chooky
5d ago
I think your explanations are missing a driver of why these trends started happening. (I also think you are underemphasizing the greater difficulty of being opposed to gay marriage when one has gay friends or family, though I am not so ambitious as to attempt to explain why being gay seems more common now than 50 years ago.) Anyway, for Gen X/Milennials, the traditional opposition to gay marriage from Boomers and previous generations was severely undermined by the prevalence of divorce among Boomers; why should younger generations take Boomers' moralizing about marriage seriously? This seems like a perfect issue for rebellion.
chooky
5d ago
I think a problem with the smoking metaphor is that it does seem like sex/pregnancy is closer to Russian roulette. Besides Russian roulette, a matching metaphor could be rock climbing/falling to your death; flying/plane crash; or driving a car and crashing it. While sometimes people have sex with the aim of conceiving, all of these other "bad" outcomes are things that would make people just never do a given activity if they thought it was at all likely to happen in that instance.
chooky
5d ago
Pregnancy is a foreseeable consequence of sex in much the same way that lung cancer is a foreseeable consequence of smoking.
These seem substantially different in that each time of having sex is an either/or of conceiving or not, but each instance of nicotine consumption only very marginally increases cancer risk. No one is going to get cancer because they tried smoking a couple of times, but they very easily could conceive a child on their first time having sex.
As someone who thinks the war is unwise and that the Trump administration seems incapable of competently executing its policies, the blockade makes sense. When Iran closes the Strait, it still lets it own oil out and thus has a strong financial lifeline. The US needs to prevent in order to create leverage, especially because a peace in which Iran tolls the Strait is clearly a massive loss for the US. Even if one cedes, or believes, as I do, that the war was a bad mistake by Trump, the blockade was the only move left.
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