I need more information about your username. Is it the trebuchet that acts as a taxi, as in you sit on it and drives along, or is a trebuchet service, where it uses its primary function to yeet you to your destination?
It’s a shame, aside from all the racism, Newbern actually seems like a lovely little southern small town.
To clarify, this came in response to looking up Newbern on Google maps and seeing the only photo attached to the town is a group of smiling black women celebrating the 4th of July. If that’s the representation of the town, it seems like a nice place.
I probably should have said more specifically ‘aside from the racist white minority leadership it seems like it could be a really nice place.’ Nice places can have shit leaders. Was happy to see the town hall already has some one star reviews in response to this story. Hopefully more attention will help them toss the bigots to the curb.
Pretty sure the more than %70 black/African American town population might disagree with you. Seems pretty unkind and disingenuous to paint a whole town as a shithole because some assholes are in charge.
Well, that’s the funny thing. If a nation does it, it isn’t considered “terrorism”. If you open that door, then the US gets implicated, too, because they’ve also been involved in terrorist activities. So, it serves US interests to keep the definition narrowly defined to non-state actors.
The US bombed every cathedral in Germany worse than this. This is what happens in war. You should devote your energy to stopping wars, not trying to get them to be “nicer”. War will never be nice.
Too chicken shit to do that since its russia. They only do that to small nation they can bully around. If its another superpower, they engage in proxy war and cower behind NATO or other nation such ukraine/hong kong.
Owner Stuart Rome told the New York Post Ms Russell was no longer employed at the Woodhouse spa in Birmingham, and that staff were “pissed” about her abduction claims.
The 25-year-old told police she was kidnapped while stopping to help a toddler on Interstate 459 on 13 July. However, police say they have doubts about her account after finding suspicious internet searches on her phone.
Mr Rome said staff had been devastated by Ms Russell’s disappearance, and had passed out flyers in an effort to help find her.
“As the information came out that there were some questionable things, we’ve been a little pissed off, mainly because so many people took so much time out to search”
One of her searches before the incident was “how to take money from a register without being caught” so I’m thinking maybe she was trying to pull a Psycho; steal some money and disappear. But either changed her mind or botched it.
Because that is how it was communicated to the reporters, and editorializing would be irresponsible.
Though the department’s statement said the death appeared to have followed the woman’s interaction with the bear, it did not confirm her cause of death.
Social media impacting mental health is definitely happening, but its a symptom of a larger problem. And COVID definitely accelerated it. But this is a problem that has been going on for decades IMO. American society is crumbling and fixing it will be a multi-prong, multi-decade, probably multi-trillion dollar effort.
I’ve heard this before about a billion things, it’s not a particularly useful take. IMO we’ve got a youth depression problem because of extremely hostile messaging about “how screwed our country is”, “how screwed our planet is”, and addictive mind manipulating social media apps.
I’m in my late twenties, my generation was plagued by hot take social media, and I think the current generation has it even worse. I’d love it if we could avoid these hot takes on Lemmy. Break the problems down into their pieces and attack those things; IMO, like solving any big problem, that’s how we get through this.
I’ve heard this before about a billion things, it’s not a particularly useful take.
It wasn’t really intended to be, as that is a larger conversation. But I didn’t mean it the way I suspect you thought I did, in a boomer “tight pants and rock music are all of society’s ills” way.
My take on it is that ever since corporations got away with prioritizing shareholder profits over everything else, the safety nets that kept families strong started to crumble. Parents had to work more hours, people were more stressed, neighborhoods became more distant, urban spread increased. Add that to hysteria over crime and we get parents that aren’t able to raise kids and think schools can do it. No sense of community responsibility and no safety net of a village helping to raise the kids because everyone’s at work and scared that someone’s going to shoot or kidnap them. So you get generational radicalization with acting out behavior getting worse and worse.
Social media makes all this worse because it optimizes for engagement, and nothing gets engagement like misery and jealousy all while giving an illusion of actual socialization. COVID was gas added to this fire that has been burning for decades.
Break the problems down into their pieces and attack those things; IMO, like solving any big problem, that’s how we get through this.
I definitely agree there. Which is a challenge in and of itself. Like I said, this is a multi-pronged issue. It didn’t get to where it is quickly and it won’t get fixed quickly either. It will be a generational effort. And I don’t think all the fix actions needed are agreed on or even known.
I think part of it will be strengthening neighborhoods and creating a sense of community and pride in it. Another part is allowing parents to actually parent and giving them the tools that their parents didn’t pass on to them because they probably didn’t have them either.
