No, they wouldn't, because they didn't care when this happened during Trump's first term, Trump said this would happen during his 2nd term, AND THEY STILL VOTED FOR HIM.
Failing to enforce the Constitution is part of the problem. The Constitution gives very few options for recourse and was not designed for the situation where two of three branches of government willingly abdicate their own power.
Even the government shutdown is an example of the failure of the US constitution. In most other countries in the world, the inability to pass a budget triggers an election.
> In most other countries in the world, the inability to pass a budget triggers an election.
In many parliamentary systems, and some semi-presidential systems this would be likely or automatic. Basically no presidential systems do this, though some have optional safety valves that might be threatened to try to force resolution of a budget deadlock or invoked in response to one, like the muerte cruzada system in Ecuador (which allows the President to dissolve the National Assembly or the Assembly to impeach and remove the President, but either action triggers new elections for both the President and the Assembly.)
This is one of many reasons why presidential systems are bad.
I find very strange that the presidential systems claim to be "republics", presumably because most people do not know what a "republic" had previously meant.
The most important principle of the Roman Republic was that it should not be allowed for any important civilian executive function to be occupied by a single human. All major functions should be held by 2 or more humans with equal power, e.g. 2 consuls for the supreme function (because it would be less likely for all of them to agree to do something abusive or illegal).
Only in exceptional circumstances, like war or natural catastrophes, it was fine to temporarily delegate power to a single dictator, to ensure fast decisions.
This principle of the Roman Republic was intended for avoiding the abuses of power, like those typical for kings. There is very little difference between most presidents of countries with presidential systems and absolutist monarchs, even if their function hopefully is not hereditary, but even this is not always true.
> This is one of many reasons why presidential systems are bad.
It is perhaps a consequence of some of the ways in which Presidential systems are suboptimal, but I don't think it is itself a way that they are bad. If you had a Presidential system and changed nothing else but making failure to pass a budget on a set timeline an election trigger, it would make things generally worse, not better, except maybe if the regular election interval was intolerably long to start with (in which case it would maybe be incidentally weakly, indirectly positive.
>In most other countries in the world, the inability to pass a budget triggers an election.
That's actually a wonderful idea. Our legistlature definitely needs more skin in the game, so I was privy to the idea that their salaries are also frozen during a shutdown (like 90% of federal workers). But having them ousted from their seats can be interesting.
Of course, the obvious counter argument is exploitation. Could a bitter party band together and try to force early re-elections if they feel they have the upper hand?
In a Parliamentary system there needs to be either one party with a majority or a coalition that agrees to rule as one party. If one party wins a clear majority it is rare for a government to fail to pass a budget or collapse early, as it'd require the party to turn on itself. In coalitions bitter parties can indeed force early elections and it happens all the time. It's the reason European countries have such unstable politics and frequently experience government collapse, "caretaker governments", "firewalls" and long delays after an election before a government can be formed.
They did NOT abdicated the power. They, meaning their republican members, are actively using power to achieve or defend republican ideological goals. Democrats are not fighting as they should, they tend to be centrists seeking to accomodate.
But, there was no abdication. There is an intentional cooperation.
It might be cooperation through abdication, but it's still abdication. They are choosing to allow the executive to do things that would be under their control.
I'd say choosing to let the executive execute reckless tarriff policies counts as "abdicating power". If they really believed in their power, Trump would just need to throw tarriff policies at congress and they can approve it with their majority house and senate votes.
Likewise, the Supreme Court putting an immunity clause right before Biden left feels like abdication. Again, if what Trump was doing was just, it'd be easy to interpret it in his favor, 6-3. But instead they gave blanket immunity. It can be intentional cooperation and still be abdicating.
The Constitution is not fine. You are correct that it is not being enforced properly, and IMO we have a coup being staged in real time.
We should have rolling term limits for SCOTUS.
We should have ranked-choice/multiple-choice mechanisms for all elections to facilitate a true multiparty system.
We should further regulate money and transparency in spending vis-a-vis political advertising.
We should ban gerrymandering.
The Senate should be weakened or entirely removed. I am aware that is theoretically the only thing that is not amendable, but it's a flaw that we have it in any case.
The Electoral College should be discarded.
