The internet is a commercial, mass media space, in large parts an entropy machine, where you're unlike in the library backroom are always under surveillance, where it's not you actively engaging with books but the internet engaging with you. A library is a repository of knowledge (which is not the same as information or "data") the internet is a dark forest where some pretty eldritch entities are always on the lookout for someone to pounce on.

Kids can be free in the library because, as to the title of the thread, there's always a librarian. There's no heroin needles on the tables. You buy the freedom of the library by it being an ordered and protected space.

There is no comparison possible between algorithmic surveillance capitalist social media, and a library.

I'll expand a bit on my perspective to avoid just sealioning here:

Where I've come across proposals for policies like actual age verification is in the "social media is bad for kids" milieu. I'm extremely skeptical that these proposals are workable purely technically, but ignoring that, I have some sympathy for the concept. I do think that kids mainlining TikTok and YouTube Shorts and PornHub is really bad.

So having cleared my throat, I'm back to wondering about your comment. How, in your view, is this kind of policy "protecting parents at the expense of children"?

If you think TikTok is bad because it promotes unhelpful or malicious advice around body standards, that's one thing. (See: bigorexia getting promoted into the DSM)

If you think TikTok is bad because it puts children under a lens, that's another thing.

If you think TikTok is bad because it exposes contrarian viewpoints that are not available on your television, like, say, something Gaza related, then that's yet another thing.

They all have a “class chat”, and it is used daily for relentless cyber bullying. The current trend TikTok is pushing this month is to push the boundaries of calling black kids the n-word without explicitly saying the word. There is one little black girl in his class.

He says every class is the same, horror ideas pushed by edge lords TikTok algos push on the kids. Relentless daily bullying. And unlike bullying on the playground or at the boys and girls club.. there is no realistic way for adults to intercede beyond disconnecting their kid, shutting them out of the social context entirely.

but can your brother setup a class chat that he moderates?

I'm working on a simple chat app in Go as a learning project [0], you're welcome to use that, but honestly there are almost certainly better solutions out there, which he can actively moderate. Maybe a WhatsApp group, or something that can be used by a web interface (old forum techs?)

Group chats can be nice, I'm part of several acroyoga group chats and they're lovely, probably because adults who practice acroyoga tend to be nicer than middle schoolers.

[0] https://codeberg.org/achenet/go-chat

Interestingly the exact example you gave is something I can see happening when I was a kid as well as now.

Bullies gunna bully.

But: all other things equal, of I get to pick between “10-year-olds primary daily public forum is completely, cryptographically, devoid of any moderating adult presence whatsoever” and - what I had - 10-year olds have privacy but there are adults around that have a chance at picking up that things are going off the rails”

But I don't relate to any of the reasons you listed. I think TikTok is bad for two reasons:

1. It is controlled by the government of China, and I don't trust them to avoid influencing Americans with propaganda.

2. It is bad in the same ways as all other social media.

What are the Chinese supposed to do here, influence the US to give up their manufacturing edge by outsourcing all the capital formation to Asia? Waste their economic surpluses on endless war? Promote political division by pretending that the president is an agent of a foreign country? The US political process throws up a startling number of own goals. The Chinese aren't savvy enough to outdo the US domestic efforts.

Propaganda aimed at your enemies isn't about achieving any specific goal, it is about obtaining potential advantage. It's an investment, the same as funding a startup but with much broader success criteria.

Your comment here belies the benefit because at its core is the most dangerous assumption: I am too smart to affected by propaganda.

The vague "obtaining potential advantage" is unreasonable. An advantage at what? China doesn't benefit from the US suffering, much like the US has actually benefited a huge amount from Chinese prosperity.

> Your comment here belies the benefit because at its core is the most dangerous assumption: I am too smart to affected by propaganda.

Quite the contrary; We're supposed to be affected by what we listen to. But I'm not smart enough to figure out what the Chinese think without going and listening to and reading things written by Chinese people and pushed by people with Chinese perspectives. We're not psychic and the Western media are also unreliable. Listening to diverse news sources is important. Particularly since the truth is often the most effective form of propaganda.

by making the main characters of a movie American, and giving them positive traits, you're 'obtaining a potential advantage' for every American that travels abroad is associated with positively portrayed fictional characters, or in biopics, historical characters.

Zero Dark Thirty is perhaps the most egregious example of this, with the CIA consulting and the film depicting that the information leading to Osama Bin Laden's location was extracted under torture from an inmate (it was not).

