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Sometimes they happen often enough that they foment irresistibly-large social movements demanding draconian top-down enforcement to prevent their failure states.
Neither chewing bubblegum nor consuming fentanyl guarantee doom. But there's a pretty large mountain of evidence that Free Love is closer to the Fent end than the bubblegum end, and thus, it seems to me, something people should generally steer away from. It's not close enough to the fent end that I'd advocate passing laws and enforcing them with the police, but it's close enough that I'm not really interested in expending significant effort to stop others from doing that, even when they're being quite dishonest about the nature of the problem. It's certianly bad enough to make an explicit point of the chain of causality between the Free Love narrative of "harmless fun" and the very real and apparently quite significant amounts of harm it has been causing for the last several decades. As the evidence continues to accumulate, hopefully people will learn to make better choices voluntarily, and those who do not can serve as cautionary examples.
This is a fully-general argument against prudence in any form.
I am of course opposed to "believe all victims", the draconian on-campus tribunals, #MeToo in general, etc. I'm about as libertarian as you can get on this issue. You get to reap all the rewards, and all the risks. I think that's a consistent position.
Sure. It's a classic sliding-scale boundary problem. We both presumably recognize that some things are worth the risk and some things are not, but the question is, where do we draw the line? Is pre-martial sex more like fentanyl, or is it more like chewing gum?
I don't think that question itself is very interesting or worth debating. I believe we both agree enough on the empirical facts that we're not going to learn anything new from it. The real question is why do you think the way you do, and why do I think the way I do? Why is it that, when we are both presented with the same information, you say "I dunno man that looks too dangerous to be worth it", and I say "I dunno man I think it looks fine you should go for it"? What explains this?
See my reply to 100Proof for more details.
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