The risks are called living your life – there is a inherent risk with traveling, hiking, wandering around as a kid, and almost any activity outside of staring at a screen.
I said by today's standards.. women going home with some random guy without anyone even having a phone number for them. No mobiles, no net, no nothing.
And in most cases that worked out fine, but today people would think it insane to even suggest that.
The enormous amount of fear that has been injected into society, seemingly permanently, disguised as "safety" (i.e. framing a negative as a positive) is one of, or perhaps THE, the most detrimental factors to the health of that society, and is actively harming the development of people growing up within it.
Life is much safer now so mundane relative risks look much worse. When illness or famine lurks a every corner, no one is questioning a kid venturing 3 miles on his bike to buy mom a pack of smokes and buy himself some Cracker Jacks. Now you're considered Satan if you allow that and some prosecutor will ramble about predators and kidnapping at your trial.
999 good or OK outcomes and 1 bad one can still be overall pretty damn bad, when scaled up to the level of a society. It becomes a Something Must Be Done scenario pretty quick.
And I suspect in this specific case, the ratio of bad experiences.. maybe not terrible, but just bad.. was a lot higher than 1 in 1000.
I mean, the flip side of that is, going home with a stranger in a big city is pretty much a total historical anomaly before the 60s sexual revolution (because of smaller communities as well as more conservative sexual attitudes), maybe some of it is just the pendulum swinging back.
I disagree. A few of those 999 hookups will result in marriages and families. Others in relationships. This is arguably the whole point of society, to engage with other people, to be in relationships, to reproduce. What we see now, largely due to unrelenting fear (again, disguised as "safety"), is unhappiness, isolation, loneliness, depression and mental illness all dramatically increasing. This is not a coincidence.
That's true if the only alternative to hooking up with randoms in a bar is staying home.
Same as, until the Jet Age, the only alternative to risky world travel by land and sea was to stay home.. and then we invented jet airliners, which made travel multiple orders of magnitude safer than the Age of Sail.
I'm a neutral observer on this tbh, never had anything against bar culture at the time, but if you were a 19yr old weighing up your options today, online dating looks like the same potential reward without all sorts of down sides. Not just the personal safety stuff, but as a guy not having to run the gauntlet of approaching women and getting shot down (no big deal really, but cultural shifts now frown upon asking at all, whereas it used to be more a case of.. ask away, the important thing was to respect it if you got told no).
The flip side is that online dating results in a much more publicly conservative culture, where even merely flirting is at risk of being reframed as sexual misconduct, people have thinner skins and lower tolerance generally because they've never had to develop a thick skin, it takes some of the beautiful chaos out of the world.. people didn't go about the place constantly looking to hook up (well, maybe some did) but the very possibility added something to the atmosphere, even if the probability was low.
And on the subject of beautiful chaos. Take a look at video footage from major rock, pop and dance concerts/festivals from 2000 ish and today. Watch the crowds, look at their facial expressions, energy level, state of mind.
It’s a mistake to assume that there will be 100% correlation between the past and future, but it’s probably as bad of a mistake to assume 0% correlation. (Obviously dependant on exactly what you are looking at).
That’s my point – they are not. Your previous comment implied to me a belief that any attempt to draw inference from past events was doomed to failure!
Each circumstance is different. Sometimes the past is a good guide to the future – even for the notoriously unpredictable British weather apparently you can get a seventy percent success rate (by some measure) by predicting that tomorrows weather will be the same as todays. Sometimes it is not - the history of an ideal roulette wheel should offer no insights into future numbers.
The key is of course to act in accordance with the probability, risk and reward.
Okay, so how would you consider the alternative when someone is expressing their opinion on other topics like: “Do you really like dating people of the same sex? Sorry that’s the kind of thing I associate with someone who does not have any mental issues as yourself”.
I am not advocating if any of them are good or bad (personally I avoid both), but we should really have the same standards when it comes to the famed “free speech”.
All of these hypothetical conversations are great reasons why sex, politics, and religion should never be discussed in the workplace. Somebody's feelings are going to get hurt.
I don't understand how that's relevant. The comment I replied to was arguing about applying the same standards in free speech, whereas "protected class" refers to employment discrimination.
Yes, it is. My philosophical stance has been changing and evolving constantly over these 40+ years that I have been alive. Unlike my race or my sexuality, it's not part of who I am, it's part of who I choose to be.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that anyone who feels like they have no control over their religion -- the same way they have no control over which color of skin they were born with -- should seek help because they're being abused by someone.
"So you think religion is a personal choice and sexual orientation isn't? Sorry, I cannot hang out with misguided people such as yourself!"
I can literally take anything you say and find any excuse to disassociate myself from you. The problem is when people don't talk to each other and it's worse when they disassociate based on topics they likely have no idea about.
Is it a personal choice though? If in the morning I decide between wearing a blue shirt or a red shirt, that's arguably a matter of personal choice, but deciding to believe in God is as much a 'personal choice' as deciding to believe in gravity or deciding to believe in homeopathy.
What a pretentious comment, everyone makes mistakes and everyone can write a big mess of a code eventually. The benefit of typesafety is how easy we can spot that and recover / rewrite when needed.
