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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.
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.
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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