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Comment by BasedAnon | Hacker News Reader

You shouldn't be, 13 year olds have complex reasoning and the physical capability. 14 year olds used to be expected to fight wars.

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I'd be surprised if a 30yo could keep a 1, 4, and 9 alive in the jungle for 40 days.

A 30yo with no experience in the outdoors, maybe

Big difference between a 30 year old westerner who’s never been more than 500m from a paved highway and is afraid of spiders and a 13-year-old indigenous child who grew up in the jungle

I do believe we are in agreement, yes

Ah yes, our species has always lived in air conditioned houses

Definitely not a normal 13 year old. Taking care of a 1 year old in ideal conditions is already a challenge (even for an adult!), but doing so in the Amazon for over a month is a different ballgame. Also, the older siblings’ mental state must have been all over the place.

What do you mean by normal? Having an adolescence centered around indulgence and freedom from responsibility was not the norm anywhere, historically, and is not the norm in many places today. Waiting until adulthood to learn practical skills (whatever those might be) is a little weird, if you think about it.

“Normal” as in, if you take a random 13 year old off the street and throw them into the Amazon with their younger siblings, they wouldn’t be able to keep a 1 year old alive for a month.

I’m not talking about history. I’m talking about the current state of the world.

Its not likely a random 33 year old would fare better to be honest

Current state of whose world? At 13 many of us had been intimately involved in raising infants and toddlers for years. It's not surprising that the 13-year-old in question is a girl.

She was able to do it in the Amazon because that's an environment she knows. Many, many others may not be able to do it in the Amazon specifically, but would be able to do so in a wilderness that they know.

Not your world - the world, i.e., reality. I’m not sure how I could have been any clearer about this.

I mean, right now what I'm reading from you is that all the teenagers today who could in fact keep an infant sibling alive in a wilderness environment they're familiar with are not part of reality, which is probably not your intention. So there's room enough for more clarity

Literally the age of any main character in a Shonen anime for these reasons.

I think the reason for this being the age of most Shonen main characters is a bit more pragmatic than that - it is simply around the age of the target audience.

P.S. No, I am not insinuating that shonen is strictly for middle schoolers, and that no one else could enjoy it. It is just the target audience for the genre, in general, is middle school boys. Like, even the name shonen itself translates literally to "boys' comics", and is officially listed as an editorial category targeting adolescent boys.

A few 14 year olds have always fought in wars but when was this common or expected?

Here is a good historical reference from a western viewpoint.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_children_in_the_m...

I am less familiar with other regions of the world but understand it to be common place in some of them to this day.

The repeated use of the phrase that children were "used by all sides" is concerning because there were many countries that used no children except those that got in by pretending to be older.

Just a few generations ago. If you were 14 in parts of europe during wwii theres a good chance you were in some army or a rag tag band of partisans. Probably a lot of 14 year olds took up arms against the US in wars since if I had to guess.

Iran systematically employed 12-16 year olds en masse for the purposes of clearing minefields and drawing Iraqi fire. Perhaps 50,000 Iranian children were sacrificed in this manner. Iraq regularly responded to these child-wave tactics by deploying mustard gas.

I read a bunch of your comments and you seem like a very erudite person. Is there a way I can contact you?

I appreciate that. You can find me on Discord with the name AbuSnood#6321

Thanks, I sent you a friend request on Discord!

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