Teal Dragon @lemdit.com Okay. Sometimes lavender too.
(and I have zero tolerance for trolls :-))
Widespread Delusion
We have tens of thousands of 22 and 24 year old cops, nurses, army officers, managers, drivers, etc
but people claim their underdeveloped brains can't make rational decisions.
It's absurd :-D :-D :-D
Pathetic fool loses the argument so he starts hurling vile insults :-D
Sorry Clown. You lost.
Oooooo. The old "anyone who disagrees with me is a pedo" argument.
Clever.
I wrote nothing about any children.
Go away and annoy someone else with your bullshit.
Your first sentence is completely wrong.
Your straw man at the end is stupid bad-faith bullshit. The vast majority of teens are no longer 13.
There are other factors, of course, but getting treated like shit, being constantly told you're a moron, having your sex life criminalized, constantly being told you'll get groomed and preyed on because you're an idiot, getting zero respect, and having no legal rights is a major cause of the mental health crisis (which happened simultaneously with the change of paradigm from teens = young adults to teens = large children)
Wow.
Completely ignore what somebody actually wrote. Make up some shit they didn't write, and respond to that.
You are a pathetic troll.
13 year olds are also different from 19 year olds
and 13 year olds are different from 7 year olds
I have seen people literally argue that a romantic relationship MUST be abusive because one of the lovers is only 19 and therefore "still a teen" ... the dogma that says teens are children is absolutely false and it is damaging the hell out of young people.
This 4 minute vid explains it pretty well. https://youtu.be/12J1f0Zqaqw
How we got teen pregnancy all wrong and made it much worse
Statistically poverty, substance abuse, and dysfunctional families often correlate. Domestic abuse is in the mix too. No one can isolate one single cause, because the world doesn't work in the oversimplified way we'd like it to.
Imagine you're a girl in a poor abusive household. There's really not much you can do but pray for a better future. Then you hit puberty, and you become sexually attractive to the men in town. This may be the first power you have ever had.
Some peeps are endowed with the power to physically or psychologically dominate their peers with implied threats of violence. Others are gifted with natural leadership abilities. But not all. Then there's a group that is simply pretty and sexy.
If you are this poor young woman from an abusive family, and by chance, nature gives you a sexy body that men like, why wouldn't you start flirting with a man you treats you nicely and makes you feel loved? And wouldn't it be even better if the man had a job and a car?
Your way to get away from your hellish home on a Saturday night may literally be the vehicle owned by your new boyfriend, but your ticket to a better life could definitely seem like a serious relationship with a somewhat older man.
Young adults (aka teens) from poor families tend to have more unplanned pregnancies than their peers from rich families. There are many possible reasons for that. Better access to contraception being the most obvious one.
Young adults (aka teens) from rich families also have much better access to options for terminating an unplanned pregnancy than their poor counterparts. So statistically teenage mothers tend to be much less wealthy than older first time mothers.
There was a famous study done by Darroch in the 90s. (see above) It shows a lot of what I have outlined here. When California Gov Gray Davis saw the study, however, he ignored all the relevant data, and decided that the CAUSE of all these problems was statutory rape.
His plan was to get the cops & prosecutors to put more of the boyfriends with jobs & cars in prison as a way to solve the teen pregnancy problem. This was, of course, illogical to the point of batshit crazy. Smart people at the time pointed that out.
https://guttmacher.org/journals/psrh/1996/01/can-statutory-rape-laws-be-effective-preventing-adolescent-pregnancy
So people in the 90s screwed up. Big deal. Who cares?
The main issue here, is that Gov Davis's batshit stupid thinking went mainstream, and dominates our discourse to this day. Big TV personalities like Oprah picked it up and spread it generously.
The goofy myth based on contorted logic took on a life of its own. The general public, who never spend a lot of time digging into the research or thinking things thru, started to believe that the causation runs opposite to the reality.
That is to say, people now believe that teenage women dating men 10 years older than them causes them to be poor and show the symptoms of an abuse victim.
The obvious reality is that poverty and dysfunction is what led them to choose that partner in the first place.
Criminalizing a young woman's choice of boyfriend isn't the way to make her life happy and healthy. Incarcerating the father of a young woman's baby is one of the worst things you can do to her and her infant. We need to bring a little common sense back to this discussion.
Revolutions Are Scary
When the printing press was invented it unleashed an information revolution. Lot's of people gained access to lots of new ideas. It freaked a lot of people out. Information spreading like that was dangerous. It sparked the Reformation, and the Counter-Reformation, which included long bloody wars. Arguably the beginning of the Renaissance. Change scares people. Instability is very worrying. Conspiracy theories thrive in an environment like that. The result was the famous witch trials.
When the internet was invented it unleashed an information revolution. Lot's of people gained access to lots of new ideas. It freaked a lot of people out. Information spreading like that was dangerous. Change scares people. Instability is very worrying. Conspiracy theories thrive in an environment like that. QAnon, massive freak-outs about pedophiles, flat-earthers, idiots eating horse deworming paste.
The parallels are clear. Today peeps scream about wanting to lynch anyone who dares to date anyone younger than them. They need no evidence. Just like nobody needed evidence to know a witch needed to be executed. In times of great change people look for a scapegoat. Then it was alleged witches. Now it's alleged pedophiles.
