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"Build something. Do something."
Does it make any difference to you what we do, or is it enough just to have a job? Is the guy selling cigarettes at the same worth as someone making buildings?
There’s an interesting question there which I don’t think I have a very developed answer to. Namely, how socially negative can a job be before we stop being proud to do it.
I tend to see cigarettes as one vice among many but bookmaking as a terrible thing. I may not be entirely consistent.
Cigarettes seriously harm you when used as directed. Most other vices have to be abused to harm you.
Tinfoil hat double feature:
@Jiro I think smoking causes cancer and is genuinely bad for you, but that smoking was intentionally used as a patsy for a lot of cancers caused by commonly used industrial compounds.
@Tree hysteria over premarital sex and teen pregnancy was intentionally induced in religious conservatives in the mid 20th century to reduce their birth rates in an effort to stamp out Christianity in the United States. You’ll notice that it was combined with induced economic and social factors that make early marriage impossible for a lot of people. The punishment in Leviticus for unmarried people caught fornicating was just to get married. Notice that the hysteria over premarital sex (reduced family formation) was also combined with a drive to get religious people to be much more lenient toward adultery/divorce (increases family dissolution), and abortion (reduces birth rates). So you have mind-broken psyopped evangelical boomers who are on their third marriage but are morallly horrified and indignant over the idea that their children might be having premarital sex at the age of 23.
Sometimes they can compound each other; e. g. asbestos fibres will stay in the lungs of a smoker long after they would have been expelled from a non-smoker's lung due to the former having killed off their cilia.
Wait, you can expel asbestos fibres? I thought once you were exposed that was it? (I may have been exposed in my youth so big if true).
They do damage while they are in your lungs, and that damage may or may not be permanent. However, healthy lungs have cilia which will expel foreign material, limiting the total damage that it can do; but if you kill off the cilia, asbestos fibres will linger for far longer, and do much more damage.
Cool, good to know. Thanks :)
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This is great tinfoil. I love it.
Somehow the kids are having less sex and doing less drugs but no one who was upset about the kids having sex or doing drugs is happy about it.
This is simple to understand: it’s because the reason the kids are having less sex and doing less drugs is that they’re less healthy, socially connected, and happy — not because they’re following the social conservative model of being healthy, socially connected, and happy. The ideology of social conservatives is not “the kids must do less drugs, and I don’t care about anything else.”
We could solve drug abuse by just shooting anyone who’s addicted to drugs, but somehow I don’t expect that this would make anyone very happy.
Social conservatives placed their bets on the law—eradicating sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll—to mold a generation of upright, flourishing youth. Yet, even with less vice, the promised redemption hasn’t arrived. The young remain hollowed out, lonely, and adrift. Works alone, it seems, bring no salvation for the masses; true renewal, whether for all or the elect alone, demands a faith that transcends mere rule-keeping.
Sure. Fully agree that a positive vision is needed. But I disagree strongly that social conservatives didn’t have one, or that they aimed entirely to eliminate vice rather than supply virtue. That’s a caricature that could only be written by their enemies.
I'm not arguing they don't have a positive vision, they absolutely do. For the positive vision to manifest requires faith not works, the circumcision of the heart.
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The social conservatives thought if they could stop the kids from having sex, drugs, and rock and roll that the kids would be healthier, more socially connected, and happier. This turned out not to be the case.
Social conservatives believed that curbing youthful excesses—sex, drugs, and reckless music—would pave the way for a healthier, more connected generation. Yet, while there may be less outright debauchery, the kids are still struggling, isolated and unhappy. It seems you can’t fashion a silk purse from a sow’s ear simply by enforcing restraint. Human nature, it turns out, demands more than just the absence of vice.
More than that, absence of vice may actually be harmful.
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Their lives are also ridiculously locked down. They are tracked by phone apps, social media is read, driving privileges are extremely limited (you can’t drive with more than two friends in the car until 18 under graduated licenses). The ability for kids to just go do things the way that their parents and grandparents did doesn’t exist anymore. We used to ditch school all the time, we cut class, we would go outside with other kids and the adults would not know where we were until we came home. And it was entirely possible to have friends your parents would not approve of. Kids could get drugs to school because it was easy enough for a kid to go to skid row and score some to sell at school. Safetism coupled with modern social media and phone tracking killed this type of independence.
