Australia Has Fallen (Part Deux)

Australia' broadstroke social media ban for people under 16 that was passed last year is set to fully go into effect just days from now on December 10th.  That makes Australia the strictest country in the world in that regard (though a few other countries are moving towards something similar).  And Big Tech said they will comply with it.  Much like how Big Tobacco and Big Vape ultimately cynically supported the 21 smoking/vaping age here.

We at Twenty-One Debunked have already discussed why we oppose such a ban:  it is overbroad, throws the proverbial baby out with the bathwater, the mandatory age verification would create a privacy and cybersecurity nightmare for all ages, violates free speech, and last but not least, blatantly violates youth rights.  And on balance, we believe it does far more harm than good.

Yes, we are well aware that social media does have a dark side, for all ages, and that it needs much better guardrails.  But this age ban is both over- and under-inclusive, and thus utterly fails to accomplish the stated objectives.  Rather, we believe that (as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) advocates), comprehensive data privacy legislation for all ages, that would ban the practice of surveillance advertising, would be a far better idea to do before anything else.  Then improve the safety features of these platforms, and if we still want something more age-specific, perhaps have something like New York's SAFE For Kids Act and the New York Child Data Protection Act.  In fact, New York even has a bill that has yet to become law, the SAFE For All Act, which would go a LONG way to making these platforms much safer and less addictive for all ages, and we fully support that 100%.

(The SAFE For Kids Act does have some flavor of age verification, but it narrowly targets only two very specific features of social media platforms:  1) Personalized algorithmic feeds (aka "addictive feeds"), and 2) Late night notifications (12 am to 6 am).  These relatively useless and harmful features are disabled by default, and only to enable them would one need to verify age.)

But an Australian-style age ban?  HELL NO!  The same also goes for the creeping censorship of the UK currently (and soon eventually Australia as well, with the way things are going now).

And Big Tech can go EFF off!

(Mic drop)

It Was 40 Years Ago Today

It was 40 years ago today, the last day in history that young New Yorkers could legally drink before 21.  The drinking age in my home state of New York, originally 18 for nearly half a century, was raised first to 19, effective December 4, 1982, and three years later raised to 21, effective December 1, 1985.  Just in time for the holiday season.  And with no grandfather clause either.

New York, due to their sheer size and clout on the national stage, was essentially the last real hope for bucking the trend and opposing federal coercion to raise the drinking age to 21.  And, alas, they too drank the Kool-Aid as well.  As did the other last real hope, Florida, the following year as well, albeit with a grandfather clause.  Without those two anchor states, the remaining holdouts didn't stand a chance against the feds, and the rest is history.....

Note that the iconic 1985 hit song "You Belong To The City" by Glenn Frey (RIP), is now officially 40 years old as well.  It came out in September 1985, three months earlier, and was famously used in the TV show Miami Vice.  An excellent song and video, filmed in and taking place in New York City, very nostalgic indeed.

Have A Safe And Happy Thanksgiving And Thanksgiving Eve

(This is a public service announcement)

It is that time of year again when Thanksgiving and Thanksgiving Eve (Blackout Wednesday) is upon us, and many of us Americans will be celebrating with alcohol and/or other substances, pretty much back to normal now.  We at Twenty-One Debunked would like to remind everyone to be safe and celebrate responsibly.  There is absolutely no excuse for drunk driving at any age, period.  We cannot stress this enough.  It's very simple--if you plan to drive, don't drink, and if you plan to drink, don't drive.  It's really not rocket science, folks.  And there are numerous ways to avoid mixing the two.  Designate a sober driver, take a cab, use public transportation, crash on the couch, or even walk if you have to.  Or stay home and celebrate there.  Or simply don't drink--nobody's got a gun to your head.  Seriously, don't be stupid about it!  And the same goes for other psychoactive substances as well, and a fortiori when combined with alcohol.

ARRIVE ALIVE, DON'T DRINK AND DRIVE!!!   If you plan to drink, don't forget to think!  The life you save may very well be your own.

