I need to stop being surprised at how bizarrely naive people are. I was going to say I don’t think I was ever that innocent, but of course I was. I mean, I know this isn’t entirely believable to most of you (as Bradbury demonstrated, the old were never children) but I was once a little baby, a toddler, a little girl. And I can still on occasion be startlingly naive and well meaning, particularly when I have some reason to like the person selling me the swamp land in Florida. … And since I generally like people (they’re fascinating) this leaves me open to a lot of bs.
But let me put this way: I was never happily and stupidly credulous. When someone tried to tell me to do something for my own good or worse for a bunch of other people who weren’t asking me to do it, I always wondered what was in it for the person. Always as far back as I remember.
Which is why I sometimes hit my desk so hard with my forehead that it leaves big dents, and I wonder “How can adults not see the trap in giving a lot of power to the government? Precisely?” Particularly a bunch of power over your ability to express yourself on the internet?
Yeah. Increasingly I’m coming across articles on the right lauding the kind of Self-Doxing that Europe is requiring of people on the net. Because, you know you should prove your age before you access stuff. And also we really should “clean up” the net. For the children.
When I come across this nonsense I’m neither child nor work safe for about ten minutes. And I’m fairly sure I invented some new German swear words.
Look, yes, there is horrible stuff out there. Arguably there always was. Not just the internet but everywhere. My parents kept a tight rein on me and we lived in a village. Most of the books I read had been stored by some ancestor or other. Apparently some of them liked spicier stuff? I mean– weird, but– Look, Victorian porn was bizarre, okay. Anyway, moving right along, there was also Roman myth available because I sneaked the books from a friend’s father’s library.
If you’re laughing, don’t be. It gave me a very weird idea of what went on between men and women. And the livestock manuals didn’t help. Not even slightly.
The point being that a child who is curious and will read everything could stumble on bizarrely inappropriate stuff even in the “safe” mid sixties in a country known for ALMOST keeping its women in purdah.
And I raised kids in the age when the internet was a wild frontier. You could — and sometimes hilariously did, at a con, in front of a bunch of people, type something innocent in, and get page upon page of outright gross porn opening up on your screen. Add to this that my kids each had their own computer, kept in their rooms from age three, and had internet connections from age 8 and 12.
So, how come they didn’t get catfished by pedos, or get a porn addiction or– Well, like with houseproofing the house, we didn’t internet proof the house. We internet proofed the kids. We explained all the possibilities, the pitfalls, why things weren’t good for them, until it came out their eyes, I think. We still dealt with an addiction issue, but it was to neopets, not porn. And we talked to and with them. A lot. Some would say endlessly. So we knew what they — even super-secretive younger son — were thinking and doing. And they were aware that Dan could — and did, about once a month — look at their history and see what they were up to.
We were very hands on, very active parents. And when they read something that had mention of adult relationships (usually not terribly explicit) they were comfortable enough to talk to us about it.
Oh, and we raised them in a church that gives a strong moral foundation.
Did it work? Seems to have. They’re in their thirties and seem like decent human beings.
Was it a lot of work? Oh, heck yes. I refer to days and weeks of getting up each day with a longer to-do list and never getting to sleep 8 hours a night, and–
Was it worth it? Absolutely.
Because it was tailored to our kids, whom we understood, we could keep them out of danger without nerfing everything around them. When they came of age, they were prepared because they’d never been over protected.
As I tell people: The Spanish royal family tied pillows around very tree in their park to protect their hemophilliac sons, who still got injured and died young. Because nerfing the world doesn’t work. Preparing the kids does.
Are there misfires? There are always misfires. Even in the tiny village where I grew up, girls got persuaded away by traffickers, and kids found out things they shouldn’t be exposed to, and child abuse is a human failing. BUT I was okay, despite my bizarre reading and some very weird ideas, because my parent shad made me suspicious of strangers bearing gifts. Perhaps a little too suspicious but that’s better than the alternative.
Unfortunately telling people “The solution to keeping kids out of trouble is to watch them, to talk to them, to discuss things with them, and to know your own kids” is not popular. “Let’s give the government the ability to see that everyone is on the internet under their own real name and address and says only things that are safe for the kids” is. Because it involves no personal work.
It does however open the door to a lot of horrible stuff and to totalitarian control, that has nothing to do with the children. And don’t come back at me with “if you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to worry about” because you’re not an infant or a mental defective and you KNOW better.
For one because every one of us who is on the internet publicly and on the right has a passel of stalkers. They’re mostly annoying and probably harmless. Maybe. Looks at Charlie Kirk’s death. MAYBE. Yeah, people can find addresses for us. If we’re smart enough, those are decoys (not counting some bizarre internet confabulations that link me to people I’ve never met, too. And the fact that Dan and I have apparently to body doubles running around who are married to each other. For a while we lived in the same neighborhood in Colorado Springs. Never managed to meet. Now we’ve both diaspored away. I usually find out because someone tells me they went to my talk. It’s not mine. Or for a while that they saw a house I’m selling. The other Sarah Hoyt is a real estate agent. Their sons have the same names as ours. I have a head story that they’re us from other universes.) Anyway…. we all have people who’d like to kill us for things we say. And some of them don’t even work for the government.
If I were doing this again, from the beginning, I’d fly under a nom de internet. Heck, I did for a while, I just dropped it because it was so much effort. Because you really don’t need your net life to bite you in the *ss in real life, because you didn’t do anything wrong, just said some thing that someone else didn’t like. Or even didn’t say it, but they spun it up in their heads to where you said it.
To clarify: I’ve had people furious at me for writing a post about my own struggles with awards and whether to campaign for them, that someone else convinced them was about THEM. (Hint to anyone wondering: I NEVER WRITE THINGS TO GIVE HINTS. If I think you’re doing something assholish, I’ll name you by name. You’ll KNOW if I’m talking about you. The exceptions are close friends I don’t want to call out, just say “well, they’re good people, but they’re wrong on this” because they’re friends. And I don’t name writers and books when I find a book horrible, because I don’t need total strangers googling themselves and coming over to yell. I have trouble enough.) I’ve had people have a confrontation on this blog and decide I was the devil and go on multi-year revenge quests, at least three of them ongoing (and crazy. Did I mention crazy?) I’ve had people develop a crush on me sight unseen and try to move INTO MY HOUSE (which was fortunately not my house, but our drop address. But still.)
Forcing me to dox myself would materially endanger me and mine. My husband, my kids, my cats. Yes, the kids are grown and moved out, and fully able to defend themselves, but they have their own social lives and careers that don’t need my public life hanging over them.
And this is me: I do nothing more wrong, ever, than writing some things that upset people for reasons that often are in their own heads. And for questioning orthodoxy because it makes people uncomfortable.
Then there is the governmental decisions of what you’re not ready to see. Yeah, yeah, it was supposed to be stuff like porn. Guess what? It took them zero seconds in the UK to decide kids needed to be protected from knowing about the rape gangs. Or the Israeli hostages. Or….
Yes, yes, all that is strong material for young minds, but guess what? It can happen to kids, so kids should know about it.
The government can in fact take something as simple as “protect kids from porn” to “Protect” kids and adults from the truth. And will. As soon as some bureaucrat with an ax to grind gets hold of it.
I’d think after the gaslighting of COVID you wouldn’t be so eager to give the government the power to control what you see and what you read, and to come down like a ton of bricks on anyone who says something they don’t like.
