Hmm. Consider this said earlier in this thread:
Me, I just enjoy this site, as I have enjoyed the books for the past twenty or so years. Was the OP right? Yes, in that the site shouldn’t have been on a “kids safe” list, IMHO. However – I wonder if the author of the OP has also conveyed his concerns to the list site?
Guess we’ll never know for sure.
Sounds to me like the OP is the author of the list site. Or at least one of them.
Hey, yeah. I see that now. Perhaps copied it from elsewhere on the Net, as folk do?
Ah. Okay, that makes more sense. I thought you were talking about the policy regarding posting copyrighted material on the boards.
I still don’t think it should be the SDMB’s responsibility to monitor who’s reading or linking to the site, though, any more than it’s Quentin Tarantino’s responsibility to make sure that theater’s aren’t letting unaccompanied 6 year old’s in to see his movies or the Playboy Channel’s responsibility to make sure you aren’t parking your rugrats down to watch their programming. People linking to supposed “kid-friendly” sites should be actually looking at the sites before they program in that link.
Damn. I do know how to properly use apostrophes, I swear. :smack:
Not really the SD site owner’s responsibility, Kat – just something they might want to be aware of. For the next time someone like mablache comes in shocked and flurried.
I agree 100%. Well said.
Chronos said:
My wife and I would be such parents. Our children are grown now, but when they were young we would certainly not have censored their reading of The Straight Dope or its message board. We’d have introduced them to it and discussed it with them, including the notion that no one (not even Cecil) should be taken as absolute, infallible authority, without considering other sources or arguments, and drawing rational conclusions about the probability of who’s right. Fighting ignorance is especially important with the young, as it’s during the formative years that a healthy, functioning Shit Detector needs to be developed. Trying to pretend to kids that the word “shit” doesn’t exist is not doing them any good. I can’t see it being of any benefit to a child to grow up unnaturally sheltered from reality for eighteen or twenty years and then be suddenly thrown into the world as it really is and told to deal with it as an “adult”.
That anyone can be “SHOCKED” (it’s always in capital letters, of course) by the use of terms like “brick shithouse” (let alone a scrawled line drawing of an obese female in a bikini) is really pretty amazing. Victoria has been dead for over a century, and Bowdler for nearly two, and I mean, shit, even the Queen had to take a dump every now and then. And nearly-naked fat ladies can be seen at any beach or poolside. In a world where things like American Idol, Snoop Dogg, WWF, Botox and Donald Rumsfeld are popular with millions of people and seen on tv even during prime time, it’s hard to see how anybody could be shocked by anything as innocuous as “built like a brick shithouse”.
I think the shock was more the fact it was listed as a kid friendly site more than of the content alone. I agree that sheltering kids and then throwing them into the real world would actually be damaging.
It’s true that children are not allowed to register here, but so far as I know there’s no rule against children reading the columns or the message boards. That’s what I was referring to.
I would say this site should have a PG rating, but nothing worse. I would like to challenge anyone out there to find a more mature, intelligent, spam-free, flame-free discussion group environment than we have here. I have been around the web since day one, let me tell ya, things are pretty ugly out there. I finally found a forum where people can discuss interesting subject matter without turning the place into a flame war, and that forum is right here folks. I just want to say thank you to all the people behind the scenes that make this website a reality. Good job people.
I’m still wondering how this could be a scientific site. For the short time that I have been reading the SD, the most scientific thing I have seen was about the caloric content of semen. Which I’m sure is now taught in Elementary nutrtion classes, and maybe some 5th grader will do a science project on it some day, but for the most part it isn’t a scientific site. More of a philosophy site, where everything is open to debate or comment.
P.S. Do any of you’re kids play with Barbie? Her clothes come all the way off.
Actually, I think this message board is a great way to expose kids to the world of intelligent adults grappling with ideas in a direct and uninhibited manner. If others want to keep their kids from seeing it, fine, but really, you’d have to be Ned Flanders to find this site offensive in any sense of the word.
I’d let my kids read the main site, but not the message board. If I had kids. Which I don’t. And I’m glad.
But I wouldn’t characterize the Dope as a ‘kid-friendly site.’
I’m confused about why the OP would put it on a list of resources for kids without reviewing it thoroughly- it really doesn’t take too much browsing, imho, before you come across content that some parents wouldn’t appreciate their children reading.
I also find it odd that she/he would post with such an offended tone. Is it the fault of the Straight Dope that she assumed the site was appropriate for her list without looking closely at it? She isn’t clear about what her list’s purpose is or what age-level kids it is aimed at, and there’s no link in her profile.
I agree that it is a wonderful exposure, unless that is, you still want you’re children to believe you know everything. I just don’t see how it is scientific.
Heck, muh Paw gave me the first Straight Dope book when I was 13 or 14.
It made a man of me.
[sub]Fuggin’ A.[/sub]
Why wouldn’t it be considered scientific? GQ and GD alone are very scientific, applying logic to rational discourse, buttressed by citations from scientific sources.
Then there’s the approach to finding out if a duck’s quack echos, where Cecil has his minions catch a duck to record it quack. Data collection! Or how about the column where Cecil has staff members get sucked by mosquitos to attempt to make them explode? Data collection!
The mosquitos explode, not the staff members.
Well, at least until the shrieking insults and Nazi references prompt a swift displacement to the Pit.