Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/03/28/now-peeps-are-being-enlisted-t.html
…
6 Likes
Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny are double plus good.
“War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.”
11 Likes
Peep reports directly to the Easter Bunny.
Not in my Universe.
13 Likes
Whatever happened to ‘be a decent person because it’s a good thing?’. I get that there’s deep philosophical implications in the idea of what an unmonitored person does, but man…these elf on the shelf / peep on a sheep things irritate me.
14 Likes
You’ll get yourself nailed to a post with that kind of talk.
16 Likes
See in East Germany, you knew you were being surveilled because a substantial fraction of the populace was being employed as snitches. Here in the enlightened west, you know you’re being surveilled because you’ve been conditioned from infancy to accept it.
Again I really miss the times when totalitarian regimes were the bad guys!
25 Likes
Honestly the question of ‘when do you lie to kids and when do you not’ is a serious part of the reason I don’t have/want children.
I don’t think that this stuff is any real new problem in society - frankly put, the idea of a magical being reporting back to another magical being about your behavior and rewards being doled out at future dates is basically Religion 101, and clearly there’s a bunch of people who think that’s the basis for morality. If there’s an innate problem with it, we done already got that problem. I don’t think it really contributes to the surveillance state.
I think it DOES contribute to the idea that people learn to be good because there are consequences rather than being good for goodness’ sake…although again, complicated philosophical problem that I wrestle with a lot as an agnostic.
10 Likes
I hear the echoes of my grandma…
“Growing up is doing the right thing when no one is looking”
16 Likes
13 Likes
I feel like the marketing people behind this are unclear on the meaning of the word “tradition.”
11 Likes
I was hoping to hear about Peeps promotional IOT toy with terrible security. I am disappointed,for now.
I have two vivid Easter memories as a kid. One memory is the taste of AquaNet, liberally applied to our hair before we drove the 90 miles (144.8 km) to visit my grandparents. Our hair was crunchy, and the taste of the spray coated our tongues and inside of our lungs for hours. Just as that taste and smell died, my mother would envelop us in a fresh cloud of AquaNet from a can that I am sure is still full and hidden under their bathroom sink. No amount of candy can kill that taste.
The second indelible Easter memory involves my father using the harshest language he had access to- “Jesus Christ”, “Damn It” and “Damn you kids.”
As a kids, my sister and I attempted to catch the Easter Bunny. It wasn’t that we tried to catch the Easter Bunny that got us in trouble. That was cute. It was our belief in a magical indestructible bunny coupled with … inventive use of local materials that ended the fun magical Easter for us.
My parents would leave Easter Baskets on the front steps. I think it was the second year we tried to catch the Easter Bunny. This particular year we decided to set literal traps out for the Easter Bunny.
Earlier that year, my mother had found an put up some coyote traps on a wall or shelf because we lived in the prototype for TGI Friday’s. We took them down and set them outside along with some carrots. There might have been some wood with nails on it too, along with some strings leading to our bed rooms. Bits of Erector Set were likely used too. The result was my father screaming early in the morning damning us.
In the end, my parents were not happy with our thought processes. “Why would you hurt the Easter Bunny?”
The response from us was, “The Easter Bunny is Magic, so it can’t get hurt.”
Parents, “Your done with Easter Baskets. You’re too old.”
We didn’t set the traps open, and couldn’t have even if we had known how to do it. I think my father got a tetanus shot a day later. I am sure he “damned” us several times.
From that day forward we were too old for Easter. Easter from that point forward wasn’t much more than dying eggs, watching Harvey, and taking a drive to my grandparents with the taste of of cheap flammable hair spray in our mouths.
22 Likes
Nope, they understood it loud and clear, in their own cynical way.
There are way too many people who treat this ridiculous thing, created in 2004, as a “tradition,” because it says soon the damn cover.
And now that it’s a “tradition” in their minds, they have to put it up. Because Christmas is about tradition. And it’s a tradition.
It’s amazing how well this shit worked.
16 Likes
What’s all this I see lately about a judgmental Easter Bunny? It’s a bunny. Sure, it brings you gifts, but I never really heard of anyone holding it over a kid’s head until recently.
9 Likes
Nope, not one bit.
The elf-on-the-shelf people (by which I mean either the FBI or Skynet) did the exact same thing. “A christmas tradition” is what they’ve been calling it from day one. In 2005.
edit: beaten to the punch by SamSam, and with the cover to boot. I’ll show myself out.
2 Likes
The way I handle it is that I don’t tell them any of these Santa/Tooth Fairy/Easter Bunny/etc. lies myself. When they pick them up from society, I don’t refute them, either. When they ask me how Santa can deliver toys to every kid in the world in one night, I say it must be magic. But all throughout the year, I’m constantly telling them that “magic isn’t real”. It’s been surprising to me to see how long it takes them to put two and two together, but they eventually do. I like this approach because it keeps me as trustworthy, it has a consistent message of what’s real and what’s not, it doesn’t make me the asshole whose kids tell everyone else’s kids that Santa isn’t real, and it gives the kids practice in working out what to believe.
As for being good for goodness’ sake, I’m fairly certain that children are not capable of such things. That’s part of the process of growing up - learning empathy, altruism, etc.
As an atheist, my philosophy is that life sucks for everyone. If my life is going to have any purpose at all, it’s going to be in making the lives of other people suck less, in whatever ways I can.
12 Likes
All rightthinkers bellyfeel that Baby’s First Telescreen is doubleplusgood.
6 Likes
Eh, I wish you had gotten there first, because then, in finding the link to the image of the cover, I wouldn’t have gotten sucked into the black hole of the GoodReads reviews — normally a place I think of as more discerning than your average Amazon reviews — where a huge number of people happily refer to having “adopted this wonderful tradition in our family,” or something along those lines, thereby lowering my views of humanity for good.
7 Likes
I am in awe of what the synergization of extending two loathesome brands at once can produce.
6 Likes
