Category: editorial

Massachusetts, marijuana, and the mushy middle 

I was a teenager during the 1980s. Where drugs were concerned, this was the era of “Just Say No.” This was little more than a decade into the so-called “war on drugs”

Adults were concerned that we were going to  become potheads—like one of the characters in a Cheech & Chong movie—or, perhaps, like Jeff Spicoli in Fast times at Ridgemont High.

Even the well-heeled suburban kids in The Breakfast Club indulged in weed on the sly in those days. But if you were caught, the penalties could be severe—in theory, at least. In the 1980s, simple possession for personal use could result in jail time.

Once again—in theory. The legally stipulated penalties were often applied unevenly, based on racial and economic factors. The law was not color-blind. Nor was it money-blind.

The legalization boom

All of that changed in the early 21st century, when the mood regarding marijuana decisively shifted. This was the era of legalization. Washington and Colorado were the first U.S. states to legalize recreational cannabis in November 2012. Other states followed suit to greater or lesser degrees.

Before long recreational marijuana use became not just something that was tolerated, but a full-fledged industry. People weren’t just growing and purchasing pot for their own personal use. Now they were growing and purchasing it to sell to others at a profit. Marijuana had gone from a forbidden activity to one that was more or less encouraged by the new legal framework.

Massachusetts has never been a state to miss out on nitwittery. So of course, Massachusetts voters approved recreational marijuana in 2016. The marijuana industry has grown in Massachusetts since then. In September of this year, the state’s Cannabis Control Commission reported that recreational marijuana sales had surpassed $10 billion in the Bay State. It takes quite a few potheads to reach sales figures like that.

The wrath of unintended consequences

But not everyone in Massachusetts has been happy about this outcome.

This brings us to the concept of unintended consequences—something that those pesky conservatives like to bring up. It is ironic that Massachusetts, one of the most left-leaning states in the USA, has come to the realization that legalizing pot—and turning it into a full-fledged industry—has brought some unintended and undesirable consequences.

There have been concerns about an increase in marijuana use among young people. If weed is legal—and the government practically encourages it—why shouldn’t young people use it, after all? 

There have also been concerns about impaired driving. One of the things you might remember from those 1980s movies is that people don’t drive particularly well when they’re high on weed. This is a lesson we learned long, long ago with alcohol.

And speaking of old lessons… Massachusetts was one of the first states to ban smoking in public places, because cigarette smoking isn’t good for you. It turns out that marijuana is also bad for your health—especially when you smoke it. It’s not particularly good for your focus or your mental health, either.

All of these things are true—and have been true forever—even if you happen to think that marijuana is some cool new hipster drug.

Question 8

This has led to Question 8, an effort to repeal most aspects of Massachusetts’ weed legalization framework. Question 8 is on the ballot in the Bay State this election season.

Question 8 would eliminate recreational marijuana sales, along with the accompanying tax and regulatory framework. In other words, all the things that make recreational marijuana an ordinary business activity.

This wouldn’t be a return to the harsh anti-weed laws of the 1980s, though. Adults twenty-one years old and above could still possess up to one ounce without getting into trouble. Medical marijuana would also remain legal.

If approved, all of these measures would take place on January 1, 2028. Massachusetts would thereby become the first state to repeal a voter-approved recreational marijuana market.

There would be winners and losers, of course. There always are when laws change. If you’ve recently invested in a recreational marijuana-related business in Massachusetts, you might or might not be willing to make the personal financial sacrifice for the sake of public health.

The challenge of victimless crimes

We tend to veer from one extreme to the other where victimless crimes are concerned. Victimless crimes include weed use, gambling, and prostitution.

No one thinks that these activities are socially beneficial. But should they be made illegal? Should consenting adults be prohibited from participating in these activities when they directly harm no one, at least in theory?

Victimless crimes are not always victimless when practiced at scale, though. Widespread marijuana use can endanger all of us when we’re forced to drive alongside intoxicated drivers.

