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Cake day: February 22nd, 2024

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  • VirtualOdour@sh.itjust.workstoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlParent to Moderate YouTube
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    2 months ago

    I’d be interested in examples of what he watchs, it’s hard to know how to respond otherwise.

    I think you’re probably worrying too much though, I watch all sorts of junk on YouTube largely because I enjoy finding out how other people think more than it constanrly changing my opinion - sure he’s young and doesn’t have the same level of awareness as an adult but also nothing in his life will actually matter for about 5 more years so a few bad opinions aren’t the end of the world.

    When he says ‘I don’t know’ maybe you should believe that’s how he really feels, feed into it a bit and as painful as this might be for you admit that you don’t know either - life is full of confusing shit and honesty half the stuff I see I don’t even know how I feel about it or if it’s true, sane, or sensible. I’m sure he knows loads of interesting things going on in the world that you’re totally unaware of so let him tell you about it, be interested and accepting while in a non-dogmatic way rasising doubts where appropriate or simply tell a story from your own life that explains your doubts - not like ‘I’m old and know better’ but more friendly and demonstrating it’s normal to not know who to trust or what’s valid.

    Positive reinforcement of doubt and distrust is important, demonstrate that you understand he’s learning about the world and its absurdities and complexities, laugh about some of it WITH him rather than making him feel like you’re saying ‘the stuff you watch is dumb and you’re dumb for watching it’ because understanding others is FAR more important in life than knowing the truth about obscure subjects, hard pill to swallow maybe but it’s true.

    Your seven points you worry about are well and good but media doesn’t do that, politicians don’t do that, corporations don’t do that, life partners and lovers don’t do that, friends don’t do that, I bet YOU don’t do that… To live in this world we’ve got to learn how to take the important bits and leave the rest, we’ve got to learn why people do the things they do and that’s only possible with a big messy database in our heads of all the different types of people out there.

    It sounds from the way you speak like you’ve given him a good grounding in logical, sensible, and scientifically literate discourse which is great but now his brain yearns to understand more of the world - why is everything so crazy and weird? why do people who seem nice sometimes do crazy and hurtful things? Why does this girl say such odd things, does she like me or hate me? These are questions you can only start to answer by understanding people and things you don’t believe in.

    I listened to endless craziness like Alex Jones, 5Live, loveline, all sorts of brain rot shit - never once did I think Adam Carolla was anything but [string of words now forbidden] though he was funny, it was fun to listen to and entertaining, I learnt a lot about the world from callers and even Adam though he certainly never did a single one of your seven virtues.

    Yes maybe the entertainment is more important than the content of their arguments, being able to know the truth is useful but being able to entertain friends, girlfriends, bosses and authority figures is what can turn a hard life into a great and easy one.


  • Part of the problem with arguments like that is if you say ‘trans women are not widely represented in women’s jails’ they can say ‘yeah but the left want to change that with self ID and all the other things they push for’ so really the only point you’ve made in their mind is that its good the people pushing these things aren’t in power.

    Surely no one can deny that the lefts messaging has been that a trans person should be able to enter any gendered space without question? You never see trans advocates say ‘yes creepy men pretending to be women to gain access to female spaces is a legitimate problem which we intend to protect against by…’ they say ‘its not a problem, will never be a problem and anyone who says it might be is evil and stupid and bad’

    Everyone knows a lot of men are creepy, everyone knows that there are rapists who if able to get put into a woman’s jail would jump at the chance - if one side is going to pretend these aren’t true simply because it makes the rest of their belief on the issue difficult to explain then that’s not on the normies who don’t accept it without question.

    Up until the run up to the election the UK labour party for example pledged self ID legislation would be made law and there was huge outcry from trans advocacy groups when they changed their mind - you can’t argue that something you’re trying to make happen isn’t a problem because it doesn’t yet happen.




  • The sad truth is that the right are pandering to homophobia because it’s a vote getter for them not because they really care about it.

    A huge portion of religious people believe that homosexuality is an especially dangerous sin because it’s a social contagion, they see the increased popularity of gay things and the decreased respect for religion as a clear sign that the devil is winning and faithful, godfearing society is collapsing. To an extent they’re right, modern views on self determination and respect for others is anathema to Christian society as it’s been for over a thousand years - to the faithful it’s like saying the sky is pink or fish live in trees.

