The War Against Children
Jul. 26th, 2022 10:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kimberlysteele
Our civilization has a love/hate relationship with children that is currently listing heavily towards hate. Children and their parents take a bad rap for being selfish in an age of overpopulation. Long ago, in a time before the woke revolution, gay men came up with the term "breeder" to label people (typically straight ones) who wanted to conceive and/or successfully bore children. As someone who has never wanted children of my own, I was regularly mystified by people who pitied me for not having children or who asked when I was going to have children of my own. At the tender age of 18 I already felt a great deal of pressure to have children. The pressure did not truly subside until I reached the age of 45 (I was a very young looking 40) and it became patently obvious my husband and I had no designs on creating a child together.
My go-to line was and is "Raising a child is one of the toughest jobs in the world, and I skipped it because I didn't want to do it half-assed". I only say this to parents who I believe are doing an excellent job raising their children. Many people who become parents belatedly discover they don't want to be parents. There are message boards for parents who confess that having one or more children ruined their bond with their spouse or mate. They regale anonymous viewers with horror stories about the aftermath of childbirth-ruined bodies, isolation, depression, and regret. Many wish they could go back in time and make a different decision. Many feel tricked and hoodwinked. Parenthood was glorified and its truths downplayed. Many feel eaten alive by toxic mommy culture and to a lesser but still significant extent, toxic daddy culture. Many suck it up and never let anyone know about their negative feelings, burying the wound deep inside where it festers and burns.
It's a fact that many people have children merely because they are expected to have them. Many more have them by sheer accident. I was an accident; that's why I was adopted at the age of ten days. When parents do regret having children, they are not allowed to say it aloud. They are never allowed to mourn what they have lost in terms of freedom, youthfulness, autonomy, and potential. They are handed a set of unrealistic expectations. Nobody can have it all, yet we are told this all the time with the hackneyed term "limitless possibilities". We are also told we should desire to have it all while being all things to all people. There are many idealized images where one can have kids, career, a perfect house, a killer Instagram, and of course lots of money.
Spoiled Rotten: Is There a Subconscious Backlash Against Children?
Childhood is fetishized. Suburban childhoods like the one I experienced in the late 70s and early 80s became a trend on big and small screens when the TV show Stranger Things resurrected the packs of kids on bikes trope from Stephen Spielberg's ET. Today's über-precious, molly coddled Gen Z child does not know what it is like to be sent outside to play and forgotten about until dinner, or the brief phone call from a friend's house to get permission to eat dinner over there. As generations of children have become more and more materialistic, they have become more feral, either shrinking away in horror from just about everything or boldly bratting it up while posing for a mom-assisted selfie in front of a mountain of unearned toys. As a teen, a healthy amount of my self-hatred came from remembering what an insufferable brat I had been just a few years earlier. Maybe I'm not the only one who hates how spoiled I was.
Instead of raising kids sensibly to do without en masse, I hypothesize that hatred bubbles up as severe and awful post-hoc punishments for children, for instance making them the subjects of mass medical experiments with various vaccines and allowing woke teachers to use them for sexual grooming purposes. In other unsurprising news, the most draconian elements of child punishment have been originated by the most child-hating and overpopulated nation on the planet, China.
It is the worst time in history to be a child. The second you pop out of mom's body, you are pricked and poked with vaccines that cause learning disabilities and auto-immune dysfunction ranging from mild to severe. If you survive, you may end up being told you are insane by the tender age of ten for maintaining an active connection to the spirit world. If you are not a natural conformist, you will be mercilessly bullied, often by your own parents. If your parents have any money, it is highly unlikely you will know what it is to play outside without being in constant danger of being run over by a car, if you are allowed unsupervised play at all. Every parent I knew as a youngster dealt with depression. Psychiatry as a profession only exists because of moms and dads who hate their lives. This begs the question of "What's the use of a gorgeous, comfortable lifestyle if you're depressed as hell all the time?" It's the same sort of conundrum of the very rich and very sick. What good is the $400 bottle of wine when you cannot drink it even with the help of a nurse holding a straw to your lips?