Many American films are not even casually not propaganda. The way you think about the US military is shaped and influenced by the influence the US military gets from fronting money, consulting and equipment appearances to appear in Hollywood films (with sometimes some weird consequences - for example they refused to back The Avengers because they felt SHIELD undermined the portrayal of the US, but were happy to back The Winter Soldier because in that SHIELD isn't the US DoD and goes down).[1]

[1] https://gamerant.com/marvel-military-propaganda-explained/

China is (at best) a frenemy of the US. Allowing a rival to push propaganda onto your children is foolhardy.

It has nothing to do with whether Chinese propaganda is worse than US propaganda.

I don't recall historical instances where that was a major problem. The closest analogue would be the cold war, where US propaganda successfully got the USSR to switch to democracy (a move that, ultimately, was to the benefit of the people). The Soviet counter-propaganda was ultimately unconvincing and everyone agrees that Communism was a disaster - even the people who lived in communist communities as children.

It is too hard to come up with a 20- or 30-year propaganda campaign that has meaningful impacts, the results are fundamentally unclear because everyone will have different policies in 30 years. If anyone knew how to reliably change societies through propaganda we'd already be using that technique in the west to align everyone to capitalism instead of having the constant socialist regressions that keep cropping up.

Propaganda is effective for specific political decisions in the short term when targeted at adults. Over the longer term it has impacts that are hard to foresee and impossible to control, for good or ill.

> It has nothing to do with whether Chinese propaganda is worse than US propaganda.

It sounds important when you phrase it like that. Why listen to worse propaganda?

Besides; that has nothing to do with children. The Nazis didn't last an entire generation. They weren't trying to propagandise children, they targeted adults.

> And the Chinese government would never let a US company own any of their influential media networks.

Again, Chinese media policy is an example of bad policy - I would advocate doing the opposite of them in that sphere. They're authoritarians. We want to intentionally copy their industrial policies after careful consideration.

Also:

> They weren't trying to propagandise children, they targeted adults.

I'm not sure I've ever read a more historically illiterate statement.

If you don't believe state diplomacy is related to propaganda, then I think I should be even more insistent about asking what, exactly, do you feel the Chinese are supposed to do here? They're going to swoop in, "influence" everyone, and then it will have no impact on US-China relations. Maybe you believe it will have a huge impact on industrial policy?

(Possibly resulting in the US adopting a policy of outsourcing production to China? I might ask in a more mischievous mood).

> I'm not sure I've ever read a more historically illiterate statement.

That isn't the strongest argument I've seen today. bobthepanda's point still seems accurate - you haven't nailed down specific concerns, as far as I can see you've just identified that Nazis were foreign and China is untrustworthy [0] ergo the Chinese can't own a US media company. I'm not even convinced that is the wrong outcome, but the concern doesn't seem to be principled to much as you're just abstractly worried about foreign views without much reference to what they are or what impact they'll have.

[0] I see an irony here - the Nazis were implacably opposed to the Chinese communists on at least two ideological points - the Communism and the Chineseness.

>>> They weren't trying to propagandize children, they targeted adults.

>> I'm not sure I've ever read a more historically illiterate statement.

> That isn't the strongest argument I've seen today.

They had a propaganda organization called The Hitler Youth. Either you were unaware of that or you're arguing in bad faith.

Either way, I don't think you're a serious person.

The Hitler Youths weren't the result of foreign propaganda, they were Germans consuming German propaganda. I'm not sure why you think that is relevant. If you want to bring them in to the argument, note that they'd probably have done a lot better if they were exposed a bit more to foreign propaganda rather than a steady diet of home-grown muck that the Nazis were feeding them. The Nazis had a pretty serious groupthink problem that led to the eradication of their entire ideology and left Germany devastated for decades; they desperately needed persuasive external opinions in their society.

It would take a lot more than TikTok and some propaganda efforts to establish something equivalent to the Hitler Youth in the US; it was their equivalent of the Democrat/Republican party feeder systems - building a political machine. That takes on-the-ground work, many years and is extremely visible (not to mention quite delicate).

> You're using fancy language and fancy-seeming arguments that don't engage in the actual argument being made, but instead are designed to distract while changing the subject. This kind of argumentation is called sophistry.

You're probably in a state of cognitive dissonance. Unable to articulate why you worry about foreign propaganda your mind isn't latching on to a pretty basic challenge of articulating what you think the problem is. It'll pass, nothing wrong with being surprised and it doesn't make you a bad person.

No, the runner up country in the AI race with a vested interest in undermining the USA should not, as a matter of reasonable statecraft, have mainline access to the algorithmic media feed of the nation's youth...

Same goes for cults, calling something a cult doesn't automatically mean it is an organisation dedicated to destroying itself. Some cults are organised by people who ultimately want their community to be successful and hold extremely worthwhile values. Too much authoritarianism will be a disaster but nuclear families are a good compromise position where there is just a dash of authority in the small.

