User Comment Rodeo: The Saga Continues

Sometimes a habit becomes a tradition, and then everyone venerates or denigrates it as they see fit. Once this happens the only rational thing for a human being to do is to abandon whatever the fuss is being made about. Just concentrate on increasing the distance between yourself and that thing. You don't talk about it, you don't think about it, and most importantly, if you do it, you don't make a big deal about it.

Carbonated beverages are probably the third dumbest consumer beverage, coming in after bottled water and slightly behind energy drinks. When it comes to poisoning yourself I tend to think like the Greeks: hemlock or bust. Why stretch the suffering out over years and why pretend it doesn't harm you? What's wrong with alcoholism? Why do some people avoid the bottle but fall for the Full Throttle?

Fortunately I'm not here to answer those questions. Shit I barely even understand them, or the complex consumer economics research that goes into creating them. However we all know that the people who invented bottled water became incredibly rich shortly after the year 2000, and the people who mass marketed energy drinks became rich shortly thereafter. (These data for North American markets only). The grandfather product that all these imitators were imitating was the venerable Coca Cola, brand extraordinaire!

While cigarettes and booze were repeatedly demonized throughout the 1900s, Coca Cola took some mild flak for involving cocaine in their recipe. Profit flowed as freely as the drink flowed out of the iconic bottle's neck. Times were great. An hundred years later and things are still fantastic. Coke managed to survive the 80s, managed to survive all competition, and even managed to survive moralism and nutrito-facism. There is no stopping Coke, or any soft drink, and I think that's wrong.

All they do is sell you poison. Sugar liquor, by any other name, with ingredients you wouldn't throw on your worst enemy. Pepsi, Coke, independent manufacturers. When sugar was demonized in the 80s they all switched to carcinogenic sweeteners that people still drink and that have not been banned. You know when drinking gets serious? It gets serious when you mix white rum and Diet Coke, because all you have to do is add a tylenol to nuke your liver for good. When you recover, just blame the alcohol.




I've been writing profusely about this because a while ago I saw how very insidious righteousness is. I saw people of firm faith drink no alcohol but indulge in soft-drinks. I can't say I know which is worse for a person, because I'm not a doctor, but it's pretty stupid to avoid a gulp of wine in favor of Coca Cola. "If your body is a temple, drink ye no shite."

Then a few days later I saw a user comment discussion about soft drinks:

Clearly it was something that people loved to talk about. The old themes of moderation apply. Useful advice! These are consumers who are healthy, but who are nonetheless addicted to consumption. "Oh, but we are the heterotrophs, and must consume to live." Sure. It's all true.

The tinfoil hat brigade shows up as ever. The worst part? They're right. You can look up the many questionable choices Monsanto has made in its transition from 'good ole local company' to 'transnational monster without brakes'. If you ever try to start up a farm, and wonder why you can't get shit done without being pestered by lawyers, and why suppliers won't buy your crops, and why your livestock mysteriously die while getting anally reamed, look no further than your local out-of-control agribusiness committee.

And stevia really does exist. It's probably already been grafted into lettuce by a transnational, though it wouldn't surprise me if what they really did was introduce a virus into the drinking water supply that made it so that people pissed out  a certain amount of 'steviosides' which could be reprocessed into bottled products by convenient and ecologically friendly sewer substations. Congratulations, morally righteous uptight ass-artists, you've fucked the whole world up because you never saw evil for what it was. A drunk is pathetic, but generally conscious (no pun!) of the toll of drinking. A soft-drink drinker who does not drink alcohol on moral grounds is morally inconsistent.

As always, the gentle debaser escapes into the dusk, ready to sell another valueless nostrum to the imbeciles over the ridge. We still live in the age of snake-oil salesmen, but their pitch is too good to ignore now.