If you’d asked me at twelve, I’d have told you I had no idea why the story charmed me as it did. I only knew I liked re-reading it and it became one of my favorite books. It felt good and somehow “right” in a way that fairytales and romances didn’t.
Today, when I telling the kids about it, I realized why. It was because the character was a strong woman. Born with the ultimate disadvantage, the ultimate lack of support, she doesn’t – like fairytale princesses – either get rescued by a strong knight nor even by fate that reveals her to be a hidden princess. Also, she never complains; she never repines – she takes the situation she finds herself in and makes the best out of it, all the while looking out for those who are weaker or in more need than her. This last characteristic nets her the all-important recipe book (supposedly created by a medieval convent, which rings true for Portugal, and lost for centuries.) When her romance doesn’t work because her very conventional suitor wants a girl of suitable family, she doesn’t go into a decline, she just goes on with life.
She is, in fact, what editors so often say they want “a strong woman heroine, self sufficient, a good role model for growing girls.” Only, from my observation and reading, by this they usually mean mouthy, aggressive, foolhardy and complains a lot about men till one wonders if said character has an issue with being born female. There are exceptions, of course, but complaining about fate and men and being bitter seems to be obligatory.
And yet, it is true that this type of character is not only a great role model for young women, she is the type of role model we do need. Earth needs women (yes, and men, but we’re talking women here) who take care of the weak and helpless. Earth needs women who don’t whine. Earth needs women who cheerfully shoulder the burden of what needs to be done.
Earth does not need women who complain about men all the while neurotically obsessing on clothes and jewelry to attract said men and pursuing the highest-status males they can possibly get. There is nothing wrong with these activities, in moderation, but when they become the focus of existence they create a generation of infantile harpies. Now, I don’t think any women in real life are as bad as that, but almost all women characters in books and movies are just like that.
Young women who read/watch these characters end up feeling they must APPEAR like them or they’ll be thought weak. And this is wrong. Strength in women – and men – can be defined not as throwing weight around but in doing what must be done for oneself and those who depend on one.
Earth needs grown up women.
I very much hate to tell people what to do, much less what to be, but I wish we could set about writing – and living – role models for the women Earth needs.
Sarah Hoyt, “Earth Needs Women a blast from the past of November 2010”, According to Hoyt, 2017-07-13.
August 15, 2019
QotD: Strong female characters in fiction
June 25, 2019
QotD: Perpetual adolescence
SENATOR BEN SASSE: Yes, so this book is 100 percent not about politics, and it’s 99 percent not about policy. It’s about this new category of perpetual adolescence. And, first, let’s just say that, over the last two millennia or so, the emergence of a category called adolescence is a pretty special gift. We believe that, when our kids become biological adults, when they hit puberty, they don’t have to be fully formed, morally, emotionally, economically, educationally, in terms of household structure. They don’t have to go out and be fully adult immediately. They don’t have to go off to war, and they don’t have to become economically self-sufficient. That’s glorious, to have that protected space between childhood and adulthood. But it’s only glorious if you understand that it’s a transitional state, it’s a means to an end. Peter Pan’s Neverland is a hell. It’s a dystopia. And we don’t want to be — have our kids caught at a place where they’re not learning how to be adults. And, right now, we’re not tending to the habit formation aspects of a republic.
“Face the Nation transcript, May 14, 2017: Schiff, Sasse, Gates”, CBS News, 2017-05-14.
June 20, 2019
A Clockwork Orange – Dystopias and Apocalypses – Extra Sci Fi
Extra Credits
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ExtraCreditsto get an extra month free. Protect yourself online today!A Clockwork Orange reflects a cultural fear of society’s moral decay in the 1960s. Its usage of a mashup slang language known as “nadsat” illustrates the complexities of rebellious youth culture. Ultimately, Anthony Burgess’s work asks us to think about if or when free will should ever be suppressed, but the major differences between the book and the film version of this story present contrasting takeaways.
