Violent, lively and brash, taverns were everywhere in early colonial America | Hacker News Reader

Violent, lively and brash, taverns were everywhere in early colonial America

aeon.co

120 pointssamclemens93 comments

> By 1775, however, sporadic rioting and violence in and around taverns transitioned into outright war when a group of ‘minute men’ gathered at the Buckman Tavern in Lexington, Massachusetts on 19 April 1775, just before murdering more than 70 British troops.

Murder of the British is a strange take on the events of Lexington and Concord. The author appears to be scraping.

Is the assertion that the taverns caused public life to take a different course than it would have otherwise, or just that they were the place where public life occurred?

> Murder of the British is a strange take on the events of Lexington and Concord.

The outbreak of the American Revolution in 1775 can fairly be called an act of violence. The American colonies in the early days of the conflict were pretty evenly split between loyalists and revolutionaries. The latter ultimately won the day in large part by burning down loyalists’ houses or tarring and feathering them, sending some of the loyalists into exile in Canada or the Caribbean and encouraging others to stay low lest they be attacked, too.

These facts don’t get talked about much in the American school system, because like in most countries the public school system seeks to perpetuate a national mythology for the sake of civic unity. However, revolutions anywhere in the world tend to initially play out as a civil war of sorts among the country’s own people, and the American Revolution was no exception.

Nobody is doubting it was an act of violence. The oddity is that they're calling it an act of murder as opposed to an act of war. Murder sounds like a bunch of criminals, which is a really one sided take. The british soldiers were there to destroy colonial military supplies. It may be technically correct, but you don't hear about how the GIs murdered a bunch of Nazis on the beaches of Normandy or whatever other war suits your fancy. Save for the particularly one sided conflicts.

I got history from american public education, and while half of it was garbage, and half of it was dull internal politics of isolationism, there was no ambiguity that the revolutionary war was a bloody conflict.

I'm not a historian but isn't there some ambiguity here? If war hadn't already been declared by the relevant governments, you can't be killing in the name of war.

The British troops had set out to disarm the local militia. I have a hard time seeing how something that began with armed infantry units confronting each other at Lexington was not a war.

And by the way, when the British seized a Spanish fleet--which had imagined itself to be neutral--during the Napoleonic wars, their government stated that the United Kingdom had never been in the habit of starting wars with a declaration.

This is just semantics, but I think not. If you're attacking a military unit to achieve a military objective, murder feels inappropriate. In my opinion, murder tends:

* to be done by an individual, not a group

* tends to happen to one, or a few victims. It's odd to describe someone as murdering 70 people at once.

* tends to imply the victim was not professionally engaged in such a way that their death in those circumstances is not a plausible concern

* the motive is not political, else it is an assassination

You don’t want to open up that can of worms. Thousands of war deaths would qualify as murders if you used a declaration as the deciding factor.

What's the danger in "opening that can of worms"? IMHO the world might be a better place if there were a lot less killing, whether it's in the context of a war or not. Some killings throughout history are certainly justifiable or excusable, but it seems far more dangerous to me to stick one's head in the sand and avoid reflecting on whether each killing really needed to happen, or if the victim could reasonably have been spared without significant risk of harm or jeopardizing the larger cause (presuming the cause itself is just). "Murder" doesn't seem like an unreasonable label in the latter case. (Whether and how the killer should be punished in such situations is a separate question that I'm not taking a position on here.)

The danger is there are plenty of rebellions, revolutions and other "positive" conflicts where wars were never declared. You're basically going to be painting the people that took part in conflicts like the American revolution, Irish War of Independence, Indian War of Independence, Cuban Revolution, etc as "murders".

Well, back in the day wars did usually start with a declaration of war.

> It may be technically correct, but you don't hear about how the GIs murdered a bunch of Nazis on the beaches of Normandy or whatever other war suits your fancy. Save for the particularly one sided conflicts.

That's because the nazis lost. If they had won, as Robert McNamara said, we'd be called murderers and criminals and our leaders would have been hanged for crimes against humanity.

