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Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
User ID: 1175
I believe that heavy social media use is extremely damaging for everyone, but particularly for young children and adolescents. Some of the reasons social media is bad for teenagers and pre-teens include the fact that it facilitates child grooming, how it tacitly encourages members of this demographic to dress and behave in sexually provocative ways and how it encourages members of this generation to obsess over their appearances in unhealthy ways. Before TikTok, did you ever hear of an eight-year-old being asked what she wanted for Christmas and her replying "skincare"? No eight-year-old should want skincare products for Christmas, and it's obscene that social media has made her think she needs them.
If you are concerned about the existence of people who might watch these videos and think unsavoury thoughts, thus defiling innocents with their nasty brain-waves, then that sounds like a classic moral panic. The haunting fear that somewhere a nonce is happy.
This is an extremely obnoxious misrepresentation of what I said. Children are not being magically defiled by the nasty brain-waves of pederasts thinking impure thoughts about them. I explained quite clearly that a major component of the audience for tweens dancing on TikTok is nonces; that tween girls (like everyone else) respond to social media incentives and engagement metrics; and that in attempting to attract as many nonces' eyeballs as possible, these tween girls end up dressing and behaving in more sexually provocative fashions than they otherwise would have. Sexualisation of children is bad, and to the extent that social media incentivises (or algorithmically encourages, or whatever term you prefer) children to dress and behave in sexually provocative fashions prematurely, social media is bad.
There is no point troubling yourself (or everyone else) over such things, it’s almost certainly healthier overall than the alternative.
I do not believe that our world, in which most teenagers in the West own smartphones and use social media, is healthier overall than the counterfactual world in which most teenagers do not own smartphones and use social media. As I recently pointed out, the year 2014 (the year the iPhone achieved market penetration with a critical mass of American users) was the beginning of an enormous spike in teen suicide, self-poisoning, diagnoses of depression (and, less politically correctly, corresponding spikes in gender dysphoria and trans identification, and probably various things that are harder to quantify like loneliness, friendlessness and the ability to concentrate in class). We don't have to go way back into the mists of time to imagine a world where most Western teenagers don't own smartphones: I don't think it's remotely controversial to suggest that the average teenager was happier in 2013 than they are now. And what, exactly, are the benefits of widespread smartphone adoption among young people? This really does seem like a case of extreme costs and marginal (if any) benefits.
Another wrinkle in the Platner story: his working-class man of the people presentation is a complete shtick:
Platner, for example, said he relied on assistance from the Department of Veterans Affairs to purchase his home in Sullivan in 2017, but mortgage records show he borrowed $200,000 from his father, a prominent local attorney, to buy the house, the Free Beacon reported. Platner has also said he's "never been close to money and power," though he attended an elite Connecticut boarding school that costs upwards of $75,000 a year and is the grandson of a world-famous architect known for designing $20,000 chairs. And while Platner presents himself in campaign materials as a hardscrabble "oyster farmer," his business partner also attended an ultra-elite New England boarding school, graduated from Dartmouth, boasts of drinking "foraged spring water with Redmond sea salt," and is an owner of the secluded Maine island where Platner's oyster farm is based. The primary purchaser of Platner's oysters, meanwhile, is a "casual fine dining restaurant" owned by Platner's mother, financial disclosures show.
His military background, while legitimate, was with the private military contractor Blackwater, rather than the US armed forces. He sometimes criticises his opponent Susan Collins by claiming he fought wars she sent him to fight in, but as she pointed out, this is a bit of a reach considering he was never drafted.
Wealthy nepo baby who went to an expensive private school signs up to fight for a PMC. After tendering his resignation, his father buys him a house, and he starts a business whose primary client is his mother. Despite later presenting himself as a socialist, he gets a tattoo heavily associated with a far-right political ideology (the significance of which he's obviously aware of, given his efforts to hide it from cameras), and only reluctantly agrees to cover it up on sufferance. He gets married, but either cheats on his wife or tries to, while attempting to conceive via IVF.
If this guy was a Republican candidate, the Dems would be calling him a wealthy scion of intergenerational privilege who harbours crypto-fascist leanings and doesn't respect women. The other week I linked to an article by Jeff Maurer, who predicted that Platner might change his tune and become much more openly conservative, perhaps even running as a GOP candidate. Nothing I've learned about him since makes that eventuality seem less likely.
