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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

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Mineral Bluff is a small, isolated, unincorporated community in Georgia (US, not the other one) of around two hundred souls, six miles away from the big city of Blue Ridge--a proper city of over one thousand people (yes, more than ten hundred), the seat of the Fannin County (population just a tad over 25K). Demographics-wise, Mineral Bluff follows similar trend and makeup of its larger neighbor and its county, with almost a 100% non-Hispanic White back in 2000 Census, with that percentage dropping to around 90% by 2020 as more identifying as multiracial.

Mineral Bluff is in the news because a local 11-year-old boy walked about a mile to its center, by himself which precipitated a chain of decisions and actions that led to the arrest of the child's mother:

  • While the boy was walking along the road (speed limit 25/35 miles), a woman stopped and asked him if he's OK. He said yes. She called the sheriff's office anyway.

  • A female sheriff from Blue Ridge picked up the boy and called the mother. The mother told the sheriff that she didn't know that her boy went off to the town, and was upset he didn't tell her, but was not worried since the boy knows the area and there are plenty of family living within walking distance. The sheriff dropped the boy off at home (a house on 16 acres of land) and left him in the care of his grandfather, who lives with his daughter and her four children (while the husband works out-of-state).

  • Later that evening, the sheriff and a back-up came back to the house and arrested the mother--in front of her four children (of which the 11-year-old boy is the youngest)--who after booking was soon released on $500 bail.

  • The next day, a case manager from Children Services came to investigate. That investigation resulted in requiring the mother to sign a Safety Plan that requires her to install an app on her son's phone that would track his location, and to designate a Safety Person who will oversee the the children whenever she's not home. Again, the youngest is 11.

  • The assistant district attorney says that he'll dismiss the charges if she signs.

But no, that's not why the case is in the news. The case is in the news because the the woman got smart, lawyered up, and told the Assistant DA and the Children Services to take a hike. She got the lawyer who heads ParentsUSA and she ain't gonna sign nothing.

Five years ago, Utah passed a law that parents cannot be investigated for child neglect based solely on the fact that they let their kids walk alone, play by themselves, or wait in the car by themselves. Several states followed suit. I hope that more do so, and that publicity of this case in particular--and cases like it--precipitate adoption of similar legislation.

Because what this case so aptly illustrates is that, under current laws, it takes one stranger with safetyist mindset to see the child unaccompanied and make the call. In this particular case, the call went to the sheriff's office, landing on a sheriff who agreed with the exaggerated sense of danger for the kid (I checked the FBI stats for the county, it's not a dangerous place), which led to the dramatic arrest of the mother.

But the more typical case bypasses the law enforcement and goes to the child protection agency, which is stuffed with social workers that, charitably, over-train on the worst of parenting, and who like all bureaucrats feel the urge to To Something. That potential harassment means that even parents who themselves do not have a safetyist mindset must rationally conclude that the probability that there is one such person in the area where their child would walk or play is so high that they better not allow it. Which leads to fewer kids walking by themselves; which leads to every kid that does walk by itself being a glaring exception, which leads to higher probability that a well-meaning adult with a deranged sense of danger will call the authorities...

I don't have a Culture War angle to this. I mean, I have heard of cases like this happening in urban areas (coded Blue), but this case happened in a rural place (coded Red). When all it takes is one deranged stranger (to report, not to kidnap!), coordination becomes near-impossible. Thus the need for explicit laws like Utah's: This Is Fine And Thou Shall Not Investigate.

I would have thought the culture war aspect would have been obvious.

a woman stopped and asked him if he's OK

A female sheriff from Blue Ridge

My life, over the years, has taken weird turns, and put me in contact with people are are decidedly outside the norm.

Nothing best exemplifies this by my most recent job, which has put me in close contact with law enforcement around the country, Sheriffs Office's most heavily.

What I've learned is that Sheriffs actually have a very broad range in how they can enforce the law. Complaints from constituents can result in everything from just a general wellness checkup to brushing the matter off('I know the guy, he's fine, and I know the person complaining, she does this all the time') to putting out a warrant for someone's arrest.

So when I see something like this;

Later that evening, the sheriff and a back-up came back to the house and arrested the mother

That makes me raise more than a few eyebrows.

To put it bluntly, what the hell happened here to cause this reaction? Was the person filing the complaint a political bigwig who could have stirred up a massive fuss and the Sheriff wanted it taken care of properly to quiet a reaction? I've seen this happen before, so it wouldn't surprise. Or, more unfavorably, did the female Sheriff get a particular bee in her bonnet that made her bring the hammer down? I have no idea. An uncharitable part of me wants to lean in this general direction, because this entire thing is odd, no question, but who knows?

And on top of all that, this entire commotion was brought about by an 11-year old boy walking a mile in an area where a mile really isn't that big of a deal. Hell, I walked more than a mile away from my home when I was a kid, and I certainly don't live anywhere near the Blue Ridge mountains!

What an absolute mess and embarrassment for the Sheriff's Office.

Nybbler is going to shoot me as a back-the-blue conservative normie for this, but it's also the case that sheriffs know who the troublemakers are, and use stuff like this to go after them.

It's unfortunate, but there's going to a lot of free range kid incidents that do involve genuinely negligent parents or feral kids, and from our perspective 30,000ft above the media firestorm we'll never see it.

Where I live there's a group of tweens+teens who roam around breaking into empty summer houses. The sheriff can't really even arrest them, and even if he did the leftist prosecutor wouldn't do anything about it. So naturally his only leverage over the parents is going after them with CPS. So far this seems to be working, with little pushback because the local head of the ACLU isn't inclined to start a fuss due to her summer house being broken into.
But if it did blow up, I can already write the reason dot com article about "rural kids reported to child services just for riding their bikes to town!", and the resulting shitstorm would distract from any real conversation about how law enforcement got like this in the first place.

See this locally famous case for another example. Any attempt to do something about the kid before his crimes escalated to international aeroplane hijacking would have been based around a CPS investigation, because realistically there was nothing else the police could do about him. Many such cases, and a lot of them end in deadly carjacking rather than just hilarious levels of property damage.

So for the "free range kids" movement to win, it's going to need to help solve the youth crime problem that incentivizes helicopter-parenting mandates. And since a lot of the big media figures are left-libertarians like Radley Balko who also went all-in on BLM, the odds of them owning up to this are low.

Nybbler is going to shoot me as a back-the-blue conservative normie for this

<BLAM!>

You're just-worlding this nonsense hard. You've got no evidence, aside from blind trust in authority, that this 10-year-old kid was up to anything troublesome.

That's the thing: you're right in general, and I don't have any evidence about specific cases other than the ones in my local community. But CPS is still a tool to "do something about those damn kids" that normies find a lot easier to stomach than caning the little shits, so unless you can deal with the underlying problem your CPS-reform movement is going to be resisted by people who are sick and tired of having all their shit stolen by 17yr 364day & 23hr old minors who get away scot free.

But CPS is still a tool to "do something about those damn kids"

And it was used to exactly that end in this case.

I don’t think @SteveKirk was claiming, nor even implying, that the specific kid from OP’s story was up to no good. I think the actual point he made is that it would be very dangerous to dismantle law enforcement’s ability to deal effectively with actual cases of child abuse, just because sometimes those powers will be overfitted to apply to benign cases. It’s no different from the general discussion about tradeoffs regarding how much power to give law enforcement and how much risk of overapplication of that power you’re willing to stomach.

Iterate that sort of advice for several generations and you end up right where we are now. You can't improve things by being afraid to dismantle harmful institutions.

In any case, he's not talking about these laws being used to deal with child abuse; he's talking about using these laws to punish parents for crimes of their children which somehow the cops can't do anything about otherwise.

Not so much "dangerous" because a) the benefits of cps-elimination for good kids might outweigh the harm done by yobbos anyway, and b) taking away that specific tool would encourage people to support real solutions to youth crime.

It's mostly that a lot of people are going to see cps-elimination as taking away the one thing they see actually being used against ferals in their community. And people are so sick to death of unpunished crime right now that you don't want to become an acceptable target for their anger. (It's a lot safer to attack white libertarian free-range kid activists than it is to give a physical description of the Youth who stole your bike.)

It's "you can't take my broken stapler; what else will I use to pound nails?" You need to at least hand the guy a rock if you want him to give up his stapler without a fight.

Any attempt to do something about the kid before his crimes escalated to international aeroplane theft would have been based around a CPS investigation, because realistically there was nothing else the police could do about him.

The law is far too soft around young children who commit serious crimes. Deadly carjacking by under-age girls? Death penalty!

Not:

The 15-year old received the maximum sentence allowed by law and was remanded to the care of a youth agency until deemed rehabilitated or reaching the age of 21; the younger girl (age 14 at time of sentencing) received the same sentence on July 6, 2021.