Not only did the british call the revolutionaries murderers, they also called them terrorists since the revolutionaries were attacking and terrorizing the loyalists. Ironic huh? One man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist.

As strange as it sounds, in an alternate universe where the brits won, the history books probably describe the revolutionaries as murderers and terrorists. Can you imagine how odd it would be to view Benedict Arnold as a hero and George Washington as the villain?

> there was no ambiguity that the revolutionary war was a bloody conflict.

And there certainly was no ambuigity about who were the good guys and who were the bad guys.

History is just one part of nation building propaganda. The people in charge ( usually the winners ) get to write it. Fundamentally, there are no good guys or bad guys, just winners and losers in history.

> That's because the nazis lost. If they had won, as Robert McNamara said, we'd be called murderers and criminals and our leaders would have been hanged for crimes against humanity.

Perhaps this is just an American thing, but I wouldn't call the Nazi soldiers killing American soldiers murderers either. The holocaust is murder, if not superceded by the term genocide. Something can be an unjust killing and still not be murder.

As a Canadian: A tar and feather illustration is among the most memorable from my childhood.

Yes, important to keep in mind that revolutions always have their roots in civil war, and that's always brutal.

They were presented in my education, though mine wasn't a public education.

They were presented in mine, though New York being the center of Loyalist America probably had something to do with it.

Interesting! I wonder how it has influenced political parties etc. to the present?

I don't think it has influenced political parties per se, because New York has had so much immigration that descendants of the original colonial population is a negligible percentage. (That, and many Loyalists fled to other British colonies to escape persecution.)

Where this shows up is maybe general political philosophy. New York has a strong tradition of concentrated government, with Alexander Hamilton behind proposals for a US Senate with lifetime appointment and a central bank. And the state executive is unusually strong and the most celebrated figures in state government, elected or otherwise, are known for wielding their powers in nearly dictatorial ways. (Andrew Cuomo is currently trying to emulate this, invoking the images of former members of government like Robert Moses and Nelson Rockefeller. And yes, that Rockefeller.)

> As is still so often the case when white, powerful men felt threatened, they banded together to create, and separate, the other.

What, this is a behavior specific to white, powerful men?

What went down in and around Lexington and Concord was a more serious crime than murder, it was an act of rebellion.

The author appears committed to a particular affect which seems out of context with the history he presents.

It’s not. In Bangladesh, we precisely identify the town or village ethnic Bangladeshis come from, but have a single word to refer to all non-Bangladeshis (“bideshi,” meaning “foreigner”).

The article reads like the author wrote it, and then sprinkled in “white men” randomly wherever it fit grammatically. Maybe it helped get the thing published.

I once described the caste system as “racism invented by people who look alike” and my girlfriend from Madya Pradesh (Central Indian Province) thought that was very apt.

Humans are great, until you let them form groups, once that happens you’ll get tribalism and prejudice almost every time as far as I can tell.

Even sports’ fans will beat eachother up sometimes.

I'm increasingly hearing the idea (from Hindu nationalists?) that the caste system was the invention of the British, not anything indigenous. If anyone's in the know, I'd be curious to hear what's broadly accepted among historians nowadays.

The scholarly opinion of this question has been quite dynamic over the last century.

Nowadays, the consensus seems to be that Caste was definitely a thing before the Raj took over, but it was more fluid and regional, and was not the centralized, static hierarchy it is today. There were other power structures (feudal, religious, etc) that were not colored by caste, and competed with caste to triangulate people.

The British Raj took calculated steps to centralize, formalize, and entrench the caste system, shaping it into a form that is recognizable today, where it is strictly tied to opportunity and wealth.

It’s worth noting that is a common pattern of colonialism: to divide the colonized people against themselves along arbitrary, existing lines and elevate an arbitrary group, aligning the interest of that group with the interests of the colonizers. It’s a timeless and tragic human story.

I’ve only started researching this subject, so if anybody would like to correct or qualify anything I’ve said, I welcome it.

