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I'm committing a major faux-pas by posting a second consecutive top-level comment, but it's been 12 hours and people need to post more. (Seriously, post a top level comment. Do it now.)
What's something that you were wrong about?
I'll start. I was wrong about marijuana legalization. It was a bad idea and we never should have done it. Marijuana is, contra urban legend, actually pretty addictive. And it makes productive people into unproductive people. The benefits, such as they are, are best enjoyed in moderation. But legalization has resulted in a whole new class of junkies that wouldn't have existed otherwise. Also, weed culture is gross.
Scott, as always, says it best:
In any case, what were you wrong about?
-- Gambling. I thought when my state legalized gambling, what's the big deal? It's legal in Atlantic City and Vegas, plenty of people travel there to gamble, and everyone knows someone with a poker game or buddies who keep a pool of NFL bets going. Why not keep that revenue in the state? I miss the old equilibrium. When one had to take, at least, a two hour trip to Atlantic City to gamble, there was at least a certain occasion to it, now there are guys gambling away their paychecks to a video poker machine in the back of a truck stop. And don't even get me started on phone gambling. The idea of people losing huge sums of money without ever leaving their house or talking to anyone is horrifying to me. All the old forms of gambling that lead me to view it as harmless had strong social elements: your local poker night was really everyone hanging out together, the office super bowl pool was a bonding experience, even the casino in Atlantic City had the advantage of travel and adventure and glamour. Legalizing it in every state removes the glamour of the destination gambling trip, and turns it into just a straight suck of money from the foolish to the pockets of casinos. If we're going to have sports gambling, we should just make it a state monopoly like the lottery, and shuffle all the profits into the education system.
-- Aging. When I was a teenager I bought into the Sex and the City-era framing for how the first half of your life path was supposed to go: a series of romantic adventures, serial "serious" monogamous relationships, and then at 30-35 getting "serious" about settling down. Plenty of time! People getting married later was treated as an unalloyed good in the media, and I should note that my own parents married late and had me late. Now, a few days from 33, great Odin's raven how did no one tell us how fast we were going to get old? The number of single friends I have who got unbelievably fat or have aged out of their looks! I talk to my friends, and especially my wife's friends, and they have these romantic problems, and the sad grainy truth is that they should have made hay while the sun shined and hooked someone ten years ago when they were still hot. There are girls we went to college with, and they were reasonably in the same league as my wife at the time, and now they're completely unfuckable, to the point where effort will never get you back where you were.
And it's blackpilling, because there's no advice to give them on their relationship strategies that doesn't run back up against that cold hard fact: you're fat now and there's nothing you can do that will deliver what I would consider good results for them at this point. And I knew that there would be some point where that would be true, but I thought it was 40 or 50 or after the third kid. Not 32. It hits women harder, but hits men too, the curves that online dating sites show men getting more attractive only in relative terms. The media told us at 32 we'd just be hitting the peak of our hotness, not that better than half would have fallen off.
Somebody needs to warn the youth, we need to be sending our freshmen to college this fall with a copy of Princeton Mom as required reading. In media I felt like the point at which one really aged, in the sense of looks, was at least 40. Certainly, though I wouldn't watch the show until after I was married it was just in the air at the time culturally, Sex and the City's girls dealt with the idea of aging in their 30s and 40s, but they didn't even have friends or side characters who got fat, or were completely aged out of attractiveness in dating. There's a huge number of women, and a decent number of men, in my social circle where I look at them and I'm like wow you've already missed the window. It's not "over" for them, after all they might find each other, but their championship window has closed and that's indescribably sad for me. I can't imagine not being hot at your own wedding, that should be near the hottest you've ever been, and some of the weddings I've been to lately it's a joke. And these people are only in their early 30s! You have a narrow window to really maximize your talents in looks, narrower if you don't take care of yourself. Pick ye rosebuds while ye may!
-- Donald Trump (on foreign policy). I voted for him in the 2016 primary after he got up at the debate and said that Iraq was a big fat mistake. While I'm a bit more of an internationalist, I bought into his America First isolationism as at least reasonably peaceful. In office he mostly got captured or railroaded by neocons in his administration, or turned out to lack the temperament for peace. Continued most of the bad policies of his predecessors, while adding a few new ones of his own, and reducing the reliability of the USA as a global partner around the world.
-- Dress shoes are dead, and my decade of resistance has been pointless. No one wears them anymore.
-- Church. I sort of thought church would always be there. That I could wander in and out of religion as I chose, and there would always be other people who kept the place going while I figured my shit out. Now we're seeing churches die out in my town and it's dawned on me that I, me, personally, I'm responsible for maintaining these things. That if I don't do it no one will. I'm back at my church, but even then it makes me sad seeing the parking lot at the historic lutheran church near my house and knowing that they're dying. And it's not like I can do anything for two churches at once. There's got to be a German word for the sadness at seeing things that you didn't like die out? These assumed bedrocks of our lives just aren't as secure as we thought they were.
