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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.
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.
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.
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.
These two things are at odds. If you believe teenagers should be thoroughly desexualized (and if you even use the term "underage" that way, you likely do), you're going to think the "right age" is 25-30 for both parties. By that point you have enough sour grapes from the men and enough "thottery" from the women that your "active co-ordination" isn't going to be better than the Tinder status quo. One of the things you want from a marriage is the concept and expectation that you'll grow together, and that's much more likely at 20 than 30.
Indeed, money makes all the difference. The Japanese might have the right idea with the company dating services, and since you only see your spouse for a couple of hours one day a week the dynamics of a marriage aren't exactly going to be that deep.
It's the same thing you just described, but up one level: if you don't understand how men and women actually work (perhaps because you think man bad woman good, which is the traditionalist-progressive compact, or because you're just not self-aware enough or too tired/don't have time to deal with it, which is the issue with the liberals), then you're not going to be able to fix issues built upon faulty understanding, you're just going to make them worse.
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