The MRNA vaccines were first billed as a way of keeping grandma safe from her grandchildren. Once the optics fail of children suffering on behalf of their grandparents was perceived for the failure it was, the myth machine churned out propaganda about the vaccines being safe for the youngest of the young. It was always clear they were not safe for anyone paying attention. I'm not sure why it took so many ten year olds keeling over with heart attacks though. My suspicions are that many people who claim to love children actually don't love them at all.
Misanthropy as a Function of Overpopulation
The Plandemic turned regular people into original sinners who could only get clean one way: by getting repeatedly inseminated with a DNA-modding set of machines in injection form. The baptism rite in question was demanded by the anti-theist powers of Progress. The children were offered up as the ultimate sacrifice on the altar, which is to say children are still the disposable cannon fodder they were in World War I. Though some may claim they believe the children are our future, nobody has any problem with child labor as long as it is done by little Pakistani girls in sweatshops and little boys in the Congo mining cobalt for electric cars. Children were always on the front lines and precious little has actually changed except the flavor of lies we are expected to swallow hook, line, and sinker about how much they are loved and valued.
The reason companies are rushing to get vaccines on the childhood vaccine schedule is because it lifts the onerous burdens of liability in case they kill or maim children as they are already doing. Autism is up to 1 in every 30 births. Compare to 1 in every 2500 being diagnosed with autism in 1960. Something is amiss, for sure, but there is no rush to get to the bottom of it. To add insult to injury, autistic people are thrown away by the time they hit their teens. To exact revenge, many of them have become memelords on 4chan.
Commodifying Innocence and Manufacturing Consent
In the Jim Henson fantasy film The Dark Crystal, the evil villains are a race of decrepit bird-creatures called Skeksis who spend their time and resources hunting down the last of a race of mini-people called Gelflings. When they find a Gelfling, they hang him or her in the air and extract his or her life essence until the creature dies. They drink the substance as an elixir and gain an addictive rush along with a temporary stay from aging. Basically Jim Henson had his Skeksis drinking adrenochrome long before it was cool. Right around the same era, Brooke Shields made several soft porn movies and starred in extremely mature photo shoots, many while she was still a pre-teen. 80s kids were pushed into sexuality at age 12. Now that sexy 12 year olds are yesterday's news, mainstream media has moved on to five year olds and toddlers.
There are some teachers of the type displayed on Libs of TikTok who have the sick idea that little kids should be initiated into adult domains to "help" them figure out what they will be in terms of future sexuality. My husband pointed out that anyone with a sexual agenda to "help" a little kid is a pedophile no matter what they believe they are doing. Most kids are unaware of themselves as having sexual feelings until at least a few years before puberty. Most of those feelings can easily be shelved until they grow into semi-adulthood and begin the cycle of puberty. Sexualizing a child, ogling a child as Brooke Shields was ogled, or attempting to influence a gender decision upon a child who has not completed full puberty is sexual abuse and a breach of their human right to privacy and autonomy. If I was Queen of the World, I would enact no punishments for thought crimes. However, those who acted on their pedophilic urges would be put on trial and quickly executed as a matter of course, and that includes teachers who "come out" to their kindergarten classrooms. Communists believe that turning all sex into a robotic, debased free for all is better than the opposite traditional religious obsession with sexual shame and humiliation. Evangelists want an eternal re-run of the opening scenes of The Handmaid's Tale, with any woman who dares have a child outside the confines of marriage literally branded (preferably by cutting off a hand or putting out her eye) for life and her child taken away to be gifted to the deserving and heterosexual faithful. Commies prefer an abyss of perversion and Evangelists delight in a morass of repression and punishment. Either way, kids get thrown under the bus.