And clearly, impeachment should be easier than it is - or else maybe we just have the dictatorship we deserve? Thanks, GOP.
Your democratically elected president (or, rather, the group behind him) is undoing whatever was left of the democratic apparatus. There is no counter power in place. Executive, legislative and judiciary are de facto one.
You seem to operate on the belief that democratically elected leaders can't do harm to democracy, while history has times and times again proved you wrong, and that to me is what's insane here.
> He's the democratically elected president of the US
“Dictator” and “elected” are not incompatible. In fact, the term originates as the title of an elected (not directly by the citizenry, but then neither is the US President in any case) officer, and the term has nothing to do with how you got into power, but with what practical constraints it is exercised.
I mean sure. But he's not even doing anything dictatorial. Most of his actions are well within the laws of the United States. Not more than any other president.
If the reports are true, the proceeds from selling Venezuelan oil are going into his own Qatari bank account. That's third-world tinpot dictatorship right there.
Those takes are informed and level headed. We have a wildly unqualified Secretary of Defense who was appointed only because he advocated in his book "American Crusade" for a crusade against the "American Left". A Project 2025 leader Kevin Roberts described us as in the middle of a second American Revolution that will remain bloodless if the left allows it. And he said that before the election.
The DOGE project was a wildly unconstitutional overreach of the executive branch, shutting down or severely crippling agencies like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau without the approval of Congress.
Republicans are letting Trump act like a dictator to accomplish things they want outside of the guardrails of our democracy. There are plenty more examples out there if you choose to pay attention.
> There is no dictatorship ... He's the democratically elected
The first part does not follow from the second. It's much easier to become dictator when in power, e.g. after being democratically elected. It's a common route. See also Self-coup / autocoup (1).
Of course, nothing like that could even be attempted in the USA! (2) /s
https://fairvote.org has info on Ranked Choice Voting. It is, to me, the single most bang-for-buck reform we should have in government.
A voting system where voters give preferences to multiple candidates on a ballot takes away the "spoiler effect", where a candidate too similar to the two main candidates will split the vote.
We need a freer market of political parties for a number of reasons. People need to feel like political change is possible. The two main parties need more pressure to evolve or die within their section of the political spectrum. Allowing more political parties to exist allows splinter parties to have a chance. Imagine a "sane Republican" party, or a progressive party, or some hybrid-centrist party that likes unions and public education but doesn't like massive social services, and so on.
MAGA would be polling at 15% or less, I think.
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SCOTUS term limits is just an idea I heard once. Most other democracies have it in place.
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I am skeptical of the Senate's utility in a modern federal government - the difference between the population of Virginia and Rhode Island was far less extreme than the difference between California and Wyoming today. The electoral inequality is too much.
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Electoral college has to go for obvious reasons, as does gerrymandering.
Uhhhhh... What? Are we living on the same planet? The Senate is absolutely terrible. Not only is it breathtakingly undemocratic, the modern rise of the filibuster raising the threshold to 60% makes it even harder to pass any legislation.
The weakness of the Senate has abetted the expansion of the other two branches as Congress has ceded most of its lawmaking responsibilities. But there are still limits. There are so many other knock on negative effects too: inability to pass laws leads to more enormous omnibus bills, increasing the influence of lobbyists.
Simply deleting the Senate entirely would go a very long way to improving the structure of the US govt.
Edit: incidentally, the main thing I've learned over the years about this topic is that most Americans (not necessarily you specifically) have simply never questioned the received wisdom about the US Constitution that they learned in grade school and are maybe even incapable of evaluating it dispassionately.
In a hyper-partisan age, it seems good to have some collegiality and requirements for cross-partisan cooperation.
If we can't agree on anything then maybe we shouldn't do anything. If it ain't broke don't fix it. Why are so many people so desperate to move here if things are going so badly? Much of the discontent is performative. How willing would you actually be to give up your spot and switch places with someone in Guatemala?
Maybe we need filibuster-style restraints for the executive too. Executive overreach is a major complaint people have about the current structure, correct?
Yup. There were supposed to be 3 separate, contentious arms of the government: executive, legislative and judicial. The problem, and I honestly can't see a solution to it, is that the same party/group controls all three and nobody's willing to buck the trend. The "guardrails" are there, it merely turns out they're only weakly enforced.
