A Drinking-School Professor Crusades Against... Drinking

Former University of Wisconsin law professor Ann Althouse -- who taught for years at a school in a state that champions the freedom to drink beer early and often -- is taking on the NYT today for allegedly pushing people to drink earlier and earlier in the day. 

I thought "day drinking" seems different because in the daytime, you're supposed to be productive and so you shouldn't be undermining your mental and physical capacities. And also, someone who drinks in the day is presumably someone who drinks in the evening too. You're getting an early start — or you just never really stop — so it looks like you have a problem. But here's the NYT coming to help you feel good about it and not stigmatized. Why? I'm thinking the NYT has a lot of alcohol advertisers, and I'll bet it can see that articles on the happier side of alcohol consumption attract readers. Still, it's almost evil to prompt us to go ahead and begin our drinking earlier in the day.

It's like she's never seen the tailgates, including underage drinkers drawn to her campus, for the afternoon football games on campus. They start before noon, ann.  Any fall afternoon there is a home game down the street.  Come on... clean up your neighborhood first, before you go making this a problem of national perspective...

(Don't look now, but the Republican takeover of the state had led to a No Choice regime.  I wonder how long Wisconsin will retain their reputation as a libertarian state school drawing out-of-state dollars when co-eds realize the law faculty, who championed the religious leadership of Scott Walker and the white men currently entrenched in power there, have pretty much surrendered the state... )

Now -- someone who benefited for years from teaching at a well-known "party school" in a state where the alcohol lobby has greater power than the law faculty really, is going to tut-tut an out-of-state newspaper for writing about a trend noting that middle-aged boomers drink earlier and often?

Lolol.  You are a product of the Alcohol State of Wisconsin, Althouse.  Who buttered your bread all those years and now you are going to be anti-alcohol?  Somebody call the good professor out on her hypocrisy?  Dare ye that, students of Wisconsin today?

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* Maybe it's a gendered argument?  That young men (and their women) in their late teens and 20s can and should be encouraged to consume on campus and in Madison bars in "safe spaces", whereas the NYT appears to be championing women and older others who drink alone in the home and not socially like the good young boys?  

I'm not pushing drinking, but it seems hypocritical to take an anti-alcohol stance and call others out if you made your game in Madison, Wisco in the german Beer Culture all those years... ("When you say Wisconsin, you've said it all...")

Supperclubs ain't for sippers, baby. That's harder still.