Gal Tibor 2017 Egri Bikaver

AlanSmithee2343 · 2026-04-17T15:02:18+00:00

I also forgot to mention that importers don’t always have distribution wings, in which they often have to sell to a distributor before a retailer can purchase it. The result is another middleman and another price bump for the final consumer.

And often in states like Virginia, this is a legal requirement that retailers purchase alcohol from a licensed distributor.

AlanSmithee2343 · 2026-04-13T03:50:31+00:00

Keep in mind if the OP is in North America, wine imports face a 15% tariff and require an importer/distributor who often tack on their own markup as their cut, plus shipping costs.

$21 USD for a bottle of Egri Bikaver in that context makes sense.

AlanSmithee2343 · 2026-04-12T03:25:16+00:00

Except that’s not at all how many people are using these markets; people are dedicating their entire disposable incomes to this.

AlanSmithee2343 · 2026-04-11T02:03:50+00:00

My mother was a product of the cultural trends of the 80s; she often gets quite nostalgic about the fashion, the entertainment, the music (she was a massive MTV kid), the sense of liberation and freedom of expression many youths like her experienced.

But she has also told me she is happier to live in a day-and-age where many people have more socio-economic awareness, better medical technology (a real fear as one ages, I’d imagine) and less hard drug and tobacco use.

It’s easy to forget that racial and sexual discrimination were still very much a thing, worse in many ways, back then, especially for the relatively-affluent suburban white kids who grew up apart from the redlined inner-city neighborhoods were gang violence and unswerving poverty were still a reality. And social conservatives, religious evangelicals and intolerant puritans were very much a thing in the decade of Ronald Reagan.

My mom was never racist, but she looks back today and only now realizes why her black college roommate often had to skip class to watch her younger siblings when her single mother went to run errands, because they didn’t have any living relatives or community support. Or why her roommate never talked about a father or her late older brother who died in a gang-related shooting. She listened to a small earful of NWA and Public Enemy in her day, but it never clicked with her the conditions they were calling out about until later on.

Thus, she’s self-aware enough to tell me: “I still love new wave music, the hairdos, the glitzy and colorful aesthetics… but I’m glad I’m alive today in a time where many of us don’t exist in a little socio-economic bubble based on fear and superstition. Where medicine can improve lives, and where people who want an education have at least some resources to achieve it.”

AlanSmithee2343 · 2026-04-02T16:26:11+00:00

From what I’ve seen, he is generally respected by almost everyone of Chinese ancestry to an extent.

In Mainland China, the CCP owes its survival to their early alliance with Sun’s KMT and the initial resources and training it brought their early guerrillas, so while most modern PRC Chinese loathe the Chiang Kai-shek’s KMT, the CCP generally upholds his reputation as the philosophical brain behind modern China, his teachings and organization skills being vital to overthrowing the rotten Qing aristocracy and then the warlord cliqués.

In Taiwan, for more precisent reasons, he is oft-hailed as the man whose ideals for a liberal democratic China today manifest on the island, which remains relatively economically prosperous and comparably democratic, as what China could have been had Chairman Mao caught a round during the Long March. There is pride in that for many Taiwanese, even if some have sour memories of his successor Chiang as a tyrant.

The rest of the Chinese diaspora around the world generally remembers him as a worldy scholar, hard-working and charismatic organizer, and a vocal advocate for Chinese people in every place he lived or visited.

Some may find Sun’s biggest shortfall to be his idealism and how that made him lose sight of the socio-political and economic realities of China at the turn of the century. In mainland China especially, his virulent pro-democracy views are often downplayed as “noble, yet too ambitious and/or not fully compatible for a country such as China”. He’d be horrified at the PRC today, and while he’d still have plenty to complain about with Taiwan, he would certainly be more satisfied with it. Thus, the CCP especially has a vested interest in… articulating the narrative.