Yes, the original dream of the U.S. is very clearly a failed experiment with both the legislative and judicial branches essentially extensions of the executive branch. The checks and balances that used to exist have almost completely disappeared. Whatever’s left of those branches are essentially extra entry points for lobbyists and billionaires to fully drive the knife deeper.
It wasn’t actually designed that way but it has slowly manipulated and shaped into that way over a hundred years of stacked up law bloat built with the sole intention to make challenging it impossible for anyone who’s not crazy wealthy.
Well yes. It's easy to manipulate when you freeze the House for 100 years. That's the biggest reason we keep swinging so much. The House became a mini-senate, and the Senate structure is already something under contention (designed from the beginning to compromise with smaller population states). Now we have a Senate that can change every 2 years. 2 years is simply a bad golf swing for billionaires when they "lose". 2 years of suffering feels eternal for the working class
The Legislature has the most power and the House freeze made it easy to co-opt. you make the house compliant or essentially useless, and you can't impeach anything in the executive nor judicial branches. Freeze the house and you can't really start any legislature to have laws catch up with rampant greed. Or make it easier to lobby into more greed.
We desperately need to expand the house again. I remember saying we should have over 1000 reps with current growth. Maybe starting at 700-800 would be a good start.
I don’t know what the solution is, because a fourth branch of government also could be problematic. But it’s becoming a very obvious problem that the justice department is not separate from the executive.
> But it’s becoming a very obvious problem that the justice department is not separate from the executive.
The alternatives are probably worse. Every alternative trades political accountability for independence or vice versa.
The alternatives are: An Independent Prosecutorial Branch (a “fourth branch”), OR Prosecutors as Part of the Judicial Branch, OR Congress-Controlled Prosecution, OR Fully Decentralized / Elected Federal Prosecutors.
The US uses a hybrid model of executive control with strong counterweights rather than full independence. This model persists because it maintains democratic accountability, preserves adversarial courts, and allows checks without creating an unaccountable power center.
The real problem is that Congress delegated all its responsibility to the executive and judicial branches.
To the executive branch it gave the power to declare war (war power act), and to make new law (administrative law). Then it created a new branch, the federal reserve, to make monetary policy.
To the judiciary it handed the power of checking the president.
Now Congress does nothing as evidenced by how little actual legislation they've passed while Trump has just done everything via executive order.
But this entire system developed while one party held all three branches but also while the branches were held by different parties.
Since the house is up for election every two years, they have every incentive to delegate so they can wash their hands free of any decision.
"To the executive branch it gave the power to declare war (war power act), and to make new law (administrative law). Then it created a new branch, the federal reserve, to make monetary policy."
The War Powers Resolution of 1973, aka War Powers Act, does not give the executive power to declare war. On the contrary, it was intended to limit the executive's ability to engage in armed conflict. It says so right at the top:
50 U.S. Code § 1541 - Purpose and policy
It is the purpose of this chapter to fulfill the intent of the framers of the Constitution of the United States and insure that the collective judgment of both the Congress and the President will apply to the introduction of United States Armed Forces into hostilities, or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances, and to the continued use of such forces in hostilities or in such situations.
One could argue that it hasn't worked all that well, but it is, for example, why George W. Bush got Congress to pass the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002 before invading Iraq.
Also, "[t]hen it created a new branch, the federal reserve" is a sort of unusual way to describe something that happened 60 years earlier.
well, it might be bucked. The problem is you can tear down a lot more in 2 years of reckless, lawless land than you can build in 20 years of gridlock. Even 5 years of unanimous cooperation may not be enough at this point to rebuild what's happened, and we're halfway to midterms.
Legistlative will bend and sway as it's been doing for 30 years now. the judicial is the much more concerning branch. EVen if Trump was ousted tomorrow, we're still stuck with a conservative majority for a good 20 years or so without major intervention. The long shot is that Thomas and Alito get convicted. But we'd need huge momentum for that to gain ground, and even then Breyer may pass sooner or later.
Adding to the courts would help, but not solve the underlying issue.
What do you mean no one is willing to buck the trend? It’s almost a certainty that Republicans will lose the house this year and maybe the senate.
