I’ll drink to that.
Most of today’s regulatory framework for alcohol traces back to the immediate post-Prohibition years. The basic assumption was that alcohol consumption is bad but unavoidable. The goal, then, was to regulate in ways that led people to drink less, via high taxes and inconveniences, without returning to the bootleggers and speakeasies of the disastrous Prohibition era.
Though things have lightened up a bit since then, that’s still the basic philosophy today. Alcohol discussions tend to turn on things like liver damage, impaired driving, violence and so on.
These negative consequences are real. But as Slingerland makes clear, they aren’t the whole story. There are a lot of less-heralded positives.
Given the downsides, alcohol consumption must also offer some advantages, Slingerland reasons, else it would have died out. But it hasn’t. In fact it’s hard to find successful civilizations that don’t use alcohol — and those few that qualify tend to replace it with other intoxicants that have similar effects.
Drinking doesn’t just make us feel good,
Until the hangover sets in.
it also makes us get along better,
Until the brawl breaks out.
cooperate more effectively
Until the obstreperousness spills forth.
and think more expansively.
Until the blackout occurs.
Of course, drinking isn’t all upside, but that isn’t the point. The point is that it’s not all downside, either — yet we regulate it, essentially, as if it were. We need a more balanced approach.
Said a mouthful there, Glenn.
And it isn’t just alcohol. As our culture has veered in an increasingly bossy and punitive direction, the tolerance for any sort of downside is vanishing. The “playground movement” at the beginning of the last century argued “better a broken arm than a broken spirit.” Today’s society takes a different approach.
Indubitably so…and there’s a reason for that, too. In present-day Amerika v2.0, broken spirits are the goal, the real point of the whole exercise. Why? The better to oppress you with, my dear. Docile slaves are much easier to lord over than resentful, belligerent ones, you see. The bottom-line problem propping all this foolishness up? The deep-seated Progressivist aversion to any and all risk.
During the pandemic, we saw a degree of safety-ism that discounted the value of humans getting together in the face of tiny or even notional risks, leading to absurdities like ocean paddle-boarders being arrested for paddling maskless. There’s much more value in the activity than risk in being unmasked at sea.
The list of cases where killjoys focus excessively on the negative is huge, and anyone reading this can think of many examples. But what do we do about it?
Ain’t but the one thing: start killing the killjoys. It really is the only way to be rid of them for any meaningful length of time, although even that isn’t permanent.
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Happy New Year, Mike!
One of my favorite H. L. Mencken essays argues that the great majority of the world’s problems could be solved or averted from arising if we could just keep everyone “gently stewed” — a state somewhat beyond merely tipsy, but short of intoxicated. I find this to be worthy of exploring in practice. It certainly works for me! Perhaps I’ll apply for a Federal grant.
But isn’t that what Soma was all about?
Ain’t but the one thing: start killing the killjoys. It really is the only way to be rid of them for any meaningful length of time, although even that isn’t permanent.
We’re long overdue to invoke Rule .308
Broken Spirited fighting age males don’t make for good soldiers.
Another goal is to end America’s ability to defend itself.
Au contraire, mon frère…
After two hitches in the once-beloved corps of Marines, and two decades with RenFaire folk, I have no problem with people drinking, per se. They’re frequently fun, and moderately entertaining. In moderation.
But come pull a New Year’s Eve shift in my ER, and let’s talk.
About the family of four smashed up by a drunk who ran a red light. Between them, 42 fractured bones. While sitting at a stop light.
About the 19-year-old who nearly died of alcohol poisoning, after skating right up to the lethal dose of alcohol poisoning.
About the sixteen – I repeat, SIXTEEN – other contestants brought in by either trauma response, or the local constabulatory, for being drunk and beating up strangers, friends, and their own family members, including wives and kids, while far beyond “well-lubricated”.
I want no return to Prohibition. It was the crowning idiocy of Progressivism last century, and died a happily unlamented death.
But looking at the nightly toll -never mind holidays – alcoholism wreaks on society, all I ask is something simple and straightforward:
Injure anyone because you were drunk, and you get a public beating, with baseball bats. By guys big enough to hit major league home runs for the Yankees. Fair is fair.
Injure anyone while driving intoxicated? After the beating, you get thrown into the modern-day Chateau D’If, never to emerge whilst alive.
One strike, no parole. ever. Period. Full stop.
Pay for it with the excise taxes currently collected already on alcohol. They needn’t increase a cent.
Responsible drinkers should have no more quarrel with this suggestion than responsible and law-abiding gun owners have with executing mall shooters who use AR-15s to rack up a far smaller annual body count.
You have the killjoys, because your fellow imbibers kill a lot of people, and have, going back decades, if not centuries. Own that, and suck it up. Or else, switch to the Aesop Plan to solve problem drinking, and let the culling of the Darwinian Idiots commence.
I’m tired as hell of splinting, or zipping into body bags, the tally of people the drunken idiots rack up every year.
Like caning miscreants, this is one more bit of jurisprudence Singapore gets absolutely right.
I get that. I’d hate to see the carnage in the ER on nights like New Years.
I’ve heard it from my sister who worked many a New Years Eve.