Thanks for the detailed comment, and I’d love to read your little review on the book when you’re done.
Thinking about it, you make a very compelling point. How do we pretend to try and fight gambling, while allowing literal private companies to profit from it. I didn’t think about the complexity and price of alcohol distillation up until the industrial revolution, and it’s interesting to know that for most of history, distilled drinks weren’t a thing for the vast majority of the population. Honestly, good for them. Low alcohol content beers are much much harder to get alcoholic on, than hard liquor. I lived in Germany for a while, and I was horrified at a common practice in supermarkets: next to every cashier, they have a little shelf full of little booze bottles and cigarette packs. How is that fucking legal, it’s extremely obviously targeted to addicts, and it’s honestly shameful that people in Germany don’t fight to forbid that.
About wine being considered high alcohol content, I did know that too, reading some historic novels about the second punic war (the trilogy of Scipio, by a Spanish writer called Santiago Posteguillo) and about Julia Domna (also by Posteguillo), it was clear thay Romans considered drinking wine without watering down to be a thing for barbarians. Funnily enough, in contemporary Spain, a very popular summer drink is “tinto de verano”, which is a mixture of wine with a slightly sweet soda water called “gaseosa”, so I guess we still run with it at least partially (many people do drink wine with meals).
All in all, yeah, I’ll definitely dedicate some time and possibly research to looking into prohibition of certain addictions such as some drugs or gambling in socialist countries… Interesting shit. Thanks again mate, always a pleasure to see you around
I lived in Germany for a while, and I was horrified at a common practice in supermarkets: next to every cashier, they have a little shelf full of little booze bottles and cigarette packs.
Same in Poland, and all the cheap fruit wines, commonly called “brainscrambler” or “brainfucker” - on a sidenote, Janusz Palikot, one of most notable Polish liberal succdem politicians (though now he’s sidelined) made a fortune producing and selling them.
Thanks for the detailed comment, and I’d love to read your little review on the book when you’re done.
Thinking about it, you make a very compelling point. How do we pretend to try and fight gambling, while allowing literal private companies to profit from it. I didn’t think about the complexity and price of alcohol distillation up until the industrial revolution, and it’s interesting to know that for most of history, distilled drinks weren’t a thing for the vast majority of the population. Honestly, good for them. Low alcohol content beers are much much harder to get alcoholic on, than hard liquor. I lived in Germany for a while, and I was horrified at a common practice in supermarkets: next to every cashier, they have a little shelf full of little booze bottles and cigarette packs. How is that fucking legal, it’s extremely obviously targeted to addicts, and it’s honestly shameful that people in Germany don’t fight to forbid that.
About wine being considered high alcohol content, I did know that too, reading some historic novels about the second punic war (the trilogy of Scipio, by a Spanish writer called Santiago Posteguillo) and about Julia Domna (also by Posteguillo), it was clear thay Romans considered drinking wine without watering down to be a thing for barbarians. Funnily enough, in contemporary Spain, a very popular summer drink is “tinto de verano”, which is a mixture of wine with a slightly sweet soda water called “gaseosa”, so I guess we still run with it at least partially (many people do drink wine with meals).
All in all, yeah, I’ll definitely dedicate some time and possibly research to looking into prohibition of certain addictions such as some drugs or gambling in socialist countries… Interesting shit. Thanks again mate, always a pleasure to see you around
Same in Poland, and all the cheap fruit wines, commonly called “brainscrambler” or “brainfucker” - on a sidenote, Janusz Palikot, one of most notable Polish liberal succdem politicians (though now he’s sidelined) made a fortune producing and selling them.