You think wanting to execute drug dealers and criminalizing drug use, which means police shooting people, beating people up, dragging them off to prison where they face a high likelihood of being assaulted and raped, and having their family finances liquidated for legal fees, is not being an angry and violent person, huh?
This is why statism is such an insidious poison to civilization. It makes people able to delude themselves into believing they are well intentioned when they argue for applying state power (which is violent coercion) to accomplish societal ends that they deem proper. Someone is going to be dragged away in the night. Someone is going to be beaten to death in prison. Some child is going to loose an imperfect but still sincerely loving and willing to die for that child parent because they have a behavior that displeases others.
Criminalization must be reserved only for those acts that by their very nature deprive others of life, liberty, and/or property. Period!
Notice how it's always "decriminalization" rather than legalization.
The problem with this is that by keeping the production and distribution illegal, it retains the black market which is where much of the crime occurs. Also, this continues to justify the police apparatus that attempts to "interdict." Finally, the addicts are still going to be getting black market drugs of unknown and frequently unsafe composition.
Thus, the harm is not fully minimized.
The solution is legalization. Even with legalization, every effort will be made to fully corporatize it, by "regulating" it to high heaven. Pun intended!
However, decriminalization recommended by an important entity such as WHO is a step in a better direction than what we have now.
Are you lost? Did your time machine break down? Because the world you describe is the distant past.
I'm a compulsive electronics designer and computer hacker. I have oscilloscopes, power supplies, machine tools, etc. all laying around the house, even in the living room. My wife (Asian) has a M.S. in Physics and was a geek as a young lady, and now just wants to make dresses.
My daughter is welcome to use my equipment any time. We've tried to encourage her to be interested in making better toys using the tools. We've tried to encourage her to learn about electronics and build robots by buying her kits and spending time with her to complete them.
Guess what? The only reason she wants to build the kits is to get my attention, and the only reason she cares about electronics is because she needs my lab power supplies to power her dollhouse LEDs since I haven't finished the 8-channel dimming/driver board for it yet.
She's a girl and wants to do girly stuff, and no amount of surrounding her with equipment is going to change that. Unless something *intrinsically* within her wants to do it, she won't, despite that fact that her environment has been heavily biased in a "tech" direction.
What are we to do? Throw all her home-made dolls away and FORCE her to do "science and engineering" stuff?
All evidence seems to indicate that girls just don't want to do these things as frequently as boys.
Only people stupid enough to look at men (with penises) and women (with vaginas), with completely different hormonal systems, anatomy, and significant differences in brain structure, and declare "men and women are the same" could see a problem with this.
The ultimate irony is that the liberal feminists are in exactly the same camp as the old-school (Christian) conservatives that they think they are more enlightened than and liberating us from:
They hate nature! They do not want to understand nature, and are instead at war with it. Does anyone see this?
This is as fundamentally anti-science and inhuman as theistic religion, because only true understanding of reality and how to work WITH it is the answer to any of our real problems.
Skip the whole grains. Carbs are the whole problem, and while whole grains may have more nutrition, they are still digested nearly as quickly as pure sugar. The resulting release of insulin causes the storage of fat AND the eventual depression of blood sugar which causes craving for food. After more than 30 years of struggling with waking up hungry at night, regardless of whether I ate a lot or little, after trying a ketogenic diet, I no longer get hunger pangs. Fat just melts away, without even trying or worrying about counting calories. I no longer suddenly step from fine to lightheaded and agonizing hunger pangs 2-3 hrs after every meal. Rather I just slowly start getting tired and a little weak.
Basically, modern medicine has pulled a fast one on the population, by selling the low-fat diet. It's false. And now it is embedded into government policy! The reason for obesity is carbs. People can't help themselves but to eat when faced with the intensity of cravings for food that high carb. low fat diets cause. The Drs. have caused the obesity epidemic with their attempts to prevent heart disease.
http://www.biosciencetechnolog...http://online.wsj.com/news/art...
That just means that we have too many regulations due to too lax liability suits.
Current drug research precludes development of drugs that have "getting high" as a predominant effect, because the medical establishment considers any such effects "side effects" even if it was the intended effect!
One cannot develop an antidepressant drug, if it actually makes someone feel good!