(I’m already responding more thoughtfully in other areas of this thread, so won’t regurgitate the same points here)

That gets in the way of Empire and economic flexibility.

Has it? I thought most colonies relied on corporate families.

If a parent's control over a child is subverted it doesn't change the relationship or family structure.

Citation needed!

My read of history is that it’s the single most stable and ubiquitous human social arrangement by a very long shot.

eg:

  Some sociologists and anthropologists consider the extended family structure to be the most common family structure in most cultures and at most times for humans, rather than the nuclear family.

which also provides the common use definitions:

  A nuclear family (also known as an elementary family, atomic family, or conjugal family) is a term for a family group consisting of parents and their children (one or more), typically living in one home residence.

  It is in contrast to a single-parent family, a larger extended family, or a family with more than two parents.

  Contemporary trends such as increased one-parent families, high divorce rates, second marriages and homosexual partnerships have all contributed to variations in the traditional family structure.

  But to what degree has the function of the family changed and how have these changes affected family roles in cultures throughout the world? This book attempts to answer these questions through a psychological study of families in thirty nations, carefully selected to present a diverse cultural mix.

  The study utilises both cross-cultural and indigenous perspectives to analyse variables including family networks, family roles, emotional bonds, personality traits, self-construal, and 'family portraits' in which the authors address common core themes of the family as they apply to their native countries.

  From the introductory history of the study of the family to the concluding indigenous psychological analysis of the family, this book is a source for students and researchers in psychology, sociology and anthropology.

EDIT: If you're arguing mixture of experts works better, than sure, I got you, if your arguing that there's a more non-binary way to do the self replication, that's a harder road to hoe. At least if you want to do it for free, which has a better track record of working for most people.

The nuclear family was an oddity that developed in England concomitant to the Industrial Revolution in middle-class families for whom occupational relocation was common. It was enshrined as an ideal sociological familial arrangement in the United States because its normalization was conducive for developing larger pools of productive labor.

As opposed to pseudo-Confucius China where larger pools of productive labor naturally formed?

That doesn't take away anything from the fundamental point where it's the smallest self-replicating unit, logic on behalf of the participants has nothing to do with it because it works out the gate. Of course it isn't the best, it was developed during a time of struggle and turmoil a la the industrial revolution (for the rural poor), it won because it was the the most resilient model (small, mobile, reactive, etc) to hard times.

Edit: I said developed, if formed is a word that helps you understand that it's not conscious then here you go

Its really tertiary education and suburbia that undermined the corporate family, atomising it. The Atomic family is modern.

Long lasting societies have a larger formal weave based on outworking and out breeding, formally moieties in the indigenous peoples of North America, Australia, Indonesia and elsewhere.

A single family unit alone is insufficient and historically cycles members in and out over half a generation through marriage and fortune seeking.

I've seen your other comments and they have that kind of first order depth expected of a simple thought and looking things up quickly on a phone.

Here's a very shallow introduction to a family of systems with many variations that lasted some 70 thousand years keeping bloodlines clean: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moiety_(kinship)

The comment chain you replied to said it's a stable and ubiquitous arrangement. You're not trying to argue it's stable or even that it's an arrangement - you're just arguing it can be found within a larger structure. It's as if someone said cliques and anticliques aren't good designs for computer networks, and you said yes they are, because every network of a certain size contains a clique or an anticlique by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramsey%27s_theorem - that may be true but it's incidental.

It's also as if someone is saying that Java isn't best at functional programming, and you pointed out that yes it is, because look at all the functions calling other functions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_in_ancient_Rome

You had the familia, which was similar to the current nuclear family, but that was wrapped into the larger gens

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gens

people cared not just about the success of their intermediate family, but also their gens, which was similar to a clan.

You'll have similar structures in many tribal societies.

Do you have actual statistics to support your hypothesis that

> My read of history is that it’s the single most stable and ubiquitous human social arrangement by a very long shot.

besides just "oh yeah bro, it's my read of history bro, totally rigorous"?

I am willing to bet you will be fairly shocked at how recent it is, given your comment.

Nuclear family has never had primacy - look at wild, dangerous places, primacy is held by extended family, clans, tribes or mafia.

‘Nuclear family primacy’ exists only In carefully crafted stable and safe societies, and another authority must exist to organise military-age men for matters of war and survival.

Thus nuclear family can only exist as we know it, in a partially undermined condition.

>throughout most of human history, people grew up with their mother, father, and siblings being the most important people in their lives.

