Free_Taco
5mo ago
Shooting is the hobby of choice for my male acquaintances. They meet at gun ranges or someone’s house in the sticks to fire rifles at targets. Guns are expensive, though.
Free_Taco
5mo ago
Counter point: it’s trivial to identify and either ostracize or legally hobble a repeat offender, and there’s barely any gratification from a one-time theft of an overpriced dessert coffee.
On the other hand, I have personally witnessed people attempting to steal booze and smokes, both of which are expensive as hell and taxed to high heaven.
Food doesn’t seem to be a terribly powerful motivator for would-be thieves. Food is plentiful and literally no one in America starves unless it’s on purpose.
Free_Taco
5mo ago
A half measure that still caters far too strongly to the liberal theory of educated citizens making good citizens, which has been brutally debunked at this point.
I would eliminate high school entirely in favor of trade schools. These schools would function essentially as what undergraduate programs function as now, with students funneled into trade programs at age 14-15 to become functional, productive members of society at 18. This would have a myriad of beneficial follow-on effects, chief among them being the end of the current cultural epidemic that is the extended adolescence of the most intelligent and privileged children in society. The other chief follow-on benefit would be increased rates of family rearing among older teenagers and young 20-somethings, to the benefit of local communities and the current social morass of porn, video games, and Tinder exclusively through age 25.
Physical health doesn’t need to be taught. Most modern men and women are not physically impressive because they don’t need to be. Mandating physical fitness does little except create a society of pretty boys and metrosexuals who are worthless at actually performing dirty work. Teach them how to replace a transmission and roof a shed if you insist on making physically useful citizens. But making pretty citizens is a stupid vanity project.
Otherwise, the upper class can continue to send its children to liberal arts programs until they’re 27 and ready for a 2-year backpacking trip to Europe. But this needs to stop being the norm and become the gross, embarrassing exception.
Free_Taco
5mo ago
This assumes your agreement or disagreement on its own is important or worth sharing. It isn’t.
Free_Taco
5mo ago
The assertion that The Motte can or should be building consensus, let alone good consensus, is laughable on its face. The “high IQ” citizens of yesteryear’s Motte were in universal agreement that sub-100 IQ people were physically incapable of understanding hypotheticals, which is obviously false to anyone who actually interacts with idiots, and not insulated morons subsisting exclusively on a social diet of nerdy coworkers and college friends.
Free_Taco
5mo ago
Voting has always been one of the worst functions of Reddit and should have been discarded with the offsite move. I voted on one comment in my decade plus on Reddit, and it was a technical solution to a video game bug buried under dozens of useless comments with bad advice. As a subjective “I agree/disagree” button, which is what it morphed into on Day 2 of Reddit going live, the philosophy of its inclusion is counter to the Motte’s explicit rule against consensus building.
Let ideas stand on their own, without the peanut gallery’s worthless input. Motte monkeys are often not nearly as informed as they believe themselves to be, either, outside of their favorite subjects of “computer science careers” and “why girls don’t think programmers are alpha males.”
“The other side” is presumably having children, which means your attempts at raising an army of military school cadets poised to recapture American institutions from the commies will be met with fierce parental resistance about half the time. Particularly once you begin trying to dictate how parents feed and exercise their children, which is extremely unpopular with parents on all sides.
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