If swift use of the death penalty returns, people will be amazed at how quickly the random stabbings of 3-year-old children ends, how these violent carjackings and armed burglaries get squelched. These 'mentally deranged' people rarely try stabbing attacks or pushing-onto-the-tracks against 190 cm bodybuilders or big, tough construction workers. They go for women and children or they bring weapons. They know what would happen, even within their esoteric, legally fortuitous 'unable to understand the consequences' mental state. They do understand consequences, we just don't inflict the necessary punishment.

If all else fails, the death penalty will cull the problem people out of the population.

If swift use of the death penalty returns

Technically speaking, 2A + property rights is the death penalty. It's distributed (and you'll get prosecuted if the perp fails the paper bag test and you live in a jurisdiction that conducts them), but it's still there.

I think my culture war angle on this is that most safety enforcement is too easily weaponized against ordinary people to be actually effective in preventing the worst excesses. Worse, they created a situation in which activities that are not only not dangerous, but actually good for kids are forbidden lest some overactive Karen decide to insert themselves into your life and use CPS to punish you.

Helicopter parenting has been shown to causing negative effects (https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2018/06/helicopter-parenting). Ordinary milestones like being able to play without a parent present, let alone walk to a neighbors house, are now pushed so far forward that a child is likely to be a pre-teen before doing anything away from the prying eyes of parents. This is something that harms kids because the normal avenues for learning to problem solve and be independent are now pushed to nearly adulthood where the stakes are much higher. At ten, outside of edge cases of kidnapping (which are pretty rare) the worst a kid could do is maybe stay out later than he should or cause minor trouble. At 16, the kid can get into drugs and alcohol and vandalism and so on. He hasn’t yet learned to handle peer relationships, knowing what is dangerous and what isn’t, and has no skills to handle himself.

I think my culture war angle on this is that most safety enforcement is too easily weaponized against ordinary people to be actually effective in preventing the worst excesses.

It's not just "safety" enforcement - enforcement of any standard is easier against the ordinary than against the willfully noncompliant. The battle against anarcho-tyranny is constant, and the temptation to slide down is extremely high on multiple axes.

to report, not to kidnap!

Reporting is just kidnapping by proxy, is intended as kidnapping by proxy (much like swatting is), and children today are at a higher risk of being abducted by the State than they ever were of the more typical criminals.

You want to fix the birth rate, this heckler’s veto needs to go. But then again, parents have gladly, like good conservatives, sat back and had their rights stripped from them over the past 50 years, and that was pretty negligent on its own…

But then again, parents have gladly, like good conservatives, sat back and had their rights stripped from them over the past 50 years, and that was pretty negligent on its own…

I strongly suspect this is downstream from increasing individual wealth, which makes the family unit less and less necessary as a locus of economic production and coordination.

I think that the propaganda machine is to blame as well. Look at just about anything on television or any movie, music, etc. The resounding themes are family is a drag, parents are idiots or don’t care, and that the point of life is hedonistic pleasure which things like family and religion are drags on. I’ve challenged people with this, and it’s hard to do it. Find four mainstream television shows that show intact, loving, and competent families. Find four such shows where religion and particularly Christianity is portrayed as good wholesome, and not full of hypocrisy and repression. When the entire culture tells you over and over that families and traditions and religion are a drag on your individual hedonistic pleasure seeking, and that the highest good of life is hedonistic pleasures, it’s not shocking to me that families are dying.

parents are idiots or don’t care

I mean, this part is 100% true- they have no parental rights, their kids have no human rights, and they for some reason appreciate that state of affairs.

Look at just about anything on television or any movie, music, etc. The resounding themes are family is a drag, parents are idiots or don’t care, and that the point of life is hedonistic pleasure which things like family and religion are drags on

Yeah "liberatory" culture and increasing wealth definitely work hand-in-hand on this.

Have you considered that those themes are popular because they contain a very large degree of truth?

Have you considered that having only the negative aspects displayed in media is pretty biased? I get that at least some families have negative aspects to them. Some families are neglectful or overly critical or strict or even abusive. But when looking at the mainstream media shows, I’m finding that you have to look pretty darn far to find a show that has a positive view of family life — present, active, competent parents who love and care for their children and know how to help them navigate through life. Likewise, it’s rare to find shows in which the parents are happily married and aren’t constantly spitting out one-line put-downs of their spouse and who actually seem to like being together. I would personally guess that less than a quarter of families are actually negative forces in each other’s lives. Maybe less than 10% are neglectful or abusive, maybe a bit more common to see people struggling a bit, though generally doing okay. Yet, to watch mainstream media, you have the opposite viewpoint. They show, at best, a Simpson’s style family that features a pair of idiot parents (especially a clueless dad) who don’t seem to like each other much and who are generally unaware of anything going on in their children’s lives or how to handle those issues.

I mean, I think a large part of this is simply the need to generate some type of conflict in order for there to be a plot for each episode. A happy family with two normal even-keeled parents assisting their kids with mundane life situations does not make for interesting TV.

As for TV representations of happy and well-functioning families with parents who are invested in their kids’ lives, I think Modern Family is a good example. Yes, the main dad is presented as a bit eccentric and gaffe-prone, but he’s clearly not a Homer Simpson level doofus, and he’s shown over and over to be a great father who makes a positive difference in his children’s lives. His wife teases him and gets mad at him sometimes - which, I think is realistic, and especially so given the sort of slightly-larger-than-life hijinks involved in some episodes - but she also very obviously loves him, and they’re shown to have a thriving sex life and a real love for each other.

I haven’t watched a ton of TV in recent years and can’t confidently comment on what’s going on in the current landscape, but it seems like Tim Allen’s most recent sitcom Last Man Standing also portrayed a happy and functional two-parent family.

From "The Simpsons and Cultural Decline" by Free Northerner:

The Simpsons family is intact and stable, if slightly dysfunctional, and hold to functional, almost traditional, family values. They all love each other, however much they might bicker. Homer is a flawed man, often selfish or stupid, but still loving and caring towards his family. Marge is shown to love and respect Homer, despite her occasional anger at his flaws. Bart disrespects Homer occasionally, but it is shown as a clear deviancy for laughs; it also clearly shown that he does look up to and admire Homer. The kids fight, but at heart care for each other.

Compare those family values that to the three highest-rated sitcoms of 2013: Big Bang Theory, Two and a Half Men, and Modern Family. The first is about a bunch of (fornicating) nerds and their slut friend who spend the entire show snarking at each other. The second is about a cad, his divorced brother, and his nephew who regularly snark at each other; the cad is shown as cool, while the ‘family man’ is shown as a loser. According to Wiki, the third is about a blended family, a somewhat normal family, and a gay couple; the ‘modern family’ is so screwed up wiki needs a chart to keep family relations in order.

The Simpsons has a subtext of Homer as patriarch. A few times in the first couple of seasons Homer makes a family decision, whether it is selling the TV to attend counseling, buying a new TV, or choosing a camping spot, to name a few examples. The rest of the family complains or looks unhappy, yet it is not even questioned that, however flawed he or his decision may be, it is Homer’s place to decide these things. The show just assumes the father makes the major family decisions. Other than Duck Dynasty, would any modern show simply assume the father’s position as head of the home?

The show assumes that normal people go to church on Sundays and say grace at mealtime. Prayer is a casually accepted part of the show, as is religion. Does any major show today, other than Duck Dynasty, so casually accept religion as a normal, unremarkable, everyday part of life?

Other, less remarkable, moral lessons are also included. The pro-family/loyalty message of Life on the Fast Lane. How Marge’s sisters constant denigration of Homer is shown as negative, destructive behaviour. In one episode, Marge is casually referred to as Mrs. Homer Simpson.

All this is not to say the Simpsons is a font of traditional values, it is a liberal show, it does have some fem-centrism, and is rather subversive, but it is a good example of just how fast our culture is collapsing. Just a couple decades ago, the Simpsons was a controversial show that was held up by the president as an example of family dysfunction. Yet compared to today’s cultural wasteland, where broken families are common, disrespect and degeneracy are the norm, and the husband as the head of the family is, at best, a joke, it is very tame, almost traditional.

25 years is all it took. In 20 years, will Two and a Half Men and Modern Family be relatively tame and traditional?

If I was looking for healthy and natural family values in modern television, I would turn to anime, where girls still dream of getting married and having a child is still a blessing. The spirit of Shinzo Abe lives on.

Bob’s Burgers is pretty good at this.

I mean, Leave it to Beaver managed. It seems obviously doable.

Oh, you touched a third rail for me here, Bro.

Modern Family is satanic. It's a show that makes fun of loser normies to their face in such a way that they, the losers, not only don't get that they are the punchline, but they actually like it.

