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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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, but parents and kids take it seriously now. And I think the official punishments have gone up, like losing your license until age 18 for a single violation.
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