> "Getting young kids involved in ham radio [..] We must get children interested in the hobby." This has often had a bit of a creepy vibe to me. Not a sexually

> "Getting young kids involved in ham radio [..] We must get children interested in the hobby." This has often had a bit of a creepy vibe to me. Not a sexually creepy vibe, more like the Church targetting children to instill a set of beliefs about the world before they develop critical thinking skill. More like "adults won't want to do it our way, they'll try and introduce all these new digital modes; we need to get to them while they're young to "instill the correct values"" creepy. Apart from that it has a "treating women as objects" vibe to it; imagine The Simpsons' Comicbook guy saying "we need more women in here", or Google saying "we want more women employed here", Or Peter Thiel and his "I want young people's blood"[1] ideas. Instead of wanting people with radio skills or technical skills or organizational skills, instead of valuing people's humanity and ability, only (non-sexually) fetishising one desirable attribute - age or gender or skin colour or malleability (youth said a different way, but this time meaning life inexperience) or excitability (youth said a different way, but this time meaning pre-cynical age). And apart from those ways, it's predatory in the sense of Facebook building its software to focus on how to extract information from you, instead of focusing on what you want. "We want more (youth/women/people of colour), nevermind what they want". You want more children interested, why should the children give a damn? In the way that incels aren't entitled to a woman's attention just because they want a girlfriend, amateur radio isn't entitled to young people just because it's ageing out. You want to expand amateur radio, no problem with that. Be interesting. Welcome whoever is interested. You want to spend more time with kids? Get out of the shed and volunteer at a school or play Fortnite, somewhere they are, and support what they are interested in. Don't be the "parent" saying they only have value to the extent that they mould themselves to the life shape you want them to have, they already have personalities, they are people not club-number-filler. (I'm neither young, nor a ham, but I've seen it as a sentiment over the years in RadCom the magazine for the Radio Society of Great Britain, not just in this blogpost, and other places which I won't try to name and shame, but this isn't just a rant from one line in one blog post). [1] allegedly.