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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   8193 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 21, 2025

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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.

smoking was intentionally used as a patsy for a lot of cancers caused by commonly used industrial compounds

Sometimes they can compound each other; e. g. asbestos fibres will stay in the lungs of a smoker long after they would have been expelled from a non-smoker's lung due to the former having killed off their cilia.

Wait, you can expel asbestos fibres? I thought once you were exposed that was it? (I may have been exposed in my youth so big if true).

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.

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.

I am happy about the kids having less sex and doing less drugs. I'm not happy about some of the things they're doing instead, ie either end of the OnlyFans transaction.

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 sort of encouraging, isn’t it? It shows that those people weren’t just ‘ah, damn kids today!’ But actually somewhat care about people having happy and healthy lives.

The religious mind may consider harm and sinfulness to be inversely correlated (smoking vs promiscuity). The latter is particularly unfair to the believers and offensive to the gods precisely because the sinners are having fun without repercussions. The greater the temptation, the stronger the smell of sulfur.

The religious mind may consider harm and sinfulness to be inversely correlated (smoking vs promiscuity).

Speaking in generalities, we do not. On the other hand, regardless of what we disapprove of, whether smoking or promiscuity, it seems that the irreligiously-minded are always ready to explain how our disapproval shows us to be terrible people.

The latter is particularly unfair to the believers and offensive to the gods precisely because the sinners are having fun without repercussions.

It's pretty uncommon to see people commit murder over cigarettes, and yet they commit murder over promiscuity all the time and across a wide variety of cultures. This seems odd to square with claims that promiscuity is "harmless".

Two members of my family were, until recently, dealers at a casino. They were both somewhat clear-eyed about it; they loved how much money it brought in, as well as the opportunities to socially interact with a lot of interesting people, but they understood that their jobs only existed because of a substrate of gambling addicts whose hobby has the potential to destroy lives. I don’t know that I’d describe either of them as “proud” of their jobs, and I certainly was not proud on their behalf when telling people what they did for a living.

I don’t know if real problem gamblers go to casinos. I think casinos at least have the virtue of being bounded in time and space.

The person I knew who destroyed himself gambling did so on horses and on (predictive) markets. We never even knew until he died and we discovered he’d leveraged himself and his wife to the hilt. She became absolutely penniless as a result, though friends and family gave her what help they could so she’s not homeless.

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