And don’t give me “The US is different”. Yeah, until we aren’t. We’re still living with FDR’s bs. And this would just make it a lot worse and postpone getting rid of it.
We’ve been fighting back, to the extent we have, because the internet gives us the ability to talk freely and to talk back at the barrage of mass media propaganda. To codify some “internet safety act” would be to tie us hand and foot and deliver us bound to our foe.
You can take your little horse out of the rain. And not wait with sandwiches by the phone. Because we’re not — repeat not — going to let you do that. Particularly not after the last 5 years. We’ve seen what y’all want for us. And we don’t want it. Bleating “For the children” is not persuasive anymore.
“BUT SARAH! CHILDREN WILL SEE BAD THINGS!” Oh, yeah? And they won’t in schools? This article is horribly written, but the point is the books this school carries. Click through. The ones I’ve read are appalling for eighteen year olds, and I wouldn’t want anyone younger getting them. And yet, they’re fighting back against the mom trying to remove them from the school library where kids are supposed to roam free.
Nerfing the internet will do nothing if you let your kids go to public school. Nerfing the internet will do nothing, if your kids have friends whose family situation might not be ideal.
Look, the truth is nerfing the internet will do NOTHING. Yes, there is bilge out there. There has always been, there will always be. Don’t delude yourself the situation was better pre-internet. It wasn’t. It was just different.
The solution to keeping your kids safe and introducing them to this fallen world at a safe and sane pace is to WORK WITH YOUR KIDS. There is no other solution. There is only blood, sweat and tears, day in and day out. And yes, sometimes it will fail, because horrible things happen to good people. But it is still the only solution.
I don’t remember who said that it makes no sense to prevent adults from eating steak because children cannot chew it. However, it’s even worse to prevent the children from seeing the inappropriate by blindfolding every single person, and giving the government the chance to say what is inappropriate.
Don’t be naive. The government is not your friend, even when it is, temporarily sort of kind of on your side. People in government are there because they like power. And the more power they get, the more they’ll take.
The solution to raising moral, sane kids is for PARENTS to raise them.
Not to nerf the world with injurious laws.
According To Hoyt 
Some people wouldn’t know something is a TRAP if the word “trap” was written on it in Capital Letters. 😡
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Some people would say “How do you know it’s a trap?” accuse you of bigotry, and walk right in.
And then scream that you didn’t warn them hard enough.
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Modesitt occasionally writes polities that do that, particularly in his science fiction. He’s not a fan.
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There was a speech last night, some big deal, where the guy speaking said “Hey – I’m setting up a trap, here. If you want to avoid the trap, here’s how to get around. OK? Everybody ready? Here’s the trap!”
And half of the audience rushed straight in.
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Then the guy speaking looked at the camera, looked at those standing and clapping, looked at those sitting down, raised his palms and shrugged, looked at the camera, again. Plain as day “I told them.”
The 2026 campaigns, for the republicans, should be writing themselves.
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Sadly, it won’t. Turning this into an ad spot would work wonders in most locations in the country. But it won’t get used.
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I’m hoping the billionaire who pledged hundreds of millions to aupport the GOP in the midterms and knows very well that he will also be a big target if dems EVER have power again, has the survival instinct to take care of this.
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I have no doubts about the GOP’s ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
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And if it was Admiral Akbar himself telling them it was a trap.
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Unfortunately too many otherwise freedom-loving people will suddenly go “help me daddy government, you’re my only hope” when they run into something difficult involving children in danger and if they think it’ll only affect people they dislike. Especially if it involves something personal involving a child, like those people who lost a child to a mass shooting and think gun owners are to blame.
But don’t worry, Sarah. I’m sure you’ll get called a coomer or gooner or whatever. *eyeroll*
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The trans push in the public schools was one of the gambles that is simply too big.
Pointing at someone else, letting someone else eat a cost, is attractive to many simply because they don’t want to be scrutinized themselves.
Social media gets pointed at, so actors in public education and in public law can hope to retire without more scrutiny.
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When it is permissible to act to protect a child is unfortunately situationally and culturally conditional. In some places you can’t legally stop the abusive parent even if they kill the child. In others, you can be prosecuted for doing nothing even if the abuse is only suspected. Here, I’d say you have good grounds to step in if the person cold-cocks or kicks a young child; but there are places here that I would still be found wrong. NYC being one of those places that you can’t depend on a jury of 12 sensible people.
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True, we cannot let them pull this kind of crap again. And the “for the children” line is outright BS to let those who want to rule silence anyone who doesn’t want that to happen.
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Not a single Democrat chose to stand when during the State of the Union address, President Trump asked all those support protecting American Citizens over protecting illegal aliens to stand up. They also showed visible displeasure when Trump memorialized people murdered by illegal aliens.
I hope every candidate running against Democrats is smart enough to run ads that keep showing the utter contempt Democrats have the citizenry.
Democrats showed beyond a reasonable doubt that as a political party, they despise the USA and the citizenry.
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I too hope they are smart enough. These people HATE us.
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Actually, I expect Fetterman stood up. The guy who spent the first 2 years of his term recovering from a debilitating stroke is the sanest Democrat in Congress.
———————————
Some folks can be taught. Others can learn by example. The rest have to piss on the electric fence for themselves.
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Fetterman did stand up, multiple times, during the SOTU address. He is also publically chastising those of his party who didn’t.
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When he won the PA senate race I thought “Great they’ve saddled us with another human vegetable like the president being run by his spouse”. At this point, I must apologize to Senator Fetterman. I still probably wouldn’t vote for you sir, but you have the guts to tell your democrat buddies to take a long walk off a short pier. God bless and God speed and keep telling the truth.
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Same. Medically, I didn’t think Fetterman was fit to run, or stay in the senate. Initially this was true. Now? No. When it comes to Fetterman, I was wrong.
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Honestly, I want the party to look more like him. We’d do well to have two actually functional parties.
Even if, at this point, I’d settle for just one.
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The reasons don’t really matter, beyond a very, very strictly limited few that are found in the Constitution. Y’know, that document that was invented, written, and signed in the blood of patriots to set limits on governments, not their people. What am I talking about?
“If only we give the government the power to-”
Nah, bro. Not feeling it. Let me stop you right there. Nope. They don’t need it. And I mean every single word of that. They (the greedy sh!ts that staff governmental positions) don’t (DO NOT. Negative. Nothin’ doin’, so don’t get any bright ideas) need (they WANT with all the power of a toddler screaming that they need it with grubby, sticky fingers- that’s not a categorical imperative, it’s an addiction that you best not feed) it (power- over you, me, puppies and kittens, and also importantly our property what we already paid taxes on multiple times over).
Giving them power that WE already have is stupid. And lazy. And short sighted. And infantile. Grow the f@ck up and do it your damned self, if it incenses you so. Get your bloody nose out of other people’s business if it’s not yours, and you’re pissing your panties over it.
If it’s something you can pay someone else to do, that’s fine. Capitalism’s great, folks. I’m too old and too busy to disassemble my heat pump and put in the new board it needs, so I pay someone else to do it as I have the money to do so. If I had kids, I’ve enough owed favors to get babysitting hours if the time is convenient and discussed in advance.