On the other hand we have federal district court judges in podunk deciding that they have the unilateral ability to stop the president from exercising executive authority. It wouldn’t be so comical if they didn’t ultimately lose in most cases; our judges are the real Constitutional crisis right now.
I have not seen the Trump administration fail to obey a single court order; I just don’t see Trump as a crisis. His policies, you could make a good case. His rhetoric, yes. His official acts, not so much.
> On the other hand we have federal district court judges in podunk deciding that they have the unilateral ability to stop the president from exercising executive authority
He doesn’t have unlimited executive authority; it makes sense for a judge to be able to determine where that line is. It’s literally their job?
Very true. The trials against these people better be brutal (assuming they don't all run to Argentina).
It's frustrating now, but having all these cases and cases over ignoring orders is a very important paper trail if we want to civilly resolve all of this. The new DoJ can certainly go after the old one and they have a disgusting amount of cases to comb through to make their case. And a frankly incompetent opposition (it's okay, about 2/3rds of the DOJ quit as of now, I imagine many of the sensible/talented ones realized the incompetence).
> I have not seen the Trump administration fail to obey a single court order
If we can avoid playing word games, the Trump administration has been accused of defying or frustrating court orders at an unprecedented rate, with analyses indicating it failed to comply with approximately one in three judicial rulings against its actions.
Notably in regard to deportations. The administration either acts in defiance of, or appeals until the case is elevated to a sympathetic judge or eventually complies. This is the trend and has been a successful set of tactics so far.
Every American, even the president, even (gasp) Donald Trump, has the right of appeal of judicial orders and rulings. I could just as well say that people and organizations who oppose Trump's immigration policies go "judge shopping" or "jurisdiction shopping" to find sympathetic judges, which happens all the time (For example, there is absolutely no justification for Judge Boasberg in the DC Circuit to have adjudicated the issue of the deportations from Texas; it should have been a local judge in TX).
Inferior court judges (i.e. judicial branch judges that are not Supreme Court justices), only have judicial authority as granted by Congress, and it's not clear whether they do or should have jurisdiction outside their circuit- the Supreme Court is currently deciding that one. Congress explicitly has denied judicial branch judges from jurisdiction over immigration issues, in favor of immigration judges. I believe that most of the judicial actions against the administration wrt immigration are largely lawless (illegal) actions by judges, but I am very much not worried about Trump because his administration is NOT ignoring court orders.
There is a lot of FUD in the news that you have to do a bit of reading to understand (for example, why district court judges may not lawfully order a halt to a deportation that has been properly adjudicated by an immigration court).
My bottom line is that I don't see a Constitutional crisis in Trump's actions, although I very much see many reasons why many people would be upset; he has a very polarizing personality and demeanor.
This really isn't up for debate. the admin has most certainly ignored court orders.
>Every American, even the president, even (gasp) Donald Trump, has the right of appeal of judicial orders and rulings.
If I even talked the way Blanche and Bondi did in these hearings, I'd instantly be held in contempt and be thrown in jail. let alone the overreach of order applied. Let's not pretend that we are on an equal playing ground here.
>Inferior court judges
I think this phrasing alone says a lot more about you than anything you typed. I bet over Biden you were ranting about how the Supreme Court is corrupt. Just shifting in the sands based on what "your team" is doing, laws be damned.
> I think this phrasing alone says a lot more about you than anything you typed.
I'm not sure it says anything about them: "inferior court" is the term of art for any court whose decisions can be appealed to a higher court [1]. It's not a derogatory term; 'inferior' is just the Latin for 'lower'.
So it’s ok he was sent to CECOT in violation of an order not to in the first place? The original question was whether Trump ignored court orders. Id say that removing someone against a court order to a third country is a pretty big issue. Even if a year later after a huge public pressure campaign he is temporarily back in the states.
He wasn't removed to a third country. He was removed to his home country, illegally, as he had a court order for deportation but per his own request he left open only deportation to a third country because he was granted his petition to bar deportation to El Salvador after his asylum claim failed.
Had he had been shoved out of a C-130 and parachuted into South Sudan, we'd never even be hearing of the guy because that would have been allowed and been in compliance with the deportation order as well as the order blocking deportation to the one country they deported him to.
