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by phatskat 14 days ago
Sure, kids will encounter a lot of things, but there’s a difference between coddling and having conversations when the time is right (well, better - there’s rarely a correct time in any exact sense with kids).

Our kid is old enough now to have a good grasp on “world war 2 was bad, nazis are bad”, and if they were to hop on this server and then we have discussions surrounding ie the “obsidian swaztikas” mentioned above, I think it would go alright.

This kid is also smart, and emotionally aware, and actually a pretty cool dude. They can swear around us, and never in anger towards someone, and tbh they’ve said “oh shit” once while playing a game with us because they got spooked and last night during a run on Marathon they went “hey phatskat, I might use a swear word”. I asked what they wanted to say and why they were hesitant (since they know the rule that it’s ok generally), and they explained that swearing makes the “queasy” lol. A couple minutes later they went “ok, I’m gonna say it. Fuck yeah!”

All that is to say, I don’t feel like they’re coddled, and they also aren’t just going to grow up like I did in the Wild West of the 90’s internet. I saw a LOT of things I shouldn’t have, way too soon, and I also grew up in an environment where hiding that from my parents was the safest option. So yeah me and my friends swore and made off color jokes around each other because the adults would get mad, despite us learning a lot of the crude stuff from them and then Something Awful et al. In hiding it, I felt like the harder topics were absolutely not able to be broached with my parents, and looking back on it that sucks.

The way my partner and I are approaching it is to be up front and have the conversations we can at the kid’s level in a way that makes sense (eg age six: war bad, age ten: World War Two was a war about…).

There’s a middle ground between coddling and bootstraps, and it’s the kind of parenting I want to encourage others to do if they can.

1 comments

You making the rest of the world foam padded because you don't want to control what your kid can access is gross. The rest of the world didn't have a kid. You did.
That’s a wild take tbh. In a different comment I did say that ideally the community would’ve taken action before MS had to step in. I don’t want to make the world “foam padded”, and in particular when it comes to fascism it should be stomped out wherever it appears, point blank. It’s a bummer that Microsoft came in and threatened to blacklist the server, and at the same time if you have a nazi in your bar and you don’t kick them out, you own a nazi bar.

Yes, my kids will run in to nazism in the wild, and I can’t control that, and if they ran into in a Minecraft server we’d talk about that and maybe even make an effort to clean it up ourselves - that’s what I think that community and frankly any community that doesn’t want to be a nazi community should do.

Having a Nazi in a bar doesn't make it Nazi bar. It creates a tendency to become a Nazi bar, which can be counteracted by other forces.

If that logic held water, having a communist in a bar would make it a communist bar, which is ludicrous.

That’s a false equivalence and imo disingenuous - Nazis are understood by the broad majority to be “bad”. We, the public, don’t want nazis around - period. If I go to a bar and there’s a handful of obvious nazis there, I’m leaving because said bar has said “we’re ok with Nazis” and that’s a Nazi bar.

Most communists don’t hold abhorrent beliefs such as “Jewish people should be eradicated” or “the world belongs to the aryan race”, but a Nazi is a Nazi, there’s no grey area there.

That presumes:

1) that said bar knows everyone's political mindset, including those which haven't been made public;

2) that said bar actually treats said Nazi with decency;

Also, most communists hold the belief that there must be a violent revolution and the opposition should be executed, specially those of the tankie variety.

Edit: I have noticed you switched the count of Nazis from singular to plural ("if you have a nazi in your bar" -> "If I go to a bar and there’s a handful of obvious nazis") while proposing I'm being disingenuous. This might not have mattered to you, but the prevalence of an ideology is very important to whether a bar "is a Nazi bar" or "happens to have a Nazi".

1) I did say “obvious Nazis”

2) letting a Nazi be at your bar is decency imo

3) “most” is doing some heavy lifting, and even so, you are showing the shades of communism. Nazism expresses an ideology of hate and racial superiority, it’s a completely different beast. (And yes I know that communism has been party to some ethnic cleansing such as in Stalinist Russia, however, that belief system of ethnic superiority is not inherent to communism)