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I've never really understood this line of thinking, that the "real you" comes out when you're inebriated. Couldn't both sides of her - drunk and sober - represent what she really thinks, such that one could just as well say that when she's drunk she's being too impolite to say the truth?
Taggin @PutAHelmetOn as well, because this relates to his point about the "sacredness of race."
In Vino Veritas.
For a bigger exploration see several chapters of Slingerland's Drunk or listen to him on Rogan, but at core alcohol weakens your ability to suppress impulses you had already. It does not create whole-ass new impulses.
An analogy:
I might get drunk at a party with my wife and hit on one of her female friends (or worse, one of her female enemies!). I might do 8 shots and tell her friend Brittany that she has great tits and we should hang out some time. Afterward, when my wife and/or Brittany's boyfriend confront me, I might say "I'm sorry, I was really drunk, I never would have done that sober." And everyone will understand that what I'm saying is that I wouldn't tell Brittany that I wanted to fuck her if I were sober; it's understood that my urge/impulse/desire to fuck Brittany exists when I'm sober (I'm a straight man after all!) but that absent alcohol I am capable of suppressing that urge in polite society. No one would think that meant that when I'm sober I don't think Brittany has great tits, that would be stupid.
On the other hand, if I get drunk at a party with my wife and I hit on one of her male friends, if I did 12 shots and walked up to Craig and said that I wanted to take him home and bend him over my Eames lounge chair, no amount of pleading about the top shelf tequila would convince them that I'm heterosexual. I might once again plead that I wouldn't have tried to hit on Craig if I were sober because I would suppress the urge to fuck Craig with my full-powered prefrontal cortex, but I couldn't argue that the bourbon created the urge to fuck Craig and I wouldn't have any homosexual impulses if I were sober. That homosexual urge necessarily already existed, before I started drinking, the drinking merely brought it out, suppressed my ability to suppress my urges.
Alcohol causes you to pursue your desires, it does not create those desires.
Same with any other urge I might or might not have. Alcohol doesn't produce new thoughts, just reveals old ones.
So you don't think the prefrontal cortex contributes meaningfully to who you are as a person, and that judgment and reasoning aren't part of your personality? I think this is a strange way to understand the human mind.
I mean, isn't what anti-racists want is for people to use their moral judgment and reasoning abilities to suppress impulses to act racistly? Or is the goal to eliminate every racist urge in all human brains, no matter how deep it's buried?
I wouldn't label myself an "anti-racist" I'd label myself a "non-racist" if forced to. But I don't think
Is as crazy as you think it is. You could get me as drunk as you want, I'll never hit my mother or my wife, or really any woman. That is ingrained in me at a deeper level. One might achieve a similar degree of non-racism with proper cultural upbringing.
Maybe I'm phrasing my argument poorly. Let's use the old Freudian division: in my view the drunk you is your id, your deep and base desires; the sober you is id managed by superego, societal training and politeness, producing the ego. Which we call "you" or your personality is a secondary question, "then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes;" if you yell slurs at black people when drunk your id is racist. It's possible for a person to have a non-racist id, to genuinely not see race as a valid category for insult and negative judgment.
If you believe something inside, but your judgment tells you not to say it out loud, we call that political correctness. If one thinks Black people are inferior, but doesn't say it out loud sober because of political correctness, I'd call that a belief in racism. I think fat people are ugly and inferior, I don't say that out loud because of political correctness, it's a belief I hold, if you get me drunk and in an argument with a fat person I'll probably call him a whale.
What if you don't think Black people are inferior, but the particular person in front of you, who happens to be black, is inferior?
Call them a pleb for having a work study job instead of rich parents or a scholarship, obviously.
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Even takin this literally - if discrete impulses exist then they are complex, interact, and make up larger impulses. If you're very drunk and stumbling around, then alcohol 'weakens your ability to suppress' your impulse to, say, sway to the right and left as you walk instead of walking correctly. There certainly is an impulse to sway to the right and left, because you do it while walking, but suppressing that 'impulse' is a critical part of normal walking - you subtlely shift to the right and left at various moments to maintain balance. But - is it even really suppression, or is it just a decision not to sway that way? If you have one neuron that tends to activate an output neuron, and another neuron that tends to suppress that - you could say "the neuron suppresses the impulse encoded by the first neuron", or you could just say - it's just a logic gate that's part of a much more complex system.
And alcohol is messing with every 'impulse' that exists, there's no reason it has to emerge from 'racism being unsuppressed'. What if the alcohol suppresses the authentic anti-racism, and all that's left is 'randomly picking bad sounding words'? Maybe when drunk they just decide to insult people. A very gay person can totally call another gay person a fag as an insult, a black person call another black person a nigg-r, when they're very pissed.
