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PaperclipPerfector  13d ago (text post)   30531 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024

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From Kavanaugh to Hegseth with dozens of right wing personalities and political figures in between. Why is the left so obsessed with calling them alcoholics? Is enjoying alcohol some taboo thing now? I just dont understand it from the party of needle exchanges and drug decriminalization.

Just because I saw it posted today. Here is the Babylon Bee mocking Nancy Pelosi for being an alcoholic.

The post in question is Secretary of Defense -- this is a big-deal kind of position, and one where sort of like the President, you're basically expected to be "on-call" for major incidents that can crop up. Regularly over-indulging in an intoxicant famous for making your judgement significantly worse is a major and legitimate concern. I should say that specifically, Hegseth himself appears to have implicitly acknowledged the criticism as valid by pledging not to drink if confirmed.

I don't think this is exclusive to the left.

Many people on the right were saying that Kamala showed up to speeches a little drunk or that she was on Xanax. Biden was also accused of using a cocktail of drugs to stay alert. For the record, I think a lot of the allegations on both sides are true.

You are new here, but this isn't really what we look for in a top level post in the culture war thread. It's a little too boo out group. Just a warning for now.

The steelman idea is that alcoholism is a worse thing for an airline pilot or a politician than for a CRUD software developer or a librarian. Not in some fundamental essential moral sense of it being wrong, but just in the sense that it's morally wrong to continue doing a job which heavily affects people's lives while regularly in an impaired state.

No one in the left elite professional classes supports alcoholism or drug abuse among themselves, no more than they want their daughters to go into sex work. It's still considered a personal failing, which at the very least needs to be covered up.

No one in the left elite professional classes supports alcoholism or drug abuse among themselves

Strong disagree, I think the left tends to have this massive blind spot around marijuana where they simply refuse to acknowledge any evidence that chronic usage has been implicated in psychosis.

Agreed that casual marijuana use is widely accepted. But being a stoner is stigmatized. I know one couple who sent their teenage son to a ritzy rehab for it.

Attacks like these are typically orthogonal to the actual reason for not liking a nominee, which is often something unpopular to say. With Hegseth its that he wants the military to be more effective, less woke, and less wasteful. That upsets people in DC, but is popular with the voters. Being an alcoholic means nothing in DC, but it still carries some weight with voters.

Alcohol is right coded. It’s for frat boys and working class men in the popular consciousness.

Good liberals are supposed to toke up, instead.

That doesn't match my experiences.

The liberal wine aunt is surely a major (semi-true) stereotype

I wonder in what social circles that would be. In my social circles alcohol use has no correlation with political opinions.

One of the most common insults I saw thrown at Kamala this election was that she was a drunk and fit the "wine aunt" stereotype. Obviously certain stereotypes of alcoholics code one way or the other, but the insult of "drunk" seems pretty universal.

Was that based on anything or just a typical smear job?

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