It's protecting the parents at the expense of the children.

Interestingly, one of the things cults and totalitarian regimes have in common is a singular obsession with subverting the primacy of the nuclear family and the parent/child relationship.

One of the things all abusive and controlling parents have is a singular obsession with maintaining the primacy of the nuclear family and absolute parental authority.

Excellent riposte!

(I’m already responding more thoughtfully in other areas of this thread, so won’t regurgitate the same points here)

Another thing they have in common is having children. A group of bad people having something in common doesn't tell us anything about the thing. Obviously the motivation in their case might be a bit suspect but nuclear families with strong parental authority are nonetheless a good model for families. I'd argue an extended family is probably a little bit better, but nuclear isn't bad.

Same goes for cults, calling something a cult doesn't automatically mean it is an organisation dedicated to destroying itself. Some cults are organised by people who ultimately want their community to be successful and hold extremely worthwhile values. Too much authoritarianism will be a disaster but nuclear families are a good compromise position where there is just a dash of authority in the small.

And many such parents are in cults similarly guarding them, it's not true at all what the grandparent post says that cults don't value the nuclear family. They often value it a lot more than the rest of society, and it's often a key part of their marketing.

You mean like our current totalitarian, oligarchical US government?

I'm confused though, children getting information via unfiltered access to the internet is a subversion of "the primacy of the nuclear family and the parent/child relationship", no?

Yes, I was agreeing with you.

I get what you meant now, after reading more of the thread.

that's just a kid, unsupervised where are the parents in your scenario anyways that's how I learned to fly, without the chains people like you want to throw on the rest of us stay down there in the muck and grime

I think this is unfairly assuming what I want, when I didn't specify that in my comment.

If a hundred kids throw themselves off the cliff and one learns to fly, it's not oppressive to the one who did learn to fly to prevent other kids from throwing themselves off that same cliff and probably end up like the 99 that didn't.

Now, of course, if 99 kids learned to fly, then the opposite conclusion should be drawn - so, as in all things, we need nuance and a good understanding of the situation, not first principles thinking and anecdotes.

The nuclear family is neither a natural nor ubiquitous relationship, though. Any other dynamic of social support - whether it be manipulative or freeing - may likely subvert it.

> The nuclear family is neither a natural nor ubiquitous relationship

Citation needed!

My read of history is that it’s the single most stable and ubiquitous human social arrangement by a very long shot.

It's not even the most stable or ubiquitous family arrangement in the modern day.

It is. I think you’re bringing a lot of baggage to the term. In common usage (verified on my phone dictionary), it simply means a couple and their dependent children. It doesn’t require that they live separately from extended family. It doesn’t require that all the children have the same biological parents. It doesn’t even require that the parents are different sexes. Or that the parents are married and live together. It’s just a more specific term to remove the “extended” sense of the more general “family.”

You're telling me that the nuclear family - two parents and their children living as a unit without drama - is more ubiquitous and stable than, say, the exchange of goods and services for money? Divorce rates and credit card would beg to differ.

The comment chain you replied to said it's a stable and ubiquitous arrangement. You're not trying to argue it's stable or even that it's an arrangement - you're just arguing it can be found within a larger structure. It's as if someone said cliques and anticliques aren't good designs for computer networks, and you said yes they are, because every network of a certain size contains a clique or an anticlique by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramsey%27s_theorem - that may be true but it's incidental.

It's also as if someone is saying that Java isn't best at functional programming, and you pointed out that yes it is, because look at all the functions calling other functions.

I would suggest that you do some actual reading of anthropology - or just look up what the term “nuclear family” means and where it started.

I am willing to bet you will be fairly shocked at how recent it is, given your comment.

I think you’re actually confused about the term, see my responses elsewhere in this thread.

If you are going to refuse to actually look at what the term means and insist that you are correct there is no conversation to be had.

Look, I don’t know what to tell you. Dictionaries contain the meanings of words and terms as commonly used. If you look up “nuclear family,” the meaning comports entirely with how I have been using the term. I’m sorry that’s inconvenient for your self conception.

History, by my reading, seems more replete with examples of extended families, which include additional relatives like grandparents, aunts, and uncles.

eg:

  Some sociologists and anthropologists consider the extended family structure to be the most common family structure in most cultures and at most times for humans, rather than the nuclear family.

~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_family

which also provides the common use definitions:

  A nuclear family (also known as an elementary family, atomic family, or conjugal family) is a term for a family group consisting of parents and their children (one or more), typically living in one home residence.

  It is in contrast to a single-parent family, a larger extended family, or a family with more than two parents.

Other sources include: Families Across Cultures: A 30-Nation Psychological Study (2006) from Cambridge press by the same author cited in wikipedia (James Georgas) and others: John W. Berry, Fons J. R. van de Vijver, Cigdem Kagitcibasi, Ype H. Poortinga

  Contemporary trends such as increased one-parent families, high divorce rates, second marriages and homosexual partnerships have all contributed to variations in the traditional family structure.

  But to what degree has the function of the family changed and how have these changes affected family roles in cultures throughout the world? This book attempts to answer these questions through a psychological study of families in thirty nations, carefully selected to present a diverse cultural mix.

  The study utilises both cross-cultural and indigenous perspectives to analyse variables including family networks, family roles, emotional bonds, personality traits, self-construal, and 'family portraits' in which the authors address common core themes of the family as they apply to their native countries.

  From the introductory history of the study of the family to the concluding indigenous psychological analysis of the family, this book is a source for students and researchers in psychology, sociology and anthropology.

