Alcohol has a tendency to exasperate already tense situations, so abstaining is usually a good way to go.
This step was well calculated to delight the followers of Ali, but it could not fail to exasperate the Abbasids and their partisans.
He became, and could not but become, a persecutor in and out of Spain; and his persecutions not only hardened the obstinacy of the Dutch, and helped to exasperate the English, but they provoked a revolt of the Moriscoes, which impoverished his kingdom.
The sense of injury, no doubt, contributed to exasperate Sarpi's feelings towards the court of Rome.
At other points of the coast the British navy was employed in punitive expeditions against the coast towns - as for example the burning of Falmouth (now Portland, Maine) in October 1775 - which served to exasperate, rather than to weaken the enemy, or the unsuccessful attack on Charleston, S.C., in June 1776.
