UK legislation: Online Safety Act 2023

Brazil legislation: Digital Statute For Children And Adolescents

Apple App Store Age Verification

These are not tumblr specific policies. Tumblr is implementing age verification in response to legislative moves that were made months ago.

Tumblr is a failing social media site that has escaped death multiple times already; they do not have the social cachet to defy state regulatory agencies. We know they won't say no to Apple, either--the porn ban on tumblr was in response to Apple's crackdown on explicit content.

If you did not know this was happening, you were behind the curve. That is fine. You're caught up now. The next step is to link up with people in your country who are working to preserve privacy, to roll back these laws where they exist, and to prevent their passage where they do not. In the US the organization you want is Stop KOSA--in the EU you can start with Fight Chat Control.

(funny enough, a lot of people have been saying it's youtube forcing ads, but that's not the issue, nor is this intentional)

“your YouTube tab just consumed 7GB of RAM and froze your entire browser.

That’s not user error or aging hardware—it’s YouTube’s latest interface bug turning routine video watching into system roulette.

Reports flooded Reddit and browser forums late last week as users watched their browsers transform into digital quicksand, with tabs becoming unresponsive and entire systems grinding to a halt.”

The main issue is the Like, Dislike, and Share buttons

“Developers tracking the issue through Mozilla’s Bugzilla pinpointed the problem to YouTube’s flexible menu container below each video.

The interface enters an endless identity crisis: it checks whether all buttons fit horizontally, hides the overflow, recalculates the available space, then shows them again—repeating this cycle thousands of times per second.

Think of it like someone obsessively rearranging furniture in a room that keeps changing size.”

All browsers are experiencing the same thing

Google has said nothing

Reports have said that a temporary fix is to use ublock origin and Add this filter: www(.)youtube(.)com###menu

Some idiot who completely missed the fucking point:

Every.

Single.

Comment from josenros reading: As long as you say the blessing first. Probably shehechiyanu for you losers.

ah. so close!! antizionism is in fact antisemitism though, and zionists are not pro-genocide.

The pinned post, immediately confirming my hypothesis:

Now, this is problematic from a bodily autonomy perspective, and trust me, Jewish feminists have been grappling with it for ages. But from a legal perspective, it is incredibly important.

Many humanist and secular religions are flexible on the subject of abortion, because starting from scratch, it seems like a pretty good idea to bake bodily autonomy into the question. But this isn’t nearly the cudgel against the Christian far-right that people think it is. If one side of the argument (say, an atheist woman) is somewhat flexible on the issue (as in, she morally feels she can choose to either get and abortion or not) and the other side of the argument (say, a Christian-run company that woman gets her healthcare from) is very inflexible on the issue (as in, they feel they morally cannot facilitate abortions under any circumstance), then there’s a tendency to draw the compromise in a deeply unreasonable place. “You think women should be able to either have or not have abortions, and he thinks women should not be able to have abortions – If we go along with your suggestion, he’s unsatisfied in every situation, whereas if we go along with his, you’re getting like half of what you want, so that’s clearly the more fair option!”

This, of course, is a logical fallacy, and a rather silly one at that, but it holds real emotional sway for people, and ought to be taken seriously. Wanting a single thing is a much stronger place to argue from in our society than wanting the ability to choose between things. It’s unfortunate, but I don’t think anyone has the slightest idea of how to to fix it yet – that’s just the way that people seem to think.

HOWEVER –

This all falls apart when you meet another immovable object, such as Judaism. Judaism’s position on abortion is very clear, it leaves essentially no room for choice in situations where the mother’s life could be at risk, and it comes to conclusions which are startlingly different from Christianity’s. To put things into perspective here, the Mishna (one of the earliest codifications of halacha, or Jewish law) explicitly states that not only is third-trimester abortion required to save a mother’s life, but that even the dismemberment of a fetus midway through a breach birth is required when failure to do so would imperil the mother. Let me say that again – Judaism says that if the baby gets stuck literally halfway out of the birth canal during a birth and endangers the mother’s life, you are required to cut the partially birthed infant out of the womb, killing it if necessary, in order to preserve the mother’s life.

This is way the fuck out there in crazy-land, as far as US abortion law is concerned. Even pro-choice advocates that are maximally permissive on the subject of third-trimester abortions usually stop short of saying “you have the right to cut up a partially-birthed and completely viable infant while the mother is in labor.” That’s not a position that anyone has been advocating, literally anywhere that I have ever seen.

