Comment by lm28469
6 months ago
I feel like the patterns are more or less the same but the cycles are getting shorter and more pronounced.
I met the son of a family friend today, he's 13, already has an opinion about the Israel/Palestine war and spent $500 in roblox so far, they're not wealthy at all. Back in my days I was stuck in the free to play parts of mmorpgs (or had to beg for months for a $5 monthly membership), playing tf2 (free) and had 0 political ideas or even knew people who cared about politics
It really is not beyond the reach of a motivated and curious 13 year old to have an informed opinion on (geo)politics.
You don't gave to be particularly motivated to get predigested opinions from influencers. There's too damn many boys and young men echoing how the "Matrix" keeping them down
Sure, but that has little to do with age. To rephrase in terms of an older crowd, there’s too many damn 60+ year old men parroting what they hear on conservative AM talk radio. But there are, nevertheless, 60+ year old men with well informed and well considered opinions.
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When I was 13 I had a paper route and mowed lawns, and with those earnings I spent about $75 per month on video games and comic books, easily exceeding $500 over a year.
This to me on a surface level this seems totally fine, however I can't help to feel conflicted when that money is being spent on some of the more "predatory" games like gachas, however I'm not sure if it's really too different from kids spending their money on pokemon cards either. Do you feel different about those or would you say it's the same thing?
There’s nothing to say it was predatory games. Roblox is a platform with a vast number of games from unaffiliated developers.
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It's normal for 13 year olds to have strong opinions on such topics - they have plenty of time to refine them or even change their mind.
I would be more worried about those who by this age didn't develop any interest in geopolitics - it affects them all the same but they typically don't understand why and pick whatever source tells a more compelling story.
When I was 13 (in the US in the 1970s) none of my classmates or friends ever expressed any interest in geopolitics or international relations.
That's probably the benefit of you not being 24/7 glued to the broadcast system called social media. I imagine in the 70s you spent your time mostly with friends in real life, and geopolitics was just 10 easily missable minutes on TV every evening.
Sure maybe there's a minority of kids with social media/smartphone bans nowadays, but they're probably as plentiful as 13 year olds interested in geopolitics in the 1970s.
I browse Instagram's TikTok clone ("Reels") when idle, it's rather dull, when that hurricane hit a few weeks ago, the stories were all about that, a few days later it was forgotten. Obviously, lately it's been about Luigi Mangione...
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No one had an opinion about Vietnam? I was 13 in 2003, plenty of people had an opinion about 9/11, civil liberties, and Iraq.
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$500 in Roblox? that's a lot of money for a 13 year old and that money could likely be spent elsewhere... As far as the opinion about Israel/Palestine it's likely that opinion is inherited from family or cohort and it's not fully their own.
I recall in grade school in the 80's lots of kids had opinions on Jews, Poles, black folks, gay folks, etc. Clearly, all acquired from relatives.
Young people emulating the adults in their life is how it always has been.
Oh yea I was a big Republican when I was in high school because I went to a private school and all my friends were also Republicans (except the theater students). We were all Republicans because our parents were Republicans.
Then I got several years in the workforce and realized I wanted nothing to do with the Republican party.
If you don't have decades of built up propaganda it's pretty easy to see that Israel is the bad guy. The condescending "it's complicated" line is part of the propaganda telling you that you're not allowed to come to the obvious conclusion for yourself. My 10 year has figured out that Russia is the bad guy in Ukraine and that Israel is the bad guy in Gaza.
Must be nice if politics is just good and bad guys for you.
It should give you some pause that a 10 yo has the same level of understanding of global politics.
Yes, it's pretty scary that anyone sees things so black and white and would encourage their children to do the same. These are multi-decade conflicts where no one has clean hands.
10 year olds can figure out that killing children for 14 months is evil . That everyone can't see that is the power of propaganda.
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> Must be nice if politics is just good and bad guys for you.
Some politics are more complicated. Other politics are treated as more complicated because people get uncomfortable when you point out that they're casually endorsing-via-silence the mass murder of one group of people by another.
There's nothing complicated there. If you as a nation state or standing army are obliterating an opponent that can't fight back in a meaningful way, with lethal force, along an ethnic or racial line, that's a genocide. That's just what that is. The past year of desperate attempts by the West to re-frame it as something else have not been successful for exactly that reason.
And before you say it, no Palestine is not innocent. But unless I missed some pretty radical court proceedings in the UN, the punishment for their crimes as a state was not ruled to be "Israel gets to ethnically cleanse you" which is what is now happening.
> It should give you some pause that a 10 yo has the same level of understanding of global politics.
Kids aren't inherently stupid either. Kids have a lot of good questions to ask about our modern world and the fact that you don't have answers beyond "that's the way it always has been" both a) does not make that complete horseshit far more often than not, and b) does not make the question somehow lesser compared to you, irrespective of how many journey's around the sun they've taken.
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Well he didn't have decades of propaganda but still roots for Israel... I didn't mention this subject there because I have better things to do with my time than ruin Christmas by talking politics with teenagers so I can't tell you where he got that from
> If you don't have decades of built up propaganda
But how are you so sure that doesn't apply to you?
I'm saying it doesn't apply to my 10 year old
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If Ukraine's fighting back include indiscriminate bombing of the majority of Russian cities, cutting off their water and food supplies (letting Ukrainian civilians attack aide trucks), then, we'd have more equivalence in your ridiculously simplistic logic.
That's a 40 year old pretending to be 5 year old, not a proper 13 year old zo
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