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See, a print ad is kind of like a video, only it doesn't move. |
I have a number of quibbles with this video. First, not to debate semantics, but those aren't actually "excuses" so much as "tactics to avoid detection," but nice try with the English. Second, who the fuck thinks wearing a hat or not has any effect on their driving proficiency or level of conspicuousness? Third, doesn't that guy with the hat and Jew-'fro look like a young Adam Sandler? Weird.
Before any of you jump to the wrong assumption, I am not some sort of anti-authority anarchist, nor one of those people whose playlist endlessly loops "Cop Killer," "Fuck tha Police," "Killing in the Name of," and similar odes to angry stereotyping. I don't rage against the authority the police represent, though I am wary of any ordinary, average human being empowered disproportionately. And, don't mistake me, I am not advocating drunk driving at all. As a matter of fact, I have even discouraged it in an article extolling alcohol. But I am opposing campaigns based largely on fear, exaggeration, and lies. Are more cops going to be on the roads in the weeks before Labor Day to build a subconscious public paranoia that may possibly slightly reduce the number of intoxicated drivers on said holiday? Yes, if only because it's easier to hit quotas and make up municipal budget cuts with fines. Is there some federal directive mandating a stealth operation coordinating every law-enforcement agency nationwide to catch any and every borderline-inebriated driver, as their media blitz suggests? Of course not.
You see, because I paid attention in government and civics class, I know the USA is not a unitary democracy, where all power flows from the top (federal government) on down to the local level like the droid control ship in The Phantom Menace. In Great Britain, for instance, all of the police forces, from the quaint, stick-wielding county constabulary to London's badass Mossad-like metro cops, draw their authority directly from and indeed exist at the whim of the central government. Thus, if Queen Elizabeth decides it is now criminal to spread compromising photos of the Second String King, Prince Wanker Fratboy, no one further down the chain of command is in the position to argue. Or something like that. Parliament might be involved.
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Obviously, Her Majesty made no such decree: that's the front page of their #1 national newspaper. |
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For starters, none of you look remotely like this. |
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He only operates in Detroit. |
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"Yeah, I can't find any precedence for 'spider-senses tingling' in this state . . ." |
While we're on the subject, let's dissect those ads that unilaterally declare "Buzzed Driving is Drunk Driving." Well, not to nitpick or naysay, but no, it's actually not, that's why we coined another term to describe it. When the law decided to legally define what drunk means, it had to lay out specific terms that are verifiable for enforcement. In all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Guam (as the NHTSA proudly proclaims, like some pompous, know-it-all dick telling you how many chapters his fraternity has), that means you can be charged with driving under the influence/operating while intoxicated if your blood-alcohol content is .08 or above. So, it stands to reason, if your BAC is lower than that, you are not technically drunk, in the strict legal sense, just "buzzed." Win.
But by now I am used to this sort of fudged thinking being used for the purposes of intimidation and furthering a narrow social agenda. As someone who has gone through the process of being "rehabilitated" for an "illness" I didn't have, I can vouch for the levels of bullshit they attempt to get away with. Aside from mandating treatment for alcoholism based on one incident in the first place, the methods of said treatment are laughably transparent. Among other things, they tried to simultaneously claim that alcoholism is nothing short of a hell-sent scourge, a civilization-threatening epidemic worse than porn, and that less than 50% of "people" drink at all, ever. As they showed us the widespread, multifarious live-destroying effects of booze with shocking statistics, they also told us that in fact most American citizens don't ever touch a drop.
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Pictured: The majority of American drinkers (and, presumably, my whole social circle). |
Well, sorry, you can't have it both ways. If a catastrophic wave of drinking is the first sign of the Apocalypse, you can't also tell me almost nobody but me is doing it. For the love of Bacchus, god of spirits, probably 80% of the adults I know drink. Maybe not daily or even weekly, but they aren't teetotaling boors either, and what are the odds I just happen to know so many exceptions to the rule? Sure enough, when I called out the instructor on these statistics, asking where she got them, who collected the data and how, and even what definitions they used to describe "people," I was met with flustered, indignant, and meaningless responses. My treatment/indoctrination center could not provide a single parameter, specific, or source for the studies.
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"Raise your hand if you've never drank alcohol! All right, that's our focus group done, case closed." |
It is something I have come to expect in this nation, where drinking is starting to be demonized as a crime in and of itself, a shameful vice that needs to be weeded from our society, despite society arising from alcohol production, as I have pointed out before. Remember how well that Prohibition thing worked out? It has reached the rather ludicrous point where a CNN contributor asked whether it is acceptable, ever, to give a minor even a sip of alcohol, including in her article this quote:
"If parents have a liberal idea about alcohol, kids may get the wrong message," says Dr. Vivian Faden, director of the Office of Science Policy and Communications at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism at the National Institutes of Health. "Underage drinking can lead to injuries, fatal car accidents, risky sexual behavior, and there's also potential risk to the developing brain."
As opposed to the day you turn 21, when magically all of these negative side-effects vanish, as proven by the perceived necessity of the scare campaign I outlined at the start of this post. Remember when your negligent parents let you taste their $9.00 table red and you became a hopeless, lifelong addict? Of course you don't, you braindead degenerate drunkie. That's because even minute amounts of alcohol introduced to your delicate physiology before majority, an arbitrary legal definition, target your brain like neuron-seeking missiles, turning you into a maladjusted booze monster by age 20.
Or so some would have us believe, despite the fact human beings have been drinking for thousands of years, and up until a few centuries ago, most did so on a daily basis from childhood onward. These are the same people who wrote the health questionnaire I had to fill out at one of my doctors' offices. It asked which best described my alcohol consumption:
Pornography, tanning, shopping, and even gaming are all potential fixations requiring professional diagnosis and therapy under these guidelines. And why not? It lets impulsive fuckwits write off their self-destructive behavior, maybe getting some pills or pity in the bargain, while the placebo-pushers line their pockets with extra green for supplying treatment. Just to be clear, these are the definitions that will be officially accepted by the government and your medical insurance provider, and we all know how accommodating they are. Can you see how this brand of grade-A anal leakage might make me sociopathically distressed? At what point does someone raise their hand and say, "Um, wait, what? Are you sure the problem isn't how we define 'the problem' here?" Wake up, America, before someone tells you that you need prescription medication to do so.
KP, out.
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Because you can never have "just one," kids. |
(1) Never drink.I am not even kidding, that is what it said. Seriously. Judge much? And this was a hand-specialist's office. I felt a strange tingling in one of my fingers right then, specifically the middle one. All personal umbrage aside, this sort of blanket generalization is offensive to common sense and simple truth. When your redefinition of something is so out of whack with reality, it is an affront to intelligent thought. In yet another article (this one has a nice, dumbed-down video, too), CNN's Alina Cho pointed out how the latest revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders - the standard psychiatric handbook for what kinds of crazy people are - is changing what "addiction" means, broadening its scope to the point that 40% of college students could be classified as alcoholics and as much as 60% of the population suffers from some form of abusive indulgence and/or dependence.
(2) Drink on special occasions.
(3) History of alcohol abuse in my family.
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Would an alcoholic waste all that perfectly good rum? |
KP, out.