I can't access the first source for that Wikipedia quote, but the second is a defunct website created by a graduate student. The fact that they're using it in the introduction for an article about the nuclear family is a good reason why people should be skeptical about claims on Wikipedia and should look into the sources themselves, not treat Wikipedia as if it was a source.

Isn't the extended family just a superset of the nuclear (or atomic) family? Defining the boundaries at grand-parents, aunts and uncles (I'm guessing proximity-based living relatives is kind of where you're making the boundary). By that logic an extended family is a nuclear family (formally) as it contains the definition of nuclear families by default, the nuclear family is just the smallest self replicating unit we've got available by default. Sperm (differential change between gens), (egg - really mitochondria) consistent base stability (ground truth) across gens, and the ability to self replicate.

EDIT: If you're arguing mixture of experts works better, than sure, I got you, if your arguing that there's a more non-binary way to do the self replication, that's a harder road to hoe. At least if you want to do it for free, which has a better track record of working for most people.

There's no "logic" here, you're just not aware of the history of the term and the sociological history behind it.

The nuclear family was an oddity that developed in England concomitant to the Industrial Revolution in middle-class families for whom occupational relocation was common. It was enshrined as an ideal sociological familial arrangement in the United States because its normalization was conducive for developing larger pools of productive labor.

> It was enshrined as an ideal sociological familial arrangement in the United States because its normalization was conducive for developing larger pools of productive labor.

As opposed to pseudo-Confucius China where larger pools of productive labor naturally formed?

That doesn't take away anything from the fundamental point where it's the smallest self-replicating unit, logic on behalf of the participants has nothing to do with it because it works out the gate. Of course it isn't the best, it was developed during a time of struggle and turmoil a la the industrial revolution (for the rural poor), it won because it was the the most resilient model (small, mobile, reactive, etc) to hard times.

Edit: I said developed, if formed is a word that helps you understand that it's not conscious then here you go

This is like saying the diatomic vases include monoatomic gasses because there are single atoms in the diatomic gas molecules. The whole point of the nuclear family is that it is indivisible, but easily divisible from other parts of the family. This is very visible in decisions like "can we move away for work?". In a nuclear family, this decision rests almost entirely on whether both parents agree to it and can find work. In an extended family, the grandparents and aunts and uncles (especially the grand aunts and uncles) will have an important word in the decision as well.

The Corporate Family is what you are thinking of. A corporate family includes all immediate branches. Imagine a ranch with a Patriarch and 3 male kids and their wives. If your dad dies your uncles and aunts just pick up the slack. Its usual also for all branches to work the same or related trades.

Its really tertiary education and suburbia that undermined the corporate family, atomising it. The Atomic family is modern.

See my other comment in this thread about anthropologists dichotomizing societies based on nuclear vs extended families. In short, it’s orthogonal to the issue.

The issue is that across the movement of time and generations a "nuclear family" unit of parents and their offspring has all the stability and longevity of a pencil balanced on it's tip .. the clock is ticking on Hapsberg lips and the oddities of pharoahs.

Long lasting societies have a larger formal weave based on outworking and out breeding, formally moieties in the indigenous peoples of North America, Australia, Indonesia and elsewhere.

A single family unit alone is insufficient and historically cycles members in and out over half a generation through marriage and fortune seeking.

I've seen your other comments and they have that kind of first order depth expected of a simple thought and looking things up quickly on a phone.

Here's a very shallow introduction to a family of systems with many variations that lasted some 70 thousand years keeping bloodlines clean: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moiety_(kinship)

what about Roman families?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_in_ancient_Rome

You had the familia, which was similar to the current nuclear family, but that was wrapped into the larger gens

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gens

people cared not just about the success of their intermediate family, but also their gens, which was similar to a clan.

You'll have similar structures in many tribal societies.

Do you have actual statistics to support your hypothesis that

> My read of history is that it’s the single most stable and ubiquitous human social arrangement by a very long shot.

besides just "oh yeah bro, it's my read of history bro, totally rigorous"?

I don't think it is. Cultures around the world had wildly different familial and child-bearing organisations, too much for the nuclear family to be considered a cultural universal.

This is mostly a fiction.

Nuclear family has never had primacy - look at wild, dangerous places, primacy is held by extended family, clans, tribes or mafia.

‘Nuclear family primacy’ exists only In carefully crafted stable and safe societies, and another authority must exist to organise military-age men for matters of war and survival.

Thus nuclear family can only exist as we know it, in a partially undermined condition.

It’s absolutely not a fiction that the nuclear family is the most important human social arrangement. In every language I’m aware of, a child’s first word is ‘mother’ and in most languages ‘father’ follows shortly thereafter. Other social arrangements are important (we live in societies or tribes or clans, after all), but throughout most of human history, people grew up with their mother, father, and siblings being the most important people in their lives.

It's very odd to me seeing nuclear family being propped up in an exclusive/or relationship with a strong extended family. Every strong extended family dynamic that I've seen is the result of a strong nuclear family from a generation before.

That distinction is what defines a "nuclear family" to begin with...

To be clear, I am not arguing that nuclear and extended families are exclusive of each other. I think most of the people arguing against me are confused about this. Anthropologists dichotomize societies by nuclear family vs extended family because Western societies basically don’t have extended families as an important social unit at all, whereas in many societies the extended family is an important social unit. And the difference usually has a lot of implications. Hence the dichotomy being useful. But this does not mean that in societies where extended families are important that they are more important than nuclear families. And really this shouldn’t be surprising: we’re not bees. We form reproductive pairs. Our children are twice as related to us as our nieces and nephews. There’s no way it could ever come to be that the nuclear family would not be the primary human social institution.

