Leaving kids in front of screens unsupervised for hours may have unpleasant consequences, parents learn

You know, that’s the weirdest slam on adoption I’ve heard yet, and I’ve heard some pretty weird stuff. Dude needs to lay off the viagra, get some bloodflow up to his other head.

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I’m pretty sure he didn’t intend it that way, it was just meant as some good old fashioned racism.

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Is he the one who invaded Russia in the fall?>

Came to thread confused about who these people are and left hungry.

That was not what I expected.

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Thank you! I’m so sick of that BS line about her.

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Okay, this is gonna sound completely left field, because it totally is, but two things:

  1. Did you ever write for Garrison keeler? Cause that anecdote sounds perfectly in context.
  2. What is your hourly rate for workshopping very short stories? I have a ton already written, but I would be a huckster if I said they were finished.
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One of many to make that mistake, but he’s the only European commander to do so without being defeated by the Russian winter.

Eventually Peter the Great took the Swedes down, creating the Russian Empire in the process and sending Charles XII into exile. But if Charles hadn’t diverted his attention to give Augustus the Strong a well-deserved spanking, the Russians might well be speaking Swedish today. In the initial phases of the Great Northern War the Swedes were trouncing the Russians despite being outnumbered by as much as four to one, and in the final confrontation it took twice as many Russians to defeat Charles’ exhausted, logistically overextended Swedes, and even then if Charles himself hadn’t been in a coma from a wound he’d probably have won.

Remember, the Poles, Lithuanians, Germans, Norwegians, Danes, and Russians all invaded Sweden simultaneously three years after he took the throne and the massively outnumbered and surrounded Swedes beat the stuffing out of all of them in response… Charles XII certainly didn’t start the Great Northern War! Really Augustus the Strong did, the great sweaty pillock.

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I’m a grown-ass man and I love to watch folks play video games. I said as a teen, if there was a TV channel of folks playing high-quality STREET FIGHTER 2 matches, I would watch it, and lo, it has come.

Now that I have some kids that are old enough to dig video games, we watch some of this stuff together, largely on Twitch. And it’s a constant battle to find streams where the host isn’t drinking, screaming “FUCK!” constantly, and the chat is civil and not an endless barrage of racist memes.

Youtube is basically out of bounds. To me, it’s the 21st century exemplar of scrambled porn channels from my youth. The forbidden content is there if you are willing to look for it.

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Who both did bang up jobs.
Also Tutankhamun.

Doesn’t matter, Yoko Ono is way better than the Beatles anyway!

(ducks!)

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Ugh I am google failing right now… but I read an article about Abbey Road and the filming of the making of the album and how Paul and John HATED each other, that it’ll never be released because its just hours of them bickering and fighting with Ringo and George being all quiet and awkward. And by the end they were recording their bits on different days so they didn’t have to be in the same room with each other.

I’m glad John got to go do something else with someone he loved. Sorry Paul, don’t be bitter!

@popobawa4u - I’m not going to throw anything, I love Yoko Ono. :slight_smile:

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Well, there’s salt, and there’s pepper, and according to my mother, beyond these two spices, there’s butter.

What is this basil people speak of?

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I KNOW! You turn your head for one minute and you know what? They’re reading The Bell Curve and running away to become groupies on Koast-to-Koast Klan Tours.

The comparison of racism to rock and roll is cute, I’ll give ya that!

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Lightweights.

Why is it so hard to find someone who uses resiniferatoxin in their cooking.

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Key difference:

  • Dylan Roof and others like him are real. We can point to specific incidents in which specific people were attacked or murdered by young white men who were exposed to or engaged in racist communities online.

  • Young people holding occult rituals in which they’d sacrifice their newborn children to Ba’al after playing Dungeons & Dragons was a phenomenon that existed only in the fevered imaginations of easily frightened Evangelicals.

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They are pretty unimaginative though. It’s all Hitler and Mussolini. Maybe Pinochet too, if they are feeling like taking a risk.

Where are the arseholes who want to be like Idi Amin or Leopold II, King of the Belgians?

Actually, on second thoughts, I don’t want to know where they are, unless they are in a padded cell.

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And maybe remember the difference between lemons and limes.

Well, to be technical about it, I compared Satanism to racism and videos on YouTube to rock and roll.

However, I do thank you for the mental image of someone reading The Bell Curve under the covers with a flashlight and many furtive glances at the bedroom door.

Also ‘koast-to-koast’ which is something the Klan would have totally used. I’ve never heard tell of an organization that combined so much evil with so much goofiness. If you made them up in fiction you’d be accused of hamming it up. (Indeed, for the longest time, as a non-American child I thought they were fictional. Imagine my surprise.)

Point.

I compared it to the silliest moral panic because I felt like mocking, but there are other moral panics which blamed $POPULARTHING for absolutely real problems. There’s the “Video Games are Murder Simulators” one which blamed Columbine on Doom, if you’ll recall. Columbine absolutely did happen and was absolutely terrible, but it wasn’t, I think all sane people can agree, wasn’t caused by Doom. And then there’s the one surrounding the introduction of the Hays code which, again, was focused on things that Actually Happened.

Hell, a lot of the Satanic Panic was about teen suicide (that was the delightfully named Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons pet issue—I recommend the Pulling Report for details) and that was real. It just had bugger-all to do with Satan.

My point is more general, actually. Every once in a while some new thing is blamed for a societal ill (real or imagined) and the pattern is always the same: We were righteous folk before this $NEWTHING came and corrupted the youth. Except, no, watching Let’s Plays won’t turn little Billy or little Suzy into Nazis. Billy and Suzy have moral agency and will interpret what they hear through the lens of what their parents saw fit to teach them.

Now, you might point out to the fact that Nazi-esque images are on the rise on the 'net and yes, you’d be right. But I maintain that most of those are absolutely jokes and not, as people are insistent secret vessels for malign intent.

Why do I think so? Well it’s in the nature of certain people—young people, largely—to deliberately go against the grain and shock their elders. Now, used to be you’d dress funny or listen to discordant music or use the word ‘fuck’ with wild abandon. You may enjoy a comic who lambasted society and cursed with artistic precision—think Lenny Bruce, say.

But that doesn’t shock anyone. Not even slightly. Ah, but draw a swastika and wow everyone’s paying attention to you. The trollies of the Internet got a presidential candidate to discuss their ridiculous frog on air. They must have been over the moon.

Milo Whatshisface may be an idiot of epic proportions and as slimy a being as has ever crawled the Earth but he got one thing right. Alt-Right is the new punk. On the plus side that does mean most of them will feel vaguely embarrassed about it when they grow up a bit. On the minus side, well—look at the world.

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Mmm. But you gotta get one that’s been properly rubbed with a clove of garlic just after it was made. And for added points, you have to get this Rocambole cultivar of garlic that’s used in the region that’s a little bit purple and has this amazing aroma. That’s how they make it in Szentendre, and it’s just amazing.

I guess I know what I’m having for lunch tomorrow. :slight_smile:

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I think the death of nerve thing has a bit to do with it.

Just saying.

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