Commercialized sex is another tough one. Although there is an effort to portray all instances of commercial sex as victimization, there is much evidence to the contrary here. High-end sex workers like Alice Little and Meida Marek are clearly women with options, who have chosen sex work for reasons of profit—not coercion or desperation.

That said, no one wants to see a brothel in the local shopping mall. No one would welcome sex workers speaking at the local high school on the next career day.

We have many choices on a continuum between open encouragement of a socially deleterious activity—and ruthless, uncompromising prohibition. One option is to allow these activities to take place on a small scale in private, but without the legal and societal stamp of approval that a formal regulatory framework brings. This means that the government can’t tax these activities. But the point is to keep the total revenue generated by these activities low to begin with.

Another option is selective enforcement. In Ohio, where I live, it’s legal to gamble so long as the government gets a piece of the action. Ohio has a state lottery, and we also have legal casinos. It is, however, illegal in Ohio to organize an unregulated poker game for money in your home. Employee betting pools are also technically illegal.

But authorities in Ohio aren’t going out of their way to search out such instances of unregulated gambling, not even with Republicans in charge. Restrain your home poker games to a small scale, and you probably won’t get in trouble.

I would argue for a similar approach to commercial sex. In 2013, authorities in Kennebunk, Maine, jailed Zumba instructor Alexis Wright for selling sexual favors to men from the privacy of her exercise studio. Wright was not coerced, nor was she coercing anyone else. Alexis Wright was a 30-year-old woman selling a voluntary service to adult men in their 40s and 50s. Yet they arrested her and put her in jail. The libertarian in me bristles at such authoritarian nonsense.

At the same time, I don’t want brothels in the local shopping mall, or sex workers speaking at the next career day at my local high school. In other words, I come down in the mushy middle where commercial sex is concerned, just like I come down in the mushy middle where recreational marijuana is concerned.

A more nuanced, more ambiguous approach to victimless crimes won’t please purists at either extreme. But from a societal perspective, ambiguity makes sense. There are certain activities that we don’t want to encourage at scale among the general population—especially where children and minors are concerned. At the same time, however, consenting adults should be allowed to do what they want with their own resources and their own bodies, so long as they aren’t directly harming others, and they’re mostly keeping their activities to themselves. The mushy middle is not a perfect approach to victimless crimes, but it’s better than either of the alternative extremes.

-ET

Matt Walsh embraces “Boomer conspiracy” ideology

I agree with Matt Walsh on certain issues, but I have never really been a Matt Walsh fan.

It’s the old saw of the stopped clock that tells the correct time twice a day. I also agree with Bernie Sanders on certain issues. That doesn’t mean I’m ready to join the DSA.

Like many youthful commentators in the political arena, Matt Walsh likes to interpret everything as an oppression narrative. Most recently, he has decided that the average Boomer is stealing from 35-year-olds in order to blow their Social Security checks on slot machines. (I’m not exaggerating here. Walsh actually makes this assertion.)

This no doubt relates to chagrin over the fact that millennials and Gen Zs are not reproducing at the expected rates. Matt Walsh, like JD Vance and other right-leaning social engineers, wants to redirect both public and private funds in order to encourage more marriage and childbearing. So the hobgoblin of the greedy, grasping 70- or 80-something fits neatly into this narrative.

I remember the 1980s; Walsh does not. (Walsh was in diapers in 1986.) I was a teenager back then, and my Boomer parents had noticeably fewer assets than my WWII-generation grandparents—who were also drawing Social Security.

Matt doesn’t seem to realize that this is the way Social Security has always been.

And this brings us back to a fundamental problem with Matt Walsh. Walsh is no dummy, but he has always been callow, petulant, and an aspiring authoritarian. Walsh has never been anything but a political commentator. He decided to start explaining the world before he had lived enough to fully understand the world.

You can challenge the premise of the Social Security system, if you wish. But to turn this into a “Boomer plot” is just silly.