If you lock people out of adult society they gain no life experience.
Strictly keeping youth out of bars because they have no "life experience" means they'll never get the "life experience" you think they need to be considered adults and allowed into bars. It's a system for maintaining child status permanently.
Your subjective opinions on who is "mature" are irrelevant.
Do people really believe that 20 year olds are children and no one ever in the entire history of the world ever noticed this, and the only people who ever got this right are in the USA in the last 20 years?
That is just astoundingly ridiculous.
If a child is raised by wolves do they ever become "mature"?
"maturity" is purely subjective. there is no way to measure it. what is perceived as mature varies a lot from culture to culture.
Nature makes us adults through a process called puberty. Society cannot change that. It is biological reality.
Your position, that puberty is irrelevant, and the only thing that makes humans adults is a vague kind of "maturity" measured only by minute changes in the least-understood organ in the human body, is appallingly stupid.
Like, I can't believe that you're not just trolling me. How on earth can you claim something so obviously not true?
I'm blocking you. Rethink your life. You don't have to be a useless blockhead troll forever.
Do you know how many factors are considered when calculating the Tanner Scale?
It is a complex and comprehensive measure of puberty.
Puberty is what makes us adults.
The fact that you can deny that with a straight face is amazing.
Teens are adults. We reach Tanner Stage 5 on average at 14 years of age now. This is not in dispute. The science is clear. You just dislike it, so you deflect to irrelevant garbage about some neural pathways that change a bit when you're 20 :-D
Incidentally teen brains aged 13-15 perform best on several types of cognitive test.
again, data that bigots choose to ignore.
Odd how our bodies reach adult height and brains adult size during puberty :-)
You have cherrypicked your sources. All of neurology points to very fact that brains develop very quickly ages 9-13 and then very slow change from that point on.
but that data doesn't support your bigotry, so you ignore it.
You chose to ignore all of the obvious signs of adulthood. Instead you want to cherry-pick a few insignificant changes in the brain and say "these are the only things that matter for maturity"
Sorry. That's just very stupid.
It would be equally valid to claim that pubic hair, or menstruation, or any other adult trait is the only one that matters.
You think that there's a difference between 26 year olds and 16 year olds. Well, yes, there is. But many 26 year olds can pass for 16 and vice versa. Because they are both adults. 16 year olds cannot pass for 6 year olds or vice versa. 6 year olds are children.
After puberty humans are adults. This is not difficult. Desperately searching for neuological data so you can claim 17 year olds are children is dumb. Stop doing it. Nobody benefits from you supporting bigotry. Stop it.
Everything you write fuels bigotry against a hated demographic.
Teens usually have less experience than older adults. So they will be at a disadvantage.
You write that my posts have nothing to do with the topic, but my posts are the topic. You have veered off into totally irrelevant nonsense about neural pathways.
The vast majority of brain development happens ages 0-3 and 9-13. We get adult brains along with our adult bodies during puberty. That is scientific fact. The fact that brains age even after puberty is not new info, nor is it relevant at all to anything. Our brains slow down as we age. Maturity is not always a good thing.
re: "has convinced people that everyone under 25 is a retard" Yes. Sensational clickbait headlines about very unreliable fMRI studies did that. I am talking about public opinion here. You links to studies of tiny brain changes make no difference. Nobody cares. Read the nasty crap peeps write about under 25s. They have truly been convinced that youth are brain-dead morons who must be shunned if not locked up entirely.
What's the real goal of neurology?
Nazi scientists used to poke around people's brains looking for ways to claim that dark-skinned people are inferior and justify treating them like dirt.
Today our scientists are poking around people's brains looking for ways to claim that teenagers are inferior and justify treating them like dirt.
Child Beauty Contests
Child beauty contests are completely harmless. Certainly no more damaging than the competitive sports we let, encourage, and sometimes force them to do. People, however, need to do tons of virtue signalling, so they scream about the terrible "sexualization" going on there, when it is in fact just some kids playing dress up, one of the most natural games children play.
Enforcing Taboos
When the "crime" harms no one, but the taboo is so strict that the punishment has to be brutal and extreme.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=eWPtAJS1kro .
Puritan Revival
We are in the middle of a huge #PuritanRevival
It's all around us. Young people condemning everything as gross or cringe, getting the ick, railing against male gaze, or pissed off about "sexualization"
Some openly want to reverse the sexual revolution. Others want to ban sex to "protect" people from evil power dynamics. Either way the #Puritans are back and strong as hell.
Brain Myth
Nothing significant changes in our brains in our 20s.
All this talk of "fully developed at 25" is ridiculous bullshit. Even if it were true, it wouldn't mean that people below that age are mentally incompetent.
How we created the very problems we think we're solving.
cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/2114210
> Ever wonder why our young people are incompetent and depressed? > > We raised the age to "protect" them.
The Culprit is Nature
cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/3618558
> "sexualization" is 100% bullshit > > The entire concept is crap. Like totally absurd. > > Mandrills have colorful noses. We have beards and boobs. Exactly the same function. We are sexual. We have sexual bodies with sexual body parts. > > #Monkey #Peacock #Sex #Sexual #Sexy #Hot #Cute