Basically we are still in the midst of an inquisition against pleasure, thanks to you know who, dating back to the Opium Wars.
Then drastically de-regulate insurance so that ins. cos. need only comply with rules regarding actuarial solvency, and let them charge people rates that actually have some correlation with the risk generated by a person's behavior.
Yeah, yeah, I know, "I would never trust some corporation more than I trust the good and noble government."
Only idiots hopelessly indoctrinated in government schools with dumbed down/censored summaries of the Constitution could possibly prefer the dangers of living in a society where you can get taken to jail if you dare refuse to get breathalyzed, ultimately venipunctured, and potentially even taken to a hospital and probed up the ass for 12 hours (this actually happened to an innocent person), all on the whim of some cop, rather than deal with insurance companies in an open competitive market.
No one ever gets taken away in hand cuffs by a corporation!
The ins. cos. will have a strong incentive to develop certifications and standards for the inevitable self-driving cars, which stoned people can populate in order to get absurdly low ins. rates, and so the most risky thing they will do is accidentally instructing the car to take them to Nova Scotia or some similarly tripped out destination.
One of the main points of legalization is harm reduction.
Ruining people's lives by charging them with crimes, subjecting them to the most dangerous environment in the world (prison), potentially causing them to get blacklisted from employment forever, forcing everyone to pay ever more tax dollars for ever more government police state powers and abuses while the "meth epidemic" and the "violence in Mexico" continues to worsen, etc. are far more harmful to individuals and society as a whole than just letting people buy the damn stuff in a pharmacy.
Sign a waiver so that you can't sue the pharmacist for any consequences of using the drug and that you were provided and understood either written or verbal instructions on how to dose correctly. Pay the piddly little $10/gram that methamphetamine, cocaine, MDMA, or heroin, or whatever the heck you want would actually cost in a minimally regulated open market (basically the only rule needs to be--what's in the bottle must be what's printed on the label), and go your merry way with 10x less incentive to commit the crime of theft to support your habit IF you get addicted, and far better chances of being able to be employed and live a "normal" (responsible) life since you won't be getting hauled off by Mr. Officer.
In fact--you will be less likely to get addicted at all, since more addictive means of administration are actually economic optimizations that people do because of the high price of black market drugs! Ie., taking meth in pill form is far less addictive than smoking or injecting, and users will be more likely to use it in pill form if it is legal and inexpensive.
Additionally, rather than 20000 pages of new laws trying to prevent kids from getting it (with the real intention being to ensure that the police/prison/industrial complex STILL has a continual supply of new arrestees and inmates), let's just keep this really simple: The waiver can include a statement that you may be sued for damages if you transfer or sell the drug to a child (other than an immediate family member--can't have mom and pop getting sent up the river if Jr. cracks the medicine lockbox), and/or criminal charges of misdemeanor (not felony!!!) reckless endangerment if you intentionally transfer or sell the drug to a child who subsequently commits a crime, becomes addicted, or suffers a medically harmful consequence.
The fundamental problem here is that: people want to use drugs.
It's something about how our brains work. It's not that different from why we desire and have sex. No, from the perspective of our brains, reproduction is irrelevant. We want the high--the stimulation of the dopamine reward circuits, and the other chemical responses.
Natural inclinations that do not directly lead to harming others (ie., acts that in and of themselves do not deprive others of life, liberty, or property, ) must never be made crimes!
Also, some "social problems" simply can't be "solved." Declare them solved by simply not defining them as problems anymore. Human society is not perfect.
Don't you understand? We can win the war on drugs but we need more funding for police, the DEA, the FBI, the NSA, more crates of guns to send to Mexican drug lords, more police powers to search anyone at any time for any reason, and even for no reason, and to get Afganistan under control. We can do this!
"The shit destroys their lives, and I would know." "Fortunately, a few years later when I met him, he went back to school and now as far as I know he's doing okay."
Perhaps his life wasn't quite so destroyed then? Maybe we should have finished him off by putting him in prison, to protect him from himself (but not from the rapists) ?
We have a guy who died at 88 after trying 1000s of drugs all his life and performing at a technical career with a high degree of competence.