Where the dystopias of Brave New World and 1984 warned against the easy slide into totalitarianism, and painted for us worlds in which freedom is nearly a forgotten thing… A Clockwork Orange presents us with a protagonist who has almost an excess of freedom, and in doing so it shows us the shift in societal fears.
May 21, 2019
Four “youths” vandalize model railway show
There don’t appear to be any details online about the four “youths” who were arrested then released, so I assume their anonymity is protected by a British equivalent of the “Young Offenders Act”. The Market Deeping Model Railway Club describes the crime on their website:
We were all immensely upset to discover that overnight the school where our show was to be held had been broken into and almost everything totally ruined. This has devastated not only our own members but those of other clubs and the traders who had already set up shop. In the circumstances we felt we had no option other than to cancel the show.
Some of the models destroyed were irreplaceable and while we will of course be seeking to replace and rebuild wherever possible, this will take time and money. We have been overwhelmed by the many messages of support we have received together with offers of financial assistance. Please do help raise funds via our Just Giving page.
Click the image to go to their Just Giving fundraising page.
More on the incident from Deepings Nub News:
Bill Sowerby, Market Deeping Model Railway Club exhibition manager, told Deepings Nub News: “I arrived at 7.30am to be met by one of our members who told me the terrible news.
“Four of the layouts were completely trashed – two of our club’s, one privately owned and one from St Neots club.
“Four demonstrator stands and one for Bourne U3A stall, which would have raised funds for their organisation, was also smashed.
“Fortunately five other layouts in another room were undamaged and we had nine more left to install early this morning.
“It’s really hurtful for us all, not just because of the thousands of pounds we have lost in income – we were expecting between 400 and 500 visitors – and have paid out a lot of money to put on what is the club’s main fundraising event. Demonstrators and trade stands have also lost income.
“But it’s also the time and effort that members put into building the layouts. The St Neots layout took 25 years to construct and our Woodcroft layout took 26 years and involved more than 100 people over those years spending thousands of hours.
“Woodcroft will be repaired, but it’s so sad because a large number of the people who dedicated their time to build it are no longer with us. It has real sentimental importance to the club.
“Although our Knowl End – a children’s layout – was completely destroyed.”
January 7, 2019
People tend to become more conservative as they age … let’s just lower the voting age to “fix” that “problem”
It is a truth universally acknowledged that as people age they tend to develop more conservative or even reactionary views. This can, in extreme cases, lead to deplorable results — as our American and British friends discovered in 2016 (fortunately, we Canadians were lucky enough to avoid such unpleasantness by having our election in 2015). Some advanced forward-thinking on how to best address this problem was reported in the Guardian on suggestions by Cambridge professor David Runciman, who advocated lowering the voting age to six, as younger voters are generally much more open to progressive ideas.
This extension of the franchise was not proposed by an inmate of an asylum for the criminally insane but by a professor, David Runciman, of the University of Cambridge, supposedly one of the best three or four such institutions in the world. But no mere criminal lunatic could have dreamt up such an idea. Is it any wonder that many people feel the world has gone mad?
Sure enough, Runciman’s idea was given serious consideration by a writer in The Guardian. Admittedly, the writer came down against the proposal, but only after giving it credence. Nevertheless, it gave an insight into the mindset of those whose political ideas are to themselves so self-evidently virtuous that the only possible explanation for the fact others do not share them is stupidity in the case of the poor and wickedness in the case of the rich.
At the head of the article were the words: “Allow six-year-olds to vote? No, but it’s not as crazy as it sounds. Children tend to be more progressive and idealistic than their parents.”
I think it’s safe to say that if the US election and the Brexit referendum had included all those woke six-year-olds, the results would have been much more amenable to our moral and intellectual superiors in the media. However, I suspect that Professor Runciman’s proposal is only half of the necessary solution. In addition to lowering the minimum voting age, we should give careful consideration to lowering the maximum voting age as well. I’m sure that a properly funded study would find that not only do older voters tend to become more conservative as they begin to fall apart physically, but it also tracks directly with mental incapacity. Our study — perhaps a pan-national group drawn from Harvard, Berkeley, Cambridge and the London School of Economics — would almost certainly conclude that a pattern of voting for more conservative options is a clear indication of enfeeblement of judgement and society would be doing a kindness to remove the franchise from those who can no longer responsibly exercise it.
