How are you going to make it illegal for the person who gets shitfaced four times a week without forbidding it for the hordes of people who have a glass of wine or a beer with dinner, or for that matter a shot of scotch twice a week?
And how, in practice, are you going to prevent the shitfaced person from getting shitfaced anyway?
And how, if it’s all illegal, are you going to make sure that what’s on the label is what’s actually in the container, thereby preventing people from accidentally poisoning themselves and/or winding up a lot drunker than they intended?
Nothing that humans want to do is entirely controllable; but legal things are a lot more controllable than illegal ones. We learned that one during Prohibition.
Yes, here are some things I listed in that post that need to be weighed:
the benefit of that behavior to the individual
the benefit of that behavior to the perception of freedom
the risk of using the government’s power (potential for abuse)
the collective external costs of dealing with that behavior, etc
Most societies have weighed various factors and decided that it’s best to keep alcohol legal and deal with some of the worst aspects through general taxes.
Most societies have done a similar debate over heroin, and decided that it’s best to keep heroin illegal (although increasingly in progressive countries, not strictly criminal), knowing that’s not a perfect solution.
You can’t make blanket statements about drugs. Each one has to be weighed individually.
Some people feel the need to control others “for their own good”. To quote the (possibly apocryphal) line from Ambrose Bierce (or H. L. Mencken), the definition of Puritanism is:
“The haunting feeling that someone, somewhere, might be happy.”
I think this motivation is often blended with the general disgust reaction that people have regarding the actions (or sometimes mere existence) of others - “people should stop doing that, it’s bad” is not really all that different from “people should stop doing that, I find it disgusting”.
wrt HOAs, some developers have turned them into a money printing machine. They have subsidiaries which “manage” the large neighborhood they have built and each homeowner has to sign the HOA contract in order to buy into the neighborhood. Technically the owners do vote on things, but I’m not sure they can actually vote the management company out - or if they can it takes an unreasonable quorum and percentage.
The HOA where I live manages three clubhouses, each with a gym, a swimming pool, and rental spaces. So the developers will continue making money on this neighborhood 100 years after the last residence was sold.
Obviously, this only works in areas where housing is tight, but where is there plenty of housing?
Puritanism.—The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
The proper ascription to Mencken was clarified when the quotation appeared in his 1949 collection “A Mencken Chrestomathy”. The details are presented further below.
My thought is yes they can- with a majority vote of a certain quorum. That quorum may be hard to reach, especially as many Condos are not lived in by their owners, the owners living some distance and could even be shell companies.
If you want me to care what you think about someone else’s behavior, then there has to be some kind of harm involved. If there’s no harm, or at least no inordinate amount of harm, then why are we even talking about it?
One thing I’m thinking of here is marijuana. Pretty much any substance you can put in your body carries some kind of risk, but as long as we’re letting people consume alcohol, which is more destructive than some illegal drugs, prohibiting marijuana should not even be a live discussion. If you care about eliminating dangerous drugs, prove it by criminalizing alcohol. If you’re not bold enough to go that far, then leave the potheads alone, because by comparison it’s nearly harmless.
But on a different note, usually when I hear “let people enjoy things” deployed, harm isn’t in the conversation at all. It’s more in line with simply judging people for having unusual tastes. i.e. you may have a lot of opinions about “Disney Adults”, many people do find them weird. I don’t get it at all, it does raise my eyebrows in certain ways. But it hurts nobody at all, it gives enjoyment to some and employment to others, so live and let live. Let people enjoy things.
“To all who come to this happy place: Welcome. Disneyland is your land. Here age relives fond memories of the past—and here youth may savor the challenge and promise of the future. Disneyland is dedicated to the ideals, the dreams and the hard facts that have created America—with the hope that it will be a source of joy and inspiration to all the world.”
So, there is nothing at all wrong or weird about being a “Disney Adult”. The Park was designed for them in mind also. I think it is just parents selfishly wanting the park to themselves, and then jamming up everything with strollers- often used as shopping carts.
Right, add me to those who mostly hear that discourse in this sense. A response to someone/something being judged as “cringe” or condescended at (implying that enjoying it is something you should put behind). And the response is oh come on let people enjoy things.
That’s IMO a different dialog than those over “victimless crimes” or harm reduction or utilitarian morals or commonality of mores that a lot of the thread has been spinning around.
Wagner seems to miss what the meme is about. It’s not about people who simply dislike things. It’s about people who shit on people for not liking things. This can sometimes include certain over-the-top negative reactions in fan spaces, where they seem to be trying to start a fight. This is the bulk of how I have moderate spaces.
Alessan, HOAs are not always optional with houses. I lived in Flower Mound TX (DFW metro). The town was about 75,000 when I lived there. City requires all houses/neighborhoods to be in an HOA.
They’re just flip sides of the same coin; basically it’s people getting agitated because others have different opinions, views, and behaviors. From where I sit, it’s the same people giving me the stink-eye if I tell them I’m an amateur mixologist/cocktail hobbyist, and who do the same when I tell them I don’t go to church often, if at all.
Ultimately they have their own views on how the world is, and how it should be, and they get judgmental about people who don’t fall into that how it should be box, whether it’s for things they do, or things they don’t do.