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Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
14hr ago
What a sad story. Simmons and co. should be ashamed.
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Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
15hr ago
Probably nothing Rebecca Black experienced is legally actionable. But I don't think it requires any great insight into the human condition to say that a typical thirteen-year-old girl would find it extremely upsetting if complete strangers were calling her on the phone telling her they'd kill her if she didn't take a YouTube video down. Even if they were just prank calls, even if she knew they were just prank calls. I don't see why there's such a great objection in this thread to characterising this behaviour as bullying. Calling a thirteen-year-old girl on the phone and threatening to kill her (even just "as a prank") is shitty, inexcusable behaviour, even if it might be technically legal in certain jurisdictions.
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Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
15hr ago
Yeah, I think that's a fairly typical route by which children end up being financially exploited.
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Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
15hr ago
You're not picking an adult up off the back of a dirtbike they're too big for and then CGI-ing it into something else.
I mean, there are plenty of points in T2 where Edward Furlong is pretty obviously replaced by a stunt double. Arnie too, for that matter.
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Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
15hr ago
And it's not "bullying".
Well, now I think you're splitting hairs.
I agree, and part of the reason I object to child actors is because in many ways it's an extension (or intensification) of some of the worst parts of bubble-wrap parenting: it's yet another instance of children being kept indoors under the direct supervision of adults, rarely interacting with their peers directly, optimising their appearances and mannerisms for how they'll look in a camera lens. It used to be that only a tiny minority of children would ever even consider pursuing a career in the entertainment industry, but now "YouTuber", "influencer" and "streamer" are among the most popular career aspirations for Gen Alpha, and they spend hours every day using devices with which they could in theory pursue these careers.
Let Make them go outside and ride their bikes, for Christ's sake.
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Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
At least two of them were considered serious enough to warrant investigation by the Anaheim police department. @The_Nybbler
Contrary to your suggested complaints, I believe this is the exact kind of restriction that breeds creativity.
Oh I agree, absolutely. I think the hypothetical directors who would complain about no longer being permitted to use child actors will eventually sound as ridiculous to us as directors from previous generations who would complain about not being allowed to endanger, maim or kill animals to get the shot. Photorealistic generative AI is one example of how a creative director could get around this restriction.
That being said
In our world however, modern movies go for maximum immersion. Everything must look as true to life as possible.
I'm not sure if I really agree with this. Modern Hollywood movies don't really look anything like real life. Even when they aren't primarily filmed on a green screen, they tend to use much more aggressive colour grading than the films of earlier decades did. Actors tend to be perfectly made up: it is rare to see a character in a tropical climate who is dripping with sweat (as was done in, for example, Sorcerer). Modern Hollywood films tend to be stylised to within an inch of their lives and drained of weight and tactility.
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Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
I put trash-talking in a different mental category.
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Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
But again, I think this argument proves too much. Having sex with someone where no money changes hands is uncontroversial, therefore there should be no controversy about having sex with someone when money does change hands?
The fact that money changes hands fundamentally alters the nature of the arrangement, creating opportunities for abuse and exploitation that wouldn't otherwise exist. It's true that no child could stand to have his earnings appropriated from him by his greedy parents because he landed the lead role in his school's Christmas play. That's (one reason) why I don't have a problem with children acting in school Christmas plays.
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Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
What do you call complete strangers sending death threats to a thirteen-year-old?
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Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
Imagine trying to portray the accusations of pedophilia in a way that doesn't make them come off as either indisputably true or slander, but rather something that's likely not true but maybe? How do you do it?
Andrew Jarecki gave it his best shot.
As for the child actors, is there even a problem? We all know of the cases where things go bad because they are reported on by journalists (Jake Lloyd podracing in real life amiright?) but when the child actor goes on to become an electrician who's going to inform you?
Couldn't one make the same argument about any kind of child labour?
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Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
I'm against it. God knows people like Rebecca Black were bullied horrifically by people she'd never met on the other side of the globe because of a silly music video that should never have been shared publicly. See also parents who've faced legal repercussions for playing "pranks" on their children in order to create YouTube content, and these "pranks" functionally amounted to physical and emotional abuse.