Perhaps, rather than directly revoking oldsters’ voting rights, we could offer a more gentle option of designating a responsible young voter (ideally between the ages of six and eighteen) to exercise the franchise on their behalf. This way, they are still fully represented, but the vote will be directed by someone with a direct stake in the outcome, as the young will have to live for far longer with the result of any election (and the oldsters are all going to die soon, anyway).
It might also make sense to revise the voting system so that the votes of younger people carry more weight than those of older folks. Perhaps double the weight of their parents’ votes and quadruple the weight of their grandparents’? We can’t be short-changing the people who matter the most, after all … that would hardly be progressive, would it?
The use of the word progressive is telling. It implies not only that there is a clear path in humanity’s moral ascent to perfection but also that its route map has been vouchsafed to certain adults. For self-proclaimed progressives, there are no complexities or unintended consequences, let alone ironies: there is only progress and its opposite, reaction.
For the writer of the article, children are born with a knowledge of the route map of the ascent to perfection, as salmon, cuckoos and swallows are born with a knowledge of where to migrate to. Only the corruption of age causes them to forget: “Children do tend towards the progressive, having a natural sense of justice … and an underdeveloped sense of self-interest.” But what has caused the realisation that children may be suitable for enfranchisement? Our author cannot be clearer: “Most of the arguments against giving six-year-olds a vote have been capsized by the (Brexit) referendum.”
In other words, because the electorate got the answer wrong, it is necessary to change the electorate. If only it had answered the question correctly, it is a fair guess no one would have thought of lowering the voting age to six.
Why, then, does our author finally reject the vote for six year-olds? “If parents could be trusted to use their influence wisely and inculcate children with the politics it will take to assure a better future, then I wouldn’t necessarily have a problem with that, apart from, obviously, that culture is already wildly skewed towards parents … But that’s moot anyway, because parents can’t be trusted, otherwise we’d all already vote Green.”
December 31, 2018
7 Things You Should Know About Free Speech in Schools: Free Speech Rules (Episode 1)
ReasonTV
Published on 13 Dec 2018Watch the first episode of Free Speech Rules, a new video series on free speech and the law. The first episode looks at the seven things you should know about how the First Amendment is applied in schools, from black armbands to ‘Bong Hits 4 Jesus.’
——————–
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—————-Watch the first episode of Free Speech Rules, a new video series on free speech and the law that’s written by Eugene Volokh, the Gary T. Schwartz Distinguished Professor of Law at UCLA, and the co-founder of the Volokh Conspiracy, which is hosted at Reason.com.
The first episode looks at the seven things you should know about how the First Amendment is applied in schools:
1) Political and religious speech is mostly protected.
Students, from first grade to twelfth, can’t be punished based on their political or religious speech. As the Supreme Court ruled in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District: “It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gates.”2) Disruptive speech is not protected.
Schools can punish speech that “materially disrupts schoolwork” — for instance, because it prompts fights.3) Vulgar or sexual speech is not protected.
Schools can also punish students for using vulgarities or sexual innuendos.4) Praising drugs is not protected.
Schools can punish speech that seems to praise drug use, and probably also alcohol use and other crimes, at least when the speech doesn’t seem political.5) Official school newspapers are the school’s own speech.
Courts see the newspaper as the school’s own speech, even if students are the ones who write it.6) This only applies to public schools.
Under the so-called “state action doctrine,” the First Amendment doesn’t limit private schools, even those that get tax breaks or government funds.7) California is different. Some states, like California, have passed laws that provide more protection to students.
Written by Eugene Volokh, a First Amendment law professor at UCLA.