I think this explains the mental health crisis and the no sex and drugs thing. Kids are never allowed to be alone with other kids without all the adults being privy to where they are and what they are doing. It causes a mental health crisis because kids never learn to get out of messes on their own, or to be independent. This means that kids never learn that they are capable of being independent or that problems that come up are solvable, least of all by themselves. The sex thing is because it’s impossible to get alone with a member of the opposite sex. No telling mom you’re spending the night with Mike and then going to Mary’s house. Mom will be tracking you. If you go anywhere other than Mike’s house, you’ll be in big trouble.
A bigger factor than external restrictions is that the entire online world decreases the impetus to go out and do any of these things.
I fully agree with this. I’m a zoomer, and many of my friends, including me, waited a long time to get drivers licenses, or be independent, or live outside the childhood home, etc. Seeing this as entirely or even mostly the result of restrictions put on by parents just doesn’t reflect what I’ve seen in my generation — it was voluntary, not imposed. The internet supplied enough pleasure to make leaving the house feel like a chore rather than an exciting prospect.
I think older generations find this hard to understand — why don’t you want to rebel? — which means that it’s easy to misattribute it to rules. I don’t doubt that this has had an effect. Maybe more so on gen alpha, I don’t know. But the internet has been for my generation what the car was for older ones — it’s the means of freedom and exploration. Why go through all the trouble of driving when the glass Skinner box gives you all the pleasure you could ever want?
It just so happens that the freedom and exploration it offers doesn’t actually make people connected to others.
That, rather than anything boomers did or conservatives did or geotracking did or the woke did, is the cause of stunted interpersonal development among the younger generations. We didn’t get rid of the sex and drugs and rock and roll but keep the social connections — which is what social conservatives wanted — we got rid of the social connections, which got rid of the sex and drugs and rock and roll. That the kids are unhappy in a situation where the sex and drugs are gone doesn’t say a single thing about whether social conservatives were right — the variables aren’t controlled. And the social conservatives definitely didn’t get what they want.
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And this is all taken seriously. When I was a kid we had the start of some of these rules... but I went to driver's ed with kids who drove themselves to the class. Restrictions on passengers and times driving were ignored by the kids themselves and not taken particularly seriously by the parents.
You can still do this. The chances of getting pulled over are still low. They always have been.
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To be honest, this sounds horrifying. I understand the rationale behind helicopter parenting a lot more if this is the perceived alternative.
Some level of independence is good but this really seems like too much. Independence is like bank lending - you prove you can have it by proving you don’t need it.
Most kids turned out just fine. And honestly I think it was ultimately good for us to have done those things. First of all because it taught us to self regulate behaviors and thus learn when and how to break rules with minimal danger to ourselves and others around us. Second because we’d end up getting in some level of danger either of getting caught breaking rules, or rarely physical danger, an$ would have to figure out how to get out of that mess. And finally because we learned how to get along with other kids without mom and dad to mediate. If you wanted to play one game and they want to do something else, you negotiate and figure it out.
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Helicopter parenting is a practice ruinous for children and parents alike. I see it around me all the time when turbo-neurotic mothers drive themselves and everyone around them and of course their children crazy with their unchecked overdramatic fears of absolutely everything that can imaginably go wrong going wrong in every moment, every day, all life long.
OTOH, full independence for kids has another set of pitfalls. Drugs, falling in with bad crowds, neglecting school are all entirely possible and I've seen them all happen very, very often in my immediate social circles.
The better solutions, as so often, are neither 0% nor 100% surveillance/independence, and require regular reevaluation.
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No; given that social conservatism has failed to provide health, social connection, and happiness (indeed, it believes that teenagers should not have those things in general, a viewpoint they share with progressives) I judge it completely fair to say that the ideology of social conservatives is exactly that- or at least, it's not opposed to sacrificing health, social connection, and happiness on the altar of "the fun things in life are evil" because those things are not terminal values.
POSIWID.
Are you under the impression that kids these days have grown up under a socially conservative system?
Yes- progressivism (the current dominant ideology of women and their corporate arms- schools, etc.) is omnipresent and an extremely socially conservative force, very publicly allergic to any kind of human dignity (typically referred to as "risk").
Sure, they sometimes pretend to be on the side of "liberalism", but they cheer when kids get arrested by CPS (or are themselves doing the arresting) for not being visibly accompanied by the head of the household, something they have in common with fundamentalist Muslims. That doesn't scream "freedom-respecting and risk tolerance" to me no matter how much leather they're wearing.
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This is ignoring the massive confounding variable which is social media and the post 2014 culture (much more engagement with politics, for instance)
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Oh, don't get them wrong, they were happy about it back when their kid was 12-20. Every conservative parent's dream, really- no sex, no drugs, and otherwise content to be seen-but-not-heard. Just follow the process and your life will surely start eventually.
