Fine. But that is not the point. That many people have little to fear of alcohol, LSD, or whatever, makes it no less true that it is dangerous and destructive in general.
You still haven't shown that alcohol is dangerous and destructive in general.
I suppose it is not destructive enough to satisfy your expectations of fair justification for boycott and repudiation. I just don't understand why it is so.
1) The fact that some people drink and do stupid things that harm others is not enough to ban a substance that the vast majority of people can use responsibly and not harm anyone. When deciding whether or not to ban something, you need a really good reason to do so, because essentially you're taking away a freedom.
2) You've been talking about banning these things, which is much different from boycotting or repudiation. I agree with repudiating things like drinking and driving, but not drinking in general, the same way I agree with repudiating letting your little kid play around your pool, but not owning a pool in general.
I don't know about that.
I am generally big on personal responsibility towards the collective.
The very idea that one might want to intoxicate himself instead of, well, pestering others (and allowing oneself to be pestered) into better understanding is quite alien to me.
I instinctively perceive it as clearly, utterly immoral. It is only by an effort of will that I don't assume that others do as well.
Yeah, I guess that makes me... odd. I'm attempting to better understand the implications.
But this is still irrational. This was the reason I gave the example of me playing poker with friends. The idea is to have a good time. You can't really think that every minute of a person's life should be devoted to better understanding the universe in the sense of studying it like a science. Sometimes people just need to relax and have a good time, and alcohol helps people do just that.
As far as personal responsibility toward the collective, you still haven't shown how drinking alcohol goes against that. How does my drinking while hanging out with friends oppose my personal responsibility toward the collective?
Far as I can tell, nothing on that list is both actually assimilated by the organism (therefore endangering any efforts at self-control and self-regulation) and psychoactive. If anything is, then sure, they should be repudiated with extreme determination.
Actually, chocolate and pizza fit that description. But the point is your problem with alcohol was the risk of not using it in moderation. The same can be said for almost anything. The point being, unless you want to ban cars, almost all food, and many, many, many other things, your argument against alcohol in this part doesn't hold up.
That sounds just about right. I flat out don't believe there is an upside to alcohol or any other drug.
Why is that not a good perspective? I don't doubt there is a good reason, but I have no idea of what it would be.
Sure, alcohol makes many people more spontaneous, and I suppose there is a need for being seem as we are, in circunstances that allow people to decide whether they want to be exposed to us or rather be away.
But alcohol? That is perhaps the easiest, quickest way of attaining such very necessary situations... and also the one that I would never willingly pursue.
Maybe I have just decided from an early age that it is a given that intoxication is deeply wrong and should be sometimes forgiven, never pursued. At this point it is very much a passion for me, and I will not easily let go of it, or even attempt to.
This last part pretty much sums it up, it seems. So, this is like a religious belief to you, no different from puritanical views. But that's exactly why it seems to odd to me coming from you. This is what I'd expect from some extreme conservative who's been raised in a strict religion that is against immoral stuff like drugs. There at least it makes sense, because you expect such irrationality from people like that.
The interesting part is that this very view goes against your reason for holding the view. You talk about not drinking alcohol because of how it impairs your ability to learn about the universe rationally, and yet here you are refusing to learn rationally about the universe, even admitting that you're doing so. You say you don't believe there is an upside, but that's a belief based on nothing other than faith. The facts disagree strongly with that belief.
The bottom line is that there is an upside to alcohol, even though there are risks. Since we value freedom so much, it's necessary to make a very good case when you want to ban something. The fact that a small minority of people abuse thing X, while the vast majority use it responsibly to make their life more enjoyable, is not a good case at all for banning thing X.
