US Politics Mega-thread - Page 1969

On December 22 2019 09:16 Lord Tolkien wrote:
The general argument would be that addiction has differing effects on adolescent/developing brains which makes them more vulnerable to addiction. There's a decent field of study on addiction and differences between adults and adolescents.

It's less about "I can choose/can make independent decisions to smoke/drink alcohol" as opposed to "I am still developmentally more vulnerable to addiction, and it can cause [greater] health problems down the line". Both can be accepted. It's still an arbitrary line, but I see no problem with having a higher age limit for potentially addictive substances.

On December 22 2019 09:56 Wombat_NI wrote:

I think it’s pretty overstated tbh and predicated on ideas that youngsters are significantly more vulnerable to peer pressure and cultural advertising than ‘adults’ are.

They are, to a degree. Adults are much less immune to such pressures than they’d like to believe though

On December 22 2019 09:30 GreenHorizons wrote:
It's hard for me to comprehend the reasoning that leads to thinking the risk of nicotine addiction is remotely in the same ballpark as damaging as being compelled by poverty into taking orders from the US military but I can accept that people believe it.

On December 22 2019 11:25 Lord Tolkien wrote:

It's not about peer pressure or advertising. It's about physiological addiction (and susceptibility to) and the impact it has on brain development and the development of related mental disorders. Of course such pressures towards addiction exist for all ages, but that's not what I'm focusing on, only the medical aspect of it. Being older doesn't make you immune to addiction, but it does reduce the long-term health effects of it, at least developmentally. That's the (medical) case for controlled substances in general.




I appreciate the condescending attitude and hyperbole, but it's again a separate issue. One's medical, the other's socio-economic. I agree that it's borked that the present economic system incentivizes such a pipeline for low-income enlisted who MOS into infantry, but that's not relevant as to whether or not we should be discouraging substance abuse, particularly at a younger age brackets. There's a degree to which we say that we are allowed to put whatever we want into our bodies (which I suppose I hesitantly agree with in the spirit of liberalism), but if it were a case of people eating, say, arsenic or tide pods, we'd be doing our best to discourage it, because ultimately it's bad both for society as a broader whole and for those individuals in question. Just because they're younger doesn't necessarily make it more outrageous that we're clamping down on it. Not trying to be paternalistic about it, but yes. There is a better case to be made for addressing the issues leading to addiction (social, economic, academic strains) that lead to addiction as an outlet and a source of dopamine hits, but that is not limited by restricting access to addictive substances.

On your other point, the fact of the matter is that military service often opens up a great many doors than it would for them otherwise, and while there are certainly risks involved, many different occupations can and will involve similar risk. It's not as if there's a similar narrative out there championing for a raise in the minimum age due to safety in the fishing or logging industry, for instance. And those industries are limited to 18 years of age for work as well. It seems the current social convention for potentially hazardous work is 18. To point out the military exclusively is somewhat disingenuous, as again, not everyone who enlists will fight or be deployed into high intensity combat areas. And to the point I was making earlier, it's actually less likely to happen as technology develops that their lives are put into direct risk. Future war may just look like drone swarms shooting at drone swarms, missiles targeting missiles, precision strikes against key installations, and complex cyber-attack networks trying to shut down Command and Control.

On December 22 2019 11:25 Lord Tolkien wrote:

It's not about peer pressure or advertising. It's about physiological addiction (and susceptibility to) and the impact it has on brain development and the development of related mental disorders. Of course such pressures towards addiction exist for all ages, but that's not what I'm focusing on, only the medical aspect of it. Being older doesn't make you immune to addiction, but it does reduce the long-term health effects of it, at least developmentally. That's the (medical) case for controlled substances in general.




I appreciate the condescending attitude and hyperbole, but it's again a separate issue. One's medical, the other's socio-economic. I agree that it's borked that the present economic system incentivizes such a pipeline for low-income enlisted who MOS into infantry, but that's not relevant as to whether or not we should be discouraging substance abuse, particularly at a younger age brackets. There's a degree to which we say that we are allowed to put whatever we want into our bodies (which I suppose I hesitantly agree with in the spirit of liberalism), but if it were a case of people eating, say, arsenic or tide pods, we'd be doing our best to discourage it, because ultimately it's bad both for society as a broader whole and for those individuals in question. Just because they're younger doesn't necessarily make it more outrageous that we're clamping down on it. Not trying to be paternalistic about it, but yes. There is a better case to be made for addressing the issues leading to addiction (social, economic, academic strains) that lead to addiction as an outlet and a source of dopamine hits, but that is not limited by restricting access to addictive substances.