-- Marijuana, from the opposite direction. I didn't use weed until I was married, and I didn't get it, I was a straight edge teen. Legalized marijuana has been a Good Thing. Notwithstanding my immense dorkiness, when I was a teenager, I could get pot more easily than I could get alcohol. I knew guys who dealt pot from the Boy Scouts or from basketball or from debate club, it was normal to know someone who sold pot. Because the marijuana distribution system was already illegal and underground, so they weren't exactly checking IDs, and a teenage could go buy a half pound and chop it up and sell it, where alcohol had to be stolen from an adult or a store. Now, marijuana is mostly distributed through legal channels, so you equally need a 21 year old willing to get you weed or beer, and fewer teenagers can swing that. And we've seen that decline in youth drug use. See attached image. Youth drug and alcohol use has continued to drop during the process of marijuana legalization. The kids are, by that standard, alright. Further, traffic deaths have not correlated with weed legalization driving high is probably bad, but it's not as bad as driving drunk so we see a replacement effect.
In general, Marijuana is and was normalized already, even before legalization. And I'm of the opinion that there is a deleterious impact on civic fabric from ordinary, law abiding citizens being anti-cop, in the sense of breaking the law and hoping not to get caught by the police. The policeman should never be the enemy of the citizen, the citizen should always see the policeman's presence as a positive. That's why I'm also in favor of more reasonable drinking age laws. There should only be laws against things that the average person would find morally blameworthy. Laws that over-reach and criminalize the conduct of ordinary citizens set up a conflict between the state and the citizen.
And, for that matter, I use thc these days, and I think done right it is the conservative family drug. The effects are, in context, ideal for relaxing after a hard day with people you love. Alcohol leads people to get into fights with their family, to sleep with people they shouldn't. Marijuana leads to hanging out with people who annoy you and just laughing it off, it makes sex with your spouse better but sex with anyone else unthinkable.
/images/17262286826661794.webp
I agree about marijuana, especially the point about cops. I think the fact that for so many years, cops would harass or even arrest people for making a personal choice to put a substance in their own bodies, helped to lead to the current widespread distrust of cops and the overall rise of extreme leftism. When you're an impressionable 18 year old, the idea of some cop arresting you for using weed naturally makes you distrust the entire system, and especially law enforcement. I think that many young people have been drawn to leftism by this over the years, to our detriment. The drug war helped to create several generations of people who had a natural and substantial reason to distrust and oppose civil order, law enforcement, and the legal system.
I disagree about women/attractiveness in some ways. In my experience, aging by itself takes a very long time to degrade a woman's looks substantially. 90% of the problem is simply obesity. The overwhelming majority of women who are hot in their 20s are still going to be very attractive in their 40s, as long as they do not get fat. They will probably have some subtle wrinkles and lines in the face, but they will still be attractive. If they take really good care of themselves, they will still be attractive even in their 50s. Maybe your standards are higher than mine or something, but in any case, this is how it seems to me. The key purely physical aspects of a woman's attractiveness - facial beauty, breasts, butt, legs, etc. - do not really change shape much with age until quite an advanced age, assuming that the woman does not get fat, although the skin does get less smooth. Out of those characteristics the face starts changing the quickest, probably. But even then, a woman who had a pretty face at 20 is still probably going to have a decent face at 45 as long as she does not get fat.
I don't know why that would be the case any more than they would have that same reaction for any other thing that they clearly know is a crime. Are you positing that impressionable 18 year olds just don't understand what the law is? What it does? They certainly were aware that it was illegal. Does an 18 year old getting into legal troubles for underage drinking and driving naturally make them distrust the entire system and especially law enforcement? I have to imagine it would only do so if they were extremely stupid. The only other explanation is that they'd simply drank the 'first principles' "drugs are my human right" kool-aid, but that's more a problem with the dumb propaganda than it is with the law, itself. If some dumb 18 year old gets arrested for assaulting an officer in their anti-police riot, I'd say that the blame for them possibly turning even more ACAB is the fault of the stupid propaganda that led them to believe stupid things, not laws allowing for riot control.
No, there is a big difference between various kinds of laws. A blanket principle of "always obey every law, simply because it is the law" makes no sense, since many laws are stupid and/or immoral, and that is even more the case in authoritarian countries than in the US. The law, in and of itself, has no moral authority. So one must pick which laws to obey. The law against, say, raping people makes sense to obey because clearly, raping people is immoral because it seriously harms others. Using marijuana, on the other hand, does not harm others, so the law against doing it is stupid and immoral.
Making laws against things that do not harm anyone except the person who does them is a quick path to raising generations of people who feel contempt for lawmakers and the legal system. And then you get more leftism, because some of those people who feel contempt eventually go down the rabbit hole of starting to believe that the entire system, rather than just part of it, is fundamentally wrong, and that it must be overthrown and so on.
Good thing that this is not what I said. I said that your particular statement makes no sense unless you're extremely stupid, not having any idea how law works, or drank the propaganda kool aid. Yes, dawg, you will be arrested for something that's obviously illegal, even if it's a dumb law. This happening can't possibly shift your position, unless you were really really dumb/naive.
Many teenagers are naive, or more charitably, they think of the people around them naturally while the law is not a natural thing. In the natural world, you either face the consequences for an action with some degree of certainty (therefore it's a bad thing to do) or do not (therefore it's an okay thing to do); there is no "as long as you don't get caught", or rather, the ones doing the catching would be fellow members of the community, not faceless distant "authorities". When they're faced with a dumb law, their naive expectation is that no one would really put you through the wringer over such a dumb law, come on. Everyone does that. They'll just give you a slap on the wrist unless you do it so stupidly openly that the authorities have no choice.
Then they learn what cops are and conclude that cops, too, are not natural, hardly human.
Up to this point, all of this is relevant to all law.
This beggars belief. What kind of childhood did you have? Did you literally never get in trouble for something that seemed dumb? That happened to me allllll the time.
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