Nah you dont talk to casual libs enough. They read about a genocide of Uighers and believe it and thats it. Its an incredibly effective psyop. To believe noone actually believes its actually real is silly. Not that long ago i posted something from an anticolonial account posting awareness of all the ongoing genocides on the planet (you can find it in my post history). It wasnt one of the main ones, bit deep in the replies it did mention Xinjiang and the invasion of Ukraine as ongoing genocides too. Well meaning people sincerely believe it because its a psyop that targets well meaning people.

I'm a little bit worried about your own instincts if you dont think "a 13 year old was in a cage for two weeks" isnt viscerally upsetting to anyone whos "sympathetic to the left".

I saw a comrade calling this whole thing bad on twitter and one of his replies called Chuck his "fellown communist" lol

I literally didnt even realize that when I wrote it plus like, the actual information is right there in the screenshot so the fact that people took it as as Maduro calling him gay came as a complete shock to me because I only thought of the scientific term.

Jocks weren't even my main issue in school really. Team sports themselves were bullying central but like. In highschool a lot of the football kids were nice to me. Not all my bullies were athletic. My experiance with bullying defied the stereotypes shown in movies in many ways!

This isnt about that. its about the well documented problems with athletic programs for kids that exist right now. Is my experience universal? No, because not every kid is an uncoordinated autistic kid with negative athletic ability lol. But it is pretty fucking common and other people in this thread have talked about it.

Those need to be fixed. The fix isnt abolishing sports programs obviously. But there does need to be cultural change. Because until there is theres going to be a lot of disabled kids going through traumatic experiences.

Like idk I dont get your reaction here like do you think my solution is to abolish sports? The only ones I'd even consider that for are golf for environmental reasons and even then I'm fine with driving ranges and mini golf. Others have said abolish american football (gridiron) but I'm not even sure i'n behind that. Though there are serious reforms that have to be made for contact sports so kids because of concussions and shit. But sports that aren't even high contact like basketball and soccer? Totally fine with me lol. I'm not trying to abolish them. I'm trying to make reforms to the culture surrounding them. Toxic sports parents, shitty abusive coaches, the bullying culture, the way many schools are biased towards athletes, ect ect ect.

Jocks arent an opressed group lol please calm down. Yes athletes have other hobbies and are whole humans. Im talking about cultural issues not individuals. A lot of these issues come from parents and coaches anyway.

And futhermore I'm not talking about professional athletes im talking about sports for kids. I lived in predominatly white areas so the kids who picked on me for sucking at sports were all white and my latent dislike of people that remind me too much of my bullies due to my trauma is directed based on that (ie like, a black pro athlete has never triggered that once in my life lol). I actually have similar feelings about letting go of bitterness towards bullies for various reasons i wont get into. But i learned the hard way when i tried to impose that on others that telling people how to deal with their trauma is not right and they dont have to forgive if they dont want to.

Team sports are demonstrably a bad idea for an uncordinated autistic kid like me. I become a load to the team and it doesnt work for anyone. The other kids hate me for dragging then down. Put those kids in something individual like martial arts, gymnastics, dance, even track would work.

And idk the fact that team sports for kids (and college sports to an extent too) have serious cultural issues is well documented i dont think i should even have to explain like its demonstrably true and theres mountains of evidence.

Thats certainly not the first thing I think of when I hear the team "forced into sports". That term definitely evokes being forced into little league or whatever. and RyanGosling hasn't really clarified elsewise.

I played in my backyard pretty much on my own as a kid. But I was doing like, imagination games, not really "sports". Like tech wasnt as ubiquitous then and I definitly stopped doing that after like, middle school. But I think there's a difference between "I wish my screentime had been limited" and "I wish i had been forced into sports rhetorically.

I think OP said a bit more than that. As did oregoncom. OP said he wished he was forced into sports which I can tell you is misguided on so many levels. oregoncom said we should just straight up ban video games as if games cant be a healthy part of your life or an artistic experiance, implying theyre all slop. Which is just art snobbery.

Theres a lot more going on then just "I wish I wasnt addicted to computers". If it was just that, I might agree. Though frankyl I dont reeally regret myself just existing day to day because Im disabled and capitalism doesnt really have a place for someone who functions how I do so Im just gonna keep drifting. I wish I could find time to like, read more, or learn to draw, sure. (Hell I actually wish I could find time to acutally PLAY games rather than waste time on youtube/twitch/discord. Even that would feel more productive). But I think alienation has hit me so hard that I dont really care that much anymore.

There's no way being forced to do something against your will would have changed this. I find it extremly strange that you're saying you wished your parents forced you into a socially normal box you probably were never actually suited for. My parents tried to sports me a bit, not too hard. But it never worked. So they stopped.

encouraged and forced me to do it

These are two different words you cant put an and between them like they mean the same thing. There's a huge difference between providing sports as an option and "forcing" a kid.

Like if you had been forced the chances the end result would have been you loving them would have been slim.

Does this website seriously believe that jock culture is any less toxically masculine than gamer culture or? Have we gone so far the other direction where we started realizing that nerd culture is actually just as toxicly masculine as sports bro culture, which was a good thing, but now we actually think that its only the nerds that are?

Like if this thread was about encouraging kids to disengage from screens to read or do artistic things or even do physical things on their own or with accepting friends I'd be down but team sports are fucking toxic as hell man. Unless your kid is like, actually jock-coded and can fit in they're probably going to have a bad time. And even then like, do you really want to socialize them into that culture? I question that.

ETA: I'm also put off by the art elitism in this but thats another subject.

ETA2: Actually no ok I do want to talk about that a bit. Can we like, talk about how a good parent could engage with their kid about the games they play as like... an artform? (And lso steer them away from the sloppy stuff to stuff thats actually like... good. Which like, I realize is hard for a parent to do especially if they dont know about games in their own right, like whats going on with my sister and my nephew, but its not impossible. And I dont think like, banning a form of art is really the way to solve the issue lmao.

But i absolutely of course in favor of screen time limitations. I see an increasing amount of child liberation discourse that seems to genuinly believe that you can just let 5 year olds do whatever they fuck they want and they'll end up fine, up to and including things like not enforcing a bed time, and that shit is dumb like. I do think child liberation is good in some amounts but theres obviously like... parents do need to enforce certain rules and standards on kids especially with so much brain poison out there.

But I think there's a midpoint here between "let the kids entire freetime be Fornite and Minecraft" and "just dont let the kid play games literally at all".