On your other point, the fact of the matter is that military service often opens up a great many doors than it would for them otherwise, and while there are certainly risks involved, many different occupations can and will involve similar risk. It's not as if there's a similar narrative out there championing for a raise in the minimum age due to safety in the fishing or logging industry, for instance. And those industries are limited to 18 years of age for work as well. It seems the current social convention for potentially hazardous work is 18. To point out the military exclusively is somewhat disingenuous, as again, not everyone who enlists will fight or be deployed into high intensity combat areas. And to the point I was making earlier, it's actually less likely to happen as technology develops that their lives are put into direct risk. Future war may just look like drone swarms shooting at drone swarms, missiles targeting missiles, precision strikes against key installations, and complex cyber-attack networks trying to shut down Command and Control.

There's a degree to which we say that we are allowed to put whatever we want into our bodies (which I suppose I hesitantly agree with in the spirit of liberalism), but if it were a case of people eating, say, arsenic or tide pods, we'd be doing our best to discourage it, because ultimately it's bad both for society as a broader whole and for those individuals in question. Just because they're younger doesn't necessarily make it more outrageous that we're clamping down on it. Not trying to be paternalistic about it, but yes.

There is a better case to be made for addressing the issues leading to addiction (social, economic, academic strains) that lead to addiction

On December 22 2019 07:52 Lord Tolkien wrote:

I'm not saying that there are not issues with raising the legal age, depending on how enforcement practices pan out, but to frame it as an issue of youth rights is somewhat disingenuous. There are worse things that are happening that affect youth's "rights and future" much more urgently, climate change the most obvious one. I'm personally not yet convinced that consistent use of nicotine won't have long-lasting effects on a person's body, but the science isn't there yet given how novel the e-cig industry is.


On the military age, it's a tangent that's more complicated than you make it out to be, and it thus detracted from the issue you're raising, namely vaping age. If we want to discuss that fully, however:

1) Primary education ends at 18, and the general cultural expectation in the West (or specifically the US) is that you either go to college or you start working a job at 18. It's how economy now works.

2) Medically, we can now say that the frontal lobe (that regulates empathy, self-reflection, judgement, etc.) is fully developed by around 25. There's strong evidence that addiction formed during early/late adolescence has long-lasting effects on a person physiologically.

With the military, it's a career track/profession; for low-income communities, the military is often one of the best options for upwards mobility in this country (given how poor social mobility is in the US in particular), so moving it up to age 21 or 25 basically means people are denied a career track and opportunities between 18-25. On the other hand, cigarette/alcohol/drug use would generally fall under medical direction for what should or shouldn't be done (or morality laws in general).


That's not to say that you're wrong; early military recruitment still problematic, because the military is still hierarchical: the difference in opportunities between enlisted and officers (or MOS) are still present in terms of advancement, and also there's the issue of how we reintegrate veterans back into civilian life (which is often still poorly). Etc. But that's generally why we don't talk about raising the recruitment age.

With technological development and the current trajectory of military technology, however, warfare may shift away from a need for young, "unskilled" soldiers to ones seeking "older", higher skill recruits anyways. Managing a drone swarm or plotting ballistic missile defense is increasingly a higher demand skill. Alternately, this could mean that it becomes more of a career, with the military looking for longer contracts in order to maintain such expertise, which does include a greater demand for ROTC and thus university training for the military, etc. Basically, it can start to self-select for "older" recruits.

Outside of current operations in Afghanistan which require "boots on the ground", most of the fighting we'd actually do in a hot war in the future will probably require less grunt work, or the need to "hold a rocket launcher" as it were. Our geostrategic competitors in a hypothetical war would be China and Russia, and such a conflict will largely be carried out in cyberspace, aerospace, and on the seas. Other areas of concern would be North Korea (in the event of regime instability/collapse), and Iran (much lower probability).




Heroin should remain a controlled substance, but nothing; as should all (highly addictive) substances. Honestly, I think nicotine should fall under that category, but hey.


How we address drug addiction does need to change, however, and that's where the issue in US drug policy lies: criminalization instead of medical rehabilitation. There are some signs of change in that area, but it's not happening fast enough, and drug policy in the US is tied with the wider issues with the folding of welfare and the social safety net into the incarceration system.

On December 22 2019 16:44 GreenHorizons wrote:


I disagree. I think it's a immoral position wrapped in paternalism and I don't think your argument refutes that.

Specifically:


The moral position is not allowing people to join the military until they at least meet one's requirement for brain development to smoke a cigarette. Not letting/encouraging them join as a career opportunity.


Yes. This is my point. Laws banning cigarettes for teens are silly and practically unenforced (unless you look like Eric Garner) as others have pointed out. What matters is why people are drawn to military service or nicotine or the heroin people wanted to sell a few pages ago.