Throughout most of history people grew up with their mother, 3 aunts, their dad, 5 uncles, and grandparents if they are lucky, learning the single trade of their entire family. The "Nuclear" family is the atomisation of this corporate family through modern practices (Finance, Tertiary Education, Suburbia)

I’m a simple man, so I like to use the dictionary when there’s a disagreement about what something means. In this case, my phone’s dictionary, which cites the Oxford American dictionary as its source, has the definition of ‘nuclear family’ as “a couple and their dependent children, regarded as a basic social unit” and I’m not seeing how anything I wrote is in disagreement with that.

Sure, people often grow up with other relatives. But we have other terms for them, which belies their reduced importance in our lives vs our parents and siblings.

I feel like you have conflated the nuclear family (a method of organising the basic social unit of a society) with "The importance of parents". The nuclear family simply isnt the only basic social unit with parents in it.

>nuclear families are so pervasively important

Parents are very important. The nuclear family does not have a monopoly on parents.

Kids that don’t grow up with their parents do not learn them as first words. Kids that do grow up with their parents, often still learn something else as their first words.

Learning X as your first word does not prove that X is a foundational unit of society, it simply does not follow.

This doesnt agree with anything I said lmao. A corporate family is much larger than a nuclear family.

>Sure, people often grow up with other relatives.

Not in the same house, as the basic social unit.

But past a toddler age, in a large clan-like structure, if your father and the clan's patriarch give you conflicting orders, who do you obey?

This question is moot in a nuclear-family society, with relatives beside father and mother minding their own children, and not more.

Good question, here’s one for you: if your father and a police officer give you conflicting orders, who do you obey?

The existence of a layer cake of social units doesn’t argue against the primacy of the nuclear family. Here’s another question for you: who’s more likely to advocate for your interest, your father or the clan’s patriarch?

This goes to show that you, along with many other commenters here, do not grasp the concept because it’s so different from your experience.

Extended family would often raise your kids, I know a person that was taken away by extended family as a child because the father had anger management issues.

They are not functionaries like police, they actually share responsibility. In case of conflict, loyalty is highly situational. And if your mother dies, they would be expected to take you in, even if your father is alive and well.

Yeah, but the default was for them to be raised by their nuclear family.

Like with low birth rates, this appears to stem more from modernity than anything else. Both Western and non-Western societies placed more of an emphasis on extended families in the past, and both have placed less of an emphasis on them as they've modernized. Western societies have been at the forefront of a lot of modern changes, so these changes were more noticeable in them.

But then one day you have a government that, say, starts mining the IRS databases to pass that information along to ICE for arrest prospects...

Once it's recorded, you not only have to trust the current government, but all future governments as well.

That immediately paves the way for expansion of those restrictions.

We see that currently with efforts to "protect the children" by limiting access to things like porn. It's reasonable on it's face but immediately gets weaponised to start banning access to any content that isn't gender or sex normative.

There is a very intentional framing of "protecting children" while book bans are really targeting what are more fairly described as "young adults". The goal is of course ensuring young adults are only exposed to a certain world view.

I'm not saying exposure to such material doesn't risk traumatizing a child or even an adult, or that I am entirely untraumatized by what I've seen, but it still pales in comparison to the violence I faced at home. The problem is that it's like abstinence or prohibition: If such material is legally restricted, when people do encounter these materials, it won't be in a safe environment and the risk for trauma is much greater. To be clear, I do understand that some people fetishize violence, but I believe this risk is also greater if there is not a safe avenue for understanding the darkest sides of humanity.

But on the subject of compulsion: there is definitely a line where utility is not worth the trauma, but as a child I was shown images of the Holocaust, of emaciated and abused Jews, and that has influenced me to now be against Israel and their continued holocaust against the Palestinian people, so I'm quite thankful for that.

In general, because school introduced me to it, I read quite a lot of Holocaust-related literature in my free time, both fiction and nonfiction, and that led me to learning about ongoing genocides and neoliberal violence-backed economic power struggles, and identifying with other oppressed people across the globe, greatly influencing my politics and turning me into the exact kind of person that my current state considers radical and would love to imprison and extract slave labor from.

Not everyone has this reaction, because what they have been exposed to shapes how that content will affect them.

Specifically people who have been victims of serious assault or even witnessed that can have a much worse, and irreversible reaction to you when seeing things that make those memories come to the fore as recurrent, intrusive thoughts, which then affect their behavior and lives. That is really what the restriction of content should be about if anything: helping people avoid things they want to avoid.

The people who have struggled (especially at a young age) with real trauma often come across as distant, quiet or anti-social; sometimes they never were so before. But often, our community where this behavior is more normalized, is where those people come, even if they don't have a primary interest in the community, to feel normal again, while still feeling fearful or full of empathy. You may have trauma, or not, depending on what violence you faced. However, even with violence, people react in wildly different ways, for one, women are much more anxious and cautious after feeling at risk or violated than men, so you really cannot assume that how you feel represents how a woman would (for evolutionary sensible reasons). Meanwhile, men often suppress their emotions (at a truly deep level, killing their relationships).

