In a healthy society there would be no need for intoxicants with so severe harms (BBC list for substances by harm is a good reference) and thus no exposure for a addictive substance.
Now the norm decides that, almost without exceptions, we must all be exposed.
You've completely missed the point. People don't drink alcohol because it's healthy. Just like people don't eat cake because it's healthy, nor drink coffee because it's healthy.
They do it because the unhealthy effects are desirable.
Which is why moderation is the key. There's absolutely nothing wrong with someone enjoying a drink. But there is with people who need to drink. And that's just as true for sugar addition and caffeine addition too.
Now I'm not suggesting that the negative effects of all vices are equal, because clearly they're not. But suggesting that total abstinence is the answer completely misses the point of why people enjoy a drink to begin with. You're setting an unreal expectation that will never work with society. Just like telling people that they shouldn't ever eat cake or drink coffee would be an unrealistic demand on society.
We already have a mountain of evidence that prove the removal of said vice without solving the underlying problem only drives people will just switch to something else. Often that "something else" can be much much worse. So it's far better to give people outlets but ensure there is support to ensure they descend into dependence (and the vast majority of people do consume in moderation).
> I was only using your own framing. You're the one who lazered in on health.
Actually no I wasn't. It was shrubby who mentioned "health" in the medical sense. I was replying to them using "health" in the social wellness sense. ie making the point that "health" is a nuanced term and shouldn't be used in an absolute way like they, and yourself now too, have done.
Health isn't just about physicality. There are social and emotional benefits. For example, enjoying a beer, or glass of wine, with my wife on a Friday evening when we rant about work is a great way to unwind for the weekend. It improves our mental health to have that shared experience. Our relationship is closer for spending time together. It has a net benefit despite it being an unhealthy treat.
You could replace the `wine` with `cake` in statement and have a similar point. But I don't personally enjoy cakes. Also take notice of how I'm not telling you that you shouldn't eat cakes because I don't personally like it ;)
> With alcohol this is well established to be false.
Again, you're missing the point. People enjoy stuff that isn't healthy, but sometimes that can still promote other benefits. Such as mental health. "Health" is a broader term than you give credit for.
Also the links you shared do not prove your point. There's no actual data in either of them. It's just pop-science articles with zero substance designed into scaremongering people. For example their arguments that it takes just one drink to become an addict is just laughable. The real statistics they don't print show a very different story where occasional to moderate drinking is not going to significantly increase your risk of cancer nor anything else. You're talking about fractions of a percent in the change of risk -- and that risk was already a low percentage to begin with. This is where understanding how statistics actually work makes a difference ;)
For example, some studies studies only show a correlation in 5% of cancer cases being related to alcohol consumption and that was proven against heavy drinkers. And the percentage of drinkers who have that cancer are < 1%. eg
And a lot of these studies exaggerate what I'd classed as a "light drinker". Take that link I shared:
> Even light drinkers can be at increased risk of some cancers. For example, women who have just one drink per day have a higher risk of breast cancer than those who have less than one drink a week, and risk is increased even more in heavy drinkers and binge drinkers (3-7).
If you're drinking 1 drink per day then you have a dependency. That isn't occasional consumption. I would not class that as demonstrating moderation. If you need to drink every single day then you fall into the category I described in my previous comment when I said there is an underlying problem that needs addressing.
Most people do not drink every day.
---
So to summarize:
- light and occasional drinking is a rounding error of 0 in terms of physical health risk. But it can have much more significant positive effects on mental health.
- understanding the actual statistics and how they work matter if you're going to argue about the risks to health
- people don't become alcoholics from one glass of wine
- if you don't want to drink then I agree nobody should force you. But please don't share bullshit pop-science articles claiming we're all going to become cancer-riddled addicts from an occasional drink just because you don't understand why some people do enjoy the occasional glass of wine. That just demonstrates you don't understand the subject matter.
- and please don't ignore the parallels I made about coffee and cake. They demonstrate the hypocrisy of comments where people claim absence is the only smart choice.
(and no, those bullet points were not AI generated)
edit: sorry for all the crappy grammar. I'm multitasking...badly it seems haha
I'm tempted to start the full deontology and Jellinek model on substance abuse on this, but don't have the effort now.
If we perform a cost benefit analysis on alcohol the downsides are plentiful and then some.
And the pluses are practically masked versions (taste, buzz,...) of the two major things that make human do anything: what others are doing and what I'm used to (which are pretty shit reasons to do anything IMO) it basically boils down to addiction. Not chemical, but functional and social.
