Would you mind elaborating? I shouldn’t find it hard to follow but I don’t have a lot of natural intuition on that world of decision making and would like to improve.

Interesting!

Do you happen to know about that (“most normies” not having home Internet, just phone) or am I misreading and it’s half guess?

Not tryna start an argument, to be clear lol, just wondering if you have interesting info.

I’ll be dead honest, I’m stoked they did for the simple fact of pointing any kind of light at Scientology (I don’t need the “this doesn’t really help” POV to be clear).

Whether it’s stupid in a general sense? Maybe specifically for these ones, yeah, gonna be consequences lol.

But I expect there exists some inflection point, where the knucklehead youths do more and more funny (cool) shit, looking a bit like this.

I think that exists because they’ve grown up on a singular social message - broadcast *stuff*, it's both no big deal (any given stream) and important (can't not stream). While at the same time things really crumble and get notably shit, the same generation growing up to see the Emperor’s Clothes, so to speak, via Epstein and the amazing un-response to some of the worst shit ever.

That’d be I guess, roughly, you and my generation who mostly sleep-walked into that.

So yeah. More people doing and more people streaming the doing is what I expect. If it’s inevitable, let’s welcome it. Celebrate. If not, regardless of value judgment, starting from just what seems likely, well, strap in lol.

Kids swept along by the mob of social media is just literal baseline childhood today. You sound like you’re just wishing that away, or avoiding looking at it too hard.

And in this case, the kiddos are doing something cool. Go find the every-single-thing else worth complaining about, this is the least dumb or bad thing happening presently. Makes you sound like an asshole 🤷‍♂️

To me that reads as a guy (Tolkien) coming to grips with reality about a handful of things but then stopping short. Wishing to retreat, really, to a “simpler” time, from his perspective (read: lib shit, tbh). His “anarchism” seems real, in that he sees clearly the fundamental issue with humans operating in a deeply articulated government structure - those who see it as a game, game it well.

Not exactly defending the guy, I don’t actually know him lol, but there wasn’t much “and that’s why monarchy should be preferred”, I was kinda looking to see what he’d say there. Seemed more just “and people doing more of their own governance happened and was clearly better under a smaller “state”. Like a good old fashioned monarchy, I liked that better and not just me, wasn’t that better? record-scratch-noise”

So I guess on balance I read “anarcho-lib-shit” over “anarcho-monarchism” overall lol 🤷‍♂️

[Edit to add - thanks for the share, not grumping at ya, just enjoying what ya shared]

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We’ve seen this happen already btw, time and again. Most of Appalachia, for one thing, tons of textile mfg towns in the south, steel / auto mfg in Detroit and etc. The response (~none) to guaranteed lead in the water in Flint is fully damning, a data point like Uvalde to make all others nearly irrelevant. Flint Michigan is a federal government directly saying “we will never help you, because you cost money”.

One thing is clear - it can be fantastic to live somewhere in the US that is booming. And the flip side of that coin? No help is coming whatsoever for places whose economic engine starts to run dry.

Lots of these abandoned places yet carry on, cuz ya know, they aren’t faceless economic engines, they’re communities of humans. And it gets fucking bleak.

Anyone who thinks they live somewhere it couldn’t happen to them might wanna think about it. Look at property insurers pulling out of Florida. Climate writing is on the wall. That’s not even just abandoning the economic has-beens. But you’ll be fine, probably.

Kids not having phones at school (or not having access to them or similar) does address huge problems with phones at schools.

I’m not advocating anything like ID verification and have no idea what the pouches are about.

Self regulation is great and the only true solution. But roughly no kid can self regulate under current conditions, as we see. They need an environment conducive to learning those crucial skills.

And I hate the retreat to “well the parents should do more!” which is just an unsympathetic blamey way to say “what we have is as good as it gets I guess” because if it’s largely the parents needing to do more, that’s what we have. The status quo. Not a great recommendation.

If parents doing more was a viable strategy would we need to regulate use of car seats? Would we have seatbelts at all if some flavor of “people making important but annoying decisions correctly all the time” was a good way to achieve healthy societal outcomes?

“Kids probably shouldn’t have cell phones in schools” does not seem controversial, given the evidence, the specific nature of school and kids and those devices, and the blatant obvious evidence we see everywhere we look.

Dope.

Thanks, it’s at least a familiar metaphor (-ish), but I’ve always struggled to describe the feeling well. I do think something like “seeing a shape in the mist” does a good job capturing it too. How it’s obviously there but still hard to identify, easy for others to dismiss, etc. It’s all the things you should be seeing but don’t.