I think this is a really great response; I agree with you on a lot of this. I (personally) think we need more of this sort of dialog and less “American society is crumbling.” I hope you’ll agree here/try to keep that in mind as much as possible. IMO some outwardly expressed optimism and hope is really important and can go a long way towards fighting the collective depression and overwhelming feeling that we’re up against an insurmountable force … IMO we can get through all of this, we just have to work together and have constructive discussions on how.
There’s definitely been some dropping the ball by previous generations, and I hope (and if we try, know) we can do better in the coming years.
As a parent with a kid entering middle school who just got a phone (average age for one in this area) here is my 2 cents:
I want my kid to have a phone more for me than her. There are no pay phones and if, heaven forbid, some shit goes down (we are on America and shit goes down in schools) I need to not only be able to allow her to easily contact us and us to contact her, I need to know her location. Past events have shown we can’t count on anyone else. Barring school shootings, I would not be anywhere near as concerned about her having one. I know parents of kids with severe allergies also want kids to have a phone on them.
Since she could talk we have talked about media and it’s influence on her mind and life. That talk has evolved as she has grown. I studied the impact of harmful media, so in this way I have the privilege of knowing why this education is so vital. She knows what she watches and puts out there can impact her in insane ways. And though I have to slowly trust that this took root in her as I cant control what she watches forever, things like Google family link can help me block sites and apps, make her ask for permission etc. She knows I do this and why and she will talk to me when she thinks she should have access. It’s a conversation.
I know her friends parents don’t do this. Which I also know allows her access other ways, again, I have to slowly hope this education worked. I wonder if more parents instead were taught to take these steps if it would help and if we taught students directly. There are privacy concerns too though, my kid knows I’m here parent, not the government, she has no expectation of privacy on her phone (mostly anyway) at this age from me, but she should from her school so I wouldn’t want them to be allowed to block etc.
I want my kid to have a phone more for me than her.
Imo, this is the root of the issue that must be addressed. No child under 16 should have a smart phone, of anything they should have a flip phone for calling and texting only, no apps.
Children will see violence, porn, or beheading videos if they have a smart phone. No parental controls can stop a child from seeing the full Internet and a lot of parents don’t get that. The quickest way is to boot the phone into safe mode, access the web browser, boom full Internet.
I think that this is like wrapping a kid in bubble-wrap, though. And like, not in that "over-coddling" metaphorical sense, but much more literal - sure, the kid can't get scrapes if they fall off their bike, but the other kids are going to make fun of the kid wearing bubble wrap.
You don't necessarily want to give them an unrestricted mainline to the worst of the internet, but you don't want to overcorrect so hard that you're causing other problems.
As toxic as it is, as much as there's space for harms and bullying, or that the internet holds porn and violent content ... the internet and social media spaces are where a huge portion of kids social lives live, and barring them from participating in that will do one of two things - teach them to get sneaky in order to bypass the restriction, or force them into an 'outsider' role in their peer group. In the first, it's a lost cause and all you're doing is making it inconvenient without addressing the harms - and ensuring they can't talk to you about what comes from that space. In the latter, there are strong social and self-esteem costs associated with excluding your child from having a social life with other children - is it "better" for the parent to do the harm instead of the other children? Is it better for your relationship with that child, long-term, their trust in you, or your ability to support them?
The kid restricted to "dumb phone only, no internet, no apps" is the current generations' equivalent of that one kid that wasn't allowed to go to the park, or the mall, or hang out on the street - whatever any given past generation used as their youthful Third Place, where they could socialize and hang out separate from school and without adults actively supervising them. And it's never been great for the kid whose parents won't let them participate in the common social life that their peers have.
It's far more fruitful to give them age-appropriate education related to their use of and relationship with the internet and provide a controlled and supported introduction than it is to simply bar their access for several years. You're either stunting their social development in order to avoid harms to their social development (?!?!) or you're simply winding the proverbial rubber band tighter and tighter against an inevitable rebellion - at which point they're jumping in headlong without ever developing any sort of media literacy or social media savvy and never had a chance to build coping and resilience for whatever rabbit holes they're likely to fall into .
I blocked social media sites at the router and on the phones for my kids and don't feel bad about it at all.
Reason I don't feel and about it is that as soon as we blocked everything my daughter's mental health did a 180 from planning her suicide to having real life goals. And she tells all her friends how much happier she is without those stupid apps all the damn time.
I make an effort to talk to my kids about media and critical thinking. We have awesome communication and I'm super happy that my kids talk to me about things. They're not ostracized for their lack of TikTok. They actively avoid the kids who are obsessed with socials because those kids are toxic and struggle in ways that make them not great friends. I truly don't see a downside to implementing this boundary on behalf of my kids.