Produced and edited by Austin Bragg, who is not. This is not legal advice.
If this were legal advice, it would be followed by a bill.
Please use responsibly.
November 30, 2018
QotD: A university education is not for everyone
We went through a generation in this country where parents discouraged their children from going into trades, and they said to them, “the only way you will get ahead in life is to stay at school until year 12, go to university.” Year 12 retention rates became the goal, high year 12 retention rates became the goal. Instead of us as a nation recognising there are some people who shouldn’t go to university, and what they should do is at year 10, decide they are going to become a tradesman. They will be just as well off, and from my experience and observation, a great deal better off than many others. I think we have to change that, and it’s a very big challenge because 30 years ago, we started getting this foolish bind that everybody had to go to university. Everybody doesn’t have to go to university, and a lot of people will be a lot better off if they don’t go to university and they recognise that at age 15 or 16, and go down the technical stream.
John Howard, interviewed by Mark Riley, 2005-03-06.
October 26, 2018
An old-fashioned Fisking
The always-entertaining David Thompson harks back to the early days of blogging by indulging in what used to be called “a Fisking“:
In the pages of the New York Times, a philosophy professor named George Yancy is gushing his little heart out:
It is hard to admit we are sexist. I, for instance, would like to think that I possess genuine feminist bona fides, but who am I kidding? I am a failed and broken feminist.
Upon which revelation, I suppose we could all just stop and go home. But no, let’s press on.
More pointedly, I am sexist. There are times when I fear for the loss of my own entitlement as a male. Toxic masculinity takes many forms. All forms continue to hurt and to violate women.
The word toxic, by the way, is deployed no fewer than nine times, excluding various synonyms, as if it were an incantation. Now brace yourselves for some full-on testosterone-jacked beastliness.
For example, before I got married, I insisted that my wife take my last name… While this was not sexual assault, my insistence was a violation of her independence.
To reiterate. Asking a fiancée if she’ll change her surname upon marriage, as is still the custom, perhaps to avoid confusing people as to whether you’re actually married or not, and possibly to avoid imposing on any children lengthy hyphenated surnames… this is not sexual assault. I’m glad we’ve cleared that up.
[…]
Or, as our educator puts it, tearfully, his face reddened with shame,
When I was about 15 years old, I said to a friend of mine, “Why must you always look at a girl’s butt?” He promptly responded: “Are you gay or something? What else should I look at, a guy’s butt?” He was already wearing the mask. He had already learned the lessons of patriarchal masculinity.
Yes, adolescent butt-watching. Oh calamitous woe. And which, apparently, girls never indulge in. Presumably, we should only be sexually attracted to personalities, and never the fleshy packaging.
There was no wiggle room for me to be both antisexist and antimisogynistic and yet a heterosexual young boy. You see, other males had rewarded his gaze by joining in the objectifying practice: “Look at that butt!” It was a collective act of devaluation.
Or possibly the reverse.
The acts of soul murder had already begun.
I’ll just leave that one there, I think.
October 11, 2018
It’s all in the spin – “Another ‘human trafficking operation’ that wasn’t”
Elizabeth Nolan Brown on how to pitch a “human trafficking” police sweep that doesn’t actually uncover any human trafficking at all:
One hundred and twenty-three missing Michigan minors were found during a one-day “sex trafficking operation,” the New York Post reported yesterday. Similar statements showed up in other news headlines across national and international news. What the associated articles fail to mention for multiple paragraphs is that only three of the minors are even suspected of having been involved in prostitution.
Officials said the operation — a joint effort of the U.S. Marshals Service, the FBI, Michigan State Police, and multiple local Michigan police departments — identified three “possible sex-trafficking cases” among the 123 minors that were located on September 26, according to a press release.
What’s more, all but four of the “missing children” were not actually missing. In the remaining cases, minors were listed in a police database as missing but had since been found or returned home on their own. “Many were (homeschooled),” Lt. Michael Shaw told The Detroit News. “Some were runaways as well.”
