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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   18980 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 29, 2024

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This is a situation where it’s illustrative to look at the alternative behavioral choice. A 17 year old whose parents do not allow her to host a party with drinking will instead attend parties where no responsible adults are present. These parties will probably include drugs and sexual harassment by strangers.

The “don’t leave” was made to sound like they were trapping the kids but it was certainly more about preventing them from driving drunk. Which, again, some percentage of teen drinkers will do after attending a party without adult supervision.

Eh, depends. The endorsement of parents could definitely make a difference.

And, of course, hosting a party with drinking doesn't mean they won't also go to the other hypothetical party, unless you're deliberately scheduling parties to conflict or something.

This is a situation where it’s illustrative to look at the alternative behavioral choice.

That's what I find so interesting about the situation: that argument of "harm reduction" is exactly the argument that Moms for Liberty's opponents are typically making. MFL (and its allies) largely argue against early/LGBT/overly-explicit sex-ed on the basis that kids shouldn't do that so they shouldn't know about it. Liberal arguments are that kids will do it anyway so they should be educated about it so they do it safely. We've precisely flipped our valences.

On parental control: did each child (30-40 by police report) show up with a signed permission slip? Was each parent aware of where their child was going and what they were doing? Or were the teens mostly there without their parents' permission?

You see where this all gets slippery, I hope. I see the harm reduction argument she would make, but teen drinking is also not an inevitability for all kids, and making it less convenient makes it less common. Marginal kids are drinking/not-drinking based on how easy it is to get alcohol and get a place to drink it, even if some kids are going to find a way regardless. Much like it's obvious to me that doing too much PRIDE bullshit in the classroom will probably increase the amount of homosexuals coming out of that school marginally, even if there will still be gay kids if you don't do any PRIDE education; holding regular ragers at your house probably causes some marginal kids to drink who would not have otherwise been drinking, because now they're invited to a party where otherwise they might not have been or because they feel comfortable going there or because their parents are ok with them going to a party with Mrs. Schillinger, even if it is true that some kids would still drink regardless. I was drunk less than five times in high school, based on my later behavior in college I've not doubt I would have been more likely to drink had there been a convenient Party House in our school system.

I think this analysis completely skips over the fact that public K-12 education is compulsory. Attending some wine mom's parties are not. Likewise, introducing kindergarteners to the gender/sexuality spectrum is way off the fucking mark of when that lesson would be age appropriate, if you agreed it was appropriate at all for compulsory K-12 education. Having teenagers drink at roughly the same age teenagers have always drank as long as humans had alcohol gets a big fat meh from me.

Source for the above claim about gender spectrum bullshit in kindergarten

In his kindergarten classroom, one teacher in western Massachusetts using “Rights, Respect, Responsibility” introduces the idea of gender as part of an exploration of identity. He explains that people use all sorts of pronouns: he, she, they, ze. He introduces the terms transgender and gender queer but doesn’t fully define them because that is too much for kindergartners, said the teacher, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because his district did not authorize him to speak publicly.

He talks to students about anatomy but declines to classify various body parts as male or female. “We don’t say a penis belongs to a man,” he said. It belongs to a human, he explains.

And he makes clear that even if a doctor proclaims at birth, “It’s a boy!” that baby may not be a boy. “Someone who was born a boy may not feel they are a boy.”

I think this analysis completely skips over the fact that public K-12 education is compulsory.

No, it isn't. If you don't want your kids going to public school, you don't have to send them.

You are required to do something that you call education, and public schools are the lowest friction way to do that. But the unschoolers get away with it, you can too.

You are required to do X. X costs a lot of money. The government will provide free X and will generally make it the easy default.

What percentage of people choose not government X?

Not only that, but you can opt out of certain curricula. There was always some religious kid who had to leave the room when we talked about sex in health class, presumably to pray for our souls.

I was unaware I could opt out of English class.

I think this analysis completely skips over the fact that public K-12 education is compulsory. Attending some wine mom's parties are not.

I'm not sure I did. The question here isn't whether attending those parties is compulsory, it is whether I as the hypothetical parent of teenagers in her neighborhood in suburban PA, have control over my kid. If parents don't let kids drink at their house, then as long as I ensure that my kids are overnighting at someone's house with parental supervision, I can be confident they won't be drinking. If other parents are allowing kids to drink at their house, I now need to investigate every time my kid overnights somewhere else. My freedom is restricted by that.

((My, largely unrelated, view on compulsory LGBT education is that it's a complete waste of fucking time and money, but also likely to be highly ineffective at inculcating values in kids. My advocacy for local schools has been to implement elective courses in bible study, I'd LOVE to see an AP Theology course.))