> Western societies basically don’t have extended families as an important social unit at all

Like with low birth rates, this appears to stem more from modernity than anything else. Both Western and non-Western societies placed more of an emphasis on extended families in the past, and both have placed less of an emphasis on them as they've modernized. Western societies have been at the forefront of a lot of modern changes, so these changes were more noticeable in them.

Sorry, my response to you was in agreement if that wasn't clear.

"Nuclear" here is in reference to households with only mother, father, and children, in distinction to the norm of multigenerational households throughout history and in most of the world today excepting the West.

No, that’s baggage that people are bringing to the conversation. It merely means a couple and their dependent children. Whether or not they live separately from extended family has no bearing on the term.

I had to make an account for this but it's been incredibly frustrating seeing you going up and down this thread and dismissing interesting and well informed discussion with actual sociological background behind it based on a misunderstanding of terminology. I have never thought about the nuclear family for more than 5 minutes but it's clear to me that both uses of the term (in the way you are choosing to interpret it and in the broader sense that everyone else has discussed so far) are widely accepted in English. I would urge you to reflect in the future on why, when multiple people on a message board with seemingly well informed opinions and no obvious malicious intent try to persuade you that a term you are using has multiple definitions and connotations, you might choose to plant your feet on the ground and resort to a dictionary definition (not really well known for their completeness or depth)! If you had chosen instead to look up this definition in an encyclopedia, you might have found saving yourself (and me) a lot of angry typing. I hope you can find some humility and learn from this

Certainly, having a mother and a father is pretty traditional!

But past a toddler age, in a large clan-like structure, if your father and the clan's patriarch give you conflicting orders, who do you obey?

This question is moot in a nuclear-family society, with relatives beside father and mother minding their own children, and not more.

> if your father and the clan's patriarch give you conflicting orders, who do you obey?

Good question, here’s one for you: if your father and a police officer give you conflicting orders, who do you obey?

The existence of a layer cake of social units doesn’t argue against the primacy of the nuclear family. Here’s another question for you: who’s more likely to advocate for your interest, your father or the clan’s patriarch?

> if your father and a police officer give you conflicting orders, who do you obey?

This goes to show that you, along with many other commenters here, do not grasp the concept because it’s so different from your experience.

Extended family would often raise your kids, I know a person that was taken away by extended family as a child because the father had anger management issues.

They are not functionaries like police, they actually share responsibility. In case of conflict, loyalty is highly situational. And if your mother dies, they would be expected to take you in, even if your father is alive and well.

> I know a person that was taken away by extended family as a child because the father had anger management issues.

Yeah, but the default was for them to be raised by their nuclear family.

You seem to have a definition of nuclear family which differs from the consensus.

>throughout most of human history, people grew up with their mother, father, and siblings being the most important people in their lives.

Throughout most of history people grew up with their mother, 3 aunts, their dad, 5 uncles, and grandparents if they are lucky, learning the single trade of their entire family. The "Nuclear" family is the atomisation of this corporate family through modern practices (Finance, Tertiary Education, Suburbia)

> You seem to have a definition of nuclear family which differs from the consensus.

I’m a simple man, so I like to use the dictionary when there’s a disagreement about what something means. In this case, my phone’s dictionary, which cites the Oxford American dictionary as its source, has the definition of ‘nuclear family’ as “a couple and their dependent children, regarded as a basic social unit” and I’m not seeing how anything I wrote is in disagreement with that.

Sure, people often grow up with other relatives. But we have other terms for them, which belies their reduced importance in our lives vs our parents and siblings.

It's the basic social unit part. In society that actually exists, they're not a basic unit. You can obviously find couples and their dependent children, just like maybe you can find a monad in a Java program, but they're not basic units.

If nuclear families were not of fundamental importance, you would not see “mother” and “father” universally conserved across all languages as the first words that people learn. This is like the thing with the two fish who don’t know what water is; nuclear families are so pervasively important that you just can’t see it.

This is both a non-sequitor and a confabulation.

Kids that don’t grow up with their parents do not learn them as first words. Kids that do grow up with their parents, often still learn something else as their first words.

Learning X as your first word does not prove that X is a foundational unit of society, it simply does not follow.

This doesnt even seem like you are arguing for nuclear families.

I feel like you have conflated the nuclear family (a method of organising the basic social unit of a society) with "The importance of parents". The nuclear family simply isnt the only basic social unit with parents in it.

>nuclear families are so pervasively important

Parents are very important. The nuclear family does not have a monopoly on parents.

>has the definition of ‘nuclear family’ as “a couple and their dependent children, regarded as a basic social unit”

This doesnt agree with anything I said lmao. A corporate family is much larger than a nuclear family.

>Sure, people often grow up with other relatives.

Not in the same house, as the basic social unit.

The nuclear family is such a recent concept so I have a lot of trouble understanding this wacky point of view. The nuclear family is itself a destruction of the corporate family. How do weird manosphere types identify it as somehow being the core of society.

To be fair, it has been the dominant mode of familial organization in colonial powers for the past 100+ years. When economics are stable from generation to generation there would be far less tendency to split households - only in times of abundance or want would it make sense for each generational unit to live separately. Killing off natives and taking their land and resources tends to create an awful lot of abundance. The nuclear family thus symbolizes prosperity and the right-wing mythological ideal of past abundance that can be regained by returning to "traditional values".

Multigenerational families are hard to move, and come with a lot of baggage (hah).

That gets in the way of Empire and economic flexibility.

>To be fair, it has been the dominant mode of familial organization in colonial powers for the past 100+ years

Has it? I thought most colonies relied on corporate families.

The colonized often do - the colonizers are the ones splitting and creating new families as quickly as possible in order to occupy more resources and grab a larger slice of the opportunities afforded by empire.