The one-day “rescue” sweep was a long-time in the making, with police beforehand “investigating their whereabouts by visiting last known addresses, friend’s homes and schools.”
Nothing in the U.S. Marshals report on the operation makes mention of any arrested kidnappers, “traffickers,” or other adults involved in endangering or exploiting any of the missing minors that were identified. Which makes sense — very few missing children are actually abducted. And when runaway teens do engage in sex for money, the vast majority do not have “pimps.”
October 8, 2018
The tyranny of testosterone, or why we shouldn’t lie to our kids
Sarah Hoyt, in the latest Libertarian Enterprise tries to talk to young women about the biological reality and how to avoid being fooled by Hollywood fantasy:
Myself and accomplice, neither of us fainting maidens, first went to the cabinet store, and found that cabinets we could barely move with much effort between the two of us were hefted around effortlessly by teenage employee who probably weighed all of 90 lbs and therefore less than either of us, and had arms like boiled spaghetti, but who had the blessings of testosterone making him much stronger than either of us.
I first ran into this with younger son, who at fourteen looked like a twig which I could have broken over my knee (he’d just grown two feet over the previous year, going from a foot shorter than I to a foot taller. This was also the year in which I was unreasonable and would turn around when he came in the room and say “shower, now” even though he’d already showered twice that day. I.e. to quote our old neighbor “that poor boy is being beaten with a stick made of testosterone. Mothers of boys will get it. At least mothers of boys who went through growth spurt from hell.) We went to the store to get cement to repair a crack in a garden path. The bags were 100 lbs. I tried to lift it and (partly because it was at foot-level and was an awkward floppy bulk) just couldn’t budge it.
Younger son gave the theatrical teenage sigh, reached past me, grabbed the bag and threw it into our shopping cart, leaving me open-mouthed in surprise.
So every time 90 lb girl beats a 300 lb trained fighter on TV remember that. And for the love of heaven explain to your daughters that it’s play fantasy. The daughter of old friends of ours has fallen for this hook line and sinker and was telling older son she could beat him. Older son actually has muscles (he was the one who helped me renovate two Victorians from the ground up and build two balconies. He also does all the sawing by hand.) He’s six one but projects taller. He also happens to be built like a brick ****house, as the men on my side of the family are. (As a little girl I keep insisting my cousins were wardrobes. If you think of the old fashioned wardrobe, seven feet tall and six feet wide, that’s the impression they projected.) That poor girl is five five and skinny for her height. She couldn’t even push older son back if he decided to stand still. She MIGHT be able to fend him off long enough to run away, if she fought like a cornered cat and gouged eyes and bit (I’ve done something like that in similar circumstances, but there’s a reason I’m never without a weapon.) but that’s about it.
Watching her brag to my least excitable, very patient son who just sighed and didn’t even bother contradicting her, I thought how lucky she was in her choice of male to annoy. But if she keeps it up, sooner or later her luck will run out.
We shouldn’t lie to the young, and all our fiction and most of our movies lie about what women can and can’t do, all in the name of “there is no difference between men and women.” (“Except men are defective women” is implied.)
September 17, 2018
QotD: Parents and drug use
Any parent who has ever smoked a joint has a moral duty to give up all hope of achieving good things in life, give him- or herself permanent brain damage, and get a career working on an assembly line, wearing a hairnet and stamping packages of irradiated food. Only in this way will kids realize drugs always lead to a bad end.
Tim Cavanaugh, “Don’t try this at home, kids; you might end up becoming President”, Reason Hit and Run, 2005-02-20.
August 30, 2018
Britain “forgets” to regulate e-cigarettes, youth smoking drops substantially
Last month, Matt Ridley sang the praises of the regulators who didn’t regulate:
A selection of e-cigarettes
Photo by Ecig Click via Wikimedia Commons.