> It’s worth noting that is a common pattern of colonialism: to divide the colonized people against themselves along arbitrary, existing lines and elevate an arbitrary group, aligning the interest of that group with the interests of the colonizers. It’s a timeless and tragic human story.

The Tutsi and Hutu of Rwanda immediately come to mind.

It can’t be a British invention. My understanding of Bangladeshi history is that we converted to Islam to escape the caste system. That predated British rule by hundreds of years.

What classical Hinduism had was the varna system, where you were a member of a particular varna according your jobs and qualifications (for eg, bhramans were supposed to be learners and teachers of scriptures, analogous to professors and phd's today). And even this varna system was debated and discusses throughout classical Hinduism, as with every other idea in Hinduism was.

But overtime, especially when people of different cultures and languages interact, things can become twisted and lost in incorrect translations, whether through genuine error,any inherent biases of the translator or malicious intent.

And also overtime, cultures can evolve in response or in interactions with outside forces (especially the Islamic and later European invaders over a 1000 year period) that would seek to implement their own hierarchies and systems. Infact, the indigenous Indians were treated as second class citizens in empires established by outside invaders (Jaziya collection is common example of this).

But what generally makes the system as being attributed to the British is due to the Divide and Conquer strategy implemented by the British. Dividing the populace becomes a lot easier if you can mutate or deepen existing lines in the system.

But truthfully, the exact lineage is very hard to find, especially for a culture that is not only 5000+ years old but has also been interacting with and assimilating just about every other global culture during that 5000 years period (Indians have been interacting with everyone from Chinese, SE Asians, Romans, Greeks, Persians, Mesopotomians, Africans, Arabs, Ancient Egyptians, Turkic Nomads, etc)

This isn't my area, but my understanding is that like most things related to history (especially Indian history), it's complicated. There are a lot of very old antecedents, but the modern caste system probably "originated" with the later Mughals. The British Raj took those scattered, vaguely related systems and codified them into what we recognize today.

Buddhism started in India and from the beginning it criticized castes, so yes they were there and they were not fair

http://www.buddhanet.net/e-learning/dharmadata/fdd53.htm

Is that label typically applied to anyone not an ethnic Bangladeshi, or to people who aren't citizens of Bangladesh? E.g. if there's a Bangladeshi in India, would they be bideshi? Conversely, if there's someone who moved to Bangladesh from Pakistan but are current citizens, do they get that label? (this is to satisfy my own curiosity about identity formation on the subcontinent, not accidentally stumbling on some hot button political issue)

In my experience it is applied to people who are not ethnically Bangladeshi, or who are but were not raised in Bangladesh. E.g. https://scopeblog.stanford.edu/2020/01/15/speaking-the-langu...

> In Bengali, the term bideshi is used to describe a foreigner. The literal translation is "without land." This past summer, during six weeks conducting research on a global health project in Bangladesh, I heard the term often -- in reference to me.

> It felt strange, as I was born in Bangladesh and lived there until I was 3. To me, Bangladesh is where I can easily blend into a crowd. Bengali was the first language I learned. I visit often to see family. I feel a sense of ownership and belonging in Bangladesh that I have not always felt in America.

Citizenship isn’t particularly meaningful in Bangladesh. You can’t become Bangladeshi by acquiring citizenship.

> Citizenship isn’t particularly meaningful in Bangladesh. You can’t become Bangladeshi by acquiring citizenship.

This is also true of most European countries, FWIW.

Maybe a better qualifier is dominant culture men in a society because I’ve seen that across the world. Rarely do non dominant cultures band together effectively. But this is all anecdote and conjecture on my part.

It's odd how many people who share this anti-Whitism express this sentiment in the very same breath in which they denigrate, demonise or humiliate Whites.

Either they don't actually believe it and are just zealously taking the opportunity to revel in their socially-acceptable racism, or they're supporting this trend I'm seeing of Whites becoming ethnically conscious and collectivising in the face of the hostility they are being exposed to.

It's probably the former, but the latter is the effect regardless.