In Which I Propose a Ternary
I believe there is a happy medium that neither involves five year olds receiving cartoon masturbation manuals nor a pamphlet of lies about storks and mommy's tummy. De-stigmatizing unmarried teen pregnancy would help countless generations of children from a couple of key angles. Allowing younger people to have children outside of marriage with the expectation of being completely supported and accepted would result in healthier generations of children. The later one waits to have children, the worse one's prospects are for having a healthy, intelligent child. One of the reasons for the high number of autistic births is because of the general age of today's parents, not just the amount of unnecessary and toxic chemicals being shoved into baby's shoulder. A hundred short years ago, teenagers had children on the regular and nobody batted an eye. Women wrapped up childbearing at age 35 if they were not dead from doing it, unlike now when women don't think about having a child until they're having sporadic hot flashes. Healthier attitudes towards unmarried teen pregnancy would mean more children and fewer abortions of the legal or illegal variety. Considering the vaccinated are very likely to face fertility problems in the near to far future, there is haste to be made in accepting parenthood in in forms that were previously considered declassé or embarassing.
Though I am encouraged to see alternative schools springing up in my area in response to the exposé of public schools in 2020-2022, I am dismayed by the surging tide of Christian schools which seek to replace once kind of indoctrination with its equally bad opposite. I believe children should learn that being gay is OK, just not in any graphic detail.
Boomer mom
Date: 2022-07-27 02:47 pm (UTC)My mom was a working class Baby Boomer who got married shortly after high school. While many of her peers were out having all kinds of fun, she was stuck home with an abusive husband and screaming children. She always seemed angry and stressed, so strict. She had good reasons for it. Looking back I think she wanted us to grow up in a hurry so she could move to work she enjoyed more. She loved us, she was just better at providing than mothering. She eventually earned college degrees and a successful career. My relationship with her improved greatly when I grew up and moved out.
When I became an adult I chose freedom and flexibility instead of marriage, children, or career. It may look selfish to some people but I probably would have been a bad wife and mother. Way too much unhealed baggage. It would be nice if the stigma for not having kids went away too. Some people really aren't meant to be parents. Parenting well takes a lot of skill and strength...what would happen if people were more honest about that?
Thank you for your thought provoking post. It's such an important topic...as a society, we are doing awful things to our kids. We're not so good at supporting parents, either.
Re: Boomer mom
Date: 2022-07-28 02:39 am (UTC)I agree, it would be VERY nice if people could stop putting all of their hangups on the childless and the childfree. I could have been a very good parent and that's exactly why I chose not to do it. I still think parenting should require a license, though there could never be any enforcement for a parenting license, it would only be a badge of honor.
Pro-abortion types do have legitimate points when they draw attention to the fact that pro-lifers don't care about babies or children once they are born. In a Childfree Vegans Facebook group I used to run, we called pro-lifers "fetus fetishists" because they were obsessed with protecting the unborn child at the mother's direct expense.
Re: Boomer mom
Date: 2022-07-28 03:05 pm (UTC)In historical accounts, you run across a lot of references to single-sex boarding houses-- places where old bachelors and spinsters could rent a room, not have to do their own housekeeping, and get a meal or two a day served at the house. They still exist but are much rarer and seedier these days. When I was a kid, and my dad worked in another city for a while, he lived in one such place, sort of a holdover. The proprieters had been in the business for a very long time, and still brought up a pitcher of wash-water each morning, to use with the basin on a stand in his room! That was the 80s.
Side note: a more retro understanding of family does a pretty good job of handling teenage pregnancy as well. It used to be fairly normal for an out-of-wedlock child of a teen mother to simply be adopted by its grandparents, and move seamlessly into the family. Knew of a trad catholic family who'd done this: after eight kids, adding a ninth was no big deal, he was doted on by all his sibling/aunts/uncles, and bio-mom successfully finished college. Win win. It'd work even better if there was no stigma attached, and nobody had to go through the farce of teenage daughter "going off to stay with relatives" for the duration ;) This used to be fairly common, and I even wonder idly if it happened in my own family-- my grandmother comes from a huge family, where everybody's about 3 years apart in age except the youngest-- 7-year gap there, and she was the only blonde one. Probably a surprise menopause baby, but what if...?
