MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
No bio...
User ID: 1783
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
8mo ago
It’s clear the St. Louis clinic benefited many adolescents: Eighteen patients and parents said that their experiences there were overwhelmingly positive, and they refuted Ms. Reed’s depiction of it. For example, her affidavit claimed that the clinic’s doctors did not inform parents or children of the serious side effects of puberty blockers and hormones. But emails show that Ms. Reed herself provided parents with fliers outlining possible risks.
What gets me about this is that these surgeries are being declared as helping kids six weeks after, when the full weight of the decisions made may not happen for 5-10 years later when they become full adults and can understand the life-long effects of these decisions. Most tattoos would be considered great if you only asked about it in the first few month when the person is still experiencing an after-tattoo glow. The same tattoo might later be a cause of grief if the location or content proves embarrassing or limits their options. That facial tattoo might feel cool at 19 when you’re young and in school and only need to worry about looking cool to your peers. At thirty when you’re turned down for jobs and can’t get serious dates because you look like a circus freak, it’s not so successful. I want to see a study that at least follows the same kids from transition to middle age, because I think a lot of their opinions on the subject will change as they mature.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
10d ago
My working hypothesis on bad writing is at least in part due to the hyper-professionalization of movies and games. In both cases, the people making them don’t come from all walks of life. They come from a rather insular world of people who have gone through specialized training at university, and they then go on to live in the same town and hang out mostly with other people like themselves who went to the same professional schools and so on. They’re rarely if ever outside that bubble. They rarely know anyone who came from outside that bubble. And as this goes on for generations, the lack of contact with the normie world makes it impossible to create movies and tv and games that feel realistic. Nobody in Hollywood shoots guns, and probably very rarely would they even know anyone who collects or uses them. When it comes to writing a story about the kind of person that owns or shoots guns, they aren’t referencing their own lived experience with gun owners. They’re referencing other works about the topic, they’re referencing their political views about guns and the people who own them, and maybe stereotyping they’ve seen about gun owners. That doesn’t allow for much depth. It’s like a copy of a copy of a copy — every step away from the real thing makes it less like a real person and thus less interesting.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
17d ago
I agree that it was urban vs rural. But the biggest difference was in the effects of pretty standard policies. It was painfully obvious that most of the CDC had no idea how the rural economy works. Shutting down an office and going remote is no big deal. Those office workers didn’t lose their jobs, the owners of those companies were in no danger of losing their businesses. It frankly mattered so little that most office workers are fighting tooth and nail to not go back to the office. In rural areas, the exact same restrictions were absolutely devastating. If you worked in a factory, a small business store, a restaurant, a construction company, you got a layoff. If you owned those kinds of businesses, you had bills pilling up at a time when it was illegal to do business. At the same time, big businesses doing the same thing could often poach your customers by simply being allowed to do business. If you needed something, you went to Amazon or Walmart or Target, nobody else was open for business. And the cruelest part was that the owners of those businesses were basically forced to watch and forced to let it happen.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
4mo ago
I think just assuming for a moment that the results are accurate, a couple of things stand out about conservative parenting particularly.
First, parenting for conservatives is a focal point for life. Family formation and child rearing are central to the conservative and they will absolutely rearrange their lives and schedules to focus on their family life. If they see public schools as a problem, they’ll do whatever they have to do to route around the problem. If they have to scrape by on one income, drive beater cars and live in a tiny house or apartment so that mom can stay home with the kids they will do that. Kids do pick up on this. They know the kinds of sacrifices their parents are making for them. They know that the reason dad works long hours is so that they can have the best life possible. And this tells them they matter to their parents enough to make serious sacrifices for them, which tells them that they are absolutely valued.
Second they tend to teach self discipline, which in my mind is absolutely critical to developing self esteem because disciple is what makes achievement possible. And achieving things is where real self esteem comes from. A kid that lacks the self discipline to make the baseball team, or keep a clean room or get decent grades or whatever else fails a lot, and he doesn’t have the mindset of “I’ll do this thing differently and then I can make the team or get the grade next time.” Without knowing how to succeed in his efforts life becomes arbitrary and frustrating because he has no idea why he’s such a failure. This is why so many children of liberals love Jordan Peterson. His advice isn’t magic, there’s no “one weird trick” he’s telling people what conservative parents have been saying all along — get disciplined, do the work, get along with people, and learn some self control. Without those things you get lost and often depressed.
