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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.
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).
They do damage while they are in your lungs, and that damage may or may not be permanent. However, healthy lungs have cilia which will expel foreign material, limiting the total damage that it can do; but if you kill off the cilia, asbestos fibres will linger for far longer, and do much more damage.
Cool, good to know. Thanks :)
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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.
Their lives are also ridiculously locked down. They are tracked by phone apps, social media is read, driving privileges are extremely limited (you can’t drive with more than two friends in the car until 18 under graduated licenses). The ability for kids to just go do things the way that their parents and grandparents did doesn’t exist anymore. We used to ditch school all the time, we cut class, we would go outside with other kids and the adults would not know where we were until we came home. And it was entirely possible to have friends your parents would not approve of. Kids could get drugs to school because it was easy enough for a kid to go to skid row and score some to sell at school. Safetism coupled with modern social media and phone tracking killed this type of independence.
I think this explains the mental health crisis and the no sex and drugs thing. Kids are never allowed to be alone with other kids without all the adults being privy to where they are and what they are doing. It causes a mental health crisis because kids never learn to get out of messes on their own, or to be independent. This means that kids never learn that they are capable of being independent or that problems that come up are solvable, least of all by themselves. The sex thing is because it’s impossible to get alone with a member of the opposite sex. No telling mom you’re spending the night with Mike and then going to Mary’s house. Mom will be tracking you. If you go anywhere other than Mike’s house, you’ll be in big trouble.
To be honest, this sounds horrifying. I understand the rationale behind helicopter parenting a lot more if this is the perceived alternative.
Some level of independence is good but this really seems like too much. Independence is like bank lending - you prove you can have it by proving you don’t need it.
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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.
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Oh, don't get them wrong, they were happy about it back when their kid was 12-20. Every conservative parent's dream, really- no sex, no drugs, and otherwise content to be seen-but-not-heard. Just follow the process and your life will surely start eventually.
But now you fast-forward 20 years and they're still in the basement. Encouraging their children to reject the more pleasurable (and riskier) parts of life may have had some unforeseen consequences, but if your judgement as a parent is that the best way to make sure your child isn't living in sin is to encourage them to refuse to live then, uh... mission accomplished, I guess?
The idea that you should find a partner by fucking around through your teens and twenties until you find a girl you want to keep is incredibly recent, though. Basically Europe/Anglo only, between 1960s and now.
What makes conservative sexual policy stupid is trying to reject the Sexual Revolution for people their children’s age while keeping all the related social frameworks and assumptions that underlie it.
So you get ‘sex when you’re young is bad’ combined with ‘arranged/facilitated marriages are evil because they prevent twu wuv, as is anything that even slightly impinges on women’s sexual autonomy’. You can have either position but not really both, especially when you cripple your childrens’ game and then throw them into the tinder meat market at 20.
You are right about the recency, but sadly wrong about the spread. Hollywood and Harvard have exported the sexual revolution around the world, with a little help from the US military. The false life plan is now the standard across much of Latin America and Asia. I think Muslims in the Middle East and Africa are the last line of defense humanity has against this poison.
In particular, mainstream conservative boomers have brought into the cult of education and careerism, especially for women, and expect everyone to not even think about marriage until after they graduate college at 22 and spend a more few years getting established in the workforce. In this, they are in complete agreement with the progressives, dissenting only in believing that chastity should be preserved until then.
But, of course, humans are not made to be virgins until 25; we reach sexual maturity in our teens. That is when we are meant to start having sex and becoming independent of our parents. Instead, we rot in classrooms memorizing random trivia and practicing useless skills, enforced by a legal and social regime that views teen marriage and teen labor as barbaric abuse.
The only possible results are stunted or disobedient individuals.
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Yes, the ability to have sex and be more or less guaranteed for that not to result in pregnancy is an incredibly recent development; and the kinds of people who take advantage of that technology (and encourage taking advantage of the same) tend to be somewhat less encumbered than what the past several million years of evolution suggest they should be, to the point that someone closer to that prediction would/should believe that a serious malfunction.
There are two types of conservatives: those who have realized this and ally with the less-encumbered as described above, and those who turn inwards and die (their daughters become progressives immediately after leaving the house and remain that way for the rest of their lives, and their sons don't figure out becoming progressive is a bad move until it's too late for them to ever leave the basement).
What about instead noting that we’ve done quite well at stopping underage sex and taking the required next step: reviving the social apparatus for allowing responsible (by the conservative rubric) young people to find a healthy mate, while shutting out the thots? It doesn’t require much to start, just a practice of actively coordinating unattached acquaintances of the right age.
I was speaking to a Chinese person yesterday: her husband is a 667 programmer and therefore relatively wealthy but unable to date. Her cousin interacted with his cousin, they swapped photos, then WeChat contacts, and the marriage was two months later.
But I’ve noticed that Western parents are simultaneously incredibly intrusive and demanding about careers whilst absolutely rejecting any responsibility for their hothoused children’s marriage. I don’t get it. Well, half the problem is that most of said parents are divorced, but I still find it incredibly annoying.
These two things are at odds. If you believe teenagers should be thoroughly desexualized (and if you even use the term "underage" that way, you likely do), you're going to think the "right age" is 25-30 for both parties. By that point you have enough sour grapes from the men and enough "thottery" from the women that your "active co-ordination" isn't going to be better than the Tinder status quo. One of the things you want from a marriage is the concept and expectation that you'll grow together, and that's much more likely at 20 than 30.
Indeed, money makes all the difference. The Japanese might have the right idea with the company dating services, and since you only see your spouse for a couple of hours one day a week the dynamics of a marriage aren't exactly going to be that deep.
It's the same thing you just described, but up one level: if you don't understand how men and women actually work (perhaps because you think man bad woman good, which is the traditionalist-progressive compact, or because you're just not self-aware enough or too tired/don't have time to deal with it, which is the issue with the liberals), then you're not going to be able to fix issues built upon faulty understanding, you're just going to make them worse.
I think I haven’t communicated my perspective well. I think that a good marriage time is say 21-25.
Two months is admittedly brief but part of the point of having a supportive infrastructure is that people shouldn’t need or expect to be fucking around in their teenage years. So the resentment/thottery dynamic shouldn’t take off so much. And yes, I think that we should discourage media that tries to display fucking around and experimenting as being a natural part of growing up, since it isn’t and never has been.
Part of the reason I prefer doing it this way is admittedly selfish - I fell into the situation described and would like society to uphold its end of the bargain. But the other half is that I don’t believe the ‘promiscuity then marriage’ dynamic works for more than 30-40% of the population at most. Maybe another 30% get married but are already kind of bitter and difficult by that point, and the rest stay in perpetual bachelordom of either too much sex or too little.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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".
Because the harm is attributed to the person who chose to commit murder.
If Alice does $THING (being promiscuous, wearing the 'wrong' clothes for her gender, expressing unpopular opinions, eating rice on Tuesdays, &c., &c.), and Bob chooses to kill or otherwise harm her over it, that does not make $THING responsible for the harm done to Alice; the blame lies on Bob. Otherwise, Bob would have the ability to prevent Alice from doing anything he didn't like. (cf. the Heckler's Veto.)
They're often choosing to commit murder because they are having what is commonly known as a significant emotional event. Hence the term "crime of passion". Such crimes have been a constant through all of recorded history, indicating that their emergence is not the result of particular social customs. It seems pretty clear to me that sex tends to be deeply emotionally significant for healthy humans, and that perceived violations of trust in these matters cause intense emotional reactions indicates that promiscuity can, in fact, cause significant harm.
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