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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • What it “ACTUAL” says is “no disrespect” not “no unintended disrespect beyond the disrespect you deserve” - the intended use case is clarifying statements that are ambiguous or could read as disrespect, but are intended respectfully.

    I do not agree that it’s “intended” as a window-dressing disclaimer for open disrespect. Even if you personally feel that the target deserves no respect - just have the balls to disrespect them openly and without dancing about the matter.









  • I think there were a lot of players up and down the ranks waiting to see which way the wind blew before casting for any given side.

    With so many concerns that the coup had backing from either Putin or other power blocs, a whole lot of side players would have wanted to back a winning pony and were waiting on early outcomes. Equally, with Putin not providing decisive action, I’m sure that invited meaningful concerns that this was some sort of double-dealing or the beginning of a Putin-backed purge.



  • My comment was clearly not written to give you advice for your specific child and her suite of issues.

    I’m speaking a lot more generally and while I’m leaving room for parents like you to make your choices, I’m also still being direct that I think it’s not a good universal rule. Even if that is an outcome someone chooses, it’s no less true that engaging with the whole choice is necessary to do a good job of making it. Internet=bad is an incredibly simplistic old-person take at this stage in society, and some parents even to current generations can misunderstand or underestimate the significant role that the internet can play in their kids’ lives. No solution fits across all kids, that’s part of the challenge - but understanding the role that the internet plays in modern kids’ social world and peer networks is important to making decisions about their access to it with complete information and goal-oriented integrity.

    The matched point in that comment you may have missed is that I’m not modelling my remarks around a binary of “unrestricted internet” vs “no internet.” If anything, I think I was clearly saying that absolute ‘solutions’ get progressively worse the wider they cast their net - as more and more unintended consequences are included in that broad-reaching choice.

    Separately, you also shouldn’t expect that what you felt you needed to do in order to support your child in a relatively unusual situation - will also be a good foundation for broad-case parenting practices. What is good for one child is not good for all children - and the more unusual the child or their needs, the less applicable that solution would be to “average” kids. There are other kids in similar-looking situations where your solution would exacerbate the problem instead of reduce it - now not only are they depressed and bullied, but also isolated from their friends. The vast majority of kids aren’t in situations particularly similar to yours and using your solution in their cases risks putting them into worse places than they started, or putting a target on them where none existed prior. Sever the child from the internet isn’t something you necessarily should be treating as universally good for all parents and all kids with zero possible downsides.

    There are always downsides. Especially in parenting, everything is a trade-off and nothing is clear-cut. If you can’t see what’s being traded off - in effectively anything - that’s a good cue to start hunting for blind spots. Especially when making rules for kids like cutting off parts of their world. As you said, being a parent requires making tough choices, and that requires engaging with the whole cost/benefit of the choice.

    There’s nothing challenging or tough about firmly believing you are wholly, completely, and absolutely Correct in whatever option you pick. It’s easy to choose something and insist that it’s 100% totally and absolutely correct with zero room for discussion. That approach actively shuts down all the actually hard parts of making the choice. But that is a choice with it’s own downsides. It makes it hard to relate to those kids as they age enough to challenge you, or start leaving home, and it doesn’t model behavior that I - personally - think is producing functional adults down the road. At the very least, the kind of person who is never wrong is not the kind of person I want to raise.

    So I think that commenting more specifically on what you’ve said here - it rings some bells and tints some flags. You’re proudly teaching your kids critical thinking, yet also say you cannot see any downsides to cutting off social media completely. You’re absolutely blase about deeming all kids who use social media “toxic” and “bad friends” with “struggles” as if it’s completely normal, healthy, and definitely non-toxic for an adult to be passing those kind of judgements about children on such a trivial basis, and to model that for their own kids. You talk about one child’s needs to justify the choice, but have more than that one affected by it. You reacted as if this is already a hot-button issue to you - and responded to remarks clearly speaking generally and not at all targeting to you as if it was a personal attack, returning fire with a bunch of spicy jibes about me as a person and as a parent. If this is how you experience and respond to an opinion you disagree with on the internet, I can certainly imagine how you deal with faintest hints of dispute from your own children. Of course they’re telling you what you want to hear.

    The calls are coming from inside the house, friend.


  • I think maybe some of that is on me; I’ve been using “in power” somewhat colloquially and to me there’s a gap between ‘gaining power’ in a soft sense referring to achieving a station that possesses power - and complete seizure of power. The latter is always the goal of the former, but the former is generally a necessary intermediary step.

