Hard News: Conversation Starters
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Ed Byrne on why people drink. Don't know how to embed, so here's the link:
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had my sexuality called 'disordered'
What?
You didn't make the bed afterwards??
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Ed, I see you're drinking again. What's the special occasion? I was sober.
Heh. :)
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I did pretty well in chemistry in my day too :-)
Sorry Graeme, that came out sounding much more arrogant than intended.
Both are polar solvents. Ethanol does extract a whole lot more compounds from the grape skins than water. And when you remove ethanol from the wine you tend to remove a huge number of the flavour compounds, changing the flavour of the alcohol free "wine".
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Thus those humans that laced their water with alcohol (thus killing nasty bacteria, worms etc) were less likely to succumb to disease and more likely to breed.
Nothing to do with getting their women drunk, then?
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Only humans will persist with it, and then only adults, who have trained inhibitions that they would like to lose.
tell that to dogs, most especially my Anjing Kampong (english: Bali Dog) who is likely to take a quick lick out of my beer glass if I'm not looking. Never more than that though..she just likes the flavour.
Getting drunk is not something I've done a lot in my life, and when it was it was as a young fella on something horrendous like Cider (and once on tequila...that was awful). I often drink water in a club or bar, especailly if its turning into a late one.
But I do drink both beer and wine, in limited but very regular quantities..I pace myself so that I don't get drunk or close to it, I'm rather fussy as to which two glasses of Pinot Gris or lager I might drink though as I'm a terrible bloody snob when it comes their their flavours.
I don't think I'm that unusual in any of that.
And I'd argue that anyone who can't understand how a light (as in flavour, not alc %) lager accentuates the flavour of a very good vindaloo has a gap in their life.
For a variety of personal reasons I hate drunk people and cannot be in their company, but I'm also label to draw a line between the that and my enjoyment of alcohol.
I've owned premises that've served alcohol for decades (although not for 10 years now) and it's also a truism that those who tend to get pissed, or want to, rarely do so on the good stuff. An $8 bottle of Jacob's Creek often (usually but not always) serves quite a different purpose to a $40 bottle of Cloudy Bay.
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Nothing to do with getting their women drunk, then?
Or making them look/smell nicer?
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<quote>Nothing to do with getting their women drunk, then?<quote>
In Egypt at least, brewing was women's work, just like baking bread. So yes, probably for getting women drunk.
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Though there's always a risk of taking the beer drinking too far.
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Or making them look/smell nicer?
Oh Bart, you romantic dawg you. I bet they just swoon in your arms, don't they?
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Emma
Of course it isn't. You said people only like alcoholic beverages because of the alcohol, because they're intoxicating. Ergo, by your reasoning, the more alcoholic something is, the more they should like it. This clearly isn't the case.
Nor did I say it. There's no ergo, and it is an argumentum ad absurdum. You're trying to extract my principle and take it to an absurd extreme.
You're not actually listening to anything people are saying, you're just repeating 'it's yucky' over and over again until, I assume, you 'win' by sheer persistence.
Calm down, and quit it with the faux outrage. I'm not trying to 'win' anything, just responding to your questions. If you don't want response don't ask a question. I'm not trying to say who you are, or commenting on your sexuality or any bloody thing personal about you at all. I'm arguing a case. If you don't like the case, please address the case and leave out all the ad hominems.
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Yup, so what?
Because that would mean they have different tastes from me.
Again, so what? What bearing does that have on what we were talking about? I have never denied people have different tastes. I've just said some tastes are trained, alcohol being one of them. It's really a small point and I'm surprised you're disputing it.
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Alcohol is in fact, a solvent
So is water. Your point is?
Are solvents a new target of chemicalism - if it dissolves stuff it must be bad. (Almost all liquids are solvents for something, either polar or non-polar).
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Only humans will persist with it, and then only adults, who have trained inhibitions that they would like to lose.
...
tell that to dogsWe used to have a shih tzu who would beg for beer cans at the dinner table. If you gave him one he'd carefully lie it on its side, and lick as much beer as he could from it. He also once drank a large glass of wine at a party (someone had put it on the floor). He vomited most of it up, but still looked pretty ropey for a few days.
As to the arguments about how people have come to like things - two points.
1) Surely it's not a binary decision? There's ground between the two extremes. As with most things biological, it's probably a messy intermediate where there's a combination of your taste buds maturing, subconscious positive reinforcement from the active ingredients of whatever you're consuming, and a psychological association. I know for a fact that one of the reasons I like the taste of Old Speckled Hen is the memories it brings back.
2) Who cares why you like something? If I like a particular flavour, sporting activity, author or sexual position, why on earth would it matter how that liking came about? Maybe someone started drinking red wine because they didn't really mind red/white and their partner preferred red, and they then got a taste for it as a result - so what? Why on earth should the origin of a preference matter in the slightest jot?
Personally, I can pretty easily think of tastes that I've had since birth, that I suddenly realised that I had in adolesence, that I've acquired without wanting to and that I've acquired through sheer bloody effort. I'm just wondering why the origin is supposed to matter.
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Don't know how to embed, so here's the link
The wonders of PA System :-)
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Also, there's a "fun" case you come across early in one's law degree which explains that if you can't physically get drunk off something (e.g. a low alcohol beer you'd need to drink a physically impossible amount to get drunk) then it isn't covered by licensing laws
Must have been before the current Sale of Liquor Act which sez:
Liquor means any fermented, distilled, or spirituous liquor (including spirits, wine, ale, beer, porter, honeymead, stout, cider, and perry) that is found on analysis to contain 1.15 percent or more alcohol by volume -
1.15% Does that mean Mac's Light is not liquor?