Then we return to the cost benefit analysis and start figuring out how far the lying disease has progressed. The fierceness of the debate feels like a good indicator of this usually.
I'd be tempted to explain this more in depth, but I have stuff to do.
I actually don’t disagree with some of that. But that’s not the point I was discussing.
Let me put it another way: banning something that most people use sensibly and enjoy in moderation isn’t a society that anyone wants to live in nor should live in. I'm sure you'd be the first to complain if the government went after something you enjoyed that caused harm to a minority of other people.
Which is why I keep coming back to the cake analogy. The only reason people eat cake is because of the buzz and taste. Which are pretty shit reasons to do anything in your opinion. And people do get addicted to sugary snacks. Some people even eat for comfort. But a lot of other people do have self-control. Should we ban cake for everyone regardless? Of course not!
As I said in my earlier comment, the problem with substance abuse isn’t the alcohol. The alcohol is just a tool. If you banned alcohol today then people who want escapism will switch to something else. And we’ve seen this trend time and time again throughout history. And it's what any experienced doctor of medicine will also tell you.
So if you want to understand the problems of alcohol abuse better, you need to first understand what drove people to abuse alcohol. Banning alcohol isn’t a shortcut to solving that problem -- despite how much you might like it to be.
Also accusing all people who drink, even those who only do so occasionally, as being addicts (as you literally have done) is so far wrong that it’s just insulting.
Banning something that has so huge disadvantages, but has been lobbied just like cigarettes is exactly the kind of society I want to live in.
But the choice is not mine, so in that way I win.
It's a social norm and a poison from my POV and just like pfas or plastic in the drinking water I believe it should be controlled and the lobbying banned. Then we'd see the true wish of humanity.
Now our needs are manufactured, not around our wellbeing, but for what "must" be lobbied and advertised.
The norm is manufactured. Just like the addictive algorithms and almost any other thing in this world of pseudo-free will.
Even the likes of Joe Rogan are bringing up the issue, with many others so I see some light in the tunnel for my society, but so far you're right. Your side seems to be winning.
> Banning something that has so huge disadvantages, but has been lobbied just like cigarettes is exactly the kind of society I want to live in.
Alcohol isn't like cigarettes. It's more like coffee or cake in terms of the social aspect. You clearly have huge prejudice against alcohol as a whole, but you need to understand that the vast majority of people who drink, do not drink like the minority of people you associate with alcohol.
Also, cigarettes haven't been banned. Their sale has just been hugely restricted. Which is also true for alcohol.
> Now our needs are manufactured, not around our wellbeing, but for what "must" be lobbied and advertised.
You're now just reiterating the same point I made elsewhere ;)
> Your side seems to be winning.
It's not a battle to win. It’s about choice and support. You are responsible for making your own choices. But you shouldn't be dictating how others should live their own lives.
The way a healthy society works is you give people opportunities and support, and the freedom for individuals to make their own choices. However what you're advocating is taking those choices away for everyone based on your own personal prejudices of a small few. And that's not a world anyone else wants to live in.
You also keep ignoring my point that the actual subsection of society you have a problem with (alcoholics) are the same subsection of society that needs support first. If you simply take the booze away, then their underlying mental health and addiction will just drive them to switch to different substances. And if you solve their condition first, then alcohol no longer is the problem you protest so strongly against.
Simply put, you really don't understand the thing you have such a strong opinion about. And it's evidenced by the fact that you keep sidestepping the real issues behind alcohol. But you still want to restrict peoples freedoms regardless.
You're now making a rational argument against an irrational condition.
As I keep saying: the underlying causes behind alcoholism is something that needs to be specifically addressed if you don't want alcoholics to simply switch to something worse.
This is why support groups like Alcoholics Anonymous talk about people's lives and their struggles. They aren't trying to address the access to alcohol, they address the mental state that drove people to abuse alcohol.
This is the key part you keep ignoring. Making alcohol illegal doesn't solve these issues. People will still find a way to get smashed. And there's proof of this in Saudi and Iran where black markets thrive. The proof is also with people in the the EU, UK and US who keep switching from one recreational drug to the next as governments ban new substances in a game of whack-a-mole.
What you're trying to do is treat the symptom, not the cause. And that's why I keep disagreeing with you.
Root cause is the human biases and lying due to cognitive dissonance? And alcohol is a symptom that's easy to grasp.
You’re talking about waterfall management by laws and I’m talking about individual consciousness and the capability of understanding our biases? I guess that explains the perceived differences.