    It seems to me that the current crop of neo-fascist (or fascist-adjacent as you call them) leaders have remained in power for a very long time, even with more or less fair elections. Erdogan in Turkey, Netenyahu in Israel, and Orban in Hungary come to mine.

    Those three for sure have held power quite a while - just that they’ve held power long enough I don’t really consider them representative of modern neo-fascism so much as inspirations for it. In the sense I was thinking of when I wrote the above, I was thinking more of the factions and leaders that exist within states that are not clearly semi- or pseudo-fascist in their structure. The ways that Erdogan, Netenyahu, and Orban maintain their power are not yet in place in those other states, but implementing some forms of them are goals within those movements.

    The neo-fascists’ I was talking about have to win elections and hold legitimate power within the current structure of the state before they can alter that structure enough to fix elections or bypass them. And in getting that initial foot in door, creating the opportunity to hijack the state, benefits strongly from using populist rhetoric - as genuinely pro-fascist voters are relatively rare, those factions and leaders need to use other causes to win over voters who wouldn’t support their “real” goals directly.


  • I think that this is like wrapping a kid in bubble-wrap, though. And like, not in that “over-coddling” metaphorical sense, but much more literal - sure, the kid can’t get scrapes if they fall off their bike, but the other kids are going to make fun of the kid wearing bubble wrap.

    You don’t necessarily want to give them an unrestricted mainline to the worst of the internet, but you don’t want to overcorrect so hard that you’re causing other problems.

    As toxic as it is, as much as there’s space for harms and bullying, or that the internet holds porn and violent content … the internet and social media spaces are where a huge portion of kids social lives live, and barring them from participating in that will do one of two things - teach them to get sneaky in order to bypass the restriction, or force them into an ‘outsider’ role in their peer group. In the first, it’s a lost cause and all you’re doing is making it inconvenient without addressing the harms - and ensuring they can’t talk to you about what comes from that space. In the latter, there are strong social and self-esteem costs associated with excluding your child from having a social life with other children - is it “better” for the parent to do the harm instead of the other children? Is it better for your relationship with that child, long-term, their trust in you, or your ability to support them?

    The kid restricted to “dumb phone only, no internet, no apps” is the current generations’ equivalent of that one kid that wasn’t allowed to go to the park, or the mall, or hang out on the street - whatever any given past generation used as their youthful Third Place, where they could socialize and hang out separate from school and without adults actively supervising them. And it’s never been great for the kid whose parents won’t let them participate in the common social life that their peers have.

    It’s far more fruitful to give them age-appropriate education related to their use of and relationship with the internet and provide a controlled and supported introduction than it is to simply bar their access for several years. You’re either stunting their social development in order to avoid harms to their social development (?!?!) or you’re simply winding the proverbial rubber band tighter and tighter against an inevitable rebellion - at which point they’re jumping in headlong without ever developing any sort of media literacy or social media savvy and never had a chance to build coping and resilience for whatever rabbit holes they’re likely to fall into .


  • Absolutely, I’m gobsmacked nobody seems to read history.

    Although, a lot of these nowadays fascist leaders are being supported by very large swathes of their own populations, as much as 48%, which is the truly shocking thing.

    Reading history … that tends to be how it works. Fascism is good at getting popular support for it’s ideas, without overtly being fascism to the people who support it. Fascism’s gateway drug is populism, and populism works best when the ‘common’ population is under strain too complex to address as a single issue.

    The worlds ongoing climate crises, economic issues, and political instability within developing economies are all placing unusual and complicated strains on the common populations of developed nations - which in turn opens the door for populist rhetoric and leaders to thrive and gain a foothold on the political discourses in their nations. The biggest single pro/con of populist rhetoric is that it is at its strongest as challenger or as opposition - much like armchair quarterbacking, it’s very easy to criticize what has been done, and even easier to sound like you could do it better, but very hard to deliver on promises from the drivers’ seat. As a result, populism is good for getting elected, but is not good for staying there - or getting re-elected later.

    So given that many populist talking points in current economies are fascist-adjacent, pivoting towards fascism makes for an easy and natural segue in the event that they gain power or hold sufficient security of position and supporter base that populism alone cannot serve to maintain.




  • Anomander@kbin.socialtoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.mlIncel vs Excel
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    1 year ago

    I have a hard time believing that all of even just most of the men that initially joined her group had “concerning views” if that’s meant to refer to the misogyny we see in those most associated with the term today, but I do know that plenty of the posters I saw on the subreddit years ago when I visited were not of that ilk.

