Sex With Teenagers: The Next Generation

Okay, I’ve been saying for a while that the next turn of the culture will involve a revalorization of 70s-esque intergenerational sex with teenagers. And you’ve been like “konty, but how? we’ve so strongly stigmatized that!” and I just shrugged

Well, as time passes it becomes clear that is the mechanism, that we’ve encoded it with such stigma that people who came by after those 70s find it irresistible to appropriate for their own ends, try to pull too much weight with it, and have it all fall through.

Like, at this point in almost-2023, what is your first impression if I tell you someone is going off about pedophiles and groomers? Is it of “antis” saying something dumb and philistine, or is it of rightists saying something incredibly dumb intended to license violence in service of making society worse? Or just straight QAnon?

As that keeps up the reaction by anyone sensible will be to tune that out and take it as a mark of foul idiocy, which will come to include concern with things even 1998 might accept as constituting pedophilia or grooming.

When I get anons like this I just roll my eyes these days,

“Nice go-to smear. Would be a shame if someone were to… encode it with low-status valences”

So.

bogleech:

pissvortex:

daughter-of-sapph0:

xbuster:

radiofreederry:

Matt Walsh doesn’t like the idea of teaching children about consent, for some reason

I wonder why

this is the guy terfs idolize and is best friends with jkr btw

Genuinely why do so many innocent people get murdered in random shootings but nobody has ever just run up and stabbed this guy in the eye socket? Yeah I know chuds will try to martyr him but that’s still worth a world where he’s a corpse.

Would you? Why or why not? Other people also face those constraints, though they may not highlight them in their online presence.

kontextmaschine:

Huh, based on a chat realized my energy problems might have been anemia and got some iron pills. That was definitely part of it – I started maybe 3 creatine scoops/day in the hole a few days ago but was getting up to 3/12hr and still off, but then taking a 100% RDV iron pill every 8 hours, after 2 I was maybe 5g down, enough to just roll with it.

But there doesn’t seem to have been much change from a 3rd and none from a 4th. So maybe anemia was this case’s new long symptom but plus a mild echo of the 2nd case energy stuff?

I dunno what that means, my bone marrow, my liver? Or maybe there’s something going that’s consuming red blood cells and I had drained iron replacing them? I dunno. Wild.

The thing where I keep having to solve these little riddles to maintain bodily function is getting tired, honestly.

quoms:

thenarator:

as someone with a bachelor’s degree in english, i am inexpressibly tired of people telling me to get highly specific jobs that often require highly specific degrees. “just go write for a magazine!” you need a journalism degree for that. “just teach!” you need a teaching certificate, and also fuck you. “just go work at a tutoring place!” tutoring children with learning disabilities, which make up the majority of the clientele at those places, requires not only a teaching certificate but a specialized master’s degree. “just go work at a library!” you need a master’s degree in library science to be a librarian. it is actually a highly skilled and extremely competitive field. you don’t just “go work at a library,” you train for years in the vain hope that you will get one of handful of available jobs. “just go work at a library.” the nerve. the unmitigated gall. “just go work at a library.” ugh.

You don’t need a degree to write for a magazine, you need a portfolio and a professional network, which university journalism programs are entirely oriented around helping you get. I know people who dropped out of journalism school the instant they had these two things because at that point it was a waste of time and money and distracting from their career.

Many states and school districts have programs to let you earn a license while you teach (though often in a particular subject that may not be English). This is in response to a teacher shortage driven by bad pay, lousy work conditions, and an extremely hostile political climate, but you would encounter those things even if you went back to school first.

As someone who has stared down the beast that is the public library job hunt, and was the first to blink: the absolute majority of jobs in libraries do not carry the title “librarian” and do not require an advanced degree. In fact, librarian jobs are being eliminated in many places in a process called “paraprofessionalisation,” in which the job duties of lower-ranking and lower-paid employees are expanded in favor of replacing retired librarians. Anyway, most of my classmates in library school already worked in libraries and were getting the credential to angle for a promotion.

