Just to be clear, you’re on board with America bombing Iran then? Their entire modern political identity has been based around American antagonism (or Great Satan if you prefer) and they’ve been tied by proxy to violence that has killed Americans.

Or if not, are we going to talk about how Taiwan has been consistently ranked among the top countries in democratic representation since the end of martial law nearly 40 years ago? Maybe this Taiwan authoritarian boogeyman is only being propped up by the PRC’s saber rattling?

If there wasn’t a constant threat across the water, we’d probably find that the Taiwan populace isn’t in favor of the war hawk conservatives but also isn’t in favor of reunification. But the status quo is better for everyone: China gets to keep its “liberation” card, Taiwan regressives get to keep their national security platform and the USA gets a plausible excuse to expand their military sphere of dominance.

Keep waving your team colors though 👍

It’s textbook sea lioning: asking for information you can easily find yourself as a civil question and now backing out of it to some other tangential sticking point.

The missile comment was a tongue in cheek reference to the third Taiwan strait missile crisis. Even worse than accidental, they just straight up said “[the missile tests] attacked the power of the ‘Taiwan separatists’”. There’s no way to reconcile that with your imagined warm and fuzzy peaceful-reunification world super power.

previous, highly oppressive, government to and is currently a vassal …

Ah there it is. Does an oppressive government give you free reign to attack the sovereignty of a neighbor? That sure smells a lot like America-style “liberation”. But of course when America does it we call it imperialist.

And spare me this cold war era quid pro quo defense. No superpower in history has ever been in such desperate straits that aggressive action against a minor power was critical to their security. It’s just a convenient excuse to play international power games.

Which neighbors is it threatening to invade?

“It’s not threatening to invade, we’re just coincidentally running an amphibious assault war game right across the strai-- oops don’t mind those missiles, shot those a little too far 🤭”

If you’re going to be a disingenuous sea lion at least skip to claiming “it’s a valid casus belli and blah blah blah”. It’d save us all a lot of time.

Receiver of Wrecks is a pretty metal title tho. If he’s telling me to do something I might listen

Sure, if you go in with the idea that the ban won’t impact their social media usage then it obviously follows that it won’t impact their usage. And that might be true for a while, but:

• Declining usage compounds and any barrier to entry drops users. Reddit wouldn’t be suing to stop this if they didn’t think it was a major threat to their platform.
• The single largest factor in platform membership is peer membership, and the most influential peers in adolescent development will always be real life friends
• A cohort aging up doesn’t mean that the next cohorts will automatically follow. Late millennials weren’t tied to Facebook, Gen Z wasn’t married to Snapchat, a drop in TikTok usage will eventually precipitate a need to migrate somewhere else
• Global social media usage, by human screen time, has been declining from its 2022 peak (excluding a North American exception), with the largest drop among younger users

Putting all of this together, it seems very plausible that child bans could hasten this decline. It would probably work twice as well if more public money was directed to alternatives (third spaces, clubs, etc…).

You can covertly buy and take illicit drugs all by yourself and have a good time. Bypassing a ban to get on a social platform with very few of your social peers is… pointless?

So what if you get to watch a tiktok from the other side of the world, none of the kids in your class are sharing that experience and building the peer pressure.

Sorry, wording was unclear. Their methodology was pulling everything in pubmed on “social media” or “social network”, “health”, and “pediatrics”. Nothing particularly biasing in either direction.

something you potentially have no sufficient alternative for should be denied.

Not having an obvious alternative ready doesn’t change the cost/benefit weight for society at large. Just because cars are the only way we have to navigate suburban sprawl doesn’t absolve them of being one of the worst modes of transport for safety, the climate, passenger efficiency, etc… We should be talking about radically restricting their use, not shrugging and trying a driver education bandaid.

For a laugh, a scoping review of social media and adolescent risks through 2022. Sure, plenty of questions on causality, but also quantitative articles on direct impacts to physical health and harmful exposure to constant ads. In dozens of articles, just 1 (one) article finding a positive socializing impact… I’m certainly leaning towards denial by default…

I’m trying to “use my damn brain”, I want genuine research showing this as a benefit that outweighs the numerous and well documented negatives that social media causes in children and young adults (depression, social isolation, body image issues, extremist and regressive worldviews, sleep and concentration issues, and on and on…).

If you can actually show me that it saves queer kids from oppression in a way that couldn’t be done via other methods (school programs, library funding, safe and child friendly neighborhoods, media representation, etc.) then maybe we shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bath water. Otherwise this is keeping the baby by voluntarily flooding your house with sewage.

Strangely enough, support networks can exist outside of social media. It’s very possible to directly message friends or neighbors without being subjected to the dregs of public social media. It remains possible to get world/local news without an attached public forum.