-ET

Indie publishing has an originality problem

(And that’s why indie authors have to spend so much money on Facebook ads—and worry endlessly about AI)

The other day I was scrolling through my Facebook feed when I came upon an ad for an indie-published military science fiction series.

The ad was slickly produced with AI video that was only available to movie studios a few short years ago. The ad promised tales of drone swarms, planets in peril, and gritty space marines!

Hoo-rah!

I was curious. And so I exited Facebook and did a little research on the author using Google. I also searched for his books on Amazon.

He was the author of a five-book space marine saga.

Hoo-rah!

As soon as I returned to Facebook, Meta’s algorithm continued to show me ads from this same author.

But that wasn’t all. Meta also had now identified me as someone interested in space marine stories (hoo-rah!)—probably because of my Googling and my searches on Amazon.

For the rest of the day I was served more ads for indie-authored space marine sagas. They all had the same exact tropes.

A planet in peril!

Terrifying aliens!

Drone swarms!

Space marines!

Hoo-rah!

But no discussion of mind-numbing sameness in indie publishing would be complete without mentioning the romance field. Indie romance authors now write almost exclusively in hyper-focused niches: hockey romance, billionaire romance, enemies to lovers, cowboy billionaire romance, etc. (And that’s without delving into the really weird, hyper-focused romance niches, which I don’t care to mention here.)

There is an indie author who openly copies the Jack Reacher novels. I mean—openly copies them to the point of borderline plagiarism. The hero of these novels behaves exactly like Jack Reacher, all the way down to Reacher’s famous black coffee habit.

Indie publishing was supposed to provide room for creative freedom and literary diversity. (I mean that word in its best, truest sense.) But then the indie author “gurus” convinced indie authors to pick a narrow lane, and mass-produce the same kinds of books written by other authors working in that same lane.

This has made most of indie publishing both tiresome and mediocre. The market is filled with “me-too” offerings that capitalize on prefabbed packages of tropes.

This must bore the bejesus out of readers. I mean—seriously—how many books of the exact same kind does the market really need?

It has also made indie authors highly dependent on an increasingly complex, ridiculously expensive PPC ad ecosystem. Most authors working inside constricted trope lanes have little space to differentiate themselves. They must therefore rely on the brute force of high-bid, pay-per-click advertising. Many indie authors are spending more than half their revenues on Meta and Amazon ads. Some indie authors are outright underwater because of high ad spends.

That path is not for me. Whether you like my stories or not, each one of them is mine. I would never write by committee with “beta readers” (one of indie publishing’s most ridiculous concepts). Nor would I ever want to churn out repetitive stories to a trope standard. If I’d wanted to march in lockstep with a specific, clannish little group, I would have stayed in the corporate world.

But there’s another problem with the lemming-like approach so common in indie author circles. Many indie authors are fretting about the threat from AI: software penning novels—whiz bang!—with a handful of prompts.

The best way to yield literature to soulless AI is to make each story a soulless, standardized product. Yet that’s exactly what so many indie authors are doing nowadays.

-ET

Lindsay Clancy, the 19th Amendment, and our culture wars

The trial of child murderer Lindsay Clancy has produced yet more political fallout. Over this past weekend, some Republican women in media circles expressed concern over online calls to “repeal the 19th Amendment.”

Let me save you some googling here. The 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was passed by Congress in 1919 and ratified in 1920. It was the amendment that gave American women the right to vote.

So why would anyone want to repeal it? There is scarcely anyone left alive who was even born before the 19th Amendment’s passage. No living American woman has ever been lawfully denied the vote because of her sex.

The answer is… because of vocal (though fringe) feminist calls to pardon, exonerate, or otherwise excuse child murderer Lindsay Clancy. Throughout Lindsay Clancy’s recent trial in Plymouth, Massachusetts, pink-clad, overwhelmingly female protesters showed up to demonstrate on Lindsay Clancy’s behalf.

The pro-Clancy demonstrations provoked widespread backlash. At the most extreme end of this backlash are some calls to repeal the 19th Amendment. Such declarations are mostly limited to social media.