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The evidence is very clear... the best way to reduce alcohol related harm is to reduce the number of outlets selling alcohol in a community.
Got references?
Westies seem to be some of the biggest piss artists around, despite the King Dicks liquor monopoly. I don't believe that, if you take away the tendency to warehouse those with social problems here, that Wellington CBD locals have more alcohol problems than people from places with less accessible bottle stores.
Like I say, the only effective way to address substance abuse is to look at the underlying causes - if people have good lives and self respect they won't engage in damaging substance abuse. That means starting with decent education, health and social care, not taking away rights.
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Stewart
Ben,
it's your argument to & so up to you to provide evidence (other than the anecdotal stuff proffered thus far).
I'm not sure who died and made you God of who has to supply evidence. This is not a courtroom. A well formed case has a negative and an affirmative and both sides need evidence. I'm not a scientist nor a journalist and I don't have time to waste searching for any more evidence than the (so far) 100% observations I have made of the hundreds of children I have come into contact with and seen that they are disgusted by alcohol. If you have some contrary evidence how about you lead the way and supply it to the standards you want to hold me to.
Bart
I don't expect to change your mind Ben but this is not correct.
You might be surprised. If you have a good case, my mind is totally changeable. I change my mind about things every day.
There is sweet FA evidence to show alcohol in small doses does humans harm..........So your evolutionary argument is without basis Ben.
Right, but in moderate to large doses it can kill, and those doses are not very high, with alcohol in concentrated form. Furthermore, even a small dose intoxicates you, which is a survival disadvantage right there. Having your reflexes slowed even a little bit in nature can be harmful. Why is it that no other animal will drink it unless it's been watered down, or added to something they really want to eat or drink? They may taste it occasionally, and if they are really thirsty they will drink it, but put it next to a full bowl of water and see which one gets drunk first.
Dogs are different perhaps. They eat shit. Perhaps they do actually like the taste.
I think you're right about alcohol actually being a safer drink for primitive peoples. It's easier to keep it sanitary for long periods. That may be another explanation for it's persistence, but I don't think it rules out the idea that getting pissed is something that people have always liked, ever since they had any kind of comparative safety at all from the dangers of being pissed.
And yes, evolutionary arguments are waffle. Nothing can be proved by them. They are insightful at best.
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Calm down, and quit it with the faux outrage.
Ben, I'm not going to continue to argue with you. But if you believe nothing else I've said today, please believe that I would never fake being angry on a PA comments thread. If I'm ever caught doing that Russell can take me out to the woodshed.
2) Who cares why you like something? If I like a particular flavour, sporting activity, author or sexual position, why on earth would it matter how that liking came about?
I don't, really. What annoys me is being told that I'm wrong about why I like something. This comes up in discussions of non-vanilla sexuality quite a lot - you think you like it, but in fact it's just that something traumatic happened to you as a child and you just need to examine more blah blah blah. Ironically, people often try to get across the gap by using food and drink likings as a metaphor - nobody tell you you're wrong if you say you like jam better than marmite, so why is this different?
Now I find it isn't. It's a bit depressing.
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I've just said some tastes are trained, alcohol being one of them. It's really a small point and I'm surprised you're disputing it.
Except the entire crux of your argument is that ethanol tastes bad, and that people habituate to the flavour. Except that ethanol doesn't taste bad for a lot of us.
In this study, approximately half of all participants found that aqueous solutions of ethanol varying from .3 to 10% tasted bitter alone (it seems safe to assume that Ben falls into this camp).
The other half variously found ethanol solutions to taste sweet, sour, salty and bitter alone, or various combinations of those flavours.
This isn't too much of a shock, as higher alcohol beers and wines are often perceptually 'sweet', even when fermented to dryness (ie no sugar).Also, in the second experiment, they had a taste-matching paradigm, and ethanol was indistinguishable from various combinations of quinine, citric acid, and sucrose. The latter sounds suspiciously like something that some people drink voluntarily with no ethanol in it (tonic water, perhaps with a twist of lemon?)
This experiment did not use alcohol naive subjects, so they could have habituated to the taste. HOWEVER, in the introduction they cite studies with alcohol naive subjects.
And convergent electrophysiology adds some further weight. Hellekant et al 1997: Electrophysiology in Rhesus monkeys, alcohol triggers the same nerves as sweet tasting solutions.
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Apologies for sounding like (your idea of) God, Ben. I was merely trying to indicate that you had provided no credible evidence to support your assertion. Not my assertion so I see no need to do your research for you.
I'm really not the argumentative type...
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I'm not a scientist nor a journalist and I don't have time to waste searching for any more evidence than the (so far) 100% observations I have made of the hundreds of children I have come into contact with and seen that they are disgusted by alcohol. If you have some contrary evidence how about you lead the way and supply it to the standards you want to hold me to.
you give kids alcohol? hmmmmm.
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Thus those humans that laced their water with alcohol (thus killing nasty bacteria, worms etc) were less likely to succumb to disease and more likely to breed.
I have seen people theorise that the rise of the British empire was due to getting at tea and/or coffee early, meaning that they had a safe liquid to drink that didn't make them drunk all the time.
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Emma, fine. You're genuinely outraged. I don't know how or why, and I don't care. I will continue to discuss it and you are most welcome to rejoin whenever you like. But if you snipe at me in an angry way again, be assured that it will not deter me from continuing to argue about this highly abstract topic in the polite way that I have done so far. I am not trying to cast anything on you, and if you think I am, then point out where or consider that you may be mistaken.
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