Same shit different day. These corrupt bastards in the senate want to pass KOSA (Kids Online Safety Act) which, as we have seen with similar bills in the past, is nothing more than a ruse using the “safety of children” as a guise to induce sweeping online censorship and surveillance.
If you want a more detailed understanding as to why KOSA in particular would be terrible for us, check out what the Electronic Frontier Foundation has to say about it here, here, and here (this last one is more of an aid for talking about why KOSA is bad). There are plenty of people and organizations talking about why this bill would be detrimental to us, and I encourage you to seek them out (if you’re playing around on Tiktok, maybe look up what people are saying about this shit).
Essentially, KOSA would grant state governments the power to sue social media platforms for allowing unfettered access to what they deem as inappropriate content. The range of what constitutes as inappropriate content would depend on the state’s definition of said content (e.g., if you’re in a conservative state, LGBTQ+ information is often thought to be inappropriate for children). In order to prevent being sued, social media sites would have to institute massive surveillance over the content the user base posts/interacts with, ensure that users are legally of age to view “explicit” content (e.g., requiring you to upload a government issued ID), and preemptively censor content that could be considered “inappropriate for children.”
We know that this is a direct attack on our first amendment rights.
We know that this is just a way for them to control us.
We know this is going to actually hurt everyone looking for information online, especially LGBTQ+ kids who would (in many states) no longer have access to LGBTQ+ resources online.
Please call your senators (find out who they are here), especially if they are on the committee for commerce, science, and transportation. Tell them to vote NO on KOSA, tell them that it is a direct violation of our rights to privacy, and our first amendment rights. Tell them that, SHOULD KOSA BE PASSED, you will do everything in your power to support a candidate in opposition to them that is against KOSA during their next election cycle. If you are currently not of voting age, call them and let them know that you will not support them should they pass a bill that doesn’t actually act in your best interest.
I know phone calls are scary, but what’s scarier is an internet under the total control and discretion of the bigots that are ruining our lives.
💥📢 We need to rally this week around stopping KOSA (and other similar bills). 💥📢
Here are a couple of scripts you can use when calling your congress person, as well as a petition (provided by this linktree from omarsbigsister on tiktok).
Adulting advice: if you think you can’t do a thing because you tried it as a child or teenager and you sucked really badly: try it again.
You may not notice it, but as an adult you continue gaining motor skills, insight, problem solving skills and above all patience and resilience in the face of failure. Also puberty can be a nightmare. For some of us it’s just harder to do things when we’re full of insecurities, low impulse control and focus, heightened emotions, etc. A thing that was hard for 15 year old you might not be hard for 25 or 35 or 45 years old you.
I thought I was the absolute worst at sowing because I tried to learn it in my teenage years and failed spectacularly at the most basic tasks. Turns out I just didn’t have the patience and focus for it yet. I tried it again recently and it didn’t take long at all to learn how to make my own clothes. (And oh my, being able to make any outfit I want in any fabric is a queer superpower.)
It really sucks that we’re told quite early in life what our talents are and we end up assuming that there are some things we’re just not good at, when the truth is that learning as an adult is just completely different from learning as a child.
Oh man, since I’ve been like… 32+ ? So many things have gotten easier.
It’s not something anyone tells you. In fact, I think with our youth-obsessed culture, there’s a tendency to think that you’re going to peak young. Generally, this just isn’t true.
A lot of the improvement feels, like the OP says, kind of effortless. It’s me going back to cooking after not cooking for six years and suddenly, oops I’m pretty damn good at it. Why? I wasn’t cooking in the meantime, I wasn’t practicing. (I didn’t even have a stove.)
But other mental qualities were developing that make everything easier. My executive function, decision-making, motor skills, etc. are all better than they were, through completing thousands of other tasks. I can think, know, and focus better.
There’s a huge element of this, also, which is enabled by emotional capacity and maturity, which is even harder to describe. It’s easier for me to do things like tell the truth because I can actually understand the truth of how I feel and I am more likely to have the confidence to say it. It’s easier to make the right decisions, to weigh all the factors. Especially for me since I was really not consistently good at this in my teens and 20s (I was possibly more impulsive and risk-seeking than many people, but that just makes the contrast more apparent.)
The other thing to consider is that when you are a teen/child, you’re being taught things often in a very specific way that’s been determined by someone else. My dad, for example, wanted me to understand how engines worked, so he explained them to me while we both looked under the hood of his various cars or trucks. I learned absolutely zero things by doing this.
When I was 21, I decided I wanted to know, so I learned how engines worked from an educational website with animations and quizzes. And of course, I was able to learn it. It’s not that complicated. I was never unable to learn it, I was just not able to learn it that way.
YES.
And for the record: I don’t wanna shit on teens and young adults here or to discourage teens from trying complicated things. Everyone is different and not every teen is as much of a distracted and easily discouraged mess as I was. And as you say: a lot of why things are often harder for teens is because they’re not given the space to choose what they want to learn and how they want to learn.
Also, everyone at every age is allowed to make tons of bad decisions and mistakes and fail at tons of things or do things they enjoy without ever becoming good at it.
it’s also why cycling through a lot of hobbies and interests is just fine in the long run. even if you don’t learn how to do anything well, you’re picking up plenty of foundational skills along the way. everything gets easier and more familiar the more experience you get at doing anything.
I feel like people underestimate how much story you can get into a story. A good novel should have four or five other novels happening offscreen. Otherwise you end up with side characters that feel like they pop into existience the moment the protagonists need to talk to them.
I see people talking about the Brave browser in the whole Firefox vs chrome debate, and while people rightly point out that it’s just chromium and that they do shady cryptocurrency shit, I never see anyone point out that Brave’s founder and CEO is Brandan Eich.
He founded Brave after massive protests against him becoming CEO of Mozilla, resigning after 11 days. And the reason for those protests? He donated a lot of money to the Prop 8 campaign to ban gay marriage.
So just remember: it’s not just another chromium fork, it’s not just a browser with cryptocurrency bullshit, it’s also the browser founded by a homophobe because he got kicked out of his former organization for being a homophobe.
Also, he invented Javascript. I’m willing to believe that maybe he has grown on the gay marriage issue, and made amends for his former mistakes. But Javascript cannot be forgiven.
dead girl media where their absence shapes the whole goddamn thing!!!!! the hole they left inhabits the narrative more than their presence ever would have. oooo wooooo
Today I saw a pic of a baby cowbird next 2 its nest “parent” and it was so much bigger!!!!! Which is the sort of thing that gets normal people upset about the injustice of nest parasitism but makes *me* worry if baby cowbirds get bird dysmorphia
This (from Cornell Labs via Merlin) is the pic I was looking at. It’s just a little baby but it’s so much bigger than its “parent”!!!! Do baby cowbirds feel isolated? Do they understand they’re a different bird, or are they just a really bad sparrow?
hey, good news! ecologists have been studying this very thing! it seems young cowbirds have some kind of innate sense that leads them to sneak out of their foster nest at night to hang out in grasslands where they—more often than not—meet other cowbirds and learn more about what they really are.
