WTF happened to personal responsibility?

beer is +EV
dying is -EV

[Colonel Kataffy]

[ QUOTE ]
No matter what age you set it at, it's going to seem to silly.


[/ QUOTE ]

I would argue, though, that 21 is particularly silly because 21 hits most people smack in the middle of their college years. With the way everything is structured in the U.S. most of us show up to college at 18 almost 19. Ever been in a group where half of the people are 20 and the other half are 21, and want to go to a bar, its frustrating as all hell and is unfair to people who are slightly younger than friends.

If it was 18, then most everybody in college would be good to go. Now, yes the line would be instead drawn when people are in highschool, but I think this would be less harmful becasue again, its not right in the middle of the highschool experience, and most people still live at home so a bar culture in highschool is unlikely to develop to the extant that it exists in college.

Basically, 21 is a particularly inconvenient age for most college kids in this country. If wise adults feel that 20 year olds can't handle drinking, then they ought to bump the age up to 23 and try to keep drinking out of college all together.

[sam h]

I have no problem for ringing them up on the charge of selling alcohol to a minor, but this additional charge of selling alcohol to a minor resulting in death seems like bullshit to me.

Seems like a case where you have to get the facts about what happened. If they funnelled vodka down his throat, that's one thing. But if the kid just went to the party, drank a bunch, and then wandered off and fell in a river that is an entirely different matter.

[Blarg]

Making 19 a minor seems pretty stupid to me. You're old enough for the electric chair, to die in overseas wars, to vote -- yet you can't buy a beeer?

This strikes me as an example of "feel-good law" that doesn't really make sense or have much of a chance of working, as certainly 19 year olds can and do get booze all the time. I realize there may be people who feel the law has good intent, but unfortunately, good intent isn't enough to make good law.

I think the frat culture can be way beyond stupid in many ways, including their hazing by making each other drink dangerous amounts of alcohol, and that the frat boys should be responsible for that. But providing liquor to a minor as a charge? If he's old enough to risk his life running into houses full of terrorists and at the same time decide in a split second who he's going to shoot, the dude is responsible enough to have a beer.

You can't childproof society by turning everyone into a child. And laws aren't the solution to every problem; they're often just a very clumsy feel-good type of false action.

[Colonel Kataffy]

[ QUOTE ]
I have no problem for ringing them up on the charge of selling alcohol to a minor, but this additional charge of selling alcohol to a minor resulting in death seems like bullshit to me.

[/ QUOTE ]

The whole retributive theory of punishment is B.S. anyway. Punish to deter. It out to be dealt out according to expective value of the decision not the actual results. Is a drunk driver who slams into a tree any worse than one who slams into a car killing two. They both had the same state of mind; they both committed the same volitional movements. I say no.

edit: please swap "car killing two" and "tree"

[SL__72]

How about they just make a highschool degree the only qualification. Everyone in college would be legal, everyone in highschool would be underage and less people would drop out of HS!

[JaBlue]

Yes, this guy is dead and only he is truly responsible for it.

Too bad the law doesn't feel that way

[Blarg]

[ QUOTE ]
I'll never understand why you have to be 21 to drink in the U.S.

But that aside - you have to respect the law. There's no getting around it.

[/ QUOTE ]

You didn't use to be. Reality didn't change, just the social trends constructed around it. The use of law not to deal sensibly with the realities at hand, but as a rallying point and crowd pleaser for popular social trends, can make for some silly, unenforceable "feel-good" laws.

[jason_t]

[ QUOTE ]
Making 19 a minor seems pretty stupid to me. You're old enough for the electric chair, to die in overseas wars, to vote -- yet you can't buy a beeer?

[/ QUOTE ]

I've never ban a fan of this sort of argument. Let's not get philosophical and political here, but voting doesn't have grave potential to ruin lives and isn't surrounded by a culture of fun, wreckless, irresponsibile behavior. The very nature of the military and serving overseas forces people to be far more mature and responsibile than they would otherwise be.

[ QUOTE ]
You can't childproof society by turning everyone into a child.

[/ QUOTE ]

This is spot on. It's so sad how purtian based America still is.

[Blarg]

[ QUOTE ]


[/ QUOTE ]
so you never went to a house party underaged in your entire life? never threw a house party which inevitably attracts minors?

[/ QUOTE ]

No, I am an alcoholic virgin. This rant was about accepting "personal responsibility", the dispensers of alcohol to minors can dispense it all they want, but they should do so realizing that there is an outside chance something very bad will happen, in which case they will have to accept personal responsibility. If these kids get away with it, the line gets pushed back, and when do you place blame if say dozens of kids are dying from this? Sometimes people are used to set examples for laws which sucks, but it's a risk they took, and therefore must face personal responsibility.

[/ QUOTE ]

Kids always drank underage, and underage used to be younger than it is now.

I think the main difference is, they used to drink to get drunk, drink while partying, etc. The object wasn't to drink just to drink, even when you drank to get drunk.

When you drink to get drunk, and get drunk, it's mission accomplished, and you only need to drink enough to keep the buzz flying, and may even want to drink as little as possible to keep the buzz going, so you don't get sick later.

But frats do seem to have gotten worse than they were even 20 or 30 years ago when it comes to drinking, and that culture seems to be spreading outside frats. Now there is regular what I guess you could call "power drinking," and drinking contests, where getting drunk strangely enough seems to be almost incidental to the process of drinking, and it's more like a matter of how much you can drink without getting really sick, barfing yourself, passing out, or killing yourself. The goals have totally changed, and the tone of what happens to the participants has changed drastically. Drinking used to be a fun trip, but it's veered over into being some kind of a weird death trip. I guess people in sheltered lives don't get enough danger, so they have to get a false macho going by creating the danger themselves out of thin air. You used to look out for your buddies more, but now you want to see if they sh*t themselves or get brain damage or something.

The control and concern with a decent outcome that even the stupidest guys used to take for granted seems to have been replaced with indifference at best, including people's indifference toward themselves. It's not like frats or young kids have ever been less than stupid, but it used to have a lot happier and much, much safer edge to it. I wouldn't worry too much about kids going to frat parties 20 or 30 years ago, when competitive drinking, including competitive drinking of hard liquor, wasn't so popular. Now, I'd feel nervous about it if I had a kid that age. Having a drunk kid come home isn't so bad, and at least he comes home. Finding out your kid's friends all helped him poison himself is something different.