The problem with saying that prohibition necessarily means they will encounter the material in an unsafe environment is that, someone who has been assaulted or abused is already in an unsafe environment, everywhere, in their mind, and for legitimate and rationale reasons. The world is different when you know police will generally not deeply investigate a serious crime, when one has been personally been conducted against you. Seeing content like that, can prolong or make permanent that state of being, which can leave to bad and convoluted consequences later on. It is easier to understand this if you have children or have seen real pain and suffering with someone you love too, that can give you the empathy to understand this reaction.

It is hard to understand psychological damage unless you or someone you truly love and have strong empathy with goes through it. Until then, it's hard to understand or imagine at all how other people might be affected by some things. They will not always have your reaction to content which is extreme. I do not agree with prohibition, but do consider that others can have different reactions to you, ones you possibly cannot imagine.

Put another way, many times, we label content extreme not because it is extreme for everyone. We label it, because for some group of people, at some point, it could set their own lives back a lot to encounter it, and these people are already suffering more than the average person. It's about helping them avoid more pain.

Obviously this does not apply to all content, but for your examples, it does. Do not imagine there are not blue collar workers who have seen close friends suffer similar pain to the fate you mention, haunted by it. Men who would break at the knees at the sight of that kind of video. There are. You brush shoulders with them on the street. We can understand the dark sides of humanity through history and the written word (which I believe should be fully unrestricted), but not everything needs the very human, memory-provoking visual element.

People would get in less street fights and do less dumb shit if they knew what the world was like. The cartels are not your friend, falling and hitting your head can kill you, wearing a seatbelt is mandatory, there are no winners in armed conflict, factory farming is not ethical, etc.

People that say these things, but they don't truly understand them until they see it.

It’s very easy to fetishise war when you have not seen the grim barbarity of true conflict.

It’s not like the movies, and we should not think of it as a desired or easily entered venture.

Street/Knife fights are another, I’ve seen them first hand and its impressive how mundane things or subtle movements are actually just lethal. There’s a saying that “The winner of a knife fight is the one who dies at the hospital” but even glib phrases like this are not enough to prepare you.

Kids would be less keen to join gangs if they saw the brutality before thinking they might get cool points.

I also dont get why whenever I bring this up I am immediately asked if I have kids and whether I would support some random fascist book being shelved.

Censoring raw information seems like such a seppo thing and I really dont want it imported.

The primary difference is that in a library or bookshop there are competing ideas right there in the same room. A curious mind will develop critical thinking skills. There are also curators who care about something other than making money - they're playing a long game, so will apply quality/safety filters.

This is opposite to the algorithms, which in the name of monetization needs to pull you down into a rabbit hole, an echo chamber void of contradiction, a spell of indoctrination and affirmation of your own Worldview.

Fiction, in particular, is a useful abstraction to grow emotional intelligence in hand with critical thinking. It allows - no, it demands - you develop a sense of empathy and live a life in someone else's shoes. You can then bring that experience back to your own idea of self and your place in the World.

There's a lot of money in putting ads next to content teaching a kid who feels sad that they should kill themselves. I have absolutely no doubt that the World would be a better place if people were inclined to read books instead of hang out on social media, even if those books did contain dangerous ideologies.

So, maybe it's time to revise your stance.

Control we got.

Parenting time is up 20-fold (few hours/week->24/7adulting) from my parents generation (silent gen).

Consequently, compared to my parents, I (gen x) had 20x the control over my what my kids were exposed to.

Parenting was exhausting for me. My kids spent their entire childhood in adult-populated, adult-curated boxes. They were denied the regular hours of adult-free, free-range time, where I developed my most of my life skills.

But as a parent, I had pretty exclusive control over what my 5 sons were exposed to.

> A curious mind will develop critical thinking skills.

This is the linchpin of the debate.

What if the first book you read at a critical age insists that it alone is true, and that other books should be distrusted at risk of harms to yourself? Say, the Christian Bible.

It is absolutely possible -- unlikely, given the subjects of most books, but possible -- to have harmful information encoded in a book.

The question is then how to blunt those negative outcomes, at scale, democratically, without opening the door to arbitrary political interference of the day.

Diversity of opinion for me increased after I left school, and that's when I became more critical of the beliefs I held as a child. It's for that reason I think libraries are better than social media - social media is not just the equivalent of a religious tract that insists it is true, it actively prevents you from finding and considering contrary views all by yourself.