According to the logic here, if women will support child murderer Lindsay Clancy, they should not have a voice in our democracy.

Before we go any further, allow me to make a necessary disclaimer. Taking away women’s right to vote is neither justified nor a plausible political outcome.  “That dog,” as the old-timers say, “ain’t gonna hunt.” Women’s suffrage is not some newfangled idea of the social media age. My grandmothers both voted, as did all four of my great-grandmothers. This is not 1919. Women are now CEOs, governors, senators, military personnel and police officers.

And then there are the retail political realities—even if the 19th Amendment is never repealed (which it won’t ever be).  Want to elect liberal Democrats for the next four or five election cycles? Keep talking about the repeal of the 19th Amendment.

Calls for the repeal of the 19th Amendment are so politically toxic that one almost suspects a false flag operation. But that probably isn’t what’s happening here. This is yet another instance of social media rewarding the most extreme and combustible positions available.

***

But two things can be true—or false—at the same time. The wrongheaded, politically suicidal proposal to repeal the 19th amendment must be evaluated on its own terms. So must the affection for the filicidal Lindsay Clancy in certain feminist circles. Continue reading “Lindsay Clancy, the 19th Amendment, and our culture wars”

Hating Boomers without knowing what they are

The other day I came across a news story on Facebook about a contentious local issue. Against my better judgment, I ventured into the comments section. (Nothing good ever comes from reading the comments on Facebook.)

A woman in her early 50s (born in 1973) expressed an opinion that conflicted with the views of many of the younger commenters, who were mostly in their thirties.

Rather than answering her argument, the younger commenters replied with a string of denunciations of “Boomers.”

One even typed, “I can’t wait till all the stupid Boomers die.”

Source: Facebook

There are a number of problems here—the gross generalizations and hopes of mass death aside.

First of all, a person born in 1973 is no Boomer. A person born in 1973 is solidly in Gen X (born 1965 to 1980) territory. So insulting a Gen Xer by wishing death on all Boomers is kind of like insulting a person from Germany by saying that you want to exterminate all the citizens of Denmark.

I have noticed this tendency among some Millennials and older Gen Zs on the internet: They define “Boomer” as anyone ten years their senior who happens to disagree with them. At best, this is a scattershot approach to being an insufferable boor on the internet. At worst, it is a display of rank idiocy.

For the record: a “Boomer” is someone born between 1946 and 1964—i.e., someone between the ages of 80 and 62 at the end of 2026.

If they don’t fall within that age range, they aren’t a Boomer—just like a hummingbird isn’t an armadillo. You can’t use these words interchangeably just because TikTok has told you that Boomer = “bad.”

If you’re going to be a jerk, at least get the terminology right.

-ET

Asian students are smarter than your kids, but…

Students in Asian countries—China, Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan—score higher than their US peers in reading, math, and science. CNN, whose writers apparently fell off the proverbial donkey cart yesterday, describes this as “a troubling trend.”

This is, however, a trend that goes back at least two generations. In the early to mid-1980s, when I was a high school student, there was a panic about US students falling behind. (At that time, we were probably more concerned with US student rankings vis-à-vis West Germans and Finns.)

On January 28, 1986, teacher Christa McAuliffe died along with the NASA crew when the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded over the Atlantic Ocean.

Why was a teacher aboard the space shuttle? The Reagan administration, alarmed over falling US scholastic rankings, hoped that the presence of a teacher aboard the space shuttle would increase US students’ interest in science and math.

Despite the presence of so many world-class universities within our borders, America has never been a scholarly, literary, or test-acing nation. Well into the nineteenth century, the most popular English-language writers in the United States were British writers like Charles Dickens.

In more recent decades, there are worries that Asian students are too far ahead of our kids in math and science. These fears have been exacerbated by the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration. In the past, we could steal the best and brightest from Taiwan, South Korea, China, and India. That may become more difficult in the near future.