But keeping kids from getting at stuff they’re best off not getting into is Parenting 101. You might fail at this or that, but it’s a long war of attention that you keep at until they’re mature enough to survive the world standing on their own two feet. You’re training up the next generation to survive and thrive a world that, if you’re lucky, doesn’t much care about them- if you’re not (and for some things, that’s a lot of us of late), there are those that DO care and you’d best prepare them to defend themselves appropriately from the sorts of assaults on character and/or person that may indeed occur.
The proper conversation is “what things can we claw back from the government and do better ourselves,” NOT “what powers can we give to the people who have already demonstrated a damning lack of common sense, decency, literacy, morals, basic intellect, and so on. They’re in the bloody Epstein files for Bog’s sake. We always knew they was dirty, dumb ducks. There’s proof all over the freaking place.
NO. They don’t need any more power, frakking period. They need less. We need them to have less. The conversation isn’t “can the government just do-” it’s “we need to stop electing idiots and tolerating bad sh!t.” Less loosey goosey laws riddled with loopholes and gatcha gotchas. Fewer ridonkulous rules and RUFKM regs.
Here’s an idea that’ll never happen, but one near and dear to my heart: stop paying the useless parasites. Delete the line item of their paychecks. Close buildings, end departments, stop the moneys from leaving the bank. Take Milei’s chainsaw to their chain of command. Cut out the clutter.
Stop engaging with “buh muh gubbmint!” Counter with “less government, the better.”
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The nice thing (for us) is the UK seems determined to be “objective example, one each” of why an “unwritten constitution” is a really really bad idea.
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Mike, I believe we are quite unreasonably blessed with the bevy of bad examples as it is. Might we request of Greater Humanity that common sense and civility might suffice where applicable, and child sacrifice, rape gangs, and random fits of violence be met with something rather more fitting than a pat on the head?
Alas, poor Britain. “Men without chests,” indeed.
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Of course, having a written one that you don’t actually follow is a worse one, because it gives you the comforting illusion that it wards off bad things by existing.
And for those who want to dispute it, remind me again how a Constitution with a “full faith and credit” clause allows NY or CA to disregard my TX CHL? If it isn’t a fetish with the same effect as the cargo cult’s fake airport.
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–
Right?
Bad enough for our son when dad and I go together into California on a trip. The first two weeks of February this year was a nightmare. Just hubby & friends. Worse hubby took the vehicle with the, um, mini-pond without *batteries or keys. Nothing in it, because headed into CCL enemy California territory.
(*) The alarm is sensitive. Good hard bump almost always sets it off. But it can also go off just because it wants to. Not easy to take it in/out of the vehicle either, by design. First time mom heard it go off, she thought there were emergency vehicles behind us. No (I checked, always check). Just the pond alarm. Cannot be turned off unless someone is in the backseat. One of those someones must be one of us.
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The US Constitution is not a document addressed to the Government, that lays out what the Government may and may not do.
It’s an advisory letter addressed to us. It lays out things that We The People MUST NOT PERMIT!
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‘Forcing adults to eat pablum because baby can’t eat steak’ is from… [drum roll] RAH!
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DUH.
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RAH got that one from Mark Twain:
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It’s almost a direct quote from “The Man Who Sold the Moon.”
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what can I say? I’ve been sleeping like crap. Today I stuck for fifteen minutes trying to remember “Chernobyl”
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I’ve been taking naps. Which comes under good and sometimes not so good. Good, because needed. Bad because then can’t sleep as good as I should that night. But if I don’t nap, sleep is hard because too tired to sleep. If that makes sense.
Today, nap was a given. Slept okay -ish, last night. Part anguish driven that wouldn’t hear alarm (didn’t because up and turned off before went off). Nap after got home to sleep off rest of happy juice from left eye cataract surgery. Which, doctor said “you did good”. More aware of what was happening. Vision is already a lot better/brighter, and the left eye isn’t back to normal focus dilation. Will not know for another 3 weeks, but looking like even reading glasses won’t be required except for tiny text or suboptimal lighting. Definitely not normal computer, phone, reading. Put me in the category of “best decision ever”. Unlike mom, I was never so blind that I went from being legally blind without glasses to not needing glasses at all. Still, the difference is wow even compared to the prescription I was using.
Next medical round (not eyes) starts in a month.
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There’s an interpretation going around that at the SotU, Trump told the Democrats he had a trap for them, and the Democrats fell for it anyway. Talking about how fortunate Trump is in his enemies.
“Trump’s enemies” pretty much literally created the Trump coalition. We are not all natural friends and allies.
The anti-Trump choir largely thinks that non-malice options would not have enough magical power. The anti-Trump choir thus chooses malice, because ‘it is the only effective option’ against Trump.
However, if one is outside, this looks malicious. If one gets screwed by the malice, and notices, it can look malicious. If one simply thinks that there is a finite cap to the damage Trump can do, then the attempts against Trump can look like they are not proportionate.
This is a key implication of M.A.G.A. M.A.G.A. is a practical goal if one is starting from a situation where key decision makers have been acting maliciously. If it had merely been fundamental limitations of human competence, then changing the people would at best average out to the same.
One of the early (defensive) critiques of MAGA is ‘akshuly, changing people will merely average out to being the same or worse, the status quo is simply driven by the fundamentals’. If the people in MAGA had been naive, and the people saying this had been wise, then we would have seen a different balance to the patterns than what we did see.
Fundamentally, naturally occurring but so-rare-that-first-time-in-history diseases would occur at some point in political history, but do not just happen to line up with ‘thematically significant’ states of political factions. Health problems that /are/ political policy are common ones, involving sanitation, etc., stuff with clearly understood ‘right’ decisions. More disease correlation than that is the realm of people who believe in a ceremonial universe, of rites that cause things to happen. Thus, diagnostic timing, and the policy selection was also diagnostic.
There are a bunch of more subtle reasons to infer malice.
We are now a coalition created by the enemies of Trump. Trump’s remaining die hard enemies are a concentrated residue, more fanatic because they have driven everyone else away. Thus they cannot manage optics in a way that seems as reasonable to outsiders.
However, we do not have a lot of things in common.
Other people doing bad things on internet? Is an attractive explanation for people who want one, and want a quick easy fix. The ones who go for it, weigh freedom of speech lightly, and ignore that the people doing bad things in public school are as damaging, and not protected by the first amendment. Public funding for education is not a freedom of speech issue, we could just shut it down, and we should do that before we put any shackles on the internet.
Preston Byrne and the Granite Act, and the true purpose of Ofcomm. It was not a coincidence to see this legislation in so many countries at once. It is enemy action.
We still have effective speech controls on disease in many places.
The purpose of these laws ‘for the children’, are not protecting children, they are attacking speech. They are attacking speech because many of the professional managerial class have backed some very bad horses, and some of them are desperately afraid of what free speech might accomplish in correcting their errors.
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If after Trump was “beaten” in 2020 they had ruthlessly left him alone (to steal a phrase from another local here :-) ) he would have whined and complained and enjoyed a quiet life at Mar-a-Lago playing golf and drinking Diet Coke. Instead, they piled on him and continued to abuse him and his faithful followers. They chose to sow the wind and reaped the whirlwind. I thought the republican party were a bunch of sub morons who couldn’t organize an orgy at a cathouse (apologies to actual felines). But having likely cheated your way to victory trying to do a victory lap kicking the previous guy instead of actually consolidating your position is just fricking insane. If they’d actually consolidated their position and let Trump stew without media attention they’d have been fine. They have 1984 as a playbook and don’t even know enough to use making someone an unperson as a strategy. That incompetence alone should be enough to convince us that we dare not let these idiots run anything important again.
