24 August 2005

Canberra Needs Better Social Lubricant

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The CT has this story on Canberran’s losing touch with their neighbours. It talks of the social exclusion and fragmentation of the Canberra community due in part by our highly educated women having fewer babies, childrenbeing the usual way of bringing communities together.

I’d like to suggest a solution to the problem, firstly shutting down the TV signals in Canberra and secondly more neighbourhood pubs. What better lubricant could there be than beer?

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I’m going to argue the pleasurable social effects of cheap beer till the cows come home.

Em, think of the viking longhouse situation, women feeding children, older children tearing around the place like tornado’s, males together drinking ales and talking about when Valad chopped his arm off and sprayed the enemy with his blood. Overall a very social atmosphere, warm, cosy and I’m sure a great many interactions were produced, regardless of child in tow or not 🙂

Having babies has totally killed my social life. CT obviously didn’t think about it! Who has time to meet the neighbours and be nice to others when your waking hours are spent cleaning someone else’s bum and making airplane noises while aiming spoonfuls of slop at their face?

Absent Diane7:25 pm 24 Aug 05

Im a big big fan of all these ideas… cheap, booze, more pubs, MILFs, but if they could get rid of the negative effects of ecstasy then that is the feinenen ticket or what that little irish runt was sayin

You can certainly make a real social policy argument for having booze in bars cheaper than to drink at home.

More supervised, more social, certainly community building.

Depending on how much is drunk? It can be family planning or birth control :).

el – beer goes down, the rest will follow to remain competitive.

Indi – no offence bud, just using it to emphasise my point. (I seriously thought I’d get flamed for the stanhope comment over that one)

Mael – I’m very sorry to have told the story of the ‘queue trouble’…sigh, I guess a it was all too much to cope with.

I’m all for giving the neighbours a wave and a g’day when I see them. I keep half an eye on their kids when they play in the streets and throw their ball back over the fence.

That being said I don’t want to feel inhibited if I feel like breaking into song at three in the morning. I want to be able to pull weeds in my yard without it turning into a neihbourhood watch meeting. I want to be able to pull into my do my own thing without fear that it will become common knowledge to the whole frickin’ poplulation of this town.

It’s got nothing to do with occupation, drink of choice, industry or being a ‘wider range of people’. It’s got to do with needing time and space to wind back and do your own thing.

Besides, you haven’t met my neighbours.

What about us rum drinkers?

As opposed to methanol, propanol, or any of the other ‘ols? Laboratory grade (90%)? My kind of man!

Well Howard doesn’t drink beer, it’s to fair dinkum and crude, I heard he drinks ethanol cocktails.

Ah beer – the bread and the circus in one package.

I’m hearing your arguments and saying to myself – cheap beer is the solution, now what was the question again ?

If anything, a happier Maelinar is a more pleasant Maelinar, and therefore more likely to be friendlier when I meet some asshole in the supermarket who thinks they can get into the 8 items or less aisle with 11 items. I might even let them get away with it if beer was 50 cents a pint. I’d be that happy.

If somebody wanted to talk to me, I’d have something to talk about, like; ‘remember when beer was so expensive and pubs really sucked like being caught in Bali with a pack of gum, an empty wallet and 2,000 ecxstasy pills’?

Now beat me black and blue with a policemans truncheon, but I’d even consider voting for Stan the Man if he reduced beer to 50 cents.

Afterall, cheap beer, and of course disarming the populace, is the great social panadol enjoyed by most white governments of the world today.

I’m with bulldog – I had to change my local supermarket once because they got all “friendly friendly” on me and buying a carton of milk turned into a serious D&M.

More’s the fact that folk like me choose to indulge stereotypes, save the cognitive overload and be antisocial pricks the majority of the time.

We need more industries, wider range of people aside from public service blanks.

Well I’m happy to say I chat with my neighbours, drink with them, and they’re always calling me over to help shift furniture (particularly the MILFs), push trucks with flat batteries etc.

We have a good community spirit happening. One of the things that shits me about Canberra is that people don’t want to stick their head over the fence for a yarn with the neighbours. People are too insular.

Cheap booze and decent sporting teams will make the difference to population increase, but let’s not go overboard with the neighbourhood love thing.

More pubs my ass. (Sorry Thumper but higher agenda at work)

Where I come from cheap beer is what brings people together, and creates more babies.

Don’t care if there’s only 1 pub in Canberra, as long as it served beer at $0.50 a pint, you’d be an incredibly popular government, you’d definetly get more babies, and the community would definetly be closer together.

Heck I might even consider car pooling with all the residents on my street as long as I wasn’t deputy driver all the time.

The problem with jumping on the ‘getting to know your neighbour’ band-wagon is that I suspect that a lot of Canberrans, like me, enjoy the anonymity of the current arrangement.

Let me explain: As anyone who has spent any time in Canberra will attest, you only have to speak to someone for forty seconds before you know not only who they are but also who they’re related too, who they went to school with, who they’ve worked with etc.

For once, let Canberrans enjoy a sense of ‘I can do what the hell I want without it getting back to people I know’. It’s healthier that way.

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