Comment by sarchertech
1 day ago
Again, if you occasionally caught a glimpse of a playboy, that’s not a significant problem.
If you were regularly smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol, and reading porn magazines at 8 yeas, your parents fell down on the job. An 8 year old doesn’t have the wherewithal to hide that from parents who are paying attention.
> Now, as an adult, I can see more ways I could have gotten it if I wanted it.
Yeah a kid with the mind of an adult could access all kinds of illegal material.
Making it illegal to rob a bank doesn’t mean that’s it’s literally impossible. It’s about stopping enough people from trying that society functions.
The state of the world before the internet was that it was hard to keep a kid from ever glimpsing a titty, but it was relatively easy to keep a kid from having regular access to hard core porn-much, much easier than it is now. My take is that as a society we need to figure out some way to make this easy enough for parents to do that it becomes the default. Just like drugs, alcohol, and porno mags.
Another issue is that online porn and algorithmic brain rot is free (at least enough of it is). With IRL contraband, lack of money is a big limiting factor for kids. The IRL equivalent would be if the local liberal let 8 year olds checkout hard core porn DVDs.
Yeah. Anyway, porn, cigarettes, alcohol, and drugs were very accessible to me despite being a good kid with parents who cared in a world where those were all legally forbidden to me.
All this talk of “glimpses” is you trying to read too deep into a single example.
I’m not using my adult mind to figure out how I could have gotten this stuff as a kid. I’m using my adult mind to recognize that if I had been motivated as a kid, there are additional ways I. as a kid, would have been able to figure out how to get it.
I’m not throwing my hands up in the air and saying this is impossible or that we should just open up access. I’m saying requiring ID for access wasn’t effective before and it won’t be effective in a world with easier access. Yet the cost of that is quite high. Scan these threads for actual ideas, I’m not arguing for any particular one but there are plenty of them and some I think are good.
>Yeah. Anyway, porn, cigarettes, alcohol, and drugs were very accessible to me despite being a good kid with parents who cared in a world where those were all legally forbidden to me.
Were they accessible to you, or do you just think they were accessible to you? How many of these teenagers who would let you try a cigarette would have been willing to keep supplying you cigarettes regularly. How many would have been willing to keep buying you alcohol?
>All this talk of “glimpses” is you trying to read too deep into a single example.
No, it's glimpses, because it's about at the very least semi-regular access, not preventing every single child from having tiny amounts of alcohol. Look at my reply the other poster in this thread. There are dozens of studies that show conclusively that minimum age drinking laws reduce alcohol use among children, and reduce alcoholism later in life.
>I’m saying requiring ID for access wasn’t effective before
But yes it was effective. Read the studies. Minimum age drinking laws have been shown almost universally to be effective. Not at stopping every child from drinking but at harm reduction.
>I’m using my adult mind to recognize that if I had been motivated as a kid, there are additional ways I. as a kid, would have been able to figure out how to get it.
The level an effort an 8 year old would have to go through to get regular access to cigarettes and alcohol in the US, would require an enormous level of motivation which almost no 8 year old has, and it would be outright impossible to do without a semi-observant parent noticing.
That's the whole point of making it hard to do.
It takes much less effort for a kid to walk to the library and check out a hardcore porn DVD than it does for him to convince an 18 year old to buy one for him. Most kids just aren't going to go through the hassle of doing the latter, but they'd do the former in a heartbeat. All things being equal, greater motivation is required to overcome greater obstacles.
I’ve told you that access was not a problem at all. All your questioning is because you can’t grasp my lived reality. You think I’m mistaken, but actually I just don’t care to try to convince you because you’re already so sure.
Disinterest was what really “saved” me from these vices but lacking that, it was my parents. I also had access to perfectly legal things that were bad for me that I actually wanted and it was my parents who helped me there too; no mandatory ID required.
1 reply →
you are writing this as if you were never a kid yourself... there is absolutely nothing I wasn't able to "get" as a kid - some stuff I had to jump through some hoops but end-result would always end up being the same. if I wanted to watch hardcore porn, there was a way, if I wanted to smoke a cigarette, there was a way. if I wanted to drink, there was a way. and make it "forbidden" made it ever more appealing for me to get it as a kid. I grew up in society where alcohol was not a big deal, I was buying alcohol for my parents when I was 6-years old, would get sent to the store to get stuff and among the stuff was always beer and sometimes wine if my parents were expecting some guests. most of my friends growing up never thought of alcohol as something cool, we had easy access to it so it was like a rights of passage or anything like that and it showed, just about no one was doing any drinking while we were teenagers. when I came to america junior year of high school I was stunned at home much effort my schoolmates were making to acquire alcohol - could not really understand what the big deal is until I realized that was because it was forbidden and acquiring beer etc for a friday evening chill made one a cool kid.
the only barrier I have ever had to doing stupid things was the wrath of my parents. the punishment(s) levied when I did stupid shit was always such that I would very seldom-to-never-again consider doing whatever stupid shit I did. it always starts and ends with parents. you can put in whatever "laws" you want (which will always get weaponized politically at some point either immediately or at a later time) but end of the day the buck starts and stops with parents...
1. There is no scientific evidence that the "forbidden fruit" theory is correct. Studies of minimum drinking ages show a near universal reduction in drunk driving deaths, alcoholism, and crime rates.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3018854/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3586293/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4961607/ https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/02/10/you-must-be... https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/underage-drinking/minimum-legal-...
If you care to google it there are dozens of additional studies that all say the same thing.
2. You're writing this as if you don't understand what it's like growing up in a country where 8 year olds don't have easy access to alcohol, cigarettes, and drugs.
And you're writing this as if you don't understand what it's like growing up was a kid growing up in America specifically. My young children and the young children of everyone I now could not regularly drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes without their parents knowing about it. When I was 8 I couldn't have done either regularly without my parents knowing about it.
Again this isn't about stopping every single kid in the world from ever trying alcohol. This is about making it harder for them get and easier for parents to enforce.
>end of the day the buck starts and stops with parents...
That's a completely unrealistic view of the world and it's just flat out wrong on the face of it because every study we have on the subject shows that minimum drink age laws reduce harm--they work. If it were solely up to the parent they wouldn't work.
The easier you make it for parents to do the right thing, the more of them will do it.