    There are of course now grifters using homophobia to draw people into their political ideologies but it’s generally people from homophobic families in homoohobic communities that get drawn into it, it’s easy to forget that when you see a twenty something year old kid making homophobic comments it’s likely at his age his dad was going ‘queer bashing’ for fun with his friends and certainly wouldn’t have hesitated to beat up a gay person in a bar or in the street if encountered.

    Even big artists like Eminem had deeply homophobic messages in his music, now that’s backtracked and he’s friends with Elton - this isn’t entirely because he’s grown as a person but because at the start of this century it was unconscionable that rap or hip hop could be anything but homophobic. School kids used the word ‘gay’ to describe uncool or disliked things so commonly it was even part of my own vocab despite being raised in a progressive and accepting family in a liberal area.

    Things have changed so much just in my adult lifetime but it’s not universal, a lot of religious and conservative people see the ‘gay agenda’ exactly as you see the ‘homophobic agenda’ in that they believe it’s political narrative being pushed just to destabilize morally virtuous power structures to allow corrupt and evil people to take power and steal money.

    Companies that shoehorn a poorly written gay character into everything for the sake of inclusivity feel like a pandering cash grab to me but to the homophobic Christian it feels like asymmetric warfare from a deranged and selfish elite hellbent on ruining western society.

    It’s a hugely complex issue for me, I honestly have no idea what the best thing for the greater good is. Forcing things too hard can be painful for those unready which causes resentment and reaction but holding back and allowing non-violent homophobic behavior to exist in our society is hurtful to those struggling to find snd accept themselves. (For example being 17 and trying to reconcile popular music explicitly talking about how your unexplored sexual desires are disgusting, realizing you have to make the choice between humiliation and self denial - and this is probably a big part of other emotional troubles which can lead to rejection of otherwise sensible social norms leading to unhealthy drug use, self endangering behavior and other things that still have lasting damage to my life to this day)

    I don’t know what will solve these complex issues in our society, maybe making certain concessions to mildly homophobic sections of society would stop driving them into full on culture war crusaders? Maybe highlighting that it’s not only possible but probable to be gay and boring would help ease the anxiety? I actually kinda think straight pride type events and companies pandering to heterosexuals could be normalized and accepted more - not in a way that pits them against everyone else but more of a everyone gets a party kinda way. Stop heteros feeling attacked or at least make those who want to paint that picture looking silly.

    It’s sad to admit but humanity is naturally kinda selfish and shitty, bigotry and group thinking is as natural and easy to us as breathing while compassion and understanding takes effort and the right circumstances to flourish.









  • This is a fascinating one.

    Some things to consider, a toddler can easily defeat a baby but a 40 and 45 year old are evenly matched. There’s also the question of how much is there to learn, at some point the tech tree is pretty much done - iron is much stronger than brass but maybe light-speed heavy plasma guns are pretty much maxed out and physics simply doesn’t allow more.

    This could result in interesting stalemates, a natural limit to the size of conflicts for example if it’s possible to maintain a defensive sphere that can withstand the maximum level of abuse that a circle of attackers can provide - any weapons platform too far back being unable to increase the force applied. We might get technologically perfect civilizations effectively combined to bubbles of influence around their power sources.

    What is possible is that at a certain level of tech we discover how to tap into the universal internet, aliens give us the rest of the answers to physics and philosophy then show us how to build VR gear so we can explore the cosmos in perfect VR and no one ever needs to build Dyson spheres or hyperwarp megastructures because we can do anything with a dark matter powered computanium smart phone.



  • When I was a kid people said the same about typing, homework has to be handwrittena because no boss will ever accept a typed report.

    We had the same when media studies became a lesson, everyone freaking out that kids learning to watch TV is stupid but of course that’s not what they’re getting taught - media literacy turned our to be a hugely important subject even for those that don’t go on to work in the huge and ever growing media sector.

    Teaching kids to use AI tools effectively is the same, you hear it and imagine ‘they put homework prompt into chatGPT and hand in the output’ it’s the same as imagining media studies as being nothing more than watching TV. AI is going to be an ever more present and useful tool in our lives so kids need to learn how to leverage and utilize it or they’ll be at a huge disadvantage.

    You can’t hold back time by denying your kid a full education, they need to know how to effectively use the tools everyone else will be using.