On what basis can they do this? No human is born with a magical algorithm in their brain that can sort good ideas from bad. The only scalpels we have are those which we collect. Critical thinking must be bootstrapped. Mind viruses must be inoculated against. Just because you (eventually!) threw off your case of memetic measles, doesn't mean that everyone does. Some people die of it.

Because it's a work of fiction and since it's missionary, it is exactly the kind of work which aims to suppress critical thinking in order to lock the reader into a particular world view for the rest of their lives.

I also did not find it prevented me from changing my World view as I grew up. I am not a practicing christian today, but I do think that many christian parables have helped make me a more rounded, generous and thoughtful human being. I am certainly quite likely more empathetic and loving than many others around me.

Read it as a work of fiction and don't be afraid of it "converting you" into a a robot remotely controlled by the pope. You might be surprised.

We can quibble about whether or not dogmatic interpretations are in the original work or were layered on top by the organized church, but at the root of both is the idea that some things must be believed without questioning.

Up and down this thread there are notes about people who were raised in a religious tradition and then branched out -- that's great, but you all are also the exceptions.

There are far more people who believe what they're told, as a consequence of religious indoctrination, until the day they die.

And because of that, on the whole, the Bible (as used in modern Christianity) is anti- free thought.

> aims to suppress critical thinking in order to lock the reader into a particular world view for the rest of their lives.

There are a myriad of books that present their POV as absolute truth. Some of them aren't even in the dreaded fiction section! Most books don't end every statement with, "I could be wrong though, do your own research."

A bit off topic, but I find it interesting that the Christian Bible is always the example of a "bad" book, when there are other, very popular, religions whose books literally tell them that non-adherents are worthy only of a grisly death.

If it were a Venn Diagram, the circle of the people subject to the other 'big' religious books would have very little intersection with the set of the people who frequent this forum. It follows then that they would get far less criticism, since there's so much less exposure.

Step 1 of teaching people to uncritically accept crappy ideas is to remove all references to anything that contradicts them. Maybe it's time to revise your stance?

I agree that it's hard to see your own ideological commitments without seeing alternatives. Yet allowing any and all ideologies the same opportunities to compete for public attention is clearly problematic. You don't want to wait until flat-earth theories and holocaust denial go fully mainstream to start to nuance your no-standards policy.

In that case, how do you know the rational ones won out in you?

It's always other people getting brainwashed we worry about, right?

That said, we shouldn't then count all our present knowledge as worthless and any and all kinds of information as equally valid and worthy of dissemination.

I do get your fear - censorship is a dangerous tool that is not always used responsibly. Yet abandoning any kind of social self-regulation in what information circulates publicly sounds a lot more dangerous.

   A little learning is a dangerous thing;
   drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
   there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
   and drinking largely sobers us again.

What's the difference between Alex Jones preaching antivaxism on his internet podcast that you listen to, or in a book that you read?

They don’t get updated with the latest emotional hot button issues so they just can’t stomp on emotional triggers as well. It’s much easier to digest arguments and see the errors when you can reread them. They don’t take long to read so they don’t clog up access to other sources.

Rebuttals are targeting a specific argument so you can’t just keep throwing up intellectual chaff.

I read Atlas Shrugged as an impressionable young teen, and developed some pretty horrible notions about society and morality (and literary technique) as a result. Of course I saw the error of my ways, in no small part by reading other books!

Don't get me wrong, books-as-propaganda isn't necessarily bad. Animal Farm, 1984, To Kill a Mockingbird... These are brilliant but are also such effective forms of propaganda that even mentioning their titles is a form of propaganda in itself.

I think that shows their weaknesses. Propaganda seems to work best when reinforced over long periods. People read a book and get really into something for a while, X is now the one true diet! However, I rarely see longer term shifts without something else reinforcing the ideas.

By comparison the US military has been subsidizing media who want access to military hardware for decades as long as they follow a few guidelines. It’s a subtle drip of propaganda but across America and much of the globe people’s perception has very much been influenced in an enduring fashion. No single episode of talk radio or Fox News is particularly effective but listen for years and you get a meaningful effect.

I would be more worried about you developing a terrible sense of narrative and character development. I would kill for a well written ancap paradise book (there are plenty of Ancom options) but it honestly just sucks as a piece of writing I cant get into it.

In my experience, consumers of propaganda respond to emotional and social cues. They rarely ever review the information provided without social and emotional context. Its always a video or a rally or something.

Whenever we dismiss bad ideas out of hand rather than showing how they are bad we miss one chance to prove our stance, and we ever so slightly feed the notion that maybe they aren't bad, just called bad.

If the only book in your library is Mein Kampf, you are likely to empathise with young Mr. Hitler. If you have access to alternative viewpoints, you'll be forced to compare and contrast, and you just might develop your own understanding of the world.