I stated earlier that I really don’t have the resources for this discussion in extent, but I’m leaving a draft for a blog post based on this too. I’ve been creating a matrix of different human habits to perform the cost/benefit calcucaltion. For alcohol and for practically anything individuals do.
I’ll try to sum it up here really quickly and hope for you to provide the pluses, should you have those, for alcohol. You already mentioned with strong emphasis that its normal thus right. And I don’t think either of the “facts” that we’re used to doing something (like smoking, before it was approached with honesty) or because others are doing it (like social media on the predatory and attention wrecking platforms) are good reasons, but I’ll accept that these are pluses to you.
So based on the homo economicus narrative we are rational and will make a rational choice, right? Then this matrix (a quick draft, for reference only, I hope you give me more minuses here than the buzz, the norm and the herd instinct) should work as the guiding light. https://imgur.com/a/NgV6dt9
Then we have the homo ephicus (ethical human with a twist of brutal praxis) that knows that human “mind” is actually an intuition making decisions and strategic reasoning and excuses and post-hoc justifications (thanks Jon Haidt & Hume) we use to lie to ourselves and to our societies.
So with the lingo of THN:
normal =! right
human =! reason
human === lying
But sorry, I can’t do this more clearly as the homo economicus world is putting immense pressure on the cog, I’m positioned to be. I’ll keep you in mind should I have the time to make this bit better.
I’ve never argued against the negative psychology of the minority. And understand the how it affects substance dependence. In fact I’ve talked about the psychological effects of addiction many times before on HN and have studied it in detail. Likely more than yourself owing to the fact that I also know there’s a chemical dependence component of alcohol addiction in the worst cases, which you’ve neglected to mention.
But I was never talking about addicts. I was talking about the majority of people who drive. And this is why you keep getting replies from me after your silly strawman arguments that all drinkers are alcoholics who need the government to save them.
The point you keep ignoring is that you’re repeatedly just talking about the minority and them extrapolating that like it’s equivalent to smoking. And that is simply just your own prejudices in action.
Take the cake example I keep making and you keep ignoring. People comfort eat. People get addicted to sugar. People get fat from sugar and cause a huge burden on health services, and cut their own lives short. But you’re not advocating the outright ban of sugar. Why? Because it can be consumed responsibly. And that’s the crux of the matter.
And even if we take your silly pop-science comparison with smoking, the end conclusion is still the same; smoking isn’t illegal either. It’s just heavily regulated )just like alcohol already is). So by your own silly comparison, you’re effectively just arguing for the status quo.
That’s an impossible to prove opinion without changing the laws of physics. But there are some precedence we can refer to as a counterargument.
1. There have been plenty of other substances that have been banned which were legal and widely taken since before such laws existed. Demonstrating that governments are willing to control substances that were previously legal.
2. There have also been other drugs that have been legalized after they were previously banned. Proving that governments are willing to accept the risk of people taking drugs.
3. And your augment about alcohol specific actually did happen in some places. It is commonly referred to as "prohibition". And that decision never stuck.
The reality is drugs aren't legal nor illegal based on solely the harm they do. They are judged based on how easy they are to regulate (read: monetize and tax) and the subsections of society which enjoy them.
To expand on that last point: there's a reason cannabis was illegal in most countries while cigarettes weren't. And that reason wasn't because cannabis was considered more dangerous than tobacco. It's was because certain leaders wanted us to think that the people who smoked cannabis was more dangerous than the people that smoked cigarettes.
> 3. And your augment about alcohol specific actually did happen in some places. It is commonly referred to as "prohibition". And that decision never stuck.
> Since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, alcohol has been strictly banned in Iran, where consuming, producing, or selling alcohol is punishable by prison, floggings, and fines. Despite the official ban, Iranians still drink foreign and homemade alcoholic beverages that are sold on the black market. Over the past year, there has been a spike in the cases of fatal alcohol poisoning, according to medical officials in Iran.
And I'm pretty sure few Europeans nor Americans would want to mimic the laws seen in those Islamic countries. Even putting aside the depressing rise of nationalist parties in the west, Saudi and the US and EU are just culturally very different. So what works there isn't necessarily going to work here.
>In a healthy society there would be no need for intoxicants with so severe harms
Yeah but we don't live in a healthy society. We have more abundance and more advanced healthcare and drugs than ever before, but we are sick in terms of missing social connections and family unit, even in big cities. Hence why mental illnesses and substance abuse are going up.
People don't thrive on GDP line go up and cheap large screen TVs. People need friends, family, and a support network.