Britain is the world leader in vaping. More people use ecigarettes in the UK than in any other European country. It’s more officially encouraged than in the United States and more socially acceptable than in Australia, where it’s still banned. There is a thriving sector here of vape manufacturers, retailers, exporters, even researchers; there are 1,700 independent vape shops on Britain’s streets. It’s an entrepreneurial phenomenon and a billion-pound industry.
The British vaping revolution dismays some people, who see it as a return to social acceptability for something that looks like smoking with unknown risks. Yet here, more than anywhere in the world, the government disagrees. Public Health England says that vaping is 95% safer than smoking and the vast majority of people who vape are smokers who are partly or wholly quitting cigarettes. The Royal College of Physicians agrees: “The public can be reassured that ecigarettes are much safer than smoking.”
Lots of doctors are now recommending vaping as a way of quitting smoking. It is because of vaping that Britain now has the second lowest percentage of people who smoke in the European Union. The youth smoking rate in the UK has fallen from 26% to 19% in only six years.
How did this happen here? It’s partly the fault of the advertising executive Rory Sutherland; he is the Walter Raleigh of this revolution. In 2010, he walked into an office in Admiralty Arch to see an old friend, David Halpern, head of David Cameron’s new “nudge unit”, formally known as the Behavioural Insights Team. Sutherland pulled out an electronic cigarette he had bought online, and inhaled. By then, several countries including Australia, Brazil and Saudi Arabia had already banned the sale of electronic cigarettes — usually at the behest of tobacco interests or public-health pressure groups. California had passed a bill banning them, though Arnold Schwarzenegger, then the governor, had vetoed it. It looked inevitable that Britain would follow suit.
“I was a very early convert,” Sutherland tells me now. “Partly because I was a longtime ex-smoker myself who found them much better than constant relapses; I was also interested in the placebo effect they offered by mimicking the act of smoking. But I was almost equally fascinated by the psychology of the people who instinctively wanted to ban them.”
Halpern took notice. He knew the theory of “harm reduction” — that it is more effective to give somebody the lesser of two evils than insist unrealistically on immediate abstinence. So he asked his nudge team to get digging. Over coffee at No 10, he was surprised to learn that even the anti-smoking group Ash was leaning in favour of ecigarettes. So when public-health nannies started calling for them to be banned, Halpern made sure the government resisted.
In his book Inside the Nudge Unit, Halpern wrote: “We looked hard at the evidence and made a call: we minuted the PM and urged that the UK should move against banning e-cigs. Indeed, we went further. We argued we should deliberately seek to make e-cigs widely available, and to use regulation not to ban them but to improve their quality and reliability.”
H/T to Rafe Champion for the link.
August 24, 2018
August 2, 2018
The role of the gatekeepers for Trans youth
This is a debate that has been bullrushed by the sudden political success of Trans activists, but there are genuine medical and ethical issues that need to be taken into account:
I’m a transsexual woman in my thirties who transitioned in my early twenties, and I wish I could have done so earlier. Even so, I am wary of today’s Brave New World of transgender activism in which important safeguards of transition are under attack and any counter opinion, even if made by a trans woman such as myself, are labelled as an attack on trans rights. At first it was easier for me to not ruffle the trans activists’ feathers, but my conscience got the better of me, and now I am continuing to speak up in order to help those who deserve better in their own journey of transition.
Through talking to other trans people in my life, it has become apparent to me that transition surgeries are an answer but not the answer to the long-term health and well-being of gender dysphoria patients. Unfortunately, many trans people get so fixated on surgery for so long, that they may forget that there is more to life and transitioning than just surgery and other medical intervention. The fixation is often driven by the fantasy that surgery, and transition in general, will transform them into a new person, and that all the problems in life will go away.
I haven’t known a lot of trans people over the years, but of the few that I know, there did seem to be a powerful belief that if they could fix just this one thing — their gender — then their lives would be perfect forever. In at least two cases, having transitioned, they then discovered that they were just as miserable as they had been before despite having changed to their preferred gender. All the surgery in the world won’t fix mental problems, and the disappointment and anger seemed to be that much greater when the situation finally came home. I’m not claiming this is in any way universal, but of the small number of trans people I’ve known, it was true for half of them.