Exactly. They denigrate one racial group by point out how they were more apt to denigrate another racial group.

So they are basically doing the same thing they are accusing the group of.

He has some, ah, unique takes scattered throughout:

> American forces – well, the French and Spanish forces, along with the sputtering Americans – managed to win the American Revolution in 1783.

Make no mistake, the French forces were key, but to lay the victory at the feet of the Spanish ahead of the Americans throws the whole piece into question.

With the Spanish getting a mention, it seems odd that the Germans/Hessians don't. They were very nearly as numerous as soldiers from the British Army and were more numerous than Loyalist american troops.

wait till you learn how the same stories are told in different countries. its different everywhere.

...like when you see German museums talking over and over about the "period of migration". First time I saw that it took me a while to understand what they were saying...

"Oh, that's what the Anglosphere calls //the barbarian invasions//".

(...or, I think every country has a statue of its native son who invented the television. Some are people I'd never heard of.)

The naming has nothing to do with Germany but is a common term describing migratory movements that where in part invasions into the Roman Empire, no all of those migrations into Roman territory where violent though. That invasion connotation seems to have carried over into present time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migration_Period

By 1780 it was a matter of when and not if. The American people had been so thoroughly brutalized by the British at that point that there was certainly going to be ongoing violence as long as there were British soldiers around to shoot at. So then the British options are genocide or wash their hands of it. And the Bible says you're not supposed to commit genocide against other Christians let alone people who might be British subjects (also you need them alive to work to pay taxes and the population needs to exist as a hedge against French influence) so since that option isn't really on the table the question at that point is at what point do the British wash their hands of it.

Cant treat them like the irish, if the island is to far away..

On Virginia Avenue NW in Washington, DC, there is a statue of one Galvez, who led Spanish forces in the Mississippi Valley area, fighting against the British. But that was a long way from the main theatre of operations.

Agree. Remember the British were already under order to raid the towns for supplies ('powder and ball'). In Lexington, the militia had made a show of force, following which gunfire was exchanged, and the British officers authorized a "huzzah" in celebration of the death of several militia members.

Quite a stretch to call resisting an army under orders to seize munitions by force "murder" per say, this was a clear act of self defense.

Even if you don't side with the militia, by any reasonably modern code of ethics and rules of engagement "resisting a uniformed army by force" is completely and totally fair game. Armies exist to project state violence. Sometimes people take them up on the offer.

I'd be interested to see if anyone applied this argument to Al-Quaeida in Iraq against coalition forces.

> As is still so often the case when white, powerful men felt threatened, they banded together to create, and separate, the ‘other’.

This was gratuitous too. Out-group formation happens across all cultures regardless of ethnicity or sex.

This even online where sex and ethnicity have no value but where topic groups or online clique’s are formed.

One of my great-grandfather's stories was that soon after immigrating from Poland he and his father found work mining coal in Indian Country (soon to become Oklahoma). The family lived in a shack abutting the local tavern. Everybody (including at least 3 children) slept on the floor due to the frequent bullets coming from the tavern.

I've been reading The Big Bonanza by Dan De Quille, and he relates how early miners at the Comstock Lode would surround their beds with stacks of sandbags to protect themselves from stray bullets.

TBH in many places in the US you still have regular shootings, and bullets also do get into homes. Residential homes are also built way more crappily now than the log cabins of old times. So nothing much changed about the shooting part. Compare it to Europe which has deweaponized itself.

This isn't true. Shootings are very, very rare. And they are concentrated in certain types of places (e.g., poor urban ghetto) such that the parts of the country that aren't these places have vanishingly small probabilities of being hurt by a shooting.

Gun murders in the U.S. are a very low percentage of deaths (0.39%) and preventable deaths (~1.1%, there's some disagreement about what's "preventable"). That's 0.0036% of the population per year gun-murdered. That this statistic is 3x some other country's is irrelevant because 3x a small number is still a small number. If your goal is to prevent untimely deaths, focus on boring things like falls, car accidents, and diabetes.

