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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   35888 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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This theory predicts that young people are well to the right of senior citizens.

Not necessarily. As I said, the determining factor is one's self-perceived ability to protect oneself from harm, which can obviously be radically skew of one's actual ability. I think the average 19-year-old man is actually able to protect himself from harm far better than the average 75-year-old man, but this says nothing about their relative self-perceived ability to do so. Considering that Zoomers report vastly elevated rates of mental distress than older generations, there's no contradiction in the idea of a fit and healthy 19-year-old man who believes, contrary to all objective evidence, that he is helpless to protect himself from harm. What you end up with is a virgin vs. chad meme, with a fit and healthy 19-year-old man who is scared of his own shadow*, in stark contrast to a 75-year-old man with a host of comorbidities who refuses to stop smoking or wear a seatbelt.

*not a strawman, I personally know several people meeting this description or something approximating it

Is this falsifiable? How would you check for so-called "perceived ability"? Ask them how many fights they've been in?

Ask someone a series of questions, like "how worried are you about being attacked by a stranger?" or "if you were attacked by a stranger, do you think you would be able to defend yourself?" You could pair this subjective polling with objective data like "how many guns do you own?" or "do you have a black belt in karate?"

My half-baked hypothesis is that, all other things being equal, people who don't own any guns, don't practise martial arts, don't think they would be able to defend themselves if they were attacked by a stranger etc. will be more likely to support authoritarian policies than the converse.

As you get older, you become very aware of your own growing fragility.

Which does not automatically imply that the (accurately) self-perceived fragility of an older person is necessarily greater than the inaccurately self-perceived fragility of a younger person.

This is actually the case in Sweden now, except the reasoning goes the opposite direction.

There was an expectation of a "generation Greta" effect but instead the opposite happened. The leading preliminary explanation is that young people being victims of and knowing victims of violent and organised crime, and having limited ways to protect themselves go to "the right". Older people meanwhile are largely insulated from the crime and grew up during a safer time.

It'll be interesting to see what more extensive analysis will say.

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