Why are we such second-rate students? Historically, America was a frontier nation that was stubbornly obsessed with the practical. During the Industrial Revolution, education was tolerated if not necessarily prized. Could an education help you build a better steel mill? That was the relevant question.

The modern era, with its industrial-model grade schools and high schools, has shaped our indifference toward education in a different way. In recent decades, the obsession with competitive games and other extracurricular activities in school environments has far eclipsed the interest in competitive GPA rankings. At least, this was the way it was when I was a suburban high school student in the 1980s.

(The American obsession with watching grown men play boys’ games continues well into adulthood for most of us. This week I have heard little on the news but chatter about the start of the NFL season.)

One of my coworkers from Taiwan, a man I worked with in the late 1990s, was particularly baffled by this. He told me that in Taiwan, sports are seen as little more than something you do to blow off steam and keep your body limber when you’re not studying for the next exam.

All of these criticisms of American priorities are fair game and worth noting. I have noticed them for years and I haven’t been the only one.

But the proof is still in the pudding. The U.S. is still the top economy in the world, the country that draws the most immigrants. People aren’t flooding into Taiwan and China from other countries, despite these nations’ superior math scores.

All of this means that we’re doing something right, and we have been doing something right for decades now, even if we could genuinely use some improvement in our scholarship.

Imagine if we could raise our test scores to the top international levels and maintain the dynamism and competitive spirit that has always distinguished America from its Old World and Asian counterparts. Now that would really be something.

-ET

Amy Acton and the empty podium

Amy Acton is literally old enough to be Ramaswamy’s mom, yet she’s afraid to debate him because of “personal attacks”?

(Note: I’m not age-shaming here; Acton and I are roughly the same age.)

But this is a very bad look on her part.

Both of these candidates are political neophytes. Neither one has a track record in a major elected office. (We can thank both of Ohio’s two major parties for that.)

And as an Ohio voter, neither one of them looks like a stellar slam dunk to me. I keep waiting for the actual candidates to appear.

But a debate would help me decide which is the lesser of two evils.

Acton’s (ostensible) logic is that Vivek Ramaswamy is just too impure a candidate to share a stage with her lofty presence.  But Ramaswamy, whatever his flaws, is willing to show up and make his case. Amy Acton is not. 

-ET

Medicare for all, or the Bell System solution?

The other day an older woman in my social circle mentioned that she had to finance unpaid charges from her dual cataract surgery. “Four thousand dollars per eye,” she said. “Eight thousand in total.”

This woman is not indigent. She’s a retired public school teacher on Medicare.  She also has supplemental Medicare insurance through Anthem.

This suggests that neither Medicare nor Anthem is all that great.

What options are available for those who are too young for Medicare? The Affordable Care Act (ACA)—aka Obamacare—insurance plans provide high-priced, privately available health insurance plans that come with high deductibles. And there’s another catch—many physicians do not treat patients on ACA plans.

The Affordable Care Act was enacted in 2010 in an effort to make health insurance more accessible to individual purchasers. But the ACA preserved the oligopolistic structure of the preexisting healthcare insurance market. This factor (combined with the inefficiencies of government planning) made ACA expensive and inefficient, despite the underlying intentions.

The typical ACA plan costs $650 per month, with a deductible in the $5,000 to $10,000 range, and a very limited selection of network physicians. This is not good health insurance.

“Medicare for all” has therefore entered the public debate space again this election cycle. DSA-backed Democrats like Abdul El-Sayed are advocating for single-payer public insurance, and this is taken as evidence of the Democratic Party’s sudden lurch to the left.

But the first Democrat to make such a proposal was Harry S. Truman. In 1945, just seven months after he took office, Truman made a written proposal for the creation of a national healthcare program. Universal healthcare was also an animating cause for the Democratic Party in 1992—the election that brought Bill Clinton to power. Neither Harry Truman nor Bill Clinton are widely regarded as wild-eyed left-wing radicals today.

