Posts by BenWilson
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Emma, unless you are a freak, you trained those tastes. What I'm saying is that the reason so many people have trained themselves to like the taste of alcohol is for the bloody alcohol, not the inherent niceness of the tastes. It's a very simple point and I don't care how arrogant it sounds.
I am by no means alone in finding alcohol yucky, in fact I join the majority of species which have the ability to even discern the taste. Alcohol is poisonous so it's built in us to dislike the flavor, as is the natural aversion to inhaling smoke. Only humans will persist with it, and then only adults, who have trained inhibitions that they would like to lose.
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Yup, I quite like Powerade if I'm really thirsty. But if I have time to prepare I do actually mix water, sugar and salt, and save myself $3. That's only if I have actually dehydrated from hardout exercise, or being out in the sun too long. Otherwise water does the job just fine.
C'mon Ben, you don't really like grown-up drinks and you're generalising your experience to everyone else.
It's not just my experience. It's the experience of everyone I grew up with when we came to alcohol drinking age. Only a very few of them actually claim to like the taste, and these are the same people who love getting pissed way more than average. Funny that.
Furthermore I'm only saying I don't like the taste of 'grown up drinks'. I do like to drink them sometimes (more in the past than now), but I'm honest enough to admit the reason is for the alcoholic effects.
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Graeme, did that ever actually get tested? I mean a lot of low alcohol beer is only half strength. It's well within my powers to drink 10-12 cans of it, and I'd be as drunk as if I'd had a 6-pack, which is too drunk to drive. Not that I ever would, or any sane person, for that matter, for reasons I've been elaborating.
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Josh, by drunk, I mean 'under the influence of alcohol', which for me takes about half a beer. That's more than enough to feel the effects. I don't think it's got amazing taste buds, I've just never been able to stomach the lying-to-oneself involved in saying yucky things are nice. I also like coffee, but I would never have learned to like coffee by drinking decaf.
Bart and Giovanni, I can fully appreciate that it's very difficult to make wine taste like wine without the alcohol. But I put it to you that you would never have learned to like any of those wonderfully subtle nasty yucky flavors if there was no alcohol in it. There are plenty of nasty non-alcoholic things that people could sit around developing a taste for, but strangely they don't seem to. To me, that is a clear indication that the alcohol is what people are in it for, and the tastes are just way of justifying that.
People talk about how wonderfully thirst quenching beer is. But there is no way on earth it really is as thirst quenching as something actually designed for rehydration, like maybe water mixed with glucose and salt. Beer is simply low-alcohol and low sugar, so it's more thirst quenching than, say wine, or a really sweet fizzy drink.
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And I am not sure that collectively, in our heart of hearts, we really want to abandon just yet our red-blooded Anglo-Saxon binge drinking culture for the effete ways of the continentals.
Well put. I feel just like that. Personally, I'd rather abandon drinking altogether than become effete.
Giovanni, of course I don't drink ethanol. If I must drink alcohol I drink beer or wine because that is what is offered. I still hate the bloody stuff, but when you're with the Indians, it's rude not to smoke on their nasty peace pipe. Doesn't mean I'm gonna puff all night long. Ethanol also tastes disgusting, as do most spirits in pure form. I'd almost certainly dilute them with a drink that tastes nice, like maybe orange juice or coke.
Now I'm not about to say that no-one else can possibly find the taste of alcohol nice. You can come to like any yucky old thing, if you have it enough and enjoy something else about it, and keep telling yourself you like it. I've heard smokers discussing the various lovely taste of their cancer sticks in much the same way a wine drinker carries on. Many people actually like the smell of their shit too, possibly associating the relief they feel from doing it with the smell. I actually like the smell of leaded petrol, and despise unleaded, possibly because of a mental association with the traditional lameness of the unleaded, and working for years in a servo.
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I drink alcohol to get drunk. The taste of the stuff is disgusting, as is usually the case with toxins. But at times, I enjoy being drunk.
I'm always mystified by people who talk about how much they like the taste. There have been comments that you have to be an adult to like it because of various strange things about taste buds and being 'undeveloped' as a child and so forth. But I can honestly say that despite having been an adult for some time, and having drunk a shitload of alcohol, I have never liked the taste of any of it. If someone could provide me the same taste without the alcohol, I would laugh at the idea every bit as much as everyone does laugh at low or non-alcohol beer. What is the fucking point? I finally poured out 7 lingering cans of low alcohol beer that had hidden in my fridge for 6 years. No takers in all that time (including the guy who brought them to my house in the first place). Curiously every other beer, from the flash to the lowbrow, got drunk.
I do sometimes like to drink alcohol. But it's not for the taste FFS. The only training of the taste buds that goes on with alcohol is in disconnecting them from your gag reflex, and then telling yourself you love it. I'm yet to see the shelves lined with no-alcohol wine and millions of connoisseurs supping away going on about the lovely bouquet and which bloody province of France it comes from. If that could be done it would solve the alcohol problem straight away. But it can't because of the elephant in the room, that we drink to get the alcohol out.
So, when I say I like Heineken (for instance) what I'm really saying is that I hate it less than most beers, and I'm prepared to endure the yucky taste, upset stomach, and flatulence, to get the quite strong drugged effect I can get from it.
Pardon me for being so frank about my crass tastes here, but I think it goes to the very heart of the massive mind fuck involved in discussing the 'alcohol problem'.
If you are having trouble understanding why it is that kids binge drink then you are failing to admit to the whole point of alcohol. It IS a substance designed to get you drugged. If you have seriously convinced yourself that you drink because you like the taste but not the effect then you won't be able to understand where kids are coming from. All they see is adults drinking, and since they can clearly tell the stuff is yucky as, they conclude that adults think this kind of intoxication is OK.
