John Kerry is President of Craft Beer

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I twittered this yesterday from my beer account, but I thought I would bring it to the attention of Porch Dog readers. John Kerry has proposed legislation that would reduce the federal excise tax on beer made by small brewers (that is, small quantity, not LP brewers).

Anyway, maybe later I’ll write a post about how a tax-and-spend liberal who is a little divided on the excise tax in general can rationalize a reduction in the small brewer’s share of the burden.

Story here.

Just some basic self-promotion: Follow Me!

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Just a reminder that some things are happening (have happened) here on the Porch.

First of all,  Beer Friday is gone on to a new home. You can fine Beer Reviews and local (i.e., Indiana(polis)) beer news at BrewIndy. I have a great logo idea but lack the technical expertise for this site but have recruited a long time friend to solve that problem.  (You can also follow @BrewIndy on teh twitterz. I don’t tweet those though. Those come from my co-blogger, partner and pal J Cochran. My next blog there will either be an attack on a local neo-Prohibitionist group or a review of Bell’s 9000. For the first I have to get through a statistical analysis of the effects of allowing Sunday sales of package liquor in New Mexico and for the second I need to get through this sickness that makes all things taste like phantom versions of themselves.

You can find Beer, Whiskey, Wine and other Spirits commentary at Central State Asylum (mostly beer though). Still rocking the basic WordPress blog theme over there but that’ll change soon. I also tweet news and interesting liquor-related items as I find them on the internet and you can follow me there (@CSAsylum)

You can find reviews of books, history, and notes about Prohibition and the so-called War on Drugs on OverModeration. That site is infrequently updated at best but should ramp up as time goes on.  That site still has the basic WordPress theme too and that may never change. Next up for that site is a review of 99 Drams of Whiskey by Kate Hopkins, but first I have to stop wrestling with Ubuntu and finish the book.

Gah! Ubuntu!

Beer Friday: Will Shatter-Proof Pint Glasses Increase Pub Fights?

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Some of you may be wondering where Beer Friday went. Well, the short answer is here and here. I also Tweet beer news here.

Without going into too much depth, I’ll say this.  I started doing Beer Friday’s about a year ago and as it turns out, I liked it a lot. I regularly had to restrain myself from blogging beer more frequently than once a week. And, if I had to force myself to write a political post and write a Beer Friday post that I had to save I eventually just wouldn’t write either post.

I still like politics and I still will be blogging here and tweeting interesting news and blogs at @Porchy (follow me) but for my last Beer Friday I thought I would go out with a bang: a Game Theory and Pint Glass link.

For those who don’t know, the UK has a lot of rules about what you can and can’t do in a pub. And whenever they’re bored, which is apparently frequently, they come up with new ones. The latest one to make a splash is the removal of glass pint glasses from pubs. Or, at least that’s what the beerarati thought was going to happen.

Based on a laughably fictional number, the Health Ministry decided it would be in the best interest of pub goers if there weren’t so many pint glasses to get stabbed with or otherwise cut by. But rather than risk revolution by replacing the British pint glass with an inferior polymer version, they went all Space Age and invested time and UK taxpayer money to invent a pint glass coated in a thin laminate which prevents the glass from shattering. If you saw the picture in this post you can see the difference between the unbroken and the broken but unshattered versions. Good show!

So The Oregon Economics Blogger whips out his handy Prisoners Dilemma chart and tries to figure out 1) Why American’s have less of a problem with “casual violence” than the Brits do and 2) if the shatterproof pint glass may raise violence while (and by) reducing injury.

Now he admits his chart is all in good fun so I’m not here to rip him apart, and couldn’t anyway, not real well at least. But I will say this, granting that Americans do have less casual violence than Brits (something I’m not at all sure of after watching the first eight episodes of Jersey Shore) I’m still not sure his prediction holds up.

There are two fascinating, broad concepts that have come out of Game Theory. One is that every interaction is something like a game. This has always been known on some metaphorical level, but game theorist, in pure Saussurian fashion, have attempted to formalize these unspoken rules that govern, without our knowledge, our decision-making process.

The other interesting thing is that the mathematical formulas that predict game play behavior have so frequently been proven wrong that it’s exploded research in the soft sciences. When Game Theory was first being proposed and developed economist and their very fancy math seemed on the verge of subsuming all the soft sciences. But once they started testing their hypothesis on humans they started finding wild (yet predictable) inconsistencies.

Suddenly cultural studies, sociology, psychology all had a deeper resonance as economist had to turn back to these softer sciences to help explain why their models didn’t describe real human behavior. I don’t want to be too hard on Game Theory it’s still wicked useful. But we don’t have behavioral economist for nothing.

And I think OEB’s prediction misses a few things.

  • Guns are not so prevalent in our culture that most people consider seeing one whipped out in an altercation so if there is reduced American casual violence, I doubt this is the cause.
  • In American subcultures where guns are prevalent, backing down in the face of a gun would lead to additional social opprobrium than in those cases when they aren’t drawn (Menace 2 Society didn’t invent this, I think Sam Houston did.)
  • “Pint glass” in my opinion is really just an instantiation of “Improvisational Weapon,” so in the altercation model by which people were being injured by pint glasses they will now be concussed rather than slashed, they will be pierced with pens and ripped with keys. I don’t think they will be injured more, just differently.

As a person who was purposefully hit above the eye with a beer bottle, I can anecdotally add that I never saw it coming. I saw he was holding the bottle but I never would have thought that my behavior would result in weaponized assault even as I was anticipating a fight.

Beer Friday: No Commentary Here!

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I’ll let  you determine why I think this post belongs on the website of a midwestern blogger on “Beer Friday.”

Beer Friday: Where I am now the Zizek of Zymurgy

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There’s a lot embedded in this little one off rambling by Alan McLeod–a lot of stuff to chew on. And I keep going back to it over and over again. He wonders as prelude to the rambling he quotes from a comment left at another blog, whether there’s anything to what he has to say. And I think there is. Too much really.

What is the quality and nature of the craft brew movement, how is success defined, is there a pop cultural achievement separable from “achievement” in a broader sense? All fine questions. I think the one Iam most enamored of though is the the one near the end where he sort of mumbles into his glass whether any achievement at all is possible or is there just a constant moving of the goal posts, redefining the movement exogenously and end0genously of its ever-shifting cultural and historical context.

There’s something Foulcautian in there and once that happens future beer blogging will be full of questions like do beers (re)present their own styles? To what extent does a beer present not just its own style but act as criticisms of all beers preceding? To what extent is each beer a failure of itself, de-tasted before it’s ever tasted? Is it possible that each beer carries in it a nightmarish disassembling of its constituent parts, rendering all subsequent beer tasting meaningless? Is this the endgame of our always-misguided search for objective mouthfuls of truth where there were only ever effervescent dreams now corrupted by too much th(dr)inking?

Am I destined to be the beer world’s Samuel Beckett?

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