If your kid feels left out because they can't wreck their mental health with their peers then there's some serious values conversations that need to be had. It's ok, and necessary to use tools for your kids when they can't or won't use them on their own. That's what being a parent means.
I’m with you on this. I blocked them too and my kid knows why. The commenter above may mean more using/having a smart phone and internet access generally and I reluctantly agree for the most part. But yeah, fuck social media and it’s debilitating impact. Not just on youth, I don’t use that shit because five minutes makes my fairly successful ass feel terrible too! Just toxic all around.
My comment was clearly not written to give you advice for your specific child and her suite of issues.
I'm speaking a lot more generally and while I'm leaving room for parents like you to make your choices, I'm also still being direct that I think it's not a good universal rule. Even if that is an outcome someone chooses, it's no less true that engaging with the whole choice is necessary to do a good job of making it. Internet=bad is an incredibly simplistic old-person take at this stage in society, and some parents even to current generations can misunderstand or underestimate the significant role that the internet can play in their kids' lives. No solution fits across all kids, that's part of the challenge - but understanding the role that the internet plays in modern kids' social world and peer networks is important to making decisions about their access to it with complete information and goal-oriented integrity.
The matched point in that comment you may have missed is that I'm not modelling my remarks around a binary of "unrestricted internet" vs "no internet." If anything, I think I was clearly saying that absolute 'solutions' get progressively worse the wider they cast their net - as more and more unintended consequences are included in that broad-reaching choice.
Separately, you also shouldn't expect that what you felt you needed to do in order to support your child in a relatively unusual situation - will also be a good foundation for broad-case parenting practices. What is good for one child is not good for all children - and the more unusual the child or their needs, the less applicable that solution would be to "average" kids. There are other kids in similar-looking situations where your solution would exacerbate the problem instead of reduce it - now not only are they depressed and bullied, but also isolated from their friends. The vast majority of kids aren't in situations particularly similar to yours and using your solution in their cases risks putting them into worse places than they started, or putting a target on them where none existed prior. Sever the child from the internet isn't something you necessarily should be treating as universally good for all parents and all kids with zero possible downsides.
There are always downsides. Especially in parenting, everything is a trade-off and nothing is clear-cut. If you can't see what's being traded off - in effectively anything - that's a good cue to start hunting for blind spots. Especially when making rules for kids like cutting off parts of their world. As you said, being a parent requires making tough choices, and that requires engaging with the whole cost/benefit of the choice.
There's nothing challenging or tough about firmly believing you are wholly, completely, and absolutely Correct in whatever option you pick. It's easy to choose something and insist that it's 100% totally and absolutely correct with zero room for discussion. That approach actively shuts down all the actually hard parts of making the choice. But that is a choice with it's own downsides. It makes it hard to relate to those kids as they age enough to challenge you, or start leaving home, and it doesn't model behavior that I - personally - think is producing functional adults down the road. At the very least, the kind of person who is never wrong is not the kind of person I want to raise.
So I think that commenting more specifically on what you've said here - it rings some bells and tints some flags. You're proudly teaching your kids critical thinking, yet also say you cannot see any downsides to cutting off social media completely. You're absolutely blase about deeming all kids who use social media "toxic" and "bad friends" with "struggles" as if it's completely normal, healthy, and definitely non-toxic for an adult to be passing those kind of judgements about children on such a trivial basis, and to model that for their own kids. You talk about one child's needs to justify the choice, but have more than that one affected by it. You reacted as if this is already a hot-button issue to you - and responded to remarks clearly speaking generally and not at all targeting to you as if it was a personal attack, returning fire with a bunch of spicy jibes about me as a person and as a parent. If this is how you experience and respond to an opinion you disagree with on the internet, I can certainly imagine how you deal with faintest hints of dispute from your own children. Of course they're telling you what you want to hear.
The calls are coming from inside the house, friend.
I totally get your thinking, and really thought this put and almost went that route. But she is 11, I want to see how she uses this stuff and have an active part in it and teaching her how to navigate because at this age there is no holding back. Maybe if all the kids had dumb phones that tracked location or something but it is not the world we live in. I pretty much agree with the comment below yours except on social media. I have a hard fucking no stop and I think, I can’t be sure but really think, my kid gets why that is just so terrible. Thankfully we don’t use it so it’s easier to call that a cesspool. We’ll aside from reddit and now lemmy 😉
We did similar with our kid regularly talking about social medias effects and ills. Maybe not in enough detail (mental note for me to bring this up soon). She’s entering HS and is mostly uninterested in social media. Only thing we blocked was TikTok. She mostly only texts with friends. Which can and has led to issues, but normal ones that are somewhat manageable. I would imagine plenty of parents do similar. And plenty don’t.