But now you fast-forward 20 years and they're still in the basement. Encouraging their children to reject the more pleasurable (and riskier) parts of life may have had some unforeseen consequences, but if your judgement as a parent is that the best way to make sure your child isn't living in sin is to encourage them to refuse to live then, uh... mission accomplished, I guess?
The idea that you should find a partner by fucking around through your teens and twenties until you find a girl you want to keep is incredibly recent, though. Basically Europe/Anglo only, between 1960s and now.
What makes conservative sexual policy stupid is trying to reject the Sexual Revolution for people their children’s age while keeping all the related social frameworks and assumptions that underlie it.
So you get ‘sex when you’re young is bad’ combined with ‘arranged/facilitated marriages are evil because they prevent twu wuv, as is anything that even slightly impinges on women’s sexual autonomy’. You can have either position but not really both, especially when you cripple your childrens’ game and then throw them into the tinder meat market at 20.
I think the general script that I see among the more conservative/traditional people in my life is you meet someone in college and marry them shortly thereafter, with varying degrees of whether you sleep with them before marriage (but your lifetime body count is much more likely to be 1).
This puts extra non-academic pressure on college, and most of this happened pre-COVID, so not sure how easy it is now.
I was raised in a conservative family, did not partake in sex, drugs, or alcohol in high school and feel like my life turned out pretty awesomely.
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You are right about the recency, but sadly wrong about the spread. Hollywood and Harvard have exported the sexual revolution around the world, with a little help from the US military. The false life plan is now the standard across much of Latin America and Asia. I think Muslims in the Middle East and Africa are the last line of defense humanity has against this poison.
In particular, mainstream conservative boomers have brought into the cult of education and careerism, especially for women, and expect everyone to not even think about marriage until after they graduate college at 22 and spend a few more years getting established in the workforce. In this, they are in complete agreement with the progressives, dissenting only in believing that chastity should be preserved until then.
But, of course, humans are not made to be virgins until 25; we reach sexual maturity in our teens. That is when we are meant to start having sex and becoming independent of our parents. Instead, we rot in classrooms memorizing random trivia and practicing useless skills, enforced by a legal and social regime that views teen marriage and teen labor as barbaric abuse.
The only possible results are stunted or disobedient individuals.
Young men and women in cisHajnal cultures did not get married as teens. The average age of first marriage for the working and middle class was mid-twenties with small age gaps being the norm. The 1950's model of marrying your high school sweetheart at 19 was an artifact of the extraordinary wealth (relative to expectations formed during the Great Depression and WW2) of 1950's America enabling early marriage.
"You can't expect people to go without sex for a decade from puberty to marriage" had been refuted by 1600. (Premarital sex was common, but only among people who were ready and willing to be shotgun-married if necessary).
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Yes, the ability to have sex and be more or less guaranteed for that not to result in pregnancy is an incredibly recent development; and the kinds of people who take advantage of that technology (and encourage taking advantage of the same) tend to be somewhat less encumbered than what the past several million years of evolution suggest they should be, to the point that someone closer to that prediction would/should believe that a serious malfunction.
There are two types of conservatives: those who have realized this and ally with the less-encumbered as described above, and those who turn inwards and die (their daughters become progressives immediately after leaving the house and remain that way for the rest of their lives, and their sons don't figure out becoming progressive is a bad move until it's too late for them to ever leave the basement).
What about instead noting that we’ve done quite well at stopping underage sex and taking the required next step: reviving the social apparatus for allowing responsible (by the conservative rubric) young people to find a healthy mate, while shutting out the thots? It doesn’t require much to start, just a practice of actively coordinating unattached acquaintances of the right age.
I was speaking to a Chinese person yesterday: her husband is a 667 programmer and therefore relatively wealthy but unable to date. Her cousin interacted with his cousin, they swapped photos, then WeChat contacts, and the marriage was two months later.
But I’ve noticed that Western parents are simultaneously incredibly intrusive and demanding about careers whilst absolutely rejecting any responsibility for their hothoused children’s marriage. I don’t get it. Well, half the problem is that most of said parents are divorced, but I still find it incredibly annoying.
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I am happy about the kids having less sex and doing less drugs. I'm not happy about some of the things they're doing instead, ie either end of the OnlyFans transaction.
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This is sort of encouraging, isn’t it? It shows that those people weren’t just ‘ah, damn kids today!’ But actually somewhat care about people having happy and healthy lives.
