It’s poll time!
[socialpoll id=”2412282″]
I’m not sure the thumbnail captures the full transphobic awfulness of the graphic for option number three, so here it is full-size:
In case you’re wondering, Saddam is not actually mentioned in the story.
If you haven’t guessed by now, I voted for option 3, though the car seat one is lovely as well.
Here’s an archived link of Return of Kings’ front page as of today, in case you want to read any of these posts. I didn’t bother.
I hate those “share if you survived X” bloody things. They’re worse than the “when we were kids we played down at the park all day long and went home for dinner when the street lights came on.”
Yes, and no-one ever had problems, there were no gay people, no domestic violence, kids could just be kids, and ohmygod vomit.
Maybe some people had idyllic childhoods overflowing with simple joys and freedoms, but jebus.
Re the four options: I got distracted, because the dog story reminded me of an earlier RoK story featured here, about girls and their dogs (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) – which then reminded me of Buttercup Q. Skullpants’ genius comment “Man’s best-friend-zoned”.
Goooood times 😀
I really want to pick “all of the above” but if I can only pick one I would have to go with the anti-car seat story. Claiming more innocent little kids not dying in car accidents is some kind of societal drawback is just vile. If the assholes at RoK really think safety equipment is so “pussified” then I encourage them to go without it and nominate themselves for a Darwin Award. But keep the kids out of it.
I was born in 1975 so my brother and I rode around in the front with no car seat once we were past the infant stage, but Mom drilled it into our heads to wear our seat belt to the point where it is automatic. Now I don’t even feel comfortable driving across the parking lot without putting it on.
Ah, good old misogyny to interrupt the current orange, well, misogyny. Who thought one could be nostalgic for such vileness.
I vote 3, and humbly suggest the addition of “all of them oh God why” in future polls.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbKkfj0XF4c
Watch out for these fine gents if you attend the march on 1/21.
Regarding the above-reference Turd Flinging Monkey, please share this on the march’s Facebook page if you’re on FB. (I’m not). Thanks!
But those posts are the perfect way to figure out if you’re friends with a zombie!
RE: those “we didn’t need safety in my day” memes –
I have a friend who likes to respond with a cheery “I played in the street as a kid too! 🙂 What are parents even worried about?!” – followed by a picture of his prosthetic leg.
He was hit by a truck as a young child after he chased a ball onto the road while playing on the pavement. He says he’s extremely lucky to be in such good shape (only lost the one leg above the knee) given he ran right in front of the truck without looking. Because six year olds are not known for their impulse control.
I do think yer average suburban kid is protected from too much. They don’t know the joy of walking to the corner store alone or having hours of independent outdoor play. My son has far less freedom than I did, and I give him much more freedom than most of the other parents of his cohort – and I suffer from tutting and side-eye as a result. But my goal isn’t to be today’s ideal parent, my goal is to raise an independent, confident adult.
But car seats and seat belts… bless.
I have a cousin who is from the pre-seat belt and car seat days, she fell out of a moving car and did live to tell the tale, with a steel plate in her head. I think she and her (now deceased parents) would have certainly been in favour of seat belts.
Anecdotes like that help season the evidence, but car seats save lives and there is plenty of statistical evidence of that. The CDC estimates around a 45% reduction in child fatalities in auto accidents.
I vote for that one as the worst, because none of the other articles is likely to change the everyday (already deplorable) behaviour of RoK regulars, but that one might.
My vote also goes for the car seat one, although for different reasons from rugbyyogi. I’m not good with humans wishing death on other humans, especially when it’s expressed as “it’s good that they died because if they lived they would have been a pussy, amirite?”
As Axe said, ain’t no misandrist like a misogynist.
The “share if you survived X” stuff is especially awful in the antivax variety (or maybe it just seems like that to me because I have a bunch of friends in the anti-antivax community so see their struggle). This illusion that, say, measles is something simple and easy – “I had that as a kid and I’m fine” – when we know how deadly it can be, and what damage it can cause even when not deadly. Ugh.
(Someone I know once mentioned how striking it was, when reading 18th-19th century literature, to run into the concept of young kids falling ill and dying. It’s everywhere in the books, because it was everywhere in real life – losing a child / sibling / friend / etc. to something like dyptheria, measles, or one of the many other horrors we now vaccinate against and thus hardly see, it was just something that happened.)
I… just wanted to point out something that logically follows from “For every law passed, two must be removed”
To remove a law generally requires the passing of a law repealing the previous one. So, logically (well, if you get overly literal about things for humor value), after the first law gets passed, Congress must pass an exponentially increasing number of bills repealing laws, and at some point will have no laws to repeal, except for the ones that were passed repealing laws.
So the end result of 2 for 1 is a random set of laws being valid and invalid at different times, depending on which bills get passed by Congress. Of course, that seems to be the case much of the time, but this would be even more random once they start having to repeal laws repealing laws in order to pass laws that they have to repeal almost immediately later.
I would probably make an appalling lawyer.
I went with #4, because it reflects the obnoxious, anti-intellectual “don’t tread on me” attitude that elected Trump and is probably going to destroy civilization as we know it. Also because kids young enough to need carseats are vulnerable and dependent on their parents to protect them, whereas the bikini-clad women being ogled by Spuds McKenzie’s smirking wingman are adults and can walk away from his slobbery negs. (Not sure why there’s a dog DIRECTLY ON THE BEACH though – where I live, dogs are only allowed to run on the beach at certain times of the day/year. Do other parts of the world allow it?)
@rugbyyogi – Agreed, there is a disturbing trend towards criminalizing unsupervised children in public. Kids can no longer walk to the store by themselves, or play in the park, or sit alone in a car at the supermarket, without some busybody calling the cops and siccing CPS on the mom. One gets the feeling it’s more about passing judgment on the mothers than concern for the welfare of the kids.