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There are too many people allergic to the idea that children require work on their part besides the bare minimum of food, clothes, and shelter. Pfui.
And I am for all the information being out there for kids. All of it. Because you have no idea how many kids are in terrible, even life-threatening situations and don’t know it’s not normal. If they can find information on what someone is doing to them and that it’s wrong, they may have a chance to escape. Or get help. Or at least know whatever happened to them wasn’t right.
“For the children”, my left foot.
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*wags paw* My concern is the material out there that tells kids, “Not only is what you see normal, it’s good.” Or the version of “This [perversion/maladaptation/dangerous thing] is a positive good, and you need to try it, because people who do/encourage/distribute it are really the good people.” I’ve watched kids get sucked into that, so I’m hesitant to say that everything should be available, especially in school libraries, and public libraries without age checks. The internet? I have reservations about access to unfiltered content for those under 14.
YMMV, and there’s plenty of room for honest and thoughtful disagreement.
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“This [perversion/maladaptation/dangerous thing] is a positive good,” is what family and church were already preaching. What I could find in libraries and on the internet was much saner.
OTOH I didn’t have a lot of internet access until I was an older teen, and I have always had a distinct lack of interest in anything related to sexual stuff, so my free-raoming internet experience may have been nonstandard.
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School and main stream culture.
I knew some things made me really uncomfortable, but I didn’t have words for it.
Have good parents… who never found out, because that was normal. Why would we tell them what Everyone was doing?
(Had a few “discussions” when husband and I were explaining why we were going to homeschool, and had to call in our siblings to go no, really, that is what was happening. And they’d had no idea.)
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Finding in my high school library books containing actual recipes for several types of dynamite, and some -really- nasty crap from WW1, taught me to go digging for useful things wherever information might be found.
Also that even really big bullies could be … dealt with.
Did everyone ever know that valve lapping compound (or similar fine abrasives) should -not- be added to the oil in a motor crankcase? Its a really bad thing to do. Say in a bully’s prized hotrod. When that has been done just once, you can induce all sorts of paranoid and modestly expensive hilarity by simply leaving an empty can of the stuff sitting on the hood of your motorhead mark’s vehicle.
Abbie Hoffman also taught me the value of leaving large-ish fish in odd places. This is especially true in regions where Turkey Vultures frequent.
Alas for humor values of books not written, I did reform myself……
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Except that the internet (in your own home, or on devices that you can control) is the easy place to keep your kids away from stuff that they should not be seeing. Once my kids got their own computers, I established a white list. They had to talk to me before I would consider adding any site (or a whole domain) to that list.
Now, they weren’t the <strike>stupid</strike> smart phone generation – but there are similar apps that you can put on those, too.
It’s the protection of your kids from the society at large that is difficult. Fortunately, they learned early on that they were able to come talk to us about anything – and that they damned well better do so!
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It’s going to vary from situation to situation. In some cases, it’s what they need to get out of a bad situation. In others, I remember reading what one mother wrote about her daughter’s transgender period. The mother eventually had to heavily restrict what her daughter could do on the internet. Many of the daughter’s online “friends” were actively turning the daughter against her own parents, and other content (including a webcomic that I see mentioned a lot over on TV Tropes) was encouraging the transgender thing as normal. The mother had to step in, heavily restrict what the daughter was accessing on-line (cutting off all of the “friends”, for example), and encourage her to visit websites that had testimonials from people who had detransitioned (which, depending on how far the transition went, can often only partially reverse the damage; the pro-transitioners are known to blatantly lie about this). After a while of this strict enforcement, the daughter’s mental health recovered.
Ultimately, online is an opportunity. And as with all opportunities, there are risks that must be properly handled.
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At summer camp as a young kid, I had a cabin counselor who was a Special Forces veteran.
Our hikes and expeditions and even daily chores were phreaking educational and purposeful and oh my stars useful later. Pre-internet, that info was -gold-. And he would answer any reasonable adult question with whatever info you could process. If you could figure out the adult way to ask about Bangkok R&R or how to properly use a knife on an unsuspecting opponent, you got the adult response. Ask it like a giggling naughtyboy and you got the Bozo The Clown answer.
No one wanted to be Bozo. Not twice, anyway.
A currency of -respect- worked -fast-. We had poker faces worked out in a couple days. (grin)
In a mere two weeks, we were …. a functional squad. Still kids, but totally functional. I was there the whole 8 week summer session. He was there several years…..
Not terribly long later after that first summer with “C”, some of that “adult” info was useful dealing with a perv. (very feral grin)
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I am SO with you on this.
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I start breathing fire when folks– often folks older than me– start on the “social media” stuff.
No. Heck no. You are not fit to be parents to the entire world.
I’m at least aware that the “socialization” at schools has gotten worse than it was when I was a kid, and I would’ve killed myself, or someone else, if I wasn’t allowed to escape even the tiny bit that message boards allowed.
You don’t like how Kids These Days are all group think horrible people yadda yadda yadda?
THEN STOP FORCIBLY ISOLATING THEM WITH FERAL MONSTERS AND FOLKS WHO ONLY HAVE POWER TO HARASS THE GOOD KIDS.
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Actually just unfollowed a podcaster– a rather good psychiatrist– because his solution to everything for kids is to take away their phone.
“See, see, they’re really upset! That shows that the phone is the cause of their problems!”
Not that the kid is in school or enrolled in Approved Events for 14 hours a day.
Not that there is not a single day a week where they have any kind of control over what groups they interact with, even to be able to withdraw.
Nope, it’s that the eeeeeebil screen is making problems.
Totally not a matter of being treated like a barn animal.
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How about no phones and no social media access during school and during practice/rehearsals for school sports and arts events? (Yes, I am biased. I was almost plowed down by someone on the phone, on social media, as I walked back from the copy room before school this morning. The student was so deep in [redacted app] that the kid never saw me, and was truly shocked when I yelped.)
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For public schools, hard no.
The correlation between “we must make sure they don’t have phones” and “hey, look, that thing the kids said was happening? They just posted video proving it did actually happen, when we said it didn’t, and we were engaged in criminal conspiracy” is too high.
For private schools– they actually have to keep the customers happy, so fire away. The parents who think that’s great can go there, and they can even actually remove kids from class for using them during school time.
I was almost plowed down by someone on the phone, on social media, as I walked back from the copy room before school this morning.
Having BEEN the kid that would do that with a book…..😅
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You weren’t the only kid that’d do that with a book. Just sayin’.
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Ayup. And you and Foxfier weren’t the only two.
Also, an open book in the front bike basket isn’t the Good Idea some nerdy 8-year-olds might think it is. Trust me on that…
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Kid? I have been known to run over my wife and kids while glued to a book… (Still doing it, at now sixty-six years and one day.)
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–
Same. Never heard “ban books in school”.
Would have been the same if I was of the age to be in school these days. It would be a book on the phone. But it would be a book, not social media.
The “not paying attention because on the phone in class”? I read in every single class from age 9 through HS graduation. Hint, I was not reading the class text book. Might have made the difference of not getting 4.0 GPA, like my sisters. Not that my GPA was much lower. Did prove the “not applying myself 100%”.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
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*raises hand* Yes, I had books confiscated in school.
