No group of people in human history, not on-line, not in real life, has ever existed without content moderation. The idea that Reddit, or Twitter, or Nostr, or any other place, virtual or otherwise can, should, or ever will exist without content moderation is fucking absurd. You have to be brain-dead to believe something so obviously idiotic. And to frame that ridiculous delusion in terms like "free speech" only goes to show that nobody has a clue what they're talking about.

Nobody cares about this, but I think it is interesting and important. It's about the way we use language to describe ourselves. Charlie's Angels was a hit TV show in the late 70s. I looked at the transcripts of 17 episodes broadcast in 1978. 1) The show is about 3 women in their late 20s. The actresses are in their late 20s. So logically we should hear the word woman, or women, a lot, right? Women 27 times in the singular and 15 times in the plural. 42 times altogether. 2) The word girl, however appears 120 times, with the plural form showing up 61 times, for a grand total of 181 instances. I watched all 17 of these episodes. There are no females who even remotely qualify as girls. There are no children. There aren't any women under 20. 3) In all of those instances the word girl is being used to describe an adult woman. This was a mainstream show. It was seen by lots and lots of people. It was not an outlier. This was normal television. 4) The original pilot, broadcast in 1976, has a scene where one character tells another "There's a young girl at the door" The character was clearly an adult woman in her late 20s. The actress playing her was 31 at the time. That qualifies as "young girl"?!?! 5)

It's never about 5 or 10 year olds. It's never about children. It's never about pedophilia. It's always about young adults 14+ 1) Half the peeps respect teens' right to control their own bodies, and half the peeps furiously demand we treat teens like toddlers. 2) Peeps over 40 remember a time when teens dated, and had sex with 20-somethings all the time, and nobody batted an eyelid. It was not abuse. It was normal romantic love-making. We old folk remember. We lived it. We know there's nothing wrong with that. 3) Since dumb urban myths and very sketchy pop "science" reclassified young adults aged 14-20 as children, suddenly literally all men are pedos. 4) and I mean that seriously. Real pedos are attracted to children 12 and under. Normal hetero men are attracted to young women post-puberty (they've got boobs and hips etc) Normal gay men are attracted to young men post-puberty (they've got muscles and body hair etc) 5) No sexual attraction ever depends on arbitrary legal definitions. Nobody starts or stops being attracted to someone on their 18th birthday. Nobody chooses who they are attracted to. Literally all men are sexually attracted to minors. 6) and that's what creates the vicious debate. Puritans are furious that someone might have lewd thoughts about a "child" Large numbers of people have been fooled into thinking that completely normal sexual attraction is a dangerous perversion which leads to violent rape. 7) It's absurd, of course. Tucker Carlson can watch Miss Teen USA and think that the hot 15 year old is appealing and not rape anybody. It is not at all dangerous to admit that beauty pageant contestants are pretty or sexy. Tucker's commentary did not harm anybody. 8) but the extreme anger directed at Mr Carlson is sure to prevent him from ever telling a simple truth like that again. American men are now forced to pretend that teenagers are not fully sexually developed people and so attractive to non-pedos. 9) Gays in the 50s were forced to hide their sexuality, never admit the truth. Homosexuals are 4% of the population. Today men are forced to hide their sexuality, never admit the truth. Men are 50% of the population. 10) Many gays in the 50s loathed themselves. They had internalized the hate directed at "deviants" and "perverts" We are repeating exactly the same thing today, but with 1/2 the population. 11) Men see sexy teens every day. Often they feel sexual arousal when they see them at the mall or the swimming pool, or watching porn featuring 18 year olds. Puritans want those men to believe that that makes them disgusting creeps. 12) Puritans call them pedos to try to induce deep feelings of shame and self-loathing. A brand new taboo has been born just in the last 15 years. It's amazing. 13) It is very much like the witch trials of old. There is no logic. There is no evidence. but there is enough fear to generate the hysteria needed to convince large numbers of people that they are facing pure evil which must be brutally suppressed. 14) and since this fake "pedophilia" is pure evil then anyone who questions the fight against pure evil is also pure evil. this is all the more terrifying as literally half the population is guilty of feeling normal sexual attraction to post-pubescent men and women. 15) No one dares speak out against the hysteria, because anyone who does will immediately be accused of being a pedo themselves. Why else would anyone defend pure evil? It's exactly like the witch trials. and it's happening in the USA in 2023. 16)