Alberta Gets It Right (Re-Post)

The Canadian province of Alberta is basically the only place in all of North America that gets it right across the board.  Legal age limits there are as follows:

• Alcohol:  18
• Tobacco and Vaping:  18
• Cannabis:  18
• Gambling:  18
• Guns:  18
• Voting:  18
• Run for office:  18
• General age of majority:  18
• School leaving age:  16
• Driving:  14 for learner permit, 16 for GDL, and 18 for full unrestricted license
• All other age limits:  similar to the rest of Canada and the USA overall (at or below 18)
• Curfew:  None at provincial level, only locally in a few towns here and there (usually 15)

In other words, 18 is the age of majority, and once you are an adult, you are an adult.  Period, full stop.  Some age limits can be lower than that, of course, as there is much room for nuance, but no age limit can ever be higher than that, at least not without extraordinary levels of justification.  And guess what?  The sky didn't fall in Alberta.  No seriously, it really didn't.  Alberta still has yet to get the memo about the supposedly catastrophic effects of full adult rights combined with "underdeveloped" 18-24 year old brains.

In fact, the Alberta Human Rights Act explicitly prohibits age discrimination for anyone over 18, except for senior citizen privileges for people over 55.  Anything else requires truly extraordinary justification, which in practice is about as rare as a unicorn. 

That is really how it should be everywhere, regardless of what exact age limit is chosen for age of majority (which is 18 in most of the world and most of the USA).  It's really not a difficult concept to grasp, as a child can easily understand it, but too many chronological "adults" seem to be unable to do so.  Anything else is a slippery slope, and such slopes are much, much slipperier than they appear.

And for alcohol, tobacco, and cannabis, while underage possession and consumption is illegal, for all three it is basically a mere ticket-level offense with no criminal record.  Unlike many US states have.  And parents are allowed to give their own underage children (but no one else) alcohol at home (within reason), as many but not all states currently do.

The driving thing is of course probably the most jarring one of all to the rest of the world, so allow us to explain.  The global outlier young age limit of 14, rivaled only by South Dakota and a few other rural states, applies ONLY to the learner permit, which is similar to an American style learner permit, with only supervised driving allowed among other restrictions.  To get a GDL (probationary) license, i.e. what Americans often call a "junior" license, you need to be at least 16 and also have had a permit for one year or more, and pass the basic road test which is harder than an American road test.  There are some restrictions to the GDL, such as no more passengers than there are seat belts, and a zero tolerance limit for both alcohol and cannabis, but no night restrictions.  And to graduate to the next level, the full unrestricted license, one must have had the GDL for at least two years regardless of age, be suspension-free for the final year of two years, and pass an advanced road test, the latter of which has since been phased out in 2023 in favor of simply making the basic road test more difficult and more like the advanced road test.  Honestly, making the American road test more difficult would probably be far more effective than any age-based restrictions ever could be.

Alberta in recent years has had one of the lowest overall traffic death rates per vehicle kilometers traveled in Canada, and lower than the USA, so they must be doing something right!

And DUI laws are quite strict there regardless of age as well.  There are swift and certain penalties of immediate but temporary administrative license suspension and vehicle impoundment for BAC as low as 0.05% (or 0.00% if GDL), in addition to any criminal penalties if above 0.08% and/or obviously impaired.  Note that the zero tolerance for GDL is regardless of age.  For DUI cannabis they are also quite strict as well, and we at Twenty-One Debunked think TOO strict since hard per se limits (let alone zero tolerance) don't really make sense for a substance with such complex pharmacokinetics and long detection times, and generally less impairing than alcohol.  At the very least, in the interest of simple justice, they really need to set the testing cutoff for positivity high enough to prevent false positives or innocent positives. 

Thus overall, Alberta is a good model for America to follow.  So what are we waiting for?

Oh, and they also have the best and largest shopping mall in the entire western hemisphere, the West Edmonton Mall.  It makes the even the vaunted Mall of America look a bit "meh" by comparison. 

