You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

Clarity comments on Social Necessity of Drinking - Less Wrong Discussion

17 Post author: Raemon 13 February 2011 10:52PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Article Navigation

Comments (96)

Comments (96)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: Clarity 04 February 2016 02:04:32PM *  0 points [-]

Social necessity? Think of all the drunk driving accidents fueled by alcohol. The king hit murders. The rapes, the suicides, the hospitalization, the addictions and psychoses, the cost to the health care system, the filthy vomit ridden streets, the dopey people wasting their youth and their lives, the children that grow up neglected, the fetuses that grow up poisoned and the activists that believed before me and you that there was hope in the face of the way things have been done for time immemorial. Are that a social necessity? No. We can do better than this.

[The connection between intoxication and sexual violence is well-established]

-The Crimson

Comment author: gjm 04 February 2016 04:56:21PM 0 points [-]

You are using "social necessity" in a different way from Raemon. Maybe that's entirely deliberate, but it's worth making explicit. It's perfectly possible for something to be

  • a social necessity in the sense that anyone who doesn't do it will suffer serious adverse social consequences, but
  • not a social necessity in the sense that our society would be better off if people did it much less or not at all.
Comment author: polymathwannabe 04 February 2016 02:58:51PM 0 points [-]

That was beautiful.

Powered by Reddit Powered by Reddit