The Phil-Claire family (the most "traditional" of the three featured) is a weird reverse domme fantasy wherein Claire, without a job, enjoys the success of her pliable and doting husband, Phil, as if it were her own. Phil is apparently a Real Estate salesman of some skill - how else can they afford their home in that part of California? But his success isn't the product of a shrewd and hard-working businessman - he's a human gold retriever who sells houses because he's just so darn nice!

And Claire hates his niceness and quirkyness. She is often, obviously, embarrassed by him. But the living is good and, gosh darn it, she just loves that big old goofball at the end of the day. Even in the infamous "Godfather" episode, wherein Phil is attempted to be portrayed as a cunning genius, it's all tongue-in-cheek and sophomoric. Simply put, Phil offers no real danger, competency, or capability and lustfully pines away for his father-in-law's second bride, Gloria. He's also financially stable and a devoted father. He's in good shape. He has his hair.

Phil is also an awful father despite, you know, being presented as a good dad. His oldest daughter dates a notorious dufus (in whom Phil sees himself) and is speedily on her way to Stripperdom. If I remember correctly, the later season had a literal teen pregnancy arc. The middle daughter, Alex, feels both a lack of attention from her parents and a sense of dread that she is obviously smarter than everyone she shares a home with. Although the show had to pivot once the actress playing her developed, that character was hurdling towards Sarah Lawrence levels of political lesbianism. Finally, Phil's son, Luke, is a profound idiot and bonds with his father, mostly, during his most intense bouts of senselessness. Remember, Phil is a multi-millionaire somehow.

I won't cover the other two families. The two gay men adopting an asian female child is so on the nose that the show makes fun of itself for that. The Gloria-Jay dynamic with the wise cracking Manny is some sort of weird Frasier redux. The eternal craziness of the original mother (name forgotten) is Hollywood stating firmly that yes, once you are old and a woman, the world hates you.

Modern Family is not a sincere gesture towards the changing realities of family life. It is a cruel imitation of all the dark patterns of family mis-formation that Hollywood feeds back to the masses to perpetuate a system that's already failed, but still has viewership to capture. We're starting to see this with fat people in health ads and perpetual man-children dating stand-in mom's in Taco Bell ads.

These people hate you, they will say it to your face, and then you will ask for more.

More comments

Many things are true, but which truths we emphasize is all the battle. Yes, families can be a drag. They can also be tremendously-joyous sources of shelter and respite. Parents can be idiots. They can also be wise and protective. Whether the positive or negative aspects of a particular social relationship get highlighted often follows resource generation and self-interest.

Yes, families can be a drag. They can also be tremendously-joyous sources of shelter and respite.

Yes, there are those for whom families are a drag, and those in the families getting the joy by doing the dragging.

People do not universally experience the same relations in the same valence.

Find four mainstream television shows that show intact, loving, and competent families

Well good television (and possibly all storytelling) thrives on conflict and problems - there are a zillion films and television shows set in wars, whether real or fictional, but that doesn't mean we all love war and want more of it, it's just a compelling backdrop for engaging media. Troubled families are simply more interesting than 'intact, loving and competent' ones.

I live in a suburban area where there is a group of children who run around essentially unsupervised. This past Fourth of July they set off fireworks in the street and hid behind the tree in my front yard(it’s a good tree to hide behind).

This should be the default, but it’s not. I suspect that if all the parents in the city decided to send their kids on mile long walks into main street, something similar would happen, and no one would think about calling in to report it. And that’s the solution, not some words on pieces of paper. Be the counter revolution.

and no one would think about calling in to report it

Texas has arrested mothers of 12 year old boys doing the same thing. They haven't yet fixed their law completely.

And that’s the solution, not some words on pieces of paper.

Yes, but that's scary.
The problem with telling Karen "fuck you" is that it's ultimately a risk- a risk that should be taken for the sake of your children (something most parents have forgotten how to do- it's a generational problem), but a risk nonetheless. Otherwise you're teaching your children to never take risks, which just pushes the societal balance further towards evil.

I’m saying no one in my neighborhood would think to call in and report twelve year old boys playing with firecrackers in the street(after all, they appeared to be taking appropriate safety precautions like hiding behind a tree, checking for traffic before going into the road, etc). No doubt in the woodlands and Frisco it is different. But in those places it is so much less common as to be highly unusual. No doubt a man wandering around in a bear suit singing the national anthem would generate a police report, despite not being illegal. Why? Because it’s weird. The solution is to make children playing without direct supervision more normal.

despite not being illegal

Unlike driving while black walking down the street while 10, apparently.

Gotta stay within a few feet of the head of the [long]house; you should be grateful they're not requiring the burka like they did a couple years ago.

That's to prevent sexual crime- don't you know literally all men are overcome with lust when they see a child? If they're not literally on a leash there's no limit to what perversion could happen. (The people who identify with this most strongly even have their own version of making boys into girls.)

It's no different than fundamentalist Islam. For the women who espouse this philosophy, the Handmaiden's Tale treatment would be an improvement for both them and the rest of us. And perhaps ironically, the first polity who have passed anti-Karen laws was the Mormon one.

My whole point, of course, is that things only generate a police report if they're weird. If you make ten year olds going out and about by themselves normal nobody will call the cops.

And perhaps ironically, the first polity who have passed anti-Karen laws was the Mormon one.

A bunch of mormonism's social technology(the mission year, subsidized BYU tuition, singles wards) appears based around being able to separate the young from their families, so that's unsurprising.

I suspect that if all the parents in the city decided to send their kids on mile long walks into main street, something similar would happen, and no one would think about calling in to report it.

I think you'd be horribly, horribly disappointed. And do you want to be the one who goes first, and risks having CPS remove your kids because some childless cat lady keeps reporting you for "neglect"?

I mean, I live in a neighborhood where I won't have to go first, and I find that a very minor benefit towards expanding my house over moving. But I also live in a filter bubble of people who have gone first and gotten away with it- mine own parents were among them, once upon a time, for letting me bike to 7/11 or the library on mine own far younger than the other children in the neighborhood.

So I think if I had to make that gamble I'd feel comfortable rolling the dice. Lots of people I know did, and it worked out for them.

I mean, I live in a neighborhood where I won't have to go first, and I find that a very minor benefit towards expanding my house over moving.

And we were talking about "parents in the city" — if you lived in such a place, instead of where you do now, would you still take such a risk? If, in that scenario, a bunch of busybody Karens call CPS on you for "neglect" by insufficient helicopter parenting, what then?

mine own parents were among them, once upon a time, for letting me bike to 7/11 or the library on mine own far younger than the other children in the neighborhood.

That, of course, was a different time, when people — especially cat-lady "karens" — were less likely to report people to the government for being more permissive than the norm. This is the age of "see something, say something (caveat: unless "seeing" would be racist)."

And we were talking about "parents in the city"

The city in this case is rural Georgia. I doubt whoever reported the kid was a ‘childless cat lady’.

I have heard of cases like this happening in urban areas (coded Blue), but this case happened in a rural place (coded Red).

I agree this is strange.

I think there's something we aren't hearing in this case. Mrs. Patterson is a real estate agent in the city of Blue Ridge. She even has an office in the charming main street of the mountain-lake town. She probably has a billboard somewhere. She places Emerson quotes in her real estate biography.

Blue Ridge has boomed as a tourist destination the past 25 years. The city government and county surrounds it has all the typical trappings of a quiet place finding more and more money flowing in. Every small town has petty feuds, power struggles, and usually some corruption and/or incompetence. Add in the fact that New York millionaires and retired baseball players are setting up shop there it seems to raise the stakes.

The place is being gentrified. It wouldn't surprise me if local authorities might go out of their way to make trouble to the people selling out their culture as agents of change. It could also be something pettier, too. Maybe Patterson did someone's cousin dirty in a wrong way. Officer Powertrip happened to hear all about this story and never liked the woman or anything she represents. So she finds her kid wandering, decides to drop him off with gramps, and when she finds out that was her-- a quick call to Cousin Jimmy. A Sheriff that either looks the other way or himself was the one to receive a phone call and Make Things Happen. Bam. She done got what was coming.

That's all fiction, but it makes a heck of a lot more sense than Blue Ridge police demanding parents keep their kids on a leash at all times. As far as I know it is a place where the locals will give little Sam a deer rifle for his 13th birthday. The charge is one thing, but the follow through makes me think Patterson has upset someone at some point. It is a place where you do business, make friends with the local powers, do County Commissioner Rick a solid, and stuff like this never happens.

Could also be overzealous enforcement by Officer Karen. All the follow through is the typical signifier of loyal backing. Cops can do that. I don't blame Mrs. Patterson for assuming she lived in a safe place where her 11 year old could enjoy some freedom. Very strange.

