The whole stranger danger thing in my view as an adult feels like a downward spiral. It's not like this in many countries.
In the UK it's kind of like - kids don't wander about alone because they might run into baddies, and now adults are afraid to interact with kids because they might be seen as a baddy, and this kind of loops around until no-one is interacting.
Basically, it's like any adult man is seen as a potential child predator, when in reality it's some tiny tiny fraction and in an ideal world we would be able to assume that they get sectioned / locked up quickly so we don't have to worry about it.
Meanwhile I can travel around many parts of Asia, for example, and parents and children alike have no issue interacting with strangers.
I was at a gathering of distant relatives I had never met before. I struck up a conversation with the 15-year old daughter of a cousin whose aunt came running on up with a stern look on her face that made me feel like she thought I was a child molester.
That this was a family gathering I was invited to for honoring my close relative who passed away just made me very sad.
Unfortunately it's not a tiny, tiny fraction. I thought this too once then looked up the stats.
It's horrifying when you find out. It's 1 in 20 children get sexually abused in the UK at the moment for example, and we have loads of checks and safe guards.
And waiting until they get sectioned/locked up, that means someone else has to suffer potentially life-long trauma.
In the UK, about 5% of children have been sexually abused. Nobody wants to risk that happening to their children and it's mostly perpetrated by people known to the children, so trust is understandably at an all time low.
Right, but parents don't trust anyone in the community, so stranger danger teaches kids to avoid any adults outside the immediate family and it's not unwarranted. For every Madeline McCann, there are literally millions of children abused.
now adults are afraid to interact with kids because they might be seen as a baddy
This only applies to men though, as if all men are predators by default. There are cases where a single adult man was refused entry into a park, mom calling the cops on a single adult man in a park who was minding his own business etc. As you pointed out, this doesn't seem like an issue in Asia, at least not yet.
No wonder men do not want to become teachers. Why risk your freedom, reputation?
I'd blame the media (especially right wing media) whose entire business model is fear mongering about everything/everyone
As a Brit my feeling is that the state has basically given up on the concept of doing the right thing (not even from an ivory tower moral perspective, but from a realpolitik grow the economy / fix the issue sense) and is just throwing sticking plasters everywhere.
The recent issues with crime are, at root, apparently down to the fact that we don’t have enough prison places and we don’t have enough police.
The obvious solution is to hire more police, raise the wages, compulsory purchase a big field somewhere, make a massive prison and lock up the worst offenders for a long time.
There is some obsession with “making the books balance” as if this even matters. The Government is sovereign but acts as if somehow they have to do everything at market price like a private individual would.
That's kinda how it works in Germany and many other European countries. Thinking of RAC bands like Landser. Mein Kampf is now legal as long as it comes with a commentary. The game mod I've mentioned, not sure if it would go through. Depends on the details, I guess
I’m not really sure what cutthroat and cooperative mean in this context.
I see society as being cutthroat at the larger and more economic scales (e.g. global, obtaining / keeping your place within the elite of your country, etc) and more cooperative at the smaller scales (e.g. neighbours in your street, your friends, business partners).
The blue haired woman won’t date the fisherman and the farmer girl won’t date the metrosexual city boy.
Somehow you’re getting stuck on one side being universally correct, which in some extreme cases might be reasonable, but generally you are just looking at a societal split rather than one side moving hard.
IME, as a mid 30’s bloke in the UK in a stable relationship, guys haven’t significantly moved right wing, society as a whole has feminised (mostly in large cities). If anything it’s the women moving away from the previous norms - polling struggles with this because it defines “how the world was 30 years ago” (e.g. the home that almost everyone I know grew up in) as being hard right / conservative.
Conservatives always perceive themselves as simply wanting to return to the past.
Unfortunately, their perception of "what was normal 30 years ago" is generally inaccurate as well as biased by their own personal experience, because it's hard to get an objective picture of their society as an 8 year old. You're growing up raised by a particular family (who, statistically, shares your tendency for conservativism) in a particular community, watching media made a decade ago by people who formed their values two decades previously.
Ah, yes, those dastardly conservatives, always trying to <checks notes>, bring back strong labor unions and <checks notes> repeal Citizens United.
Which isn't to say that the past was great or anything or that the conservatives are broadly right, just that your generalization is overly broad to the point of absurdity. Pretty much every ideology tries to pick and choose things from the past that ought to be revisited.
Edit: The sarcasm in a certain sentence in this comment is obvious enough that I'm not gonna feel bad for anyone who didn't get it.