Re: Boomer mom
Date: 2022-07-29 03:45 pm (UTC)Cute story about the blonde baby!
Re: Boomer mom
Date: 2022-08-03 06:01 am (UTC)Re: Boomer mom
Date: 2022-08-03 04:57 pm (UTC)Basically there are binaries that try to establish themselves: that all parents ("breeders") are indulgent morons who rampantly spoil their insufferable children and that the childfree/barren/childless are painted saints who suffer the indignant horror with a stiff upper lip.
The other binary is that all childfree/barren/childless are bitter scourges, warlocks, and witches who spend most of their free time wishing death on the breeders and their precious children for the mere crime of expressing their joy to be alive by shouting and being cantankerous.
Both of these binaries are false images that present themselves to be worshipped (idolatry) and fall far short of the big picture. The truth, as usual, is in the complicated middle.
Re: Boomer mom
Date: 2022-07-29 08:09 pm (UTC)Thank you for your kind thoughts. My Mom did find something kind of like that in her third marriage. They both seemed happy with how it turned out.
Sometimes I wonder how it would be if potential parents had to pass a basic test before having kids. The equivalent of getting a drivers' license...easy for an ordinary person to pass but weeding out some of scariest contenders. People who were basically good but with a weak area (say, anger management) could take a class if needed.
Yes, there is something a creepy in being so focused on the fetus that the mother and her needs become invisible. Pro-choice and pro-life camps both have good points but taken to extremes...creepy.
no subject
Date: 2022-07-27 04:29 pm (UTC)Imagine our surprise when the next two turned out radically normal! I was nearly forty when the last one was born. I know, statistics, exceptions, etc. It's just funny to see "autism = older parents" and then look at my own kids who follow the opposite pattern.
Public schools were a colossal waste of time even when we were school age. I wouldn't dream of putting my kids in school now, as long as we had *any* other options. I don't like the product they're turning out. My relatives in the recently-graduated age group are basically unmotivated marshmallows. I'm glad they like their parents enough that they don't feel *driven* to leave home by any means necessary like I did at that age, but still... No drive, no resilience, no curiosity. They don't *want* anything. If that's what schools are producing these days, why the frack would I want to put my kids through it?
(internet issues, delete if it posted twice)
no subject
Date: 2022-07-28 02:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-07-28 04:32 pm (UTC)Like you: a few really excellent teachers that I learned a lot from. But still mostly a waste of time. I never fit in socially, nothing was intellectually challenging, and I still had to work at the same excruciating snail's pace as everybody else in the class, to make sure nobody was falling behind. My Dad taught me to read and do basic arithmetic. I remained far, far ahead of grade level on reading and English for my entire school career. Math didn't catch up with me until fourth grade, and then long division clobbered me over the head hard, because I was 9 and it was the first time I'd ever had to *work* at anything in school. After that, went back to basically daydreaming and reading through classes until high school. So. Much. Time. that could have been spent doing *anything* else. I could have been outdoors. I could have been in the library. I could have been chasing weird hobbies. All of those would have been a better use of the time!
I try really hard with my own kids, to remember what the biggest deficiencies were in my own preparation for independent life, and make sure to fill them in on those things. How often to change sheets. How bank accounts work. How loans and credit cards work. How to balance your checkbook. How to keep track of your spending and calculate your real income (minus taxes, minus costs imposed by the job). We even use ledger books :) We of course do the usual round of subjects, but the focus is different. It's way more important to be able to manage your own money, and make a professional-sounding phone call, than to understand plate tectonic theory, you know? So the great thing about homeschooling is, we can breeze over things like plate tectonics, just enough so they know what's being talked about if the subject comes up in conversation and don't look like rubes, but no further unless it's a subject of interest to them. Otherwise, it's basic skills and literacy that we focus on: math, reading, and good literature (if you're raised on good stuff, crap literature is intolerable!)