Cthulhu may swim slowly. But he only swims left towards safetyism. I've considered myself allied with the right against leftism for quite a while now, and everyone here could have been Blue I have no problem imagining conservatives all around... well probably not Children Services. There have always been many Karens on the right and piece of shit sheriffs who last year grilled in MAGA caps.

Cthulhu may swim slowly. But he only swims left towards safetyism

"I swear officer I didn't mean to send those poor people gibbering and screaming for the insane asylum!" "Tell it to the Deep Old Ones, Chtulhu. We've finally got your number this time!"

I was saddened this morning to read of the resignation of one of the founders of La Leche League from that organization.

La Leche League was founded in 1956 to improve breastfeeding rates in the United States. Many people are unaware, or do not fully grasp the implications of, the fact that the mid-20th century was an era of hyper-medicalization and scientific interventionism. Probably most college students today know how to make the proper noises concerning the historic exclusion of women (or racial minorities) from medical studies, but few could tell you why in 1965 Robert Bradley made waves by arguing that childbirth shouldn't be such a medicalized process. It would be a good half century before skyrocketing c-section rates persuaded the AMA (etc.) to take seriously the idea that medicalization was harming mothers at least as frequently as it was helping them.

Breastfeeding has not received quite as much cultural attention as childbirth, for reasons I can only guess at. One is probably just that breastfeeding does not typically present quite the same "life-or-death" questions that childbirth sometimes can. Another is that, historically, not all mothers have been successful breast-feeders, whether by chance or by choice; relying on other mothers to feed one's own infant, at least for a time, is attested cross-culturally. Breastfeeding has well-established health benefits for babies and mothers both (in particular, nothing else is more decidedly protective against breast cancer), but between the availability of adequate (if not really optimal) substitutes, psychological difficulty some have treating breasts in non-sexualized ways, and a sometimes steep learning curve, many mothers find the whole proposition... unpalatable.

La Leche League's most visible influence (at least in my experience) has been their gratis lactation consultants. Some mothers, and some babies, take to breastfeeding like the proverbial ducks to water, but many, maybe most women have at least a little difficulty. Will the baby latch, will the latch hold, how to avoid painful latching, how to deal with chafing, what if I don't produce enough milk, are there foods I need to avoid, etc. are things women once shared with their daughters, or learned from their midwife, and aren't necessarily things your average OB/GYN has any grasp on. (It's not unusual for full-fledged OB/GYNs to spend 6-8 weeks (or less!) in their entire training learning about normal pregnancy and childbirth; their job, after all, is to fix such problems as may arise.) For women who are willing to accept input (and, I suppose, for women who capitulate to the sometimes, er, zealous lactation consultants), La Leche League has filled the gap left by the steamrolling of familial bonds by cultural "progress."

So why, as a 94-year-old woman, would Marian Tompson denounce decades of work brought about, in large measure, by her own efforts? Here is what she wrote:

From an organisation with the specific mission of supporting biological women who want to give their babies the best start in life by breastfeeding them, LLL’s focus has subtly shifted to include men who, for whatever reason, want to have the experience of breastfeeding, despite no careful long-term research on male lactation and how that may affect the baby.

This shift from following the norms of nature, which is the core of mothering through breastfeeding, to indulging the fantasies of adults, is destroying our organisation.

Helen Joyce of British women’s rights charity Sex Matters commented:

By including men who want to breastfeed in its services, LLL is destroying its founding mission to support breastfeeding mothers.

It also goes against the wishes of many mothers, group leaders and trustees around the world, who have been fighting to convince LLL International to hold fast to its woman-focused mission...

Conquest's Laws win again. La Leche League has been profoundly nonpartisan, but it was not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing, and so "another previously innocent activity" heads toward "World War I style trench warfare."

What is there even left to be said at this point? You really just have to put your foot down and tell these people (the men, in this case) that they're not welcome. And when they inevitably respond with accusations that you're being sexist, transphobic, and exclusionary, you say: "yes I am sexist, yes I am transphobic, yes I am exclusionary, yes yes yes, it's all true; now please, the door is that way, if you don't mind."

The left only has as much power as they do because people are deathly afraid of their accusations. If people would just affirm being racist, sexist, and transphobic as positive things then so much of their power would evaporate.

EDIT: Just to head off some potential misunderstandings caused by my imprecise phrasing: I'm not saying to turn yourself into an evil caricature. Don't make yourself adopt positions that you don't sincerely hold in the first place. What I meant was that, the ideal scenario would be, you lay out your position as honestly and truthfully as possible, and if you are then informed that your position is sexist/transphobic, etc, your response would be: "ok, point accepted. I am. Now let's move on to the actual substance of the issue."

The left only has as much power as they do because people are deathly afraid of their accusations.

Also very much recognized by the left.

A perennial question in online spaces is "Why do leftists spend so much time critiquing people who agree with them on 90% of issues when they could instead focus on people who disagree with them on 90% of issues?" and the answer, beyond standard narcissism of small differences, is that the people who disagree with them on 90% of issues usually aren't going to give a shit about their critiques or outrage.

You really just have to put your foot down and tell these people (the men, in this case) that they're not welcome. And when they inevitably respond with accusations that you're being sexist, transphobic, and exclusionary, you say: "yes I am sexist, yes I am transphobic, yes I am exclusionary, yes yes yes, it's all true; now please, the door is that way, if you don't mind."

On social media, you get banned at this point. If the moderators controlling the forum in question don't bend the knee, they get removed.
IRL, these conversations don't really happen. Presumably there are a lot of legal things happening behind the curtains but you only find out when you're already being sued.
And frankly, 'trans' advocates were never interested in having a real conversation in the first place. They only act like they want to talk because they think that will get them the most influence. They don't actually believe there's anything to discuss, they already know they're right.

Okay! You go first.

Right, obviously I’m not going to do that! I didn’t say it was easy, or even feasible.

In fact when questions like “when will woke end?” or “what can we do to stop wokeness?” get raised on this forum, I’m usually in the position of being the bearer of bad news: wokeness might last for a very long time, and there’s probably nothing you can do as an individual in the near-term to hasten its downfall. There was probably nothing that any one individual could have done to hasten the end of communism in the USSR. If someone did speak out publicly, we might admire it as an individual act of heroism, but ultimately it would have accomplished nothing in historical terms. Deciding to arbitrarily burn all your social credit one day is pointless if it doesn’t accomplish anything. Probably you could make a bigger difference by staying under the radar and putting your talents to use elsewhere.

But nonetheless. The biggest historical changes still have to start as individual, isolated thoughts. Just letting someone know that they have permission to think heterodox thoughts, privately, to themselves, can be very powerful. If it wasn’t, then TPTB wouldn’t be so obsessed with censorship and deplatforming. Tiny messages communicated from one individual to another can go on to have ripple effects. Or so we have to hope, anyway.

This is why we can't have nice things.

Breastfeeding has not received quite as much cultural attention as childbirth, for reasons I can only guess at.

Yes, yes it has. Screaming about breastfeeding has been A Thing for a while now.

nearly two decades ago, I was introduced to the term "titalitarian" specifically in reference to the La Leche League's emphasis on breastfeading.

I was introduced to the term "titalitarian"

Fun, and barely relevant anecdote, I was born very premature, like so premature that it was unlikely I was going to survive. I'm told I also cried nonstop for milk but never could latch on. The La Leche consultant (Activist) was absolutely nasty to my mother about allowing me to be bottle fed. It didn't matter if I died to her as long as I was breast-fed. Sufficed to say she reduced my mother to tears and a breakdown and my father almost got arrested throwing the activist out. I can totally imagine these people as the sort of crusaders that then get infected with woke-beliefs, but this is very much leopard-eating-my-face for them.

Breastfeeding has not received quite as much cultural attention as childbirth, for reasons I can only guess at.

Yes, yes it has. Screaming about breastfeeding has been A Thing for a while now.

I'm well aware, which is why I said "not . . . quite as much . . . as" rather than "none at all."

Will the baby latch, will the latch hold, how to avoid painful latching, how to deal with chafing,

Doesn't pumping solve all 4 problems ?

My wife actually relied on LLL circa 2019 with our daughter. She had a lot of issues with latching and LLL helped, but unfortunately our doctors scared the crap out of my wife and talked her into pumping. After that started, the latch was basically permanently broken. This resulted in my wife being stuck pumping for hours a day while struggling with post partum. It served as a daily reminder that she wasn't having the breastfeeding relationship with our daughter that she had dreamed of. She sank into a pretty deep depression, and had a lot of feelings of inadequacy.

This is apparently not uncommon.

Damn, Post partum is rough. So easy for it to sneak in.