> And they are concentrated in certain types of places (e.g., poor urban ghetto) such that the parts of the country that aren't these places have vanishingly small probabilities of being hurt by a shooting.

I said "many places" not "all places". Indeed, shootings are concentrated to a few areas with high crime rates. Doesn't mean that people living in those areas don't have to watch out. I replied to an anecdote about people living close to such a tavern having to watch out.

As for gun murders being a rare death cause, indeed if you average over all age ranges they are. However, for younger people they are a major concern. CDC data [0] lists homicides in the top 4 reasons for death for age groups from 1 until 35. Which weapons are used for these homicides? A different statistic tells us most times it's guns [1].

And yes, focusing on falls, car accidents and diabetes would be awesome. But preventing gun deaths is important too.

[0]: https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/leading_causes_of_dea...

[1]: 6.4k murder victims in 2019 from handguns, 3.3k from unspecified firearms, 1.5k from knives or cutting instruments, all other causes below 1k. https://www.statista.com/statistics/195325/murder-victims-in...

> I said "many places" not "all places"... Doesn't mean that people living in those areas don't have to watch out.

I agree that there is some non-zero number of people in the U.S. who have to watch out for gun murder. The point I'm trying to make is that they make up a really small proportion of the population. Anecdotes are fun.

> As for gun murders being a rare death cause, indeed if you average over all age ranges they are. However, for younger people they are a major concern. CDC data [0] lists homicides in the top 4 reasons for death for age groups from 1 until 35. Which weapons are used for these homicides? A different statistic tells us most times it's guns [1].

You're right that, among untimely deaths, gun murders move up the ranking if you're looking at young people. But this misses the main thing, which is that untimely deaths of any kind are super rare among young people, even rarer than overall. Why should we care if gun murders make up 50% of untimely deaths among young people if the likelihood of untimely death is sufficiently low? Your line of reasoning seems to indicate a 10% chance of untimely death with 1 percentage point of that being gun murder is preferable to a 1% chance of untimely death with 0.5 percentage points of that being gun murder.

As an aside, thinking about this (and many other things) in terms of ordinal rankings will often lead you down the wrong path. "Top four reasons" tells us nothing at all. If there are 5,000 categories constructed and they are roughly evenly distributed, "top four" tells us nothing. If 99% of the probability mass is in #1, "top four" tells us nothing. It's like the classic "The U.S. is [embarassingly] #44 in math achievement". This means nothing if the top 80 countries are tightly clustered around 98 math achievement points.

> But preventing gun deaths is important too. My point is that it isn't important. There are much, much bigger fish to fry from a public health perspective. The marginal benefit of throwing one dollar at "gun violence" is << the marginal benefit of throwing that same buck at something like trying to get construction workers to wear proper safety harnesses.

Getting hit with a bullet isn't the only risk of living in an area with community violence. We're not robots who can coolly base our response to danger on a statistical risk assessment. Living with community violence has serious psychological consequences which result in significant, measurable problems for those who endure it... particularly children.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2700237/

Unsurprisingly, the communities who most frequently endure violence are not a representative sample of the US population— they are drastically more likely to be poor and not white. Black communities are particularly subject to this violence, and considering that discrimination against them was not only legal, but legally mandated until around a decade before the first millennials were born, the dominant culture within the US has a moral obligation to address this violence because it's responsible for its creation.

https://www.ajpmonline.org/article/S0749-3797(18)31907-X/ful...

I encourage you to make your argument with numbers. Even if I end up not agreeing, it will be a much better argument. I agree that there are downstream effects of violence, and it's a good point. It's still going to be dwarfed by all the boring stuff (e.g. diabetes). The fact that you think that the "dominant culture" (which one is that? "White" isn't a culture) has a "moral obligation" is, I think, just a result of how you've evolved to think about interpersonal violence through a moral lens and diabetes through a public health lens. If your goals have to do with "saving lives", or increasing the number of hours lived, or preventing unexpected deaths, even among specifically Black Americans, gun violence isn't the road to go down.