A few months ago I saw a graph showing how many more teens were employed in the 1980s than in the 2000s and 2010s. (sadly I can't find it now) I think this trend toward teens working less contributes a lot to the hate everybody piles on teenagers. Back in the 80s young adults aged 14-18 socialized with older adults sometimes. Maybe with neighbors, their parents friends, during church or scouting activities, while cheering for a local football team, but mostly at work. Usually in the service industry. Restaurants, and retail outlets had staff aged 16 to 65. They mixed. They got to know each other. They communicated. They learned from each other. In those days NOBODY had an official mentor. But everybody had half a dozen unofficial ones. Chatting about the world with coworkers of various ages and backgrounds was Very Healthy for us. It's so much harder to hate people you've gotten to know. Fewer teens in the workplace is a sad development. It makes our society worse. #SPR860

Nobody ever talks about the vicious hate teenagers face on line. Bigots abuse and harass them simply because of their age. It's vile AF but everybody just acts like it's normal. #SPR860

Sensationalist media, the Chris Hansen types who make piles of money drumming up hysterical fear of X or Y, love to use words like "predator" and "prey on" because it evokes images that stick in the mind. It gets people emotional. Having a calm rational public is not profitable for them. #SPR860

Real solution: A. lower the age of majority to 16 (even runaways need legal rights) B. decriminalize all sex work (cops should work for the prostitutes not against them) C. triple the minimum wage (make non-sex work far more attractive and sustainable) #NotRocketScience

Some of us are old enough to remember back when the neo-Puritans used terms like "The Gay Agenda" to terrify parents. They wanted to think LGBTQ+ people were trying to convert your sons and daughters, to win them over for the dark side like Darth Vader. Today on Twitter if you state a simple fact like 16 year olds are young men and women, you'll be assaulted with accusations that you are promoting "The Pedo Agenda" Within a couple of years we'll see terms like "The Perv Agenda" or "The Kink Agenda" Or maybe the neo-Puritans will replace the word agenda altogether. But they will find new scary-as-hell labels for sex positive people who want a healthy, natural, realistic approach to erotic activities. They need to gin up fear. Otherwise they can't justify the repression.

Why do so many people so desperately cling to the obviously false belief that 17-year-olds are children? a thread 🧵 1) Very lucrative television fear-mongering has, over the last few decades, ginned up so much hysteria that large portions of the general public now believe that sex crime is rampant. 2) They are thoroughly convinced that sex predators are everywhere. At the same time they are sure that anyone under age 18 or 25 is totally helpless against the magical brainwashing powers of "groomers" 3) In their minds teens can easily be raped and traumatized for life by these perverted sex-crazed psychopaths without ever even realizing that they're being permanently psychologically damaged. Teens are normal humans who like sex. So sometimes they have sex. 4) In the deranged minds of the fear-addled public however, it's very important to make sure that teens cannot legally consent. Otherwise how could you get a rape charge to stick against the alleged sex predator, with whom the young adult made love? 5) It is crucial to the fight against the mythical monsters that teens have no right to consent, and no right to control their own bodies or sex lives. 6) This is problematic because we spent the last 50+ years repeating the axiom "What 2 consenting adults do in the privacy of their own bedroom..." 7) Therefore adulthood simply must be denied to biological adults who don't meet the age requirement. Anything else would be an endorsement of their rape and traumatization by evil sex monsters. 8) Their fear-addled minds are really convinced that anyone who acknowledges the fact that 17-year-olds are adults has no motivation other than the legal sexual exploitation of defenseless feeble-minded 17-year-old children. 9) The whole thing is completely insane on every level. but nobody is thinking. everyone is fearing. the rational got tossed out the window long ago. the only thing left is hysterics. 10)

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

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

Pleasantly surprised to see how good this old forgotten video of mine is https://youtu.be/GIrTW5OE2ck #Rewatch #Nostalgia #SPR860