Perhaps but when I look into examples of corporate families they are almost always in a colonial context. Like you might be more likely to fragment if opportunities exist, and franchise out. But you still get the same stories of a family farm or workshop being owned and operated by multiple generations until the young ones get a tertiary opportunity to take on something else.

How does this subvert the nuclear family?

If a parent's control over a child is subverted it doesn't change the relationship or family structure.

Honestly curious: What does this mean?

I'll expand a bit on my perspective to avoid just sealioning here:

Where I've come across proposals for policies like actual age verification is in the "social media is bad for kids" milieu. I'm extremely skeptical that these proposals are workable purely technically, but ignoring that, I have some sympathy for the concept. I do think that kids mainlining TikTok and YouTube Shorts and PornHub is really bad.

So having cleared my throat, I'm back to wondering about your comment. How, in your view, is this kind of policy "protecting parents at the expense of children"?

I mean there are many reasons that people say that TikTok is bad.

If you think TikTok is bad because it promotes unhelpful or malicious advice around body standards, that's one thing. (See: bigorexia getting promoted into the DSM)

If you think TikTok is bad because it puts children under a lens, that's another thing.

If you think TikTok is bad because it exposes contrarian viewpoints that are not available on your television, like, say, something Gaza related, then that's yet another thing.

The worse part of tiktok, like much of the web, is that it clips up your attention span into such tiny chunks that the consumer can NEVER feel the joy of thinking or talking. You can never voyage into someone else's mind deep enough to bee truly terrified or blown away, never see how they are fundamentally different from you nor why. All other complaints are a mere distraction by comparison.

This seems like a bit of a non-sequitur, but you also correctly guessed that I think TikTok is bad.

But I don't relate to any of the reasons you listed. I think TikTok is bad for two reasons:

1. It is controlled by the government of China, and I don't trust them to avoid influencing Americans with propaganda.

2. It is bad in the same ways as all other social media.

Your #1 reason is bobthepanda's #3 reason - exposes contrarian viewpoints. There isn't any reason in the abstract to think that Chinese propaganda is any worse than US propaganda. US propaganda is pretty stupid vis a vis promoting domestic prosperity.

What are the Chinese supposed to do here, influence the US to give up their manufacturing edge by outsourcing all the capital formation to Asia? Waste their economic surpluses on endless war? Promote political division by pretending that the president is an agent of a foreign country? The US political process throws up a startling number of own goals. The Chinese aren't savvy enough to outdo the US domestic efforts.

This is a naive view of propaganda: everyone always says "well, they're not trying to achieve <overtly obvious goal>" therefore there could be no benefit!

Propaganda aimed at your enemies isn't about achieving any specific goal, it is about obtaining potential advantage. It's an investment, the same as funding a startup but with much broader success criteria.

Your comment here belies the benefit because at its core is the most dangerous assumption: I am too smart to affected by propaganda.

Well, no. It is good to listen to other people even if you think they don't have your best interests at heart. I can certainly see a security argument for restricting foreign media, but to get upset because literally one media source is owned by foreigners is too much.

The vague "obtaining potential advantage" is unreasonable. An advantage at what? China doesn't benefit from the US suffering, much like the US has actually benefited a huge amount from Chinese prosperity.

> Your comment here belies the benefit because at its core is the most dangerous assumption: I am too smart to affected by propaganda.

Quite the contrary; We're supposed to be affected by what we listen to. But I'm not smart enough to figure out what the Chinese think without going and listening and reading to things written by Chinese people and pushed by people with Chinese perspectives. We're not psychic and the Western media are also unreliable. Listening to diverse news sources is important. Particularly since the truth is often the most effective form of propaganda.

yes, but I think by your logic Hollywood movies are "propaganda"...

by making the main characters of a movie American, and giving them positive traits, you're 'obtaining a potential advantage' for every American that travels abroad is associated with positively portrayed fictional characters, or in biopics, historical characters.

The US military directly sponsors or promotes Hollywood movies with the benefit of gaining fairly good control of the overall messaging surrounding the military in the film.

Zero Dark Thirty is perhaps the most egregious example of this, with the CIA consulting and the film depicting that the information leading to Osama Bin Laden's location was extracted under torture from an inmate (it was not).

Many American films are not even casually not propaganda. The way you think about the US military is shaped and influenced by the influence the US military gets from fronting money, consulting and equipment appearances to appear in Hollywood films (with sometimes some weird consequences - for example they refused to back The Avengers because they felt SHIELD undermined the portrayal of the US, but were happy to back The Winter Soldier because in that SHIELD isn't the US DoD and goes down).[1]

[1] https://gamerant.com/marvel-military-propaganda-explained/

Many Hollywood movies are literally US government propaganda, yes.

Um, yes?

> There isn't any reason in the abstract to think that Chinese propaganda is any worse than US propaganda.

China is (at best) a frenemy of the US. Allowing a rival to push propaganda onto your children is foolhardy.

It has nothing to do with whether Chinese propaganda is worse than US propaganda.

> Allowing a rival to push propaganda onto your children is foolhardy.

I don't recall historical instances where that was a major problem. The closest analogue would be the cold war, where US propaganda successfully got the USSR to switch to democracy (a move that, ultimately, was to the benefit of the people). The Soviet counter-propaganda was ultimately unconvincing and everyone agrees that Communism was a disaster - even the people who lived in communist communities as children.

It is too hard to come up with a 20- or 30-year propaganda campaign that has meaningful impacts, the results are fundamentally unclear because everyone will have different policies in 30 years. If anyone knew how to reliably change societies through propaganda we'd already be using that technique in the west to align everyone to capitalism instead of having the constant socialist regressions that keep cropping up.