Third, the conservative mindset itself might well be protective. It doesn’t focus too heavily on how you feel at the moment, which prevents rumination on negative emotions. Not to say don’t feel them or that they don’t matter at all, but the conservative mindset does not see feelings as facts in themselves. They see it “either you do something about the problem, or learn to live with it.” It’s a kind of practical stoic mindset. Yes, people can be jerks, don’t be one of them, but also don’t let them ruin your day. This is a major issue I have with modern therapeutic culture in which people are encouraged to focus on feelings, treat them as facts, and do nothing about them. If I wanted to cause depression, that would be the ideal way to do it. Especially if I can make you anxious about things you have no control over.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
7mo ago
Long term I think this might be a blessing in disguise. There’s really a mask-off moment here where the government never even pretended to be making or enforcing a new law. They didn’t bother with even a decent pretext for doing this. The governor simply declared a health emergency out of not much (the murder rate isn’t as bad as most major cities) and decided that carrying is illegal.
This is a case that everyone concerned with civil liberties can and will point to probably for a long time as the point where the mask slipped and the public got to see the full on truth that the government doesn’t actually believe in rights or at least not your rights. I don’t believe in conspiracy, however the last several years seem to have been a whole series of red pills in the sense that I don’t think anyone paying attention can deny just how far from the Republic (as defined by the Constitution) we’ve actually gone.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
8mo ago
Well, given that almost every rule in question has long since been broken by the ruling class, my question is why is this guy so bad? Hillary had an entire private unsecured email server outside the government firewall. We didn’t care about norms then. If you want corruption, how is it that a person can go directly from public office to a very lucrative job lobbying for industries that they sought to (not really) regulate months earlier? Or how they always manage to sell their stocks just before us plebs get bad economic news? Hunter Biden had been peddling influence in Russia for decades. We didn’t care about any of those things until Trump did them.
And there’s the ball game — this decidedly is not about laws, norms, or precedents. It’s about making an example of a man who violated the hidden social contract of having good decorum and toeing the social norms an$ keeping quiet about the grift. It’s completely about who he is and what he represents— he’s an outsider, and worse one that won’t play along. He was about the common man.
And to be honest here, I think he’s probably the only politician in memory that could have actually gotten a mob to do anything. Rubin or Cruz or Pence might draw a crowd, but not one willing to fight for their cause. I live in a red state, and I talk to MAGAs. I have never seen a group so enthusiastic about a political leader. For them, this is the first time in memory that a political figure has actually been on their side. The first time in memory that they feel listened to. They don’t trust other people as they’ve been stung too many times by promises that the government “would be there for them”.
I think he’s wrong on policy, but I will point out that the entire thing is absolutely about destroying him and him personally. Others have quietly done what he did.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
11mo ago
Even though I think the disease was real and needed at least some level of intervention, I fear that we’ve learned all the wrong lessons and are creating the basis for severe oppression in the name of safety, especially things that should never have been seriously considered. And the reason is that I think most white-collar people are so safetyist that it skewed the entire thing to maximal government intervention and control without any thought to the wider implications.
The inflation and supply chain issues should have been obvious to anyone giving thought to how our supply chain actually works. We don’t keep warehouses full of goods “in the back” as the Karen would say. Everything is manufactured and shipped in a very short timeframe. Our system is set up to deliver just in time. Which, obviously means that you can’t just “shut down” manufacturing or cut shifts back or whatever else without breaking the thing. It doesn’t work that way. You can’t have food processing plants shut down and still have food on the shelves or turn on a dime from restaurant ready food to grocery food. It doesn’t work.
And the level of authoritarianism that we enabled without thinking about it is insane. In Australia, you needed permission to go more than a couple of miles from home. You needed and easily revocable pass in some parts of Europe and China. Even in America, health departments were empowered to simply order things closed without so much as a hearing. And without any regulation requiring that they make businesses forced to curtail operations by the government to be able to sue or demand payment for their loses. Also the “emergency” had no legally enforceable end date or even a requirement for re-authorization. The emergency will last *until the people empowered to run your life decide that it’s over and they’ll simply hand it back.” Which, as you point out, only ended in May 2023, after being declared in March of 2020. Three years and two months of fiat control unanswerable to anyone is not something I find compatible with the idea of human rights. In fact, had you told people of the “before times”, even if you’re talking about the 2000s, they’d have assumed a coup had taken place in these countries. You need a pass to enter a business? Permission to open? Permission to leave your home?