I really don't think trying to get kids to buy into some whole boring adult lifestyle choice which involves lying to oneself a great deal, is something they take to easily. There is no 'right' way to drink. There are merely consequences of your choices in drinking. That is the only factual thing you can tell kids about how to drink responsibly. If they drink too much, a great many very bad things can and probably will happen to them.
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Regulation obviously can control alcohol usage. Countries with very strict laws make this very obvious. Conversely, removing regulation absolutely will not reduce usage. At best, it could have no effect. When people said that the Prohibition didn't work, they weren't saying that it had no effect on alcohol consumption. They were saying that the side effects were worse than the problem, namely the enormously profitable illegal business of selling alcohol, and all the flow on effects of such a powerful and popular drug being only available from hardened criminals.
The question of how big a shop should be allowed to sell alcohol seems pretty irrelevant to me. It's a question for local communities, and each community will have different preferences. I'm quite happy to buy my grog at the supermarket, since I go there with the car, and booze weighs a lot. I also buy my milk and bread there too. I personally don't want a grog shop of any kind on my street, boutique or otherwise. But that's because I don't want any shops of any kind on my street. I chose a quiet suburban street because that's where I want to live at the moment. And still I get yahoo kids doing burnouts every night.
When I was younger and living in Melbourne I lived above 4 separate Italian restaurants, a bottlo, and there was a 7-11 right across the road. I liked that then too. There were drunken yahoos of every description carrying on all night long, particularly during Formula One season, or the soccer World Cup. At least once per night each restaurant would dump all the empty bottles in a bin just below my balcony. Visitors would leap to their feet thinking there had been a car crash. I scarcely noticed it.
One size does not fit all on this question. Obviously the way that rural people buy their alcohol has to be different from suburban people. And there will be differences between inner city, inner suburbs, middle suburbs and outer suburbs. Most people choosing to live anywhere further out than the inner suburbs will have cars and find going to the supermarket extremely convenient. Further in and the car could be a liability, in which case there's a good case for more distributed shops (and of course there ARE more distributed shops, for this reason).
Then there's kids. Of course stricter laws in some areas will make it harder for kids to get alcohol. But getting alcohol will still be extremely easy. The whole country is awash with the stuff. Always has been. If there is a problem (I'm not convinced that anything has changed, or ought to), then it's a social problem driven entirely by the demand for alcohol, not the supply of it. Personally, I doubt that we have the ability to alter anything at all, so far as the emerging culture of youth goes. The next generations will decide for themselves what their values are, and so they should. Since my generation is hardly a wonderful role model, any advice towards moderation seems like hypocrisy in the extreme.
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To me the principle is: "police should only 'spy' on people, when they have a reasonable suspicion that they have, or are going to, commit a crime of some serious nature".
So I see no common principle here. In Te Qaeda, that principle applied, in the material that Gilchrist passed on (I'd hesitate to call what he did spying) it didn't.
I think it's dubious whether it applied in either case. We don't have all the information about the Gilchrist case yet, and the question of what 'reasonable suspicion' is, is exactly what is at stake. Having a bunch of illegal firearms and talking about killing politicians would land about 1 conviction per square mile of NZ. What exactly was it that made the suspicions of Te Quaeda reasonable? And how do you know that the police didn't have 'reasonable suspicions' of the group Gilchrist was passing info on, until there is an inquiry?
I doubt there were good grounds in either case, but in the Gilchrist case I don't know yet. In the Te Quaeda case I do, because enough time has passed to show that all they netted were some pretty minor offences. Not really enough for a counter terrorism squad to terrify the crap out of some small town, anyway.
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Kracklite, there may be some on the payroll that are easy to spot, but if there are ones who aren't easy to spot, how could you know?
I think you're right but it's one of those beliefs that's based far more on theory than evidence. Evidence for the absence of something is extremely hard to come by. My theory is that there is simply no need for 'deep moles' in NZ activism. Such resources would be better spent investigating the far more likely kind of conspiracy that exists all the time, conspiracies to profit from crime. Even then it's probably a waste of resources, except in the case of very serious crimes like robbery and murder. Activists are mostly do-gooders, so any conspiracy to commit crimes will come apart from the inside.
Only a theory, mind.
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Yeah it's all in my mind that that the police found it a whole lot more credible that a group of Maori who were acting like commandos out in the bush are terrorists than, say, at least 2 dozen similar such fools that I met at University who didn't happen to be Maori, who talked of armed insurrection, and played wargames, and said they'd love to blow politicians up.
But for some reason, it's totally credible that the police have right wing motives for investigating unions and other left wing groups. That's not in the mind, it's established fact.
Personally, I don't even HAVE an opinion on whether such biases exist. But I would like to know, and would think an inquiry might make it clear whether this Gilchrist spying might actually have been motivated by credible evidence that crimes were being committed. Evidence that goes further than 'general police bias against left wing groups' which so far as I can see is very much a conspiracy theory at the moment.
To make it crystal clear, I do not like spying of any kind and think it should all be investigated, and have extremely high standards of evidence and proof. An inquiry would be good now and it would be good for Te Quaeda too.
Crying 'Equivocation' seems to be the favourite online way of dismissing anything resembling principle recently, and I really don't like it. I'm sorry if that offends people. Sometimes equivocation is a perfectly valid way of thinking, indeed the ONLY way that abstractions can be made. Otherwise morality descends into a gigantic cacophony of unrelated laws. That is exactly why our drug laws are so disjointed and fucked up, because too many people squeal 'Equivocation' as though that is an argument. It is not an argument, it is a way of avoiding an argument, of ignoring the possibility of a principle, of justifying piecemeal prejudice. I don't think like that, and no amount of social disapproval will change that.
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