We have a kid who learned the hard way that trying to escape the unsatisfactory nature of life by using drugs can lead to a destructive spiral, which fortunately self-limited and he apparently decided to clean up and try living life on life's terms.
This isn't an uncommon story, as the exact same thing happened to me 26 years ago, after which I went back to school and undertook to perform at a high level in a technical career.
Maybe all the propaganda is over-blown?
Maybe people with psychological stress and poor social lives are prone to addiction, but it's possible to recover with little or no detectable permanent harm?
Maybe if there were no drugs, they would have gotten into some other sort of trouble anyway?
So many questions deserving of straightforward scientific exploration. One thing prevents gaining a deeper understanding of why people do what they do, the role which drugs play, the potential for discovering drugs with most of the desirable effects of current drugs, but fewer of the undesirable effects, and how people can better help themselves (note I did NOT say "how we can help people") to solve life's problems without having to turn to drugs.
Why does there have to be "2000" pages of regulations for everything?!?! It's just a fucking law: Fraud is illegal. Period. It's a one-liner.
But it's no good if the law isn't enforced. And if the government is funded by the very same mechanisms it's trying to regulate, then the law, predictably, won't be enforced.
They were rated by once independent agencies who would loose their reputations if they gave bunk ratings, who were then mandated to rate them which changed their incentives to rate them all as bowls of cherries, so they would be the ones chosen to do the ratings.
And why is that? Because of the free market? Lack of regulation? No, because the government mandated that the credit rating agencies be used to rate the packaged loans, which fucked up the incentives to rate them legitimately. Mike Shedlock wrote a good article about this, but I can't find it now.
Basically it's like this, everyone (the tiny minority, that is) who saw it coming before-hand knew damn well that it was perverse incentives created by government mandates, guarantees, and implicit guarantees, plus all out fraud that nobody believed (correctly) that they would be punished for, which caused the bubble.
Predictably, those who didn't see it coming, would, after the fact, suddenly become experts on what happened with their interpretations of events strictly following partly lines.
And both sides of the group that didn't see it coming--Rs and Ds, supported bailouts.
There you have it. Guaranteed by the government. The free market at work! I knew all those liberals that were bragging about how rich they were getting and laughed in my face before the crash when I told them it was a bubble, and who I predicted that after the crash would blame the free market, would blame the free market. And deny every single aspect of how the government created a completely artificial market.
But most people here cheered on the creation of a new agency to "protect" people after they were all "victimized" in the housing bubble that "no one saw coming."
As long as the cognitive dissonance persists that we can expand the regulatory state and yet also avoid NSA like powers aggregating in every government agency until the whole thing becomes totalitarian total information awareness, this will go on to its bitter end.
Nobody accepts "nobody is forcing you" in the religion of statism. Everything is political. Like the poster who suggests lobbying for more regulations to deal with this. The same people will bitch about the NSA, and never get the cognitive dissonance involved.
If you feed the beast, you have fed the beast, and will have to live with the consequences.
Anyone in today's world who believes any "regulatory" legislation is going to work out in their favor (unless they are the big money paying for it) is a fool.
Where I work, and in the places I have temporarily worked in Si Valley in the EE field, most of my colleagues consisted of white and Asian guys, and Asian women. There was never any behavior in my encounters that ever suggested that during work hours anybody gave a flying f*ck about whether anyone was male/female/white/green/gay or whatever.
People should not extrapolate the world of juveniles to the professional workplace.
The one guy that actually did harass women at my present employer, was promptly fired.
Read "Diaspora" and "Schild's Ladder" for highly plausible pictures of how machine intelligence may develop sentience, and go about it's existence.
What's wonderful about these books, is that they are far from dystopian. After reading these I'm left feeling that it is a moral imperative to work toward the development of machine intelligence and the possibility of transcending the human body and Darwinian evolution.
Slashdot Mirror
You think wanting to execute drug dealers and criminalizing drug use, which means police shooting people, beating people up, dragging them off to prison where they face a high likelihood of being assaulted and raped, and having their family finances liquidated for legal fees, is not being an angry and violent person, huh?
This is why statism is such an insidious poison to civilization. It makes people able to delude themselves into believing they are well intentioned when they argue for applying state power (which is violent coercion) to accomplish societal ends that they deem proper. Someone is going to be dragged away in the night. Someone is going to be beaten to death in prison. Some child is going to loose an imperfect but still sincerely loving and willing to die for that child parent because they have a behavior that displeases others.
