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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 23, 2026

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The fucking problem with this shit is even if you don't let your kids have a smartphone with social media apps, if you send them to school, every single friend of theirs does and they use these social apps to communicate and bond and if your kid is the weirdo without one they feel unable to function socially and hate you every day for restricting them.

And further in defense of parents, it's hard to figure out how to square that circle. I don't have a good answer to it either. Aside from living in an Ultra Orthodox Jewish community, the balance between things like that are notoriously hard to navigate. One thing that's ironic though is that prolonged exposure to this trough of horseshit usually leads to 1 of 2 different outcomes. Either they become fully absorbed and consumed by the technology and become addicts glued to social media and everything else, or they become so desensitized to it, none of it has any appeal to them, they get bored and tired of it and just tune it all out and barely notice it anymore; if they even did to begin with. Some years back I read a mathematics textbook that was written on the kind of "recommender systems" that Amazon uses. If you count that as "advertising" as some might, then I'm somewhat susceptible to it because I've actually found it to be useful as a sort of consumer bibliographer of related items. But in my own case when it comes to traditional advertising, I came to the original, latter conclusion and I think it's for the better. And that came naturally, not through any sort of parental supervision. I grew up during the time with there were still all these turbulent changes and things didn't settle into where they are currently.

I've often wondered for instance how the advertising industry calculates the success of it's marketing campaigns because I've 'never' thought of myself as someone who's susceptible to advertising. I do my research and due diligence in advance. Walk into the store immediately to buy what it is I already did my homework on and leave. I block out all forms of advertising. I ignore everything else without any effort. Maybe it's just a personality thing. Some cats you dangle a ball of yarn in front of and they snatch onto it and get wrapped up in the whole thing. Other cats get annoyed, get up and move and go back into hibernation mode. That was me.

The old saw about advertising is that only 50% of it works; but there's no way of knowing which 50%.