During my gender transition, I didn’t fixate on surgery even though I was highly dysphoric back then. I’ve had my ups and downs, but I’ve always done okay. To be honest, thinking about sex and gender a lot is unhealthy, particularly during high-conflict public debates on what it means to be transgender and what rights we have to get the help we need. As the debate grows more divisive, the media valorization and glamorization of trans people, especially trans children, is not helping but rather, it is pulling us away from the honest conversations we need to have.
Forty-one percent of transgender people [PDF] have experienced suicidal ideation or self-harm, though this statistic does not indicate to what extent the attempts were before or after transition, or at what stage of transition. Nevertheless, studies have shown high rates of suicide among (alleged) trans people post-medical transition. Why is this the case and can the quality of transition be a factor?
As I understand it, the overall success rate of transgender surgery is higher the earlier it is conducted … within reason. This is where the ethical issues are the most pressing:
The move away from the medical gatekeeping model for treating gender dysphoria is not only unfortunate, it is irresponsible. Over the past few decades, the strictness of the standards of healthcare used to determine suitability for hormone replacement therapy (HRT) and related surgeries have been relaxed significantly. In 2008, the Endocrine Society endorsed puberty blockers as a treatment for trans teenagers. Then in 2011, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) issued new Standards of Care internationally for treating such patients via puberty suppression, while formalizing the ‘informed consent’ model. But it didn’t end there.
Last month here in Australia, new guidelines published in the Medical Journal of Australia gave the green light for potentially more trans children to go on HRT as young as 13, defying international guidelines. Specifically, “decisions about affirming a young person’s gender identity should be driven primarily by the child or adolescent, in conjunction with their family and health care providers.” While this experiment was hailed as world-leading, the minimum legal age for smoking, drinking and voting in Australia remains at 18, and it’s still 16 for consensual sex. So in Australia, a 15-year-old teen cannot consent to sexual activity but they can consent to life-altering medical treatments that they almost certainly cannot fully grasp at that age.
July 17, 2018
Juul threat
John Tierney on the good news/bad news in the most recent smoking statistics in the United States:
Tobacco-company stocks have plunged this year — along with cigarette sales — because of a wonderful trend: the percentage of people smoking has fallen to a historic low. For the first time, the smoking rate in America has dropped below 15 percent for adults and 8 percent for high school students. But instead of celebrating this trend, public-health activists are working hard to reverse it.
They’ve renewed their campaign against the vaping industry and singled out Juul Labs, the maker of an e-cigarette so effective at weaning smokers from their habit that Wall Street analysts are calling it an existential threat to tobacco companies. In just a few years, Juul has taken over more than half the e-cigarette market thanks to its innovative device, which uses replaceable snap-on pods containing a novel liquid called nicotine salt. Because the Juul’s aerosol vapor delivers nicotine more quickly than other vaping devices, it feels more like a tobacco cigarette, so it appeals to smokers who want nicotine’s benefits (of which there are many) without the toxins and carcinogens in tobacco smoke.
It clearly seems to be the most effective technology ever developed for getting smokers to quit, and there’s no question that it’s far safer than tobacco cigarettes. But activists are so determined to prohibit any use of nicotine that they’re calling Juul a “massive public-health disaster” and have persuaded journalists, Democratic politicians, and federal officials to combat the “Juuling epidemic” among teenagers.
The press has been scaring the public with tales of high schools filled with nicotine fiends desperately puffing on Juuls, but the latest federal survey, released last month, tells a different story. The vaping rate last year among high-school students, a little less than 12 percent, was actually four percentage points lower than in 2015, when Juul was a new product with miniscule sales. As Juul sales soared over the next two years, the number of high-school vapers declined by more than a quarter, and the number of middle-school vapers declined by more than a third — hardly the signs of an epidemic.