Because I was READING instead of doing the stultifying, boring, repetitive MAKEWORK that we were assigned. Once you’ve DONE two-digit multiplication for a dozen worksheets or so, you’ve GOT it. You don’t need to do five dozen more just to prove the point.
But that’s what was assigned. So I went on strike. Reading. My books were taken away. So I read the textbooks. THOSE were taken away except for the one in use at that exact moment. The school (teachers) were VERY angry with me. Nine-year-olds aren’t supposed to DO that.
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Do not know how old you are. I am old enough that there were reading cards that students went through at their own pace to prove reading comprehension during “reading time”. Started in 4th grade. I got sent to the library during reading time. Why? Already completed the sets before Christmas. Yet, in 2nd and 3rd grade, my parents were told I couldn’t read. Wrong. My mouth can’t keep up with my eyes when reading aloud. I’m 69, I still have to pay attention if reading something aloud and not “get ahead”. That, plus what I read and what comes out my mouth (pronunciation) is broken. Dr. Seuss books? Son got two different versions depending on whether dad or I were reading to him.
Math? Not that I couldn’t do it. It was I couldn’t do it fast enough. We were timed on those math multiplication sheets. There was no “you know these”. You had to do it in the time required to move on to the next level. No mistakes. Paid off later.
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We had SRA cards, I read the whole box, it was a race between myself and one of the girls in my class to see who could get through it first. I won, barely. Alas, I was not one of the golden children who were in favor with the nuns, as was she, so nothing came of it for us despite promises at the beginning.
Catholic schools teaches the great lesson: life is not fair.
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I wasn’t the only one, by a long shot. Bonus, I didn’t have to be the one fidgeting. That prize went to the boys in the group. The other girls and I got the reward without the attention.
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In kindergarten, because I could already read, I had Instead-Of-Learning-To-Read time with the Polish kids. (I don’t know why we had a groups of Polish kids at that time. Note that I don’t speak Polish, but since it was more play time than anything, it worked out okay.) I had reading time with a special group in the afternoon.
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Fifty-six next birthday.
I could read and write when I entered kindergarten. So the first-grade teacher scolded my mother for teaching me to read “too early.” (Mom majored in doormat, no, she does not stand up for herself or anyone else.) That teacher (yes, I remember Miz Bush) also got upset when I corrected her spelling. Seven-year-olds aren’t supposed to do THAT, either. (Yeah, I was not tactful, but at seven, who is?)
I call public school hell because for some of us, it was moderately hellish.
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I was also 7, but it was 3rd grade (early in the year, late birthday), when I told a teacher “No”. (62 years later “I was right.”) Got told that it was my parent’s responsibility to “handle it”. Teacher did get disciplined for imposing punishment for something mom did to prevent teacher from not following the note sent from home. But I got disciplined for not doing the discipline and “mouthing back”, got swatted by the teacher at the time (which the teacher was NOT disciplined for).
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So, merely an outer circle of Hell? 😛
———————————
It takes a LOT of Education to make somebody that stupid.
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me too. On reading. So I started writing instead. They thought I was taking notes. AH!
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Neither are 6 year olds.
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Big YES on those cases where teachers who were outright abusing kids in class, who were only caught because some kid video’d it. That was my first thought, too, about the Sudden Consensus that kids shouldn’t even have ACCESS to their phones while in class.
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Heck, we solved a school problem back in the Polaroid era. (grin)
That bonofasitch wound up pumping gas at the local SludgeMart, just in time for self-service gas to become a thing.
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So make the counter proposal “we ban phones and put cameras in the classroom. 24/7, no shut off, publicly available.”
I predict the same reaction as when police / ICE were required to have body cams. 8-)
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Why ban phones at all? If some kid’s phone is distracting the class, kick the kid out.
There is only one crime I want the law to prevent:
Recidivism.
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My brother gave his daughters a locked-down (I hope it’s actually locked down) phone when they turned twelve. Which is currently two of them. I have their numbers and call them on their birthdays, and I’ve told them they can call to talk if they want to but neither has. My Dad gets called/texted by them all the time.
I’m a boring uncle compared to their grandpa, I guess. *sulks in a corner* ;-D
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The only kid of ours that has a phone is the one with a learner’s permit, and it’s both locked down and checked quite a bit; we’ve got free-floating tablets, and computers in the main areas of the house, and sneaking around like you expect to get in trouble is grounds for getting in trouble, even if we don’t catch you Doing Something.
We’ve also got Discord and similar chat programs set up so they can connect with family/friends.
The most social girl texts with her buddies on the house phone– with the full knowledge that yes, we do look at it, although so far it’s only been “Hey! The text from the power company came in, it marked your buddies gushing about Cookie Crumble or whatever as read.”
Been a few discussions because of going with the cool push… which we pushed back on… and which I recognize as coming from the other kids’ public schools, because it’s the same nonsense that was pushed when I was in. “Poor Palestinians! Those horrible Israeli people are SHOOTING BACK!”
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Miss usage of telephones is a new thing because of cell phones. This is the message.
Since when? Seriously?
Way back when the dinosaurs roamed the earth (I am older than dirt, hubby isn’t), I had to tell classmates that “Hey. You do know that if you call at 2 AM, that my parents ARE going to be listening in? That the call will be reported to the school authorities.” It happened, one time. Parents did listen in. Parents, and I, went to the principal’s office first thing in the morning. I could guess the names but didn’t know (truth).
Our son didn’t have a cell phone until HS (9th grade). He needed it for pickup after sports (rode school bus, public bus system was not optimal). All he had to do was let it be known that his parents monitored the phone, and they followed through. Safety through reputation.
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How -dare- those Untermensch refuse to walk into the “showers”!!!
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Wen Spencer put it very well in her book Wood Sprites:
“We’re not animals. They wonder what is wrong with our country, but isn’t it fairly obvious that if children are being treated like animals instead of rational beings, as adults they’ll respond like monkeys?”
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Here is a conspiracy theory for you:
It is highly unlikely that Epstein was the only one out there doing that. If I were British I would suspect ties between MI5, Pakistan’s ISI, and the rape gangs. I’m American so I am wondering what we have here.
If and when an incident happens that is horrible or gruesome enough, so that the media can’t help themselves and have to cover it, there is liable to be an investigation of internet grooming. Who knows what that might lead to? Or who?
So, insulate the who’s and what’s by putting the responsibility on everybody collectively instead of policing people who are actually committing the evils.
And don’t rock the pedophilic boat again. After all, we don’t want another ‘Moral Panic’, do we?
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Here is a conspiracy theory for you:
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Hey- I didn’t mean to double post. Can I delete one of these somehow?
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Don’t worry about it, she usually doesn’t bother to delete doubles unless it’s that insane “somehow, there’s a shortcut to post 16 copies of the comment.”
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This. ALL OF THIS.
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“And the livestock manuals didn’t help. Not even slightly.”
Fortunately I wasn’t drinking coffee when I read that. And I remember the old interwebs before google, which we explored by typing URL addresses. If you mistyped one you were barraged by porno images. Back in those early naive days, people were paid for how many pages they presented, not how many were clicked on. It was quite embarrassing at work when that happened and you kept clicking to take them down as fast as they kept appearing as if it were an early first person shooter.
