Common Sense

Journalists wildly exaggerate how much neurology knows about brains.

but assuming that a good prefrontal cortex is helpful for good decision making,

a soldier occupying a country w/ a hostile population where he doesn't speak the language, has a desperate need for one.

If the "prefrontal cortex" myth is true, how on earth did we send 18 year olds to war in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Vietnam?

There is no job in the world that requires more rational thinking than making life or death decisions effecting civilians, all your buddies, and yourself.

but no world government has ever said that in combat they'll only have men over 25 years of age.

Never.

Not once in thousands of years of this obvious problem, has anyone noticed the problem, written about it, or tried to fix it.

(hint: it's bullshit)

but when it comes to sex,

women under 25 who decide to date a rich, famous, good-looking movie star

are immediately diagnosed with the young stupid prefrontal cortex syndrome.

Having romantic relationships

is so much harder than living in a war zone

and being sent into combat every day and trying not to kill civilians, or get killed, or let your comrades get killed...

Gotta have full brain development before you kiss a hot guy. I mean OMG.

#SPR860

The forbidden is exciting. Sexual excitement is better than sexual boredom. So people seek the forbidden for the excitement. But Gens Y + Z have stopped kink-shaming. So nothing is forbidden anymore. It's all boring.

Except....

....age-gaps.

Everybody has to run around claiming that inappropriate age-gaps are super naughty just so they have some rules to break to make sex exciting again.

Imagine you own some paintings made by an extremely talented artist. The artist has just died. You are sure that the value of his work will increase by a factor of 10 or 20 in future years.

Do you go on the internet and tell everyone to buy all the paintings, sketches, and doodles this guy ever made?

Or do you quietly look for ways to get ownership of as many of these limited items as you can before the price inevitably rises?

Exactly. That man's art work has intrinsic value.

Not so long ago there were people going on TV telling everyone that Beanie Babies are an awesome investment. They really hyped up the value of these limited edition items. Each one unique and irreplaceable.

The difference is that people who invested in Beanie Babies needed to stoke demand for the product. Without that demand the pieces of nylon cloth had zero value. Instead of quietly hoarding as many of the things as they could, for the lowest possible prices, they worked very hard to get others to also buy up as many as possible.

Beanie Babies have no intrinsic value.

There's a hard limit on the number of Bitcoin that can be made. If Bitcoin Maniacs really believed that their crypto had intrinsic value, they'd be praying for low prices for as long as possible. They'd very quietly try to get their hands on as much of the limited number of coins as they could before people realized how incredible this asset is.

but they don't do that. They do the opposite. They are super enthusiastic cheerleaders. They endlessly talk about how great an investment it is. They never shut up about how much everyone can benefit by buying now. They desperately need others to believe that the long strings of characters they have encrypted somewhere in digital storage have value.

Is that Beanie Baby worth $10,000? Only if someone is willing to pay that much for it. Just like Beanie Babies, Bitcoin has zero intrinsic value. It's price on the open market will fall to zero as soon as people stop believing in its value.

Not All Adults at the Park Are Predators

Old and young have always interacted. Yet the idea that children and adults go naturally together has been replaced by distrust and disgust.