The very same socioeconomic conditions that promote substance abuse lead to the military as an escape hatch only for countless of them to come back with PTSD, lost limbs and mobility, TBI's, poisoned with radiation or chemical weapons, etc... Perhaps that sounds hyperbolic but I know too many people that thought they were advancing their lives joining the military only to come back totally fucked up physically and mentally, way worse than from the cigarettes they smoked the whole time.

To put it simply joining the US military can easily lead to any of the consequences of nicotine, except also puts one at risk of a LOT more. The paternalism that leads to thinking raising the smoking age is more reasonable than raising the military age grosses me out.

EDIT (like the 4th tbh but only like 5 people read the original): I realized you may or may not be familiar with my general positions on this stuff so it's less immediately apparent that I'm pointing out the socioeconomic conditions that lead people to taking morally, physically, and psychologically damaging work/substances is what we need to address and not through stupid laws like raising the smoking age. Originally, pointing to how it is emblematic of the active political disdain and disregard for the fact we're not going to leave future generations a habitable planet while also placing these paternal restrictions on their coping mechanisms for that bleak future/their lives

On December 23 2019 07:31 IgnE wrote:


The moral position on whether to let people join the army at 18 or at 25 is subordinate to your moral position on the existence of the army. If you think the army is necessary or even virtuous then it makes sense to let 18 year olds join. If you think the army should be dismantled then it makes sense to prevent young people from joining. So the issue is kind of moot I think.

Whether we should prevent people from drinking or smoking is much more an issue of private vice (insofar as anything can be private).

On December 23 2019 07:23 IgnE wrote:


What is your best guess for why long term nicotine usage is so bad?

There is an increased risk of cardiovascular, respiratory, gastrointestinal disorders. There is decreased immune response and it also poses ill impacts on the reproductive health. It affects the cell proliferation, oxidative stress, apoptosis, DNA mutation by various mechanisms which leads to cancer. It also affects the tumor proliferation and metastasis and causes resistance to chemo and radio therapeutic agents.

On December 22 2019 16:44 GreenHorizons wrote:


I disagree. I think it's a immoral position wrapped in paternalism and I don't think your argument refutes that.

Specifically:


The moral position is not allowing people to join the military until they at least meet one's requirement for brain development to smoke a cigarette. Not letting/encouraging them join as a career opportunity.


Yes. This is my point. Laws banning cigarettes for teens are silly and practically unenforced (unless you look like Eric Garner) as others have pointed out. What matters is why people are drawn to military service or nicotine or the heroin people wanted to sell a few pages ago.

The very same socioeconomic conditions that promote substance abuse lead to the military as an escape hatch only for countless of them to come back with PTSD, lost limbs and mobility, TBI's, poisoned with radiation or chemical weapons, etc... Perhaps that sounds hyperbolic but I know too many people that thought they were advancing their lives joining the military only to come back totally fucked up physically and mentally, way worse than from the cigarettes they smoked the whole time.

To put it simply joining the US military can easily lead to any of the consequences of nicotine, except also puts one at risk of a LOT more. The paternalism that leads to thinking raising the smoking age is more reasonable than raising the military age grosses me out.

EDIT (like the 4th tbh but only like 5 people read the original): I realized you may or may not be familiar with my general positions on this stuff so it's less immediately apparent that I'm pointing out the socioeconomic conditions that lead people to taking morally, physically, and psychologically damaging work/substances is what we need to address and not through stupid laws like raising the smoking age. Originally, pointing to how it is emblematic of the active political disdain and disregard for the fact we're not going to leave future generations a habitable planet while also placing these paternal restrictions on their coping mechanisms for that bleak future/their lives

On December 23 2019 16:40 Lord Tolkien wrote:

Beyond the addiction proper that becomes very hard to break (last set of stats I checked, 70% of smokers want to break the habit, but only 3% do every year), there's a fairly large array of studies examining the health effects of nicotine. Of which are fairly well-documented.

Here's a paper that does a fairly good job summarizing the effects:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4363846/

tl;dr from the abstract:


At present, studies on e-cigarettes are still ongoing; it's too new for there to be definitive studies on it made for long-term health risks. Better than tobacco perhaps (assuming no popcorn lung happens because of defective product), but as juuling still involves the consumption of nicotine it probably still leads to the above-mentioned health risks, which at an individual level harms long-term quality of life and certainly strains our healthcare system further. We don't want to end up like Russia, where rampant smoking and alcoholism primarily (and other heath conditions like HIV/AIDs and tuberculosis) are sharply driving a public health crisis, which has basically led to a long-standing demographic crisis (when coupled with consistent migration outflows), with male life expectancy of roughly a decade shorter than female life expectancy. While female life expectancy is generally expected to be higher than male, for there to be a difference that large, it's a fairly significant sign of either a total war occurring, or that alcohol and tobacco use is rampant.