Painting the picture of violence as being visited upon e.g. Black communities by the world, or Whites, or the "dominant culture" is incorrect. The vast majority of murders in the Black population are committed by Black people. A black man is ~15x more likely to murder than an American who is not a black man. You can do some contortions to locate the causality elsewhere (like through a vague cultural legacy of slavery), but the evidence is overwhelming that violence is endemic to Black cultures in the U.S.

The sooner we all admit that to ourselves and start working on actual solutions that address the real problem, rather than pretending the problem is things like "they're poor and oppressed", the sooner we will all be able to help them build a better world for themselves. There are many poor, and possibly oppressed (if you are poor can you not be oppressed?) communities that do not have this problem of endemic violence, which is great evidence that the problem isn't one of mere poverty. And it's important to remember, too, that no U.S. populations are poor on a world scale. We're so rich our poor are too fat.

Statistically, for kids, the dominant causes of death are car accidents and drowning. The rest you can pretty much not worry about. Another way to look at it is if you read about it in the paper, it is rare enough you don't need to worry about it.

> As an aside, thinking about this (and many other things) in terms of ordinal rankings will often lead you down the wrong path. "Top four reasons" tells us nothing at all. If there are 5,000 categories constructed and they are roughly evenly distributed, "top four" tells us nothing. If 99% of the probability mass is in #1, "top four" tells us nothing.

That is correct, but please note that it's still a significant component. In the 15-24 age group, the top 1 cause has 13.4k deaths, the top 2 has 5.7k, and homicide has 5.1k. That's not very far away in relative terms.

> but please note that it's still a significant component.

I guess my overall point is it's not important. Even if the ordinal ranking is informative in this case (your argument), the overall likelihood of any kind of death is so low that we shouldn't care very much about the ranking.

>. And they are concentrated in certain types of places (e.g., poor urban ghetto) such that the parts of the country that aren't these places have vanishingly small probabilities of being hurt by a shooting.

And even then they are basically concentrated around illegal parts of the economy. Drug traffickers, pimps, etc. can't use the courts and the police so when it comes to settling disputes they have to DIY their own threats of violence that other people usually outsource to the state.

This is an interesting thought. Sounds correct to me. It seems like ending the War on Drugs would be a conceptually simple way of fixing most of this.

It's a big factor; legalizing soft drugs and managing hard drugs (like methadone clinics) will definitely help. Social safety nets to help prevent people going poor. Quality education for everyone. Quality housing for everyone.

There's a lot of things the US can do to massively improve the quality of life for everyone, it just means funneling some of the trillions it puts into the military and "the economy" (like the trillion that vaporized within minutes last march) elsewhere. I mean they can solve a lot of people's problems with a trillion dollars.

Afaik, personal conflict and relationships are most common reasons for murders. It is less likely to be business nowdays and more likely that someone violent with poor impulse control got angry at friend again.

This was my understanding too

Aren't rural areas also the ones with more murders per capita and more shooting deaths, mostly due to large prevalence of guns and bad economic situation?

As in, the urban ghetto is often stated, but rural parts do come up in stats quite a lot too.

Compare it to what? People are going to people. Just because your continent doesn't have the same gun laws as the US doesn't mean there's any less crime - gun related or otherwise. There are quite a few Europeans that wish they had guns so they weren't stabbed, dashed with acid, or beheaded.

> There are quite a few Europeans that wish they had guns so they weren't stabbed, dashed with acid, or beheaded.

There isn't a pro-gun-rights movement to speak of in the UK. Not sure about the rest of Europe.

As JacobSuperslav said, acid attacks and beheadings are extremely rare events in Europe, and aren't at all representative of the average murder. This is why they make international news. Stabbings are of course more common.

acids and beheadings? these happened a few times in the last decade on the entire continent

Stabbing is fairly frequent though, given that you can use basic tools or kitchen utensils for it.

The main point still stands though; guns don't cause violence and death, people do. It's the attitude and circumstances, not the tools.