Sunday, March 3, 2024

I’m trying not to obsess about child overprotection, but … obsess I do. Here’s the latest object of my ire: the playground signs at my burg, New York City, that say, “Playground rules prohibit adults except in the company of children.” Apparently, any adult who simply wants to sit on a bench and watch children at play could be a creep, so we should just ban them all. The idea that children and adults go naturally together has been replaced by distrust and disgust. There was a case here a while back when seven chess players playing outside were fined for … playing chess. Their chess tables — concrete ones, immovable, and placed there by the city — were deemed too close to the children, so the men were booted. It didn’t matter that they hadn’t caused any trouble. In fact, the grizzled guys had taken it upon themselves to teach some of the local children how to play the game of kings.  Actual kindness? Who cares? All that mattered were the fantasies conjured up by what-if thinking: What IF they turned out to be monsters?  By separating the generations this way, we are creating a society that actively distrusts anyone who wants to help a child other than his own. Compare this anxiety with what goes on in Japan. Did you watch “Old Enough,” the Netflix show with the 4-year-olds shopping for sushi ingredients? There, the youngest children wear bright yellow hats when they go to school. “Doesn’t that put them in danger?” asked a friend. To her, a child who calls attention to himself is a child who could be attracting a predator.  Only attracting adult attention is exactly what the yellow hats are supposed to do. In Japan, the assumption is that the easier it is to see children, the easier it is for grown-ups to look out for them.  Japan’s belief is that children are our collective responsibility. America’s is that children are private possessions under constant threat of theft.  Which brings me to the flip side of our obsession with stranger danger: the idea that any time a parent lets her children do anything on their own, she is actually requiring the rest of us grownups to “babysit” them, for free. The “Why should I have to watch your kid at the park?” question comes up when I talk about how good it would be for children to get more exercise and independence by doing that thing we used to call “going outside to play.” It’s not that someone else HAS to watch any child at the park on their own. It’s that usually humans DO watch out for each other. It’s not unpaid labor. It’s being a human.  Most children making their way to school or frolicking outside are not going to need major assistance from anyone, adult or otherwise. Yet if they do, I’d like to think most of us would give it ungrudgingly. Their parents have not foisted a huge burden on society by letting their children be part of it.  Old and young have always interacted. Adults who enjoy being around children are, for the most part, just adults who enjoy being around children. Not predators.  And children who are out and about in the world are just that: children out and about. Not a big, unpaid obligation for the rest of us. I’m not sure about the yellow hats, but Japan has the right idea. Looking out for everyone beats trusting no one. 

LENORE SKENAZY Ms. Skenazy is president of Let Grow, a contributing writer at Reason.com, and author of "Has the World Gone Skenazy?"

Why is there such a horrible epidemic of loneliness among young adults right now? Why are so few of them finding partners and having sex?

The simple explanation is that overall young people are more prudish and so overall they are having much less sex.

This alone is an excellent reason to fight tooth and nail against the Puritan Revival. The Sexual Revolution didn't happen because everything was peachy keen. Having a Sexual Counter-Revolution in the 2020s will cause a lot of pain in future decades.

Why do today's Neo-Puritan attitudes have more severe impact on men than on women? (as seen in the statistics showing that young men are leading the lonely and sexless trend among young Millennials and Zoomers)

The explanation is pretty simple. Most women prefer partners who are 3 to 10 years older than them. This is usually fine, because men don't seem to have a problem with women 3 to 10 years younger than them. When I was in high school it was common for juniors and seniors to date freshmen or sophomores. The older partner was always male.

(For simplicity I divide young adults into 3 age groups: 14-18, 19-24, and 25-30)

Young women aged 14-18 being romantically involved with young men aged 19-24 was extremely common throughout human history. Does that mean that young women aged 19-24 were lonely and celibate? Nope. They had partners aged 25-30. Even today women aged 19-24 are allowed to boink men who are 25-30. but men who are 19-24 are now strictly banned from becoming romantically involved with the group who they traditionally and historically most often love.

This is the main reason the cultural shift has impacted young men more than young women.

OG Puritans were virulently opposed to lust, frivolity, fornication of any kind. Oral, anal, group or anything homosexual was unthinkable to them. Masturbation was vociferously discouraged.

Neo-Puritanism has no problem with porn, gay, trans, or any of a broad spectrum of kinky behavior. But the Neo-Puritans are total fucking Prude-Freaks about age. Gens Y and Z talk about age gap sex the way the OG Puritans talked about bestiality. They are completely disgusted, horrified even.

How on Earth did this bizarre new taboo rise from nowhere?

Stranger Danger was a mass hysteria from the 80s than never went away. It just morphed into Sex Predator Panic which came to include Grooming Terror. Then it merged with a runaway MeToo movement and any imagined "power imbalance" suddenly caused rape and trauma on a galactic scale.

We stopped thinking rationally and became consumed by fear. This forced us to try to protect anyone who could even remotely be considered "vulnerable"

In this atmosphere we not only stopped believing that teens are young adults perfectly capable of running their own sex lives. We also started to believe that men are predators, women are victims, and age is a kind of power which is used for sexual evil.