But note that you'll always be comparing to the actual circumstances in your proximity: at school, neighbourhood, work...

Or that your average authoritarian Christian (or Muslim!) has read their holy books?

Fanatics may pretend, but rarely actually read. After all, it may conflict with their fanaticism.

They are happy to control what everyone else is able to read though.

Con: ostracized

You’re not the only one.

Considering Nazi propaganda, it used newspapers, radio and TV to a great effect. Mein Kampf alone did not turn Germans - a country of poets and scientist - to totalitarians.

I don't know what it's like in other parts of the world but I'd say in the UK there's a clear consensus that people shouldn't be able to incite violence - and that covers books.

Suicide and self-harm is a bit more tricky, there are books that deal with those topics that might be important to include in a curation depending on the context - e.g. the readers age and how vulnerable they are.

Feel like specifically defining these dangerous ideologies and explaining why you or anyone in a position of non-parental authority should be the people who get to decide if youth and kids are "exposed" (as if we were talking about some poisonous substance) to them and to what degree?

Same goes for self harm and suicide. Maybe these subjects should be added to a list of other things that young people's fragile little minds should be morally kept away from? Lot's of room for defining all kinds of literature, text and ideas as supposedly promoting self harm, or suicide. Better we keep things forcefully childish for young minds instead?

This shitty, tired story is very old and remains as stupid as it ever was. The dogmas and censorship fixations may vary but the people promoting them always pull out their tedious little "protecting children from harmful ideas" card as justification to then repress whatever doesn't suit their pet ideological obsessions.

If anyone should carefully consider their stance it's closet censors who can't stop thinking as you seem to.

I literally hung a lantern on this.

How are people meant to study propaganda and develop tactics to counter it if they cant go and read it.

Maybe its time to revise your stance?

That escalated quickly

And also I guess then we can't criticize politicians because we never ran for office, or judge a murderer because we never killed anyone. Like show me your graduation diploma from parent school that makes you a qualified expert on parenting and I'll concede the argument.

<< like we weren't all kids who had parents at some point.

When I was a young impressionable boy, I read through just about every book in our household. I remember "Painted Bird" by Kosinski making an impression and looking back it may have been inappropriate for my age. By today's standards, stuff there is nothing like the crap available to young minds.

I am fairly permissive, but I also do not simply allow my kid to browse the world wide web; stuff is heavily curated by me. In a sense, I am effectively replicating the approach of my parents adjusted for current tech.

edit: To be clear, librarians are effectively that world wide web, which means someone else is curating for you, which means you are bound to disagree on the actual output.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_censorship_in_the_United_...

This implies it's primarily or originally an American thing - ignoring literally thousands of years of censorship by countries all over the world, very likely including GP's own.

I just would have thought that a nation that's proud of its first amendment and build on the foundations of enlightment would not go down to the darkness where others for "literally thousands of years" had been.

I'm also not sure why you quoted that bit of my response - we have indeed been burning books for thousands of years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_burning

Its american "booktokers" trying to subdivide genre labels to filter out sex and sexuality.

Its americans writing angry reviews that characters had sex in a novel.

Its americans complaining that I would let my kid read any book, where socially no one gives a shit around me. (Be that LGBT content, or old fascist propaganda. Theres always a seppo waiting to tell you that you are """grooming""" a child with information)

Its americans creating sanitised versions of classic books """suitable""" for children

Really theres so much seppo moral panic shit these days that I have a very hard time taking anyone seriously who tries to both side this.

>ignoring literally thousands of years of censorship

I dont care about thousands of years of censorship, I simply don't want to import these stupid ideas from the land of the terminally braindead who currently champion them in some form or another.

The US supreme court appeared inclined to rule in favor of parents in Maryland seeking to keep their elementary school children out of certain classes when storybooks with LGBT characters are read, Reuters reports."

i see people often claim "the left" wants to ban fascist content, but reality just doesn't seem to back this up. im sure it happens sometimes, but i read this soooo often, that "the left" is running rampant to ban everything. this just doesn't seem to be based in any kind of reality--it seems like the exact opposite is true--maga governments around the country are feverishly, in reality, banning books as we speak. and a wild amount of these bans are because they're trying to suppress lgbtq, "woke", or poc content. deep red states are going to town banning books, the top 3 according to Pen [0] and pen's index of book bans which you can download here [1]:

- florida: 33 districts have banned 4561 books [1]

- iowa: 117 districts have banned 3671 books [1]

- texas: 12 districts have banned 538 books [1]

notorious liberal/left states don't seem to be attempting to ban content at all, and when they do, it seems like its in maga strongholds:

- california: 1 district has banned 2 books. this is escondido, the 11th most conservative city in *the country*. both banned books seem to be lgbtq. [1]

- washington: 0 book bans [1]

- illinois: 2 districts, 1 banned for lgbtq content, the other for racial justice content. [1]

- new york: the district that has banned books, clyde-savannah, voted overwhelmingly maga. [1]

- massachusetts: 1 district banned 1 book called "Woke: A Young Poets Call to Justice". [1]

- hawaii: 0 [1]

- rhode island: 0 [1]

again, compare this to florida, iowa, and texas who have 1000s of banned books across the states.

over 10,000 instances last year of book bans and i didn't find mein kampf in this list at all--while The Color Purple is one of the most banned. yeah, the novel The Color Purple...