    That’s fine, but remember you’re doubting the one person unique qualified to talk about the developmental history of the movement that they launched from the site that they ran.

    I don’t think that it necessarily was “all” or “most” but simply that the male presence within the movement was sufficiently represented by individuals with those views that it’s one of the first thing she mentions in the context of discussing the growth of the movement itself.

    Part of her point seems to be pointing out that they invited those views in, very early in the movement, out of a desire to be inclusive - only to be driven out by those views later on down the road.

    I bring that up in this context because I don’t think that the movement or the term can be divorced fully from the male misogyny that it’s associated with today. Those people are not latecomers to the label, they’ve been there effectively from the start - from the point where it went from the comments section of Alana’s Involuntary Celibacy Project blog, to becoming “a community” centered around a shared label.

    but I think if the term was originally coined to represent people who were genuinely suffering from external circumstances that put them in the position they’re in, it should remain for them and not those who sabotage themselves via their own toxic behavior.

    I’ve used bold to highlight it in the quote above - that is a big “if” that the person who coined the term says is not true. If it were true, we’d be having a different conversation. But it’s not true.

    The simple fact is that it’s a self-identifier. It’s a label that people put on themselves based on their perception of their own life circumstances. The original vision for the term says that neither you nor I get to tell anyone else they’re “not a true incel” or to go over their life and tell them the barriers are self-inflicted if they don’t see it that way. I guarantee you that the people you want to exclude from the term do very genuinely believe that they are “suffering from external circumstances that put them in the position they’re in.” No matter how much your or I might see them and think they’re clearly suffering from self-inflicted wounds, they are entirely sincere in their belief that their dating life is out of their control and has been a victim of cruel society.

    One group deserves empathy and compassion; the other deserves scorn and derision. I don’t think it’s productive or fair to the former group to use the same term for both.

    To me? They’re the same group. Some members of the group are hateful and shitty. Some members of the group aren’t. I’d say that the overwhelming majority of members, from both sides of that divider, are experiencing obstacles to dating or sex that are self-inflicted, even if they also have other barriers that are not. The vast majority of both groups would tell you that their personal circumstances are wholly out of their own control.

    The “logic” that group uses around attractiveness and dating marketability and how this or that facet of looks or wealth or social status or whatever is ultimately spurious. If Ricky Berwick get rich, famous, and married - the absolute hard impassible barriers that incels talk about affecting themselves simply do not exist.


  • Internet history pedantry, but by the time the subreddit rolled around, the term and the movement had already been coopted.

    Incel started as a term for men who felt depressed about being unable to find a female partner, and the subreddit they created was originally a supportive space for them.

    The term was coined somewhere between 1994 and 1997 by “Alana’s Involuntary Celibacy Project” as a term for people of all genders who were unable to find partnership despite trying. Alana is a woman, and is effectively universally credited with coining the term and founding the movement. The movement wasn’t ‘for men’, the term wasn’t about men specifically, and it didn’t start on Reddit. It started off as more of a personal blog, where Alana documented her own experiences and struggles - the site gained followers from other people with similar experiences, eventually growing into a combined forum / support group / community.

    Then it got taken over by angry misogynists and the term became associated with them, while the original group just kind of got forgotten about. That original group deserves attention and empathy as well as the term they coined; the latter group isn’t even “involuntarily celibate,” as they play a very big role in their own celibacy.

    Those folks have kind of always been there, and have always been a heavily represented demographic - Alana has said in interviews that the men who joined in the early days did have some concerning views and some concerning themes were on frequent repeitition in the discussions the community had. I don’t think retconning the movement to exclude those people from the “true definition” is doing either camp any favours. The “involuntary” part of the label isn’t trying to engage with whether or not the barrier may stem from factors within their control, but solely confined to the fact that they want something and are not getting it. They are simply “celibate, but not voluntarily celibate”.

    One quip that Alana made in several interviews while defining her modelling of the community she founded was that she didn’t care why someone was an incel, ie “it’s OK if you’re celibate because you’re into horses, but that’s illegal” that that person should still be welcomed and included in the community.

    I just think more people should give some thought to who that term originally belonged to.

    I think that in light of this, it’s even more important to be accurate and honest who those people are: Not male-exclusive, not limited to this or that cause of celibacy, not specifically gatekeeping out the misogynists or the beastialists any more than any other group. Just any people who want to get laid but are not getting laid.