Criminalization must be reserved only for those acts that by their very nature deprive others of life, liberty, and/or property. Period!
So we should execute and imprison people because of what you would "rather want to see?"
And what if a significant proportion of society decides they don't want to see what you like to do?
Notice how it's always "decriminalization" rather than legalization. The problem with this is that by keeping the production and distribution illegal, it retains the black market which is where much of the crime occurs. Also, this continues to justify the police apparatus that attempts to "interdict." Finally, the addicts are still going to be getting black market drugs of unknown and frequently unsafe composition. Thus, the harm is not fully minimized. The solution is legalization. Even with legalization, every effort will be made to fully corporatize it, by "regulating" it to high heaven. Pun intended! However, decriminalization recommended by an important entity such as WHO is a step in a better direction than what we have now.
Are you lost? Did your time machine break down? Because the world you describe is the distant past.
I'm a compulsive electronics designer and computer hacker. I have oscilloscopes, power supplies, machine tools, etc. all laying around the house, even in the living room. My wife (Asian) has a M.S. in Physics and was a geek as a young lady, and now just wants to make dresses.
My daughter is welcome to use my equipment any time. We've tried to encourage her to be interested in making better toys using the tools. We've tried to encourage her to learn about electronics and build robots by buying her kits and spending time with her to complete them.
Guess what? The only reason she wants to build the kits is to get my attention, and the only reason she cares about electronics is because she needs my lab power supplies to power her dollhouse LEDs since I haven't finished the 8-channel dimming/driver board for it yet.
She's a girl and wants to do girly stuff, and no amount of surrounding her with equipment is going to change that. Unless something *intrinsically* within her wants to do it, she won't, despite that fact that her environment has been heavily biased in a "tech" direction.
What are we to do? Throw all her home-made dolls away and FORCE her to do "science and engineering" stuff?
All evidence seems to indicate that girls just don't want to do these things as frequently as boys.
Only people stupid enough to look at men (with penises) and women (with vaginas), with completely different hormonal systems, anatomy, and significant differences in brain structure, and declare "men and women are the same" could see a problem with this.
The ultimate irony is that the liberal feminists are in exactly the same camp as the old-school (Christian) conservatives that they think they are more enlightened than and liberating us from:
They hate nature! They do not want to understand nature, and are instead at war with it. Does anyone see this?
This is as fundamentally anti-science and inhuman as theistic religion, because only true understanding of reality and how to work WITH it is the answer to any of our real problems.
Not a 33GHz real-time scope for $30000, but maybe a sampling scope chassis. Try $230000 for real time scopes with that BW.
An individualist stranded on planet Earth. Pity you.
Skip the whole grains. Carbs are the whole problem, and while whole grains may have more nutrition, they are still digested nearly as quickly as pure sugar. The resulting release of insulin causes the storage of fat AND the eventual depression of blood sugar which causes craving for food. After more than 30 years of struggling with waking up hungry at night, regardless of whether I ate a lot or little, after trying a ketogenic diet, I no longer get hunger pangs. Fat just melts away, without even trying or worrying about counting calories. I no longer suddenly step from fine to lightheaded and agonizing hunger pangs 2-3 hrs after every meal. Rather I just slowly start getting tired and a little weak.
Basically, modern medicine has pulled a fast one on the population, by selling the low-fat diet. It's false. And now it is embedded into government policy! The reason for obesity is carbs. People can't help themselves but to eat when faced with the intensity of cravings for food that high carb. low fat diets cause. The Drs. have caused the obesity epidemic with their attempts to prevent heart disease. http://www.biosciencetechnolog... http://online.wsj.com/news/art...
That just means that we have too many regulations due to too lax liability suits.
Current drug research precludes development of drugs that have "getting high" as a predominant effect, because the medical establishment considers any such effects "side effects" even if it was the intended effect!
One cannot develop an antidepressant drug, if it actually makes someone feel good!
Basically we are still in the midst of an inquisition against pleasure, thanks to you know who, dating back to the Opium Wars.