A simpler approach, assigning no 'internal motives', is just - alcohol makes you dumber and causes you do to dumb things more or less randomly. If you get blackout drunk and start hitting on women - does that really say anything about your non-drunk behavior, or just that you're really dumb and 'hitting on women' is a fairly simple instinct?
I could see someone doing this because they thought it was incredibly funny in the moment!
Or you could try reading the sources I linked instead of making up goofy ideas I didn't bring up. Same source, next few sentences:
Different effects of alcohol, and of other drugs.
I'll concede that point. I once loved a game of gay chicken, and found it hilarious for a while in college to slap my friend's asses in clubs just to make them uncomfortable. I guess my hypo is presupposing that it was clearly serious which is tough to demonstrate, I'll concede you could fight the hypo.
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But this is the whole anti-racist vs not racist thing. If we live in a free society (I know, big if, but that's the claim) you do not get to police the insides of people's heads. You do not get to demand everyone signs up to your ideology, the most you can demand is that anyone who doesn't agree with you shut up about it (because your ideology currently reigns in 'polite society').
This girl straight up said the word that can't be said, so I understand 'polite society' is going to throw the book at her. But if we are throwing the book at her because slurring a word over and over again to upset someone is proof she is racist in her heart - if we are going to start policing people's hearts - then there is no hope for society and its time to get out the grey hoodie and sunglasses.
I'm not really arguing punishment here, I agree wholeheartedly that hate crime and hate speech laws are total violations of basic enlightenment principles. We should punish actions not motivations.
I just found the arguments in favor of the girl to be very narcissist's prayer: the same people arguing she wasn't racist were also arguing that she shouldn't be expelled if she was.
Sorry, I didn't mean to direct my post at you, I meant the royal you but I should have realised how it would look. This whole thing is just so frustrating. There is an element of the narcissist's prayer there, but I do think it's because racial politics has become totalitarian in its true sense - nothing outside of racial politics. They're two separate positions, but if one is on the anti racist side one can't accept either of them, leaving the not racist side full of people who believe in both, or people willing to align them.
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Alcohol reduces your inhibitions. Your inhibitions might prevent you from saying an unpleasant truth out loud. Of course, they might also prevent you from saying an unpleasant UNtruth that you know will be devastating, because drunk you is an asshole that will say anything to win an argument.
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That's a nice analogy but should it also apply to people who think there are demons living in their walls after they smoke crack or any other psychoactive drug. Very compulsive and out of character behavior isn't even that uncommon among drunks. I doubt it has that much to do with one's "true character".
It's in vino veritas, not in coca veritas or in LSD veritas. Trying to apply it to other drugs, or to mental illnesses, makes it iffy. Alcohol has a specific known effect by a specific mechanism. Positing a similarity to other substances will work in some ways but not others, I lack the experiences to speak to it.
If you told me she was tweaking on meth or tripping on acid, the whole tenor of the event changes doesn't it?
"In LSD veritas" was the CIA's motto in the 60s. They tried with alcohol, but determined that alcohol wasn't good enough to be used to determine anyone's true sentiments. (neither was LSD)
People react very differently to drunkeness. Some get sad, violent, horny, lethargic, delusional or paranoid. Not all drunk behavior can be interpreted as uninhibited desire.
I would interpret most of those states as uninhibited desire in various forms. A sad drunk is sad inside all the time, the alcohol just leads them to drop the polite happy front they put up to keep moving through the day. A violent drunk is angry inside all the time, and the alcohol reduced the strength of their societal prohibition on violence. Our conscious can be forcing us to do all kinds of things, throughout the day I'm exerting my will to get excited or to stay calm or to stand up for myself or to stand down when I'm in the wrong. Alcohol throws all that haywire, but it doesn't create new urges.
For that matter, over time I've noticed that there are different kinds of violent drunks. A violent drunk who gets in my face after he gets rivered in stud is understandable, most people would be angry after that and the alcohol weakened his ability to avoid it. A violent drunk who attacks a vietnamese man at random would be someone I would avoid getting drunk with in the future, they have that inside them all the time.
Why does alcohol 'reveal desires' but other drugs not though? I don't think neuroscience is developed enough to conclude that "alcohol reveals desires" mechanistically.
I literally linked multiple pieces explaining the well studied link between alcohol and suppressing the PFC, and its role.
Your first piece is from an addiction center. In my experience browsing the web, addiction center webpages are often just an amalgam of various science-sounding claims that don't really mean anything but very emphatically suggest that addiction is bad, and scientific, and should be treated. They're just not worth reading. That doesn't mean any individual claim on the website is wrong, just that one shouldn't cite them. Wikipedia is leagues above them.
The prefrontal cortex does a whole bunch of things. Plausibly even most things.