I’m not even sure we as a society entirely grasp the impacts of social media on society or individuals. Things seem notably different today versus a decade ago. The whole influencer culture. Ever more sophisticated information. Alt right recruiting tactics. Echo chambers. I think we are collectively fucked for a couple generations at least.
This is about bottled water at the commissary, but
Because of the ongoing heatwave TDCJ guards pass out glasses of cold water each day, and TDCJ has pointed out the men have access to tap water. But many current and former inmates have expressed concern about the water quality of the aging prisons — many older then 50 years.
“I would never drink the water at the tap,” said Don Aldaco, a recently paroled man who spent 24 years in various TDCJ facilities. “I would always get a piece of a sheet and I would tie it on the actual spigot, like a filter. I would have to change it like every other day because of all the rust and all the crud coming out.
Other current inmates commented on the smell of tap water in specific facilities resembling sewage. A TDCJ spokeswoman called the claim false.
“I actually begged him not to [drink the tap water],” said Amy Aguilar, whose loved one is at TDCJ’s Ferguson Unit. Her significant other — whose name she asked TPR to not use — has described the water as “rancid” smelling. And she said she was concerned about the quality.
“Do you smell the sewer?” Aguilar said she asked him, “And he goes, ‘you kind of just smell it all. It’s just this big ole rich mix of rancid smell.’ ”
Water quality in prisons nationwide have been characterized as very low, due to the age of the facilities and the often remote locations.
If you’re ever in the Vegas area, I highly recommend going to the Valley of Fire State Park. I visited Red Rock Canyon, Death Valley, Hoover Dam, Zion - all of those were absolutely incredible, but valley of fire was otherworldly in ways those other places aren’t. It’s only about an hour drive from Vegas.
All that said, if you want to go to Vegas as a base camp for all these amazing things, don’t do it during the summer. Heat exposure is no joke. This article says there was a group of hikers who had encountered these women earlier in the day and noticed that they hadn’t come back, so they called the authorities at 3pm. They weren’t lost out in the desert for days, they went out hiking for a day and were dead in hours.
Visiting the desert in the winter is uncomplicated. You don’t need nearly as much water, you’re not in significant danger just for being out there. During the hot months, it’s another story. Unless you’re very experienced and extremely well prepared, it’s just not worth it. And even then, just go somewhere else in the world to hike while it’s 115°f/46°c in the desert.
I definitely get the sentiment. On a base level, building a city in the middle of the desert where it takes more resources to sustain the city than it should.
That said, when it comes to the primary scarce resource, water, one thing a lot of people don’t know is that the city is extremely efficient at recycling water and has taken significant measures to reduce water usage. 99% of water used indoors in Las Vegas is recycled, and they recently banned non-functional grass which has been a big contributor to water usage in the past.
It’s easy to look at a city that is built on a culture of excessiveness and come to the conclusion “Las Vegas bad” but there’s definitely more to it than meets the eye and I think there are far more productive places to focus our attention.
I would caution that, in winter, the deserts can get cold and hypothermia becomes a very real threat. To make matters worse, the temperature swings can be extreme enough that you will be hot during the day and freezing at night.
By way of example, camping in Joshua Tree National Monument, we were huddling in the shade during the day, sweating our asses off, then huddling in sleeping bags around the fire at night trying to keep warm while watching a meteor shower.
Know the conditions you are headed into and prepare accordingly.
Shit, I guess they did try that in a small town, and have decided to keep trying despite the fact the Feds have opened an investigation into it:
A state and federal investigation have been launched into the Circleville Police Department after concerns have risen that certain officers have abused their power. At the center of the investigation is the department’s newly-promoted deputy chief.
The second-in-command, Doug Davis, was bumped to the job earlier this year after the ousting of then-deputy chief Phil Roar during a harassment and assault investigation that ultimately led to Roar’s retirement. Davis assumed the position of deputy chief but was only on the job for two months before he was placed on leave; leave that has spawned a criminal probe into allegations of civil rights violations.
What people forget about the phrase including the term ‘bad apple’ is that it’s ‘one bad apple spoils the bunch.’ Even if it was “one bad apple,” the rest of them are complicit. Of course, it isn’t, but the “good” ones who don’t do the profiling or anything else racist personally are still complicit. ACAB.
Yeah, it’s definitely an “actions speak louder than words” kind of dealio. I’d accept the one bad apple response if their actions showed that their approach was “let’s get rid of this apple asap to prevent contamination and also immediately investigate the apples in the bad one’s immediate vicinity for signs of spoilage”.
news
Active
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.