1. Sarcasm, even sarcasm you think is obvious, rarely is. Even less so when in text and not spoken.
2. Not everyone on this site is a native English speaker, so won’t necessarily detect sarcasm and idiom super well.
3. Yup, blame the reader because they didn’t get what you were laying down…
Where have you seen conservatives trying to resurrect labor unions or overturn Citizens United? So far, I've only ever seen such suggestions coming from the fringe left (e.g., Bernie, AOC, etc.) and always shouted down as "socialism".
Both obviously need to happen regardless, but I don't see either happening in my lifetime short of a (probably bloody) restructuring of US government, and even then, only if we're lucky.
> polling struggles with this because it defines “how the world was 30 years ago” (e.g. the home that almost everyone I know grew up in) as being hard right / conservative
Blanket statements that frame the problem dishonestly are a large contribution to the division. I'm speaking from a USian perspective here, but the people calling themselves "conservative" these days are imagining rosy snapshots of the past in a range from 30 up to 80 years ago (depending on the specific issue), decidedly not what most people "grew up in". And they aren't even rallying behind constructive solutions that might undo or at least mitigate the problems we're currently facing, but are rather just pushing some vague idea that tearing down our societal institutions will automatically cause those problems to be fixed. That is really the polar opposite of conservatism, and we should stop calling it such. I'd say it's more like anger driven accelerationism.
Most of the UK has laws or bylaws at least against antisocial drinking e.g. if you're being a twat, violent, homeless, etc you will be asked to pour it out and leave, in incredibly rare cases I guess you might be fined but probably not.
Just having a beer in public at a picnic with friends is fine and is a national pastime.
These editorials all have a common fault which is that they fail the sniff test of “would you actually do this”. I don’t know if you would call it classism, or an attempt at manipulation, or what, it’s just weird.
It’s like - okay, I’ll have a wife and kids, go fishing with the boys, a house with a garden, a car, will fly on holidays etc, but “we” (real meaning: you) should use all of these weird technological bad substitutes.
The literal embodiment of the “eat bugs and be happy” meme.
> These editorials all have a common fault which is that they fail the sniff test of “would you actually do this”. I don’t know if you would call it classism, or an attempt at manipulation, or what, it’s just weird
They know this as well as you do. They don’t have to worry about trying to hide it any, because they know it’s too late for you to do anything about it. The quiet part is often said out loud now.
It's always funny to read this sort of thing because it's like you're so close to connecting the dots but don't quite get it.
Is it not entirely logical that a cohort that actually pays attention to where 20%, 30%, 40% of their money is going ends up wealthier than one that doesn't?
It may be a horshoe (the poor need to manage every peeny, the hyper rich distort society to minmax their riches), but the American Dream died decades ago. You can't just follow some financial wellness workshop to "save money" when you can't barely pay rent as is. Hard works correlation with wealth has decreased dramatically, very quickly
> Is it not entirely logical that a cohort that actually pays attention to where 20%, 30%, 40% of their money is going ends up wealthier than one that doesn't?
Many if not most rich never got rich, they happened to be born rich. In the situation I'm talking about, the said family has been wealthy for two centuries. And my in-laws are significantly less well-off than the generation before. Their ancestors may have been gifted in some way that got them rich in the first place, but there have definitely be some regression to average since then and their management of their wealth has been much less efficient than the one of my parents for instance (who aren't wealthy today, but are still clearly better than their own parents).
In fact I suspect that these people are obsessed about taxes because they know their fortune is ever going downhill because they lack the thing that made their ancestors successful so they spend their efforts trying to salvage their wealth instead of making one of their own.
It seems that you agree that they are wealthier than they would otherwise be because they try to minimise taxes.
The rest of your comment seems to be a political commentary on whether inheritance is legitimate. You're entitled to your opinion, but it comes across a bit like sour grapes to me.
> It seems that you agree that they are wealthier than they would otherwise be because they try to minimise taxes.
I've written the opposite actually. They would be much better off if they tried doing something else with their time rather than spending it avoiding taxes. The amount of effort (and money actually, tax attorney aren't cheap) would be much better invested elsewhere.
Edit, a fun fact I thought about: they are donating to charity so that 66% of the donation could be deduced from taxes. And yes, their main motivation is tax exemption not the charity cause (which is a nice side effect). Which means they are willing to pay a 50% premium to give money to somebody else than the state. Now talk about rationality and how it makes them richer.
In the UK it's kind of like - kids don't wander about alone because they might run into baddies, and now adults are afraid to interact with kids because they might be seen as a baddy, and this kind of loops around until no-one is interacting.
Basically, it's like any adult man is seen as a potential child predator, when in reality it's some tiny tiny fraction and in an ideal world we would be able to assume that they get sectioned / locked up quickly so we don't have to worry about it.
Meanwhile I can travel around many parts of Asia, for example, and parents and children alike have no issue interacting with strangers.