Slippery slopes are real, and one of the great fallacies of our time is the communists convincing us that slippery slopes are fallacies. They are not, they are real. But they and good-time, can't-see-the-long-term-effects libertarians took over on vice issues.
Most healthy societies historically did the following: banned or strictly controlled the use of drugs/alcohol; banned and prosecuted homosexuality, gambling, and prostitution; banned abortion; did not allow marriages to dissolve; harshly stigmatized and punished slutty behavior and single motherhood; banned men and women from wearing each others clothing; strictly banned all non-modest dress and arrested people for lewdness in dress; and censored/banned arts that attacked these prohibitions or otherwise promoted degeneracies, and required arts to promote good family images.
Although its not glamorous, we need to bring back censors. We need to start arresting folk again for causing very real, long term, quality-of-life crimes. Broken windows theory in policing worked because it was based on the same principles: attack the smaller quality of life crimes harshly and you'll stop a cascade effect of bigger crimes.
In short, bring back the vice squads. Because slippery slopes are real.
EDIT: As a current-day example, I heard that the famously race-realist late leader of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, crusaded hard against vices in his country. He believed (as do I) that vices had a dysgenetic effect on the lower classes in particular. The result? The lowest classes in Singapore consistently out pulled other countries' lower classes in GDP/accomplishment. No vices, nothing harmful for a poor kid to throw his money away on or get addicted to, and thus he can have a better chance at improving his lot and being productive.
I agree with most of your comments, except banning or over regulating alcohol. I am glad you enjoyed this essay. Hopefully you will check out some of my other writings.If so inclined, please consider giving it a "like," share, and subscribe.
Most of what we think we know about Prohibition comes from Hollywood movies (acting and boozing are best friends) and from post-Prohibition alcohol execs panicked about it ever coming back. So there's been a lot of propaganda against Prohibition after the fact, and propaganda from the winners is never the truth. If the news today is fake and gay, how much of history is?
Also, as Mike Cernovich and others have pointed out, most people when prohibition hit never bought the illegal alcohol and kept sober. There was a massive drinking problem in the country then (the liquid lunch and the liquid breakfast and liquid dinner were commonplace, especially among the Ellis Island immigrants). And The politicians in Washington and locally (most of whom didn't support Prohibition) refused to enforce it thoroughly, so gangsters grew powerful and rich off the obvious sales of it. But had the people voted these pols out and installed crusading pols and demanded strict enforcement, it would have destroyed Capone and company (as Elliot Ness and Thomas Dewey showed, it was possible to take down powerful crime bosses who'd gotten powerful off Prohibition).
Fun fact: Al Capone's brother was a Prohibition Agent.
Americans really have a much graver problem with alcohol than many other cultures. Perhaps you could justify American prohibition on that ground, but I'd be more interested in seeing a reengineering and reorienting of American alcohol culture centered around responsible usage and public courtesy.
It is because of that puritanical bullshit that alcoholism is such a problem. At the very least it is a major factor. Teenagers and college kids binge drink because of the stupid 21 age requirement. Moral fagging and kvetching about alcohol is ridiculous and I have very little patience with any of it .
You think Americans have a problem with alcohol, you should visit England, Scotland, Russia, or Australia. They can drink any American under the table, hands down, and they're proud of it.
Well the people who pushed for prohibition, a lot of them were under the premise that it would be a limited prohibition - ie banning hard liquors but keeping beer, wine, ciders legal. When they realized oh no they're banning EVERYTHING alcoholic then it was a bit too far (the United States did have a decent quality wine culture pre prohibition).
Also a lot of people just stocked up on liquor pre prohibition and created or joined clubs where you could keep all the alcohol you wanted, and because it was a private club they couldn't do anything about it'.
And clearly the American people didn't want prohibition, certainly not the prohibition they got. Probably a weaker prohibition would have lasted longer (restrictions on hard liquor more than beer and wine, which is what Canada had)
This is like an arrow piercing to the heart of the issue. We must establish our moral boundaries and defend them from environment with extreme prejudice.
