Just a den for my likes

It’s Smarter Than You Are…

A shithole country is not a poor country that can’t feed its children.

About what "Protect the youth" has become. Idk what it was like in other countries and I know that it very likely could have been stricter than it was in my country back then. But generally:

He was like "When I was 16, there were two kinds of adult content: Horror movies and explicitly depicted sexual content. The first made me have nightmares, the latter (as in what you could get in video rental stores) generally wasn't of much interest to me because it wasn't something I, as a 16 year old, could relate to. And other sexual content that was interesting (and/or helpful) WAS freely accessible. So whenever I saw an "18+" label somewhere, I just completely ignored that content because I knew it wouldn't be interesting at all to me.

But NOW, what's declared 18+ is even an excessive amount of swear words in streams! NOW, when I see an "18+" label, I don't know if it's horror movies that'll give some 16 year olds nightmares, if it's completely unrelatable porn, OR if it's educational sex ed, a 20 year old talking about their really healthy relationship with their partner (that includes intimacy), education about consent in BDSM (which affects 16 year olds as well, there's no age limit to curiosity), a live stream of wholesome musicians who happen to drink a couple of beers during kind of therapeutic talks, or simply people who aren't puritans and say "fuck" a lot! An 18+ label isn't worth anything anymore!"

And yeah... That's just it.

People who talk about body changes during their (first!) puberty are even labelled adult content. Even though puberty very much happens BEFORE adulthood. It's helpful content for minors. And it's labelled "adult" to "protect the youth".

I’d say we’re better than we have ever been when it comes to general population, literacy, and access to higher studies. Not exactly universal or easy and getting worse, not better, than the previous century in many countries, but definitely not worse than every previous time before. Uncurious and unappreciative of knowlege and study as they are, mostly current world leaders can read and write. Net win for the present, I guess. Philosopher Kings are and always have been extremely rare.

Just trying to say, whenever I hear any permutation of “in the good old days” or “when I was young”, I remember oooooold Hesiod who thousands of years ago was already droning on Ages of Gold, Ages of Bronze, Ages of Iron (guess which one he got to live in) and of course compounds the classic “kids these days”, “when I was a lad/ in the snow both ways” with “everything was better in the past”.

Carving intricate shapes out of paper is lowkey torturous but I'll do it for sealed vessel as a one-night impulse project instead of studying