[0] https://pen.org/report/beyond-the-shelves/

[1] https://pen.org/book-bans/pen-america-index-of-school-book-b...

Book banning and other "free speech" impediments? You've covered that. Vote rigging? The data on 2024 is wild... [0] Tight control of opinion through the media? The right trust Fox and few other places, the left tend to look for more varied input [1].

Basically if Trump is saying somebody is attacking him/the right on something, chances are that the right is doing to the left far bigger, far harder, and far further away from media scrutiny...

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/somethingiswrong2024/comments/1iei2...

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2014/10/21/political-...

  As an outsider (UKian), looking in, it's been obvious to me for a while that what the far right accuses the radical left of doing, is rarely actually done by the radical left, and ironically, the thing that they themselves are up to.

Even in grade 1 I remember asking if there were dinosaurs on noah's ark and getting sent out of class. This shits formative I wouldnt remove it for anything.

Overstate?

Could care less has indeed left the barn by now and I could care less (as you can tell) but mixing up understate and overstate? I hope we’re in time to stop this horse.

I think we lost the plot once "unloosen" and "loosen" started meaning the same thing: https://www.dictionary.com/browse/unloosen

By definition, native speakers aren't wrong. If your model doesn't match observed reality, it is the model that's at issue, not reality.

It's still a "contresens" (can't find the right word in English, literally counter to its meaning), and should absolutely be avoided for clarity.

Let's not just say that it's alright

An example that goes completely unremarked on is "near miss", which logically means something that came close to missing but actually hit, and yet in idiomatic use means the opposite. People also get upset at "literally" to mean "figuratively", another one I find strange because it's an intensifier.

Clarity matters more in formal writing, and "couldn't care less" isn't particularly formal in any case.

But "near miss" is more a parsing ambiguity, if not a mere disagreement about grammar. People who think it is illogical seem to assume it is "nearly missing". But in actual usage it is more that "near miss" is like a "narrow miss" and a "far miss" is like a "wide miss", all encoding distance to the implied target/hit zone.

And I can't agree with you. As a non native speaker, I deeply appreciate people making an effort to use language correctly to transmit information. I call that being mindfull of your interlocutors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jespersen%27s_cycle

Once I started reading tho things really opened up for me

This helped calm me as a parent of kids who entered first grade in the fall of 2020 not able to read (I was one of those early readers). My daughter picked up reading during the course of first grade but her twin brother not so much. Then, during the first month of second grade, he went from refusing to read “the” in a chapter title when I would read to them at bedtime to being a self-sufficient solo reader pretty much overnight.

Both of my kids are pretty dedicated readers now. When we go on vacation, if they spot a library, they want to visit it. I’m always happy to oblige.

At first the urgency to rectify the situation propelled me into not only learning but reading a lot, but I didn’t know how much my peers were reading or what, so I started reading voraciously

Didn’t take long to outpace my peers. I have kept it up ever since

I just happened to grow up in a similar time and culture with libraries, child prodigies, etc and it seems quaint and a little silly in retrospect.

I lived in poverty and abuse, under constant surveillance, and was subject to a cultural war for my own mind against my family and government. This led to strong feelings about my own capabilities and intellectualism, and a desire to prove others wrong about my limitations.

Maybe on one side it might seem a little silly, but the child in me still takes all of this extremely seriously even now in my 30s. The cultural and intellectual war against children never ended, we just stopped paying attention or became complicit with the system.

I agree. If we were actually gifted kids they should have given us real challenges with a chance of failure or discovery. Instead they just told us how smart we were and taught to emulate the appearance of intelligent people. Memorizing passages, quotes, checking out prestigious books. It’s to such a degree that much of millennial culture is references and tokens of intellectual landmarks from the 20th century - with no accomplishments for itself.

I think that’s either something you enjoy, or don’t.

(Or maybe a third of all people if you count it as a range rather than a point.)

Still not sure why it seems silly to you.

Quite the contrary; I think I was one of only two or three people in my year to go on to university. But then I was a huge nerd who was really interested in ideas.