Anyway, same, on the wool and BS detector. How do you like your instance btw, on precisely that topic? I don’t know a lot of details about that one but I feel like I see good info and takes from y’all more often than not. What’s your experience there been?

Couldn’t agree more, oddly enough to understand what they are saying you have to zoom way out, see what’s not being said, see how phrasing is implicitly shaping their narrative, etc. All the subtle techniques eventually produce enough evidence to sum up one’s observations into a really big and gross elephant. Standing right there. And somehow kind of invisible to many. Formerly to oneself.

It’s difficult, and I mean, big surprise lol, they’re basically engineered to be that way, it’s all so tiring like ya said.

No hate to elephants, elephants are fucking great

Okay got it, sounds like I just kinda jumped down your throat then. “How dare this person not dunk on those folks as hard as I think they should!” (that’s me lol)

Cheers. Thanks for the info.

Edit: I will say, Guardian and lots of others remain able to coast on an assumption of good will and journalistic integrity that I don’t believe is there. Maybe it once was earned, I’m not a journalistic historian. But it seems much like old school enshittification, where a brand builds up a lot of credibility slowly over time, then the things that made consumers like it get quietly swapped out for shittier “parts” and it takes a long time for consumers to update their understanding of the brand.

The Guardian is not a credible journalistic institution, I wish it were, but I’m glad folks like you are noticing.

Maybe we do, and I appreciate you pointing out what you did! I’ll be the first to acknowledge I never would have known those things had you not posted them (and I’m sure that’s true for tons of folks who saw your comment, so truly, thanks).

But to me even “taking this with a grain of salt”, though, that’s just way more credulity than documents coming out of those orgs will ever merit. So I don’t know, your comment struck me as really strange, you point out the bombshell facts you did, to me those utterly destroy any assumption of good faith investigation/analysis, and then you go essentially “so I’ll take it with a grain of salt and wait for other experts to weigh in”. But…why?

Apologies if you’re simply using neutral language as a way to reach more readers. But the damning epistemological facts about the document make it ineligible for taking seriously. To make an analogy it’s like you said “we can see this bread is half-baked (white paper), and it actually comes from a mold factory (Bezos, Waltons), not a bread factory. So I’ll have a little, not a lot, and then see what other bread experts say about it too”. Which would be a crazy course of action, given the preceding description.

Again, sincere apologies if I’m mischaracterizing your POV, that’s how it reads to me though.

Okay. Again, from the standpoint of how to get at what’s knowable - my complaint here with The Guardian is that they aren’t pointing out the things they should be, at all, and that the white paper nature (from such “sources”) merits exactly nothing. No further draft on any such topic from such sources could ever be credible.

Your “typical / atypical” is you getting to my point for me, or maybe we just agree.

In practice that doesn’t work, for the same reasons education hasn’t been either. Too few teachers to students, plus the things (phones) are greasily addictive. And we’re talking about the youths, lol, dumb-kid brain, most exemplified by teenagers of course. The phase of life that specifically combines “rules are actually just stupid, did you ever notice that?” with “so anyway (I forgot what we were talking about [or any other thing])”.

It’s really just placing an extremely addictive thing in the pocket of anyone prone to addiction. Kiddos are very naturally weak to resisting those “reward now, consequences later” qualities that drive addiction in the first place. And just like any drug that sells, phones have been engineered (legally, lauded in many ways for doing so) to be super-duper addictive.

“Why don’t the children simply smoke the crack pipe in the hallways, between classes, forbidden to do so in class? Why must the school be the middle-man?”

Shallow take homie.

Just on the epistemological tip, how is it being a white paper more relevant than having Bezos, Waltons, and more (of the same) sponsors?

based out of an apartheid state

This is badly understating the situation. Israel has horrific goals and works tirelessly to implement them. Cannot be trusted in any way, unless your goals align, and even then not really.

As soon as they are seen to be involved, privacy is entirely off the table, that’s the exact opposite of what that place does (and they do it well). Unraveling privacy is critically important to Israel and their genocide.

I could certainly tell it was on purpose lmao, ya don’t accidentally blow my mind by telling jokes lol.

Had no idea about it being a response to his revulsion to that, great tidbit thanks!! I’ll have to look for the parallels next time I pick em up.

Oddly enough, for all the lolz, some deep wisdom from those books stuck with me for life. The lines about how the kind of people who want to and can get themselves elected to such-and-such office, how that capability and desire also makes them de facto the precise kind of person you never want running things. That idea remains honestly one of the most profound things I’ve ever read, you see it reflected in ~every politician who walks the earth.

In many ways it feels like every other problem we have as humans is downstream from that contradiction (but of course, I’m oversimplifying / overgeneralizing hugely).

Silly books for sure, super silly, but not only silly, def agree.