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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   26855 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 26, 2025

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Apparently my whole feed is late 30s bloggers writing about child rearing now, even the ones I subscribed to for the AI news.

Today it's Zvi, continuing last week's discussion from ACX about free range kids, with a side of Aella's very odd childhood and perspective on allowing children agency.

Zvi, as usual, has dozens of somewhat interesting links, and is worth checking out. A lot of it is related to the issue that reporting parents for potential abuse or neglect is costless and sometimes mandatory, but being investigated imposes fairly high costs, and so even among families that are not especially worried about their kids getting hurt walking to a friend's house or a local store, they might be worried about them being picked up by the police, and that can affect their ability to do things other than stare at screens or bicker with their parents. I have some sympathy for this. When I was growing up, inside the city limits, there weren't any kids I knew or wanted to play with in the immediate neighborhood, or any shops I wanted to go to, and my mother was also a bit worried about getting in trouble with the law, so I mostly played in the yard. But perhaps there would have been, if wandering were more normalized? I asked my parents about this, and they said that when they were younger, they also didn't necessarily have neighborhood friends they wanted to visit, and also mostly played in their own yards and houses, but they could have wandered around more if they'd wanted. That was in the 60s, and I'm not sure it's heading in the same direction as the ratosphere zeitgeist or not. My dad does remember picking up beer for his grandma as a kid, which is also mixed.

My impression of the past is mostly formed by British and Scottish novels, where lower class children would rove around in packs, causing trouble (a la Oliver Twist), and upper class children would have governesses, tutors, or go to boarding school, where they were supervised a bit less than now, or about the same amount, and the boys would oppress each other a bit. Upper class girls could go for a walk in the garden with their governess. The police probably have an interest in stopping children from forming spontaneous gangs, which the suburban families were seeking to avoid. The not firmly classed rural children (educated, able to become teachers, but not able to enter high society) are represented as roving the countryside a bit (Anne of Green Gables, Little House on the Prairie, George Macdonald novels), and get into a bit of trouble, but there were only a few families around, and everyone knew who everyone was. My grandmother grew up in such a place, then divorced before it was cool, and taught in the South Pacific. I can't tell if wandering through the heather or prairie a lot is better or worse than reading lots of books and playing in the backyard.

The free range stuff, while it may be important for some people, seems a bit orthogonal to the Everything is Childcare problem (probably more about lack of extended family), since the age at which a child could feasibly be wandering the countryside or neighborhood (8? 10?) is the same age when they can be quietly reading novels or playing with their siblings or being dropped off at events while their parents drink a coffee or visit a bookstore or something. Unless that's also not a thing anymore?

Anyway, I don't necessarily have a firm conclusion to present, other than that that people are talking about it. @Southkraut gave me a bit of pushback for writing on screens in my daughter's presence, which I felt a bit bad about, but also not. I do agree with Zvi and Scott that it's probably bad if Everything is Childcare, and parents aren't allowed to read an article and post about it because the children might be infected by the proximity to a screen. (The children are painting. They have used their agency to decide that they want to paint, asked for the paints and supplies they need, and the older one has made a little notebook full of concept sketches)

Man... I had so many dreams of giving my child the same childhood I had. Biking 15 miles to the nearest strip mall with my sister, playing in the woods all day, ranging through countless back yards. Once I found this weird heavily vandalized abandoned cabin in the middle of nowhere. My parents never cared, and it all seemed totally normal in the 90's.

Unfortunately, times have changed. Putting aside the sociological factors, apparently ticks in my area are up 4000% since a decade ago, and my daughter has already caught Lyme Disease and Alpha Gal Syndrome. Any tick bite she gets could make her AGS symptoms worse, and causes my wife to have a week long panic attack. I didn't appreciate how much the world had changed in that regard, and how much worse just playing in the fucking woods was.

Also, I swear to god if the rumors that Lyme Disease and AGS escaped from a bioweapons lab are true you may very well see me on the news.