During the ordeal the government attorneys repeatedly claimed that they had no way to bring him back (although clearly that was a lie as he was returned…)
We have crossed the rubicon so far, the fact we even have to nitpick this is absurd.
Do you know how ridiculous you sound defending Trump for bringing back a person from a foreign prison that he sent there without due process? Only because he got caught?
The guy operates in bad faith constantly. It's why a huge chunk of his prior administration recommended against voting for him. It's his only edge in life aside from his ability to hypnotize idiots, and it's only an edge because weak willed or complicit people let him get away with it.
They couldn't bring a single man back and sweep all this under the rug. Trump has to get the last word in. Remember beforehand that they were trying to bribe him to self-deport to a country he wasn't even born in.
Trump, while president, sent a mob to assassinate the vice-president of the United States, and members of Congress, because Mike Pence refused Trump’s illegal order to overturn an election both of them had lost.
The current president is plainly undemocratic. It’s a matter of public record.
What is the evidence that America is falling apart? From all my reading of American history, America has _always_ been this way. With a wide lens it appears as healthy as it's ever been. This is a genuine question-- I've read a lot of American history, but I'm still a dilettante. It's extremely difficult to tell if there are genuinely new conditions, or if we're engaging in a vigorous political process as we always did.
We live in a world where the sitting president calls January 6 a day of love, and has pardoned the rioters, and then says that people protesting ICE are "domestic terrorists". We live in a world where federal prosecutors are choosing to quit rather than following his orders.
Remember John McCain defending Obama[0]? Do you genuinely believe that the people heading the Republican Party today would ever do that? Contrast McCain's humility and grace in his concession speech[1] with Trump's constant refusal to accept that he lost 2020, and his insistence on exacting revenge on the people who "wronged" him.
No, this is not a "vigorous political process" in action. It's something else entirely.
In the 1800 election republicans thought the federalists will turn America into a tyrannical monarchy, and the federalists thought the republicans will plunge America into mob rule like the French Revolution. They would have never defended each other.
Things look bad if you have a twenty year time horizon, but they look pretty normal if you zoom out to encompass all of American history.
Re Trump exacting revenge on political opponents, that conduct has endless precedent in American history. (Refusing to concede the election does not; but he was forced out of office nonetheless, which I read as a sign the republic is healthy.)
EDIT: I just remembered about the Aaron Burr conspiracy. Aaron Burr lost the 1800 election to Jefferson by one elector (after over a month of gridlock). He then tried to raise a private army to either march on Washington, or to form his own country and secede from the union. In 1805 Jefferson ordered his arrest and Burr was tried for treason (and acquitted!)
>Things look bad if you have a twenty year time horizon
50 year horizon, US erupted into a Civil War. Gotta expand out a bit, but maybe the republicans of 1800 had a point (who we'd call liberal today, but history has a strange way with language).
And yes, Trump has already done decades of damage to the US's soft power. countries are now trying to slowly cut out the middleman of the US and even pulling out of the dollar. the 20 year horizon here is awful.
The Constitution provides no mechanism for its own enforcement other than impeachment (not just of the executive, but of the top officials of other branches as well), but the party system makes that essentially impossible today. It might become just possible if the Senate were eliminated, but FPTP and gerrymandering would still present problems.
I love clarifications like this. It is like “The Constitution is fine; Nicolas Cage never stole it. That was just a film. In any case even if he had, it is is documented that he eventually returned it unharmed”
The article misses the other reason that Walmart has invested in multiple attempts at electronic payments: not paying merchant fees to Visa and Mastercard. That's why their system requires you hooking up to your bank account directly.
All of Walmart's attempts at this have been focused on making Walmart's bottom line better, which is why every one of them has failed, whereas Apple Pay is making my payment experience better, and why I use it all the time.
They're being too greedy. Cut out the middle man and give most of the benefit to the consumer. 3% cash back or better, and you'll sizable sign up. No profit now, but now you've got control of the situation, which is huge, and gives you more opportunities for the future. You've also got leverage for your negotiations with the merchant card banks.
>The article misses the other reason that Walmart has invested in multiple attempts at electronic payments: not paying merchant fees to Visa and Mastercard. That's why their system requires you hooking up to your bank account directly.
