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Comment by subjectsigma | Hacker News Reader

What is your point?

The guy I was replying to was satirizing beer drinkers as consumerist cogs in the machine. I pointed out that of all the things to criticize someone for enjoying alcohol is probably one of the least corporate. If buying alcohol makes you a monopolist’s bitch then so does buying anything and everyone in the entire world is hopeless.

It’s like claiming solar panels make you a slave to factory owners when they can be used, operated and repaired in a distributed manner. Sure, maybe, but like what a weird hill to die on?

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I don't know where you're from, but in the UK, over £50 billion is spent on it each year.

If you've seen anybody who lives for Friday / Saturday night and a Sunday hangover, it fits the consumerist image pretty neatly. Many (obviously not all) are slaves to alcohol.

We've all heard the wine'o'clock jokes from middle aged women in the office, people struggling to complete "Dry January" and similar challenges, colleagues talking about how excited they are to get a drink when they get home.

These people are held under the thumb of a handful or two alcohol companies. In many cases, it's simply a wasted weekend and quite a sum of wasted money, especially when you can't remember any of it.

Yep, also the 10 biggest beer manufacturers control about ~66% of the global market by volume. (And way more of that by profit.) [0]

So as a matter of current reality, alcohol-culture overwhelming means megacorporations. Things could be different... but they aren't.

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/sabmiller-ab-inbev-would-dom...

It feels like you're completely ignoring the comment that started this all, which then throws your comparisons out of whack. Here's what it looks like to me.

______

1 - Luminouslow: "Pfft, health shmelth, the corporations want us to be cowards who don't drink alcohol, and this is playing right into their hands!"

2 - Terr: "That's hypocritical nonsense. If anything, people like you--ones who treat regular alcohol as an important part of their identity and try to ostracize people who don't drink--are the real corporate sheep here."

3 - Subjectsigma: "Alcohol isn't always corporate, people can brew their own at home."

4 - Xornot: "That would be a very different situation than the world we're discussing right now."

5 - Subjectsigma: "But Terr started criticizing people who drink as consumer sheep, which is very unfair because they could have bought locally."

6 - Terr: "Dude, WTF, did you even see what I was replying to!? Where the guy suggested not buying anything was worse!? [Recursion error]

It was more of a reaction to how smug and condescending you came off as, but no I don’t agree with your interpretation of the original comment, which I interpreted as making fun of HN yuppies as opposed to a comment about society. I don’t know how or why (I really doubt Big Weed ™ is astroturfing the orange site) but the way people on HN chomp at the bit to defend weed and other drugs but decry alcohol for being “evil” feels distinctly robotic and manufactured.

That aside - the more I think about it the more I don’t understand how you could look at such a globally distributed and diverse product as alcohol and think its consumers can be easily stereotyped. Not even months ago in America there was a boycott of a massively popular brand of beer on political grounds; how very sheepish of those consumers!

Proponents of legalizing marijuana aren't necessarily advocates for it's use or benefits: for example, I am one. I have absolutely no interest marijuana, and don't particularly care for people who's identity is "I smoke weed" (I mean, the same would also apply for alcohol too).

But that's quite different to thinking the current regime of anti-drug enforcement, incarceration, and generally catastrophic waste of time, resources and lives - is at all a productive or even useful thing to do for society.

I'll discourage everyone from drinking alcohol or smoking weed, but that's very different from thinking any of this should be banned.

Though I'll happily commit to the notion that I suspect you'd get a lot fewer fights among dedicated stoners then drinkers on a friday night.

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