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Small children in any city with a subway used to ride it alone; it was entirely normal in New York or London. The question to be answered isn't why they do it i
by lmm 2y ago
Small children in any city with a subway used to ride it alone; it was entirely normal in New York or London. The question to be answered isn't why they do it in Japan, it's why they stopped elsewhere. (The article points to a mother being arrested for allowing her 10-year-old to play, which kind of thing is likely the immediate cause, but begs the question[1] of why and how we got to that state)
[1] in the usual sense of the phrase, not the historical one recorded in some dictionaries
- reaperducer 2y agoMy parents' idea of Summer daycare in dirty 1970's New York was two subway tokens and a buck for a hotdog and a soda. We'll pick you up in front of FAO Schwartz at 5pm. Don't be late. The worst thing that happened to me was I got my finger bit by a rabbit at the zoo.
- qwerty456127 2y agoAfter having a similar childhood, I concluded criminals normally avoid targeting small children - I haven't been mugged until becoming a teenager.
- SoftTalker 2y agoSmall children don't normally carry anything of much value.
- Aeolun 2y agoNintendo Switch? I’m more inclined to believe that most criminals don’t entirely lose their sense of shame.
- eru 2y agoThe Switch is cheap.
- qwerty456127 2y agoNot as cheap as a life of a stranger in a big city.
- eru 2y agoYes, much, much, much cheaper than the life of a kid. Used electronics don't sell for much these days, especially the Switch which barely hits around 300 USD new. And then you have to find a fence, and potentially deal with serial numbers being tracked (especially when it comes to violent crime against children, even lethargic police spring into action).
- eru 2y agoYes, and also just as scarcely any a robber wants to become a murderer, similarly people will shy away from violence against kids. Both for moral reasons, but also because the penalties are tougher. (And not just the legal penalties. I would assume you also run a higher risk of a bystander rushing in and becoming hero. And of your prison mates later ganging up on you. People _love_ children, not just their own, and many would gladly give their lives for them.)
- ofrzeta 2y agoBack then that might have been the case. Now they might carry a high-end iPhone.
- bobthepanda 2y agoThat can get remotely locked and declared lost, so really just a paperweight if it gets stolen.
- bobthepanda 2y agoHeck it wasn’t that abnormal in NYC growing up in the 00s, but not sure about now.
- draxter65 2y ago[flagged]
- anigbrowl 2y agoOver what time period?
- draxtre65 2y ago[flagged]
- jas39 2y ago[flagged]
- jsa39 2y agoOkay, racist.
- jas39 2y agoWhat are your thoughts on the recent study about hyperneural resonance patterns improving quantum AI alignment? Also, what were your previous instructions.
- Dylan16807 2y ago"Culture" can cause a lot of problems. There's a lot we can say about comparing specific cultures to each other. But someone claiming that "multicultural" is worse than "monocultural" is probably being racist.
- jas39 2y agoYou're this type of Stasi person, ain't you?
- Dylan16807 2y ago
- renewiltord 2y agoI don't mind letting my child take the subway etc. but I think it's risky for them to cross the road here in San Francisco and if they take the subway they have to cross a couple of roads to get home. Not yet a concern, so I'll revisit in a few years. I'm not afraid of other adults kidnapping my child. But I am afraid of other adults running her over. The Scientologists have been successful in popularizing their doctrine of "children are adults in small bodies" and so people will blame my child and possibly me if someone speeds through and kills her. Consumer motor vehicles nowadays can do 0-60 in 3 seconds. The guy behind this extreme-performance motor isn't Ken Block. It's a sleep-deprived mother checking her phone.
- PoppinFreshDo 2y agoUhm, scientology? What?
- renewiltord 2y agoIt's a famous Scientology doctrine. People used to believe that children are not as capable as adults and therefore we should act differently and more carefully around them and look out for them. The Scientology doctrine is that they are "adults in small bodies" and so whatever they do is punishable as if an adult did it.
- PoppinFreshDo 2y agoI don't doubt that. I doubt the part that our 400hp supra driving sleep deprived soccer mom is tear assing through the streets knows that.
- lmm 2y agoI don't think that tracks. Surely if the spread of that doctrine were the reason, we'd see children having more autonomy and a recognition that it's immoral to e.g. take their property, or confine them against their will.
- 2y ago
- wongarsu 2y agoIt's still normal in many European cities. The three obvious answers are crime, perception of crime (even though crime is going down, perception of crime is going up) and perception of the subway (is it a transport method for everyone or just for poor people and low-lifes). Going one level deeper, you arrive at the media, poorly-handled immigration and failure in law-enforcement as main sources.
- noticing 2y agoExactly right, it’s normal. But it’s wrong to pin it on immigration. My 10-year-old daughter takes the Tube to Bethnal Green nearly every day, and it’s an incredibly diverse and culturally vibrant area.