How America Lost The Plot (Repost)

From the ageist and illiberal abomination that is the 21 drinking age and especially its authoritarian enforcement, to drunk driving, to drug policy, to transportation policy, to environmental policy, to foreign policy, to Tobacco 21, and so on, America has well and truly lost the plot long ago on so many issues.  How long ago, you may ask?  Well, roughly 40 years ago, if not even a bit earlier than that.  But how and why did it happen in the first place?  Why can't our "leaders" (and many of those who keep voting for them) ever seem to see the forest for the trees?

In the book, The Master and His Emissary:  The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World by Iain McGilchrist (2009), the author delves into the familiar idea of the left vs right hemispheres of the brain.  Only unlike the usual surface-level analysis in that we see in pop neuroscience, this one is a real deep dive into the truly resounding implications of these brain differences for society and civilization.  Ten years later, it was even made into a documentary, The Divided Brain (2019), by McGilchrist himself along with award-winning documentary filmmaker Vanessa Dylyn, et al.

To summarize:  the two hemispheres of the brain each see the world and process information in fundamentally different ways:  the left brain is more reductionistic in thinking, while the right is more holistic in thinking.  The left is more logical, analytical and detail-oriented, while the right is more creative, intuitive, and sees the bigger picture.  The left is more linear, while the right is more non-linear.  The left sees the map, while the right sees the territory.  And so on.  While both sides are of course quite valuable and necessary, the brain functions best overall when the right brain is in charge.  The left is a great servant, but a terrible master, hence the title of the book.  And Western culture has, for thousands of years, oscillated between favoring the overall relative dominance of each of the two hemispheres.  In recent centuries and decades, as in some other historical periods as well, we have become far too left-brain dominant, with very negative consequences, according to the author.  Not only does the left not really know what the right is doing, but at least half the time the left doesn't even know what the left is doing!  The left brain has thus essentially hijacked society, and that in turn leaves us "increasingly incapable of grappling with critical economic, environmental, and social issues, ones that shape our very future as a species", as the documentary would put it.  I am largely oversimplifying what he said, of course, but that is the basic gist of it overall.

One obvious reason for this excessive left-brain dominance could be due to poorly-designed education, of course.  But another could be that the left brain is faster in terms of processing speed than the right, and the pace of life is undoubtedly much, much faster nowadays than even the recent past.  Though the latter would be more of a chicken-or-the egg question. 

(And to all of the political conservatives and reactionaries who try in vain to shoehorn all of this into their silly left-wing vs right-wing political spectrum, like that one guy on The Daily Sceptic did recently, please get your own ideas.  This book, by a renowned Oxford scholar, truly thoroughly transcends such a naive interpretation of politics.)

A-ha!  That really explains a LOT!

Clearly, the USA (and a good chunk of the world as well, but especially the USA), has only gotten more, not less, left-brain dominant since roughly 40 years ago.  We as a society have been reactively lurching from crisis to crisis, moral panic to moral panic, trend to trend, fad to fad, idol to idol, and propaganda to propaganda, throwing at each whatever left-brained nostrums seem like a good idea at the time without really thinking it through.  But try as they may, the map is NOT the territory.  And their reductionist "solutions" invariably affect not just this thing over here, but also that thing over there, and that other thing all the way over there, and so on.  Oops!

One thing's for sure:  As the late, great Buckminster Fuller famously said, you cannot solve a problem with the same kind of thinking that got us into that problem in the first place.  Unfortunately, not nearly enough people have gotten the memo, it seems.

UPDATE:  Looks like McGilchrist has a sequel to the aforementioned book, titled The Matter with Things, as well.  In it, the following quote is probably the most pertinent:

"[Y]ou could say, to sum up a vastly complex matter in a phrase, that the brain's left hemisphere is designed to help us ap-prehend – and thus manipulate – the world; the right hemisphere to com-prehend it – see it all for what it is."

Food for thought. 

A brain divided against itself cannot stand.

The ONE Thing We Agree With The Late Charlie Kirk On

There is indeed ONE thing we fully agree with the late Charlie Kirk on.  Care to guess what it is?

