Kimstu, I really don’t much care what’s going on in the Netherlands, and if memory serves I indicated what I said was a guess anyway. And given that there isn’t one country in the world that is identical to or approaches things in the exact same way as another, I fail to see the relevance. Most of my impression of the Netherlands comes from Maastricht, who strikes me as the sort of mature, agreeable, good-natured and intelligent person who doesn’t go off the deep end in anything. (Though I could be wrong about her, too. ;))
At any rate, again, it doesn’t matter. What I’m concerned about is what’s going on here.
So, “liberal permissiveness”, which is a deadly toxin here in America, for some reason has no effect in Europe? And the reason is because America and Europe are “different”.
Thanks for clearing that up for us, I was confused as to the mechanism whereby the malignant effect of liberal permissiveness is neutralized, but you’ve cleared that right up, we’re “different”.
I have my doubts, given that women in permissive societies tend to also be in a better position to say “no”; it’s still an unwed pregnancy if they kill the girl for being raped. And women are more likely to have access to birth control in more progressive countries.
I didn’t say that. And based upon Kimstu’s cite, I certainly don’t agree that everything is peachy in the Netherlands. A lower birth rate isn’t definitive. One of Roman Polanski’s defenses thirty years ago was that in France having sex with a thirteen-year-old girl was no big deal, men did it all the time. Assuming that was true, would you have us look to France, another of the European countries certain liberals are so enamoured of, to establish our sexual mores here? (And would you admit it if you did? :D)
Basically, I didn’t say much about the Netherlands upthread because I don’t want to get into an argument about it, my time is stretched thin enough as it is. But there are lots of things there that are accepted as normal and proper that I disagree with vehemently, such as exorbitant taxes, a socialistic government and socialistic health care. It comes as no surprise to me that people like you would find it all wonderful, and it should come as no surprise to you that I would find it abhorrent.
Thus **Kimstu’s **cite in no way convinces me that liberalism is working positive wonders in the Netherlands.
Hey, remember your own analysis, from page 1 of this thread:
You were right on the money.
Higher teen pregnancy rates in America are evidence of the pernicious effects of liberalism. Low teen pregnancy rates in the Netherlands tell us nothing about the pernicious effects of liberalism, so they can be safely ignored. And even if there weren’t higher rates of teen pregnancy in the US, it still wouldn’t change the fact that liberal permissiveness is to blame for society’s ills. Starving Artist is one of those guys whose only tool is a hammer, so everything looks like a nail to him.
But you don’t talk about it as a personal abhorrence, you talk about it as an historical fact, like a Marxist talks about class struggle. You lay the blame for just about all social ills on liberal permissiveness, that it is destructive of society. And yet here is a culture up to its eyeballs in liberal permissiveness, and muddling through fairly well, all things considered.
Which leads the reasonable mind to ponder if perhaps this inevitable destructive force may not be all its cracked up to be.
And yet we have all these societal ills that did not exist 50 years ago. We have high teen pregnancy, abortion and out-of-wedlock birth rates; a drug problem so severe that almost no one knows anyone who hasn’t been touched by it in some way; an educational system graduating people to college who haven’t mastered the simplist standards of speech, spelling and grammar (and who knows about the other disciplines, these are just the most obvious); a pop culture that glamorizes drugs, shootings, thugs and thug life; and an ever-increasing number of people in society who feel free to act like beligerent, aggressive assholes because people are “freer now, which also means free to act like assholes if they want to,” as it was explained to me by one of the board’s liberal posters, and which to me leads to such things as road rage.
Now, given that I don’t believe anyone would seriously try to lay these problems at the feet of conservatism, and given that they haven’t just sprouted up all of a sudden out of nowhere, and given that liberal posters here have even owned up to them with the stipulation that it was all somehow necessary to defeat racism, to what do you attribute the fact that these problems have occurred?
And at some point in time was all this going on in the Netherlands?
Ohhhhhhhhhhh the muddle. Ohhhhhh my brain hurts. The twisting, the turning, the hypnotic dance of an SA argument. Arguing with SA is like fencing with a snowflake in a windstorm. Look I found a video of Starving Artist..
The Dutch have not only a lower teen birth rate (the lowest in the developed West, as I understand it), but also a lower incidence of youth pregnancy, STDs and abortions, and a higher average age at first sexual intercourse.
In other words, Dutch teens are not only having fewer babies, but waiting longer to have intercourse, having fewer abortions, getting fewer STDs, and having fewer unwanted pregnancies.