Then drastically de-regulate insurance so that ins. cos. need only comply with rules regarding actuarial solvency, and let them charge people rates that actually have some correlation with the risk generated by a person's behavior.
Yeah, yeah, I know, "I would never trust some corporation more than I trust the good and noble government."
Only idiots hopelessly indoctrinated in government schools with dumbed down/censored summaries of the Constitution could possibly prefer the dangers of living in a society where you can get taken to jail if you dare refuse to get breathalyzed, ultimately venipunctured, and potentially even taken to a hospital and probed up the ass for 12 hours (this actually happened to an innocent person), all on the whim of some cop, rather than deal with insurance companies in an open competitive market.
No one ever gets taken away in hand cuffs by a corporation!
The ins. cos. will have a strong incentive to develop certifications and standards for the inevitable self-driving cars, which stoned people can populate in order to get absurdly low ins. rates, and so the most risky thing they will do is accidentally instructing the car to take them to Nova Scotia or some similarly tripped out destination.
One of the main points of legalization is harm reduction.
Ruining people's lives by charging them with crimes, subjecting them to the most dangerous environment in the world (prison), potentially causing them to get blacklisted from employment forever, forcing everyone to pay ever more tax dollars for ever more government police state powers and abuses while the "meth epidemic" and the "violence in Mexico" continues to worsen, etc. are far more harmful to individuals and society as a whole than just letting people buy the damn stuff in a pharmacy.
Sign a waiver so that you can't sue the pharmacist for any consequences of using the drug and that you were provided and understood either written or verbal instructions on how to dose correctly. Pay the piddly little $10/gram that methamphetamine, cocaine, MDMA, or heroin, or whatever the heck you want would actually cost in a minimally regulated open market (basically the only rule needs to be--what's in the bottle must be what's printed on the label), and go your merry way with 10x less incentive to commit the crime of theft to support your habit IF you get addicted, and far better chances of being able to be employed and live a "normal" (responsible) life since you won't be getting hauled off by Mr. Officer.
In fact--you will be less likely to get addicted at all, since more addictive means of administration are actually economic optimizations that people do because of the high price of black market drugs! Ie., taking meth in pill form is far less addictive than smoking or injecting, and users will be more likely to use it in pill form if it is legal and inexpensive.
Additionally, rather than 20000 pages of new laws trying to prevent kids from getting it (with the real intention being to ensure that the police/prison/industrial complex STILL has a continual supply of new arrestees and inmates), let's just keep this really simple: The waiver can include a statement that you may be sued for damages if you transfer or sell the drug to a child (other than an immediate family member--can't have mom and pop getting sent up the river if Jr. cracks the medicine lockbox), and/or criminal charges of misdemeanor (not felony!!!) reckless endangerment if you intentionally transfer or sell the drug to a child who subsequently commits a crime, becomes addicted, or suffers a medically harmful consequence.
The fundamental problem here is that: people want to use drugs.
It's something about how our brains work. It's not that different from why we desire and have sex. No, from the perspective of our brains, reproduction is irrelevant. We want the high--the stimulation of the dopamine reward circuits, and the other chemical responses.
Natural inclinations that do not directly lead to harming others (ie., acts that in and of themselves do not deprive others of life, liberty, or property, ) must never be made crimes!
Also, some "social problems" simply can't be "solved." Declare them solved by simply not defining them as problems anymore. Human society is not perfect.
Don't you understand? We can win the war on drugs but we need more funding for police, the DEA, the FBI, the NSA, more crates of guns to send to Mexican drug lords, more police powers to search anyone at any time for any reason, and even for no reason, and to get Afganistan under control. We can do this!
"The shit destroys their lives, and I would know." "Fortunately, a few years later when I met him, he went back to school and now as far as I know he's doing okay."
Perhaps his life wasn't quite so destroyed then? Maybe we should have finished him off by putting him in prison, to protect him from himself (but not from the rapists) ?
We have a guy who died at 88 after trying 1000s of drugs all his life and performing at a technical career with a high degree of competence.
We have a kid who learned the hard way that trying to escape the unsatisfactory nature of life by using drugs can lead to a destructive spiral, which fortunately self-limited and he apparently decided to clean up and try living life on life's terms.
