[dylan604]

And there it is! We only want ourselves to be comfy, but nobody cares what effect it has on anyone else. Just as long as everyone conforms to your way of thinking.

I really don't care if you want to live an limited life experience and assume it is the only possible way of life. But when you start telling other people that they must live like you want them to because they want to live in the same area you do is just too much to take. It doesn't truly affect you other than you have to accept something you don't agree.

[throwaway894345]

> In small town USA, the local culture usually is inferior.

> And there it is! We only want ourselves to be comfy, but nobody cares what effect it has on anyone else. Just as long as everyone conforms to your way of thinking.

Can you please lower the rhetorical temperature?

> But when you start telling other people that they must live like you want them to because they want to live in the same area you do is just too much to take.

There's plenty of cultural orthodoxy in cities as well, it's probably just more agreeable to you.

[wolverine876]

> There's plenty of cultural orthodoxy in cities as well, it's probably just more agreeable to you.

What are you referring to? In large cities, you can think and do what you want and nobody will much care or notice unless you force them to.

[throwaway894345]

I’ve seen people accosted in public for wearing conservative political t-shirts or hats on multiple occasions in Chicago. It was pretty frothing there from 2016 to 2020, and I’m not even a conservative.

[wolverine876]

Wow, never seen it in a city, and I've been around plenty. You see the absolute craziest things in cities and nobody even notices - it's part of the culture. It's a running joke.

[throwaway894345]

I notice people yelling at strangers (there’s also a whole bunch of videos of people being jumped for wearing clothes that signal conservativism, but I haven’t seen that up close), but a much less extreme example is just gender stuff: my wife and I have a pretty traditional division of labor (by happenstance, not design, although it doesn’t matter for the purposes of this discussion) and we get some funny looks/remarks from a lot of people. It would be simpler if I were passionate about cooking and my wife was the breadwinner and finance manager, but we still have it better than people who are actually conservative.

[rayiner]

> We only want ourselves to be comfy, but nobody cares what effect it has on anyone else. Just as long as everyone conforms to your way of thinking.

I do care what effect it has on others. I want say 80% of people to be comfy. Often that involves imposing norms on the other 20%. There’s lots of norms that (1) a majority like and benefit from that (2) break down if you don’t enforce them on the minority.

Unrestricted individual choice can affect others by changing market conditions and creating what in economic terms you’d call a race to the bottom. That’s the logic behind OSHA regulations and the minimum wage, for example. You can apply the same logic to social and cultural issues.

[wolverine876]

So much for the fundamentals of freedom. So I can compel you to behave and live as I want? Or vice versa?

And it's completely unnecessary - in fact, people do very well living in freedom, as you can see in most places (by population) in the free world. No societies have been more successful, and it's not close.

[rayiner]

> And it's completely unnecessary - in fact, people do very well living in freedom, as you can see in most places (by population) in the free world. No societies have been more successful, and it's not close.

You’ve got the causation backward. Freedom from social conformity is a luxury wealthy societies can afford. Western countries, including America, became rich at a time when they were still quite rigidly conformist. And some of the most conformist, such as Puritan New England were the most prosperous.

It’s also worth observing that those same societies are now literally dying out. Post-Christian Europe literally has to import people from societies with rigid social norms—among others, strong social pressures to start families and raise children—to take care of their elderly.

[wolverine876]

In fact, the US was founded on religious and other freedoms. It wasn't perfect, of course, but the US has widely been more free from conformity than others, wrote it into its foundation, and has prided itself on it. You couldn't pick an example more contrary to the argument. Immigrants for generations have traveled to the US to escape the conformity forced on them in other socities (including the Puritans!), and to live how they choose. Americans have dreamed of and achieved freedom - look at the women's rights movement, which revolutionized the freedom of women.

(I have plenty of criticism of racism and other discrimination in the US. It certainly isn't ok and I am going to help fix those problems.)

> Post-Christian Europe literally has to import people from societies with rigid social norms—among others, strong social pressures to start families and raise children—to take care of their elderly.

They need immigration in that respect (and so does the US) simply because of birth rates.

Immigrants have come from those societies to the US (and certainly parts of Europe) for generations. Some are too old to give up their old ways, understandably, but their children embrace freedom and those are the people of the US today.

And again, do you cede to me the power to make you conform to what I want? Why should anyone cede it to you?

[rayiner]

> In fact, the US was founded on religious and other freedoms… You couldn't pick an example more contrary to the argument. Immigrants for generations have traveled to the US to escape the conformity forced on them in other socities (including the Puritans!)

You’re erroneously conflating collective freedom and individual freedom. The US was founded on religious pluralism, which meant different religious groups coming here to be free from persecution back home, usually due to politics. For example, the Puritans left because they believed England was insufficiently committed to the Protestant Reformation. But that didn’t have anything to do with individual freedom within those groups. Many of the groups that came to America, like the Puritans, were regarded as extreme and fundamentalist back home: https://paulspassingthoughts.com/2017/01/17/an-examination-o... (“In 1637, the general court of Massachusetts passed an order forbidding anyone from settling within the colony without first having his orthodoxy approved by the magistrates.”).

> They need immigration in that respect (and so does the US) simply because of birth rates.

What causes the low birth rates in those places and the higher birth rates in the places immigrants are coming from?

> Some are too old to give up their old ways, understandably, but their children embrace freedom and those are the people of the US today.

Sure, the kids become socialized into the culture of individualism—that just means that the society is unsustainable without continuing to import people from those societies with more traditional and conformist culture. Put differently, post-Christian Europe is sustainable only through population arbitrage.

[wolverine876]

I'm a bit late in responding ... No matter what you try to throw out there, I don't think you will convince anyone that the US isn't a culture of individual liberty, and that it's been very successful in every way - freedom, prosperity, security, culture, etc. It turns out that people deciding for themselves, instead of others telling them what to do, results in great decisions.

All those people are coming to the US, not vice versa!