#SPR860

The fact that people believe in teenhood or "adolescence" is pretty amazing. Some "experts" talk about adolescence ending at age 14, others say 25 or 30. Since the concept has zero scientific basis it's impossible to prove any of them wrong (or right). Social media is full of people screaming that 19-year-olds are children, especially if they suspect one of having sex with the "wrong" person. If that were true we'd have a massive child labor problem. Right now we have about 8 million 14 to 18-year-old young adults who have been forced into a kind of unnatural artificially extended childhood. They work, drive cars, join the military, some even start families, but society insists on infantilizing them, and criminalizing their sex lives. Not to mention the segregation. Barred from bars and night clubs, they're not allowed to socialize with anyone over 21. No society has ever done this before. It's a big experiment and so far the results are horrible. Youth suicide is at record highs. Doubling down on this tragic mistake is the dumbest thing we could do right now.

The point of an age of consent is to send a message to a (in Poland for example) 15-year-old that "Now the state no longer decides for you. You are old enough to choose. You have the right and the responsibility to control your own body." When you add age-gap exceptions to the law, the message becomes "You may be old enough to choose. It depends. You sometimes have the right to control your own body, but obviously you're too stupid to consent to people of a certain age who can brainwash you." The later is a demeaning, disempowering, counterproductive message.

Lenore Skenazy, in her excellent book "Free-Range Kids" explains how we got the Stranger Danger Panic. Here's a link to a podcast about the same thing, which goes into fascinating detail about it as well. https://www.buzzsprout.com/1112270/3884039-stranger-danger . 1) We never recovered from that hysteria, despite the fact that crime fell precipitously from the early 90s to today. As the mania continued protecting our "kids" became more and more important. https://youtu.be/12J1f0Zqaqw 2) as a result the age at which we thought "kids" were old enough to do all sorts of things rose dramatically. https://youtu.be/3BPjj5nNc9Q 3) In a sex-phobic Puritan society like mine, of course, sex is feared the most. Adult-child sex has always been taboo, but over the last fifteen years teenagers got stripped of their adult status and reclassifed as children. https://youtu.be/5YaOKkdOCjQ 4) Well-meaning people believe that hordes of dangerous sex predators seek out teenagers to sexually abuse, and they've also convinced themselves that teens have such terrible useless brains that they are easily manipulated. So they're defenseless. https://youtu.be/GIrTW5OE2ck 5) Nobody worries very much about real pedophilia for one simple reason. 6-year-old girls don't have sexual fantasies about men who are 20 years older than them. 16-year-old women, however, often do. So taboo meets reality, and the result is a lot of acrimony on social media. 6) By redefining the word child to include lots of post-pubescent people aged 13-21 they by default redefined pedophilia to include attraction to fully developed people who have secondary sexual characteristics, adult sex hormones, and adult sex drives. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yNjdt7h3UA 7) To dismantle this chain of unscientific nonsense is very easy. BUT... taboos are special. A taboo is unspeakable. NO ONE is allowed to question a taboo. So there can be no rational discussion of the biological facts, that need to be accepted in order to dispel the panic. 8)

Do mothers and sons have conversations like this now? https://youtu.be/gtdJK3oax8Q .

