As a parent of two young autistic children, breaks are very important. You will parent better and they will react better

Wow. No kids here. But this is absolutely not the narrative I’ve picked up through mostly American media. In the back of my mind is this pull that essentially says that if a baby is awake—especially if they’re being frustrating—it should not be alone.

The wow is because 1. I wasn’t even aware I felt that way, and 2. because it’s in conflict with what sounds like helpful advice.

Your advice isn't bad - breaks are good and a few moments of crying aren't so bad, but shaken baby syndrome has some serious problems as an explanation of the injuries it gets used for:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC381308/

Their conclusions are remarkably similar to those of Donohoe, who found that “the evidence for shaken baby syndrome appears analogous to an inverted pyramid, with a very small database (most of it poor quality original research, retrospective in nature, and without appropriate control groups) spreading to a broad body of somewhat divergent opinions.”

Reviewing the studies achieving the highest quality of evidence rating scores, Donohoe found that “there was inadequate scientific evidence to come to a firm conclusion on most aspects of causation, diagnosis, treatment, or any other matters,” and identified “serious data gaps, flaws of logic, inconsistency of case definition.”

The problem here is that the story about a shaken baby has taken hold, and so anyone who has actually beaten up a baby can grab onto it and lie and say they shook the baby, they just lost control, they didn't intend any harm, and it makes them look less evil.

And obviously you can't trust the account of someone who may be lying to cover up what amounts to infanticide. Reading the account above it's clear the boyfriend was changing his story to cover up something horrific that he did. "Fell down the stairs" is another common one but it sounds like a cover up. Shaken baby syndrome still has popular credibility so it gets used.

The other side of this problem is that there may be reasons why children have internal haemorrhages that aren't related to abuse, but which then get blamed on shaken baby syndrome. Innocent grieving parents have been sent to prison and told that their actions killed their baby. They may even have believed it, until their conviction was overturned because a real expert was brought in who was able to demonstrate that it was all bullshit. Those are the cases that were overturned in time - child abusers don't do well in prison.

Another negative effect of the narrative around this questionable diagnosis is that parents are taught that they are a danger to their children because of some heretofore unknowable impulse to shake their child to death. I can tell you I had plenty of moments when I felt like I was losing my mind from the crying and sleep deprivation, but doing anything that might hurt my child never crossed my mind, not once.

When I was a new parent there was no end of bizarre, sensationalist bullshit bombarding us from all sides telling us all the ways we were destined to hurt or kill our kids, most of which was just designed to sell us crap we didn't need. In this case a lot of this is sensationalism that sells tabloids and the services of forensic "experts". New parents don't need more sources of anxiety, so I think we should reserve these kinds of warnings for problems that we actually know are problems.

I remember reading something about interracial pornography being the latest iteration of racial anxieties that originated in America as a byproduct of slavery.

In a country without a history of slavery interracial videos still play off racial and sexist stereotypes.

I dunno. I've watched vids in this genre when the lady performer is someone I'm already interested in seeing. They don't make me feel insecure or engender racism in me. But then again, I was already an adult when broadband internet became a thing. And true broadband, fast enough to allow instant streaming, was still years after that. I can see your point for kids growing up with it though.

Those accusations were a real gut-shot.

Though the only erotic things I've ever seen take at least some mental work to classify as porn, this does make me wonder how the taboo on this topic causes people and their experiences to be locked in 1-sized bubbles, because they only ever share these kinds of allusions and assume it's the same for everyone else.