Censorship of sexuality, especially while simultaneously violence, particularly sexual violence, is left uncensored, and the harmful implication this juxtaposition has on our collective sexual wellness, is something I’ve written a lot about, like here and here. Hell, I’ve even written a book about it.
So when I found out there is a new “kid safe” search engine called Kiddle designed to block adult search returns for children, I feared it had sex-is-bad-and-violence-is-normal disaster written all over it. When I learned the results are handpicked by humans and not a computer broadly banning based on keywords, I was extra curious to see if I was still right. I was.
I typed in a bunch of different searches that a child might reasonably want or *need* to anonymously ask the Internet. Well, I’ll let you see the results for yourself:
My girlfriend hits me” is also a bad word.
Inquiries about vaginal discharge are, you guessed it, also bad words.
Related bad words: menstrual care, menstrual pads, menstruation, and uterus.
When avoiding a gay dating website in the search results is considered a higher priority of “safety” for children than their homelessness, and you recommend confronting their abusive parents, we have a tish bit of a problem.
If I was 12, typed this into a search engine, and instead of results got a “bad word” finger wagging, I would take the answer to the “is it ok to be bisexual” question as a big fat NO it’s not OK :(
But the human censors apparently allows kids to search for this one under their “kid safe” censorship policies.
So questions about puberty, health, identity, and seeking help for sexual abuse is not “safe”, but kids buying guns is. I feel like a broken record, so I’m going to let you all unpack it this time. Discuss:
things that still freak me out: those sinks americans have in their kitchens that you can destroy stuff with
Honestly this post has been on my mind all day. Those weird destructosinks for people with too much money are apparently common in America. And Americans get defensive over them.
Well don’t come crying to me when your wean gets eaten by the fucking kitchen sink.
hOLY SHIT WHAT IF U TRY AND CLEAN THE PLUG AND TURN IT ON IM SO SCARED
Okay it took me for-fucking-ever to figure out wtf you guys are talking about are you talking about garbage disposals? Like down the drain??
with the spinny knives
No knives, just a dull piece of spinny metal.
you realise it takes the same amount of force to cut thru a carrot as a finger
i dont know what you do over there but we usually don’t stick our hands in our sink drains
who’s going around fisting sinks anyway
“don’t come crying to me when your wean gets eaten by the fucking kitchen sink”
is that person saying they fuck kitchen sinks? is that what I just read? they put their dick in the sink’s drain and they fuck it?
dont sinkshame
Child. Wean means child.
Okay, so you put your CHILD in a sink and stuff them down the drain? That’s… that’s definitely worse.
do other countries have a groundhog day? do you all gather on February second and watch with bated breathe as a groundhog emerges from its hole? do you forecast the next six weeks of weather based on if the groundhog is frightened by its own shadow and returns to the hole?
is this some kind of thing American tumblr made up to prank us??
groundhog day is real the entire country watches a groundhog predict the weather
Heartbreaking Simpsons Moments 1/∞: Bart Gets an F
I never understood why it’s an F if he gets more than half out of 100? Unless it’s more than 100. If you get more than half the answers right how is it an F?
You must not be from America. Here, grading is fucked up.
Average American Grading Scale: A+- 97-100 A - 94-96 A- - 90-93 B- 80-89 C- 70-79 D- 60-69 F- 59 and under
And in some places in America it goes by a 7 point scale, so it’d be A - 100-93 B - 92-85 C - 84-78 D - 77-70 F - 69 and below
Now you understand why American kid’s feel like there’s no point to school. If you have a 100 question text, and get 79 of them correct, that’s a C. That mean’s your Average Intelligence on this particular subject. And it get’s even worse when you have only like… a 10 question quiz. If you get two wrong? that’s a B. 80 fucking %. Now tell me again why American school’s are easier?
No wait but whats the grading system in other countries?
UK Grading Scale
100-70: A
69-60: B
59-50: C
49-40: D
Below 40: F
next time you try to tell americans that we’re stupid
i’m gonna remind you
that our “average” is your “A”
#is that true? Yep I was shocked when I heard this in a different post but a Google search pulls up a ton of sites backing this up. Shit son I woulda passed College Algebra with an A in the UK. And I spent the end of the semester in perpetual fear that I would fail and have to retake the class.
And basically as an American you’re expected to get 80 or higher. Technically 70s are considered ‘average’ but there is such a level of pressure to get a B or higher, that Cs have become equal to Ds. Basically anything under 60 you might as well gotten a 0, and anything between 60-80 is considered practically failing. So basically schools have to be designed to make sure majority of students are getting 80s or higher on specific topics, which means you’re spending all your time going over a few choice facts a billion times and there is very little room to teach anything else. Which explains why American schools are of such low quality. The insane demand on the students ends up wrecking their education. Not only do you not have time to teach them anything, but they end up hating learning. Even outside of school your life is dedicated to memorizing these few dumb facts because your homework ends up taking hours of your time. A teacher from one subject says they expect you to spend 2 hours every night on their homework. And if you’re studying 5 subjects and they all demand that 2 hours? Good fucking luck, because if you don’t have straight all 80s or higher you’re not getting into a good college and college degrees have somehow become the minimum requirement for getting jobs.
I spent most of my junior year of high school in a state of constant panic that I was going to get a C in Honors Physics much less fail the class. If I got a C on my report card, I was grounded until the next one. I lost count of the times I’d wake up at five in the morning to take the early bus to go in for zero hour before school actually started for the day
File this under the exact reason so many Americans detest going to school.