I'm not sure I did. The question here isn't whether attending those parties is compulsory, it is whether I as the hypothetical parent of teenagers in her neighborhood in suburban PA, have control over my kid. If parents don't let kids drink at their house, then as long as I ensure that my kids are overnighting at someone's house with parental supervision, I can be confident they won't be drinking. If other parents are allowing kids to drink at their house, I now need to investigate every time my kid overnights somewhere else. My freedom is restricted by that.

You have a funny definition of freedom. You seem to be defining it as freedom from something existing anywhere in the world. Or perhaps just an hours drive from you. To me, I see a clear and bright line between wanting to free from compulsory exposure to something odious, and wanting to be free from incidental or hypothetical exposure.

I don't have a teenager... yet. But vetting the households of her friends is already a key part of our lives. Maybe we're being controlling. Maybe we have an unhealthy fear of how bifurcated America has become. Maybe it's a perfectly healthy fear. Only time will tell.

You have a funny definition of freedom. You seem to be defining it as freedom from something existing anywhere in the world. Or perhaps just an hours drive from you.

Or freedom as the tendency for things to go to their proper place and stay there. Look, I don't actually care if teenagers drink. I think potential co-ed sleeping arrangements at that party are a bigger concern and drinking brings a profound meh. But you have to have a default about it, and taking for granted that they shouldn't, then hosting teen drinking parties should be fraught. Why? Because society has to have defaults about all sorts of behavior, and opting out of defaults carries friction. "He is sovereign who sets the null hypothesis" and all that. You can move to a nudist colony to opt out of the societal default of pants(or a sarong, whatever). I will not stop you. But it is quite a bit of friction towards living a pantsfree life. And there's thousands of defaults on issues more controversial among non-weirdos. Like drug use, which is what we're talking about.

I happen to think that defaults should be virtuous and prosocial. I don't particularly view teen drinking as bad, but imposing friction on doing bad things is, to me, definitionally freer than imposing friction on doing good things, because you can't do neither. We live in a society and societies have norms.

Now it looks like moms for liberty's sworn enemy is doing its damnedest to establish a societal norm of "everyone is a gay gendergoblin", and it is in no way hypocritical to oppose that societal norm(which is in fact highly stupid and probably destructive), while also undermining the social norm of "teenagers don't get to use alcohol". I agree with that set of values. But it is also in no way contrary to freedom to punish defectors.

You have a funny definition of freedom. You seem to be defining it as freedom from something existing anywhere in the world.

Not really, isn't this the core debate over anarchotyrrany? It's fairly uncontroversial that enforced law and order increases freedom for law abiding citizens, the question is where we set the laws and how intense the enforcement should be, what acceptable levels of law-breaking and over-enforcement are. I, and certainly my wife, have more freedom in NYC in a world where the NYPD enforces the laws than I have in a world where they don't.

You might disagree that underage drinking is bad, I might disagree with it. But there is no indication whatsoever that a democratic majority of voting Americans disagree with it. The most recent polling I could find indicated that just 10% of Americans favor a drinking age of 18, let alone lower than 18. Back in 2014, 77% of Americans opposed lowering the drinking age to 18 while 60% favored more strict penalties for underage drinking.

Allowing parents to serve alcohol to minors, to other parents' children, restricts the freedom of other parents to allow their teenagers to move about the world as freely as possible and with as little supervision as possible. It narrows the universe of places that parents can be confident their kids will be safe from something that the vast majority of parents think is dangerous.

I've heard enough from libertarians about "positive freedoms" to refuse that. They have the freedom to choose from the options they're given with regards to how much they let their kid be unsupervised. What others are allowed to do is not within the realm of "freedom".

What others are allowed to do is not within the realm of "freedom".

I would assume that @FiveHourMarathon would think that they have more viable options than they did before, if suldenly everyone decided to prevent underage drinking. That proliferation of choice seems like freedom.

And, of course, the subjective experience would feel freeing.

Thanks, you get it.

Perfect example: Ocean City, NJ

It's a dry town. That's less freedom, you can't buy alcohol on the island.

But the experience of traveling there, especially as a family, isn't necessarily that you have less freedom, it's that you have more. At 10-14, my parents could just send me and my sister to wander around the island. There was less trouble to get into, so my parents didn't have to watch me all the time, they could just send me off on my own.

Allowing parents to serve alcohol to minors, to other parents' children, restricts the freedom of other parents to allow their teenagers to move about the world as freely as possible and with as little supervision as possible.

That's like saying that allowing people to publish blasphemy restricts the freedom of everyone else to be in a world free of blasphemy.

A 17 year old whose parents do not allow her to host a party with drinking will instead attend parties where no responsible adults are present.

This is the sort of argument a judge will quote sneeringly at the parent's sentencing.

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