The actual risk of an unsupervised child being abducted by a stranger, or spontaneously self-combusting, or whatever the danger is (it’s never specified, of course) is far less than the risk of dying in a car crash without adequate protection. And yet, I’ll bet RoK readers would be first in line to sanctimoniously lecture a stressed-out single mom for leaving her sleeping six year old in the car while she runs into the drugstore for five minutes. (That actually happened to a friend of mine. A “Christian” fundamentalist couple parked nearby saw her go into the store and immediately called the cops on her.)
But car seats? NANNY STATE!
@ js
No, that would be me.
But to your main point. Common Law jurisdictions have a thing called ‘implied repeal’. Basically that means that if you pass a new law then any previous ones dealing with the same issue automatically fall away.
So for example, say one law says “the minimum age for voting is 21” then later a law is passed saying “the minimum age for voting is 18” you don’t need a separate piece of legislation repealing the previous law.
That current court case here about Brexit is all about whether serving the Article 50 notice impliedly repeals the 1972 European Community Act.
There was also an interesting consequence here when the government was about to repeal an act that had created the offence of ‘being a fraudulent medium’. It was then pointed out that that offence had been created to decriminalise witchcraft per se by making it only illegal if done for money. So by repealing the act all the previous laws about witchcraft would automatically come back into force.
@Alan
Well shit. I dunno about the rest of you, but I know *I* happen to weigh the same as a duck.
@Buttercup
Super variable, both in terms on what is and isn’t allowed, and how well it is enforced. I’ve been to plenty of beaches that say “no dogs” and are still covered in them, because the owners know that no-one will stop them.
Haven’t read the car seat article, because spoons, but is it motivated as much by cost as by “pussification”? These guys always seem resentful of all expense involved in having a family, or even a childless relationship. Kids expect you to clothe and feed them, and now they want special snowflake car seats too? Is there no end to their mooching?
All are vile, and that “encouraged to become transsexual” thing gave me pause to headdesk a few times, but in the end, I had to go with car seats. Because how despicable do you have to be to complain about something that saves children’s lives?
I had to go with #3, because someone in my family is trans and fuck transphobia. The WTFery levels of #4 are pretty high, but let’s not gloss over that #3 is a “think of the children!” post as well, advocating for something that could also do very real harm to kids. 1 and 2 are shit as well, but the most predictable kind of it, at least in my eyes.
Voted for the “pussified” one not just for its stupidity but also because the word is both ugly and misogynist.
This whole survived childhood without X is completely idiotic, those with memories will know that of several of their contemporaries did not survive the lack of seatbelts or vaccines whilst others will have been maimed for lack of the same measures.
The damage done by accidents and the misnamed “diseases of childhood” was, all too often hidden away in cemeteries and “institutions.” If a damaged child was allowed out and about they were mocked and bullied.
Re: seatbelts
A lot of peeps here enjoy geeky stuff, so you may like to check out a guy called John Stapp. He worked for the U.S. Air Force, studying the effects of acceleration and deceleration (physics folks can chip in here on why that’s a redundancy).
He designed all the safety harnesses used in military aircraft.
One thing he did note though was that the USAF lost more pilots in car crashes than in combat and air crashes put together. So he became a passionate advocate for the wearing of seatbelts in cars. That would obviously make him quite the wuss by MRA standards.
Oh, and he was also dubbed ‘the fastest man on earth’ because of his rocket sled experiments and was the personal hero of Chuck Yeager.
http://www.stapp.org/stapp.shtml
My friend and I used to walk to school by ourselves quite often. It wasn’t too far away and some of the older kids on the bus picked on us. So it was nice for us. From what I hear, most schools don’t allow that anymore. I also starred taking public transportation by myself at a very young age. I think learning how to navigate transit systems and move about independently is a good thing. The first time I went to Washington DC, I was able to figure out their transportation system and use it to meet my friend nearer to her work. The people I know who went from being driven by parents to getting a car right away without ever learning alternate transportation methods could never have done that.
One of the most surprising and weirdest cultural adjustments I had to make moving from the US to the UK was seeing kids out by themselves. When I first moved here I freaked out every time I saw a couple of kids on bikes with their fishing rods, or walking around town shopping–my heart seized up and I wanted to run to them and say ‘are you lost? are you OK? where’s your adult?’ I was surprised at how visceral my anxiety for them was (I’ve never had kids).
Presumably kids go out to play or run errands by themselves here because public space isn’t perceived as as dangerous as it is in the US, and because in most of the US you really can’t get anywhere by yourself without a car. (I once spent a few days with a friend who’d moved to South Carolina, and it was unpleasantly infantilising to literally not be able to leave the house without asking for a ride. Her ‘walkable’ community was surrounded by 12-lane roads with no sidewalks–it was pretty much impossible to walk further than a few residential blocks without risking your life.)
Maybe it’s a kind of reverse snobbishness on my part, but it does crack me up to see adults who never take transit taking the light rail to sporting events. They look so terrified of such a simple thing. I do of course understand that there are people who grew up in areas without public transportation. But if you live in a area where there is one, you should learn it so you’re not helpless if your car breaks down.
I always avoided the Tube when I lived in London; but I loved the Docklands Light Railway. It uses automatic trains, so you could sit at the front and pretend you were driving.
Tough call, but ultimately I had to go with #4. The others are par for the course for ROK, but that one just cranks up the nastiness to a whole new level. The subheading – “A child cannot grow to be a complete adult without taking risks” – is extremely deceitful, because where car seats are concerned a child has no choice and is therefore not the one taking the risk. It is the adult driving the car and requiring the child to be a passenger with no car seat who is taking the risk, gambling with someone else’s life.