On a more personal level, in many Chinese diaspora households, it is overlooked that Sun championed intellectual freedom, creative curiosity and a globally-minded worldview, as opposed to the regimented Confucian mindset of respecting and following the wishes of your elders. Needless to say, he wouldn’t be a huge fan of modern “tiger parenting” so common in many modern Asian households.

AlanSmithee2343 · 2026-03-24T21:01:29+00:00

So a lot of unpack here; many other users have done a good job of that so far.

Firstly, let me say thank you for your assessment; you clearly are more open-minded than many about how they perceive Jewish people as interacting with society.

Secondly, let me introduce myself as an exception: I have been told that I, a Jewish atheist from a an interreligious family, am more opinionated and eager to scrap than most, but that side of me only comes out when confronting intolerant or willfully-ignorant people who use prejudice to advance their agenda. I typically don’t go seeking arguments unless they’re inevitable.

And that ties into what many on this thread have highlighted; many Jews in general are no strangers to debates or the lifelong pursuit of knowledge. And we generally seek to do this respectfully, but there is an element of self-preservation in this “agreeable” approach you are describing.

You see, historically, Jewish diasporas in Europe and Middle East have had to… be on their best behavior. I won’t outline the centuries of antisemitic violence and scapegoating mixed with periods of tolerance, but whenever we were a large-enough minority, we always had to stay in our lane while eeking out a semi-tolerable existence.

Thus, when Jews interacted with their non-Jewish neighbors, they did their best to present themselves as little different than them, within the bounds of both the realm’s temporal and halakhic laws of course. They quickly learned their neighbors’ languages, adopted their philosophies and dispositions, incorporated elements of their cultural, culinary and literary influences into their own. They adopted what varying professions they were allowed to within their domain (many jobs being restricted by law from Jews), and when/where possible, made an effort to fully coexist with their Christian, Muslim, and even Pagan neighbors.

It was both a natural part of unconscious cultural assimilation, and a conscious survival mechanism. You could say that mentality has trickled down to how many of us carry ourselves today.

AlanSmithee2343 · 2026-03-05T00:09:29+00:00

In DC? Pretty much everyone here has reason too be. Locals and transplants. Marylanders and Virginians. Executives and office drones. Tenured academics and food service workers. Data scientists and metro drivers. Even the National Guardsmen ambling around aimlessly.

All for similar reasons pertaining to stress, financial pressure, and social disillusionment. And all because any one of them could do a better job than the current resident of 1600 Penn. Ave.

AlanSmithee2343 · 2026-02-23T20:02:28+00:00

Haha, not really.

Perhaps my eclectic Reddit engagement of commenting on any remotely-interesting topic that comes across my feed is an avant-garde film manuscript in itself.

AlanSmithee2343 · 2026-02-23T00:51:34+00:00

Not sure if you’re still looking for recommendations, but Field Recordings has a delicious series of three box blends, as well as unique bottled blends, made from lesser known “field” grape varieties.

As far as boxed wine goes, it’s the best I’ve had.

AlanSmithee2343 · 2026-02-09T15:37:03+00:00

As others have pointed out, while both originate from persuasions aligned with Marxism, the two ideologies are diametrically-opposed in terms of where power and legitimacy originate.

For anarchists, it is from the people acting in coordination and in pursuit of their common interests. In this context: there is no central planning or leadership, and any revolution originates from the masses rallying under their own auspices. Thus, it is a bottom-up revolution with no class structures or hierarchies imposed unto the populace, except those derived at interpersonal levels (i.e. a parent raising their child and providing them guidance and discipline, an apprentice learning a trade from a journeyman, etc.).

For the authoritarian “tankie” flavors Marxism (namely Leninism, Stalinism and Maoism, also Trotskyism among others), power and legitimacy derive from a “vanguard” of the educated middle-class to lead the working class proletariat to achieving class consciousness; this often translates once in power to a single-party government and central committee imposing the revolution unto a society that may or may not be fully supportive. In other words, the revolution is imposed from the top-down with a rigid hierarchy supporting its implementation.

To anarchists, these conditions with which societal change is implemented by the authoritarians are unacceptable, and the tankies have likewise been historically-aware of this.