Also I love your phrase about nerfing the world. Free will is how God tries to raise the human race and is responsible for most of the evil in the world, but he leaves us out there because we have to grow out of it. So many atheists are those who naively insist that if God were good, he would have nerfed the world. All those well meaning parents who insisted their kids never be exposed to peanuts only raised kids with a peanut allergy that they wouldn’t have otherwise had.
And, as you note, it doesn’t require the internet. How many kids my age bought “sea monkeys” because of ads in their comic books? I was a teenager in the 60’s. I saw plenty of crazy mad-crowd behavior, and all we had was Walter Cronkite.
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White House dot com!
And, of course, Navy FCU– which typoed over to swap the U with the C, and… ooohboy our base internet got a lot of pr0n hits.
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One of my coworkers, a lifelong bachelor, typed in, “gyniss,” into his search engine (this was very early on with m the Internet) because he5 heard there was an electronic pubs system with that name. He was instantly i produced to the world of hard-core lesbian porn. For about 30 horrified seconds, after which he shut off the browser and called Security to tell them what happened.
Go to a bad place for 30 seconds, once, no problem. Do it every day for half an hour at a time……
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Oh, gads, that reminds me of the time that they “updated” the reporting software…so it counted any access as 15 minutes of activity.
Which they only discovered via some guy being up for captain’s mast and then the captain got handed a report “proving” that he had done the same thing, from mistyping his banking address.
Problem got fixed.
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Pornado ….. now -there- is a flashback.
I was so amazingly lucky. The mistyped address during the staff meeting at my first IT gig produced a thunderstorm of pictures of beagles and the sound of many dogs barking.
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“NerfHerder” takes on a whole new meaning, eh?
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All your doxxing stories are rather terrifying. I had to keep a lower profile when I worked for security-minded employers. I’m still Frank Hood, NtM (nobody that matters), and, aside from confusion with folks with the same name, the worst I’ve gotten is somebody from Illinois that I apparently pissed off who took the time to one-star two of my stories and leave reviews of “awful”, “terrible”, and “don’t bother”. I’m encouraged because I ask at cons, “How do you find new authors?” and the universal answer is recommendations from people who know me and know my taste. People are aware of all the phony manipulation that surrounds everything they see, and basically pay it no heed.
Of course, even I still occasionally fall for the “one simple trick” that will cure youknowyougotit disease and that only leads to a 30 minute video waste of time that can’t be fast-forwarded through and that always ends in, “Just send us your money.” Live and learn as they say.
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Again, Sarah is correct.
Did I think I was naive as a child/teen/young-adult? Please. Not a chance. Looking back now, I know I was naive. Horribly so. I’m better now, for degrees of better. I want to think the best of people, especially in certain settings. Used to be it would be extremely upsetting if I learned differently. The difference now is I do not get upset. I shrug, maybe swear quietly, a little, move on and forget them. Most are not worth my time.
However, there have been those times that looking back, during my most naive times, for absolutely no reason at that time, I played it safe. Like refusing to ride with someone even going to the same location. I drove my vehicle. I did not offer them a ride either. If I had to rely on someone for a ride, I did not go.
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One thing I’ve tried to teach my kids is to look at what people do, not what they say.
That’s apparently a vanishing skill. There are *soooo many* social media California-local commenters (and yes, I’m talking real people and not bots) who sincerely state that Governor Hairgel is amazing. And should be President. I can only surmise that they listen to him talk and believe what he says about himself, rather than bothering to check any of his claims.
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Hairgel is amazing.
There are a lot of people I do not model very well, and Hairgel is one that I do find surprising and difficult to entirely understand.
My general opinion on ‘should be president’ is that Trump is president now, and that two years is a long time. I think that any opinion on current political incumbents is wildly premature, given that the circumstances may be very different then.
My specific opinion on Hairgel is sure, I bet the midwest would happily be burnt down, and that such would surely have no negative consequences for anyone.
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I ran in to something like this recently regarding Trump in the Epstein files. Bright kid in the rugby club was convinced there had to be dirt on Trump, after all everybody said so. I was able to intervene by pointing out that the Biden administration had those files in their possession for years and still had to resort to making up the fake crime of using an aggressive appraisal. IF there was actual dirt on Trump in that file ….. The kid got it right away. Bread upon the waters. You can’t talk with the true believers, but you can talk to the others, and should,
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As the song says.
God is great. Beer is good. And people are crazy.
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When I was a kid, I was way ahead of my age group at reading, and my parents let me read what I pleased. Sometimes they were concerned about what I read (like the time I was investigating the Jehovah’s Witness movement in depth) but they said later that I always came to good conclusions. (My views of the Witnesses are…unfavorable. On several different grounds.)
I really wish this fetish of “childhood innocence” had died in World War One like so many other Victorian ideas. Or that we were able to differentiate between pre- and post-pubescent “children.” What might not be good for a nine-year-old might be just the thing a sixteen-year-old needs.
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I do not trust anything a Liberal or Democrat is involved with, they have proven they can’t be trusted. And our government from top to bottom is full of Liberals and Democrats. Period dot end of story.
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Lauren is a constructed internet/writing personality. My true name isn’t found on social media. I’m sure someone could track me down if they were determined to do so, but as far as I know no one has tried.
I do not want my real name out there for a lot of reasons, the most obvious being that I would have to start over building 30 years of online profiles.
I chose to use my writing name as my internet name. It was a deliberate and considered choice, not a whim.
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One of the reasons I choose not to post much on FB or google sites. At least the Amazon reviews only has first initial and last name. Could someone track me down with the label I use here? Yes.
OTOH, my name is very, very, very, common. To the point that even in a relatively small town, one specialty medical clinic, they had six files with the same first and last name, four with the same middle initial, and two with the same middle name. They added my maiden name as a second middle name. (Before computer filing.) I suppose these days, still possible to have same name, same birthday, but will not have the same address. When I do a Google search on my name, a lot of hits are listed. None of them, on the first three pages (after that I give up), are me; not even my FB page.
More than once in the last year at a clinic the first name gets called, and multiple people stand up, look around, and in unison say “which one?”
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You can also change the name on your Amazon Reviews account.
Go to here:https://www.amazon.com/review/review-your-purchases/listing
and you can click on the link in the blue bar under the website search bar, and change it.
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On the other hand, my name is very, very unusual. As far as I know I’m the only person with this combination. The spelling of the first name is unusual enough that I have found it only once, in a book that I believe was published in the early 20th century. Other people have the same first name, but not the same spelling.
No one can pronounce it, and no one can spell it. Rather a death knell for an author who wants people to be able to find her books.
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I am fortunate that my real name sounds like a fake name.
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I know several people know my real name, and there are probably quite a few others ss well.
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I’ve mentioned before that I knew I needed a pen name. I had a great author name selected, and decided just in case to see if anyone else shared it. Alas, it was a very, very well-known tort litigator and plaintiff’s bar attorney. Oops.
Alma T. C. Boykin it is.
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For those unaware, California passed a law last October (I think it goes into effect next year) that will require a wide variety of apps – including OPERATING SYSTEMS – to perform age verification.
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And apparently SCOTUS is going to let AI make recusal decisions.