I think the truth is even more sinister here. The whole idea of 'live and let live' and 'let people be themselves' is merely a fig leaf. Wrapped under this messaging there exists an entire zeitgeist that actually urges people to engage in those types of destructive social behaviours, whereas as a form of liberation, self-reward, individuation etc. So, this dogma obscures the ethical question under the mantle of 'neutrality', whereas in reality it urges people to engage in he types of behaviours that you describe. There is however no neutrality on ethical and moral issues- every type of behaviour is either right or wrong from an ethical standpoint. This is what I find most destructive about this sort of mentality- it has us thinking that we are independent and ayutonomous actors, whereas, in reality, the decision has already been made for us and programmed into our brains. This is not freedom.
Too right. This is becoming more and more apparent as time and politics speed up. And as it becomes more easily seen, I'm wondering more and more where our societal critical mass will be and if there will be any way to survive it.
"Gambling often leads to divorce or disastrous break-ups of long-term relationships."
The gambling industry has resorted to the euphemism "gaming" -- games are fun, wholesome and just another way to relax, while "gambling" has, you know, those associations with organized crime, prostitution and the like.
You're over an important target. I would add the angle of the acceptance of artificial insemination for single females and females belonging to a homosexual coupling. Add further, the adoption of children by homosexual (male or female) or transsexual-person-containing couples. What is the potential negative impact on the children who find themselves mired in such situations? The potential carnage boggles my mind.
Indeed, one could extend the same exercise to any number of evils in the modern world. The baby surrogacy experiment is wild, and was greenlit with hardly any thought as to what long-term consequences might be. In ten or twenty years it will be easier to show how this also pertains to the law of unintended consequenes, just like single motherhood, everthing since the 1960s, or really 1945.
Over the target again. Let me further add that --stripped of medical jargon -- the concept of artificial insemination via sperm donor can be particularly wild from the perspective of the child produced by it if that child reflects on the method by which the sperm supplied could have been produced in the first place. This, beyond questions about the identity of the father. Potentially troubling thoughts and psychological trauma.
Children require a masculine and feminine parental influence. It's quite curious that liberal academia will admit that single-motherhood (and less often, single-fatherhood) are detrimental to the development of a child and their future adulthood because of this stripping of one parental influence, yet that same academia often refuses to admit that raising a child with two mothers or two fathers could be equally as detrimental for the same reason that they lack one or the other parental-sex influence. Nonetheless, a few studies have revealed that children raised by same-sex parents are more likely to be plagued by mental illness; graduate to an adulthood of poverty, joblessness, crime, and overall failure; identify by a sexuality other than straight; and contemplate or commit suicide.
A good read. As an anecdotal example of “consenting adults” not affecting others I’d like to add.
My son had a friend down the street, she and him played in the sandbox and did little kid stuff.
Until her dad because hopelessly addicted to marijuana and video games to the point where he was having trouble holding down a job, then he and his mom got a divorce.
Then the mother couldn’t afford that house with only 1 income and they had to sell the house and move to Seattle with her relatives.
So because of that man’s addiction, my son lost a friend. If you believe that “Consenting adults choosing to do X” does not affect wider society you are wrong.
An interesting and detailed read sir. I'm listening.
That's what we need: we need people to consider, instead of immediately taking offense & stammering off to their little corner of the universe in panic, anger & denial.
I'll be honest & upfront, and state that I believe the path forward is more maturity instead of limitation, sir. We don't need to narrow possibilities for people if they're more reasonable, understanding and morally sound.
I have a Substack article "in the mill" on this, but there is another point where homosexual behavior (and sexually deviant behavior in general) leads to enormous amounts of added healthcare costs from avoidable disease.