The qualitative nature of our tools enable and facilitate quantitative outcomes.

Europe! Deweaponized! HAH!

Compare the murder rates of Detroit MI, Cheyenne WY, London, and Shanghai, and then tell me which city has a weapon problem and which city has a culture problem, or both!

Murder rates (per 100k people): Detroit: 38.8 (2018); Cheyenne: 3.1 (2018); London: 1.84 (2019); China: 1.0 (2011);

Not sure where you are going with this, but I'd say the answer is Detroit??

I’m confused by this comment too. Why Detroit? It has the third highest rate of any US city in 2017. Was that the point?

For comparison the US national rate in 2019 was 5 and NYC (more comparable to London and Shanghai) has a rate of 2.8.

Yeah, look ... I like the 2A too and don’t think guns cause higher murder rates. But there is no data to support the narrative that Europe and other countries are more dangerous in some way because they don’t have guns.

Edit: To be clear, there is no evidence that they are more dangerous. They look safer.

I think "culture problem" is code for something else given that one of the other cities was also US.

NYC is smoothed out by a population of millions of people. Take a look at DC... Take a look at the average small American town. Most have 0 murders, or 1 or 2. Not everywhere is like Chicago and Detroit with hundreds of murders a year

"Europeans" (everyone from Ireland to Moldova?) are constantly talking about how safe their countries are, but the reality is that in America, not everywhere is Detroit or Baltimore. You guys are literally falling victim to fake news.

The average small town will have a maximum of 1 or 2 murders per year. Cheyenne has only 60,000 people.

Incidentally, if you think all this moralistic hand-wringing was centuries ago, famed SF nightclub DNA Lounge was in 2009 charged with, and I quote, "running a disorderly house injurious to the public welfare and morals".

https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2009/02/13.html

(Note: jwz doesn't like HN referrers, so c&p into a separate tab)

> famed SF nightclub DNA Lounge

For those not familiar with the DNA Lounge story:

- jwz was an early programmer at Netscape who made several million

- he wanted to get into entertainment, but when you buy a bar in SF, it comes without any permits, so you essentially have to rebuild and re-permit everything

- the SF Police doesn't want to bother policing bars, so the Chief fights you tooth and nail at every city council meeting. Because lazy.

- meanwhile, the property is in an industrial area, so the early closing times and noise ordinances are specious.

You can read his web site for the full story, but after reading it you will never want to open a business in SF.

> but when you buy a bar in SF, it comes without any permits, so you essentially have to rebuild and re-permit everything

I remain forever amazed that SF manages to retain the aura of coolness, while being anything but.

My first thought was NIMBYs as I used to live somewhere where people started buying properties near the college bar scene and then trying to find ways to get them shut down, but this makes sense as well.

i would enjoy a VR game where i could sit in an old tavern while i drink an actual beer

I mean that sounds pretty easy to set up on your own. Just some VRML or VRchat plus one of the "pub" discord servers (with VRchat you wouldn't need the discord part.)

I can confirm that drinking together in VR pub worlds is a very popular activity in VRChat.

This is basically Westworld

Cal Newport recently talked about this feeling on his blog [0]. These 'ambient' experiences have the power to be very deep with VR/AR.

[0] https://www.calnewport.com/blog/2020/11/23/on-technology-and...

Even better, just make a beer hat add on for your VR headset

I believe this was referenced as a VR game demo in the show Silicon Valley.

Which one?

https://youtu.be/S8MAV9jhf04

if I can have a scotch, I'm in!

Not too far from where I grew up in Downeast Maine is a Tavern in that was built in 1770. It's where some locals planned to capture a British Lt., which ultimately led to the first naval engagement of the Revolutionary war. [1]

It's website is.... nostalgic....[2]

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burnham_Tavern

[2] https://burnhamtavern.com/

I read this article while drinking a Samuel Adams American IPA. Sweet, sweet, hoppy irony.

Pardon my pedantry, but that’s coincidence, not irony.

Rebel scum!

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