But when we hit on something that truly interests them, we can go as in-depth as they want to go! My 10yo knows more than most non-pilot adults about how airplanes work, wind resistance, flight dynamics, all the instruments in the cockpit of an airplane, etc. because he's fascinated by it, and we buy him whatever books he wants, including actual flight manuals, have sent him to aviation camp, and that's a thing he pursues with tremendous devotion and energy. While pursuing that very single-minded thing, he's learned quite a lot about physics, history, maps... and if he holds onto the pursuit long enough, it'll probably involve some advanced math. Second kid has a love affair with maps, and surrounds himself with atlases, studies his globe, and is becoming very knowledgeable in geography, without any nudging or lessons from me. I just make a note of it in his school log now and then: "Studied maps of Africa, discussed colonialism and the changing countries and borders". Some kids learn that best as a historical narrative, and some kids approach it better as a study of maps from different times, and studying it in a way that grabs your imagination means you'll remember more of it. As parents, we try to do less classroom-style teaching, and more discussion and just overall... resource aggregating. Kids don't have much access to transportation, money, and resources, so that's the part we have to do for them, more than anything. Get them books, take them to the library, help them figure out where to find the stuff they want to know.
They're not, BTW, allowed on the internet yet. So "how to find it" is, you know, not just "google it" but for real, how to round up real-life actual resources and get access to people who know more about it. When we get a question that's way out of our league, it's like "let's figure out *how to get an answer* to that question" The resource-literacy, IMO, is far more important than any little facts we impart to them.
no subject
Date: 2022-07-29 04:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-07-29 12:38 pm (UTC)There is, unfortunately, always *that one family* in any local homeschooler milieu, that is doing it for all the wrong reasons-- like so they can control every aspect of their kids' lives and keep their souls in a steel box. Or as you point out, so they don't have to do anything. It's creep-tastic and those people get used to try to justify all sorts of intrusive regulations for the rest of us. There's no evidence that's more common among homeschoolers than among people who send their kids to school-- I think they do stick out more, because you meet the parents alongside the kids and see the way they interact, unlike in school. It's one of the vanishingly few cases where I think "those kids would be better off in school". There's probably not enough there for CPS to remove the kids from the home, so it's like... maybe they'd be better off if they were interacting with other adults more often. And then I see the current crop of young rainbow-haired activist teachers, and... yeah. Sigh. Sometimes all the options suck.
no subject
Date: 2022-07-30 12:22 pm (UTC)Just as an aside to the main discussion, I've never believed that the exponential growth in autism could be laid at the feet of "older parents". I think it's a dodge.
What people forget is that couples having just a small number of children while they're young is just as historically unusual as couples having just a small number of children when they're older.
Historically, people used to have larger numbers of kids, and even though the older kids were born when the parents were younger, the later kids were often born when both mom and dad had become "older parents". (One set of my grandparents, and all of my great-grandparents, started their families when they were young - but they all had their LAST kids when they were pushing, or even over, 40 years of age.) Yes, some people died young, but others, including women, would have lived long enough to have their later kids when they were older. If "older parents" were the sole or even primary cause of autism, then we'd have folk knowledge about how the youngest children in large families are "different" and have autistic traits. We have no such folk knowledge.
IMO blaming the rise in autism on "older parents" is just another excuse to avoid looking for environmental causes.
(Steps off soap box.)
no subject
Date: 2022-08-01 04:35 am (UTC)Nomen est omen
Date: 2022-07-27 06:33 pm (UTC)Before that though, I want to tackle this:
"Communists believe that turning all sex into a robotic, debased free for all"
This is just using the word communists as a swear word. The acutal real-life communists were bad but they were bad in a completely different way than the current woke culture. Also, at the risk of triggering people brainwashed by US media, the communists were very different from country to country. Some countries in E. Europe were not bad and all of them were way better than N. Korea or China.
Remember that communists had free (not bad) healthcare, free (great!) education at all levels, child support, guaranteed jobs and guaranteed places to live. In terms of cultural mores, they were very conservative - supporting large families, censoring all sexual speech and ignoring all minorities (no preferred language or schools).