It also has much nastier societal damage in the form of antibiotic resistance and accelerated pathogen evolution, which we are in the midst of right now. Money doesn't even make sense to attribute to these damages, which money cannot fix.
In the 2010's, there was a big panic (justifiable) over the antibiotic resistance crisis. What little blame was attributed to the matter was pinned on "hover mothers" supposedly visiting the doctor and getting antibiotics for their child at the slightest sniffle.
Is that plausible? Perhaps. But one thing was never, ever discussed once, in the context of the antibiotic resistance crisis, was the enormous quantities of these medications that gay men consume on a regular basis to keep themselves alive.
The aberrant sexual practices of gay men function as an accelerated evolution laboratory for pathogens. Several pathogens were never documented to be sexually transmitted until gay men found creative ways to do it involving human waste consumption. Top of the list, are monkeypox and drug-resistant Shigella. When you examine the medical literature on gay men, that is where suddenly drug-resistant pathogens and "antibiotics of last resort" become mentioned very frequently.
One research article I found documented a gay man, who despite having a T-cell count IIRC of under 20, having full-blown AIDS, still sought out a sex partner for himself. This sex partner gave the man monkeypox. In his final 2 weeks of life, this gay man in his early 30's was administered more medications than I've been administered in my entire life, and I'm in my early 40's.
This is also a big reason why homosexuals have gravitated to working in the federal government. Those federal healthcare benefits, government tenure, and secure paychecks let them live a consequence-free lifestyle of wanton hedonism and sex tourism. That's great for them, but you and I pay for it all.
My 14 year old daughter presents as a male. Thank you for this article and others on the same topic which you have written.
I've coined the term 'gender fraud' to use instead of 'transgender'. I think/hope it can make strides in remedying the social ills derived from gender fraud advocacy. I wanted to present the term to you Richard for your consideration. I believe that the premise loaded in to the term is a winning one, where 'transgender' is a losing one.
Good post. I agree overall that the “live and let live” mentality is a negative on society, but I still don’t feel right about banning alcohol as some people do like a glass of wine now and then at parties and such. Maybe a Vice Tax would be better. Also, I take the Heart Attack Grill approach where if people just keep gorging themselves, then they’ll never really change and eugenically, we should just let them gorge themselves into an early grave. Is this radical, or do people agree with me.
People who advocate for prohibition of alcohol are morons. So are those who suggest alcohol is worse than marijuana. Nowhere does this essay suggest banning alcohol, although some do in the comments.
I am not sure what would lead any reader to think I regard alcohol to be a vice similar to these other matters. It may interest you to know I have a list of essay ideas, one of which concerns American attitudes about alcohol and the absurdity of the 21 drinking law. The essay linked below may interest you, which includes a discussion how fraternities have gamed social status in the college sexual marketplace by hosting parties that both sororities and unaffiliated men cannot throw. Women love parties. Crucially, the 21 law facilitates the womanizing of obnoxious frat boy sorts because authorities invariably turn a blind eye to frat parties that serve alcohol--frat parties open to fraternity men, sorority girls, select unaffiliated women but almost never unaffiliated men. Whether this consequence is intended or unintended is for each individual to decide, but it is another data point that bolsters my utter contempt and disdain for American society. https://theravenscall.substack.com/p/incel-the-most-mindless-unoriginal
Excellent thoughts here.
Slippery slopes are real, and one of the great fallacies of our time is the communists convincing us that slippery slopes are fallacies. They are not, they are real. But they and good-time, can't-see-the-long-term-effects libertarians took over on vice issues.
Most healthy societies historically did the following: banned or strictly controlled the use of drugs/alcohol; banned and prosecuted homosexuality, gambling, and prostitution; banned abortion; did not allow marriages to dissolve; harshly stigmatized and punished slutty behavior and single motherhood; banned men and women from wearing each others clothing; strictly banned all non-modest dress and arrested people for lewdness in dress; and censored/banned arts that attacked these prohibitions or otherwise promoted degeneracies, and required arts to promote good family images.