Propaganda is effective for specific political decisions in the short term when targeted at adults. Over the longer term it has impacts that are hard to foresee and impossible to control, for good or ill.

> It has nothing to do with whether Chinese propaganda is worse than US propaganda.

It sounds important when you phrase it like that. Why listen to worse propaganda?

> > Allowing a rival to push propaganda onto your children is foolhardy.

> I don't recall historical instances where that was a major problem.

This is truly laughable.

We would have never let the German government own ABC in the 1930s, for obvious reasons. And the Chinese government would never let a US company own any of their influential media networks.

I always feel like this argument has a "doth protest too much" feel to it.

The decisions in the 1930s led to the most bloody and meaningless breakdown of communications in human history. One of the outcomes was the UN being set up by people saying, loosely speaking, "gee, we should listen to each others political stance more". I myself wouldn't cite the media policy in the decade prior to WWII as a success since it is hard to find a worse failure.

Besides; that has nothing to do with children. The Nazis didn't last an entire generation. They weren't trying to propagandise children, they targeted adults.

> And the Chinese government would never let a US company own any of their influential media networks.

Again, Chinese media policy is an example of bad policy - I would advocate doing the opposite of them in that sphere. They're authoritarians. We want to intentionally copy their industrial policies after careful consideration.

Nations being unwilling to allow their rivals to own their domestic media has literally nothing to do with that. The UN and is state diplomacy, not media policy. One has nothing to do with the other.

Also:

> They weren't trying to propagandise children, they targeted adults.

I'm not sure I've ever read a more historically illiterate statement.

> The UN and is state diplomacy, not media policy. One has nothing to do with the other.

If you don't believe state diplomacy is related to propaganda, then I think I should be even more insistent about asking what, exactly, do you feel the Chinese are supposed to do here? They're going to swoop in, "influence" everyone, and then it will have no impact on US-China relations. Maybe you believe it will have a huge impact on industrial policy?

(Possibly resulting in the US adopting a policy of outsourcing production to China? I might ask in a more mischievous mood).

> I'm not sure I've ever read a more historically illiterate statement.

That isn't the strongest argument I've seen today. bobthepanda's point still seems accurate - you haven't nailed down specific concerns, as far as I can see you've just identified that Nazis were foreign and China is untrustworthy [0] ergo the Chinese can't own a US media company. I'm not even convinced that is the wrong outcome, but the concern doesn't seem to be principled to much as you're just abstractly worried about foreign views without much reference to what they are or what impact they'll have.

[0] I see an irony here - the Nazis were implacably opposed to the Chinese communists on at least two ideological points - the Communism and the Chineseness.

You're using fancy language and fancy-seeming arguments that don't engage in the actual argument being made, but instead are designed to distract while changing the subject. This kind of argumentation is called sophistry.

>>> They weren't trying to propagandize children, they targeted adults.

>> I'm not sure I've ever read a more historically illiterate statement.

> That isn't the strongest argument I've seen today.

They had a propaganda organization called The Hitler Youth. Either you were unaware of that or you're arguing in bad faith.

Either way, I don't think you're a serious person.

> They had a propaganda organization called The Hitler Youth.

The Hitler Youths weren't the result of foreign propaganda, they were Germans consuming German propaganda. I'm not sure why you think that is relevant. If you want to bring them in to the argument, note that they'd probably have done a lot better if they were exposed a bit more to foreign propaganda rather than a steady diet of home-grown muck that the Nazis were feeding them. The Nazis had a pretty serious groupthink problem that led to the eradication of their entire ideology and left Germany devastated for decades; they desperately needed persuasive external opinions in their society.

It would take a lot more than TikTok and some propaganda efforts to establish something equivalent to the Hitler Youth in the US; it was their equivalent of the Democrat/Republican party feeder systems - building a political machine. That takes on-the-ground work, many years and is extremely visible (not to mention quite delicate).

> You're using fancy language and fancy-seeming arguments that don't engage in the actual argument being made, but instead are designed to distract while changing the subject. This kind of argumentation is called sophistry.

You're probably in a state of cognitive dissonance. Unable to articulate why you worry about foreign propaganda your mind isn't latching on to a pretty basic challenge of articulating what you think the problem is. It'll pass, nothing wrong with being surprised and it doesn't make you a bad person.

No, those are not the same at all. A government controlling the content is not "exposing contrarian viewpoints".

Chinese propaganda efforts will look more like russian botnets astroturfing culture war bullshit (which is a major factor in politics now), only instead of crude sockpuppets parroting talking points at people, it will look more like "nudge each personality/demographic archtype towards the content that incites their flavor of distrust in government/society/the elite/immigrants etc"

No, the runner up country in the AI race with a vested interest in undermining the USA should not, as a matter of reasonable statecraft, have mainline access to the algorithmic media feed of the nation's youth...

My brother, a middle school teacher, was talking about TikTok yesterday. Every 2 years he gets a new batch of 10-year-olds.

They all have a “class chat”, and it is used daily for relentless cyber bullying. The current trend TikTok is pushing this month is to push the boundaries of calling black kids the n-word without explicitly saying the word. There is one little black girl in his class.

He says every class is the same, horror ideas pushed by edge lords TikTok algos push on the kids. Relentless daily bullying. And unlike bullying on the playground or at the boys and girls club.. there is no realistic way for adults to intercede beyond disconnecting their kid, shutting them out of the social context entirely.

sorry if this is a stupid question,

but can your brother setup a class chat that he moderates?

I'm working on a simple chat app in Go as a learning project [0], you're welcome to use that, but honestly there are almost certainly better solutions out there, which he can actively moderate. Maybe a WhatsApp group, or something that can be used by a web interface (old forum techs?)