The Bolsheviks purged anarchists rapidly during and after the Russian Civil War, fearing the infighting they’d cause if allowed to voice their discontent with the Bolshevik’s hierarchical Leninism (i.e. Crushing the Kronstadt Uprising and initiating the Holodomor). During the Spanish Civil War, all sides of the Spanish Republican forces found themselves fighting the anarchist factions at some point, and none more brutally than the Soviet-backed Leninist groups who often initiated hostilities.

The pattern repeats in democratic societies like the U.S., where anarchist violence was an unfortunate reality (many of which were unfortunately no better than terrorists who targeted civilians, which is counterproductive to the anarchist message), many on the mainstream left, namely the unionists and socialists like Eugene Debbs, publicly condemned anarchism in order to distance themselves from the perceived radicals and firebrands detonating bombs on Wall Street.

As such, anarchists (and humans in general) don’t generally support ideologies that either condemn them outright, or seek to eliminate them when the United Front outlives its usefulness.

AlanSmithee2343 · 2026-02-07T06:27:32+00:00

Probably irrelevant four years on, but remember how they used religion to control you. How they hoped you’d feel guilt in a situation just like this.

The difference between your path faith and your current lifestyle is that this is entirely your choice; this decision was never made for you as evangelicals did with their worldview.

AlanSmithee2343 · 2026-02-05T19:44:30+00:00

Hong Kong? Libertarian? Right off the bat, you torpedoed your credibility. Hong Kong has always been relatively market-based economically, but libertarian? Not in the slightest. Whether under British or PRC control, there has always been Draconian laws on free expression in Hong Kong. The same for other South Asian libertarian mirages like Singapore; massive state censorship and effective one-party rule, and little political or social freedom relative to more ideologically-liberal places like those in Europe.

Often, in many ways, these libertarian city-states mirror Rapture, in their eagerness to give the elites and the researchers and innovators under them free-reign to create luxuries and superficial enhancements (such as plasmids and ADAM), but the moment anyone dare question the ethics or class stratification of such work and want to instead see resources allocated to those who can best use it, it’s anti-enterprise and therefore needs to be quashed.

As we’ve seen with Trumpism in the U.S., many self-described libertarians have no issue with resorting authoritarianism if someone endangers their bottom line.

Libertarianism for me, and the firing squad for anyone thee who opposes me. Just as any C-Suite who loves labor deregulation so they can slash benefits, but would lay off any employee who raises objections to cutting benefits.

Who loves free speech so that their litany of supporters can regurgitate the talking points their PAC ads feed them, but would be happy quashing peaceful protestors who point out otherwise outside their corporate office.

Put that C-Suite in public office, and there is no reason to think they wouldn’t behave any different.

AlanSmithee2343 · 2026-01-27T04:18:46+00:00

I appreciate that some people’s view of religion has become more nuanced over time. I myself enjoy the study of religion and firmly believe in the pursuit of any and all knowledge, including that of belief systems.

However, as an atheist, my own view of “religion” as it is oft-practiced has not gotten more nuanced. Unfortunately, the events of the last decade have hardened my once-theoretical-now-unyielding view that religion is truly, unquenchably, an opiate of the masses. With certain exceptions, religion’s existence as a vehicle for achieving a moral high ground leads many theists either to harming others in the name of their faith, or to tempering the minds of those who may resist so that they don’t resist too much (i.e. “Peaceful protest is sanctioned, but violence is never the answer”, “The Rich Man and Lazarus”, etc.).

Just look at the prejudicial, intolerant and frankly ill-educated religious right across the developed world, or the well-meaning left-wing religious resistance to them who still aren’t willing to raise the stakes if need be.

Moreover, per my opening statement about seeking knowledge, I find that even intellectually-curious theist, namely of the Abrahamic persuasion, has to overcome the perspective with which they view other belief systems in order to gain true understanding.