Whenever I walk past a pair of preteen girls filming themselves doing a TikTok dance to post on the social network in question (happens about once a week), I have the same thought: do they know that pederasts are watching these videos and masturbating to them? And then they notice that some videos are performing better than others, so they try to optimise their videos by showing more skin. A generation of prepubescent girls is falling victim to audience capture, in which the audience is made up of nonces and the content they're creating amounts to unwitting softcore CP. I don't even know if we have a term for this – algorithmic grooming? I can't fathom why any sensible parent would want their preteen child to own a smartphone.
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1d ago
There are many things that children want to do which we deny them because it's not in their best interests. I don't claim that acting is a categorical example of that, but it seems heavily correlated/associated with lots of things which unambiguously are (e.g. sexual exploitation by adults working in the industry).
You could also apply this argument to other kinds of child labour. I have it on good authority that the children yearn for the mines, but we don't make an exemption for child labour laws just because a given child claims that he really does want to work in a coalmine.
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1d ago
I'm not necessarily saying that parents push their children into acting with the expectation that the child will make it big, and they (the parents) will personally profit. The odds of a given child actor making it big are only somewhat better than those for a given adult actor. But there do seem to be a number of cases in which a child actor's career unexpectedly took off and their parents immediately began spending money which rightfully belonged to the child, not the parents, sometimes to the point that the child was left without a penny when they came of age (e.g. Gary Coleman successfully sued his parents for misappropriating his assets). This strikes me as obviously unfair, and should not be allowed to happen.
Last night I watched Adum from Your Movie Sucks's review of Michael, the recent biopic of Michael Jackson starring his nephew Jaafar. I was not surprised to find that he abhorred the film, taking it to task for its hagiographic approach (not only to its principal, but also to certain members of his inner circle, some of whom acted as producers); the way it seems to encourage an unhealthy parasocial relationship between the late Jackson and his most devoted fans, and how it completely avoids mentioning the child abuse allegations which dogged Jackson in his later years. Adum, for his part, remains agnostic on whether Jackson was guilty of sexually interfering with children: he concedes that it's certainly possible that certain of the complainants' parents coerced them into accusing Jackson of misconduct in hopes of securing a generous settlement agreement, but also points out that even some of the behaviour Jackson admitted to (e.g. sharing a bed with underage boys) was certainly questionable at the minimum.
Near the end of the review (timestamped link), Adum argues that, whatever the truth of the abuse allegations launched against Jackson, it's impossible to talk about these and his other strange behaviour (the cosmetic surgery, the Neverland ranch, the time he dangled his child out of a fourth-floor window) without acknowledging that he suffered a uniquely awful upbringing which can only be described as abusive and exploitative. If indeed he was guilty of child abuse, his own difficult childhood would not excuse his conduct, but the former is inseparable from the latter. Adum muses on how odd it is that essentially every Western nation outlawed child labour decades ago – except for child labour in the entertainment industry, where child actors and singers pass without comment. Adum argues that the existence of this loophole actively incentivises abusive, exploitative child-rearing of the kind Jackson suffered, and that this behaviour will continue as long as the loophole is permitted to remain open. He ends the video with a call for it to be closed. No more child stars. No more prepubescent musicians. Cut it off at the root.
I'm old enough to remember when "former child star" was a stock punchline, with tabloid magazines and edgy sitcoms making hay of the incongruity between adorable child actors later becoming burnt-out husks checking themselves into rehab for heroin addiction. After learning what a large proportion of these former child stars went through upbringings comparable to Jackson's in abusiveness and/or claimed to have been sexually exploited at the hands of adult producers, directors or co-stars, it's been many years since I found jokes at their expense funny. (Examples include Coreys Haim and Feldman, Drake Bell, Amanda Bynes, Jennette McCurdy and Joanna Levesque, among many others.) And that's not even getting into the rare instances of child actors being severely injured or even killed on film sets (e.g. the infamous Twilight Zone movie helicopter accident, which in fairness was in direct contravention of multiple child labour laws even at the time). Even leaving aside the most horrific cases of abuse and exploitation, many child actors and musicians cite their abnormal childhoods as underlying causes in their later mental health difficulties and problems with substance abuse. It's a bit unreasonable for, say, Chappell Roan to complain about the downsides of fame, given that she was an adult when she decided to pursue her career in music, and hence old enough to know that being famous is a package deal. I have a lot more sympathy when a child complains about never really having had a private life, often because of decisions made on their behalf by a domineering stage mom. I'm inclined to agree with Adum that I don't really understand why this loophole exists, and think closing it is a good idea.
