Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has urged Australian children to read a book as Australia’s social media ban for under 16s comes into force.
From December 10, children under 16 will be locked out of popular social media profiles, including Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and Reddit. In a video message, Mr Albanese told children on Tuesday they “know better than anyone” the pressure of “growing up with algorithms.”
“Above all, make the most of the school holidays coming up, rather than spending it scrolling on your phone,” he said. “Start a new sport, learn a new instrument, or read that book that has been sitting there on your shelf for some time. Importantly, spend quality time with your friends and your family face-to-face.” Amen. Ireland should make a similar law here.
If you want to know what happens if you let social media take over the lives of children and teenagers look no further than 27 year old virgin Nicholas Joseph Fuentes. Fuentes gave an interview to Piers Morgan this week which confirmed that he is an ignorant fool, who is rubbish with the ladies.
I was shocked, I tell you, when Fuentes admitted to Piers Morgan (who for some unknown reason decided to interview him) that at the ripe old age of 27 he has never had sex with a woman. Shocking. In an not unrelated development, Fuentes confirmed that he believes that Hitler was “cool” because of his parades. If you say so.
In a wide ranging interview Fuentes added that he would not want his imaginary children that he had with his imaginary wife to bring back a black person they were dating. I mean, what’s not to like?
There is a serious point here however. First, although you may never have heard of Fuentes he has enormous influence on the next generation, or at least a growing segment of it. His idiotic takes get millions of views. When Morgan challenged Fuentes on his antisemitism Fuentes simply said “(Hitler) was cool. I’m tired of pretending he’s not… The thing with my generation is that we’re done with the pearl-clutching.”
I thought this was an interesting choice of words. I think it says a lot about the west that a 27 year old virgin has a big influence with young men. Traditionally young men looked up to men who were good with the ladies, but now it seems admitting that you’re rubbish with women is a point of pride and cements your street cred with your fellow losers such that you can spread your misogyny, racism and antisemitism far and wide. But it is not just Fuentes’ ignorance and all round hate of others that is the problem. It is the fact he lacks all empathy, which is summed with the phrase ‘we are done with the pearl clutching.’
When Fuentes says he is done with the pearl clutching he means, quite simply, that he doesn’t care. He doesn’t care about historical wrongs and I suspect the reason he doesn’t care is that he has never read a book and his brain has been turned to Swiss cheese by the internet. The fact that he just parades his ignorance on the internet for all to see demonstrates what a nincompoop he is.
If you are to believe the media, the generation Fuentes represents are not just “done with pearl clutching,” but they are done with reading books, they are done with drinking with friends and they are done with sex. They are, in short, done with life. If this is your philosophy it makes sense then that you don’t care about anyone, especially women. If you did care about other people then you might end up connecting with another human person which can be scary. Best to remain in your mother’s basement getting a history lesson from TikTok.
Indeed Hillary Clinton was complaining the other week that young people don’t understand the history of Israel as they were getting all their info off TikTok. But it’s not just Israel, there is widespread ignorance among the youth on anything important. Their attention spans have been wrecked by swiping social media and TikTok (which is not the same as TV or even gaming.) The Australian social media ban is necessary not just to stop the youth from falling into abject depression and to halt their brains turning to mush but more importantly to increase their empathy.
Reading non – fiction books is important but not as important as fiction. It is fiction that lands the punches, that allows you to stand in another person’s shoes and walk around in them for a while. Reading books develops empathy. You must enter the courtroom and watch Atticus Finch defend Tom Robinson to even start to understand the racism of the deep south. You must feel the heat in that segregated courtroom while the all-white jury condemns Tom Robinson for a crime he didn’t commit. You cannot live the outrageous injustice of it all without reading To Kill a Mockingbird.
Harriet Beecher Stowe was moved by empathy in her display of “pearl clutching” over the evils of slavery. Stowe, who had seven children, lost a baby. This was a key motivator in her writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the book that started this great war, according to Abraham Lincoln. In it a mother overhears that one of her children is to be sold away from her in a slave auction. This was frequent in the deep south. Stowe has the mother escape in the dead of night with her child in a desperate attempt to keep him. Stowe asks the reader, “If it were your Harry, mother, or your Willie, that were going to be torn from you by a brutal trader, tomorrow morning,—if you had seen the man, and heard that the papers were signed and delivered, and you had only from twelve o’clock till morning to make good your escape,—how fast could you walk?”
If you stand in Auschwitz with the Librarian of Auschwitz perhaps you can start to understand the humiliation and desperation of those who were there. The Jews had already been banned from their employment, their children turned out of school, then forced into a ghetto until they finally ended up in a death camp with the ashes of their fellow Jews murdered the night before raining down on top of them. Just how did it come to this?
When you are with the German soldiers in the trenches listening to the rats feasting on the flesh of their dead fellow soldiers in no man’s land at the start of All Quiet on the Western Front you begin to understand the futility of war. But to the likes of Fuentes any emotional reaction to this grotesque loss of life is useless ‘pearl clutching.’
If the future belongs to 27 year old virgins who think Hitler is cool, and understand historical wrongs as “pearl clutching” then I’m heading to the jewelers to stock up on more pearls to clutch. Most of this anti-human degeneracy can be linked back to young people spending too much time scrolling the internet on their smartphones. It is time we seriously considered a social media ban for the youth in Ireland.