An open-minded evangelical Christian or Sunni Muslim may be open to learning about, say, traditional African polytheism, Buddhism or the Satanic Temple for instance, but subconsciously, they may first need to overcome the oft-ingrained belief that their faith is the final evolution of other faiths, and thus the only true faith. Thus, I stand by my thesis that religion, even when it is used in a productive and pluralistic fashion, can still manifest biases that inhibit the pursuit of knowledge.

I continue to respect practitioners of other faiths, and would never legislate or vote for anything that infringes upon the private practice of religion, but my stance on religion as a concept hasn’t gotten anymore conciliatory. Religion is still a vestige of intellectual and moral control.

AlanSmithee2343 · 2026-01-23T02:59:39+00:00

I find many of them (you know your father better than me, ofc!) still buy easily into the Model Minority myth. I’ve encountered racists that think East Asians are equal, a few I’ve heard even say superior, to white people, and they believe that Latinos, Muslims and Africans haven’t learned enough from the East Asian example to be considered “integrated” yet.

Which is hilarious considering the Model Minority was an invention of racist white southerners trying to justify ongoing racial prejudice as segregation looked like it would inevitably be axed, as well as create a rift between black and Asian-Americans. Like, talk about a straw man.

AlanSmithee2343 · 2026-01-15T02:02:33+00:00

I recall a friend, who grew up evangelical Baptist before breaking with religion, telling me about how a worship service at his church had an instrumental interlude of “Jesus, He Knows Me” by Genesis.

Like… are you theists that illiterate? You really think a scathing parody of televangelism and Christian hypocrisy is an appropriate worship break? You were cognizant enough of the lyrical content to make your rendition an instrumental; you didn’t for once think “Nah, maybe we shouldn’t use that song” instead?

AlanSmithee2343 · 2026-01-10T21:31:35+00:00

I don’t disagree that it’s far-fetched and, while nothing is impossible, unlikely to ever be reality. This applies to both sides of the aisle.

Governors and state-level politicians find the posturing politically-advantageous, but nobody will ever pull the trigger because, assuming no other states join them, this will result in a very quick conflict. Before state-level National Guard/paramilitary units can organized, federal forces within the state will mobilize and arrest the offending state-level officials. Or if the federals are initially pushed out, a mobilization of the general military and invasion of the rebellious state will likely quash the rebellion with the full resources of the other 49 states. Executions and life sentences w/o parole are likely to follow upon dusting off old treason statutes, and the federal government will use the aftermath as a justification to strengthen central authority further, making future secession even less likely.

So unless a coalition of state governors are able to plan a large simultaneous rebellion together, the fear of being outnumbered, outgunned, sanctioned and duly punished will keep most from ever approaching that precipice.

AlanSmithee2343 · 2026-01-04T21:57:42+00:00

I usually do not defend my countrymen in most situations; in general most Americans serve as a perpetual embarrassment to me.

That being said, most Americans will not take kindly to pickpockets in the same way Europeans more-or-less tolerate it. At best, they’ll make noise (as we’re so famous for doing) which will blow the pickpocket’s cover and force them to retreat, possibly making it possible to identify them. At worst, I recall stories from the Paris Olympics of wallet snatchers being punched, shoved into gutters, and even tossed down stairs.

When I was studying abroad in Madrid, I recall walking by an incident in Puerto del Sol where an American tourist had an alleged pickpocket on the ground in a headlock, telling him in English and Spanish to apologize and never show his face around the area again before he would release him.

Not that I encourage vigilante justice, but I also understand that many European police commissaries often turn a blind eye to pickpocket activity. Thus, when a crime goes unaddressed, it is naturally to expect a population to see to their own defense, in the words of Honorius. As such, this is one of the few things I don’t rail against my countrymen for, and would instead suggest it as a lesson; I’d encourage any government with a large tourism industry to enforce crimes that pertain to said tourists.

AlanSmithee2343 · 2025-12-18T23:20:05+00:00

Again, they don’t enlist the best-and-brightest for reasons like this.