Was going to reply this - I have Walmart Pay and it's my credit card.
I'm supremely annoyed because Walmart Pay still rather sucks. I have to scan a QR code which opens the app, then approve it from there. It's not simple like Apple Pay where I just tap my phone. But after hearing tons of stories of issues with people getting compromised by the terminals, I sucked it up and just did it, since their terminals don't support tap CCs.
It sounds like the Walmart approach has two fewer middlemen, which sounds nice to me. Walmart's interests are aligned with ours here. Whatever profit they have to give up as payment overhead will be passed along to us as higher prices.
This is the only statement that matters. We knew exactly who Trump is and exactly what he would do if voted in again. The "opposition" did nothing during Trump's first term, and now they are completely powerless do do anything.
America voted for this, we failed miserably to prevent this from happening for the past 30 years, and we will pay the price for this for generations.
Turns out the easiest way to destroy the greatest nation in the world is to fail to hold the rich and powerful to account.
No-one should trust us anymore, and if Europe doesn't step up and do something, this will be China's world to run for generations to come (Russia unfortunately is working on committing suicide).
My daughter will not get a phone at all until she's at least 16 and probably finally actually needs one.
As for the Switch and Nintendo Online, I didn't find it confusing or difficult at all to set up a child's account, make sure they can't buy anything without my permission, and then I make sure my daughter knows what she can and can't do, and I keep an eye on it to make sure she follows my rules. I don't trust parental controls to do everything for me.
Now that said, Minecraft on the Switch is one gawd-awful frankenstein amalgamation of permissions and accounts run by Nintendo and Microsoft. I got that working but it's by far the worst experience I've ever dealt with to play a game, even single player.
> My daughter will not get a phone at all until she's at least 16 and probably finally actually needs one.
It’s all fine and dandy, until (i) you find that they’ve actually just saved up their pocket money and gifts for the last year and a half to buy the phone (age 11 in my daughter’s case) and that all the after school and weekend activities are being arranged on phones. Seeing your kids excluded from real-world activities is tough.
In our case, a combination of talking to the kids plus Apple parental controls offered a reasonable approach.
My daughters are younger than that, but A lot of the neighbor girls in who are in that age range got apple watches before phones. Which kind of makes sense, because it allows them to text, but keeps them off of apps and such.
It's true, and it can definitely be a problem. But I wasn't getting invited to in-person events because I wasn't contactable. Kids don't ring doorbells in 2025, they text people if they want to meet up.
Allowing these teenagers who are being bullied to explore spaces where they feel safe and comfortable seems like a good idea too though. As someone who was bullied in school, being online did not make that issue any worse, and allowed me to find friends I couldn't otherwise have.
Yet in the broader sense online bullying targeting other teenagers is a commonly cited problem, including in incidents of teen suicide. "It didn't make it worse for me" doesn't counteract what we provably know is occurring[0][1][2].
Young Teen suicide (10 to 14) has increased from roughly 1 per 100K in the early 2000s to now nearly 3 per 100K in the last five years. Older teen suicide (15-19) has increased from 6 per 100K to 11 per 100K over the same time period[3].
1 and 2 do not seem to suggest that cyberbullying is more harmful in this regard than other forms of bullying - and in fact only 3 seems to contrast these concepts at all.
> Sensitivity analyses suggested that cybervictimization only and both cyber- and face-to-face victimization were associated with a higher risk of suicidal ideation/attempt compared to face-to-face victimization only and no victimization; however, analyses were based on small n. In prospective analyses, cybervictimization was not associated with suicidal ideation/attempt 2 years later after accounting for baseline suicidal ideation/attempt and other confounders. In contrast, face-to-face victimization was associated with suicidal ideation/attempt 2 years later in the fully adjusted model, including cybervictimization.
In fact, reading 3, it looks like the highest prevalence of cyberbullying capped out at a whopping.... 16% of 15 year olds, with a sharp drop down to 7% just 2 years later.
I have to say, there's lots of things to worry about with kids going online. I just don't think bullying in particular is one of them.