What would a world without child actors look like? While child labour laws vary by jurisdiction, most allow sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds to work part-time with the consent of their parents. If this law applied to film and TV sets, sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds who look young enough to pass for thirteen or fourteen would be highly prized, but films with major characters who have not yet hit puberty would be the exclusive preserve of animation. We might allow under-16 actors to make brief appearances in films, but place strict limitations on how large their role can be to prevent the emergence of newly minted child stars e.g. specifying that they can only work a maximum of eight hours every calendar month, or only have X minutes of screentime, or X lines of dialogue. This means that, for example, a short scene in which the adult protagonist of the film says goodbye to his wife and kids before leaving to blow the lid off the Brodsky case is fine; a live-action film in which the protagonist is a prepubescent child (e.g. Home Alone, the Harry Potter films) is not. This is an obvious application of photorealistic generative AI: have the adult characters played by adult actors, and the children played by mo-capped adult stand-ins (perhaps standing on their knees, like Gary Oldman in Tiptoes) who will be replaced by CGI children in post-production.
Directors and producers might complain about their creative freedom being unduly curtailed by regulations of this type. But this objection reeks of status quo bias to me. The famous "no animals were harmed in the making of this film" disclaimer is barely fifty years old. I'm sure if the American Humane Society had existed at the time Ben-Hur was being made, the directors would have complained that their creative freedom was being compromised by the insistence that they not intentionally kill upwards of a hundred horses in order to produce suitably exciting cinema. Eventually, we collectively decided that no artistic statement justifies pointless animal cruelty on this scale: it's only a movie. Sufficiently talented directors managed to find creative solutions for how to film movies without being gratuitously cruel to our four-legged friends. In the future, the "no animals were harmed..." disclaimer might well be followed by another reading "no child labour was exploited...".
If outright banning child actors and musicians isn't yet a practical possibility, an interim solution might be to have all compensation they earn from their performances paid into a trust that they (and only they) can access, and only when they come of age. The only compensation their parents could receive directly would come in the form of reimbursements for e.g. travel expenses, acting classes, music classes, accommodation etc. Many film studios are understandably reluctant about paying children their acting fees directly, fearing that they might squander their earnings; on the other hand, there have been enough cases of parents financially exploiting their children (and the child consequently ending up empty-handed when they come of age) that I'm not convinced paying a child's fees into a bank account to which their parents have access is a viable solution. If parents were unable to directly financially profit from their children's labour, that would also work to disincentivise the most egregious forms of abuse and exploitation. (A Google informs me that similar legislation has been on the books in California since 1939.)
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Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
Hmm. I think "manchild" refers to men who are immature, whereas to me "spinster" denotes a woman who failed to land a man. I think the closest equivalent in modern slang is "femcel".
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Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
Notice anything?
mf couldn't even put the toilet seat down jfc
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Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
My good man, I'd have expected nothing less from you.
At the age of eight?
I'm not obsessing over protecting the purity of women. Women are adults, and can do as they please. (I in fact get very annoyed at the infantilisation of adults, such as women who accuse men of having "groomed" them when the women in question were already old enough to drink.) I am, however, very invested in protecting the purity of girls, especially young girls. That's kind of the whole point of this discussion.
Some and some. Past generations of teenagers did not have to contend with embarrassing footage of them being uploaded to YouTube etc. for the entire world to see without their knowledge or consent, or their nudes leaked. Playground bullying by definition ends outside the playground: the current generation of bullies can torment their victims morning, noon and night, even after they've changed schools if it pleases them.
Well, I don't agree with you. Indeed, I'm not even persuaded that teenagers face higher pressure to succeed than they used to, if the proportion of obese teenagers and Harvard undergraduates taking remedial maths classes is anything to go by.
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