Slashdot Mirror
Bad Reporting, Not Email, Worse Than Marijuana
MoNickels writes "Turns out, those endless news reports and blog entries in April about "texting makes you stupid" were inaccurate. As linguist Mark Liberman at LanguageLog now reports by way of apologizing to Wilson, it wasn't Wilson's fault, but that of "rotten science journalism." Psychologist Glenn Wilson was reported to have done a study said that chat and email, as the Guardian put it, "are a greater threat to IQ and concentration than taking cannabis." But Wilson says, "This...is a temporary distraction effect—not a permanent loss of IQ. The equivalences with smoking pot and losing sleep were made by others, against my counsel, and 8 [subjects] somehow became '80 clinical trials.'" The original Slashdot story was covered back in April."
Why make something that is (1) harmless to other individuals when controlled, (2) not especially more harmful than many other accepted things, (3) highly profitable, and (4) effective for controlling a large population illegal?
It's simple. Racism is only one part.
The truth is there are three major reasons.
(1) If drugs are illegal, they are worth more money. Simply supply and demand. If you limit the supply channels, prices go up. If you make it illegal and build the image of drug use as undeserably, a certain percent of rebel youth et al. will also be drawn to it. Demand. Money. There's some accusations, too, that the CIA and other wonderful people like that are involved with it, too.
(2) If drugs are illegal, it gives us something to arrest a lot of people for. How many people are in jail for drug offenses? How many lives are destroyed because of former drug use coming back on job applications, etc.? Drugs are easy to plant. (I don't trust the police.) Therein lies the racism, to a degree. Also, before the USA PATRIOT act, there was the RICO act. Civil rights don't apply to pot heads.
(3) And now for the central reason: If drugs are illegal, it helps keep poor people poor. Who is arrested on drug charged? White, middle-class, money-laundering businessmen? Or inner-city blacks? If you were convicted of smoking pot, do you think your place of business would approve of it? Might not you risk being fired over it, even? Yet George W. Bush did it. He's also an alcoholic. And he's rich.
The rich can get whatever drugs they want. Even Newt popped pills. The rule of--or rather, enforcement of--law does not apply to them. It affects the poor.
Kinda like taxes.
The burn out down the street who does nothing with his life except collect welfare is also an out user of marijuana. TRUE.
Maybe if he didn't smoke, Feynman would have been some kind of accountant helping people get rich instead of contributing to the world of physics. UNLIKELY
Marijuana is no different than alcohol except that when you go to the liquor store, they don't offer you crack.
"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."
That would be you being useless, not the codec. VLC supports it just fine, unsurprisingly, since they're involved in its development; as should any other decent media player, once you install codecs from http://x264.nl/ or one of dozens of other repositories on the web. I still haven't seen a single person fail to get it working on windows, osx or any distribution of gnu/linux.
L