So if a woman aged 19-24 breaks some norms and has sex that her Neo-Puritan society frowns on, she might get slut-shammed. But a man that age doing the same thing is likely to get violence, death threats, or a prison term.

The main reason that men aged 19-24 are lonely and sexless is that we reclassified teenagers. About 20 years ago we stopped recognizing the young adult status of post-pubescent 14 to 18-year-olds and we, absurdly, started to believe that they are children.

This new paradigm is wreaking havoc throughout our society. It's time to stop that shit.

from Lenore Skenazy of #FreeRangeKids · Feb 23 🧵1/2

Email I got from Nat Center for Missing/Exploited Children today:

"Do you hold the key to cracking the David Yeager case? David was 17 when he vanished from his home Feb. 6, 1971."

Sure, I can crack a case from 53 yrs ago. Thanks for asking! David is 70 now?

On it!

🧵2/2

The reason I'm Tweeting about this is that the email is so dang disingenuous.

#NCMEC cannot believe a random person could solve a 53-year cold case. So why pretend? Why INVOLVE me?

To reinforce terror & sorrow about stranger-danger.

That's all.

There's a scene in the Game of Thrones where a man called The Hound finds out where an old farmer has hidden his silver. The Hound promptly robs him. There was, of course, no way to call the police. The state was not there to defend the old man's property. This was a fairly typical problem in ancient and medieval times.

In modern times if Mr Jones kept a bag of gold on his kitchen table, few would try to steal it because most peeps would be deterred by the threat of incarceration. Jones can call the cops. The state sometimes fails, but it sincerely tries to protect Jones' property rights. But even this low level of risk is too much for most people. Mr Smith prefers to keep his money in the bank. The state insures his deposits there. Official channels allow him to access his monetary assets, and he has legal recourse if there is any dispute.

The BitCoin ideology however says that the state should have no role in the financial system. So BitCoiners take their money out of legally existing institutions. They might put their virtual cash on an exchange, the crypto equivalent of a bank, but those have been collapsing as their founders simply stole the money.

So crypto enthusiasts are left trying to figure out how to keep their valuables (which are really just long chains of letters and numbers stored on a computer) safe in their own homes. It's a return to ancient times where everyone has to fend for themselves. Today it's not likely to be a nasty barbarian with a battle ax, but the chances hackers will try to get your crypto wealth thru digital trickery are very high.

If you want to spend the rest of your life trying to stay one step ahead of the hackers who would love to steal the virtual bag of cyber-gold you keep in your living room, go ahead and convert your assets to BitCoin. The vast majority of the population will not join you on your journey back to the medieval stateless Wild West of crypto-finance.

Clicked on a title containing an interesting topic. The title ends with "Here's Why" (which is of course a lie. YouTubers don't know. They don't tell you why, and if they did, they'd be wrong.)

I see an attractive extrovert who loves the sound of her own voice. She's not very bright. She reads a few lies from some magazine articles.

She repeats some long ago debunked garbage about testosterone.

She repeats some of the trite old observations like "I find it so interesting that when the woman is older, she's a cougar and that's like cool, but if the man is older then he's seen as creepy" Wow. Fucking Einstein here.

The comments surprised me tho'

Under a vid about young people not having sex, everyone, tons of people were writing their age, sexual history, and why they are or are not having sex.

To me this is totally bizarre. Why the fuck would anyone care? and WTF would motivate you to post that on the internet?

I guess some part of my brain is missing. The part that makes you want to type out your sex life for the world to see in the YouTube comment section.

No group of people in human history, not on-line, not in real life, has ever existed without content moderation.

The idea that Reddit, or Twitter, or Nostr, or any other place, virtual or otherwise can, should, or ever will exist without content moderation is fucking absurd. You have to be brain-dead to believe something so obviously idiotic. And to frame that ridiculous delusion in terms like “free speech” only goes to show that nobody has a clue what they’re talking about.

The revival of Puritanism is making everyone yap about the horrid thought crimes that were committed against them.

"I was 12 when a guy thought I was cute and made eyes at me."