We humans really aren't made for nuclear existence huh. Can't imagine how women do it without a more traditionally-sized community.

If you prefer pumping every two hours day and night to cuddling a baby. But, also, it’s pretty hard to pump enough, since babies are more efficient after the first week or so, and they cluster feed to increase production. Mixed pumping and formula is, of course, an option, but less convenient, at night especially.

Pumping only didn't work out in my ime, but we had a bunch of things that complicated the entire process. I remember reading some paper saying that mothers who try exclusive pumping fail to establish sufficient production more than mothers who breastfeed.

following the norms of nature

Would these be the same 'norms of nature' that killed 40-50% of all pre-20th century children before their fifth birthday?

I think putting 'mothers breastfeeding their children' in the same category as cholera, dysentery and smallpox is a bridge too far.

Technical interventions that remove lethal diseases aren't the same as qualitative shifts in the operation.

I'm just saying that 'we shouldn't try to change this because it's natural' proves too much.

The category is 'we want P, nature imposes ¬P, we figure out how to change ¬P to P.'.

When we make distinctions between 'nature wants half of our children to die, we want it to be rare for a parent to bury a child' and 'nature wants breast-feeding to be exclusive to women, we want men to have the option', we are merely haggling over the price.

Prices are important in the weighing up of costs and benefits. When it comes to prostitution, I am sure that most women would sleep with a man for a high repayment in money or power. Would it be rational to turn down billions of dollars that she could use to vastly improve her life and her loved ones? Would it be rational to marry a charming and pleasant life-long loser who lives in his parent's basement, as compared to a somewhat more boring but well-off computer technician? If that's whorish behaviour then the standard is awfully high.

Marian Tompson wasn't saying she was opposed to male breastfeeding just because it is unnatural but also because it is a distraction from the core goals of the organization. She also says that there's no long-term research into its effects on the child, which is basically a steelman of unnatural.

Women are the ones best equipped for breastfeeding, it should belong to them. If there is a bucket of time and effort for breastfeeding work, women should get all of it since they're better at it. Raising children is complicated, it's not really understood and we have many more important areas to invest resources in than helping men breastfeed.

Likewise, men are best suited for war. Men are stronger and more martially inclined, war should be their prerogative. History has shown this, let's keep it that way.

How exactly do men wanting to breastfeed cause a problem here? Are they doing big group lactation sessions and don't want men to see their breasts? Is it a budgetary issue? The article just assumes this is Clearly A Bad Thing because Men, but it never actually articulates any specific objections.

  • -14

Notably, there is no reason for including men. While men can be given drugs to cause lactation they cannot be mothers, even if they wear a dress and grow their hair out and insist on going by ‘she’. It is impossible for a man to give birth.

Notably, there is no reason for including men.

You can make an argument regarding "mother is unable to breastfeed because dead/mastectomy following breast cancer; father can't arrange a wet-nurse and thus tries to do it himself". It's a shaky argument, but it's an argument.

It is impossible for a man to give birth.

The consensus IIRC is that:

  • you can implant an IVF embryo in a man's abdomen and it's capable of attaching to something (abdominal pregnancy - in women - and placenta percreta prove this);
  • you can presumably take it out again via surgery, as with an abdominal pregnancy in a woman (and live babies from the latter are known).

The reasons nobody's done it are:

  • nobody knows what the different blood chemistry of a man would do to the fetus;
  • Placenta percreta and abdominal pregnancy are extremely dangerous due to massive bleeding and/or organ damage, and here you're talking about causing them on purpose
  • post-WWII medical ethics are too restrictive to allow something with such extreme risks as this without medical necessity, and I don't see how this could plausibly be medically-necessary
  • Mengele and Unit 731, who would totally have tried it anyway on Jews/Chinese, were out of the picture by the time IVF was actually achieved.

Mostly, modern formula is basically fine, the effects are there, but small, and almost no fathers are willing to go to the lengths necessary to try producing milk rather than relying on donor milk and formula.

It is impossible for a [natal-anatomical] man to give birth.

Impossible with today's medical technology. Who knows what tomorrow will bring?

More man-made horrors beyond our comprehension is a safe bet

Okay, but this isn't about mothers, this is about breastfeeding. If men can be made to lactate, what stops them from breastfeeding? The second sentence of the post made this pretty clear: "La Leche League was founded in 1956 to improve breastfeeding rates in the United States." Men breastfeeding seems like an obvious win there; previously there were zero, so even one is an improved rate!

From what I recall of this issue, male "milk" isn't even really milk, is it? Does it have any caloric value? What is the actual benefit of men engaging in this behavior? It seems to me to be pretty obviously fetishistic, and if I were the founder of the company and on the council, I would resign too if I had to pretend it isn't fetishistic and actually worth talking about.

How exactly do men wanting to breastfeed cause a problem here?

The League was founded in part on specific concern for infant and maternal health and development. Men don't lactate without hormonal intervention (or, in some cases, cancer) and studies on the health impact of such choices are... not nonexistent, I suspect, but almost certainly some combination of weak, bad, or politically motivated. The difficulties a new mother might have with breastfeeding may have some overlap with the difficulties a lactating man might have, but there are no clear health or infant development reasons to help men who lactate, the way there definitely are with new mothers.

The article just assumes this is Clearly A Bad Thing because Men, but it never actually articulates any specific objections.

When you create an organization specifically to address women's issues with a natural feminine process, then "Men" clearly articulates a pretty damn specific objection. I assume there would also be frustration with women who present as masculine, if they keep trying to police the language of breastfeeding with absurd neologisms like "chestfeeding." If you make an organization dedicated to breastfeeding and a bunch of entryists show up to tell you to use a different word, failure to address that swiftly and unapologetically will probably result in, well, pretty much what the article describes.

I mean, if guys had a Shaving Club, I'd imagine some women with PCOS might benefit from showing up. If the club is really about shaving, that shouldn't be a problem, should it?

The article didn't say anything about language policing or otherwise acting rudely. It's just upset that there's women at the shaving club.

Presumably learning more about male lactation would help the mission of infant health and breastfeeding: either it turns out to work and we have a cool new option, or it turns out to be a bad idea and now we can articulate specific concerns and help people understand why it's a bad idea.

I mean, if guys had a Shaving Club, I'd imagine some women with PCOS might benefit from showing up. If the club is really about shaving, that shouldn't be a problem, should it?

This is a remarkably terrible analogy. Consider instead a support group for sufferers and survivors of prostate cancer. Having a bunch of women show up to talk about their experiences with cervical cancer would not really fit the discussion prompt, even though there would be some obvious overlap in experience of, say, chemotherapy or medical malpractice or whatever.

The article didn't say anything about language policing or otherwise acting rudely. It's just upset that there's women at the shaving club.

No, it's upset that there are Men at the Women's club. It's upset that an organization dedicated to the advancement of women's health is being co-opted for the advancement of men's preferences and desires.

Presumably learning more about male lactation would help the mission of infant health and breastfeeding: either it turns out to work and we have a cool new option, or it turns out to be a bad idea and now we can articulate specific concerns and help people understand why it's a bad idea.

I am doubtful that you will ever find anyone who is able to do the actual science without their political biases fucking it up. But if you could, like, okay? That has nothing to do with this case; if you want to make this argument, do the actual science first, instead of doing the activism first by filling women's spaces with men.

No, it's upset that there are Men at the Women's club.

Why? LLL shifted to invite them in. No one is forcing LLL here. To quote the exact quote here in this thread: "LLL’s focus has subtly shifted to include men". Why are you so upset at the women's club voluntarily choosing to shift their focus?

If the prostate support group wants to evolve into a cancer support group, is that really so awful?

It may not be good for the babies. Hormones around childbirth and breastfeeding are fairly complex, and show up in the milk.

Wouldn't learning more about that be a good idea, then? If it's a bad idea, it would be valuable to know that and be able to explain to these men how they're potentially risking the kid's health. And if it turns out to be a good idea, then cool, more people to help with breastfeeding

To the extent that there are breastfeeding trans women willing to participate in a study, then yes, someone should do the study. Not necessarily LLL.

Right, but what's wrong with LLL being the ones to do it, if they so choose?

If the article was "law requires LLL to admit male members", I could see why you're upset, but this seems to be the organization voluntarily changing. Not once does the article suggest anyone is forcing their way in.

They can. But it's kind of against their core mission, which is about less reliance on medicalization and corporations for childbirth and feeding. So they'll advocate for things like placing the baby on the mother's chest immediately after birth, without taking them to weigh or clean first, starting breastfeeding as soon as possible, because it's way harder to breastfeed when starting later, and babies get nipple confusion, slow flow bottles so mixed fed babies don't get impatient with the breast, being patient with growth spurts and cluster feeding, and so on. This is related to breast milk being a better food, immunological interactions, and not being reliant on formula (I was very glad to not be trying to buy it during the shortage a few years ago, for instance).

