And honestly I question the whole "Where did the temperance movement go?" framing as being extremely short-term thinking Yeah we saw an overall backlash after the disaster of Prohibition Drinking is still on a massive downturn historically speaking
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You wanna compare how much we drink now to the 19th century, or the 18th century, or medieval times It isn't even *close* man
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Yeah we still have booze at after hours events held by many companies and a lot of pressure to participate in drinking at social events and parties and it's a legit problem But the Mad Men days of drinking during the workday at lunch meetings have vanished
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The article says that post-Prohibition the brewing industry started using soldiers in ads for beer to give you the idea that drinking was part of the patriotic warfighting lifestyle Okay but it wasn't just the commercials They straight up *gave you alcohol* in the military
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The Army used to *give you beer* as part of the meals they issued to you In WWII it was actually law that 15% of the output of the US brewing industry be set aside for the troops, it was seen as a necessity
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The discontinuation of issuing beer and cigarettes during Vietnam was a big deal and made headline news about the shifting tides of military culture "Black Tot Day" (Jul. 31, 1970) is commemorated in the UK as the last day of the daily grog ration in the Navy
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The temperance movement spent much of the 20th century *winning*, despite the big setback of Prohibition - indeed, the fact that Prohibition happened at all despite how central drinking is to our culture should really be seen as evidence of how powerful they were
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And I keep bringing up how this goes back for me to reading Ben Franklin's autobiography and him sneering at how stupid and wasteful the working class was for drinking "If I were them I would simply *not* drink, and both be healthier and save money"
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Drinking is obviously everywhere and was everywhere *for most of the history of the human race* because it meets some kind of need And the fact that "temperance" has gotten as far as it has may be evidence that need is fading or being channeled into other directions
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Which is good! Celebrate that victory all you like But don't turn around and try to argue that we used to be a generally non-drinking society and then Big Booze forcibly addicted us with the power of modern capitalism and advertising That makes no sense
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I also gotta say I don't love the attribution of a bad shift in society to AA and 12-step programs "turning drinking from a moral issue into a medical one" and thus made drinking more permissible Because that's just not true
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AA isn't a medical approach to alcoholism It's moral as fuck It was intentionally designed to be a Christian approach to drinking (confession, repentance, penance) only without the specifically religious language
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But it still is extremely religious The first three steps require you to admit you have no power over your own life and give yourself totally to a higher power and submit to said higher power utterly Come on
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AA absolutely does not treat addiction as a purely medical, non-moral problem Almost nobody does, it's a strawman, but AA especially doesn't If they treated alcoholism like cancer they wouldn't have you make a big list of people you owe amends to because your cancer hurt them
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I'm not saying they should treat alcoholism like cancer I'm saying this article is arguing against something that doesn't exist Being a "drunk" or an "alcoholic" absolutely is still socially stigmatized and AA absolutely is about stigmatizing and judging
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"But AA puts all the moral burden on the alcoholic for being a particularly bad kind of person rather than generally condemning everyone who buys or sells or consumes alcohol at all" Yeah cause they'd just tried that and it was one of the greatest disasters in history
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How do you just skip over that "Other than that, how did you enjoy the play Mrs Lincoln"
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It's not like AA was some attempt by anti-Prohibitionists to dig Prohibition's grave It WAS a temperance movement, in strategic retreat, carrying on temperance by other means. This is also obvious if you've ever been to a meeting - it absolutely does view alcohol as "evil"
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"If I were in charge I would simply take a top down approach and ban the thing entirely, or at least openly tell everyone it was evil and would damn their soul Why has nobody thought of this" God I hate this kind of take so much
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They've been trying to do that for hundreds of years and every time they do there's a huge backlash and it fails Shakespeare fucking wrote about it, Toby Belch yelling at Malvolio the Puritan "Thinks thou because thou art sad (sober) there will be no more cakes and ale?"
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Eddie Izzard's joke about how in the UK Thanksgiving is celebrated as "We got rid of the Jesus people"
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Come on We're *in* a temperance movement, right now, still The AA bottom-up model of imposed temperance actually has worked, it's created a new social norm of "You're a piece of shit if you offer alcohol to someone defined as 'in recovery'" That never used to exist
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"What if we treated alcohol more like cigarettes" We're doing that! Liquor licenses are exorbitantly expensive, both federal and state governments charge an excise tax on alcohol, and the number of places you can't have an open container increases every day
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(150 years ago if you told a soldier that not only would he not get beer with dinner at all but he *wouldn't be allowed to drink in on-base facilities at all* his head would explode)
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The shit about "It's wine o'clock!" and "wine moms" etc is all backlash to a cultural/legal trend that's all going in one direction long term, and it's a pretty weak backlash Count your blessings
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(And really, don't take credit It's much more likely the legal changes are succeeding because people actually don't want to drink as much than that scolding people and making them feel bad is finally working)
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