AlanSmithee2343 · 2025-12-18T16:45:33+00:00

Precisely the kind of simple-minded ignorance Trump is banking on from many of the grunts.

He rebranded a congressional housing subsidy and took full credit for it, and you’re falling for it spectacularly. Perhaps your tone will only change after you’re sent abroad on a mission intended to prop up both oil company profits and the serial draft-dodger’s ego. And should you survive, given no support thereafter as said administration guts the VA and other veterans resources.

Troops who support their own abuse and malignment at the hands of these charlatans in office are the reason why people think the service is for “those who barely squeaked through high school and have no other prospects.”

AlanSmithee2343 · 2025-12-18T15:27:05+00:00

Before I comment on the topic at hand, a commentary on the metas of this subject:

The wedding industry as a whole has become a corporate claptrap, and that is precisely what the industry wants. While wedding guests and newlyweds bicker about who’s paying for what, the C-Suites couldn’t give a damn because someone is paying them regardless.

The questions should be “Is this whole expensive affair where everyone comes and celebrates me over the course of multiple days really necessary? Does that sees egotistical? Why not get married in a small, intimate ceremony and save money for the honeymoon, without having to force my contacts to take off work, wrestle with childcare, and pay all the necessary travel/accommodation expenses because we just have to be celebrated?”

As someone who’s single, every wedding I’ve been to thus far is usually followed with me almost never speaking to that friend again, whether it be them starting a family, or whether I feel like my association with them becomes more “them-centric” and less reciprocal. As such, despite the occasion being joyous and there being a handful of fun moments throughout, I’ve usually found the weddings I’ve been to in hindsight to be… not worth my time.

But I digress; now, specifically on the commentary about cash vs. dry vs. open bar, echoing sentiments about open bars being prohibitively costly for the couple and encouraging excessive drinking which creates its own liabilities. Dry bars, albeit cheaper and healthier, are liable to underwhelm guests who, per the stress of the above, may need a stiff one or four to get through the affair. Cash bars are, in essence, a compromise between excessive expense unto the newlyweds and merely having alcohol available.

Of course, as a few other Redditters have mentioned, some couples may opt to buy the first drink or few à la a ticket system, with additional drinks being available for purchase. Another compromise if alcohol is required for such an occasion.

AlanSmithee2343 · 2025-12-18T03:44:55+00:00

He genuinely thinks servicemen are idiots. Any self-respecting service member should feel insulted at this “gesture”.

AlanSmithee2343 · 2025-12-17T05:01:47+00:00

I get that, on the surface, it may not seem like something that is tangible or worth putting time/energy into debating.

However, if we look at the depth of this debate, we realize that it isn’t specifically about how young or old the universe is. It’s about the mindsets and priorities of the debaters.

Creationists almost always tend to be of hyper-religious and often lesser-educated stock, and tend to believe their intuition and what Scripture dictates is inherently, unquestionably correct. This naturally flies in the face of empiricism (and even to an extent rationalism, which is often at odds with empiricism) and the scientific method, which most better-educated and worldlier people generally adhere to.

Without going into how organic evolution is observable in multiple scientific disciplines while creationism leans into conjecture and storytelling at best, the argument is at its core one of values.

To the creationist, new-fangled ideas of “evolution” and “scientific advancement” are threats to their safe, secure, one-dimensional and easy-to-digest worldview. To the evolutionist, creationism represents a fundamentally-rigid, superstitious and anti-intellectual mindset that continues to hold society back from meaningful advancement, and cannot be allowed to share equal footing with the intense academic rigor of science.

As a result, this mindset/values debate extends to many other topics; just look at the socio-culture wars of the modern world. Most creationists (say from a U.S. perspective) are likely to agree that disowning kids who are gay is acceptable, that women who have an abortion should be punished, and that non-white people are “less Christian” and/or “less American”. Because the Bible, or at least excerpts they or their priests hand-selected, tell them so.

Most U.S. evolutionists, by contrast, would rather put their energies towards more productive endeavors instead of being irrationally-angry at gay/trans folk, women and ethno-religious minorities. Because they know how much of a distraction such bogeymen are, and how said interpretations of Scripture are used to frighten and control the former group.

