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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.
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.
Ok, sure, if you redefine "social conservativism" to mean the opposite of how everybody uses it.
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