(I am currently doing mixed feeding, about 1/3 formula, 2/3 breastmilk, both because baby was in the ICU a few days his first week of life on formula, and the hospital was making me do some terribly depressing triple feeding, and because I'm working full time. I am not a breastfeeding purist, and have found some lactation consultants press too hard and have caused problems for my babies when I returned to work.)

On the other hand, modern formula isn't all that bad, actually. Adoption and surrogacy at very young ages are central examples of times when donor milk or formula are good choices. LLL has a video on their homepage showing someone who's face is cut off (unusual in their materials, which usually feature an entire mother and baby), a "baby" with a full head of hair, and something about dripping milk down the breast from a syringe. It is an extremely non-central example of breastfeeding. Then there's an article about non-gestational parents breastfeeding, which admits that it's quite hard, and most parents who do it are not able to do exclusive breastfeeding.

The whole regime of taking hormones, pumping, getting a partial supply, trying to get an adopted baby who's more than a few days old and not previously breastfed to go along with it, but still supplementing a lot, maybe more than half... sounds terrible, exhausting, expensive, and just probably like a bad idea for most people. I do not think it's a good idea to be advocating for breastfeeding among parents who are not the birth mother for "bonding". Babies bond with caregiver fathers just fine. Formula is fine. They look like they've lost the plot with breastfeeding extremism.

Mobile sports gambling is like, really, really bad, mmm'kay

Color me in the not surprised category. The article, and the additional one's it links at the bottom, do a good job of toe-ing the line between "people should be given the freedom to make choices" and "holy shit this is sentencing those with addictive personalities to lives of poverty."

I'm not super interested in talking about sports gambling itself, although I welcome any good anecdotes, and would instead like to invite comments on the concept of "digital addiction."

There's enough literature out there now that there's a strong enough case to be made that digital technology - very specifically smartphones - can cause behavior patterns that can accurately be described as addictive. However, there is still a delineation between digital addiction and physical/neurological addiction of alcohol and drugs. As a society, we acknowledge the basic danger of these substances by age-limiting some and outright prohibiting others.

My general question would be; what are the major culture war angles on digital addiction? For kids? For all of society?

I think this is a textbook case of the wisdom of keeping things that will be addictive as hard to ge5 as possible. Sports gambling in a casino might not be so terrible. The steps necessary to get to a casino for any sort of gambling serve as an important brake on the behavior. The fact that such gambling can now but done using stored credit card information on a device that is carried in the pocket makes it almost impossible for anyone with the proclivity to addiction to ever have control. And this is true of other potentially addictive behaviors— if you have your addiction always available, you can’t easily say no to it.

Yep. Physical barriers to harmful behaviors are a pretty decent brake to keep them from proliferating throughout a society. Low agency people are more susceptible to those behaviors, but also probably less likely to go to the trouble of accessing them if its difficult enough.

In Florida, most gambling was relegated to Seminole Tribe casinos, so they necessarily couldn't proliferate beyond the boundaries of the reservations. Florida has a deal with them where they pay up a chunk of the revenue and the state bans gambling elsewhere in its territory. It in theory keeps gambling minimized in the rest of the state and makes it easier to supervise and regulate the places where it does occur.

Now, the Seminoles have worked to make it maximally enticing to come out to the Casinos, and maximally difficult to leave once you're there, but at least it required you to physically drive there, and at some point you'd have to go home. So in a sense it beat, and still beats having a mini-casino on every street corner, which is harder to regulate and will probably ruin more people.

Las Vegas does this on a much grander scale, of course.

Digitizing the casinos... man. Its the rough equivalent of hooking up a pipeline to everyone's house that could dispense heroin, meth, and/or crack cocaine on demand. If you don't have to venture into the seedier parts of town and risk getting mugged to get your fix, I'm sure more people will partake.

I'm not sure this reasoning makes sense. People still blow their life savings in casinos, le famous twitter video. If 5x fewer people go to physical casinos, and as a result 5x fewer people blow their savings, does that actually make in-person gambling worth keeping legal? There could be a relative effect, but I'm not sure there is - I could easily imagine the opposite argument, where online gambling, relatively, makes it easier for casual to spend a little, because the friction of going to the place is relatively a higher cost if you only want to spend $20 vs being addicted. Probably better to just have the state assume the job of blocking compulsive gamblers from all gambling platforms (physical or not)

Well, the more friction you can place between you and your addiction the better. Yes, people can and do blow their life savings at casinos. But that’s worlds harder than blowing through your savings when the casino is on an always online phone you carry in your pocket. When you have to go to a casino to gamble, you need to get dressed, get your wallet, drive for 10-15 minutes to the casino, walk across the parking lot, into the casino, find a machine and put in the credit card. Those actions probably mean about 20-30 minutes of being able to talk yourself out of it.

This kind of thing in reverse is true of exercising. The more friction between you and exercise, the less likely you are to actually do it. So they advise keeping your gym clothes and shoes on your dresser, having any needed equipment at home, etc. because at every step you can talk yourself out of it. Do I really feel like fighting traffic to get to the gym? And if the answer is anything other than a very firm yes, chances are you’ll be on the couch Motte-posting instead of exercising. Or maybe you want to eat healthier. The standard advice is stop buying junk food and instead buy the healthy stuff. The reason is that inertia will work in your favor here. You’ll be hungry and all the food in your home is healthy, you don’t necessarily want carrot sticks, but getting potato chips means getting in the car, driving in traffic to the store, walking to the chip aisle, buying the chips, paying, driving through traffic back home before you can finally eat them. The extra effort isn’t worth it most of the time, so carrot sticks it is.

Imo experience with all sorts of addiction has taught us that almost nothing works once people are already addicted, and getting addicted can happen quite easily once you get in contact. If legal platforms block access, the addict will find another way. The key is to generate less addicts in the first place.

Low friction = more addicts = more problems. This is extra true for gambling, since it doesn't get you near-instantly chemically addicted the way some drugs do, it needs some time to be cultivated and re-enforced. If you need to repeatedly, physically go to a casino, people around you will notice, you might have to explain yourself to your partner or parents or close friends, and for yourself it's easier to notice when you start losing significant money. And noticing it early is important to get people to stop before it's too late. If you play on the phone, you yourself might only notice much, much later how much you have played and how much you really lost, and others notice even later, if at all. Not that this is impossible to happen with casinos, it's about the ease it happens with. There's related approaches, such as requiring casinos to change a fixed sum into a number of chips that you play with (which makes it obvious how much lost every time you go) vs just directly playing with cash (easier to lose more than you wanted to play with) or just pay by card (extremely easy to blow a lots of money), or to require limits on how much someone can lose in a specific time frame, and so on. All of these have the purpose to a) give a legal outlet to avoid the proliferation of a black market b) reduce the generation of addicts by increasing friction c) reduce the negative impact of being an addict by making sure you can only lose x money per hour or so spend.

For similar reasons, nowadays I feel like the old approach of having a small amount of a drug being mostly legal or at least not super punished, but if you were caught trading significant amounts you were fucked, was a certain sweet spot. The friction to even start drugs was quite significant. There is an argument to institute a similar ban on gambling, where small-scale private gambling is explicitly legal, but once you do it large-scale it becomes illegal full-stop. You can then still meet with friends and play a round of poker with real money but still mostly low stakes, but you don't get this industrialised pipeline of addict generation we have now.

I think the argument is that people who have an edge and are thus gambling rationally are much less likely to be dissuaded than gambling addicts.

Probably better to just have the state assume the job of blocking compulsive gamblers from all gambling platforms (physical or not)

Zvi says that the online platforms would be unprofitable without preying on compulsive gamblers, so I'm not sure that this cashes out to a difference in worldstate.

I've run sportsbooks both legal and frontier and I'm a pretty big gambling prohibitionist in my day-to-day life. If you're a wise guy, you're toeing a very fine line (yaddayadda promo arbitrage, soft books etc bit more leeway but even then) where even if you've got an edge you're likely going to run into issues in the medium/long-term if you get accustomed to high stakes gambling. If you're on the fish side, it's far too accessible and risk of ruin is very high especially in this current economic moment where most people feel a near-obligation to gamble in order to advance their socioeconomic situation.

I think the most palatable change would be something akin to banning those under age 16 from having social media accounts. Maybe a step further, banning them from possessing smartphones altogether (yes, enforcement would be a bear. No arguments there). Give them a basically functional blackberry-esque device that can send and receive messages and has GPS functionality and bluetooth, and no app store.

