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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 24, 2024

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The risk vs benefit of swimming pools vs opiates is far different. Swimming pools don't give you cities where part of the place is taken by drug zombies. It is relativism to act as if they are comparable. And so it goes for many things. There is a line to be taken, and refusing to support a line ends up with predictable large problems. Because you can in fact have a society of different levels of corruption and harmful behavior.

You aren't really encountering in this thread safetyism purity spiral supporters. There isn't a sufficient negative to swimming pools, even if a small percentage of people using them and having fun swimming (and improving cardiovascular health possibly in doing so), end up drowning.

An important point to mention, is also as the ancient Greeks, Romans, Christians, and others understood, and through continuity through the ages wise people understood, is the problem of people being enslaved to their passions. The drug addict not only harms his health, but is fundamentally not a free man. This is also bad for the group as a whole since from a collective point of view, such behaviors degenerate society.

It isn't an accident that "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law" is so identified with the modern Satanist movement. Even from a secular perspective, it tells you something that this is the philosophy of a movement that adopts the symbol and name of evil and sin, in accordance to the dominant religion of western civilization. The attempt of inversion of morality, leads predictably to an immoral code that harms civilization.

Swimming pools don't give you cities where part of the place is taken by drug zombies.

That's true, but if I recall correctly, when I was looking at different causes of death in the United States, swimming pools turned out to kill a similar number of people (mostly young kids) to accidental gun deaths in the United States annually. Obviously, you'd have to compare the base rate of pool ownership (as well as time spent around the pool) to the rate of drowning to get good numbers on the actual risk of owning a swimming pool, but I wouldn't blame a less risk-tolerant person if they didn't own a swimming pool because they were concerned about the risk of their own kids drowning.

I think the problem with bringing up "safeteyism" is that there is obviously a point in any situation where anyone except the most committed libertarian would eventually agree a law of some kind is necessary for society's well-being. Many regulations are written in blood, and I understand the impulse of a person who is more likely to ask "are the trade offs of enforcing this regulation worth it?" rather than "does this regulation reduce individual liberty?" or whatever. Sometimes it takes an unregulated amusement park ride decapitating the son of a state senator for a law to be written.

That’s because accidental gun deaths are a trivially small problem because the sorts of people who own guns are more likely to be responsible with them than average.

but I wouldn't blame a less risk-tolerant person if they didn't own a swimming pool because they were concerned about the risk of their own kids drowning

This person does not want to have to maintain and/or pay for a swimming pool, and is telling his wife it’s too dangerous as a trump card.

That's true, but if I recall correctly, when I was looking at different causes of death in the United States, swimming pools turned out to kill a similar number of people (mostly young kids) to accidental gun deaths in the United States annually.

That says more about accidental gun deaths than it says about swimming pools.