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
2mo ago
I think honestly it’s impossible not to see politics everywhere simply because conservatives have had a very long lesson in politics entering even things that had long been fairly apolitical. They cannot essentially participate in mainstream life without politics and specifically liberal politics being brought into the mix. And so now after nearly 8 years of politics invading every cultural touchstone, it seems a bit unfair to expect conservatives to try to play “cool” as liberals are coming after one of the few remaining mainstream entertainment outlets that they didn’t have to watch with their guard up.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
5mo ago
This public reaction is predictable and ultimately going to be worse than the relatively small chance of a disorder being the direct cause of an accident.
This is why red-flag laws in the USA are so dangerous. People won’t consider seeing a psychiatrist or psychologist if the potential consequences are “they’ll take away my family’s guns”. So now people who might be considering suicide or have other issues will get worse without treatment, and perhaps avoid getting help for the kids if there’s a risk that that could get on a watchlist.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
10mo ago
I always found the blackout thing funny. The average Redditor spend a lot of time on Reddit, and the blackout threats I’ve seen are “we’ll shut down for a few days”. Problem being that such a tack is pre-surrender. Reddit knows it’s a tantrum, and they know it wouldn’t last more than a week. It’s not intimidating in the least. It like a teen saying “I’m mad at you so I won’t talk to you for 3 hours.” Okay. What are you hoping to accomplish here?
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
11mo ago
I think honestly it stems from a much larger error in meta ethics in the sense that it seems that the west has come to the conclusion that people cannot choose their behavior at all, and thus if they do a bad thing, or fail to do a good thing, there must be a systemic explanation because of course he didn’t choose to live that way and didn’t choose to do that thing. And once you’ve moved the locus of control away from the individual, it becomes the fault of society and we must have programs to deal with this sort of thing, and if we have them, they need more money.
The incentive is obvious from an elite government/nonprofit elite POV — the programs created to solve the “systemic problems” are basically elite jobs programs. People like them love programs because people like them work for those new programs and spend that money. They benefit directly.
But I think the bigger issues this approach creates are learned helplessness (self-cultivation is a skill, self-control is a skill, and so is discipline), and an increasing reluctance to say something about bad behavior in ourselves and others. And in a lot of places (go talk to teachers, for example) the rules don’t exist. Teachers complain about this all the time. Kid doesn’t do anything in class but draw dickbutt and act out? He’s getting a C, because we don’t flunk kids anymore. If a kid disrupts class, even if they do so in a threatening way? He goes to the office and nothing happens. Cops tell similar stories — you can arrest them all day and watch them walk out, charges dropped, a day later. What this creates is a lack of accountability and structure. People pretty much know they face few consequences of their actions. So given that most of us won’t so much as say something, and the authorities aren’t allowed to do anything, anyone so inclined will do whatever he wants to.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
1yr ago
I say this as someone who’s roughly on her side: the thing that bugs me most about the X-rights movement is the lack of concern for anyone else. These movements are narcissistic all the way down, and worse, no one is allowed to voice these very real concerns without being shouted down as a bigot, a terrible human being, or whatever other sneer term you can come up with.
She has a point on some of her stuff. Women are extremely vulnerable in women’s shelters and changing rooms. And especially since the de-facto policy is “if they say they’re a woman they are,” this means that some nonzero number of men who want access to women’s changing rooms or shelters with vulnerable women in them will simply put on a dress and go for it. And at present women aren’t even allowed to object. Women will almost certainly be raped in this situation (which I suspect has already happened), and it seems like all of society has decided that this is acceptable provided it’s kept out of sight.
And as far as children (which to my knowledge JKR hasn’t addressed) I think there are enough concerns that i understand the impulse behind the anti-movement. There’s at least some evidence that ROGD is a social contagion. Kids aren’t necessarily claiming gender dysphoria because they have some long standing issues with their natal gender, but because it’s cool and attention grabbing and makes adults squirm a bit. Or maybe they have trouble fitting in, and believe that as the opposite gender they’d have an easier time. My issue is that society has chosen the worst possible way of dealing with the issue.