Yes. 100 percent agree. The addiction industry requires us to be desperate and wanting an escape, so that they can brainwash us into complicity and brain fog from hangover or doomscrollin.
And the substance abuse is a progressive lying disease so once we figure out "this has gone too far" the threshold for abuse has been crossed a long time ago in most cases.
First the close ones see the problem and the individual in question is the last to see it. Thus a lying disease.
I know its just a joke, but Bill Hicks also constantly marketed himself and branded himself as an anti-marketing comedian. In his mind it was okay to promote yourself as a comedian but not promote your own business.
There's a different between 'promotion' and 'bait and switch'.
There's also the matter of the externalities of the products you're promoting.
If Hicks marketed his shows as life-changing experiences which'll give you a bigger dick, then just ran normal stand-up, it'd be right to criticise him.
Just as it's right to criticise companies who claim to sell 'food', show ads of nice happy, healthy families, and throw buzzwords around to manipulate customers at the detriment of their own health and lives.
The hijacking of language by megacorps is sad. Words have meaning, backed by history, tradition, and culture, and shouldn't be used as marketing tools to get consumers addicted to slop.
I didn't recall Hicks saying that people who do bait-and-switch tactics (which i also agree are bad) should kill themselves. I recall him saying all marketers and advertisers should kill themselves.
If you think buying ads is the only form of marketing, sure but advertising is probably 10% of marketing. See my other comments to see why he was a natural marketer and used some key tactics that he specifically chose for promoting himself.
I respect the hell out of Bill Hicks but the dude absolutely sat around thinking about marketing and getting his name out there. You have to if you want to be a working comic. Hell it’s not like he didn’t have an agent.
Then I don’t think you really understand comedy to be honest.
That’s a very reductive view of comedy, essentially “just a joke with no relevant context or layers allowed,” which rubs against the entire history of the art form. No working comic would agree with you.
Put another way: Not everyone is looking to do revolutionary commentary, but good luck finding a comic with no commentary at all.
I don't think this is true, do you have a source for this? What does it even mean that he constantly marketed himself, is doing lots of shows considered "marketing yourself"?
Comedy is about putting butts in seats. No comedian can be successful without promoting themselves to get attendees at their shows, and Bill Hicks was no exception.
Bill Hicks clearly did the normal career-promotion work of a comedian: he auditioned, performed constantly, toured, did TV spots, recorded specials/albums, cultivated UK audiences, and made repeated appearances on shows like Letterman. He opened for Jay Leno, appeared on Late Night with David Letterman, recorded an HBO special, played Just for Laughs, etc.
And for context he worked really hard to get those comedy specials recorded. Those specials are basically a business product, right? It's a way for him to scale his own comedy time and make more money. He partnered with big corporations to do it and they promoted those comedy specials with marketing.
All of that is part of a pretty standard self promotion/touring package of building a comedy career.
The analogy would be if whatever company releases a product that people see out in the wild and it's so good at what it does that they want more of it based on word of mouth.
Performing is just showing up at comedy shows and doing your bit. That alone would not have made him successful.
He aggressively promoted and marketed himself!
Biggest example: Going on Letterman and other corporate talk shows / interviews (he went on Letterman 12 times to promote himself, not making much money, purely for driving awareness - classic pr marketing technique that he used repeatedly)
He also went far beyond live acts when he started monetizing his recorded acts that were playing/distributing through corporate partners. Those recordings and specials were heavily marketed and he benefited from it because it created scale.
I think marketing is fine until it turns into lies. Reaching people to sell them your product should not be an issue. That, with misrepresentation and misleading claims is an issue.
I think manipulating people is a broader surface area to describe the problem. Most people think marketing is about just showing a product, but it's not. Marketing is about psychologically manipulating people and creating subconscious associations within peoples' minds using deeply researched strategies and techniques. See stuff like the Elaboration Likelihood Model. [1]
The next time you're watching a commercial from some company renowned for marketing success (Apple, Coke, etc) pay attention to how much time in the ad the product is in any way mentioned, and how much is... 'other stuff.' That other stuff is the point of the ad, the actual product is largely irrelevant. The world would be vastly better without large scale marketing.
What about invasion of public and private spaces? Sidewalks in my neighborhood are plastered with dozens of political signs. It’s garish and in some cases hinders traffic visibility. Radio stations near me have started using the album art/song title metadata to display ads on the screen in my car in the middle of a song. Nearly every website tracks you, your phone provider tracks you, stores track you and then they roll up all of this “anonymous” information to target specific ads.
The whole industry is creepy, garish, tasteless, and rude. And that’s without lying.