If you’re going to make a space that has content for adults and allows for free adult discussions (with all the nuance and complications that entails), then restrict it to adults only.

This is only a problem in conjuction with legislation requiring social media use (ie: as an official broadcast system, payment platform, electoral tool, etc…). If we fight that and force it to remain an opt-in disinformation platform then who cares?

As it currently stands nothing is forcing you on these platforms other than a conditioned familiarity. Even worse, there are no tech or legal protections preventing them uniquely identifying users today. Them getting an official state ID doesn’t change much. More barriers to entry for a shitty surveillance and propoganda platform? Literally no downsides there.

Wasn’t aware that social media keeps kids alive?..

I’ve seen enough stories on kids being cyber bullied into suicide that I really doubt there’s enough happy inclusion on these platforms to balance that.

That has to be one of the worst guillotine designs I’ve ever seen, send this child back to school.

• no mouton
• curve is simultaneously less effective than a diagonal and harder to make
• tiny contact point with groove on the narrow blade side, basically guaranteed to jump on the way down or slip on impact
• no head basket or splatter shield
• no bascule, good luck shifting that body kid
• no stabilizing supports

This thing is gonna paralyze the guy, send the blade flying into the crowd, and cause a slow bleed death (if any)

The down votes on your comment are a head scratcher. No matter what you as a parent (or even young men commenting in this thread) say, that perspective is shouted down as manosphere brainwash propaganda.

It’s almost like retrograde toxic masculinity. Vulnerable young dudes trying to explain why left messaging makes them uncomfortable are being told to man up/grow up/get over it.

I don’t disagree that the absurdly well funded and targeted indoctrination campaign is the reason for right wing success. But I think even without that influence you’d still get a generation of “apolitical” or left-skeptic men. That was always going to be the result of any attack against the patriarchy. The inability of progressives to predict that and keep them from going farther right was a massive blunder.

Edit: This is why progressive campaigns à la Mamdani or Bernie have been incredibly popular. Inclusive policies couched alongside clear economic benefits have always been the way to capture universal support. The neo-lib Democratic establishment thought they could have their cake and eat it too by cutting out the troublesome economic half.

In some sense, yes and that’s part of the problem. Not sure if you often talk to anyone <25 years old, but as you get older it becomes pretty obvious that they’re just not mentally or emotionally mature. It’s not their fault, the human physiology makes early life an extended formative period. They’re generally not good with nuance or introspection, that’s just how it is.

Take a girl and a boy into Twitter in the 2010s and they’re going to a wide array of diverse and complex viewpoints. The girl is immersed in #MeToo-style solidarity and relatively simple to digest slogans (pregnancy is scary and the left is pro choice, the left is pushing against toxic beauty culture, the left wants me educated and more than a housewife, etc…).

None of can really resonate the same with the boy. In fact, hyperbolic or nuanced slogans fly right over his undeveloped frontal lobe or even backfire (all men are bastards?, black lives matter?, who got cancelled for what?, no means no![usually?], etc…). That doesn’t force him into being a shitty conservative adult, but it definitely affects his politics in the same way that too-early exposure to porn affects someone’s adult sexual attitudes.

People scoff at the concept of treating men with “kid gloves”, but forget that the public internet includes kids. Dismantling the patriarchy is messy and difficult stuff, doing that in front of a generation of impressionable boys is how you end up with the graphs in the article. We’re just now seeing the first social media age repurcussions, but now imagine some younger voters where MAGA politics is the status quo…

Russia also has 4x the population of Ukraine, so the manpower issue is still notable on a relative scale.

The solution is to aggressively regulate the platforms, not the people posting. Saying dumb shit like “drink horse dewormer” is free speech; providing a platform to push that awful advice to millions of people is not a protected right.

I’ll take a crack at it:

• It’s a massive privacy/surveillance concern. Look at the issues that come with doorbell cams and now multiply the number of cameras and scatter them all over
• It’s another platform for mega corporations to track and sell data to advertisers or any malicious actors, but at an entirely new intrusive level. They no longer have to approximate what’s getting your attention when they literally know what has your attention. Good luck anonymizing or hiding your usage when you can’t spoof the real world in front of you.
• It’s unnecessary e-waste, at best providing the exact same functionality you’d get from your phone with the added benefit of… not reaching into your pocket? You still need a free hand to use it…
• It’s a distraction in a way that other tech can’t touch. Pedestrians/drivers getting notifications shoved directly into their eyes won’t end well.
• It probably has all the same inherent problems as previous generations of smart glasses. Primarily: your eyes aren’t designed for extended/repeated focus on an image less than an inch from your face and at the edge of your vision

I mean I can think of one thing: tell the truth one day and a bald faced lie the next. Repeatedly propping up a regime with one hand and denigrating it with the other causes deep fractures that you can’t get from a simple one sided attack.