Compare that to today's "democrats" which are basically a combination of fascists and 3rd world dictatorships, wrapped in a lot of nazi-style propaganda. How are they communistic? They don't support working classes, they hate children and they are obsessed with sex.
So I hope someone can come up with a better term that we can use consistently. To my mind the closest historical events are the reign of terror in post-revolutionary France and the Inquisition. So "jacobin" is good or maybe fundamentalist progressopaths.
Re: Nomen est omen
Date: 2022-07-28 02:50 am (UTC)"Fundamentalist progressopaths" LOLOL for the win!
I forgot which US disaster it was that had Cuba sending their doctors to help us for free. Cuban doctors are the best on the planet because under their system of communism, becoming a doctor is a great big competition in a meritocracy. Compare US doctors, who are almost uniformly rich suck-ups who don't mind looking the other way for a fat paycheck...
Re: Nomen est omen
Date: 2022-07-28 02:32 pm (UTC)Today's Woke Progressivism does seem very close to the classical definition of Fascism, which is the marriage of corporate and state power under the banner of a totalitarian ideology that's forced on everyone. Under any totalitarian arrangement, you might not be interested in politics, but politics is most certainly interested in you! (Ditto for religion in a theocratic state)
Re: Nomen est omen
Date: 2022-07-28 07:40 pm (UTC)As someone that lived through it I would just like to mention that your entire life, from cradle to grave, was basically controlled by the pervasive and incredibly corrupt bureaucracy:
- apartments were allocated based on a rigid scheme (in practice, based on the size of the bribe)
- you could not choose schools for your kids
- universities had great scholarships, but they were like a mixture of school and army (very regimented)
- after university the bureaucracy assigned you to a job (maybe on the other side of the country or in the middle of nowhere)
- There was no political or public choice or freedom of speech
- Rinse and repeat
Most people just seemed to accept that almost-slavery but they would bribe their way to a better place to live/work. I hated it even as a kid because I always had a sense of fairness that I realize now is incredibly rare everywhere in the world.
And of course there was the other side of the coin (gulags, back alley abortions, hard work and almost starvation for the expropriated peasants etc).
Re: Nomen est omen
Date: 2022-07-29 04:22 am (UTC)Of course China is suffering a die off too as we speak but they have a much bigger population to burn through.
Re: Nomen est omen
Date: 2022-07-29 05:56 pm (UTC)Of course they are also physical limits in energy and food but I agree with you - China will probably have half of the world population at some point in the next couple of hundred of years. This was true 1000 years ago so it could happen again. Of course the world's population might be less than 1 billion at that point.
https://theconversation.com/chinas-population-is-about-to-shrink-for-the-first-time-since-the-great-famine-struck-60-years-ago-heres-what-it-means-for-the-world-176377
Re: Nomen est omen
Date: 2022-08-01 04:38 am (UTC)I do find it amusing that Schwab is getting what he wants. Of course I could be wrong, but I believe he (and Gates, Fauci, Harari, et m.) has a long sojourn in hell ahead of him, and as much as he believes he can skate as he always did during life, I highly doubt that will be an option.
no subject
Date: 2022-07-27 11:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-07-28 02:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-07-28 12:21 am (UTC)I may do a longer reply later, but there's an interesting theory going round on the conservative Christian end of the conspiracy forums that the vaxes are adding Nephilim DNA to babies, and that the mythical Biblical race of cannibalistic giants is about to be re-born. Weirdly enough, this was also the plotline of a strange book written in 2011 which I happened to read last year, not knowing what it was about (I don't think it was popular enough to have inspired the theory though).
Almost certainly complete nonsense (though some friends have been having some pretty monstrous 12lb babies recently), but what an interesting dynamic that would add to our civilisation...
Mr. Crow
no subject
Date: 2022-07-28 02:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-07-29 03:01 am (UTC)9 times out of 10...