Utterly boring, typical behavior is reframed as sexual abuse. Usually facilitated by some extremely vague but negative sounding word like "sexualized"

#SPR860

Content moderation is like knives. A lot of people are murdered by knives every year. If your brother was killed with a knife you might have very strong anti-knife feelings.

but the solution is not to outlaw all sharp bladed objects. The concept of the knife (content moderation) is not to blame for the bad things people do with the knife.

Knives are much more often used for good than for evil. They are extremely useful for food preparation, and opening packages, for example.

I've had several social media suspended. People try to murder my message with content moderation (knives) all the time. But the knife (content moderation) is not to blame. Social media platforms must delete malicious accounts. Otherwise they become unusable. My message is quite controversial. A lot of people don't want their false narratives scrutinized, or their goofy myths challenged in any way. They will use knives (content moderation) to try to stop me. That's ok. That's normal civic discussion.

and you can hear it in the way younger generations comment on 30 year old TV shows.

Watch this vid: https://youtu.be/QtLPewEg-yc .#SPR860

No group of people in human history, not on-line, not in real life, has ever existed without content moderation.

The idea that Reddit, or Twitter, or Nostr, or any other place, virtual or otherwise can, should, or ever will exist without content moderation is fucking absurd. You have to be brain-dead to believe something so obviously idiotic. And to frame that ridiculous delusion in terms like "free speech" only goes to show that nobody has a clue what they're talking about.

Sensationalist media, the Chris Hansen types who make piles of money drumming up hysterical fear of X or Y, love to use words like "predator" and "prey on" because it evokes images that stick in the mind. It gets people emotional. Having a calm rational public is not profitable for them.

#SPR860

Real solution:

A. lower the age of majority to 16 (even runaways need legal rights)

B. decriminalize all sex work (cops should work for the prostitutes not against them)

C. triple the minimum wage (make non-sex work far more attractive and sustainable) #NotRocketScience

Some of us are old enough to remember back when the neo-Puritans used terms like "The Gay Agenda" to terrify parents. They wanted to think LGBTQ+ people were trying to convert your sons and daughters, to win them over for the dark side like Darth Vader.

Today on Twitter if you state a simple fact like 16 year olds are young men and women, you'll be assaulted with accusations that you are promoting "The Pedo Agenda"

Within a couple of years we'll see terms like "The Perv Agenda" or "The Kink Agenda"

Or maybe the neo-Puritans will replace the word agenda altogether. But they will find new scary-as-hell labels for sex positive people who want a healthy, natural, realistic approach to erotic activities.

They need to gin up fear. Otherwise they can't justify the repression.

I can't think of a better argument to keep using regular money :-D

I just skimmed through a video where the author's conclusion is based entirely on the idea that kids are too stupid to understand that there's a difference between cartoons and real life.

The level of stupid on YouTube is astounding.

Total fear-mongering bullshit.

The key word here is "SUSPECTED"... they don't know. With millions of users on the platform they suspect 600 pics.

"found over 600 pieces of known or suspected child abuse material"

No one in their organization could look at 600 pics BEFORE they wrote the report?

This is not a serious group of researchers. They are obviously lying like hell.

Why do they suspect these 600 pics?

because “We got more photoDNA hits"...

in plain English that means their software flagged the photos. A robot said they are suspicious. Out of millions and millions of pics all over Mastodon 600 are maybe bad according to a bot.

Here's a link to the absolute shit propaganda:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/07/24/twitter-rival-mastodon-rife-with-child-abuse-material-study-finds/

Whatever various societies decide is optimal (it changes by time and place)

some people always choose partners who are thought to be unsuitable for them.

There's zero reason to freak out about a few peeps being in less traditional relationships.

Abstinence Only is an abject failure. The only solution is to respect 12, 13 and 14 year olds enough to teach them the reality of their situation and the choices they face. In the end they make those decisions on their own anyway, regardless of how much we infantilize them.

“They dated since he was 17. He turned 18 and now faces 15 years behind bars.”

And when he gets out he will be on the Sex Offender Registry, too.

https://miamiherald.com/news/local/community/florida-keys/article225560840.html .

Insane weirdos e.g. Musk, think that we need to make more babies, cuz somehow having less than 10 billion people in the near future is not enough,

but simultaneously this planet sucks, so we gotta move to Mars, a much smaller planet, which has no air or water.

#Batshit