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Notes -
"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.
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.
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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