Hypatia’s assertion about men changing has been rumbling around in my mind.
Ask ourselves a question – what has been one of the big changes in about the last half-century? An obvious answer is the decline in smoking. Within living memory, auto manufacturers would boast about the number of ashtrays they squeezed into their cars – now they don’t include any at all.
Ask anyone who has been to dynamic entrepreneurial risk-taking expanding China what they noticed? A likely answer is they noticed lots of Chinese men smoking, just like people used to smoke in the West before the Powers That Be drove cigarettes out of the public arena.
It is generally recognized that when an individual stops smoking, he or she is likely to gain weight. The negative health effects of that weight gain may partially or entirely offset the negative effects of smoking. But that may be the least of it.
Sir Francis Drake is often credited with having introduced tobacco to Europe in the late 1500s. What happened in the generations after that as tobacco use slowly spread through the 1600s and into the 1700s? That’s right! The Industrial Revolution! Perhaps one of the side effects of smoking is to enhance what used to be considered typical male behaviors – risk-taking, assertiveness, ingenuity.
We are dealing with a multivariate system in which it is very difficult to separate correlation from causation. But can we at least consider the politically incorrect hypothesis that part of the reason China is outpacing the West is that Chinese people still smoke?
Intriguing hypothesis. I wonder if anyone has looked at this. One could test for longitudinal trend as well as the correlation of smoking and some measure of innovation among countries at a given time.
Interesting. My brother who worked for 3M when the company had an unbelievable streak of innovation said to me one time that the innovation stopped when people could no longer smoke at work or have cocktails at lunch.
Maybe it’s not the nicotine, but the…confidence? Assertiveness? it represents. When you smoke, you’re taking up a lot of space, projecting your desire outward into a larger arena than your individual body. You’re saying to the rest of the world, “Deal with it!” Same thing with drinking at lunch, you’ll be louder, more expansive. Smoking and drinking make us bigger, they signal that we’re bold, and we’re happy to be seen acting on our desires.
But now we’re oppressed by a global nanny: put that cigarette out, somebody might be pregnant, somebody might have asthma! And stop yelling and laughing and arguing, maybe other people like it quiet when they eat lunch. Smoky, boozy Old Europe was a much more exciting place than the EU: red wine omnipresent, and those Gauloise cigarettes that turned your nose hairs black after a few drags….
How dare you? Who do you think you are?
Maybe the difference is in how people , or at least men—formerly would have responded to that question: “Me? I’m Gavin, pleased to meet you! (And oh yeah:fuck you!)” —and the way they respond now: “Sorry.”
I think the more likely answer to such a Karen would be something along the lines of,
“Ma’am. This is a men’s bar. If’en ya’ll intend to stay here AND speak such fightin’ works, do NOT be surprised if they result in ya’ll being punched in the nose.”
Western governments exist to protect the military aged male who killed her from being challenged to a mutual hunt in nature by the men who might have laid down their lives to shield her. They then offer those men “therapy” and “hugs”.
A landlord I know needs the militia.money regime now:
Unstable couple. Man has an therapy dog. Neighbors complain about shit. Man asked to clean up. Doesn’t. Couple given notice. Unstable couple splits. Man blames landlord. Spreads dogshit around landlord’s house.
Landlord’s property taxes currently pay a regime that demands the landlord provide “proof beyond a reasonable doubt” before any action is taken.
Under a militia.money regime what happens?
Let’s say the man is a sovereign and despite receiving property taxes from property owners, including the landlord, he’s still such a twit that his girlfriend, who he supports because she no longer gets material support from bureaucracies, still holds him in contempt.
Us versus Them. There is unfortunately no doubt that China has replaced the US as the “Workshop of the World” … to the extent that the US military cannot function without Chinese components. At the same time, Chinese cities are safer and more livable than most cities in Europe and North America. A Man from Mars surveying the situation would surely conclude that China is doing something right, something different from what the declining West is doing.
That is a photo of a fairly standard meeting in China about the development of the Free Trade Port on Hainan Island in China’s south. The odd thing to Western eyes is the total lack of any high-level female participation. Of course, correlation is not necessarily causation.
