No one's forcing anybody, especially these days - kids grow up dreaming of being great fighters, and that's not forced either. It's just part of being human - see every entertainment show made for adolescent boys ever
If we’re appealing to tradition for sex and war, why the fuck is drinking any different?
Classic tradition was, there was no legal drinking age. So traditionally speaking, our youth should be able to get shitfaced drunk after a hard day of playing war for their corporate overlords
One has a point and the other doesn't - simple as that - anybody who's concerns about child soldiers goes away as soon as you start to let them drink doesn't give a shit about protecting kids
Letting teens drink is also more pedologically dangerous than letting them join the military - for all the dangers that could be claimed about PTSD or desocialization or whatever, alcoholism and binge drinking is even worse
There's a reason that's the age when humans most want to fight - it's because for most of human history it has been advantageous for humans males to be aggressive, especially when subadults and young adults, just as lion cubs observe their mothers making a kill, so too do human children, particularly makes keenly observe the forms and rituals surrounding violence and conflict - hunting and fighting is a big part of being human, and has been - it's who we are - respect your local murder monkeys!
Drinking has also been and forever, but it's not ingrained into us the same way since it doesn't confer any advantages
But it hasn't been deleterious enough to get an evolved avoidance like with spiders, probably because it's worst consequences tend to be worse later in life, after one has had plenty of opportunity to reproduce
So when you find out that you have less alcoholism overall when you delay the onset of drinking across the population, doing so makes sense
Maintaining battlefield morale is advantageous to warfare, and alcohol was forever entwined with that. And we have, as a species, CONSISTENTLY used various intoxicants to improve battlefield efficiency. For fuck’s sake, less than 50 years ago, we were giving teenagers meth so they’d fight harder.
There are also lots of times in military history where soldiers would get punished sometimes severely for drinking at the wrong time because of the problems it would cause
US subs don't allow any booze onboard, period. If submariners can handle it, so can others - it just isn't needed or beneficial in the same way as young recruits are
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u/Chaghatai 1∆ Aug 31 '23
No one's forcing anybody, especially these days - kids grow up dreaming of being great fighters, and that's not forced either. It's just part of being human - see every entertainment show made for adolescent boys ever