Maybe you were, but that's not every child. To begin with, why should any child be exposed to this risk at all? Any probability above 0% is too high, if the risk is your child getting gooned out into a BBC-loving freak who cuts off their own penis/vagina and disowns your family for being *phobic. Yes, your child is going to get teased at school for your strict parenting, but how is that even worth debating when the alternative is unimaginably worse?
If you cannot find any other way of entertaining your kids and spending quality time with them then that is entirely your shortcoming. The Internet is not needed anywhere in that equation.
Kids still do need to know how to use computers and the web. We have kids now that have trouble with a Office suite. I'm not even talking Excel, I'm talking Word and PowerPoint. That is unacceptable.
Now where do I agree with the argument or can meet in the middle? Parental filters. Applications that let you remote view what your kid is looking at, at any time. Going into the router at home and hard blocking sites like porn sites. Telling your kids how to keep some basic opsec on the web. Parents should be doing all that. That doesn't excuse Roblox for not removing pedophiles. Both sides need to do their jobs.
Maybe you were, but that's not every child. To begin with, why should any child be exposed to this risk at all? Any probability above 0% is too high, if the risk is your child getting gooned out into a BBC-loving freak who cuts off their own penis/vagina and disowns your family for being *phobic. Yes, your child is going to get teased at school for your strict parenting, but how is that even worth debating when the alternative is unimaginably worse?
We can’t let this go too far though. And it can’t go in the wrong direction. Erotophobia is bad and breeds fetishism in its own way. That’s why I hate porn, but I’m not a fan of NoFap either. The Satanic Panic is actually kind of how we got here. Once stranger danger became a thing, kids started watching much more TV, and then played more videogames and used the internet. They interacted with each other less outside of school, church, and organized sports.
I also believe that obsessions with purity and sex gave kids weird ideas, and made them afraid to talk to the opposite sex. Some of it was propaganda intended to prevent teen niggers from getting pregnant that spilled onto white kids. It was also abstinence only propaganda that would’ve been applicable when people got married at 18, but not when they get married at 28. If you teach 15 year olds that sex outside of wedlock is going to send them to hell, they’re going to keep cooming to porn. And if you teach them that cooming is wrong, they’re going to get a chastity fetish, cuck fetish, or castration fetish (which pivots into trooning out).
I don’t think that’s what you were implying, but “even 0% is too high” is the kind of thinking that leads to bad outcomes.
When I was a kid: they told us not to use your real name on the internet and only talk to people anonymously. That changed to only friending people you know on like MySpace and Facebook, but kids nowadays are all about talking to strangers ie “slide into their dm’s.” Wanting and feeling validated by the attention of strangers online still doesn’t make sense to me.
If there is any "phobia" that lands the closest to the issue at hand here then it's "technophobia", but none of it is a phobia because it is a rational fear of something that is real and poses serious danger.
Even if you do not take porn into consideration, the Internet is an extremely powerful negative influence on the human mind. Take TikTok, for example, which is a Chinese psychological weapon designed to destroy the west, weaponising algorithms to overload dopamine receptors and do other fucked up shit to your brain. Social media is anything but social, where it also fucks up how you socialise at a fundamental level. I mean, this is why this forum you're writing on exists in the first place: all this shit breeds some monumentally fucked up and terminally online people that we laugh at.
Now, if you are capable of consuming the Internet critically, then that is not a problem. However, children are not capable of this. That is why this is not an acceptable risk to impose on them. They need a strongly controlled environment and rigorous coaching before being allowed to use something this dangerous.
Normalization of degeneracy comes in waves, but the point I was really driving at was that Bronies normalized that particular kind of childishness.
Prior to Bronies, adults who collected toys kept it quiet and only really shared it in special interest groups.
They certainly didn’t make it part of their “personality” and “identity”.
Around 2000, a man wearing a my little pony t shirt would have been mocked by strangers, and rightly so.
Contrary to current zoomer belief, they wouldn’t have been beaten up for it, unless they tried to make an issue out of it with the people who were mocking them.
Maybe normalizing degeneracy has always been happening, but there certainly have also been major condemnations of degeneracy in response.
To my knowledge though, there has never been anything quite like Bronies before. Not as widespread an acceptance of childishness.
Ehh... I feel like it was really the early 00's spike of weebery that really started this, because it created this "kids stuff is for adults too" mindset. Or allowed it to take root publicly, anyhow. The whole toys and tshirts and waifu body pillows thing predated bronies by years. And that had, and continues to have, a far greater amount of wider public acceptance than bronies had even at their height.
"We are aware of this claim and are currently investigating it. We take the security of our customers' information very seriously. At this moment, we have not detected any loss of information or hacking into our systems," Tipalti told Calcalist.
If they've not set up their systems to detect and log this sort of activity, then this statement isn't false. I would laugh if that were their defence though: it didn't happen because we have no logs of it happening!