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The religious mind may consider harm and sinfulness to be inversely correlated (smoking vs promiscuity). The latter is particularly unfair to the believers and offensive to the gods precisely because the sinners are having fun without repercussions. The greater the temptation, the stronger the smell of sulfur.
Speaking in generalities, we do not. On the other hand, regardless of what we disapprove of, whether smoking or promiscuity, it seems that the irreligiously-minded are always ready to explain how our disapproval shows us to be terrible people.
It's pretty uncommon to see people commit murder over cigarettes, and yet they commit murder over promiscuity all the time and across a wide variety of cultures. This seems odd to square with claims that promiscuity is "harmless".
Because the harm is attributed to the person who chose to commit murder.
If Alice does $THING (being promiscuous, wearing the 'wrong' clothes for her gender, expressing unpopular opinions, eating rice on Tuesdays, &c., &c.), and Bob chooses to kill or otherwise harm her over it, that does not make $THING responsible for the harm done to Alice; the blame lies on Bob. Otherwise, Bob would have the ability to prevent Alice from doing anything he didn't like. (cf. the Heckler's Veto.)
They're often choosing to commit murder because they are having what is commonly known as a significant emotional event. Hence the term "crime of passion". Such crimes have been a constant through all of recorded history, indicating that their emergence is not the result of particular social customs. It seems pretty clear to me that sex tends to be deeply emotionally significant for healthy humans, and that perceived violations of trust in these matters cause intense emotional reactions indicates that promiscuity can, in fact, cause significant harm.
Robbery has been a constant through all recorded history too. And greed is pretty emotionally significant. (And I'm pretty sure that greed isn't the result of particular social customs.) But we don't blame the banks when the bank is robbed and an innocent person gets shot.
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You use, excuse and legitimise an extreme minority of rage-fueled murderers to condemn everyone’s harmless daily desires. You've catastrophically misidentified who the healthy humans are.
Whether the daily desires are harmless is the question you are begging. I am pointing out at least one instance where those involved do not act as though they perceive them as harmless. I am not "excusing" or "legitimizing" anything. I am pointing to a phenomenon that has existed at least since the invention of written language, and which seem directly fatal to your argument. If sex is harmless fun, where is the rage coming from?
Nor is this confined to murder driven by jealousy. Long-term relationships being destroyed by infidelity is extremely common, and those who undergo it certainly seem to consider the infidelity to have been harmful, to the point that our legal system explicitly accounts for fidelity or its absence in the legal decoupling of such relationships.
Nor does it stop there. In the last decade we've seen a massively effective social movement aimed at rolling back huge parts of the sexual revolution from within erstwhile liberal feminism, driven by an explicit rejection of "sex is harmless fun" and a demand for a jugaad-ethics pseudo-traditionalism. This movement has very clearly been generated by the broadly accepted belief that in fact sex is not "harmless fun", that it is in fact fraught and requires serious safeguards to prevent serious harm. That their proposed solutions are absurd, unworkable and perverse does nothing to change the nature of the problem: Whether you like it or not, whether you recognize it or not, sex has serious consequences that cannot be effectively prevented or engineered around.
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Two members of my family were, until recently, dealers at a casino. They were both somewhat clear-eyed about it; they loved how much money it brought in, as well as the opportunities to socially interact with a lot of interesting people, but they understood that their jobs only existed because of a substrate of gambling addicts whose hobby has the potential to destroy lives. I don’t know that I’d describe either of them as “proud” of their jobs, and I certainly was not proud on their behalf when telling people what they did for a living.
I don’t know if real problem gamblers go to casinos. I think casinos at least have the virtue of being bounded in time and space.
The person I knew who destroyed himself gambling did so on horses and on (predictive) markets. We never even knew until he died and we discovered he’d leveraged himself and his wife to the hilt. She became absolutely penniless as a result, though friends and family gave her what help they could so she’s not homeless.
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Selling isn't building. Even making cigarettes isn't building. But building machines to build better cigarettes? Now we have a philosophical discussion about socially beneficial economic activity!
I'd say yes, it's good to design and even make better cigarette making machines. And evil to operate them. Just build them as a fun project, then retool for something good.
The funny thing is, in my experience blue-collar construction workers tend to be big fans of cigarettes. So maybe the two things aren't even all that disconnected!
There's also a weird tension. We celebrate the engineers who make better machines, because it makes our lives better. But there's a limit on how far that can go, eventually we run out of things to automate and create so much industrial abundance that it just becomes harder to get a regular job. EG, I'm worried that industrial fishing has become too efficient and without strict regulation it's just going to make more and more fish go extinct. Meanwhile, a normal traditional fisherman can no longer make a living.
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