Group chats can be nice, I'm part of several acroyoga group chats and they're lovely, probably because adults who practice acroyoga tend to be nicer than middle schoolers.

[0] https://codeberg.org/achenet/go-chat

Why would the kids want to use that?

As someone who was bullied despite adults interceding, I'm curious why you think it being physical makes it better?

Interestingly the exact example you gave is something I can see happening when I was a kid as well as now.

Bullies gunna bully.

My primary issue here was actually more about TikTok - I don’t think it’s right that software engineers get rich writing code that pushes “bullying challenges” on children to increase engagement and ad sales.

But: all other things equal, of I get to pick between “10-year-olds primary daily public forum is completely, cryptographically, devoid of any moderating adult presence whatsoever” and - what I had - 10-year olds have privacy but there are adults around that have a chance at picking up that things are going off the rails”

I think it’s mostly bad for a developing brain because it fuels dopamine-driven short attention span and on that level alone is comparable to zoning out on drugs. It is basically child maltreatment in the form of neglect, first parent-child-neglect, continued into self-neglect. Neglect as a silent form of abuse is one of the most damaging and difficult to treat in psychotherapy.

If you have a hyperlexic child but the parents are not, nor are they well educated, most of the books quite early are going to male the parents uncomfortable. Even with educated parents, you get well meaning protective measures which are harmful to the child in the short and long term. Children even who arent big readers are harmed when their questions are deflected or ignored. Especially when it starts young. When your answers or you are uncomfortable towards an intelligent childs questions, especially as their parent, they pick up on that. You may intend well, you may want to shield them from the horrors inherent in their question, or prevent anxiety. But they still have the questions, they just find the answers themselves. They stop asking you for many reasons. Ultimately the result is you have left them alone with their questjons, and for bright children particularly the very young it does so much damage, that continues. They've in a very real way, been left alone by even very devoted parents.

Kids should have to identify themselves to access the Internet. I echo part of a previous comment from a ways back:

> I would not be the person I am today without early unfettered access to an uncensored Internet, and I say that both as a blessing, and a curse. It gave me at once access to early technology that's turned into a prosperous career, while also afflicting me with a lifetime of mental scars of varying severity and intrusive thoughts of things I saw and cannot forget. I struggle to label this trauma, but it's certainly not a good thing I carry.

And having reflected on this, yes, it's trauma. It's the dictionary definition of trauma. And crucially, none of this has anything to do with viewpoints. I wish I had found more shit about different viewpoints, and less about animals and people being tortured.

But identification as a child doesn't need to stop you from accessing opposing viewpoints, it needs to stop you from accessing... that. And I don't think anyone is going to argue that seeing some of the shit I saw was a growth moment for me or contributed in any way positively to me being a more well rounded person.

I think a far more effective actionable path here is disentangling the stranglehold that parents have regarding how their children are raised. We still ascribe very diligently to the Western notion that children effectively "belong" to their parents, and that their parents are the single authority figure that decides how this person is raised. Most of the time that's benign to a bit obnoxious on the part of entitled parents, but it also very very easily ramps up into straight up abuse. The notion that, for example, a heavily Evangelical parent feels entitled to and is endorsed by the system to be able to deny their child knowledge of anything outside their specific sect and it's religious text, and enshrine that as a reasonable choice, is horrendous. This is a whole other person, this child is, and in our current system they are effectively a resident of a totalitarian mini-state until the age of 18 (and given economic challenges, potentially much longer now) that is largely reinforced by our surrounding systems.

A child has basic rights, sure, to food, water and shelter, but even the enforcement of those can be inconsistent due to a combination of poor funding and an overall deference to parents that frankly is not deserved. We have reams upon reams of evidence of parents doing inconceivable evils to their children. It is not a given that a parent wants to care for their child and see them succeed. And advanced rights? They're a joke. A child doesn't have the right to consume and learn knowledge their parents find adversarial. They do not have the right to free association, parents destroy relationships their children have all the time, sometimes out of necessity, sometimes out of neglect, sometimes out of cruelty. Children's desires, identities, and interests are not able to be pursued if their parents disagree with them because there is nowhere a child can go (save for perhaps a Library, relevant to our thread) where they can freely do so, and their economic disadvantages put a hard limit on even that.

The notion that parents should have 100% authority to effectively shape other, new people into being whatever they think they should be is frankly unhinged if you think about it for more than a few moments. This isn't a matter of coming to grips with a child different from yourself, and learning who they are, and helping them be the best them that they can be: this authority grants parents the right to determine what a child can be, with ZERO oversight, and no ability for the child themselves to speak on the subject until it's possibly a decade or more too late.

It's incredibly frustrating as well because the same Evangelicals who will claim that every woman must be ready to lay down her life to bring a child into the world will then out of the direct other side of their mouths claim that that child, once born, has effectively no rights if said rights are potentially to be utilized against this unquestionable authority wielded by their parents.

The issue is that by forcing children to identify themselves to access information, be it the internet or a library, etc is that by doing so you are normalising that there are limits to what knowledge a person is allowed to consume or possess based on who they are.

That immediately paves the way for expansion of those restrictions.

We see that currently with efforts to "protect the children" by limiting access to things like porn. It's reasonable on it's face but immediately gets weaponised to start banning access to any content that isn't gender or sex normative.

Indeed. This is how precedents get abused.

There is a very intentional framing of "protecting children" while book bans are really targeting what are more fairly described as "young adults". The goal is of course ensuring young adults are only exposed to a certain world view.

It is good to normalise that because that is true. Children are not allowed access to lots of things, and that is a good thing.