That said we try our best. Lots of tick spray, twice daily tick checks, tick treatments for the yard. Breaks my heart that she can't play in the woods and the creek I bought. Virtually every time anybody goes into them they come out with 2-5 ticks, so that's not even a hypothetical problem.

That said she fucking loved the 2 acres of yard we do have. Climbs the shit out of trees, plays with the chickens, has her own garden with her mother. She loves to pick herbs and leafy greens to add to her fresh eggs in the morning. Skips around the yard in her night gown saying good morning to the chickens. Makes my heart swell.

Her peers... well... I donno man. A friend of mine has a kid about her age, a boy, tall as fuck. He spends an hour on a tablet at his preschool to get him ready for the tablet as a learning device in elementary. Cause I guess that's what public schools do now? He can't ride a bike, climb a tree, he still has an awkward toddler gait despite being 5, and still has very soft speech. I'm reading Lord of the Rings to my daughter, he's seen all the movies along with Star Wars, The Hobbit, and countless other shows.

My wife and I constantly discuss, is our daughter just "advanced" or have we just not hobbled her with screentime and being locked in a townhouse? We may never know, but the differences we notice are stark.

After they wipe out the malarial mosquitos, ticks should be the next target.

My kid almost died of a tick two years ago. He woke up one morning paralyzed from the waist down, could not walk, just collapsed into a pile if he tried to stand. We took him to the ER and they were totally confused. Out of desperation they decided to admit him with GBS and would have put him on a ventilator in a day or two while he got worse and died.

While this was unfolding, wifey was talking with wife friends and one of them suggested we check him for ticks and we found one in his head, covered by his hair. It was a species of tick that secretes a neurotoxin to numb the host to its presence. It paralyzes and kills small kids, usually girls, because people can't ever spot it in their long hair in time.

We pulled the tick out and he was walking again the next morning, and 100% fine about two days later.

We had been camping about a week earlier. Our area is not supposed to have endemic tick diseases which is why the ER was so confused, though ChatGPT nailed it in the diagnostic when I presented his case to it.

We were already hyper wary about ticks when traveling to other parts of the country but did not expect them when camping locally. CDC guidance is apparently out of date.

Ticks have really increased our anxiety about going out into nature, something we really loved doing. Whenever we do go out mom makes the entire family strip naked at home and we do full crevice checks (including butt cracks, including adults) for ticks.

You have my sympathies, friend.

That sounds terrifying. I'm glad your son fully recovered.

Doctors working with outdated information is the most frustrating part. We're seeing a local doctor who's kept abreast of the changes, largely due to so many of her patients having tick born diseases in recent years. My daughter's school does a pretty good job too because several kids there have AGS, including kids of the staff. It's getting kind of out of control in my area if "I never knew anyone who had this and now I'm encountering it everywhere I go" is any measure.

It depresses us to no end the fact that the outdoors feels so threatening now. We're trying to keep up the love of nature too with the hiking and camping. But then our daughter gets another tick and my wife spends a week contemplating selling everything, moving to a concrete jungle, and getting rid of the dog in case she tracks ticks in too.

Supposedly the AGS gets better after a few years, but the big if is that you have to not get bit by more ticks. That's proving incredibly difficult since we've found 2 more on our daughter just from the yard (or the dog) this spring.

We live in the PNW and thought we were spared from this stuff. I'd never seen a tick irl before the one in my son's head. Guessing we're only a decade or two away from fighting them off by the handful.

My kids ran through a path in a park the other day with shorts on and the path had tall grass hanging into it and I freaked out, rather irrationally.

Moving to a place where ticks can't survive is starting to sound appealing to me as well.

Few things terrify me more than a possible (and increasingly likely-sounding) future where superbugs of all kinds have free reign and with little recourse - aggressive Asian hornets (although allegedly wiped out), ticks, bed bugs, cockroaches, fire ants, termites (two major species just hybridized), etc. To say nothing of how violated I would feel if a tick literally gave me a meat allergy. Thankfully growing up in the PNW as well, seems like we were (still mostly are) one of the places with the fewest awful insects in the country.