Teens are in the middle of a massive mental health crisis precisely because of the bizarre unnatural artificially extended childhood which is imposed on them. 1) They are demeaned, degraded, insulted, and infantilized constantly. and we wonder that they have their highest suicide rate in history. It is all new. It is completely unnecessary. It is a nasty permanent self-inflicted wound on our society. 2) I demand that people give teenagers basic human respect. Yes, bodily autonomy is part of that. Yes, not calling them children is part of that. 3) Acting like teens are toddlers who will be damaged by seeing a penis is ridiculous hysteria. It's absurd bullshit that causes tremendous harm and ignores all of the real problems we're facing. 4) We have 1000s of years of history showing that teens do just fine when given the chance, but we refuse to learn from history and we teach our young people total bullshit from clickbait myths about them having retarded brains until they're 25. 5) We as a society cannot make rational decisions because we are in the grips of hysteria. Everybody is screaming about pedophilia, but at the same time nobody even knows what the word means. It's very reminiscent of the 16th Century witch trials. 6) In the 1400s nobody was bothered by witches at all. Along comes the printing press and soon everybody was so terrified they had to start burning their neighbors alive. 7) In the '80s nobody worried about pedos at all. Along comes the internet and suddenly everybody perceives a massive epidemic of *pedophilia* and *groomers* etc who absolutely must be exterminated in a gruesome fashion. 8) Change is scary. Powerful new information technologies shake everything up. People react by looking for someone to blame. Some class of people that everyone can universally hate on. 500 years ago it was witches. Today it is pedos. 9) To make our society work we all have to calm the fuck down. There are some basic facts like crime in the USA is at 60 year lows. Our children haven't been this safe since the 1950s. Teens are perfectly capable of telling a creep to fuck off. It's not hard. 10) As with most panicked responses our reaction to the non-existent giant plague of pedos causes far more harm than good. We spend a lot of time and effort "protecting" teenagers by filling their heads with extremely disempowering messages. Effectively taking away their power. 11) and the young have internalized it. They've been told so often that their brains will not work properly until they're 25 that they fully expect to act like totally idiots in adult bodies for a decade. It's self-fulfilling prophecy. 12) It doesn't have to be that way. We chose to make them morons. 13) One of the main reasons we infantilize them is fear of sex. If a young woman at 16 thinks she's old enough to date a man twice her age, she must be convinced that she's only a child with an undeveloped brain. Otherwise she might have SEX!!!!!! 14) Despite the fact that there's not a shred of evidence to show that teens having relationships with older adults is in any way harmful. It's pure hysteria about a non-existent problem causing massive real problems. 15) Somehow in the last 20 years teenagers stopped being young adults in the public mind and became large children. It's unscientific garbage of course but it is perceived to be true. If teens are children then attraction to them is pedophilia. Which is TABOO. 16) but literally 100% of men are sexually attracted to under 18s. It's a simple biological fact. So every man feels what is publicly perceived to be the most heinous perversion of all. 17) Women who know a few men are also aware that the 15 year old with beautiful tits at the swimming pool is gonna turn on all the men. They are not blind. They just honor the taboo. Thinking that a teen might have a sexuality is repugnant to the point of unacceptable. 18) Effectively by lying to ourselves about who is and isn't a child we painted ourselves into a corner where everybody has to lie about natural sexual attraction 24/7 So everybody is terrified. Everybody forgot that arousal =/= action. 19) Americans are running around accusing others of thought crimes "That man glanced at my daughter's chest!!!!" It's absurd, irrational fear, and it makes everyone super unhappy. We all need to calm the fuck down, and start treating teens with respect again. 20)

Total fear-mongering bullshit. The key word here is "SUSPECTED"... they don't know. With millions of users on the platform they *suspect* 600 pics. "found over 600 pieces of known or suspected child abuse material" 1) No one in their organization could look at 600 pics BEFORE they wrote the report? This is not a serious group of researchers. They are obviously lying like hell. 2) Why do they suspect these 600 pics? because “We got more photoDNA hits"... in plain English that means their software flagged the photos. A robot said they are suspicious. Out of millions and millions of pics all over Mastodon 600 are maybe bad according to a bot. 3) Here's a link to the absolute shit propaganda: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/07/24/twitter-rival-mastodon-rife-with-child-abuse-material-study-finds/ 4)

Their experience has been artificially limited by restrictions designed to protect them. They have been protected from learning about the world they live in. Then their ignorance is used as an excuse to extend those restrictions to higher and higher ages. In the 1980s teen was synonymous with young adult. Now teens are considered children. That is a huge shift in the way we treat millions of people. and they are not responding well at all. They are in the middle of a huge mental health crisis. Rates of depression, self-harm, and suicide among them are at all time highs. The way we infantilize them constitutes abuse. We have to stop treating them like shit. They need and deserve basic respect. “still developing” is a fuzzy, not very scientific way to say they are inferior and justify treating them like dirt. This short video explains quite a bit: https://youtu.be/12J1f0Zqaqw ,