Yes, "content that isn't gender or sex normative" should be included. Children should not be exposed to sexual subcultures or encouraged to experiment with gender non-conformity. They are not ready to handle that.

The real question is, what is it that you're so afraid of with gender/sexuality that you think it makes sense to show some expressions of it but not others? Sexual norms change regardless of what is officially considered normative and regardless of what is repressed, so you must know you're fighting a losing battle. So who or what is it exactly that you're fighting for? I think it has more to do with yourself than with children.

What is it about “sexual subcultures” that are inherently dangerous as opposed to the main culture that is inherently safe.

Is a book character being gay unsafe for kids in a way that the same character being straight is not?

They may be ready that's why they are looking but you might not be.

Sounds more like YOU are not ready to handle it, and don’t want to have that discussion (at an age appropriate level) with them. Which is fine. Just don’t give us the BS excuse that your child is too dumb to think critically. Kids are smarter than you give them credit for.

If a pre-teen can understand the concept of sex, what’s so difficult about explaining that _some_ people have non-mainstream sexual attraction?

A better example is restricting access to actually dangerous ideas, like “Mein Kampf”.

I’ve read the first chapters of Mein Kampf, because i was very curious why the book is forbidden knowledge. It was actually quite easy to download it. I did not like the book at all, but the search to get it was quite exciting. Same with the weirdly Hackers Cookbook. Same with a lot of other so-called dangerous knowledge. I have also seen awful things on the internet that made me physically sick. I have also seen hacks that were so easy i wondered why big huge companies had not thought of that. Point is that restricting will not stop curious kids to search for it and find it. It all taught me to also accept my kids as extremely curious human beings who may not align with your personal points of view and that can sometimes be ok as long as you keep communicating with each other respectfully. Tell them why you think Mein Kampf is bad. Show them things like experiments on MythBusters if they have questions.

Seemed simple to me: one of the first results for "Mein Kampf full text" gave me https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200601h.html

But yeah, I don't want to be expressly forbidding disagreeable content to my kids, I want them to learn to choose content that is worthwhile themselves.

oh i don’t think any of it should be restricted personally. I was just pointing out that IF we are going to humor that argument at all, i’d rather restrict more dangerous ideas and things. But it’s a slippery slope!

>If a pre-teen can understand the concept of sex, what’s so difficult about explaining that _some_ people have non-mainstream sexual attraction?

They cannot and do not understand that concept which is why exposing them to it is a serious criminal offence.

If telling your children that gay people exist is a crime where you live, maybe the problem is with the laws in your place of residence.

Pre-teens don't understand sex, which is what I said, and which is why they cannot consent to it.

Pre-teens can understand sex just like they can understand what a contract is or that alcohol exists. We don't allow them to participate in those things but they can certainly be aware of its existence.

They do understand sex, but don't take the consequences seriously enough (like STDs or kids at such a young age) — they are still in the exploration phase where they believe they are invincible and nothing bad can happen to them.

well sure, they won’t understand sex if nobody every explained it to them. Learning through osmosis isn’t possible. :) They are definitely capable of understanding how a baby is made if you get a textbook and show them.

Whether or not they should learn that as a pre-teen is certainly up for debate, and many people / cultures have different opinions on that.

Teaching minors about sex is a serious criminal offence?

> But identification as a child doesn't need to stop you from accessing opposing viewpoints, it needs to stop you from accessing... that.

The problem is you'll be hard-pressed to have one without the other - not to mention that even if it starts off like that, the system is so easily abused to destroy privacy on the Internet for everyone, not just kids.

And by the way, I do actually believe more people need to see graphic violence, and I do believe it helps people grow. We all hear about gun violence and club shootings and the like, but it doesn't drive home the reality of it.

Do I think kids should see that? Probably not, but I also don't believe it's inherently going to 'traumatize' all of them - I saw much of the same stuff you did, I'm sure, and I don't count it amongst my trauma.

I saw people literally get scalped and flayed alive growing up on the internet and all it did was increase my empathy for people and compel me to pay attention to the violent struggles happening around the world.

I'm not saying exposure to such material doesn't risk traumatizing a child or even an adult, or that I am entirely untraumatized by what I've seen, but it still pales in comparison to the violence I faced at home. The problem is that it's like abstinence or prohibition: If such material is legally restricted, when people do encounter these materials, it won't be in a safe environment and the risk for trauma is much greater. To be clear, I do understand that some people fetishize violence, but I believe this risk is also greater if there is not a safe avenue for understanding the darkest sides of humanity.

Being compelled to pay attention to violent struggles doesn't sound to me like a particularly good thing. Nothing wrong with empathizing, donating, doing what you can for the causes you happen to hear about. But in my experience, people who are incapable of ever tuning out violence inevitably fall down radicalization spirals about it. There's just nothing I can meaningfully say or do about most of the violence in the world.

My argument is about restriction, not compulsion.

But on the subject of compulsion: there is definitely a line where utility is not worth the trauma, but as a child I was shown images of the Holocaust, of emaciated and abused Jews, and that has influenced me to now be against Israel and their continued holocaust against the Palestinian people, so I'm quite thankful for that.

In general, because school introduced me to it, I read quite a lot of Holocaust-related literature in my free time, both fiction and nonfiction, and that led me to learning about ongoing genocides and neoliberal violence-backed economic power struggles, and identifying with other oppressed people across the globe, greatly influencing my politics and turning me into the exact kind of person that my current state considers radical and would love to imprison and extract slave labor from.

Can I engage you on this as someone who once shared your view? Not to say I believe my view is better now, but maybe you can learn from my experiences.