America’s healthcare system is expensive, inefficient, and often unavailable—in practical terms—for anyone who is not insured under a top-tier corporate plan.

The linkage of health insurance to specific corporate employment is a longstanding flaw that is no longer appropriate in the age of the gig economy, entrepreneurship, or—for that matter—the family farm. Recent headlines indicate that large banks and other corporate employers are gearing up for massive downsizing because of anticipated AI-related efficiencies. The demand for health insurance not linked to a corporate plan is likely to increase in the coming years. Continue reading “Medicare for all, or the Bell System solution?”

Moral panic over Pattaya, and an innovative madam of World War II Honolulu

Betty Jean O’Hara (1913-1973) was a famed lady of the night and madam in Honolulu, Hawaii’s Hotel Street red-light district during World War II. O’Hara came up with a novel solution to cope with the demand of randy US sailors during the conflict.

O’Hara set up a Hotel Street brothel that combined sexual services with the assembly-line efficiency of a Ford plant. Each of O’Hara’s employees rotated between a series of three rooms. In one room a man would be undressing, in another a fellow would be engaging in an act of carnal knowledge. In a third room, a satiated sailor would be getting dressed. The Hotel Street red-light district of Honolulu lasted throughout most of World War II.

I never served in the military, but I have met many men who have. In the 1980s I met a man a few years older than me who was stationed in South Korea with the US Army in the late 1970s. He told me stories of “Miss Oh”, a local courtesan in Daegu, South Korea. Based on the gleam in his eye when he reminisced, Miss Oh must have been a proverbial firecracker.

One of my high school acquaintances was in the US Marine Corps during the 1980s. (I’ll call him Mitch.) Mitch also served in the Persian Gulf War of 1990-91.

Many years later, I ran into Mitch at a reunion and he told me some war stories.

While relating his experiences abroad, Mitch also mentioned a handful of experiences with professional women—mostly in the Philippines, where large numbers of US service personnel were stationed through about 1992.

I was somewhat surprised. Mitch had been the archetypical ladies’ man in high school: a handsome, charming, multi-sport athlete. Not the kind of guy one associates with sex workers.

Perhaps sensing my surprise at his revelation, Mitch explained: “You’re a young guy in a foreign country, working in a mostly male organization (the Marine Corps). There aren’t many opportunities for conventional dating and relationships.”

Things are different, though, in this enlightened 21st century. The USS Abraham Lincoln has just docked in Thailand. The aircraft carrier and its crew participated in US military operations against Iran, and stayed at sea for more than 260 days—almost nine months.

And what are people worried about? Some of the male members of the crew may visit prostitutes in Pattaya, Thailand, a city famed for its red-light district. Continue reading “Moral panic over Pattaya, and an innovative madam of World War II Honolulu”

Who should get the half-staff flag treatment when they die?

Ken Adams, the mayor of Olive Branch, Mississippi, has balked at lowering the flag in honor of the late Dolly Parton—who passed away last Tuesday.

Adams acknowledged Dolly Parton’s universal appeal and good works in a social media post, while also challenging the appropriateness of lowering the flag in her honor.

According to Adams, “It should be reserved for our military heroes, fallen first responders, presidents and other major national leaders, or events that have had a tremendous impact on our country. If we lower the flag every time a well-known or beloved person passes away, I believe we eventually lessen the meaning of the gesture.”

Most recently, President Trump ordered the flag to be flown at half-staff for Senator Lindsey Graham, who died of natural causes in July. (Well, there are some conspiracy chasers who think the Russian FSB was involved, but we’ll table that discussion for the moment.)

And then there was the lowering of the flag for the assassinated Charlie Kirk last year. Kirk was a noteworthy but controversial celebrity/activist who divided public opinion.

On the other hand, no presidential order was given to lower the flag for Jesse Jackson, a civil rights activist and politician who died in February. Continue reading “Who should get the half-staff flag treatment when they die?”

The Texas Roadhoax?

