Europe’s first-ever dedicated non-alcoholic craft beer festival has kicked off in Warsaw, placing Poland on the frontier of the fast-growing alcohol-free beer market while also spotlighting the nation’s wider shift towards mindful drinking.
Europe’s first-ever dedicated non-alcoholic craft beer festival has kicked off in Warsaw, placing Poland on the frontier of the fast-growing alcohol-free beer market while also spotlighting the nation’s wider shift towards mindful drinking.
This kind of black-and-white thinking is holding back so much positive change in the world.
Yes, any amount of alcohol is worse for your health than none, but being mindful of your consumption is still better than getting plastered every weekend.
Yes, but at some point people can fuck off.
We live in a world where a lot of very useful medicine is bad because of the bullshit idea that they’re evil addictive drugs, where cannabis is shown as so terrifying and a marker of criminality, where rich people casually consume cocaine on a regular basis, where cigarette is literally killing people for money, and where alcohol is basically the biggest avoidable cause of death.
I’m sick of having to pretend like people are tiny stupid babies that are going to cry if I don’t let them put their fingers in the electrical socket.
Alcohol is a big problem, is extremely costly for society, kills people (and not just the ones that drink it), and supports an immoral industry that fuels a lot of shitty people.
Yes, drinking less is better than drinking more. But at some point, enough is enough. I was basically forced socially to drink alcohol until I grew enough will to accept the “shame” of not drinking, because society is extremely heavily in favour of alcoholism. I don’t see why it’s fine for alcoholics to pressure others into drinking, but pressuring people into not drinking is too harsh and needs to be done progressively.
Also, it’s not like this progressive “grey” thinking has been doing much, since alcohol and cigarettes have been known to he 100% harmful with no real benefit for decades and decades, and yet are still here. What is the end goal, to stop these 200 years after we know for sure that they’re bad?
So yeah, rant aside, I get your point, but I think it’s the kind of soft thinking that keeps us in this same situation. A bit like with politics, when you try to be a centrist in a context where the dominant side is immoral and actively trying to self-propagate, you just end up playing for their side unknowingly.
Why dont you have a drink and chill out?
I agree with most of the premise of your comment. I downvoted because of what you’re advocating for. Yes, alcohol is bad, and it’s dumb that it’s allowed and other drugs aren’t. I don’t think the solution is to try to get rid of alcohol though. It’s education, and providing choices. Yes, alcohol is bad, but people should be allowed to make bad choices (for themselves). We should be allowing more choice of drugs, rather than trying to force people to only have a small subset. You should get to choose what, if anything, goes into your body, not the government.
Okay, let’s put the perspective from another angle.
Should companies be allowed to make money out of an addictive, toxic drug that pushes people to be more violent, irresponsible and basically out of control, and at the same time much more vulnerable to rape?
Yes. I think advertising should be limited, or zero, but selling it should be allowed.
If we follow your logic, there’s so much more that shouldn’t be allowed. Sugar is incredibly addictive and generally bad for your health (at the quantities we have access to). Shouldn’t they not be allowed to sell it? What about cars?
We should be allowed to choose what level of risk we accept for ourselves. It shouldn’t be pushed on us, and it should also not affect others though.
Sugar doesn’t make you beat up, kill, or rape people. Sugar doesn’t actually kill you if you are addicted to it and stop too fast.
Cars are a tool with a lot of uses that would be really hard to replace, but yes, they should be much more restricted, it’s absurd that having a 1+ ton metal machine is so easy but carrying a pocket knife is seen as crazily dangerous.
Drinking alcohol has no use, very bad effects, is addictive in one of the worst ways (once again, I don’t know of many drugs that actually cause you to suddenly die if you stop too fast), causes horrible behaviours that endanger both the user and people around, funds a horrible industry of pieces of shit.
Even things like heroin or cocaine are not that unilaterally bad.
The only thing that even compares would be cigarettes, as they bring absolutely nothing good at all, and also can kill others, but the scale is very different and no one has ever been killed because of the influence of a cigarette, or raped because of being too high from it.
If we follow my logic, alcohol (and cigarettes) should not be allowed, and that’s it. Once it’s done you can wonder all you want about sugar, cars and heroin, have debates, etc. Nothing prevents anyone from banning alcohol and not following up with a campaign to ban everything that can be bad.
And one last point, if you ban alcohol, it becomes impossible to advertise it. If you ban advertising, I can guarantee that it will actually not be banned, because the laws are going to be circumvented by lobbies. That’s why there are lobbies that have been protecting cigarettes, but there’s no such thing as a lobby for heroin or so, a ban is much harder to avoid than a restriction.
Cool, neither does alcohol.
Or I must not have noticed last night when my beer threw me into a murderous rampage.
Well that’s a good amount of delusion over there.
Sure, let’s pretend that violence is never related to alcohol, and that there has never been a single case of someone using alcohol to rape someone else. Also it’s good for health and possibly makes you immortal.
Your individual experience doesn’t negate millenia of alcohol-induced violence. Stop the bullshit.
Alcohol reduces inhibitions, but it doesn’t “cause” violence.
People who become violent after drinking were already violent before their first sip.
I see your post doesn’t attract a positive like-ratio but let me just say to you as an ex-alcoholic, I really like your choice of words and it was a good read.
Nope. This is just straight evidence.
I do drink alcohol. But the healthiest thing is to drink no alcohol at all. (German Article)
Not 1 glass of wine a day. Not half a beer. Thr healthiest is none at all.
suru clearly recognizes and mentions that
He does - and still says it is black-and-white thinking holfing back positive change.
No, they acknowledge that zero alcohol is best (“Yes, …”) while recognizing that a step toward zero (“but”) is better than heavy drinking.
“Black-and-white” refers to the previous comment that the only mindful drinking is zero alcohol, which discourages action by someone who might otherwise make the switch to zero- or near-zero alcohol beer while allowing the occasional standard version.