When I was a kid, there were scammy CD clubs that you could subscribe to initially cheaply and later on would get really expensive. And they absolutely went after kids because they obviously weren’t mature enough to understand completely what they were getting into. And fortunately for them there’s a provision to protect kids from being scammed this way — until they’re proper adults they aren’t held to contracts, or at least can use their age to back out. Kids aren’t allowed to hold jobs or get tattoos until they’re old enough to understand what they’re getting into. Gender is different. The same kids who can’t get tattoos or hold jobs or sign up for CD clubs can absolutely at least socially transition with full support of the faculty of the school. If they tell their parents, the parents are not allowed to question it, or slow it. But, that’s only if the child gives the school permission to tell their parents.
So I understand the pushback here. Parents for very good reasons don’t want the schools keeping secrets from them. Especially for things that involve medical care or large social changes. Finding out that schools are conspiring with children to hide a major and potentially life altering decision from them is rage inducing for most parents. They know their kid and understand that kids need guidance from parents.
But to me a lot of the over-the-top responses are precisely because they’re shut out of the conversation. The only thing they can do is shout it down, to ban it, and to require an approval process for classroom instruction and books. Shouting in school board meetings is the only thing parents can do here.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
1yr ago
And even create them. Modern therapeutic culture absolutely creates the preconditions for getting a mental illness. We teach through culture that you’re supposed to be happy and healthy and successful and that failure to achieve a life like that is a failure mode of life. And expectations are absurdly high. You have been told to get rich doing a job you love, to find a soul mate, and hobbies you’re passionate about, lots of friends, and be absolutely authentic all the time. Nobody actually has a life like that, or at least not anyone born into the leisure class. And worse, when the failures come and you feel bad, the general message is to focus on that one thing that’s broken. Incels are doing exactly what the culture has taught them, in a sense. They are supposed to have a wife, or at least date. But, for various reasons it isn’t working. So they focus on it. And they focus on how bad it feels to not only not date, but how bad it feels to feel that bad. If I wanted to create a toxic brew for mental illness, this is how I’d do it. Create absurdly high expectations, blame the victim for failures, and tell them to focus on their failures and how bad they feel as a failure. If I could do that, I guarantee I can create anxiety and depression.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
4mo ago
I’m not convinced by the court’s reasoning.
First of all, I don’t think it’s well established that anyone at the rally expected a riot. They expected a protest certainly, but I’m not sure they expected the full force of the crowd trying to breech the Capitol. Exhibit A in my view is that speakers at the event — Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz specifically— spoke at the event and then went to the Capitol to debate certification. If there were reason to suspect a riot, then why would they want to be anywhere near the Capitol when the crowds arrived? If republicans literally believed that the 1/6 rally was going to be a coup attempt, why were they so open about funding people going? If the orders to use political violence were so clear, why is it that after they managed to get into the Capitol, they weren’t doing violence or even real property damage. In fact I’ve seen more property damage done in videos of people in restaurants being charged extra for dipping sauce than happened in the Capitol.
I think there were some elements influenced by Q who wanted to overthrow the election. But the presence of a tiny minority of people who choose to riot doesn’t mean much when it comes to whether or not the leaders and speakers intended a riot.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
5mo ago
I think it’s a combination of a lot of things.
Most Westerners live in extremely safe societies where war is something they see on the news. Americans are safer than even Europeans, having never had a war on their own soil since the end of the American Civil War in 1865. We’ve had a few attacks on our own soil: Pearl Harbor, and 9/11. This makes understanding the need to fight the war a bit more difficult. To a Westerner, war is optional even when you are being attacked. I think much the same of crime — for most people, living in suburbs and gated communities, crime isn’t a reality to them. It feels bad to lock up a thief who stole from a store. But, living in a high crime area full of drugs and gangs where everywhere makes it harder to live a normal life, and makes it far more likely that you yourself will be mugged or assaulted.
Second, most westerners haven’t taken their religion seriously since at least the end of WW2. Looking at the supposed rise of Christian Nationalism, what the term seems to mean is Christians who actually believe in Christianity and live by it. They don’t like drag queens or transsexuals because they understand the Bible to say those things are wrong. They want the traditional family structure as they believe the Bible commands this. The elite see this as weird, but it’s actually the default state of humanity. Most people throughout history have made moral decisions based on their religion, and most humans do today. But if you understand religion to be “go to church, temple, synagogue, or mosque once a week and ignore it the rest of the time”, you have no way to understand people who orient themselves by scriptures. They literally have no lived experience with people who think like a religious person, so they don’t understand that Hamas means what they say, that Allah commands them to war and dying as a martyr.