Tbh kinda power leveling but here in Spain for quite some time now the media has been reporting on not only how porn and the internet are bad for the children but also how a group has been formed of parents and teachers who want to prohibit the internet for anyone that's minus 13
Now we’re listening to how our kids feel and how we should parent WITH them, and while it’s important to listen to your child, your job should not be dictated by someone who only learned how to speak fucking 6 years ago.
I hate this new-age "parenting" so much. I have a friend I've known since middle school who will argue with me until she's blue in the face about how spanking your child is abuse, yet she wonders why her own kids scream at, cuss at, ignore, or even HIT her. It only compounds issues further that she's on her 3rd kid by a 3rd different man. Every time a relationship ends she cries "men ain't shit" from the rooftoops while being shocked that no man wants to be around her disrespectful asshole kids. As a step-parent, the technicalities around disciplining a kid that's not biologically yours are dicey, especially in the modern day. Stepping up to be a parent that someone didn't have is becoming a more and more thankless task these days, almost to the point where it's a liability.
It's not your job to be your child's "friend", it's your job to teach them to conduct themselves properly to keep themselves out of trouble (be it a prison cell or a pine box) later in life. If you want to be buddies with your kids, wait until they're grown.
For context, I was definitely disciplined with spankings as a child whenever I showed my ass in public or did something I knew better than to do. My father refused to lay a hand on myself and my sister, instead opting for my 5-foot nothing mother to handle it instead. Once we got to the age where a spanking was less of a punishment and more of an inconvenience, my parents switched to taking away privileges and grounding, which was far more effective. I distinctly remember asking if I could just get an ass-whooping instead of being prohibited from seeing my friends or playing my video games, or, worse yet, the dreaded writing "I will not [insert fuckup here]" 100 times. On the positive side, at least my handwriting is consistent.
I don't hold any resentment towards my parents for this, I acted like a little shithead in my youth and any punishment I received was justly so. I've heard tales from my grandparents on both sides of the family on how they did parenting, and I'd say my parents were definitely "softer" than their parents. The only thing I was ever struck by was an open hand on my ass.
On-topic: It's a fucking shame seeing a kid's game of all things infested with pedophiles and degenerates. As other in the thread have said, the internet has never been sanitary and always had it's share of weirdos and predators, but that age had a different mentality on "netiquette".
When I was growing up, I was taught to not speak in a private setting with anyone online I didn't know and to not attach identifiable real life information to a screen name. Nowadays, people are getting "doxxed" every other week thanks to having their entire online presence interconnected with their actual identity. Think of how many lolcows on this very site ended up getting their ID nailed thanks to some silly shit like their LinkedIn.
Another think that bothers me is the perceived lack of initiative to safeguard vulnerable individuals within communities. An example, as an early teen, I played a few games and was in clans/guilds with people from ages ranging from young teens to old bastards. Maybe I have to chalk it up to the luck of being around good people, but I can remember my older peers making an effort to shield us from creeps. Not necessarily out of a duty to do so, but because they could clearly see when something was fucked up and had strong enough moral fiber to intervene.
One of my fondest memories of this type was a CoD:WaW clan I was apart of for a few years as a teen. The vast majority of the clan was veterans ranging from early 20s to one man who was a ripe young 65. Every sentence ended in "sir" or "ma'am" and they actually had a get-together every year in Texas to hold a BBQ and raise donations for charities. As gay as it might sound, it was like "the cool uncle club" to a young man. I made a lot of friends, a few of which I still talk to this day.
The point: I genuinely felt comfortable around the group because they proactively weeded out sexpests and otherwise troublesome individuals. I feel like everyone these days is too afraid to speak out against modern-day clown world for fear of being labelled a bigot or a phobe. One of these days that pendulum is going to swing back, and it will be sharpened and weighted. #MakePedosAfraidAgain
The media would be going crazy if there was a movement to "radicalize children by introducing them to far right ideals."
That shit would be taken down overnight. Just have a group dedicated to two genders, that's extreme enough for them.
While I've taken issue with some of Ruben's actions post lawsuit, I have to give him credit for being the only big name actually going after these types of scum. The fact Ruben actually focuses on these horrific Fetish groups and not Le Evil Roblox Neo Nazis or whatever is a nice break from the usual "Evil Group in X Game" genre of videos.
Yeah, I've been trying to tell my internet-connected friends about this; Shit was fucked up then as it is now, there were just relatively fewer people on the internet, and relatively more people with good grounding. I saw the sickest, most vile shit. Predators attempted to do all sorts of shit to me, I had a mixture of luck, smarts, and a good enough upbringing to have been able to shrug off all that shit, and quite frankly most of it got forgotten real quick, but recently I've been thinking of how much shit I saw as a kid that I just narrowly avoided. Worse, I've been thinking of just how much dumb risky shit I should have done but had already seen how badly it could have turned out, because there were such obvious traps out there.
I also remember that society and parents in general did a better job of alerting minors as to what pedophiles were, how to spot one and how to avoid them. There seems to be no such Internet contraceptive activism these days, all that is relegated to social media companies, gov'ment and AI to sort out, while tablets and phones are just a tool to make your rowdy ADHD "diagnosed" kid shut up.