As someone who was not popular and got bullied some in school, I think cyberbullying would have been worse since it comes home with you. I was in school when SMS was finally becoming widespread and something of the bullying happened through it, it sucked since I'm at home and getting reminded of shit at school.
I can't imagine today with 24/7 social media apps on the phone.
In my case, as you said it may not have exacerbated it, but for me it certainly perpetuated it.
A retreat into the online world seems like a comfort in difficult times but it is a retreat, and the longer you stay retreated, the less likely it is you'll regain the ground again.
This is going to show how naive I am. Because I am middle aged, do not have a cell phone, and still to this day just show up at people's houses unannounced if I want a social experience.
This still is possible for me, surely it is possible for kids.
> This still is possible for me, surely it is possible for kids.
I think there's a real generational divide here. What is normal in my parents generation (I'm in my early 30s) is not normal in roughly my generation downwards (which coincides both with mobile phone ownership amongst children/teens becoming common, and children/teens becoming much more restricted in how much freedom they had in terms of being allowed outside by themselves).
Even amongst people my age, people would consider weird and probably even rude if I turned up unannounced (a "What are you up to?" text message would probably be the norm). And I think that's more exaggerated amongst younger generations. Perhaps that's different if you live very close to your friends. But a lot of people don't.
I feel sorry for your daughter. 16 was very late to get one as far back as the late 90s - I was very glad to get one at 14 as it meant I wasn’t quite such a weirdo outcast.
I didn’t have a cell phone until I was 17, but still used the house phone to call and talk to friends. A house phone a parent can always listen in to conversations but still respect the child’s privacy. The child also knows that they can be listened in on and that their privacy is restricted.
The child may also learn about making social effort to keep in touch rather than relying on a beacon to ping them about social events.
16 is too late. You can’t teach your kids good maturity with communication devices through abstinence. You just have to watch what they do online. Which means reading their WhatsApp et al messages after they’ve gone to bed.
Yes there will be some problems created from them having devices, but parenting isn’t supposed to be easy, it’s supposed to be educational and supportive for the children. Which forced abstinence is not.
For us, it’s a system that’s worked well. So well, in fact, that our kids have felt comfortable coming to us when they see something concerning in a group chat rather than waiting for us to find it. And in return, we’ve learned to trust their judgement a lot more because they’ve demonstrated mature behaviour online.
You have it backwards, it’s not trying to catch my children doing bad things (though there is that benefit too). it’s more about ensuring that other people are not doing, or trying to do, bad things to my children.
I trust my own children but you’re right that I cannot guarantee that they’re not bullying others and deleting those messages. However I’d hope other parents are monitoring their children’s phone usage and would tell either me or the school if my child was causing issues. That’s how a healthy community of parents are supposed to work.
Also your comment has a tone of “kids can find a way to bypass parental oversight so why bother parenting in the first place?” I don’t if that is intentional or not. But it’s an attitude I have seen other parents adopt and, unsurprisingly, their kids are usually the little shits that cause trouble because they know there are zero repercussions.
A better way to frame this is supervised vs unsupervised access. And it depends on their age.
At 11 I wouldnt expect them to have unsupervised internet access. At 16 I might, but by the time they’re 16 I wouldn’t need to monitor their online activity so closely because they’ll have several years of trust and experience built up.
The dumbest timeline is the one with nuclear war. This might not be it.
If we're optimistic and assume that Trump, Xi and Putin have some kind of deal for a new world order where the US is no longer a world police, and the US gets to have its oligarchs just like Russia has.
Maybe that part of the deal is that Trump gets the Americas. It sure sucks for the new vassal states, but it beats having a nuclear war.
Putin seems intent on keeping up his threats, he might just use a "low yield" nuke to shake out the weak hands in Europe - - which it appears there are plenty of - - the question is how EU NATO would respond. I doubt they would then match him, nuke for nuke.
Could it be Trump is leaning towards just letting Putin and the EU settle their own differences by themselves - - while Trump concentrates on his side of the world, which Venezuela is a too easy prize to win. The old playbook: Find a US leaning Venezuelan leader who can be bought off with CIA money, get rid of Maduro, by force if needed, then the huge discoveries in the oilfields of Guyana next door that Exxon, Hess Corporation, CNOOC and others have their hands deep in are secured.
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