Although its not glamorous, we need to bring back censors. We need to start arresting folk again for causing very real, long term, quality-of-life crimes. Broken windows theory in policing worked because it was based on the same principles: attack the smaller quality of life crimes harshly and you'll stop a cascade effect of bigger crimes.
In short, bring back the vice squads. Because slippery slopes are real.
EDIT: As a current-day example, I heard that the famously race-realist late leader of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, crusaded hard against vices in his country. He believed (as do I) that vices had a dysgenetic effect on the lower classes in particular. The result? The lowest classes in Singapore consistently out pulled other countries' lower classes in GDP/accomplishment. No vices, nothing harmful for a poor kid to throw his money away on or get addicted to, and thus he can have a better chance at improving his lot and being productive.
I agree with most of your comments, except banning or over regulating alcohol. I am glad you enjoyed this essay. Hopefully you will check out some of my other writings.If so inclined, please consider giving it a "like," share, and subscribe.
Most of what we think we know about Prohibition comes from Hollywood movies (acting and boozing are best friends) and from post-Prohibition alcohol execs panicked about it ever coming back. So there's been a lot of propaganda against Prohibition after the fact, and propaganda from the winners is never the truth. If the news today is fake and gay, how much of history is?
Also, as Mike Cernovich and others have pointed out, most people when prohibition hit never bought the illegal alcohol and kept sober. There was a massive drinking problem in the country then (the liquid lunch and the liquid breakfast and liquid dinner were commonplace, especially among the Ellis Island immigrants). And The politicians in Washington and locally (most of whom didn't support Prohibition) refused to enforce it thoroughly, so gangsters grew powerful and rich off the obvious sales of it. But had the people voted these pols out and installed crusading pols and demanded strict enforcement, it would have destroyed Capone and company (as Elliot Ness and Thomas Dewey showed, it was possible to take down powerful crime bosses who'd gotten powerful off Prohibition).
Fun fact: Al Capone's brother was a Prohibition Agent.
Americans really have a much graver problem with alcohol than many other cultures. Perhaps you could justify American prohibition on that ground, but I'd be more interested in seeing a reengineering and reorienting of American alcohol culture centered around responsible usage and public courtesy.
It is because of that puritanical bullshit that alcoholism is such a problem. At the very least it is a major factor. Teenagers and college kids binge drink because of the stupid 21 age requirement. Moral fagging and kvetching about alcohol is ridiculous and I have very little patience with any of it .
You think Americans have a problem with alcohol, you should visit England, Scotland, Russia, or Australia. They can drink any American under the table, hands down, and they're proud of it.
Well the people who pushed for prohibition, a lot of them were under the premise that it would be a limited prohibition - ie banning hard liquors but keeping beer, wine, ciders legal. When they realized oh no they're banning EVERYTHING alcoholic then it was a bit too far (the United States did have a decent quality wine culture pre prohibition).
Also a lot of people just stocked up on liquor pre prohibition and created or joined clubs where you could keep all the alcohol you wanted, and because it was a private club they couldn't do anything about it'.
And clearly the American people didn't want prohibition, certainly not the prohibition they got. Probably a weaker prohibition would have lasted longer (restrictions on hard liquor more than beer and wine, which is what Canada had)
Not sure why banning homosexuality is included in your list of what constitutes a historically healthy society.
Banning homosexuality may be a tad overzealous, but it should definitely be stigmatized and discouraged. https://theravenscall.substack.com/p/this-horrid-rainbow-defining-deviancy
This is like an arrow piercing to the heart of the issue. We must establish our moral boundaries and defend them from environment with extreme prejudice.