(Hint:  it is quite literally the very founding cornerstone of Twenty-One Debunked indeed.)

Give up?  

Well, the following tweet from him from 2018 says it all:

AMEN to that!  And we are not aware that he has ever officially reversed or repudiated that stance, even after he recently quit drinking completely himself.

A stopped clock can indeed be right twice a day.

Actually, there is one more thing we agree with him on as well:

For the EPSTEINTH time, RELEASE THE FILES!

(Mic drop)

Never Ask Meme

There is a good meme that I found recently on Reddit about the, shall we say, shadow side of so many famous and otherwise "great" philosophers throughout recorded history:

And to that, we would like to add the following:

Never ask 57% of Michiganders, what they voted for in November 1978.  

(Hint:  it set into motion a sweeping national trend since then, a very dubious, toxic, illiberal, and ageist trend that might not otherwise have occurred, and without it, the USA would have most likely been more like Canada in that regard.  Seriously.  The agony of regret indeed....)

"You Belong To The City" by Glenn Frey, 40 Years Later

The iconic 1985 hit song "You Belong To The City" by Glenn Frey (RIP), is now officially 40 years old.  It came out in September 1985, and was famously used in the TV show Miami Vice.  An excellent song and video, filmed in and taking place in New York City, very nostalgic indeed.

Note that this was literally less than three months before my home state of New York raised the drinking age to 21.  

A Message To Those Who Still Support The 21 Drinking Age And Other Ageist Policies

Here's a message to those who still support the 21 drinking age and other ageist policies:

(Mic drop)

What If We Have Gotten "Age At First Use" All Wrong?

What if we (as a society) have gotten "age at first use" all wrong in regards to addiction?  The conventional wisdom is that the younger a person is when first trying a given substance (whether it's alcohol, tobacco/nicotine, cannabis, or otherwise), the more likely that person is to become addicted or dependent on that substance, and the more severe the problem they will develop, all else being equal.  This idea is often paired with the controversial (and half-baked at best) "gateway drug theory", namely that the use of lesser substances (alcohol, tobacco, and especially cannabis) increases the risk for subsequent use and/or addiction to other, harder substances.  But while the "gateway theory" is relatively easy to debunk, the "age at first use" theory has had much more staying power to date, mainly due to the fairly strong, and seemingly rugged and robust, correlational evidence, often combined with relatively superficial knowledge of human brain development.

However, a new study (albeit not exactly a new idea) strongly implies that at least much of the observed association between earlier age at first use and greater likelihood of addiction is actually due to reverse causation.  That is, kids who were at greater risk of addiction actually showed measurable brain differences compared to those who weren't, even before they took their first sip or puff.  This is truly a paradigm-shifting study indeed, and one that will require everyone to fundamentally rethink their approaches to substance abuse prevention.

That is NOT to say that using substances at an early age (especially before 15) is actually a wise idea, of course.  It still appears to be at least somewhat riskier overall, and the results of twin studies (which completely control for genetics, and largely control for environment) of the past still have yet to be completely explained away.  (For the record, Twenty-One Debunked does NOT endorse or encourage the underage use of any such substances.)  But this latest study shows that the reality is far more nuanced than meets the eye, and that "delay, delay, delay that first drink or use at any cost!" is also probably not the wisest approach to prevention either.  And, of course, by implication, the 21 drinking age (and smoking age and toking age) now has even less support still from The Science.

(We should also note also that people who actually do wait until 21 or older to use such substances, especially alcohol, tend not to be very gung-ho about such substances to begin with, and thus tend to be non-drinkers, non-smokers, and non-users.  That is true for both age at first use, as well as age at first regular use.  It's basically tautological.)

Perhaps this why Denmark and Iceland, who each famously take diametrically opposite approaches to teen drinking (i.e. very permissive vs. very restrictive, respectively), still ultimately end up with remarkably similar alcoholism rates among adults.  Just like the USA vs Canada, basically.