I'm mostly baffled right now, tbh. It took decades of anti-smoking lobbying to finally curtail and beat back the tobacco lobby on the basis of the health risk, even with how much money the tobacco lobbies in particularly the US held firm and dominated politics. I find the notion that it should be fine for kids to be directly advertised by e-cig companies pretty much a dark reflection of that, and yet it somehow is a major deal.

My personal opinion is that a raise of the age limit to 21 is mostly vacuous, but it's still better than nothing.

Reminds me of this pithy video, honestly.
+ Show Spoiler +


I don't think you realize that we mostly agree, except on the logical fallacy that equates raising the age for e-cigarettes to requiring a raise in military recruitment. The point I would again refer to is that at present, the military age of recruitment is largely consistent with what are similarly dangerous jobs, which we as a society have placed at 18. Singling out army enlistment, in this context, is logically inconsistent and really has no bearing as to how we regulate personal vices (in as much as those affect broader public health).

As much as I understand and agree with your point, in that similar pressures drive people to enlist, such systemic inequities don't disappear overnight even with major social revolutions. In no case in modern history has there been any successful revolution that has been able to address such inequities, no matter how much they profess egalitarianism.

Raising the recruitment age, in this context, is going to hurt the same people you're trying to help. I'm not saying it's all well and good that they come back injured, maimed or dead. However, if/when you address those very conditions, and people are not driven into the military due to lack of other opportunities, there will be less 18 year olds driven to enlist. The natural age of recruits will rise, and organizational incentives for servicemen retention will increase. Without addressing those factors (and that will take decades or more), you're mostly just cutting them off from their only real opportunity for upwards mobility here. My dad was a poor country bumpkin back in China, and was one of the lucky few to attend university and later medical school, through the PLA (at a time when university acceptance rates were a dismal ~3-5% nationwide because Mao and the Cultural Revolution).

Meanwhile, a rise in e-cigarette age limit does functionally nothing, except maybe raising awareness of it as an issue for parents. It's a false equivalence that results in wildly divergent policy outcomes. Assuming that e-cigarettes fall under current laws that govern underage cigarette possession, every state has different laws, but they typically consist of community service, fine, or a cessation of tobacco use. It's not the 80s response to the death of Len Bias and the crack cocaine "epidemic" here. Especially given how very fucking targeted all the Juul ads and products are towards youth as their future market which, again, do nothing but remind me of Big Tobacco back before the late 90s.

On December 24 2019 02:25 Ryzel wrote:
Bit of a subject change...

https://www.politico.com/news/2019/12/23/trump-campaign-compete-against-groups-money-089454

Article about how there have been many groups claiming to be affiliated with or supporting the Trump campaign and soliciting donations/selling Trump merchandise, but use only a tiny percentage if at all of the proceeds for pro-Trump purposes. Obviously the wealthy donors don’t fall for it, but over the past few years these groups have raised at least $46 million, mostly from donations under $200.

Some random thoughts about this...

1) It’s like con-ception. Con-artists are pretending to be affiliated with a con-artist to con his cons.

2) I wonder if this type of strategy would actually be an effective way to undermine support and financial backing from the Republican Party if the majority of their voting base are confused elderly that fall for shit like this. Like if one of these groups is run by someone that donates to the Democratic Party.

3) If a con-man cons people and it results in Trump getting less support, and Trump is the least ethical choice of Presidents, is the act of conning ethical?

On December 24 2019 02:25 Ryzel wrote:
Bit of a subject change...

https://www.politico.com/news/2019/12/23/trump-campaign-compete-against-groups-money-089454

Article about how there have been many groups claiming to be affiliated with or supporting the Trump campaign and soliciting donations/selling Trump merchandise, but use only a tiny percentage if at all of the proceeds for pro-Trump purposes. Obviously the wealthy donors don’t fall for it, but over the past few years these groups have raised at least $46 million, mostly from donations under $200.

Some random thoughts about this...

1) It’s like con-ception. Con-artists are pretending to be affiliated with a con-artist to con his cons.

2) I wonder if this type of strategy would actually be an effective way to undermine support and financial backing from the Republican Party if the majority of their voting base are confused elderly that fall for shit like this. Like if one of these groups is run by someone that donates to the Democratic Party.

3) If a con-man cons people and it results in Trump getting less support, and Trump is the least ethical choice of Presidents, is the act of conning ethical?