The brutal truth of higher education (particularly in the liberal arts) is that there is no amount of it you can submit to, no credential you can ever gain, that will get you to a point where people are going to reflexively defer to your elite status and just hand you the job you have “earned.” This is the promise of college, and it’s a lie; the only time it was ever credible was when scarce university education was a thinly veiled excuse to reserve jobs for the children of the wealthy and well-connected who were going to get them anyway.

I’m glad for both of the degrees I got and would happily go back and get them again, but if you let malaise push you back into school you’re going to come out of it just as unhappy and significantly deeper in debt. The way to feel adequately compensated and respected by your job is to join a union.

The “drag queen story time” thing emerging in libraries pushed by librarians trying to establish themselves as a graduate-educated lawyer/doctor/minister(/accountant/realtor/teacher?)-type profession with a guild consciousness in response to elite overproduction is one of the funnier subplots going

Tropes of Covid-worrier Twitter:

Shibboleths

• “Covid is airborne!” - that the virus is spread through exhaled aerosols, not airborne moisture droplets or surface-tainting “fomites”. A point they were genuinely more right on than authorities early on that still has some application – that only N95-type masks or respirators reliably stop transmission, not fabric or paper surgical masks. However, largely an ingroup signal at this point, they seem to believe that authorities not pointedly declaring it apropos of nothing causes or constitutes failure.
• Corsi-Rosenthal Boxes: a DIY air filter made of box fans and furnace filters, because above. They love these things and are always frustrated that schools and public places won’t welcome wild-eyed maniacs trying to set up their own homemade science fair projects everywhere.
• CO2 testing: they carry around little CO2 monitors and are always tutting about how high the readings they get are, less in their own right than because it’s a clear sign of a poorly ventilated space where exhalations are not being cleared. Once again, makes them look like maniacs.
• “SARS-CoV-2”: they kind of performatively always call Covid this, even using more characters of a tweet. I dunno if the intention was to differentiate the syndrome from the virus, or if putting it in the SARS lineage was supposed to draw on residual associations there, but by now it mostly seems like flaunting yourself as savvy.

Something there but iffy

• That danger and damage increases with multiple infections. It is true that Danger(Case1 + Case2) > Danger(Case1), which means that Case2 (and subsequents) has some nonzero risk, but they often act like Danger(Case1) < Danger(Case2), which I don’t see as well established at all.

Pretty convinced

• The danger of Covid now lies largely not in the initial “acute” respiratory infection, but in the chance of later “long Covid” progression to other organ systems, that may render the sufferer vulnerable to later mortality. Damaged heart muscles lead to later heart attacks; blood vessels to strokes & aneurysm; immune systems to later infection (as seems to be making this winter an atrocious pediatric respiratory infection season, or made Jair Bolsonaro an infection piñata). I myself can attest to later blood pressure swings that cause fainting. That this explains much of the increase in “all-cause mortality” above and beyond that attributed to Covid itself since the beginning of the pandemic.

Not convinced

• Immunity from prior infections or immunization does not durably reduce the severity of future ones. This is out of keeping with the experience of other coronaviruses already in regular human circulation and mutating into new variants, which after caught repeatedly throughout life become trivial. My own experience has my current infection (somewhere from my 4th to 6th, producing symptom “echoes” of the “long” portions of 1 and 2) as the worst since 2, but 2 was much less harsh than 1 and 3-current was nothing. I suspect this might be a stronger case against the background of a generally decreasing trend of severity. Also it might be the case that immunity wanes so subsequent cases are easier if they occur before it wears off (and leaves new immunity of its own), in which case attempts to stop any particular case with masking, isolation, or air treatment might make population-level health worse by lengthening average time between infections past acquired immunity duration.
• “Schools should have been reworking their ventilation systems for anti-viral effect!” My father was the solicitor for our school district, in which capacity one of the things he worked with was contracting. At one point the district upgraded ventilation systems in maybe a third of their secondary schools at once. From scoping through passing a bond, soliciting and evaluating bids to work completion (when the construction market was slack enough for contractors to hire labor and buy materials cheap) was 8 years. In a small subset of schools, that already had ductwork at all, in a rich school district where the bond passed on the first try. To attempt this for every school building in the US – let alone other public places – would likely exceed the national HVAC construction capacity for decades. The only precedent I can think of, the drive to rework hospital ventilation systems against Legionnaires, affected far fewer buildings and institutions that were then fairly flush with income streams atop the healthcare economy, still required extensive federal subsidy, and was ongoing decades later.