That is, the Dutch are much more successful than Americans at avoiding the negative consequences of teen sexual activity that you lament.
They also have a much more liberal, permissive, tolerant attitude towards sexual activity, even among teens, than Americans in general do. It seems that because they accept things like porn and prostitution and sex shops next to churches* and sex advice in youth magazines (with free condom inserts) as part of a normal and natural spectrum of sexuality, they manage to raise children with more informed and responsible views of sex.
The Netherlands certainly have plenty of rap music and drug use (legalized drugs is another thing they’re liberally permissive about). Oh, and legal gay marriage, too. And “yet”, they have very low teen pregnancy, abortion and out-of-wedlock birth rates, as well as a good educational system and low poverty levels.
In short, your arguments that cultural liberalism and sexual permissiveness have disastrous consequences for youth behavior are simply not borne out by the facts when we look at the cultural liberalism and sexual permissiveness of Dutch society.
*Totally true. I lived in Utrecht a couple years and there was a store with mannequins displaying leather bondage gear and cutaway corsets and such right across from the cathedral. In fact, it was even called “Cathedral Sexshop”. Made it easy to find, I guess, although I do not think that it had any actual financial connection with the church organization.
People correctly criticize Starving Artist’s confident conclusion that because liberal attitudes rose just as other societal values fell, it proves that liberal attitudes caused these declines. This is known as the fallacy of post hoc, ergo propter hoc: because B follows A, we conclude that A caused B.
kimstu commits the same sin above. It’s true: the Dutch are more successful than Americans at avoiding negative consequences of teen sexuality. And it’s true that they have a much more liberal, permissive, tolerant attitude towards sexual activity than do Americans, in general.
What’s not proven is the BECAUSE part.
Could we, for example, show that there’s a similar relationship in all countries – that is, could we rank the UK, the French, the Portuguese, the Spanish, and the Albanians on the extent of their liberal, permissive, tolerant attitudes towards sexual activity and chart it against the negative consequence rate for teens in their countries?
You are right that correlation is not causation (and that’s why I specified that “it seems” that Dutch sexual liberalism and permissiveness leads to better outcomes for teen sexual behavior rather than asserting it as a fact).
We certainly could do such a study, but I don’t know whether such studies have been done.
And yet I noticed you haven’t scolded SA in similar fashion for his endless citeless claims and encores in the very thread you opened to factually asses same.
Which is why I agree with mhendo and others that have expressed their views on why the very premise of this “debate” is not just flawed but worthless as the noise (chicken coop clucking in endless loop is more like it) is drowning the factual responses you seek.
In short, you might want to reconsider continuing with this series excluding the SA reference in them. Otherwise we’re mostly indulging in the very flaw you are attempting to correct.
That’s not the point, Bricker. Kimstu DOES prove that sexual liberalization does *not *lead to the specific “ills” that SA lays conclusively at its door.
I would suggest that relating liberal attitudes to “negative” characteristics of teenage sexual activity is just as senseless as relating liberal attitudes to “positive” ones.
However, the point of this exercise is not to determine whether liberalism leads to healthier metrics regarding youth sex, but to determine whether it’s responsible for unhealthy ones, and the example of the Netherlands would appear to indicate that its effect is somewhere between beneficial and nonexistent. In either case, Starving’s pet theory is effectively disproved.
Moreover, his totally baseless assumptions about the Netherlands, and subsequent “I was only guessing and anyway I don’t want to talk about it” handwaves pretty much encapsulate his posting style and critical thinking skills.
Can we move onto the other pernicious aspects of liberal permissiveness now? I would like to tackle popular music, although I find it disappointing that SA focuses on rap and ignores equally reviled genres such as heavy metal.
At least in this one case. Bricker does have a point that we’d need more data to draw any reliable conclusions about general relationships between sexual permissiveness and outcomes of teen sexual behavior.
If this assessment of the data is correct, then it does seem reasonable to infer a positive correlation between liberal social attitudes toward sexual permissiveness and better outcomes for teen sexual behavior.
Fascinating illogic there. Someone who actually lived in that time should be dismissed while real insight is gleaned by people 50 years later. Except I did not provide anecdotes. I described the tenor of the times. I did not itemize my experiences and claim they were universal.
But back to the point. Teen pregnancy was a huge problem and always on our minds. Movies like “The L Shaped room”,and others had teen pregnancy as a big part of its theme.
Teen pregnancy was also a theme of popular books of the time like" Mr. and Mrs. Bo Jones", and " The Popular Crowd".
The fear of pregnancy and abortion were certainly part of the culture.