I swear that stuff is all some kind of variant on the "how do we keep our white women from having sex with black men?"... but written by people so repressed they can't even say that in their own heads, much less to others. It makes for some seriously weird reading.
no subject
Date: 2022-07-29 04:30 am (UTC)So freaking what? Drag queens in schools are one thing. Two girls kissing because same sex relationships happen to exist is another thing entirely. By freaking out about it, the Christian commentator has now ensured that his kids will wonder what was so exciting and amazing about the end of Jurassic Whatever that it had to be hidden from view by Mommy and Daddy.
There are some Christians who suffer a morbid and unhealthy fascination with what other people do in their bedrooms that is equally as toxic as liberal idiots who seek to groom five year olds into working stripper poles at the night club.
no subject
Date: 2022-07-29 07:25 am (UTC)If you worry that your children/this generation of children are going to be enormous giants who will devour and enslave you, then what might that instead signify about how you feel about children, and how you have been treating them?
And wait, wasn't there a Greek myth or two about this same topic as well...?
Mr. Crow
no subject
Date: 2022-07-29 12:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-07-29 12:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-08-01 04:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-08-01 05:30 am (UTC)Parent: I can't believe the crap the kids are watching on Disney/Netflix/Cable!
So... you pay money for that, right? Why do you buy it?
Parent: WHAT??!! I can't do that!
Why not?
(incoherent spluttering that I *think* amounts to: "but then I'd have to give up *my* addiction to crap screen entertainment")
no subject
Date: 2022-08-01 04:52 pm (UTC)TV packages are super expensive, to add insult to injury. Netflix and Hulu keep playing around with rate increases but then stop for a while and plateau when they hemorrhage more viewers.
(There's a TON people just pirate whatever they want to watch anyway, not me, as I don't care enough about TV and movies to pirate them) Usually Netflix and DisneyPlus are bought along with internet service these days. You don't need a TV in order to watch TV anymore. TV is quickly becoming the realm of Boomer fossils, at any rate. Games are where it's at, and they are far more nasty as influences go. Unlike CNN, they can actually hold a child's interest during the hypnotism/cacomagic process.
no subject
Date: 2022-07-28 02:34 pm (UTC)Overheard in the locker room this morning (from a teacher), "I'm feeling like my school has become a juvenile detention center. There are so many behavioral problems because the kids missed too much school..."
I'll bet no one will think to parse those problems into the sort that are true behavioral *problems* and those that just reveal that kids don't like what schools are selling them.
Regardless, this is going to bite us so hard in the years to come
no subject
Date: 2022-07-29 04:36 am (UTC)Though according to Dr. Delores Cahill, none of the quaxxed are going to make it past 5 years from now. Dr. Luc Montagnier wasn't quite so dire in his analysis of the quaxxed before he died, but his estimation was far from rosy. His predictions were more along the lines of my Ogham's, and for the record the Ogham still chillingly claim that at very least half the quaxxed will die in five years. There may be nobody left to mow down at the school or theater...
no subject
Date: 2022-07-29 06:35 pm (UTC)[and off topic because it's not kid related, but today's locker room overheard was the all too common "So and so has covid." "Is she vaccinated and boostered?" "Yep" - but the subtext was definitely NOT "aw, heck, what are these dumb vaccines anyway" it was more like "well that's a relief that she is --- say the words..." and "oh thank goodness she's not one of THOSE people." Obviously I keep my mouth shut. :D]
no subject
Date: 2022-08-01 04:45 am (UTC)In other news, there is this fascinating mea culpa from an anonymous Australian vaxxed person:
https://rumble.com/v1d1niz-del-bigtree-the-unvaccinated-will-be-vindicated.html
no subject
Date: 2022-07-28 03:43 pm (UTC)Though, I think that the elephant in the room is the fact that children today are an economic burden. Specifically, children in our technological/industrial society that is almost completely urbanized. Kids are expensive. Notably, kids who don't do any work, which is practically all of them. Today's average spoiled brat doesn't do anything productive until they are in their early 20s (university "education" is a great way of delaying this even further). Compare to the children of yore who usually pitched in on the farm and helped care for the other kids and any family elders around. Agrarian societies make much better use of children and give meaning to their lives from early on.