This isn't an uncommon story, as the exact same thing happened to me 26 years ago, after which I went back to school and undertook to perform at a high level in a technical career.
Maybe all the propaganda is over-blown?
Maybe people with psychological stress and poor social lives are prone to addiction, but it's possible to recover with little or no detectable permanent harm?
Maybe if there were no drugs, they would have gotten into some other sort of trouble anyway?
So many questions deserving of straightforward scientific exploration. One thing prevents gaining a deeper understanding of why people do what they do, the role which drugs play, the potential for discovering drugs with most of the desirable effects of current drugs, but fewer of the undesirable effects, and how people can better help themselves (note I did NOT say "how we can help people") to solve life's problems without having to turn to drugs.
The war on drugs.
Yes, this is what is necessary to for government to solve a problem caused by government.
Or they could have just not bailed out the fucking banks, gotten rid of the GSEs, etc.!
So in the interest of making sure everyone is paying their taxes, everyone must loose all of their privacy.
But it's Ok, because, the government is just going to use all those taxes to protect our freedom.
Yeah, I get it now.
Why does there have to be "2000" pages of regulations for everything?!?! It's just a fucking law: Fraud is illegal. Period. It's a one-liner.
But it's no good if the law isn't enforced. And if the government is funded by the very same mechanisms it's trying to regulate, then the law, predictably, won't be enforced.
Let me guess, Fanny and Freddie, with Bawney Fwank giving blow jobs to one of their CEOs.
They were rated by once independent agencies who would loose their reputations if they gave bunk ratings, who were then mandated to rate them which changed their incentives to rate them all as bowls of cherries, so they would be the ones chosen to do the ratings.
And why is that? Because of the free market? Lack of regulation? No, because the government mandated that the credit rating agencies be used to rate the packaged loans, which fucked up the incentives to rate them legitimately. Mike Shedlock wrote a good article about this, but I can't find it now.
Basically it's like this, everyone (the tiny minority, that is) who saw it coming before-hand knew damn well that it was perverse incentives created by government mandates, guarantees, and implicit guarantees, plus all out fraud that nobody believed (correctly) that they would be punished for, which caused the bubble.
Predictably, those who didn't see it coming, would, after the fact, suddenly become experts on what happened with their interpretations of events strictly following partly lines.
And both sides of the group that didn't see it coming--Rs and Ds, supported bailouts.
There you have it. Guaranteed by the government. The free market at work! I knew all those liberals that were bragging about how rich they were getting and laughed in my face before the crash when I told them it was a bubble, and who I predicted that after the crash would blame the free market, would blame the free market. And deny every single aspect of how the government created a completely artificial market.
But most people here cheered on the creation of a new agency to "protect" people after they were all "victimized" in the housing bubble that "no one saw coming."
As long as the cognitive dissonance persists that we can expand the regulatory state and yet also avoid NSA like powers aggregating in every government agency until the whole thing becomes totalitarian total information awareness, this will go on to its bitter end.
There was a guy we were trying to hire named Moe, who went to the NSA instead.
1. Larry
2. Moe
Nobody accepts "nobody is forcing you" in the religion of statism. Everything is political. Like the poster who suggests lobbying for more regulations to deal with this. The same people will bitch about the NSA, and never get the cognitive dissonance involved.
If you feed the beast, you have fed the beast, and will have to live with the consequences.
Anyone in today's world who believes any "regulatory" legislation is going to work out in their favor (unless they are the big money paying for it) is a fool.
Where I work, and in the places I have temporarily worked in Si Valley in the EE field, most of my colleagues consisted of white and Asian guys, and Asian women. There was never any behavior in my encounters that ever suggested that during work hours anybody gave a flying f*ck about whether anyone was male/female/white/green/gay or whatever.
People should not extrapolate the world of juveniles to the professional workplace.
The one guy that actually did harass women at my present employer, was promptly fired.
You do realize then, that their desire really has nothing at all to do with wanting to protect children, right?
Read "Diaspora" and "Schild's Ladder" for highly plausible pictures of how machine intelligence may develop sentience, and go about it's existence.
What's wonderful about these books, is that they are far from dystopian. After reading these I'm left feeling that it is a moral imperative to work toward the development of machine intelligence and the possibility of transcending the human body and Darwinian evolution.