vorpa-glavo
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User ID: 674
vorpa-glavo
5hr ago
I'm pro gun rights, but I think there are meaningful distinctions between some of the the things mentioned and guns.
Smoking is mostly dangerous to the person doing it. Yes, yes, there's secondhand smoke, but if you're not frequently around smokers while they light up, it's not that much of a concern. Generally, little-l liberal paternalism is okay with "victimless crimes", and tobacco smoking is pretty close to a perfect example of this. You can't even make the socialized healthcare case against smoking, since it actually saves taxpayers money by killing people early.
Speeding is already illegal. However, traffic laws rely heavily on voluntary compliance with the law, since there aren't enough police in the world to catch all the people speeding. In theory, traffic cameras can also solve this issue, but if there were too many traffic cameras, people might genuinely get up in arms about it. Generally speaking, we are dealing with a bunch of trade offs when it comes to traffic laws, and it is unclear that "lock up anyone who speeds" is the best all around solution for society as a whole.
I also think we generally do make pet owners responsible for injuries and damage that are done by their animals. Tort law probably already covers a lot of the things we'd want from a legal code that deals with dangerous animals.
I mean, it could also be fairies if we're going supernatural. There are all sorts of fairy abduction tales like Tam Lin or Sir Orpheo, which have some interesting parallels to alien abductions. And European fairy myths are continuous with things like the Norse Wild Hunt, which involved bands of supernatural beings flying through the air.
Once you reach to invoke one of the more out there options, a lot of things are on the table.
IIRC, the consensus from twin studies is that intelligence is ~80% heritable, though also note that much of the remaining 20% is due to non-shared environmental effects which are likely near impossible to modify via environmental enrichment.
I'm not actually sure most of these people understand the "heritability" that twin studies are measuring. The way the math works, the heritability of number of legs is close to 0 (because there is basically no variation in leg count), even though we are quite sure that number of legs is 100% determined by genetics. And the equation we use spits out different heritability numbers under different social arrangements: the heritability of literacy is different in places where women aren't educated vs. where women are.
And I honestly lost a lot of faith in Twins Reared Apart studies when I learned a lot of them allow for a shared environment until the age of 8 - it isn't all just twins separated at birth (because there are not enough such twins for most studies.) 8 years is a long time in childhood development, and while I think the Classical Twin Design of looking at identical and fraternal twins raised together is slightly better, I still don't think we can rule out that identical twins end up with more similar "environments" because they look more like one another (and like it or not appearance matters for humans.) I think a lot of the missing heritability between twin studies and GWAS studies is probably explained by weaknesses in twin study design.
One of my friends recently "came out" to me as an HBD person, and I was honestly unimpressed with a lot of his examples (though I don't expect every random HBD person to be a Motte-caliber racial scientist.) He seemed completely dismissive of things like parasites and disease burden as a partial explanation of Subsaharan African low IQ, seemed to not fully grasp at all times how averages and standard deviations worked (since a decent portion of African Americans will end up with IQs of 100+ or 115+, and yet he seemed to reason as if they were all dummies, even if he was perfectly willing to acknowledge "outliers"), and I just didn't think he applied the rigor I know HBD people are capable of in general. (He never brought up GWAS studies or polygenic scores even once!) HBD is an interesting hypothesis, I just want to see well-constructed arguments for it.
You need to read more Burke and Chesterton.
While there are certainly debates about whether conservatism is more of a temperament or an ideology, usually conservatism is a little more broad than just keeping things how they were.
In the United States, most conservatives worthy of the name are trying to conserve the founding, little-l liberal ideals of the Revolutionary War. It is part of what sets American conservatives apart from the blood and soil conservatives of Europe.
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