Third, the university teaches that all of history runs on economics. Poverty causes crime and war and terrorism. The only solutions are thus economic and redistribution or wealth. So they’re learning only one toolset. If you just made Hamas rich enough, they’ll stop. The fact that Gaza is awash in aide and the leadership make the list of rich, and are still launching attacks should show that they don’t care about the money. But the West seems unable to look for other reasons for the attack. So the problem cannot be anything other than Israel hoarding the wealth and the land and refusing to share.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
8mo ago
I don’t think you can have a stable solution when the entire modus opperandi for a lot of LGBT and BLM activists is push as hard and as far as possible and don’t ever stop. The endpoint you’d want to get to is their starting point. As such, unfortunately (since my general sense is more or less 18+ libertarianism, with the caveat that you cannot force other people to go along with what you want) it’s hardball all the time because the only stable position at this point is to go far enough backwards that they’d have to move forward to get to where it was 5 years ago.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
10mo ago
I think the trend might be more permanent simply because it seems a result of a lot of chickens coming home to roost. I’m moving more conservative in a lot of areas simply because I can literally see what the results are of all of these policies. I’m less tolerant of socially deviant behavior simply because it’s not only gone off the rails, but recruiting has gone from a much mocked urban legend to obviously true in 20 years. I’m also much more law and order simply because I’ve seen enough people form shoplifting gangs in broad daylight (fortunately by videos) that I’m in favor of lowering the felony dollar limit.
They accelerated too much, I suppose.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
10mo ago
But it’s something they’ve sort of deliberately created for themselves. Conservatives have known for a long time that success in PMC and white colar work means being rather closeted about things coded conservative. It actually somewhat starts in college where expressing even mild disagreement with the ideas of modern progressive ideology is going to get you shunned and if you’re dumb enough to turn in a paper that expresses a conservative opinion you get worse grades. In the workplace, almost any such expression will be seen as negative and possibly get you reported to HR. As such, modern conservatives in the modern workplace, or at least the modern, urban respectable workplace are as closeted as gays were in the 1990s. You thought long and hard before telling people in your social circle and probably didn’t tell people in your professional circle because even though it’s officially tolerated, it would be risky.
As such, even though there are probably people in their social circles who are conservative, those people have learned to clam up. They were in the room when the “right” — pro-abortion— move was made. They just didn’t want the blowback from being the conservative in the room. I guarantee (especially given that the Budweiser part of InBev is in the midwestern largely Catholic city of St. Louis) that someone in that room knew the Mulvaney cans were a terrible idea that would cause backlash. They said nothing because being anti-trans is dangerous to their career.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
10mo ago
Alternative being that men are choosing more lethal means because they don’t anticipate a last minute rescue. I’ve known a woman with mental illness who’s attempted suicide several times — and every time she did it, she’d call someone or attempt in such a way that she’d be discovered quickly. In other words, the attempt isn’t exactly an attempt, it’s a cry for help and attention. People who want to die will die.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
7mo ago
I’ve never been a fan of the current iteration of no means no simply because it’s often the case where the signals are at best ambiguous. It’s not a woman saying a hard no “I don’t want any sexual activity from you,” it’s quite often “no” while not removing herself, not putting clothes back on, and in a lot of other ways continuing the activities.
My personal rule is I will not leave a public place for a private one unless I’m prepared to have sex. And once I’m there, if I decide not to have sex, I say no, and I get into my car and leave. Anything else is simply entrapping the man because you are acting as if you want sex. If you’re taking off your clothes in the presence of a man you’re telling him you want sex. Even going to private places like parks where you can find corners away from other people is telling the man you want sex.
I’ve always felt like it’s absolutely on the woman if she doesn’t want sex to make it absolutely perfectly clear with no contradictory signals.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
2mo ago
I wouldn’t say stupid. It’s that most of them have majored in film and writing and have been working on only that kind of thing and most likely have never met working scientists, business owners, or anyone who isn’t involved in writing and filmmaking.
