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Cake day: August 15th, 2023

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  • Marijuana was banned to target minorities, but alcohol prohibition mostly was repealed not because white people like alcohol (white people instituted prohibition in the first place, after all), but because alcohol is stupidly easy to make from a wide variety of substances so most cultures around the world produce some kind of alcohol with their local crops. You can use pretty much anything sugary: fruit (wine), honey (mead), and grains like rice and wheat (sake & beer). It is really hard to ban a substance when half the foods in our diet can be turned into that substance if you let it sit in a jar or bucket in your closet for a few weeks.

    Prohibition was repealed primarily because it was a futile effort and with alcohol being banned, very strong distilled spirits were the economical way to discreetly transport and serve alcohol since it is easier to hide a few bottles of liquor from authorities searching your truck or business than to hide large barrels of low ABV drinks like humans had been brewing and drinking for millennia. It is also a lot easier for people to drink themselves sick with distilled drinks, so ultimately it was decided that it was safer to make alcohol legal and regulated instead of having it still plentiful, but getting people sicker and funding criminal empires. It’s a lot easier to ban one plant than to ban every food source with sugar in it, but the marijuana prohibition has clearly led to many of the same problems as alcohol prohibition did.

    There are still people who would love to ban alcohol if they feasibly could. Many places in the US still have local alcohol bans, I currently have to travel two counties away to legally purchase liquor and one county away from home to purchase beer or wine. Prohibition only ended on a federal level.




  • Zitronensaft@feddit.detoData Is Beautiful@lemmy.mlNew gender gap
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    10 months ago

    Have you not noticed the rise in groups like Proud Boys, Patriot Front, and the Three Percenters? Patriot Front has people on overpasses waving signs in my area and they are in the news several times per year for marching in different cities. Just the other day they were recorded in New York City, unable to figure out how to swipe metro cards to get into the subway, so dozens of them charged on through without paying, so it isn’t like they are staying holed up in rural militia compounds out of sight. Far right extremism is both active and on the rise locally and globally.