Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Update on Draft 2.1

Well, after managing to meet, more-or-less, the Draft Two deadline, I took a Bridget Jones-esque mini-break. OK, maybe not so mini. What I was supposed to do in the week that ended last Sunday (two days ago) was to finish reading the Committee of Fifty's book, which I managed to do before the mini-break. I was supposed to make progress on the 1905 book on saloons, which I only accomplished if one employs an expansive view of "progress;" similar progress was made on the Okrent book. (Incidentally, the 1905 book is a pretty over-the-top attack on saloons. One point that the author, John Marshall Barker, tries to establish is that people in the liquor business know that their activities can be banned at any time, so there is no need to worry about compensating them should prohibition be enacted: "That he [a liquor businessperson] may sustain losses when the saloon is suppressed is thoroughly understood by him before he enters the trade, and there is no moral or legal right for society to reimburse him [p. 7].")

The next month looks pretty busy, so I don't expect to do much writing for Draft Three until mid-April. In the meantime, I will try to finish reading the books mentioned above, along with Jessica Warner's book on abstinence. I will also try to revise (and perhaps even submit somewhere for publication) my Self-Exclusion paper. By my standards, this is an ambitious plan.

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