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Ugh…
Given that every single LLM has shown political tendencies – sometimes *pronounced* tendencies – this is a bad thing. I get the desire to try and appeal to an LLM as a disinterested third party (especially after the Dems have been making hay over justices not recusing lately), but it’s reckless with the current crop.
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Good Lord.
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“Justices Alito and Thomas, as originalists and conservatives on the court it is best to recuse yourself from all cases brought by the democrat party.
Justices Jackson, Kagan, and Sotomayor, I found no current cases with any grounds for recusal.
Justices Barrett, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh, please peruse the lengthy recusal list sent to each of you.
Chief Justice Roberts, no grounds for recusal have been found. However please read the instructions on how to rule on the following cases.”–ScatGPT
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I think we can do without your Scatological humor….
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I’ll include the link, but it is behind the paywall:
https://www.nysun.com/article/the-supreme-court-downloads-a-software-update
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re: digital ID and self-doxing.
The answer for this is that everyone should be able to have multiple IDs, as many as they want. Each ID will earn a reputation on it’s own, and you can opt to have specific IDs that are tied to a particular person/age verified to use in those (few) places where it’s justified, otherwise let the IDs earn their reputation based on what they say.
but we need to really re-examine what needs and ID.
Why does the government require that hotels see an ID to rent someone a bed for the night? I believe that this comes from an era when it was being used by the snoop-next-door to try and find people in ‘inappropriate’ relationships.
why do we require ID to fly? it’s the (mistaken) theory that terrorists do not have access to fake IDs and so asking for an ID will prevent them from attacking.
go down the list of what requires an ID and ask why, what value/safety is really being provided? or does it just make someone feel good to be able to say that some minimum wage person at a cash register says they looked at a card for a couple of seconds and was able to know without any doubt that it’s not a forgery and the person really is over ?
There are things where it’s appropriate to do verification (porn/alcohol purchases) but even there, do you really think that the verification prevents all kids from getting access? has nobody ever heard of older teens getting fake IDs so they could go to bars? (I was never interested in drinking, so I didn’t, but it was a common thing when I was in High School)
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for a good example of how multiple IDs could work (including among criminals), see https://www.baen.com/earthweb.html it’s not the primary focus of the book, but woven into the world background.
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And just how difficult do you think it is for a government or nefarious person to tie all those IDs together, say by the IPs they use and geolocation? Say by close of business today?
Oh, wait, it was already done by systems set up to do exactly that, years ago, when you tried to be clever. LOL
“You are far too trusting…”
No. Just no.
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Let me also throw at you “The Onion router is a honeypot”.
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Why not? Lots of people in this thread seem to think that they’ve successfully kept their kids from various things, while also bragging that if the government puts any obstacles in their way to using various tech, they’ll just work around it.
Guess what, mom and dad? To your kids, YOU are the government to work around. All you can do is reduce the motivation and opportunity to do it.
No, it’s because you haven’t thought it through. Start with the terrorist’s credo: “We only have to be lucky ONCE.”
Now consider the pool of potential terrorists. X% of them don’t have and have never tried to get a fake ID. Just by requiring one, that cuts the size of the potential pool by those who decide it’s too much trouble and they aren’t that mad. The more that’s required in terms of tools and knowledge, the smaller the potential pool of those who have what’s required, including the motivation to work that hard.
Second, it’s all about increasing the number of opportunities for the terrorist to NOT be lucky: They buy their tools from the “wrong” supplier, with the “wrong” form of trackable payment, etc.
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You do not thwart “terrorists” with restrictive laws applied to the populace. Doesn’t work at all. Actual counterproductive effort, as the opposition exploits that to gain sympathy from annoyed normies.
Step 1: Never, ever negotiate with terrorists. No matter what they do, no negotiation, ever. Destroy them. They must -never- gain by their actions. Never.
Step2: Kill them as expeditiously and spectacularly as possible, then go after their supporters, families, cheerleaders, etc. If they surrender, max out the prosecutions and sentences. They must -never- gain by their actions. Never.
Step 3: If you are not at “public executions of surviving captured terrorists, and their primary enablers”, you need to up your game. They must -never- gain by their actions. Never.
This removes from the contest any potential gains for terrorism. They may do so out of malice or philosophy, but that just makes it then so much easier to rule 1-2-3 them.
Yes. Bloody. Yes, borders on horror. May jump that shark occasionally. However, if you can hold your barf reflex, you eliminate all but the crazies, and set the crazies up for extinction.
Then no sane person will touch your folks with terrorism.
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Thank you! A screed on the same subject was a-boiling on my burner, but my sometime-collaborator, Ethyl Oh*, kept trying to spice it up — “essential liberty vs temporary safety,” “SOMEBODY was Bad, so Stop’n’Frisk EVERYBODY,” 19 new blast craters in 19 hijackers’ hometowns, curses on a certain former president’s head… you– you know the thing!
She’s a beach. You covered it better. Thanks.
* Despite the name, I don’t think she’d say “Taiwan on!” like that if she were CCP.
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Like dogs, most children turn out okay, but some will become vicious, others will not, but be stupid, and a small minority are run over by cars. They have to have some freedom, though, and without it, they don’t have a chance. Cowed, angry, mentally deranged, or outright dangerous, keeping them on a chain destroys what can be their best, and the ability to function in their society.
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“When I come across this nonsense I’m neither child nor work safe for about ten minutes. And I’m fairly sure I invented some new German swear words.”
Only ten minutes? My! You need to expand your vocabulary to at least 20 minutes of creative cursing. And German is the perfect language for that. Germans connect short, simple words together to make the most convoluted complex vocabulary EVAH!
As for the quote about meat and babies, IIRC I first read that in an RAH novel (too lazy to look it up now – maybe later – maybe)
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German is a GREAT language for cussin’. Even “ich liebe dich” sounds like someone is strangling a horse.
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Awwww……ya shouldn’t have. Geeee…..and “I Love You” too. (LOL!)
Yep, that’s German for you. More gutturals than a street sewer.
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Then there’s Dutch and its offspring Afrikaans. Germans listen to a Dutchman speak and offer him a throat lozenge.
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For those who are raising children, I saw this press release this week: https://www.fbi.gov/contact-us/field-offices/boston/news/fbi-boston-warns-of-nihilistic-violent-extremists-targeting-children-and-vulnerable-victims-online
I recommend looking up 764 on Wikipedia and Grokipedia.
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Back in my childhood, Mom had a live and let live policy. “Leave my kids alone and I will let you live.”
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I’m not sure I know many people who actually think the face verification thing is about protecting kids. I know some people who go along with it because that’s what they do, but that’s about it.
Finding out that the app discord is using basically sends you face to an international background check system makes me expect it was always about mass surveillance and control, right from the beginning, rather than merely goof intentions gone bad, either.
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Where is this from?
When Discord announced the face thing, one of the specific points was that it was done entirely on the phone itself, and estimated age based off of the visual.
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Apparently a hacking group discovered they’re using Persona for it, and it appears to be absolutely not staying just on your device:
https://x.com/Pirat_Nation/status/2024847507990442480?s=20
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Insert I’m SHOCKED! image.
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Well, they did already have one big facial data spill last year because one of the contractors they hired to handle age verification appeals was retaining photos. And I recall the women only dating site that managed to store some huge portion of their data set in an unencrypted drop box.
Maybe Discord is actually not storing things this time, but I haven’t seen any proof of it yet, and honestly don’t feel like the return is worth the risk of rolling those dice.
