Interesting Links for 26-05-2025

[andrewducker]

1. If you want a picture of the future, imagine an AI reassuring you that everything is okay — forever

(tags:ai thefuture comic )

2. Stillbirth surveillance shows why we must decriminalise abortion

(tags:abortion death children law uk )

3. I am not consistently this good at raising children. But this is very-much what I am aiming for

(tags:children parenting )

4. Utah lawmakers' demanded a study on gender-affirming care. Guess what they found...

(tags:transgender healthcare USA politics )

Comments

[calimac]

3) Wow. Any attempt I made as a child to explain the reasons for my disapproved behavior was immediately shut down as “talking back.” As an adult, I spent the rest of my parents’ lives resenting them for that, though I didn’t make the connection until more recently. It did not improve my adult relations with them.

[cmcmck]

This might both amuse and interest you:

https://www.thepinknews.com/2025/05/26/trans-protest-downing-street-london-supreme-court/

[haggis]

In the spirit of 3, I offer this

https://sandersstudies.tumblr.com/post/784545261838057472

I would be fascinated to hear from the OP's parents. That sounds like an ideal to aim for but I don't know if it would always work.

[liv]

Childrearing: there's no foolproof way to consistently get children to behave (i.e. do what adults want) because they are in fact autonomous people. Also little children are sometimes emotionally overwhelmed and may be unable to do anything at all in the moment other than scream and lash out, it doesn't matter how well they understand they reasons why it's important not to act like that, or what incentives they have for stopping that problem behaviour, they just can't.

The same is true of adults really; very few adults make the morally and socially desirable choice at all times in all circumstances. So whether you enforce behaviour through punishment or respectful discussion or physical force or whatever is not really a question of effectiveness, it's a moral question. A person may believe it's wrong to threaten a child or to coerce them, and that is a reasonable position to hold. But neither a fearful child nor a respected child is always going to behave perfectly, cos they're human and humans don't behave perfectly.

[foms]

1. Be of Good Cheer, by Fritz Leiber, Galaxy Magazine - October 1964
https://www.luminist.org/archives/SF/GAL.htm

3. My mom had a degree in psychology and a career teaching special needs children before me and another degree in social work and another career as a child care case-worker, after I arrived. Her sommunications with my dad about raising children were often interesting, even to me, at the time.
https://www.libraryofshortstories.com/onlinereader/a-bottomless-grave (Ambrose Bierce, 1888)
More than anything, the fourth paragraph.
and
https://web.archive.org/web/20210725070404/https://www.kirstenenglish.com/uploads/2/5/6/7/25677021/ourtownpdf.pdf (Thornton Wilder, 1938)
Dr. Gibbs: "Well, George, while I was in my office today I heard a funny sound…and what
do you think it was? It was your mother chopping wood. There you see your
mother…getting up early; cooking meals all day long; washing and ironing and
still she has to go out in the back yard and chop wood. I suppose she just got
tired of asking you. She just gave up and decided it was easier to do it herself.
And you eat her meals, and put on the clothes she keeps nice for you, and you
run off and play baseball…like she's some hired girl we keep around the house
but that we don't like very much. Well, I knew all I had to do was call your
attention to it. Here's a handkerchief, son."