Not everyone has this reaction, because what they have been exposed to shapes how that content will affect them.

Specifically people who have been victims of serious assault or even witnessed that can have a much worse, and irreversible reaction to you when seeing things that make those memories come to the fore as recurrent, intrusive thoughts, which then affect their behavior and lives. That is really what the restriction of content should be about if anything: helping people avoid things they want to avoid.

The people who have struggled (especially at a young age) with real trauma often come across as distant, quiet or anti-social; sometimes they never were so before. But often, our community where this behavior is more normalized, is where those people come, even if they don't have a primary interest in the community, to feel normal again, while still feeling fearful or full of empathy. You may have trauma, or not, depending on what violence you faced. However, even with violence, people react in wildly different ways, for one, women are much more anxious and cautious after feeling at risk or violated than men, so you really cannot assume that how you feel represents how a woman would (for evolutionary sensible reasons). Meanwhile, men often suppress their emotions (at a truly deep level, killing their relationships).

The problem with saying that prohibition necessarily means they will encounter the material in an unsafe environment is that, someone who has been assaulted or abused is already in an unsafe environment, everywhere, in their mind, and for legitimate and rationale reasons. The world is different when you know police will generally not deeply investigate a serious crime, when one has been personally been conducted against you. Seeing content like that, can prolong or make permanent that state of being, which can leave to bad and convoluted consequences later on. It is easier to understand this if you have children or have seen real pain and suffering with someone you love too, that can give you the empathy to understand this reaction.

It is hard to understand psychological damage unless you or someone you truly love and have strong empathy with goes through it. Until then, it's hard to understand or imagine at all how other people might be affected by some things. They will not always have your reaction to content which is extreme. I do not agree with prohibition, but do consider that others can have different reactions to you, ones you possibly cannot imagine.

Put another way, many times, we label content extreme not because it is extreme for everyone. We label it, because for some group of people, at some point, it could set their own lives back a lot to encounter it, and these people are already suffering more than the average person. It's about helping them avoid more pain.

Obviously this does not apply to all content, but for your examples, it does. Do not imagine there are not blue collar workers who have seen close friends suffer similar pain to the fate you mention, haunted by it. Men who would break at the knees at the sight of that kind of video. There are. You brush shoulders with them on the street. We can understand the dark sides of humanity through history and the written word (which I believe should be fully unrestricted), but not everything needs the very human, memory-provoking visual element.

> Do I think kids should see that? Probably not, but I also don't believe it's inherently going to 'traumatize' all of them - I saw much of the same stuff you did, I'm sure, and I don't count it amongst my trauma.

I remember when it was fashionable for trolls to post shock images like tubgirl or lathe accidents. I seen to have survived ok.

Yeah, it's my view that people don't truly understand how fragile life is unless they've seen how easily it is shattered.

People would get in less street fights and do less dumb shit if they knew what the world was like. The cartels are not your friend, falling and hitting your head can kill you, wearing a seatbelt is mandatory, there are no winners in armed conflict, factory farming is not ethical, etc.

People that say these things, but they don't truly understand them until they see it.

I couldn’t possibly agree more.

It’s very easy to fetishise war when you have not seen the grim barbarity of true conflict.

It’s not like the movies, and we should not think of it as a desired or easily entered venture.

Street/Knife fights are another, I’ve seen them first hand and its impressive how mundane things or subtle movements are actually just lethal. There’s a saying that “The winner of a knife fight is the one who dies at the hospital” but even glib phrases like this are not enough to prepare you.

Kids would be less keen to join gangs if they saw the brutality before thinking they might get cool points.

As with many things, the concern is that it's bimodal. Some people learn empathy through this kind of exposure, and some people learn the opposite.

I think it's a pretty fundamental mistake to conflate the library with the internet. Even the "dangerous section" of the library is still a curated, by nature of the medium (the printed word), high information, low noise environment.

The internet is a commercial, mass media space, in large parts an entropy machine, where you're unlike in the library backroom are always under surveillance, where it's not you actively engaging with books but the internet engaging with you. A library is a repository of knowledge (which is not the same as information or "data") the internet is a dark forest where some pretty eldritch entities are always on the lookout for someone to pounce on.

Kids can be free in the library because, as to the title of the thread, there's always a librarian. There's no heroin needles on the tables. You buy the freedom of the library by it being an ordered and protected space.

Conflation is probably wrong. But librarianship is one of the most hacker-adjacent places I’ve ever worked. I fought pretty damn hard to keep UNIX tooling very directly in the information science curriculum at Indiana - circa 2005 or so. It was in serious danger of getting removed - I was just a graduate student but I got my butt on the right committee where I could articulate the need for tools and textual technologies to stay on the map there. Taking them away from the students would have been doing them a massive disservice.

Good point. One of the things that always strikes me as extremely dishonest about these conversations is when people pretend that libraries aren't curated collections. Usually with the librarians as gatekeepers, sometimes with others.

Out of curiosity, can you link some comments in this thread that suggest people think libraries are not curated collections? It seems to me that most people realize a librarian's role is indeed to curate it.

This is the single most insightful comment in the thread.

There is no comparison possible between algorithmic surveillance capitalist social media, and a library.

I just want infinite scrolling data mining attention farming algorithms to be forbidden, at the very least for children under 18. Nothing about banning access to the internet.

And that's great, so long as the government remains trustworthy.

But then one day you have a government that, say, starts mining the IRS databases to pass that information along to ICE for arrest prospects...

Once it's recorded, you not only have to trust the current government, but all future governments as well.

I don't think I said anything about banning access, just restricting it. In any case, I want such things banned too, for everyone - because you can't have it banned for kids without adversely affecting privacy for everyone.