That sounds like it covers all complex human behaviors, honestly (also imo this part of neuroscience is very messy and a lot of it is wrong, given how complicated people and their actions are, what is 'moderating social behavior', exactly, can we really attribute that to a brain region rather than much more complex higher level interaction, blablabla). And if you're suppressing all of that - that's not going to 'reveal true hidden desires', it's just gonna mess everything up. But impulses aren't discrete or ... real in any sense, they're just vague descriptions of complex, useful actions made by a complex system. A desire to be racist - like, if I read a bunch of studies and, like scott alexander, regretfully decide that there probably are racial differences in IQ, am I desiring to be racist? Why is there necessarily an innate desire to be racist component that's distinct from a complex network making decisions, and knocking out some parts of that, making it worse, might lead to things that 'sound racist', but that doesn't tell us anything direct about the desires of a person. Consider tourettes or harm OCD (and I could go on another tangent about that) - these people do not have a suppressed desire to say slurs or kill people in a normal sense, yet 'express' or 'feel' them anyway!
I'd argue that the PFC both 'suppresses impulsive behavior' and 'generates impulsive behavior', but not even in an absolute sense, as part of a really complicated set of interactions we don't really understand. So going from 'alcohol affects PFC + PFC suppresses behavior' -> 'alcohol releases suppressed behavior as a primary and separable effect' just isn't a reasonable conclusion - honestly, 'behaviors' aren't even a fixed thing, and 'suppressing an existing impulse' doesn't necessarily have any meaning outside some useful context. And in particular, concluding that 'in wino veritas' is not justified at all.
Your other source is "DRUNK - How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization - BY EDWARD SLINGERLAND", who is a a Canadian-American sinologist and philosopher. He is Distinguished University Scholar and Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia. Again, not exactly a systematic review.
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I guess I'm saying that the suppression of that desire is as real as it's unleashing. So the prioritizing of the bad behavior/utterance as Real You is just pessimism in disguise. You can just as well focus on the part of you displayed when you're not drunk and say that's the authentic you and the authentic opinion.
Getting sober can reveal old thoughts as well, unmasking the desire, hidden all along deep down, to be a better person.
I see what you mean, it depends on what we mean by describing a person as being x.
When I describe someone as heterosexual or homosexual, I'm referring to their sexual desires, not necessarily to their behavior. If you're a man who wants to fuck men you're a homosexual (or bi but we're going to ignore that for simplicity). It doesn't matter if you successfully suppress that or never get the opportunity, the identity is in the desire not the act.
Ditto racism. I'd define being a racist as having a belief or theory of racial Animus. I don't follow Kendi, I don't think actions are racist by impact alone, only by intention.
If you, on the other hand, define identities by their impact, then it would make sense to say sobriety is the "real" state.
I'm reminded of a quote from Shogun that I've got an effortpost around in the hopper:
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Firstly, thanks for the tag! I was debating whether to post my comment top(per) level or here, and because I'm a karma whore, I chose the latter.
I appreciate the link and learning something new! It reminds me of people who argue that Kanye's mental illness can't create whole-ass antisemitism, only exacerbate existing prejudice. I'm inclined to agree with everything you say here, but I'm not sure it addresses the cognitive algorithm nara and me are independently describing.
The drunkenness reveals the urge to be mean to someone (maybe it's because they're black or maybe because they punched me). If I was sober, I wouldn't be mean to them. But because I'm gonna be mean, I'm gonna execute a meanness strategy. Noticing they are black, I choose the Gamer Word because it lets me inflict violence (so I've heard) without even bruising my knuckles! I imagine I can execute this meanness strategy sober, too.
This sort of argument originally occurred to me because of the times I've been hurt by what people say to me, and every time I can recall, it was because they were set off by something (not alcohol, in any of the cases). Rather than say, "gee I guess all these people secretly hate people like me," I just decided it was because they were heated and angry.
I'm not sure what kind of evidence could distinguish either of our theories. In both cases, there is a need to distinguish why some drunk people yell epithets and some don't (equivalently: why some schizos post about Jews and some don't), and each of us go towards un-factual conclusions to support our moral intuitions.
That's fair. "One can shout bigger at a Black woman repeatedly but that doesn't mean one is racist!" Just strikes me as epistemicly similar to people in an earlier thread saying "One can post castration fetish material to a castration fetish site, and then totally separately one can publish medical guidelines on voluntary castration, they aren't necessarily connected!"
Trying to shrug it off on society by saying well she said it because she knows it hurts because other people think that, even if she doesn't; that strikes me as more like Kendi, a racism without racists.
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I would say that the unfiltered (or at least, less filtered) side of you comes out when you're inebriated. This is the "real you" if you consider those filters to be an artificial construct constraining your true self, but I would not agree. Behavioral filters, like habits, generally are constructed, but they are constructed by a long series of choices that are morally attributable to yourself.
Similarly, however, the choice to become inebriated is a choice to relax those filters (involuntary intoxication is another matter), and that is also a decision with moral weight. In short, if you don't like what you tend to do while drunk...don't get drunk.
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