But I'm just a guy who only learned how to brush his teeth properly and got glasses as a child because we had both a dentist and a doctor come to school on a regular basis. The dentist would have us all stand in a circle with our little toothbrushes and show us how to brush and correct our technique. The doctors would give us general health assessments and then have the teachers contact our patents and essentially peer pressure them into getting us any health intervention we needed. My parents only reluctantly got me glasses because they knew the teachers would judge them if they kept seeing me sit in the very front row and still squint to see the chalkboard. So I'm biased.

The only times I ever remember seeing a dentist or doctor as a child was at school. I'm quite healthy physically and I'm very grateful for all the care I got from the various professionals who cared about my well-being and development more than my actual parents did.

We had free healthcare including dental, mind you, my parents just couldn't be bothered. When my brother, as a teenager, asked our mother if she could take him to his orthodontist appointments (which he'd already arranged for on his own) she basically told him she didn't feel like it and he had to take the bus.

If I could improve anything about that system, I'd take it even further and make it so kids could see a doctor and get meds, treatments, therapy, tests, disability aids etc. without having to rely on their parents as well. I shouldn't have had to put up with being bullied and guilt-tripped about the family finances and the time investment needed to take me to the optometrist every time I needed new glasses.

Some parents would not take care of their children even if they were given all the time and the resources. Mine are a great example of that — my mother stopped working and became a homemaker when I was in kindergarten, my father worked from the garage and was also always home. They had a car and our village even had a bus that would come once or twice an hour that would take you to the next two bigger cities.

Did that, plus the free healthcare, translate into them actually parenting and caring for us properly? It did not. They only ever did any of that reluctantly when not doing it would make them look bad, and most of the time they did a shitty job because they could never resist the urge to boost their egos by means of bullying literal children.

So I have to wonder: what did they actually contribute to our upbringing? Like they didn't teach us shit and mostly they just endangered our mental and physical health — but hey, at least they gave me cPTSD! That took some work too.

see also family abolition, and youth liberation .

A knee-jerk response to neglectful parenting I see a lot is “people should have to get licenses and take rigorous tests to PROVE that they should be ALLOWED to have kids” which is eugenics. That’s just the starting line for eugenics.

We are at a point in humanity where there is no meaningful reason why we shouldn’t be structuring our societies around wellbeing for all instead of wellbeing for the “deserving”.

Assume some parents will fail. Build social infrastructure that is designed to support failed kids rather than punish would-be parents.

Parents do not have to be neglectful to fail!

They can be busy, tired, stressed about finances, ignorant, etc. They can want to do the best for their kid and Fail Anyways.

The best thing is to support the children and give them the tools they need to succeed even if the parents are already giving them those tools. Because you can never learn something too much.

Also sometimes parents become disabled or die and family can't always be counted on, and sometimes there isn't other family

Time to roll out the Andrew Marr quote again...

"If you put away social media and you walk out into the streets and you look at real people, three-dimensional people, they mostly smile back at you. If you look around you- you see perfectly decent, ordinary people getting on with their lives and inclined, by and large, to rather like each other, that is the real us. Let us not be fooled."

why did somebody tag this as #contusion. is that for like an injury-based filing system or

Hello to everyone who saw this post and decided that to pay their credit card bill. Happy Pay Your Credit Card Bill Day.

good news: there is!

I cannot stress enough how much I adore re-read comments. Leave one each and every time, and I will be equally delighted each and every time.

I love you, one and done readers. But re-readers who tell me they’re back???? I did it. I wrote a story people want to revisit. I wrote a story people remember. YES.

Oh jesus, I thought this person was exaggerating until I dared try this out of morbid curiosity. I hate the state of society 🤮

#and that's why people who think they can use gen ai 'in a smart controlled way' are kidding themselves #it is a tool but it's being used on you not by you #anti ai

Your six-word text post activated my special interest and now like a sleeper agent I’m going to share some historical context that nobody asked for on the homoeroticization of the word ‘buddy’...

An excerpt from Chapter 7 (“Comrades in Arms”) of Allan Bérubé’s Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II (1990):

By encouraging men [in the military] to pair up, the buddy systems gave a respectability to devoted male couples, whether or not they included gay men, that was unusual in civilian life. Even constant companions were protected from harassment by temporarily narrow definitions of deviant relationships. “The choice of a buddy,” explained Stewart Stern, who after the war was screenwriter for the film Rebel Without a Cause, “was as or more critical than that of a bride. You'd be living in a kind of physical intimacy which was unlike any other. The classic David Duncan photos of buddies consoling each other, those who had lost their buddies, was very expressive of this. And what greater love song in those days than ‘My Buddy’? Men were having the experience of never having been so close to other men.” Buddies watched out for each other, prayed for each other, did their best not to let each other down.
To outsiders the open affection that buddies expressed toward one another, which was captured in wartime photographs, can appear to be surprisingly “gay.” Gay civilians at the time clipped buddy photographs from magazines, such as one from Life of two GIs sleeping with their bodies intertwined on a park bench, as rare keepsake images of male intimacy. In the 1980s the popular wartime song “My Buddy” became a signature piece for many gay men's choruses, who recognized in its lyrics an open expression of male love that was rare in American society outside of gay life.

The photograph in Life magazine referenced above:

Source: Life Magazine, September 13, 1943, pg. 30. Accessed via Google Books.

The excerpt also references the 1922 song “My Buddy,” which is so worth a listen if you’re not familiar:

This is one of the earliest recordings by Henry Burr, and it has been covered many times since. My favorite version is Frank Sinatra’s 1939 cover with Harry James and his orchestra. I’m also very fond of Chet Baker’s 1954 version with his signature soft vocals, but I digress…

The point is, check out these lyrics:

Nights are long since you went away
I think about you all through the day
My buddy, my buddy
Nobody quite so true

Miss your voice, the touch of your hand
Just long to know that you understand
My buddy, my buddy
Your buddy misses you

Buddies through all of the gay days
Buddies when something went wrong
I wait alone through the gray days
Missing your smile and your song…

Source: “My Buddy” sheet music, 1922. Accessed via University of Maine Digital Commons.

The first time I heard this song I actually looked up the history and etymology of the word “buddy” to see if it had a (heterosexual) romantic connotation in the early 20th century, and could find no evidence that it did. As far as I can tell, this is a song about friendship expressed with a passion that by modern sensibilities comes off as intensely romantic. And, as Bérubé suggests, was adopted by the queer community as early as the 1940’s (and likely before) as an expression of gay love--

(the homoeroticization of the word ‘buddy,’ as it were).