sapphling:

sapphling:

I am NOT trying to trick you into putting a leash on. and if you would just come here, within leashing-range, you’d be able to see that

did you guys know that people ship the real life white boys who drive nascars because i didn’t until somebody reblogged this with that added

kontextmaschine:

Bunch of Twitter users in different areas of focus who spent the last decade furious that things were going their way but not as far or as fast as they wanted and performed that fury as a way to whip things on harder dealing with the new situation that things are going to be going against them for the next 15 years at least and they no longer have any traction on the situation about as well as you’d expect

So yeah, that phase is over, we’ve cleared Charybdis, now we gotta try and slingshot off past Scylla, shift our stance to defend rightward. I mean, my circle on here is disproportionately trans Jews.

Bunch of Twitter users in different areas of focus who spent the last decade furious that things were going their way but not as far or as fast as they wanted and performed that fury as a way to whip things on harder dealing with the new situation that things are going to be going against them for the next 15 years at least and they no longer have any traction on the situation about as well as you’d expect

So as the new bar nearest me has been ramping up it’s now full of 40something greyingbeards on dates with 20somethings, so I’m good

grimespostarchive:

grimespostarchive:

did anyone else see a tweet that said “when SBF x Caroline porn, I’m horny ;)” from her that immediately got deleted or did i hallucinate that

cop-disliker69:

Otherwise known as the basic definition of love: wanting to nurture and be nurtured by the beloved.

kontextmaschine:

Oh something I’m saying when I say it’s feeling pretty ‘80s, that’s a reactionary period. We’ve had 3 major ones in the 20th century – the Reagan '80s, the 50s, and the post-WWI “return to normalcy”, and they were all marked by processes that wrecked the things that came out of progressive tendencies since the last one, wiped the board, and reset the clock. So maybe take brace position for that.

1980s: Blacks and cities get chewed up by crime, drugs, and general “urban decay”, gays have AIDS to deal with. The “Farm Crisis” also pretty much ends America’s vs long and historically quite central tradition of family farming. A rising Christian conservatism lays claims on the culture

1950s: the Second Red Scare digs out leftism which had established itself throughout national institutions through the Depression and Popular Front '40s. The Third KKK; attempts to suppress Black agitation fail largely for lack of cross-sectional unity, however, and the Civil Rights Era kicks off. Significant cultural backlash: the stifling conformity dramatized in say Pleasantville (1998) was only The Way Things Had Always Been to Boomers going through childhood; adults who had been paying attention lamented its sexual, intellectual, and cultural impoverishment compared to what came before

(1919-early) 1920s: the post-WWI Return to Normalcy. Major themes of semireligious utopianism and pacifism that had been common and somewhat challenging to wartime stance faded. The First Red Scare. The Palmer Raids rounding up leftists and deporting them to the new Soviet Union. The second KKK, Red Summer, and 2 years later the Tulsa Race Riot that Watchmen depicted, postwar Black ambition checked.

Now: well, Musk taking Twitter and deleftizing it definitely counts. Ellsworth Toohey, from Ayn Rand’s 1943 The Fountainhead was a maybe overdone portrait of a real tendency seen in period journalism of dismissively, sentimentally moralized leftism, that was part of what the '50s wiped away. The Asian split to the right in California, other minorities in general, whatever Black/Jewish shit is going on.