That kind of insular world creates all kinds of stupid blind spots. They don’t understand science or know anyone who does, so they understand science only on a popular science IFLS level where it’s either terrible and destructive, or it basically shits out gadgets and stands in for magic.
Of course they do the same with politics, history, journalism, and education too.
I think one of the biggest things holding back screenwriting is that insular perspective. Not only does it prevent people from making compelling stories about other subjects, but since everyone has the exact same thoughts about those topics, there’s not really anything surprising. Andy Weir is good at making stories about ordinary working people in space because he studied the physics and chemistry of space and because he likely knows a good number of blue collar workers who don’t think like the elites do.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
11mo ago
This. I work American retail, and this entire policy is insanely funny because it’s so obviously stupid.
Why would anyone engage with “RESTORE” to avoid jail time when it’s already pretty rare to be caught, and even if you are, you won’t be prosecuted, let alone go to jail. Why would they try to get into these programs (which seems like an admission of guilt) when you could do nothing? At best those sorts of programs will basically move theft from the customer facing parts of the store to the back room and teach thieves how stores work so they’re able to steal better. Nobody with a brain is going to let thieves into this program at their store.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
1mo ago
As much as I dislike Trump, I always thought the ballot strikes were pretty dangerous to democracy, at least absent some sort of congressional action (which seems to be the SCOTUS take) or criminal conviction of a disqualifying crime. What the states involved seemed to be doing is declaring in absentia that a crime had been committed, and that Trump was guilty and therefore the 14th amendment holds. The problem being that this creates a hole in democratic norms that you could drive a semi truck through. Without some requirement for a legal ruling and either congress or a court conviction, it’s basically what SCOTUS says: the states can remove any candidate for almost any reason without the candidate being able to challenge the decision quickly enough to be on the ballot. Keep in mind that the decisions are made sometimes mere weeks before the election, and therefore the time available for a challenge is often limited.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
2mo ago
I think this is a case of good intentions going horribly wrong because the people making the rules don’t understand the process and decided based on what sounds good rather than what work. A rule requiring getting permission when the owners of the material are clear, obvious and still around to ask is fair enough. But when coupled with the difficulty of finding the actual tribes (which may not exist anymore) and the definition of relics being fairly wide means that you essentially cannot dig or use any artifacts because you can’t get permission. This will definitely end up erasing a lot of Native American culture from our interpretation of history.
Actually the scary part is that the LGBT movement has more or less flipped the stranger danger on its head. What’s being normalized is keep the parents out of the loop and almost presenting parents as “the enemy of their children,” and normalizing structures in society that actually work against parents being able to find out where their kids are and what they’re doing online (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.app.calculator.vault.hider&hl=en_US) for a quick example, is an app that exists strictly to hide apps (and thus online communication with strange adults and other potentially dangerous behavior). Schools have been very open — to the point of creating policies forbidding disclosure without the child’s permission— of helping children of varying ages, down to elementary school, hide sexual secrets from their parents.
I was a kid in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and I can remember the fear parents had of the internet being available to kids — because they might talk to strangers. We were warned, repeatedly, not to talk to anyone online we didn’t know in person. There were hysterical news reports about Pictochat on the Nintendo DS — because it enabled a child to talk to a strange adult without notifying their parents (even though you had to share information in person first). And obviously there was the stranger danger stuff where any adults who took a particular interest in children were to be reported to your parents immediately, and adults were not taking any of it lightly.
Obviously, this was overkill, but the switch is mind boggling to me. We’ve gone from a fear that an adult might be talking to a kid without parents knowing about it to treating the very idea that parents might want to keep other adults from talking to their kindergartners about sex without their knowledge or consent— including not informing them about what the child is saying about his/her sexuality— as the default position.
Obviously, this is the part pedophiles like more than anything else. Kids now take it as a given that parents are not to be told about their sexuality. That sexual thoughts and feelings are not to be talked about with the parents who know them best. That loving adults want to help you with your sexuality and that in order to do that keep it a secret from your parents. Which almost every advocate group trying to prevent child sexual abuse says is one of the common occurrences in child sexual abuse (https://rainn.org/articles/talking-your-kids-about-sexual-assault) the child is made to keep secrets and often fears punishment if they tell. Now, we teach that exact thing in every classroom in the country and don’t see the irony.
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