Finnish guy

Founder and admin of sopuli.xyz

Mastodon: [email protected]

Matrix: @rynach:matrix.org

  • 118 Posts
  • 205 Comments
Joined 5 years ago
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Cake day: February 1st, 2021

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  • Basically many movies from the 90s Disney Renaissance era:

    • Hercules
    • Aladdin
    • Pocahontas
    • Tarzan
    • Mulan

    And of course the Pixar movies from that era:

    • Toy Story
    • A Bug’s Life

    James Bond flicks:

    • GoldenEye
    • Tomorrow Never Dies
    • The World is Not Enough
    • Die Another Day

    Other movies:

    • The Mask
    • Home Alone 1 & 2
    • Ace Ventura
    • Spirited Away
    • The first Pokemon movie
    • The Matrix 1–3
    • Kummeli Kultakuume
    • Pahat Pojat
    • Pitkä Kuuma Kesä
    • South Park: Bigger, Longer, Uncut
    • Jurassic Park
    • Jurassic Park: The Lost World

    Note that several of these movies weren’t for kids, but I got to watch them regardless.



  • I don’t think libertarianism works, it relies naively on how the free market is omnipotent, how freedom is everything and how having a small government is somehow good. There are no countries that are entirely libertarian, that also tells a lot about the ideology’s applicability in practice. A brilliant book about why libertarianism doesn’t work is a book “A Libertarian Walks into a Bear”. In the book, a group of libertarians decides to take over the small town of Grafton in New Hampshire en masse as part of their “Free Town Project”. Of course this group cares neither about the town’s original inhabitants nor their rights. What’s the result? They hollow out pretty much everything from the library, to the school, the fire department and the police. No regard is given to any laws on hunting or food disposal, and that lures in bears, who turn so aggressive that they invade people’s homes. In addition to bears, sex offenders and all kinds of criminals are also lured into Grafton. It’s pretty entertaining book, I recommend it.

    Another reason why I dislike libertarianism is that it can function as a gateway to fascism. This is a known phenomenon. Several key figures in the alt-right for example used to be libertarians. I stumbled into a clip from some American Libertarian Party convention where Richard Spencer was with Ron Paul. I had to rub my eyes a bit.



  • Similar discussion is happening also here in Finland. However, if something is to be banned from kids, it has to be clearly defined. What is considered “social media”? Is it platforms like Facebook, Instagram or Snapchat? Does it include messaging apps like WhatsApp or Signal? Most of this discourse is also based on works of Jonathan Haidt, Greg Lukianoff and Jennifer Twente, all of which have received a fair share of criticism. There is also a considerable amount of a classic moral panic sprinkled in.

    Alice Marwick, an academic that has extensively studied kids, technology and social media, was on Taylor Lorenz’s podcast earlier this year. Her organization published a report, where the following is stated:

    We strongly believe that reform of social platforms and regulation of technology is needed. We need comprehensive privacy legislation, limits on data collection, interoperability, more granular individual and parental guidance tools, and advertising regulation, among other changes. Offline, young people need spaces to socialize without adults, better mental health care, and funding for parks, libraries, and extracurriculars. But rather than focusing on such solutions, KOSA and similar state bills empower parents rather than young people, do little to curb the worst abuses of technology corporations, and enable an expansion of the rhetoric that is currently used to ban books, eliminate diversity efforts in education, and limit gender affirming and reproductive care. They will eliminate important sources of information for vulnerable teenagers and wipe out anonymity on the social web. While we recognize the regulatory impulse, the forms of child safety legislation currently circulating will not solve the problems they claim to remedy.

    Dr. Candice Odgers is also a vocal critic of Haidt, accusing him of cherry picking with a pre-made agenda in mind:

    The cross-country comparisons, you know, they’re they’re often a starting point to see whether there might be something interesting correlationally going on, but it’s a very slippery place to start and I think you know, unless you start with the pretty clear hypothesis about what should explain those differences, if you’re just looking at trend lines and then going backwards and starting to fill in an explanation, it’s hard to follow where it goes and whether or not we’re just fitting these lines to our existing theories, but I’ll leave it.