they’re framed as new problems

I think the framing is more that it’s increasing

29% of Barnardo’s frontline practitioners said they were seeing more children affected by misogynistic content online, compared to the year before. 29% also said they were seeing an increase in child-on-child sexual abuse and / or children displaying problematic or harmful sexual behaviour, compared to the year before.

Which I think is both a fair assessment and entirely predictable given the concerted attacks on women’s rights going on across many countries by conservative parties right now. In addition to letting men’s hate speech run rampant (red pill, incel, tradwife type stuff), they’re also attacking trans women (notably not trans people, as 100% of the narrative is focused on trans women) which opens the door to transvestigation which is just blatant misogyny targeted at those who don’t conform to what is essentially tradwife goalposts.

having entire generation never start smoking

Yes because making drugs illegal stops them from ever being used😂

these bans are actively targeting only children

Quite literally true of many of the examples I brought up? I’m confused about where you are going with this. I was merely pointing out that something being done “for the children” is disingenuous framing. There is no merit in discrimination. If it was truly to protect them when they are children because children can’t make the decisions with the same brain that adults make decisions with, then the ban would expire when they reach adult age. But it’s not actually about that; it’s about the fact that they can’t ban it for adults and by claiming it’s there to protect children they can gain political capital and will to ban it. It’s effective legislative incrementalism against a difficult foe (big tobacco). I think limiting big tobacco is good, and I think cigarettes are bad, but I don’t agree with this particular application because of the flawed framing - it opens up the ability for others to legislate in areas they shouldn’t be legislating, or to use the same framework and claim its for the same reasons without it meeting the same criteria.

conflating it with other issues is a classic conservative trope

Are you saying that pointing out the framing is flawed is a conservative trope?

A full ban would cause serious political problems

Yes they’re selling it under the guise that one group is being “protected” because they ought to be protected and another group does not need this protection, which is a form of discrimination. They do this because they know they don’t have the political capital to ban it for everyone, because many adults value the ability to make choices about their own health, well-being, and what vices they wish to partake in.

New Zealand has already enacted such a law, without seemingly much blowback.

It’s pretty easy to enact laws on a small group when they have limited participation or voice in governmental affairs.

For what it’s worth I’m not against this legislation, but I am critical of it. Big tobacco is bad. Cigarettes are bad. But this kind of “save the children” mentality often leads to a lot of corrupt and incorrect decisions and legislation. Alcohol is objectively even worse, and yet we’re not banning that. Why? Will similar legislation try to capitalize on this and ban things like nicotine in general (almost certainly, despite nicotine being a relatively harmless substance in comparison). Worse yet, will they try to ban things like gender affirming care, or other objectively good things because there is a moral purity angle? I suspect so.

My favorite part about this is that it’s targeted at a specific age demographic, rather than a full-on ban. Love the cowardice. Ban it for all ages or don’t ban it at all you absolute morons.

It’s really annoying how they discount how boys can be a vector as well. Yes, HPV generally doesn’t cause cancer in men, but being able to transfer it to girls means its a good idea to vaccinate them as well! Not to mention the other ways in which HPV can effect men. Public health is so frustrating sometimes.

The right as a political machine didn’t bat an eye when democratic government officials were assassinated. They also have completely ignored the facts of just about everything and inserted their own ideology or fantasy about what’s true and what’s not. What do you think “shouting from the rooftops” is going to accomplish here? This same nonsense has repeated itself multiple times with the attempted Trump assassinations and with other figures on the right. 99 times out of 100 it’s a young straight white conservative male behind shootings, yet there is never introspection on this issue. I cannot imagine this will change the minds of any significant number of those on the right. As Kirk himself said, this is the price of business.

I’m fairly certain that this is what’s being cited. The journalism, unfortunately, is quite poor and it’s hard to confirm precisely what article she was referring to.

Public input was nothing but a facade anyways. We all know under current president they are being gutted and only listen to corporations.

It’s almost entirely medically irrelevant, and the times in which it becomes medically relevant you need to go to a doctor to manage the transition and they can explain to you the times where you need to disclose it (practically never).

With the increasing concentration/divide of wealth, this is only going to get worse without regulation. It’s frustratingly easy to solve, yet places suffering from this problem seem to be hesitant to solve it in the simplest of ways possible - add a flat tax to anyone who owns more than one property or is not a resident.

War on homeless, really? This fucking country I s2g

consultant-approved campaign

The same consultants who have repeatedly said the democrats need to keep pulling to the right. It’s entirely unsurprising that doing exactly what they don’t advise is what’s winning over people, lmao.

I think it’s probably much more mundane; they simply see an opening so they’re going to throw him under the bus so they can be the next king.

In a way, it’s extremely surprising. I agree that it seems wild for this to be what takes down the house of cards.

On the other hand, trying to think of it through the lens of someone already living within the conspiracism bubble, I do think this issue is notably different. Bragging about being a rapist is just how they talk, because they explicitly endorse sexism. That’s just “boys being boys” and whatnot. Unity is necessary to impose a collective will, so some level of bad behavior is excusable so long as you’re towing the party line. But they spent far too long mysticizing and building up the epstein files and importantly it reflected a value that they collectively held - to protect the children. For something which was so central to their conspiracist theorems (just like the deep state, except in this case it was a plausibly real thing) to be discarded so wantonly like this without a clear and plausible explanation which maintains their theories (even Alex Jones couldn’t resolve his cognitive dissonance on this entirely… is Trump actually a deep state actor?!)? Well that is a difficult pill to swallow.

Maybe someone will be creative enough to weave a story which both explains and allows them to continue to press on with their core beliefs of a global elite running the world and them fighting back against it but somehow Trump not being part of said cabal and instead acting on their behalf. If that happens, I’m sure it’ll spread like wildfire among them because it’ll help them suspend their disbelief. One can simply hope they implode upon themselves because right now things are looking exceptionally bleak for the US not nose-diving directly into fascism and being at the center of WW3 and a Nazi 2.0 movement

this is very concerning

Ah yes, integration of church and state, just like the founding fathers wanted 🙄

“There is going to come a time when everyone is retiring and there’s not going to be a workforce.”

Well there certainly wont be a workforce if we keep framing immigration as only murderers and thieves and trying our hardest to deport them all (and a bunch of legal citizens in the process).

I find it interesting that this article takes the framing of freedom, options, and a positive reality. Where’s the mention of cost? If your average worker is struggling to get by paycheck to paycheck more than 50 years ago, is it really surprising that less people are willing to take on the financial burden of kids?

And what of thinking about the future of our planet as a whole? We’re cooking the planet and many of the young adults alive today know they’ll be facing dire times in the upcoming decades. If I were younger and considering kids I would surely think twice knowing my kids would be drafted into the climate wars…

One of the most salient and annoying sludges I ever experienced was doordash support. There was an issue with my account where the credits they gave me for a failed delivery somehow broke the ability for it to process payment (the total credits exceeded the cost of any reasonable single meal). No amount of adding different cards would fix it. There is a second line of service which supports via email, but they do not keep on the same ticket, it goes back to an inbox which multiple people see and every single reply was from a different support person. In addition to changing the support person each reply, they are clearly incentivized to reply quickly, rather than thoroughly. I say this because I would get the same questions, for which my reply would be “please see the full email chain which is included, this question was asked by <representative> and the answer is in the reply”. I got stuck in an endless loop of this before I decided to just entirely give up on the app. There is no number you can call, there is no way to get a person who will read through the entire email to understand the problem and troubleshooting steps taken. It was hostile by design, and designed to make you go away.

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