake news, fake piousness. Al "Release My Chakra" Gore and the rest of those lechers surrounded by excited scolds who - you just know - had their own sexual kinks. Well, maybe not Tipper.
It was the rock music in the 50's with the black influence and the hip-swaying. Then dope in the 60's, rock lyrics in the 70's and 80's, rap and video games in the 90's, and the internet today. Same arguments that the yoots will be corrupted.
But the kids are alright. The rest of us are screwed up.
I have to admire the current crop of 21st Century censors. They know how to manipulate 'muricans to let them gatekeep and censor.
"What about the children?!" and "Dont you want everyone to be safe?" -totalitarianism and fascism disguised as "Concern" and "Protecting people".
I'm just about to visit a local University and was forced to sign a statement that I wont "Bully" anyone and will "treat everyone with respect" before I will be given a visitor badge. God knows, what this fake concern over Bullying and "respecting people" is actually used for. No doubt to enforce some leftwing dogma and controlling your speech. Since Christmas was labeled "Winter Closure" on their University calendar, I'm sure that I can blaspheme, swear, and be as Anti-christian as I like but will have to walk on eggshells when it comes to anything the Left holds dear.
BTW, the driving force behind banning Tick-tock was the ADL and various Jewish organizations. They did a little victory dance after Biden signed the bill. It seems Tick-tock had too many people on it questioning Israel's genocidal actions in gaza. "SHut it down" was the order given to Congress.
Zappa was a brilliant man. Doesn't mean he wasn't wrong about some things. As can be seen in the vid, he had no problems being hyperbolic. One thing he didn't experience is the overt targeting of children that's going on now.
Rusty:
"If it feels good, do it."
Yeah. Until you got to go to the clinic and get shots.
I'll let this young woman explain why it's bad.
@RCOCEAN II: Full agreement. The "noticing" will continue apace.
As if the wearing of bike helmets is a good solution to anything. Well, maybe: perhaps Rich wears one in his everyday wanderings.
I would not have worn one. Period. If my parents insisted, I would have told them to give my bike away, as I wouldn't ride my bike with one. Keep the government out of our lives as much as possible. THEY are NOT our rulers.
What is the local University that wants a pledge of inoffensiveness, RCOCEANII?
They should be named and shamed.
I'm genuinely curious.
You know what my daughter did when she came to the conclusion that social media was bad for her? She quit using it.
As a general rule, the more warning labels the government puts on things, the less that people will pay attention to them.
California passed that famous Prop 65 cancer warning label mandate and now so many products have that warning label on them that almost everyone ignores them.
A few years ago, an online auto parts store bought the contents of a giant warehouse where the owner had gone out of business. They had a fire sale and sold the stuff at a massive discount. I ordered a bunch of auto parts but half of my order was cancelled because they couldn't ship to California because those parts didn't have the Prop 65 cancer warning label.
Yeah, like I was planning on eating those spark plug wires.
There is on/off switch on the computer device. There is on/off switch on the WiFi router. There are parental controls on computers and routers. Children lack the funds to purchase platforms to consume social media and afford internet plans.
Like seat belts and helmets, if you don’t use the safety devices, then they won’t work for you.
I think people should be required to wear bike helmets while using social media.
loudogblog:
As a general rule, the more warning labels the government puts on things, the less that people will pay attention to them.
Or turn them into advertising. Some milk containers advertise "gluten free".
I think people should be required to wear bike helmets while using social media.
@Narr, or perhaps tin foil hats.
Tin foil bike helmets!
Why didn't we think of that before?
Narr - providing their name would not "Shame them". From talking to others, these sort of speech codes are common in elite universities and not so elite universites.
We don't say "the government can't prevent kids from getting tattoos or alcohol, that's up to the parents." Social media deserves the same consideration as other potentially damaging things we legislate away from kids or provide for gradual exposure at an appropriate age (e.g., driving). If you want to take an extreme libertarian view, have at it, but don't expect the rest of us to agree that nothing about kids can be regulated because "it's up to the parents".
I guess you access to the campus is important to you, RCOCEANII. I hope you get what you need from your visit.
When I worked at the Harvard/MIT of extreme southwest Tennessee, there were no such pledges asked of visitors.
It's not like there are a lot of possibilities around here anyway . . .
"Your" access.
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