I think there has been vastly insufficient discussion of superstimuli and policies that address the proliferation of ways one can completely wreck their life in short order. Just like drugs are more potent than they were 50 years ago, marketing companies are much, much better at their jobs and barely-legal scams are more efficiently predatory than ever before. And meanwhile, humans are, if anything, a little dumber on average.

Like, I am libertarian as fuck when it comes to social issues, but I've experienced the rush that gambling brings and my sincere belief is that we HAVE to provide some 'friction' in place to prevent people from slipping into deep, DEEP holes from which there is no escape, or at least they'll be stuck climbing out for years.

Consider if you owned a property with an extremely deep sinkhole on it, that was surrounded by smooth, polished rock with low friction coefficient on a 20 degree slope, so that anyone who wants to approach the edge of the pit would find it very difficult to climb back out without special equipment, and some % of people are going to slip and fall into the pit. If you're charging admission to view the pit, I argue we can reasonably say you're being extremely negligent (and therefore at least partially responsible) if you didn't provide people with adequate warnings, safety equipment, and AT LEAST a guardrail around the edge to keep people from sliding in.

ESPECIALLY if you were enticing people to come view the pit with the promise that some small number of guests would get fabulously wealthy, and the closer they get to the edge of the pit, the more they could possibly win.

Even my deepest belief in personal freedom doesn't require that the pit must be tolerated as-is, in its maximally dangerous state.

But metaphorically speaking, we're apparently allowing thousands of these sorts of pits to dot the psychological landscape, with bright flashing advertisements drawing in patrons and no mechanisms in place to 'rescue' those who fall in.

It is bad enough for adults who get sucked in, kids whose entire development was awash in these stimuli might not even develop basic defenses, since this is what they would consider 'normal.' The kids these days have gambling mechanics in ALL their video games, they've already made and lost minor fortunes in Crypto, they can gamble on literally any sports event they want, and they grew up watching influencers shilling them on the most harebrained of get-rich-quick schemes.

And meanwhile, financial literacy is barely ever taught.

Also, it is patently absurd that the rules as they exist allow anyone over 18 or 21 to throw money away gambling, but if they want to invest in early-stage startups they have to have a certain amount of wealth built up already.


The 'problem' such as it is, if we start investigating and making rules for those who have addictive personalities, or are easily manipulated, or simply don't understand odds/statistics and restrict their ability to use their own money in ways they wish. Maybe they have restricted bank accounts that limit them to, say $500/day withdrawals. Maybe they're not allowed to take on long-term debt, or we legally cap the amount of debt they can take to some specific % of their net worth. Or require them to pass an annual financial audit to exercise certain rights...

Because if we don't, there's a certainty that many of them will blow up the entirety of their savings and becomes a burden on the rest of us later on. And thus we can only do our best to mitigate this externality.

Well, we're essentially carving out a different class of citizens with reduced individual rights due to their vulnerabilities. What's the justification for letting such people vote? Or have a bank account at all? Or have kids?

I think the most palatable change would be something akin to banning those under age 16 from having social media accounts.

They're trying to legislate this in Australia right now.

Does everyone need to show their ID to get a social media account up? Do I need to show ID for this website? Who is storing my information and where is it going? What about VPNs (every second youtuber is shilling them, kids could easily set one up) to bypass the ban and log in from a more permissive jurisdiction - ban them? What about 4chan or its derivatives - they can't be bothered to do age-verification (and don't have the resources) - ban them? Xbox and Playstation have online chat, thousands and thousands of games have online chat. Are they all social media? In a stroke online privacy is greatly diminished, along with all small web forums.

At least in crypto you have marginally higher chances of making money and it's not inherently rigged against you. Down with sports betting, up with Shiba and Doge.

Societies' restrictive energies should remain focused on drugs, they cause much more harm than gambling does.

Thanks, hadn't picked up on small sites not being excepted. I think some of the smaller players could say "bite me" due to lacking assets in Oz, but that's not the ideal solution.

I find that I agree with you across the board, but one footnote on my annoyance with the current state of affairs:

I argue we can reasonably say you're being extremely negligent (and therefore at least partially responsible) if you didn't provide people with adequate warnings, safety equipment, and AT LEAST a guardrail around the edge to keep people from sliding in.

I feel like these online services already do this. They advertise, but they close with a line about gambling addiction. Everyone is simultaneously bombarded with advertisements for gambling and admonishments about how you need to be really careful. To me, this feels like the worst of both worlds, where we legalized something that's apparently quite destructive for quite a few people, but with the caveat that everyone has to be antagonized about how dangerous it is. I bet $2 on Josh Allen to score a rushing touchdown because I think it's fun. Leave me alone. Stop telling me over and over and over that I'd better watch out about how addictive it is. Either let people ruin their lives or don't, but don't do this stupid in between thing where we all acknowledge that it's ruining lives and therefore everyone needs to hear about that.

Overall, I guess I just increasingly believe that the typical person should pretty much not be extended credit on much of anything. They just don't seem to be able to conceptualize how credit lines work, what interest is, and so on.

For me, it is fine. I can gamble once a week a couple of dollars and it is fun without causing me any harm.

But I can’t help but note the business doesn’t really run on people like me. I don’t make the house enough money. It is dependent on the whales. Those guys lose a ton of money. I the business is unseemly.

Yep. I have a reflexive dislike for ANY business model that is entirely reliant on a small number of customers spending 10-100x of the average to stay profitable.

Has at least something to do with me being EXTREMELY sensitive to attempts to hack my psyche, which is the hallmark of such places. Oh, your game is "free to play?" Pardon me if I don't want to spend mental effort resisting the 1001 ways your game is constantly trying to convince me that spending in-game money is more important than food.

On the other hand, when I play such games I do not feel having to expend any particular mental effort to resist shelling out cash, any more than I feel compelled to take any Nigerian princes up on their offers. If you're not in the susceptible target audience, those games really are free.

But it kind of feels like free riding off of people who are destroying themselves.

'Zactly. On the one hand I don't mind free-riding by, say, using ad-blocker on sites where I was never going to click the ads anyway.

On the other, I really don't like to think that I am getting something for free because somebody else is vastly overpaying relative to the value they're getting. It is easy to imagine they're some rich loner who has endless spare cash, but it is still a predatory model. Also, in game settings, the 'free' players are arguably there just to be easy opponents for the overpowered paid whales. Not really a fan of playing the role of disposable mook so some other guy can live out his power fantasy.

I think those disclaimers are a fig leaf in this case. At best.

Its like having people sign a waiver that they understand "Gravity is a powerful force that pulls you downward" before you enter the pit zone. I don't think psychological "nudges" are actually a real thing, honestly.

To me, a 'guardrail' is something that physically prevents you from falling in. Unless you climb over it. In this case that may be something like a restriction on your bank account that prevents you from depositing money into an app or withdrawing cash at a Casino after a certain period of time or above a certain amount.

There's a (strong) case that banks shouldn't be peeking over their clients' shoulders and judging what they use money on, so I'm really trying to think of ways to put something TANGIBLE in place that might allow someone to slide right up to the point of absolute ruin, but stop at the edge and have a chance to retreat, or at least think over the implications before jumping in.

And of course, degenerate gamblers will just borrow money from 'friends' or loan sharks if their bank cuts them off, so there are no 'foolproof' solutions.

There's a (strong) case that banks shouldn't be peeking over their clients' shoulders and judging what they use money on, so I'm really trying to think of ways to put something TANGIBLE in place that might allow someone to slide right up to the point of absolute ruin, but stop at the edge and have a chance to retreat, or at least think over the implications before jumping in.

Here's an example: if an elderly customer suddenly tries to withdraw a large sum of money, the system pauses the transaction and directs the teller to arrange an interview with a security officer that ensures the customer is not being scammed by someone impersonating their grandchild in sudden financial trouble.

Is this kind of meddling permissible?

Another example: if a customer suddenly tries to transfer a large amount to an account that doesn't belong to them, the system pauses the transaction and directs the customer to upload a document that explains the purpose of the transaction.

Is this kind of meddling permissible?

Finally, if a customer tries to transfer more than X to online gambling companies this month, the system pauses the transaction and suggests the customer sets up a monthly gambling limit.

I don't think this kind of meddling is more bothersome than the previous ones.

Here's an example: if an elderly customer suddenly tries to withdraw a large sum of money, the system pauses the transaction and directs the teller to arrange an interview with a security officer that ensures the customer is not being scammed by someone impersonating their grandchild in sudden financial trouble.

Is this kind of meddling permissible?

No, and making it so is likely to result in a wave of exit from banks and into cash-stuffed mattresses.

Another example: if a customer suddenly tries to transfer a large amount to an account that doesn't belong to them, the system pauses the transaction and directs the customer to upload a document that explains the purpose of the transaction.

Is this kind of meddling permissible?