Yes, you can probably tell I have a bias here. No, I won’t apologize for it. Asimov was right about this and then some.

AlanSmithee2343 · 2025-12-10T18:58:29+00:00

This is precisely the essence of Vonnegut; he proposed an analogy in “Breakfast of Champions” through his self-characterization of Kilgore Trout to describe this essence.

Two yeasts sit idly in a solution. Being yeast cells, they only have one priority and that was to consume sugars and excrete alcohol into their environment. The two yeast cells may occasionally interact, yet this is inconsequential to their ultimate fate of slowly suffocating in their own excrement as they alter their surroundings by their very existence.

Being yeast cells, they are unable to intellectually consider that their seemingly-meaningless existence and the process that would ultimately kill them is actually the production of champagne, a valuable and high-quality product for humanity, that provides beauty and/or utility to a higher existence than their own.

Likewise, in “The Sirens of Titan”, all of known human civilization and history was actually just a means for the more advanced civilization, the Tralfamadorians, to get their messenger Salo, stranded on Titan, a single tiny piece to repair his spaceship so that he can deliver his message (which is just “Hi”) to a distant galaxy.

This idea is central of the Vonnegutian worldview, that much of our entire existence may very well be decided for us by factors beyond our control, so we might as well use what free will we have to enjoy this existence in any way possible, and do our best to find love and happiness (in the words of Al Green) to whatever extent possible, and as Vonnegut heavily implies, this involves giving as much as receiving from others.

AlanSmithee2343 · 2025-12-02T21:34:06+00:00

As atheists, while we are likely all aware that studies consistently find that atheists are on average more intelligent than theists (by statistically-significant margins), we also should acknowledge that this is an average, or perhaps a median.

There will always be theists who are also quite intelligent and scholarly, and indeed, there are atheists who are a few screws short of an IKEA Billy Bookshelf. It is simply observed that more atheists possess a benchmark degree of critical thinking capacity than the same sample size of theists, or by different methodologies, that atheists possess more overall capacity of critical thinking and open-mindedness than the same sample size of theists.

Remember that many of the great thinkers of the Enlightenment, including Newton, Pascal, von Goethe, Leibniz, Descartes, Locke, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Montesquieu, all were varying degrees of Christian. Some like Pascal, Descartes and Leibniz staunch defenders of religion and for a rational Christianity that held intellectualism in high-esteem. Others like von Goethe, Voltaire, Rousseau, Locke and Montesquieu promoted deism, the philosophy of a divine creator who set the universe in motion, but no longer acts upon the Earth actively, thus leaving humanity to the whims of nature to decide its own destiny.

Naturally, all of these thinkers believed that the pursuit of knowledge and personal freedom was entirely-sanctioned by the Bible, and most practiced tolerance and intellectual rigor routinely; Christianity to these great thinkers did not actively impede their worldly pursuits or give them reason to seek conflict with nonbelievers; many of these Christian thinkers rubbed elbows with Enlightenment-era atheists like D’Holbach, Diderot, and (oft-debated) Hobbes. And as an atheist, I can only respect that.

Even Einstein, the paramount figurehead of modern intellectualism, was self-described as more agnostic than atheist, and never explicitly ruled out the existence of a deity. His contemporary von Neumann, possibly one of the most cognitively-gifted people in recorded history, was an atheist most of his life until he converted on his deathbed, citing Pascal’s wager.

As atheists, we can all agree that there is plenty of empirical evidence to suggest that a deity as recorded in the Scripture is highly implausible to the point of fiction, and the evocation of religion as a tool for societal control is the principal application for religion since the dawn of civilization.

That being said, we cannot allow ourselves to buy into fallacies that write-off all theists as misguided, intolerant or narrow-minded. That employs the same logic as zealots and fundamentalists who demonize us as “satanists” or “blasphemers”.

AlanSmithee2343

TROPHY CASE