youth have a right to be educated about the world regardless of what their parents/caretakers believe. youth have a right to learn accurate information about the world for themselves, including information that allows them to disagree with their parents/caretakers. we have got to destroy this mindset that everyone under 18 is essentially sentient playdough for parents to mold however they want and its violating “parent’s rights” to allow their children to be educated on basic facts of the world (like that queer people exist or that america is founded on genocide) because it would mean they lose the slightest bit of control over their child’s reality. imo schools have a moral responsibility to protect youth’s right to knowledge and freedom of thought over their parent’s “right” to control everything they know. your children should be allowed to fucking disagree with you, and restricting their access to knowledge in order to prevent that is abuse.
Damn, I mean you’re not wrong, but like. There’s a hard line to walk as a parent.
YouTube exists. And YouTube is wonderful. I make YouTube videos!
YouTube is also a singularly powerful pipeline that turns kids from video game fans (like all my kids are) into right-wing fashy little soldiers of oppression.
You start with YouTuber A and the algorithm slowly feeds you YouTuber B and by the time you’re on YouTuber Q, you’re full PizzaGate and none of the steps that got you here were THAT much worse than the one you took before.
This is obviously the EXACT opposite end scenario of the one you’re talking about. But preventing it does involve restricting some “information” (false information is still information).
Idk this is just something I personally struggle with.
That’s a fair point, but, like, kids are going to receive false information, whether it’s from YouTube, their classmates, their teachers, their guardians, or other authority figures. They will grow up under a flood of information from a huge variety of sources, and the best thing you can do is make sure they have the intellectual and emotional tools they need to figure out the truth for themselves.
Yeah exactly. It’s such a fucking crap shoot. And YouTube is just one I KNOW about because its failure as a platform has been so widely documented. I do my best, my kids are comfortable talking to me about most anything, I feel.
But like. Some people are like “Just make sure they have IRL friends!” Or “get them on a sports team!” I cannot force my kids to make friends, and any attempt usually makes things worse. Sports teams are RIFE with bullying—ask me how I know.
Some other commenter was like “The answer is to pressure YouTube to be a better platform!” Great. That will take how long? If it EVER happens? We’ve known YouTube is this way for at least a decade. It has not made a LICK of progress. Another decade, my kids will ALL be adults.
It’s all complicated. It’s all WAY WAY more complicated than anybody who comes out and says “Oh the solution is actually very simple: just do this!” And it just COMPLETELY doesn’t reflect the reality we live in as a family.
I honestly think my kids are going to be okay. I worry for families who have it slightly worse off than we do. And there are no easy solutions.
The secret here, I think, is to make sure your children know they can come to you with questions and you will respond without judgment. If they can come to you for anything, and know you will respond honestly, to the best of your knowledge, there’s no way for insidious crap to take root.
When my daughter was, oh, around ten, we were around the dinner table when she smugly announced she was pro-life because ‘it’s a child, not a choice.’ My husband nearly had apoplexy but I signaled to him that I would handle it. And I did, quietly and rationally, asking her why she believed that and giving her food for thought in terms she could understand. And I asked her what she would think if her own mother had had an abortion.
I have always tried my best to keep the lines of communication open and I think I have succeeded. She’s an adult now, an author and 911 operator with her own mind and opinions that closely parallel those of her father and I (but not exactly the same and that’s okay). I couldn’t be prouder of her.
In closed-off, close-minded, ultra-conservative families (and sometimes even in the most liberal ones), the lines of communication are not kept open and you get kids saying things like ‘my parents will kill me!’ for the most trivial of reasons. Those are the families and kids I worry most about. My kid had friends like that and she’s told me I was always considered the ‘cool’ parent because kids knew they could come to me and I would be there for them, no matter what. I hope what I did helped them in the long run.
Communication and love are key to raising smart, self-aware, careful kids. Without them, you get nothing but trouble.
North American golf courses have had 50-100 years of arsenic and mercury based fungicide and herbicides applied to their soils.
Do not eat anything that has been grown on a golf course or downstream from a golf course. I know it sounds cool and radical, but you are too valuable to poison yourself with heavy metals.
Protect each other, turn your local golf course into a pollinator garden, not a sex forest or community garden.
Op turned off reblogs but this take was so real it’s radioactive so I’m reposting
Here’s the text of the image:
Something you need to understand is that when capitalists say something “can’t be automated” what they mean is “it can be automated, but running a sweatshop is cheaper.”
Meanwhile, when workers say something “can’t be automated” they mean “maybe you can automate it but the results will be somewhere between ‘incredibly poor quality’ and 'turns people into meat paste’.”
Anyway I feel like that’s a distinction worth mentioning.
also im growing to hate the phrase “hold accountable” in discourse because its always so…. empty? like you see people saying “sure this person apologized, but we need to hold them accountable!” like cool. what does that mean. how can you get any more accountable than a public apology. do you want them to apologize… again? more? get a tattoo explaining their crimes so everyone they meet is informed? do you want accountability or are you repeating buzzwords because you cant find a nice way to say you just want them to disappear.
Did you guys know the “Sickos” artist made a Sicko thats a WGA screenwriter on strike (said comic artist is a The Onion satirist comic artist and his name is Stan Kelly)
ALT