As far back as the 1970s, there have been rumors and urban legends about restaurant employees tampering with customers’ food.

I recall one such story from the 1980s, about a steakhouse employee who supposedly urinated on random customers’ steaks. That might just be enough to make even a sane, well-adjusted person go vegan.

One thing I noticed, though—these stories never stood up to scrutiny. How, exactly, did a single employee manage this urinary sabotage in a crowded kitchen environment, with other cooks, managers, and servers coming and going? Did the cook have a name? Well, no, not exactly… he was some dude who worked at X steakhouse. Continue reading “The Texas Roadhoax?”

Shariah law fails Economics 101

One of the nice things about the pre-internet world was that the foolishness of teenagers and young adults was usually restricted to small audiences. But now we have Gen Z social media influencers. Canyon Mimbs is a 22-year-old convert to Islam who wants to tell the world what he knows–or thinks he knows.

Theology is not my bailiwick. Like Elizabeth I, I do not seek to make windows into men’s souls. But economics is another matter.

Young Mr. Mimbs advocates for shariah law in the USA. Well, why not? Half of Gen Z is joining the DSA, if you believe the internet. There are any number of reasons why shariah law would be incompatible with our American system, but in this post, I’ll focus on one: shariah’s prohibition on interest. Continue reading “Shariah law fails Economics 101”

Lindsay Clancy’s mental health and the question of guilt

Lindsay Clancy is the Massachusetts woman who killed her three children. In any normal society, this would make her an instant pariah.

But this is Massachusetts we’re talking about. Child killing is all the rage in Massachusetts, where abortion was recently made legal until birth. Even as Lindsay Clancy is on trial, her exoneration has become a “cause” among progressive feminist factions of the Bay State. Hundreds of supporters, overwhelmingly women, recently rallied outside the courthouse in support of Clancy—who strangled her young children to death with exercise bands.

Lindsay Clancy’s mental health at the time of the murders is the crux of the debate—and the trial. Here are the basic arguments for the two sides: Continue reading “Lindsay Clancy’s mental health and the question of guilt”

The excesses of dog culture

Consider this recent story from Arizona:

“Woman nearly loses arm in attack by foster dog she saved from euthanasia”

I will freely admit that the excesses of 21st-century dog culture are trying my patience. I just don’t get it.

During my growing up years (the 1970s and 1980s), dog ownership was relatively rare, and most people understood that dogs were potentially dangerous animals.

In the past few decades, dog adoration has become something of a secular cult that crosses both demographic and political lines. People now anthropomorphize dogs and even want to take them in restaurants. In my suburban neighborhood, entitled dog owners form a daily procession with their pooping, barking, nipping beasts.

I actually like dogs (though I don’t understand the current, cultish devotion to them). But we need to return to common sense and moderation where dogs are concerned—especially the dangerous breeds.

-ET

21st-century obesity rates vs the buckle-down culture of the 1980s

@kwbogen

Also whyte supremacy. All bodies are good bodies but let’s not pretend we aren’t all being sold something. Exclusivity creates a marketplace.

♬ original sound – kwbogen

K.W. Bogen, an author/influencer, declares in a public video that the commonly cited male preference for thin/fit women is a conspiracy of corporations and white supremacy.

Because isn’t everything a conspiracy of corporations and white supremacy nowadays? No doubt the patriarchy had a hand in it all, as well.

Ms. Bogen then goes on to show us her figure (about which I will refrain from comment). She asserts that thinness is “really, really difficult to achieve” without “starving oneself” or taking drugs. (I assume she is referring to Ozempic, though I can’t be certain.)

First things first. Many men do prefer thin, fit women. A smaller percentage prefer women who are “pleasingly plump”. A very small percentage actively seek out heavyset women. (This last group of men is rare; but they do exist.)

But what men like is not the central issue here. On that point, at least, I think Ms. Bogen and I may be in agreement—though for entirely different reasons. Continue reading “21st-century obesity rates vs the buckle-down culture of the 1980s”