Some rightists think that pressing on queer stuff will work, I personally think that’s mistimed and they’ll lose that one like race in the 50s, in the process stigmatizing complaints about “pedophilia”. Covid and the fact that there’ll be appeals on behalf of the lonely and vulnerable to spend resources and control on protecting them that no government will be able to survive indulging and so will have to culturally pivot to normalize ignoring, ending the era since Clinton’s “feel your pain”.

Oh [tumblr], which used to be “the trigger warning social media site”, going all-Goncharov-all-the-time on main like half a year after I first started to see #unreality cw tags kinda counts too

(“The trigger warning social media” now is Mastodon, which mainstream media restorationists have been branding as “for hall monitors” so no one has to care about them)

l0s3r-g0r3-d3s7r0y4:

christs-cock-deactivated2023110:

There was this guy in secondary school who used to call me a dyke all the time until I had to ask him to stop and explained I was a guy. From then on he called me a faggot and used my correct pronouns all the time, and moved away at some point but I saw him at my uni today and the first thing he said to me was “Alex! You still a fag?”

I think that was his way of asking me my pronouns.

kontextmaschine:

Huh, more people at the supermarket wearing masks than since it was everyone and there’s more pasta sold out than since 2020. That’s not a vote of confidence.

I mean it is Thanksgiving, maybe people are making a run on macaroni elbows for pasta salad

Cashier in a gaiter mask, though. That’s not a guy who’s been keeping up maximum protection all along… but now he’s doing something.

Yeah, adult infection showing up at higher than normal intensity this year too. And I don’t know that Democrats can bring back “public health” measures at the end of 2022 and then expect to win an election against Ron DeSantis in 2024

God, do you know how useless it is trying to determine how crazy you are by seeing if you can understand news on the internet in November of 2022?

pileofknives:

taylorlorenz:

Are any other journalists back on here? 🙏🏻

“other” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here

kontextmaschine:

So looking at Twitter and active fronts of combat now include Covid-worriers vs. normie libs and… young unionization fans? While Mastodon is apparently schisming – and given its federated architecture that’s not hyperbole –between bluecheck journalists and… trans activists?

Like, I know I had predicted this year would see the online left start to fracture solidarity and fall into infighting, but that’s some Mad Libs shit right there

While back in meatspace Brooklyn is getting worked up with Black/Jewish tensions. Like, what?

So looking at Twitter and active fronts of combat now include Covid-worriers vs. normie libs and… young unionization fans? While Mastodon is apparently schisming – and given its federated architecture that’s not hyperbole –between bluecheck journalists and… trans activists?

Like, I know I had predicted this year would see the online left start to fracture solidarity and fall into infighting, but that’s some Mad Libs shit right there

So Twitter rebalancing for PvP and reinstating Trump and that Kara Swisher thread like… it’s Elon’s Carnegie library system, huh? Not run for revenue maximization but for charitable purpose of… preserving the old Internet Culture.

That's… fucking amazing. And I guess he’s the only person in the place such that he could do that. Like, going to Mars feh, even at max speed that’ll never matter in my lifetime but like, my god. That’s absolutely worth working yourself to death for.

Like, last decade when I was like “just stick in there, this wave’ll roll back” yeah, I derived that lesson from history, but let me assure you it doesn’t go this cleanly. Like, not even in half-mythical ancient history, maybe in legends.

Taking like everything since let’s say 2014, that was like a Super SSS EX++ stage clear. Oh, and plus for me at least, after confronting the fact that I am in fact attuned to the zeitgeist, and then the heimlich thing where I look death in the face and say “not today” using the exact skill set I had made a load-bearing part of my self-conception, I fell into a mystical slumber and awoke in every way perfected.

And all of this relies on things lining up so perfectly. Like, you needed the like, Incarnated Spirit of the 80s with the exact particular psychological issues to line up with the political system in the exact right way, and you needed the richest man in the world to have the exact-right Western-adjacent background and the exact right memefuck sensibility and the deal to line up the exact right way…

And meanwhile you needed a 100-year plague to show up at the exact right time, and for me with the exact right characteristics, and then I had to roll a crit on like, a d100000.

What?