I think the truth is even more sinister here. The whole idea of 'live and let live' and 'let people be themselves' is merely a fig leaf. Wrapped under this messaging there exists an entire zeitgeist that actually urges people to engage in those types of destructive social behaviours, whereas as a form of liberation, self-reward, individuation etc. So, this dogma obscures the ethical question under the mantle of 'neutrality', whereas in reality it urges people to engage in he types of behaviours that you describe. There is however no neutrality on ethical and moral issues- every type of behaviour is either right or wrong from an ethical standpoint. This is what I find most destructive about this sort of mentality- it has us thinking that we are independent and ayutonomous actors, whereas, in reality, the decision has already been made for us and programmed into our brains. This is not freedom.
Too right. This is becoming more and more apparent as time and politics speed up. And as it becomes more easily seen, I'm wondering more and more where our societal critical mass will be and if there will be any way to survive it.
"Gambling often leads to divorce or disastrous break-ups of long-term relationships."
The gambling industry has resorted to the euphemism "gaming" -- games are fun, wholesome and just another way to relax, while "gambling" has, you know, those associations with organized crime, prostitution and the like.
A badly needed essay that needed to be written 30 years ago. Great points.
More like 65-100 years ago, but yes....Please consider k subscribing and above all please share far and wide.
I shall!
You're over an important target. I would add the angle of the acceptance of artificial insemination for single females and females belonging to a homosexual coupling. Add further, the adoption of children by homosexual (male or female) or transsexual-person-containing couples. What is the potential negative impact on the children who find themselves mired in such situations? The potential carnage boggles my mind.
Indeed, one could extend the same exercise to any number of evils in the modern world. The baby surrogacy experiment is wild, and was greenlit with hardly any thought as to what long-term consequences might be. In ten or twenty years it will be easier to show how this also pertains to the law of unintended consequenes, just like single motherhood, everthing since the 1960s, or really 1945.
Over the target again. Let me further add that --stripped of medical jargon -- the concept of artificial insemination via sperm donor can be particularly wild from the perspective of the child produced by it if that child reflects on the method by which the sperm supplied could have been produced in the first place. This, beyond questions about the identity of the father. Potentially troubling thoughts and psychological trauma.
Children require a masculine and feminine parental influence. It's quite curious that liberal academia will admit that single-motherhood (and less often, single-fatherhood) are detrimental to the development of a child and their future adulthood because of this stripping of one parental influence, yet that same academia often refuses to admit that raising a child with two mothers or two fathers could be equally as detrimental for the same reason that they lack one or the other parental-sex influence. Nonetheless, a few studies have revealed that children raised by same-sex parents are more likely to be plagued by mental illness; graduate to an adulthood of poverty, joblessness, crime, and overall failure; identify by a sexuality other than straight; and contemplate or commit suicide.
Choose your tribe well. It will be your Round Table to make Camelot possible.
A good read. As an anecdotal example of “consenting adults” not affecting others I’d like to add.
My son had a friend down the street, she and him played in the sandbox and did little kid stuff.
Until her dad because hopelessly addicted to marijuana and video games to the point where he was having trouble holding down a job, then he and his mom got a divorce.
Then the mother couldn’t afford that house with only 1 income and they had to sell the house and move to Seattle with her relatives.
So because of that man’s addiction, my son lost a friend. If you believe that “Consenting adults choosing to do X” does not affect wider society you are wrong.
An interesting and detailed read sir. I'm listening.
That's what we need: we need people to consider, instead of immediately taking offense & stammering off to their little corner of the universe in panic, anger & denial.
I'll be honest & upfront, and state that I believe the path forward is more maturity instead of limitation, sir. We don't need to narrow possibilities for people if they're more reasonable, understanding and morally sound.
I have a Substack article "in the mill" on this, but there is another point where homosexual behavior (and sexually deviant behavior in general) leads to enormous amounts of added healthcare costs from avoidable disease.
It also has much nastier societal damage in the form of antibiotic resistance and accelerated pathogen evolution, which we are in the midst of right now. Money doesn't even make sense to attribute to these damages, which money cannot fix.