While Tesla has (in some years) avoided traditional marketing, the ceo is known for spending ridiculous amounts of money on publicity stunts like having a submarine shipped to a cave and buying Twitter to boost public perception of his companies.
I think this is the exception that proves the rule.
Human being, with very few exceptions, is corrupted by power. And a billion dollars is immense amount power.
You can make your opponent's life a living hell with a hundred thousand and buy or figure out a way to frame extortion material from almost any decision maker with a million.
See how wars are being started tweeting from the toilet seat by a man who has never known anything but power to harm others.
See the many "formerly normal" people ending on a private island, doing horrendous things to children.
We tried to figure out examples of people with power who weren't corrupted by it, at least to some extent, and came up with very few.
It's a human trait we know very well, but do very little about.
Yeah, that's kind of where I am: Billionaires appear to be a net-negative for society, the planet.
Regardless of what you even do with the money, simply preventing people from ever having billions is going to be a good thing for the world, democracy, etc.
> See how wars are being started tweeting from the toilet seat by a man who has never known anything but power to harm others.
To be fair: it is not Trump only who is addicted to warfare. You have a whole industry that benefits from war and thus wants warfare. Trump is just, in addition to being corrupt, really really not that clever. And now he is old and has dementia - amazing how the USA can so easily become subverted by Russia here. The KGB won.
Suppose you add a very high tax (it would have to be a wealth tax, not income, because they don’t have much income.)
Zuckerberg just moved to Florida for a tiny wealth tax in California.
These people would just leave the state or leave the country. It’s been happening in Norway with just a small wealth tax.
It’s not impossible, but it’s also not that simple to do.
These kind of policies are risky, because you may drive away the next generation of entrepreneurs and the jobs they create.
The rich should pay more taxes, but not to the point that it would chase them away or disincentive them from building companies.
That being said, taxes are incredibly destructive. Every dollar you tax someone is much more than a dollar you take from that person and the economy. Government is too big, it’s out of control. They can’t balance a budget either, so we pay an additional destructive tax called inflation. I would personally like to see government go on a diet to half or a quarter of the size it is and reduce taxes at the low end instead.
As you said a wealth tax would be needed, as opposed to income tax.
Taxes always have some optimum level: a point where benefit to society as a whole is maximized. Too high, and indeed investors / entrepreneurs could move away. Too low, and society leaves money on the table that could be better used elsewhere.
The simple fact that a society allows individuals to amass $100B+ (or even a 'mere' $1B) shows that wealth taxes are below what's optimal. If existing at all. It doesn't matter if wealth is stuck in assets, it's still society-distorting / corrupting power. There's no benefit to society to have individuals sit on say, >100x the wealth of average folks. Let alone 1000x, 100,000x or even higher.
So why is there no such wealth tax? Answer that question (in depth!), and you're getting closer to fixing the problem.
> These people would just leave the state or leave the country. It’s been happening in Norway with just a small wealth tax.
Would they really, though?
A lot of people say this, but I think one very important thing is being overlooked: should a billionaire leave the US, they'd also lose a significant amount of influence over US policy. Especially when their wealth is built significantly upon the stocks of major US companies, giving up that influence is a huge risk to their wealth.
Just think - not only would the billionaire's influence suddenly become stigmatized "foreign influence", but it would also become tainted by the fact that they fled the country to avoid taxes. Politicians on the opposing side of an issue the billionaire wants to fight for would have a field day pointing out both every time the billionaire attempted to influence any policy.
Based on what Sarah Wynn-Williams told about Zuck and what we've seen a lot of these state out loud (and know a lot more that have exrepessed this in private) seems that the society is being held hostage by child's who are threatening us with a tantrum, should we refuse the lollipop.
I think it's about time we turn adult now. The coming of age for humanity, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer used to say.
In the times of metacrisis and power concentrated in the hands of few who actively try to fry the world I think what we need is the exact opposite of that.
That is what we've had mostly for the last fifty years and look where it has gotten us? And US. I'm not from US
I was just gathering a list of global top hundred with their influence relevant spending and boy that was not a pretty sight. At least in terms of normal people.
Yeah, tbh I want more personalization in that I want posts from my friends, not clickbait the algorithm has decided I'm interested in because people who engage with this also engage with that...
We don't have a honest discussion about the progression of addiction so the choices are not visible, until later.
The first beer is the most critical choice, yet it's made for us (in 99% of the cases) by our peers. So is it a choice really?
We're routine (addiction) prone herd animals and as long as we pretend otherwise (free will and the likes) we're stuck in repeating this.
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