The baby elephant in the room is atomized nuclear family being the default family arrangement today. Nuclear families are something quite abnormal when we take reality of all cultures at all times into consideration; it's something peculiar to modern people living in crowded cities and sprawling suburbs. Extended families (plus clans/tribes or tight-knit religious communities) used to be the norm across the board. Before the advent of the welfare state and modern medicine, the extended family and village/clan pitched in when it came to raising the kids, and the kids stared paying this back the moment they were able to perform menial tasks.
Finally, on the teen pregnancy issue, when we remove the Judeo-Christian moralistic overlay on this issue, this seems less disastrous under the arrangement of large extended families (uncles, aunts, cousins, ect.) who are willing to help raise the "bastard kids" until they are old enough to earn their keep around the house. But with today's atomized micro-households, I think this is just plain disastrous economically speaking, even when we take the mitigating effects of bureaucratic social welfare (again, fueled by cheap oil) into account. That's why teen pregnancy in today's society is almost always a one-way ticket to intergenerational poverty. You can't cram a lively village into a 800 sqft. apartment or small family home. In general, think our ancestors were much wiser than most of us today give them credit for.
no subject
Date: 2022-07-29 04:45 am (UTC)I remember as a kid being conscious of the seedy nature of the suburban family model of living. We truly were atomized and it is not surprising that it got much worse over time. At this point, there isn't much to be done except live my life and let the rest of it fall apart. I'm one of the few people I know who has stuck to her family and refused to atomize. We will be atomized soon enough by the forces of time and mortality.
no subject
Date: 2022-07-29 06:10 pm (UTC)I hate this with a passion. I know it's not your fault because this is such a common trope nowadays but you have to understand this is true only if PARENTS make it true.
I understand that most american people are entitled selfish jerks that hate spending time with their family. They see nothing wrong with spending $1000 dollars every year on a dumbphone or $50000 on a sports car but they balk at spending $100 on schoolbooks?
Besides companionship, future support and the joy of having a family, the kids can also help around the house starting at about 5yo. The parents that "protect" their children by not working with them are ruining their children futures.
I was a spoiled city brat but I still helped with cleaning, vacuuming, cooking and washing dishes (my kids have it easier, they just have to fill and empty the dishwasher). Kids in the countryside helped with animals, bringing water etc.
And no, your precious snowflakes don't need expensive clothes, shoes or devices.
As for the obvious retort about college - if the parents did their job, by that age you should have an ADULT capable to earn some money or a scholarship. There are colleges overseas that have minimal cost (Europe, Cuba etc). And of course, at this point in history I would suggest kids learn something practical first (plumbing, electrical etc) and then pay for the college themselves if they think it's worth it (hint: not in US!).
no subject
Date: 2022-08-01 04:47 am (UTC)thanks for your post on living lean...
Date: 2022-07-28 07:27 pm (UTC)http://erikalopez.com/i-see-only-pretty-things/
Re: thanks for your post on living lean...
Date: 2022-07-29 04:52 am (UTC)Re: thanks for your post on living lean...
Date: 2022-07-29 01:38 pm (UTC)paint with layers of nail polish.
painted black with ink that can dry on film.
cover with SECHE VITE-- THAT IS KEY!
it lasts for a long time. the first glasses in the top photo were the very first test pair maybe 5-7 years ago to show how far my technique has come.
(smile)
but dry outside or you'll poison the air inside.
thanks, Kimberly. tips for living the scrapper way is always appreciated and glasses were on my list so thanks very much.
xxxxx
erika
Re: thanks for your post on living lean...
Date: 2022-08-01 04:49 am (UTC)Speaking of a war against children....
Date: 2022-08-01 11:35 am (UTC)Re: Speaking of a war against children....
Date: 2022-08-02 12:24 am (UTC)