In the 2010's, there was a big panic (justifiable) over the antibiotic resistance crisis. What little blame was attributed to the matter was pinned on "hover mothers" supposedly visiting the doctor and getting antibiotics for their child at the slightest sniffle.
Is that plausible? Perhaps. But one thing was never, ever discussed once, in the context of the antibiotic resistance crisis, was the enormous quantities of these medications that gay men consume on a regular basis to keep themselves alive.
The hypothesis isn't exactly rocket science: https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-health-and-wellness/taking-antibiotic-sex-helps-gay-men-curb-stds-fuel-drug-resistance-rcna71241
The aberrant sexual practices of gay men function as an accelerated evolution laboratory for pathogens. Several pathogens were never documented to be sexually transmitted until gay men found creative ways to do it involving human waste consumption. Top of the list, are monkeypox and drug-resistant Shigella. When you examine the medical literature on gay men, that is where suddenly drug-resistant pathogens and "antibiotics of last resort" become mentioned very frequently.
One research article I found documented a gay man, who despite having a T-cell count IIRC of under 20, having full-blown AIDS, still sought out a sex partner for himself. This sex partner gave the man monkeypox. In his final 2 weeks of life, this gay man in his early 30's was administered more medications than I've been administered in my entire life, and I'm in my early 40's.
This is also a big reason why homosexuals have gravitated to working in the federal government. Those federal healthcare benefits, government tenure, and secure paychecks let them live a consequence-free lifestyle of wanton hedonism and sex tourism. That's great for them, but you and I pay for it all.
This can only go on so long before it reaches an upper limit and something breaks. I think it's coming very soon.
My 14 year old daughter presents as a male. Thank you for this article and others on the same topic which you have written.
I've coined the term 'gender fraud' to use instead of 'transgender'. I think/hope it can make strides in remedying the social ills derived from gender fraud advocacy. I wanted to present the term to you Richard for your consideration. I believe that the premise loaded in to the term is a winning one, where 'transgender' is a losing one.
Thank you for reading. Please be sure to like, share, and subscribe. You will definitely want to check out the section Against Transgenderism.
https://theravenscall.substack.com/s/against-transgenderism
Well said….and rarely articulated in our society.
Thank you. Please consider subscribing on this publication. Please also share this essay with others to help this publication grow.
https://libertyuncensored.substack.com/p/cinematographe-the-engineering-of?r=25izle
Perception control
Tolerance is immoral.
Good post. I agree overall that the “live and let live” mentality is a negative on society, but I still don’t feel right about banning alcohol as some people do like a glass of wine now and then at parties and such. Maybe a Vice Tax would be better. Also, I take the Heart Attack Grill approach where if people just keep gorging themselves, then they’ll never really change and eugenically, we should just let them gorge themselves into an early grave. Is this radical, or do people agree with me.
People who advocate for prohibition of alcohol are morons. So are those who suggest alcohol is worse than marijuana. Nowhere does this essay suggest banning alcohol, although some do in the comments.
Sorry if I got accused you, I just wanted to make sure you were not advocating for that.
I am not sure what would lead any reader to think I regard alcohol to be a vice similar to these other matters. It may interest you to know I have a list of essay ideas, one of which concerns American attitudes about alcohol and the absurdity of the 21 drinking law. The essay linked below may interest you, which includes a discussion how fraternities have gamed social status in the college sexual marketplace by hosting parties that both sororities and unaffiliated men cannot throw. Women love parties. Crucially, the 21 law facilitates the womanizing of obnoxious frat boy sorts because authorities invariably turn a blind eye to frat parties that serve alcohol--frat parties open to fraternity men, sorority girls, select unaffiliated women but almost never unaffiliated men. Whether this consequence is intended or unintended is for each individual to decide, but it is another data point that bolsters my utter contempt and disdain for American society. https://theravenscall.substack.com/p/incel-the-most-mindless-unoriginal
It was me, I misread a line my bad.