Depends on what you mean. Such transfers may be interrupted by fraud detection and the customer might have to prove his bona fides (which is annoying enough) but having to write an essay explaining to one's bank why you're spending your own money isn't really acceptable.

No, and making it so is likely to result in a wave of exit from banks and into cash-stuffed mattresses.

It's standard procedure in Europe. It actually saved me money when someone managed to clone my wife's card.

No, and making it so is likely to result in a wave of exit from banks and into cash-stuffed mattresses.

It’s pretty common and most people don’t keep Benjamins under their mattress.

I personally would like to get rid of the two examples you mentioned as well. The kind of big brother monitoring banks do is obnoxious as hell and I'm not convinced it is an overall value-add for society.

That's because your parents haven't yet deposited their life savings into a "secure account" because a helpful "FBI agent" told them to.

It turns out that I do not hold opinions on policy based on whether or not the negative consequences of said policies personally impact me or those I love.

But why?

More comments

Imagine being a very smart and disagreeable 15 year old stuck in a small town somewhere. You want to be on the internet, learning to code, arguing about politics, and making friends similar to you ... except social media is banned, lmao. The internet is where the future is, and where power is, keeping kids off it isn't advantageous to them.

My guess is in most cases he would be better off learning to deal with his disagreeability in a way that does not prevent him from forming meaningful relationships with his local community, as opposed to fleeing into an online bubble of like minded people and becoming atomized and terminally online and building an identity about being very smart. If anything your example makes me more convinced kids should not be on social media, not less.

Also, the fact that in some very specific circumstances social media might have a positive effect on children, does not necessarily mean it is a good idea to have children on social media. I have not looked into it too deeply so I am open to having my mind changed about it, but I have the impression Jonathan Haidt shows pretty convincingly that social media have had a catastrophic effect on teenage mental health, so if that is true it might still be a good idea to ban or at least disincentivize social media for children.

Finally, banning social media is not the same as banning the internet. In a world where social media is banned, your hypothetical very smart child can still get on the internet and look up information of coding and such, without having to be on tiktok or anything like that. This would raise questions about the definition of social media. Maybe it would be feasible to treat platforms that have some sort of addictive recommendation algorithm differently from places where you look up your own content, so kids could look up stuff about coding or politics or find an online community that they like, while not being allowed on tiktok or youtube or whatever and be exposed to algorithms that are basically trying to get you addicted to the platform's content. Or this type of algorithmic feed could become a separate 16+ feature of these platforms or whatever where everyone can use these platforms and look up stuff whereas you have to validate your account and prove you are 16+ before you get access to the addictive features. I am just fantasizing on the spot about specific policies, but trying to get kids off of addictive social media platforms does not have to mean a blanket ban on everything fun and useful on the internet.

I think there are some confusing claims being made here.

How is meeting people who are closer to your level of intelligence online "fleeing"? These are people who you can do more with, who can teach you more, who can expose you to future occupations that properly use your talents. There are some people for whom the average poster on this forum (which isn't that high of a bar) is significantly above anyone in their small town. "Building an identity around being very smart" - what? - being very smart gives you access to different careers, many of which are significantly higher paying and many of which are, most would agree, more satisfying than those the average person has.

hypothetical very smart child can still get on the internet and look up information of coding and such, without having to be on tiktok or anything like that.

Yeah, but not make friends with people with the same interest! I think that's a pretty basic thing to want!

Maybe it would be feasible to treat platforms that have some sort of addictive recommendation algorithm differently from places where you look up your own content

This is a tangent but I think 'recommendation algorithm addictiveness' is insanely overstated as the cause of any internet badness. The thing optimizing videos for view counts isn't the 'algorithm', it's the people. MrBeast is supposedly the culmination of internet algorithms taking advantage of people, and the formula he converged on was ... game shows, which were a thing on TV too. Internet content would have all the same problems if there was no algorithm and you had to manually click links tbh. The problem is in large part the consumers who demand the stuff.

Do you think the modal teen fits that description?

Of course not, but someone here's more likely to have been like that in the past

Yes, but the policy debate is going to have to consider that the damages being caused to a majority of the teens out there might outweigh the loss to the comparative handful of teens who benefited from unrestricted internet access.

might outweigh the loss to the comparative handful of teens who benefited from unrestricted internet access

Which is just another way of saying that they don't have the right to benefit from that ability, and that ability should be redistributed to everyone who doesn't. (It's ironic that the types of people who complain about more rules being "communism" are directionally and trivially correct, yet most of them aren't smart enough to explain why.)

I think a social media ban for this subgroup is likely to pass in some way, shape, or form, but that's mainly because we don't think anyone under 18 (21? 25? 120?) is actually a human being (more like 3/5ths of one). And because it's going to be the Boomers doing it, it's going to be something stupid and ham-fisted that includes stuff like 4chan and StackOverflow (i.e. the places high-value teenagers are more likely to visit) but excludes YouTube Shorts-type content factories (which is what everyone over 30 thinks 'social media' is, and is more about dealing with the Evil New Media that they can't get their kids off of because there's basically nothing else for them to do).

At least there's a playbook for defeating tech-illiterate Boomers that more or less just needs to be dusted off. I think there's a real future in distributed social media among people smart enough to insert an SD card into a Raspberry Pi and edit a few configuration files.

but that's mainly because we don't think anyone under 18 (21? 25? 120?) is actually a human being

I mean, it shouldn't be controversial to say that youth is a form of 'mental disability' that most people overcome through age and experience.

I'd be in favor of there being some kind of basic test that someone can past to 'remove' that disability in a legal sense, rather than having a blanket age of consent.

that most people overcome through age and experience

The sheer size of my political outgroup is clear evidence to the contrary. Most of them are over 18, too.

I'd be in favor of there being some kind of basic test that someone can past to 'remove' that disability in a legal sense

Oi, where's your freedom license?

I am too, but the problem is that society won't tolerate it being an actual, legible test (mainly because muh disproportionate impact, but also because there's a lot of ego/conscience-approval involved in the assumption of righteous disenfranchisement by default, much like there is with all the -isms).

This is currently fulfilled by "having enough common sense to lie to the website about his or her date of birth, and intelligent enough not to contradict that lie after the fact". Fake IDs serve a similar purpose, or at least they did back when they were easier to make; half the problem I have with this scheme is that it makes this much harder (they are/were natural escape valves), as in the face of -ism-driven lawmaking the question of who it actually applies to and what they'll be doing instead won't be seriously considered.

If one values the experiences of the most talented and capable at the same order of magnitude as the least, it's probably not a good policy, sure.

I question whether there’s a difference between addiction to drugs and addiction to gambling. If gambling induces an endogenous release of dopamine at a level commensurate to the release of dopamine from cocaine, then there is literally no reason to treat cocaine as “more addictive” than gambling. It’s the same addictiveness. One involves cognition, but that doesn’t alter the addictiveness.

what are the major culture war angles on digital addiction? For kids

Every child allowed to play a modern video game is being trained for a life of gambling by way of lootbox mechanics. It’s really the ultimate disproof of liberalism. We shouldn’t give people free choice where (1) they lack wisdom to discern the complicated costs and benefits, (2) their instincts overrides rationality. That’s because the choice is not actually free. It’s either coerced by an illusion or coerced by an animalistic instinct.

My first instinct was that drugs categorically different because they cause physical dependence and withdrawal symptoms. A quick google search tells me that gambling withdrawal is a thing, but all the sources are treatment centers, and all the symptoms are psychological. Withdrawing from amphetamine left me pretty much non-functional for weeks. I doubt gambling can cause that sort of nervous system damage.

One involves cognition, but that doesn’t alter the addictiveness.

The argument perhaps goes that you can mentally train yourself to resist the effects of a given stimuli when the source of the neurological effect is entirely local to your own brain. End of the day, you can make a 'choice' to stop pushing the button.

But there's no training yourself to resist the introduction of exogenous drugs.

That’s because the choice is not actually free. It’s either coerced by an illusion or coerced by an animalistic instinct.

I'd object to the use of the term 'coerced' here, but otherwise mostly agree. I think its mostly based on the idea that they are not psychologically or philosophically prepared to give 'informed consent' to behaviors that have complex long-term implications. They literally cannot comprehend the effects, so while they can 'agree' to the terms, the consent lacks the actual 'comprehension' which is necessary for someone to truly consent to and accept the risks of a given transaction.

And the world has only gotten more complex, not less, so normal legal standards around 'age of consent' are, arguably, entirely outmoded for addressing this issue.

Restricting minor’s access to digital media- especially social media- is very much a culture war of the future. In the USA this is a thing we’ll increasingly associate with republicans.

At least in Australia currently there's an attempt to ban social media for your under 16. Not super up to date on Australian politics but this effort appears to be coming from Labor which is supposedly the center left party