Moral busybodies and the law
OTR Ale Festival
Originally uploaded by dynamist.
Antoine and I wandered up to the Over-the-Rhine Ale Festival at Findlay Market today, where he very much enjoyed the new Christian Moerlein OTR Ale (and I cooled off with a Diet Pepsi). I believe that the area there used to be Cincinnati’s Brewery District. We read a sign outside about how the area was where all the bars, brothels, and gambling houses were. Antoine and I were sad to see how all that fun has been driven out of the area…even though we’re not really the target market for all that stuff.
I was reminded of this as I read Perry de Havilland’s very wise words on the topic of a British group called Alcohol Concern. They are moral busybodies and should not be indulged or taken seriously. As Perry writes:
If ‘Alcohol Concern’ want to convince people that they should not allow their children to drink (which is bullshit, I might add, as I suspect that encourages alcohol abuse in later life), well fine, let them take out adverts and evangelise their views like civilised members of civil society. However when they want the violence of law to impose their views, they should be regarded as anti-social thugs calling for the destruction of yet more civil society. Such people want to see society replaced with ever more politically derived formulae for personal behaviour. And of course such nonsense is unenforceable other than by family members denouncing each other a la the Communist model, which no doubt is what a group like Alcohol Concern would like to see happen … which is literally anti-social.
Perry also encapsulates perfectly the attitude of people who wish to make laws for and against certain actions:
They do not care about making an argument and convincing people to act a certain way, they want prison and truncheons to make people tow their particular highly debatable line.
Which is precisely why I object to most laws that far too many people think of as wonderful things, such as those outlawing the use of plastic bags, banning smoking, barring drug use, and making prostitution illegal. Moral busybodies exist in all persuasions, and those who wield the law as their dagger are more objectionable to me than whatever behavior it is they are trying to beat out of people.
Filed under: Life
We are going back in time, that’s what I am saying. On Saturday I gave £1 to a arthritis charity and the man asked “do you want a sticker?” I said, 2why not” and expected him to stick it on my t-shirt, where you would usually stick it, just below the shoulder. But no, he said, he can’t do that anymore because if he did it would classify as an assault and he could get into trouble for it. I was lost for words.
Just a minor point - prostitution is not illegal in the UK.
Soliciting (advertising) your …er… wares ina public place is illegal.
I know, Mike…and I didn’t say anything about it being illegal in the UK. But there are certainly large numbers of people who wish that it was.
Want to turn kids into alcoholics? Simple! Just fetishize alcohol.
I was offered “tastes” of whatever my dad was drinking from an early age. Consequently, I had no interest in drinking. At 15 or 16, I decided I wanted to know what it was like to get drunk, I actually did it when I was at a wedding with my parents because I knew if something bad happened, my dad would be there to drive me home. Well, I threw down (don’t laugh) vodka and Tabs, and got pretty smashed, and my dad laughed at me when I threw up on the car ride home: “Bet you’re not going to do that again!”
How did that work out for me?
Let’s just say I’m the only person I know who didn’t get drunk once during college. Alcohol was no big deal to me, and it was a number of years after my big highway-side hurl before I was interested in drinking it again. These days, I’ll have a glass of wine, maybe a glass and a half.