AND YET, not only does Judaism permit this, but it explicitly requires it. There’s no room to be mealy mouthed about compromises here – the Christian fundamentalist who claims to have a deep religious opposition to allowing a woman to receive an abortion in the above situation is on no stronger ground than the Jew who claims to have a deep religious opposition to permitting the woman to avoid having the abortion.

And lest you think this is theoretical, please know that this is already a religious liberty issue for many Jews. Every year, there are Jewish women who fly to other countries, by the explicit order of their rabbis, to receive third-trimester abortions which are required by their religion, but banned by law. Every year, Jews facing what is perhaps the most difficult time in their lives are callously reminded that when people talk about religious freedom in America, they do not and never have meant religious freedom for anyone other than Christians.

Anyway I had definitely read about this before, but I love the detail here and it's honestly really fascinating. I think I had even intuited the bit about a partially delivered infant from what I already knew, as I was already aware methods like that were once commonly used in such situations in general.

Plus the bit about how compromise is often framed is so on point, and absolutely worth keeping in mind when figuring out how to approach stuff. You can't argue properly while ignoring the reality of how people think.

Specifically at summer camp, I noticed that trying to enforce a bedtime would result in nights of me going cabin to cabin telling kids to be quiet repeatedly until 1-2AM. Then we would all be cranky and exhausted about it the whole week, and it made me come off like a controlling asshole to the kids cause...I was being a controlling asshole. And like, I was young enough to have really salient memories of having been a camper, so excited to talk to new friends that I didn't sleep - the kids had good reason to stay up!

So I figured out that I could, instead, lay out the first night that they could stay up as late as they wanted, and talk to their friends, as long as they were physically in bed with lights off. I would get a lot more sleep and was better able to function in the morning, and if a kid complained about being tired the next day, I would ask about how long they stayed up the previous night and let them connect the dots themselves. Inevitably, most kids would stay up really late the first night, and then they would self-regulate and get to sleep way quicker, because they were motivated to balance their own wants & needs instead of an adult breathing down their neck about an arbitrary externally-imposed sleep deadline.

I started extending this method to more things, trying to make sure my role was less Authority Figure and more resource for learning how to care for themselves. I went through college and found it was backed up by a lot of the research out there on parenting and teaching styles. Literally just respecting the autonomy of kids in my care and talking them through decisions instead of telling them what to do would make "behavioral issues" evaporate, and make both me and the kids happier. It helped even more when I started working with traumatized kids and teens in foster care after college. Sometimes a kid would even point out to me when a given rule in a workplace didn't make sense and I could give them an exception and/or go to my boss and try to get things changed. Often, arbitrary rules from higher-ups made things way more difficult for everyone.

Trying to explain this to authoritarian parents AND my worse bosses over the course of my childcare career was like pulling teeth.

Kids deeply crave autonomy and responsibility, and if you give them the former they will often gladly take up the latter, but you have to give them the chance to make their own choices and make non-life-threatening mistakes first. But to someone who views a kid as property, or even a well-intentioned perfectionist parent, the idea of giving a kid that autonomy is terrifying, so they try to make it sound absurd to justify maintaining control.

See also Burrito Test:

It's just not punitive, authoritarian bedtime.

Plus, as I have seen discussed in the notes, this is an issue that depends a LOT on age range. "They'll figure it out from natural consequences" does not work for toddlers and preschoolers who are still figuring out what "tired" even means, for example.

Like, to be clear, I think societal norms around child rearing are often distressingly authoritarian and punitive, as well as overly programmed and over protective. It is possible to provide developmentally appropriate structure in a way that is kind and respectful. Plus it's absolutely a whole different ballgame for disabled adults, who deserve a society that can accommodate their autonomy, including the choice to stay up late.

Really wanna write ship essays? Try writing essays comparing and contrasting two ships that you like, and then post them to your own blog and AO3. Share them in ship war drama free discords. Or hell, write any fandom meta from a good faith and non-hostile position.

Exercise your analysis muscles, discover new connections you didn't think of before you started looking closer or bouncing thoughts off friends, have an exasperated laugh with those same friends about a specific scene/episode/plotline because What Was The Writer Thinking.

Make in joke headcanons with friends because you noticed some random set dressing or costuming decision that has amusing implications if it is fully Watsonian. Find that fascinating juggernaut WIP fic with 200k words at half way through, where you start chatting with the author in the comments.