You can reduce something without stopping it. I'm not advocating for the policy change that was made. But the evidence suggests it was at least somewhat effective in the goal of reducing teenage accidents in which elevated blood alcohol levels were involved. People can differ on whether that justified the policy change or not.

Can you imagine one case where an 18-21 year old was at a party where people were drinking and they said “I can’t have that beer because I’m underage”.

Yes.

I'm against having the drinking age being above the "adulthood" age, and I KNOW lots of kids violate these laws, but it is absurd to say that every single person violates them given the chance.

Ha ha you framed the question quite stringently. Even I (haven't been to an american-style party) have been in situations where someone refused alcohol because they were <21.

Yes.

Me.

Plus various other, similar situations.

(I am in complete honesty unsure whether to regret it.)

But did you refuse the drink specifically because you where underage or because you didn't want to drink? If that same party had been in country where you where legally allowed to drink would you have drunk then?

It was primarily the former. Had I been in a jurisdiction where it was legal, it seems very possible I would have tried some of the alcoholic drinks—of course I don't know this for sure, because that's not what happened. I didn't have a strong desire for it at the time, so it's not an ideal test case, but neither is it an isolated case; other situations with age-restricted materials or activities went very similarly.

(I'm eliding and slightly distorting a lot of surrounding details both because my memory of the time is often fuzzy and because I don't feel inclined to detail too much of my ancient personal life here. The central points, however, I'm clear on.)

It might be worth adding, to circle back toward the original topic, that while I notice that this isn't “normal” in much of the US (where I live), people around me have wondered whether I got this tendency from somewhere else. (In fact, I had one (non-Japanese) Asian immigrant parent, and while that one was quite chaotic about following the local laws, it's possible that more indirect connections had strong subtle influences.) Some societies are much more regimented and/or conformist, and Japan is frequently described as both (not that I would know what bearing it has on these specific questions). The “natural pattern of rule breaks” is not universal, neither in cultures where it's nearly-expected, nor between cultures.

Do you also never go over the speed limit?

My sense of “honesty” isn’t dictated by the government.

Now whether I obey the law is determined strictly by a risk/rewards calculation

But those are still entirely different.

> My sense of “honesty” isn’t dictated by the government.

> Now whether I obey the law is determined strictly by a risk/rewards calculation

That's the most intellectually dishonest answer I've seen to "I followed the law in a specific scenario".

It’s not intellectually dishonest. Speeding is against the law. Do you speed?

Have you ever downloaded a movie off of bit torrent?

Do you think that Black people should have moved to the back of the bus in the 60s because it was the law?

There were laws on the books in many southern states until recently making homosexual sex a sin. Should that law have been followed?

There were laws against interracial marriage until the 60s and Utah is just now debating whether a law against premarital sex should be taken off the books.

Sorry, the phrase risk/rewards was a trigger. I know acquaintances that drive in the carpool lane because they can afford to pay the fine if caught, and brag about it. You seemed to fall in that camp (vs thinking about higher level, heavily debated laws like the ones about homosexuality), but clearly that wasn't the case!

You never answered the question - do you ever go over the speed limit?

Would you speed if the penalty was $1000 a mile over?

What’s the moral difference?

And in either case there shouldn’t be anymore of “a debate” about how two grown people decide to have sex and who they should marry than whether a grown person should be allowed to drink.

That 18 year old college student who the government doesn’t deem to be mature enough to drink is mature enough to vote, fight in the military, sign for a student loan that can potentially put them in 10s of thousands worth of debt, etc.

No, I never ever go over the speed limit (except for the minor single digit breaches that happen when I'm not in cruise mode, etc.). But that's kind of a stupid question to ask, it's a super straightforward decision (at least for me) to follow the law when driving.

Currently, I don't drive, so I have no empirical answer.

Some people who know me have joked that I would hate learning to drive (here in the US) because of the issue where most drivers break the speed limit most of the time and expect others to do the same. I think I could get used to it or find a way to deal with it, but it's possible it would stress me out for a while at the beginning.

As I sorta-mentioned, I'm not sure my original level of tendency to follow the rules is actually adaptive here. The point was more the existence proof. And between cultures it may vary even more widely than this.

If you or your parents grew up as anything other than a straight White Christian in the southern US, you would understand why I don't necessarily hold an unquestioned respect for the law or the justice system....

Please don't do this.

You've gone from “implying that an attitude is out of the acceptable/plausible range” to “implying that the visible counterexample doesn't understand why anyone else might hold a different one” in the span of three posts.

I can imagine several reasons why this might be a hot-button topic for you, especially given what you've just said, but I am not putting my nature up for attack here. If you expect me to have a generalized disregard for or incomprehension of people who don't share my tendencies, I don't think it's true, though I don't expect you to believe me. If you feel like my attitude or existence is a shock or an affront, I'm sorry. If you resent feeling stuck with the institutions that surround you because they're not serving you well, I'm sorry. I would ask that you not extrapolate my personal attitudes about alcohol and speed limits to assuming that I follow social institutions “unquestioningly”, if that's what you were doing, and especially that you not extrapolate it to much wider and deeper issues.

This will be my last comment on this topic.

Two sub threads going on at once here.

That was more aimed at the statement (that you didn’t make)

That's the most intellectually dishonest answer I've seen to "I followed the law in a specific scenario".

My apologies. I attributed that statement to you.

There's a beer row in some vending machines on public streets in Japan. It seemed that the only enforcement on age limits was a sign that said not to buy beer if you were underage. I took it as an example of the enormous cultural differences between America and Japan.

Totally happens yes. In my Japanese university club, the rule at drinking party was: minors can drink if they want but others should not incite them to drink if they don’t want to.

Yes, I have seen people refuse because they were underage. But on the other hand those were people who I could not ever imagine driving drunk.

Yeah it's dumb, but to be fair this is something where we get to have our cake and eat it too. The moralizers / religious / people fairly concerned about drunk driving get to feel good and maybe have a positive effect, and everyone that is 18-21 still gets ready access to alcohol at school where the need to drive is substantially reduced. Whenever I wanted to get alcohol at school, I could easily get it and the situation was the same with all of the friends I knew at other universities. If you don't go to school you get access through work friends.