Lyme disease was supposedly improved by US army bioweapons dudes.

There's a whole documentary on it. Burgdorf allegedly cops to doing so.

Although it's unclear why the new & improved Lyme disease would be everywhere or spreading. There's a world of difference between molesting bacteria in a lab to get worse ones to said bacteria living in ticks worldwide.

Also, I swear to god if the rumors that Lyme Disease and AGS escaped from a bioweapons lab are true you may very well see me on the news.

That would have to be some kind of bioweapons program run by the Ancient Astronauts, because a 5300 year old mummified ice man had Lyme disease.

You could probably dial that back to a bioweapons program run by George Washington, because, shock and amazement, that study failed to replicate.

To confirm LMAT’s ability to analyze large (real) metagenomes and provide new biological insight, we downloaded the Tyrolean Iceman sequence data (Keller et al., 2012) from the SRA, which constituted 150 giga-bases of raw genomic data. While 78% of the sequenced reads were reported to be human, only a small percentage (0.84%) of the reads was reported to originate from bacteria based on a sample of 8 million reads. Our hypothesis was that LMAT could examine all the reads on a single large memory compute node and efficiently provide a more complete analysis of the microbial contents. For this application, the human genome (v19) was added to LMAT’s database to classify human and microbial reads simultaneously. The analysis on the raw 150 giga-base dataset (2.3 billion reads) ran in <20 h on our single node large memory computer (see Supplementary Material for additional details). LMAT output agreed with the published finding that the vast majority of bacteria were from the phylum Firmicutes and under the class of Clostridia. Similarly, only a small fraction of reads were reported to be from the Spirochaetes phylum. LMAT results did not show evidence for the presence for non-phage, non-retroviral viruses, fungi or protists after adjusting for previously unidentified human contamination in draft eukaryote genomes present in the LMAT reference database. The key observed difference was in the Borrelia species previously reported to be the first documented case of Lyme disease in humans. Although LMAT’s findings support the presence of the Borrelia genus with 16 180 reads assigned a read label score greater than 0, a more complex relationship is shown between the new Borrelia sequence and previously sequenced Borrelia genomes. Although Borrelia burgdorferi was previously reported to be the likely species present, LMAT shows that among the reads assigned to the Borrelia genus, the majority of the reads are assigned to non–species-specific genomic regions with species-specific reads assigned to several Borrelia species, including B.burgdorferi, Borrelia garinii and others. The Borellia reads were compared against all sequenced Borrelia genomes to compute an SNP-based genetic distance matrix. The phylogenetic tree given in Supplementary Figure S10 supports LMAT’s finding that the Borrelia variant is divergent from B.burgdorferi.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3753567/

A movie about George Washington’s secret bioweapons lab would be dope, though.

Is this really a failed replication? It seems that:

  1. Borellia samples are present

  2. Most reads are in non-species specific regions

  3. There are B. burgdorferi specific reads, as well as reads for other Borellia species

So they conclude that the Borellia variant (and I think they implicitly assume there's only one?) is not identical to B. burgdorferi. Maybe, but it's not only B. burgdorferi that causes Lyme disease. B. garinii (also found on the ice man) also causes Lyme disease, and there are other species whose relationship to Lyme disease is just not clear. So I don't view this as contradicting the claim that the ice man had Lyme disease.

You know what, I stand corrected.

I was under the impression that B. burgdorferi was the only Lyme disease causing bacteria. If that had been the case, I would stand by this as a failed replication, but with the new information, I think you are right.

Caveat for: All “Science!” seems prone to fakery in general, but I can’t see why anyone would fake these particular results, so it seems reasonable that I was wrong.

George Washington’s secret bioweapon program would still be dope, though.

apparently ticks in my area are up 4000% since a decade ago, and my daughter has already caught Lyme Disease and Alpha Gal Syndrome

Where did you find out about your tick population? And your daughter can no longer eat red meat?

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