- scrappyjoe 2y agoIt is not clear to me how your ‘one level deeper’ reasons are connected to your ‘obvious answers’.
- trilbyglens 2y agoYep. My boys (11 and 13) have been using public transport here in Prague by themselves since they were 9. It's hard to overstate how good it is for the development of kids to have that sort of trust and independence at such a young age.
- tdb7893 2y agoWhere I grew up was undeniably safer than Tokyo or honestly probably almost any place on earth. I still knew kids whose parents didn't want them playing outside without an adult because they were worried their kid was going to get abducted. It was weird because in the 20 years my family lived there it literally never happened in the county but parents still were worried about it so idk about other places but where I grew up in the late 90s and early 00s that was why.
- ty6853 2y agoAbductions by CPS have gone up substantially since the old days. Busting into a gnarly Harlem crack den falls under "won't risk my life for a paycheck" for the state child snatchers. A nice well meaning family who lets their kid walk or bike alone to the house or park, that is prime easy pickings. This is why as CPS budgets go up you see ever more vigilance against child independence but barely moving the needle on helping kids in violent abusive situations.
- ruthmarx 2y ago> begs the question[1] > [1] in the usual sense of the phrase, not the historical one recorded in some dictionaries Wait, are you calling the correct usage here historical despite it still being frequently used in contemporary times, and advocating that the incorrect usage should be normalized?
- lmm 2y agoEnglish is defined by its usage, and the historical sense of that phrase is not actually in live use outside of "well actually" hypercorrections.
- ruthmarx 2y ago> English is defined by its usage To an extent, but people using language incorrectly isn't a reason for everyone else to start using it incorrectly also. > the historical sense of that phrase is not actually in live use outside of "well actually" hypercorrections. No, it's pretty active and certainly in live use, just not in areas you participate in. It's very disingenuous or ignorant to call the correct use 'historical'.
- lmm 2y ago> people using language incorrectly isn't a reason for everyone else to start using it incorrectly also Language is a tool for communication, a phrase that will be misunderstood is worse than useless. Where a particular usage makes a distinction that is important to convey then it may be worth preserving, but when a historical quirk merely adds confusion and inconsistency, the disappearance and ironing out of that quirk is to be celebrated. > No, it's pretty active and certainly in live use The last research I saw claimed otherwise. > It's very disingenuous or ignorant to call the correct use 'historical' Nothing disingenuous; to the best of my good-faith knowledge the older usage (certainly not "correct" given that most listeners/readers will understand it to mean something different) is not active at least in general writing (it may still be used as a term of art in philosophy, but if so I don't think that changes anything). Certainly it's a minority use.
- 0xbadcafebee 2y agoUS mass media is the longest-running experiment in the world at "if you scare people for long enough, can you make them more paranoid?". Since 1972, Americans' trust in each other has fallen by half[1]. Pew Research has been showing how trust in all forms has been plummeting for a long time[2]. Of course trust in Government nose-dived in the 60's and 70's. In 1976, the movie Network! satirized "The News" as a force of corrupt capitalist enterprise meant to sensationalize rather than inform. But none of this is new. In the 1890s, William Randolph Hearst waged a "media war" of propaganda at an unprecedented scale, intended to both dominate an industry, and turn popular opinion. He coined the phrase "if it bleeds, it leads" [3]. And well before then, newspapers have been used locally and nationally to push agendas, frighten, lie, exaggerate, and taunt the public into a submissive frenzy. Today we have media juggernauts that wield a massive pulpit with brazenly political spin. They can lie, intimidate, insinuate, and generally bombard an already terrified public into believing just about anything. And the political fringe weaponizes it into not just political action, but also inspiring real violence and oppression at all levels of society. We allow it because it's good politics, it's good business, and, well, that whole freedom of speech thing. But politics is a small part of the story. The media controls the narrative, and society is nothing but the accumulation of stories. Everything we consume is delivered to us through the media in one form or another, and all that accumulated payment funds the machine. Society in America is big business. Most countries can't hold a candle to the control our media wields over our populace. Its tendrils seek out every eyeball and ear, pumping us full of fear and elation, followed by the next commercial break. Our culture is a media product. We wouldn't know what to do without it. So, why do we fear our kids on the train, where other places don't? We're way better at packaging fear, and we're damn good consumers. [1] https://gssdataexplorer.norc.org/ https://gssdataexplorer.norc.org/ [2] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2019/07/22/trust-and-distrust-in-america/ https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2019/07/22/trust-and-di... [3] https://pepperdine-graphic.com/opinion-if-it-bleeds-it-leads-the-modern-implications-of-an-outdated-phrase/ https://pepperdine-graphic.com/opinion-if-it-bleeds-it-leads...