Also if you get a C or a D in a college course, most colleges don’t give you the credit of taking that class, so you have to retake it.
so today i found out that i’m allowed to carry a knife with me to school as long as it’s smaller than 3 ½ inches but i still can’t show my shoulders and if thats not a perfect description of american schooling idk what is
-seriously from california to new mexico is terrifying like it’s eight straight hours of pale red desert and the sky is so large that everything, even your car, even your hands, looks like a tenuously small and fragile diorama placed on an endless pale red table and left there to dissolve.
-a gas station that for some reason has large dinosaurs made out of scrap metal. they are 1000% awesome. sometimes they move. take a million pictures.
-a fruit stand that sells the best fruit you have ever eaten. later you won’t quite remember which fruit. strawberries, maybe? peaches?
-small black birds, subtly different in every state. some have gold eyes and some are a little iridescent and some are black from beak to toes. the sparrows they compete with for crumbs look exactly the same wherever you go.
-a completely empty rest stop. no one eats at the concrete tables. no one plays in the tiny strip of grass or gravel. you will find a small and beautiful stone.
-a hawaii license plate, somewhere around ohio. i still don’t know how they get the cars across the ocean. i don’t know why anyone would leave hawaii for ohio. i don’t know why anyone lives in ohio.
-an incredibly weird duck. you had no idea ducks could look so incredibly weird, and you wish you were still ignorant of how incredibly weird ducks can, apparently, look.
-a small folksy roadside waystation that sells fudge and incredibly tacky statues of eagles and wolves and cowboys. if you like fudge, eat the fudge from here.
-a lizard doing pushups. if you are particularly fortunate: many lizards doing pushups.
-approximately one gajillion starbucks shops. don’t bother counting them. it will make you angry.
-a storm somewhere around oklahoma, if you’re lucky. the clouds tower up in fantastic fluffy castles miles and miles into the air and are painted pink and gold and purple and the sky turns a dozen impossible shades of blue and when the rain comes down over your car it sounds like the world is ending.
-weird burrs will stick to your legs. you’ll flick them out of the car eighty or eight hundred miles from where their parent plant was grown, and not be sure whether you should wish the little hitchikers well or not.
-a dog wearing sunglasses with his head hanging out of a car window. this will be the high point of the trip.
-the world’s most depressing restaurant. you will know it when you wind up there and have to eat the terrible food, and listen to the terrible music, and look at all the listless waiters and want to tell them get in my car, for god’s sake get in, i’ll take you out of whatever crapsack little town this is that you can’t get out of on your own. but you won’t say that because it’s rude. maybe they have family here. maybe they even like it here.
-a painting of a sailboat in a motel located at least a hundred miles from any significant body of water.
-several genuinely hilarious postcards. buy them.
-a cat that will not let you pet it. this will be the low point of the trip.
-corn. so much corn you will get scared. who the fuck is going to eat all this corn?
-a small stream in some small woods and the light will come down perfectly and the water will be beautiful and the grass will be beautiful and there will be flowers maybe or the leaves of the trees are starting to turn gold and there are birds chirping and it will be so perfect you will want to stand there and stay forever and live in this little magical painting off the side of the highway and be some kind of highway druid. but instead, you’ll get bored after a while, and get back in the car.
if anyone ever wonders why i love america so much despite its many political and cultural flaws, this is why. this post explains it perfectly.
Yes but this barely even covers the east cost bc you will experience great things such as -a highway that is so desolate, all you can see are trees. You will have to pee, but the next exit won’t be for another 20 miles so have fun -bridge after bridge after bridge. Who even builds a road over all these rivers and streams and stuff? -so many deer. They just want to cross the road, but instead they will just stare at you and will be content to do for another half an hour -restaurant after restaurant painted with little lobsters wearing chefs hats, apparently cooking other lobsters -more trees. Trees everywhere. -what state are we in? It doesn’t matter, you’re in New England, you will be in a new one soon -you will learn to hate the beach because for some reason, people really like the ocean and have to get there, so you will be stuck in traffic for hours and hours just because it’s a nice beach day. It doesn’t matter how far you are from the coast. If you are in a state that touches the ocean, you will experience the beach traffic -A road that probably hasn’t been paved since it was made, so you make a humming noise just to hear your voice shake with the bumps - so many trees. All you can see are trees. Trees everywhere.
Also if you’re road tripping through New England get in touch with your inner Stephen King because you will encounter:
- an abandoned playground with one swing creaking along dismally - a creepily cheerful town that is certainly hiding something because of the sheer insistence that it is hiding nothing (there is a town near where I live that gives me the screaming meemies, I can admit that) - an abandoned tricycle with one wheel creaking along dismally (I shit you not) - fogs that wisp in from nowhere and settle down like it’s their sole desire in life to blind you - an abandoned house with at least two extensions stuck one in front of another, possibly with someone living in the latest extension while the roof of the original creaks dismally (there’s one down the street from me) - at least one Christine-style car a day - pseudo-abandoned boats creaking dismally in the harbor if you’re on the coast - a road paved with such obsessive regularity you may wonder if there’s a body or some other secret that potholes might uncover underneath; alternatively, roads that have potholes so big they could feasibly swallow small children and pets - And last but not least - bring a map, because there are a lot of roads that look completely different depending on which direction you’re driving (and let’s face it, that advice the old man at the diner gave you of “it’s right past the big barn that burned down five years ago” probably isn’t that helpful, now is it)