Yet it feels like everyone is pushing it everywhere. Somebody must be benefiting, somehow from all of this.
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Yes. Never take the Sudden Consensus at face value. Measures that people insist are “nothing but” ways to shield the tender eyes of Youth, for instance, and not at all about making samizdat show its show its provenance with government ID at every link…
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Just because the 99% are going one way, doesn’t mean that it’s 100% the right way.
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Well, as Sarah has noted the Internet was one of the things that helped break leftist hold over distribution of information. This is probably an attempt by them and other people in power to reassert control so they can… guide those they see as peasants into the “correct” view.
But hey, if you object you want chiiiiiiiildren to see PORN or something. Same old formula I’ve seen with gun control. So tiresome.
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Like Sarah says, the whole idea is to de-anonymize the internet.
I agree with this article, that they will break a LOT of things in trying to do it, and depending on how much control they can exert over suppliers of hardware and software, they might succeed for all but a Remnant.
https://www.pcgamer.com/software/operating-systems/a-new-california-law-says-all-operating-systems-including-linux-need-to-have-some-form-of-age-verification-at-account-setup/
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How do they propose to enforce that against people who build their own Linux systems from source? Or download distributions hosted outside Kalifornia, or outside the U.S.? What about all the millions of computers already in use? What vast new bureaucracy will be required? Who will command the Computer Police?
Of course, it’s all just a distraction from a government that is
stealingwasting vast sums of our tax money while failing in its most basic responsibilities.———————————
No matter how much it sucks, you can’t fire the government.
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Policy writers have no time for how: that’s for us peons to figure out.
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Imaginos, they don’t expect to enforce it globally; they expect to enforce it selectively against people they dislike. It’s a pretext for lawfare.
And because it is, they expect organizations (businesses, places like GitHub) who have concentrations of assets they CAN damage to enforce it for them. That’s how fascism works.
We just saw a prime example this week.
https://townhall.com/columnists/kevinmccullough/2026/02/23/they-mean-retribution-n2671735
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They will try and mostly fail, but in the process will break a lot of things is more accurate.
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Yeah, I’m not believing some random hackers claim when the first round of objectively verifiably false accusations (which “organically” showed up in a bunch of locations) didn’t get the traction that was clearly wanted.
So I went and dug around, and it turns out that the connection already ended, before the “leak,” and that further more was a SECONDARY VENDOR VERIFICATION option for if the on-device test didn’t work as desired and you wanted to get out of the ‘teen safe’ experience.
Which could be why they fired the vendor, or could be because the vendor got fired and wanted to do damage.
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It’s still their responsibility for picking that vendor and giving that level of access when they were not trustworthy. And on them to prove that they are secure. They have not. They have just said ‘trust me’.
The juice isn’t worth the squeeze for what’s mostly just a convenient chat app.
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The relevant bit is that there is a MASSIVE difference between
“a vendor they tested out sucked and was fired before it even went into production,”
and
“they lied about the facial processing being kept on the phone.”
You can make that choice for yourself, but basic justice requires that others have accurate information on what hoops are being put in place to go beyond a “teen safe” account level.
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The onus is still on Discord to provide that. They have not, beyond ‘trust me bro’ press releases.
As far as I can tell, they’ve provided zero transparency on the system they are using. I have not yet even seen them refute the accusations that they are using Persona for verification.
Adding facial verification to anonymous accounts is a very big attack surface. And I haven’t seen anything from them to justify it.
And I am no longer willing to extend any trust without verification up front.
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Your original claim was:
The actual case is:
“They did a trial run with a secondary vendor, for a completely different identity check option, and that vendor was fired, then demonstrated why they were a bad choice by illegally retaining information and not protecting it.”
Again, you can make whatever choices you want, but other people have a right to accurate descriptions of the situation. Not a summary that you find good enough to justify your conclusions.
That stuff is how we got into a bunch of the messes we are in right now.
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Those are two separate events.
The current recent claim is that they’re using Persona for the primary verification. The secondary vendor data spill was a different one last year.
And, again, given they have already had one proven spill, is that risk worth it to actress a chat room?
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No, the Persona verification split was in the last few weeks– and if you can dig around enough to find a reporter that did some reporting, you’ll find links and quotes of this statement from Discord in one of their FAQs:
Which Persona was not doing, then they were fired, and then that they not only hadn’t been deleting the information but had it unsecured was found. (That would also likely be why the FAQ was deleted, since they hadn’t decided to retain after the trial run.)
Which would be a very good reason to cut ties with the company, if it wasn’t flat out sabotage after the fact.
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There was also the breach in September. That was a different 3rd party vendor, 5CA, who was also keeping IDs when Discord said they were not.
Discord confirms data breach via 5CA, 70K IDs exposed – TechBriefly
https://techbriefly.com/2025/10/21/discord-confirms-data-breach-via-5ca-70k-ids-exposed/
Most of the reports talked about the size of the breach, but took a while to find one that named the 3rd party vendor.
I’ll have to go dig into the timeline to see what order things happened in with the Persona usage. If the hackers who broke it actually were Persona employees, that still begs the question wtf Discord was doing working with them in the first place.
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I know there was a prior breach, since I got the email about it, along with most of the gamers in the last decade.
Which is why I was very surprised to see a claim that the new work-around that completely avoided sending identity information off the phone not only had been doing so (which would be an incredibly out of character failure to understand market) but was trusted to someone who violated their contract and didn’t do basic security measures.
I also had noticed that when Discord put out their announcement of a way to comply with various European rules without handing them the identities of everyone with a Discord account, there was a suspiciously unified and selectively truthful surge of reporting about it.
Reporting which was very easy to check by finding the actual announcement, which somehow none of the wave of articles did quote.
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His “conclusion” is just acknowledgement of a solid First Principle:
IF: 1) It’s doable; AND 2) It’s profitable; AND 3) It’s safe for the doer (i.e. hard to get caught, and/or low-to-no penalty); THEN: it’s gonna be done.
Maybe not by the specific suspect under the exact circumstances described in an internet article, but SOMEBODY’S doing it. If not now, soon. For all values of “it”.
If YOU want to trade your anonymity — future AND past — to strangers on the internet in exchange for access to swearwords and boobs, have at it! But don’t knock the skeptics’ good sense.
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And I give the idea of “someone will do it” all the respect due to those who go “you are male, so I’ll act like you committed rape.”
Same as any other crime.
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The idea isn’t that “You are male, therefore…”
It’s that “There are males, therefore…”
The (important) idea has little to do with Discord per se.
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That fails on contact with the original claim being that Discord had actually done the thing.
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I see. So paying somebody else to do it excuses them from responsibility?
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The accusation was that they had lied when they said that they would be using age estimation software that did not leave the computer.
This is a very, very big deal, since it is not just a lie, but a lie about data leaving a computer being made to some of the most bandwidth insane population on the planet. Gamers.
There is a very big difference between “secondary vendor that was being considered as an option for those who want to contest their detected age, who they had already decided was a bad fit, was in fact not someone they should use as a secondary age verification option” is a completely different statement.
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>sigh<
You’re right.
He said “tree!” while pointing at what turned out to be only a large fern.
Therefore forests aren’t real.
You win.
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If you want to convert to liberalism, this is probably not the best place to do so. This dance is old, and boring.
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