so you are telling me when fall comes in 6 months in the northern hemisphere fatalities won't skyrocket? you know this as a fact? the spanish flu of 1918 followed the same progression: percolating below the radar over the summer, exploding in the fall when the flu virus survives longer in the cold air
and even if the fatality rate of this flu is wimpy, which seems likely, you are telling me that when it first appeared in march/ april, your opinion of the disease was spot on about it being harmless? you knew all the unknowns?
you know right now that the flu doesn't hold the potential to not only go pandemic, as this wimpy one obviously is, but not also viciously fatal? the chance is extremely low? but not zero, right?
the spanish flu had a low mortality rate too. and yet it killed millions. what if the next pandemic the rate is slightly higher? and everyone gets it at the same time: all the tamiflu, all the mechanical respirators: swamped out of avialability. nothing to worry about, right?
so who survives when such a hypothetical flu DOES EVENTUALLY arrive? well, i know that answer: certainly not you. those who survive will be those who healhty adrenal glands, who panic, hide and flee. it MAKES SENSE, it is INTELLIGENT to overreact in the face of UNKNOWNS than underreact. then the only thing we have to suffer are the bloviating hindsight know-it-alls afterwards, even if our "overreaction" might be the behavior that prevented more deaths!
your opinion, your hindsight, your certainty upon reflection are useless and arrogant. when the next pandemic appears, and it will, could take 10 years, could take 100, the influenza virus has many more tricks up its sleeves, one of them just might have a high mortality rate. and when that killer first appears many years from now, it will be virtually undistinguishable from how this wimply one appeared in april
and yet we have to listen to more hubristic assholes like you talk about the unknowns afterward as if you knew it all along
you don't represent intelligence. you represent an ignorant false complacency just as stupid and deadly as the false alarmism you skewer. we all know the cautionary tale of the boy who cried wolf. we need a new cautionary fable: the boy who cried sheep when the wolves were eating the flock, because his life of never experiencing any disasters in his life led him to assume this was an unchanging fact of human existence. ignorant bias
you mean in china they dutifully and calmly walk out of burning buildings?
in india they react to men running around with machine guns in icy calmness?
in europe the sight of exploding buses causes relaxing, calming effect
howabout AS A SPECIES, as a creature, a fucking mammal with adrenal glands and a healthy flight or fight response mechanism, we react the way we do, as a simple consequence of what we are
that renders all your faux regret pointless and useless: people panic. people have always panicked. people always will panic. why? because its a simple unescapable fact of us as living creatures with adrenal glands. we flip out not because of any sociological or cultural convention, ro anything that was ever taught, but as a simple consequence of inescapable biology
1. you know its a shame we can't build cities under water, that we are culturally conditioned to breathe air
2. you know its a shame we can't fly by flapping our arms, such has the media and our society propagandized us to walk around on our legs
those two comments make exactly as much sense as your opinion of the nature of panic
panic is a simple inescapable comppletely natural psychologicla and biological phenomenon. get used to it, don't bemoan it. especially since YOU ARE JUST AS SUBJECT TO IT
but my favorite is the deep sea anglerfish, where the males become nothing more than warts with eyeballs that embed in the female's flesh, nothing more than a pair of testes pushing sperm into her bloodstream;-P
you need to position yourself outside of the milky way galaxy, and far from the andromeda galaxy too
and even then, the light pollution from these gaudy neighborhood photon hogs spoils the good view
but take heart: nasa already has a plan to send a telescope outside the galaxy to get a good view, and it should be fully operational in 25,000 years
of course, there's the issue of the slight lag between taking a picture and the picture being transmitted back to earth, but top minds are working on that small problem, rest assured
mostly its the urban crime. it seems new york city cleaned up its crime act from the 80s and 90s but the hudson river cities have lagged, and are still stuck in that crime wave. but poughkeepsie is not as bad as newburgh. newburgh is scary. newburgh in fact just knocked one out of the ballpark in the sad state of urban crime in hudson river cities by giving us homegrown terrorists:
plus poughkeepsie has that big beautiful old railroad bridge they're opening this year to pedestrians for the 400 year celebration of henry hudson's arrival in 1609. pouhgkeepsie will have its renaissance soon enough
poughkeepsie is the only city on the hudson that gets its water straight from the hudson, and they have done this for generations. everyone else uses reservoirs along the hudson
they in fact have problems during droughts not because there's no water, but because the salinity increases as the salt line moves further up the river from new york city and the ocean. but otherwise, a major city getting their water from the same place municipal sewage gets dumped into from huge cities upriver and downriver, and has been polluted horribly for decades by industry like of GE with its PCBs, not to mention all the agricultural runoff with its fertilizers and insecticides, doesn't seem like it is doing so bad:
but i think you'd have a problem if someone gave you a shit pancake to eat, saying it was ok, it was chemically treated to be nutritious and delicious
there is meaning in the massive amount of time and the massive natural filtration that goes into the process you describe, and the artificial tiny distance described in the article between what comes out your ass or your dick, and what winds up in your cup and on your plate
when that distance is reduced via technology, the squeamishness you haughtily assume to be superior to is really just a basic and simple form of empathetic discomfort. its intrinsic to the way your mind works. its simple psychology and its real, and you are in fact not superior or immune to it, unless you are a cyborg
what you describe is not self-conscious immaturity, its basic human symbolic thinking. and you need to understand it (and know your own mind better), if you ever hope to remain meaningful to the human society around you
for billions of years, for billions of generations, strange archaic anaerobacteria and primitive algae slaved their entire lives, heck, their entire species, to make your atmosphere one fifth oxygen
all so you could one day watch the family guy on hulu.com at a starbucks in pasadena
but when the armed forces start building real terminators just to plug the upcoming christian bale terminator salvation movie, this hollywood pr stunt business has gotten a little out of hand
i'm sorry i have to draw the line. what next? someone releases a global pandemic just to plug... oh wait
medically only. but treating them medically implies they have no limits on their freedoms like in a prison. the reason they need to be constrained is that an addict is an addict is an addict. that is, they have no free will. given free choice, they pursue the same damaging endeavour. and so you need some sort of constraint on their freedoms in order to treat them, which implies some sort of criminal confinement in addition to the medical treatment. not that your typical american prison is drug free, btw, i labor under no delusions. nor do i think drug addcits don't need some sort of medical treatment. but i am simply dispelling your notion that treating addicts only medically is pragmatic. it doesn't work because they relapse, the flunk out, they willfully fight the treatment, etc
as for death from overdose versus death from stalin: if you take an honest appraisal of all the lives destroyed by drugs on a regular background noise basis around the world throughout history and in all cultures, it would be as an ocean compared to the raindrop of the suffering caused by the cruel dictators who have ever lived. for real. drugs have destroyed orders of magnitude more lives than all the dictators ever. its just that dictators do big quick cruel things that grab headlines, while destruction via drugs is a constant low grade background noise of destruction. it adds up to a lot more
aka: an intellectually honest attempt at making dead obvious connections between word and meaning
you are either:
1. willfully intellectually dishonest. that is, you can see the obvious connection between the comments and the attitude i describe, but you choose not to admit what you see out of cowardly stubbornness 2. or you are a genuinely pedantic moron
you decide
but my point has been made, and is fucking obvious to any neutral party and is multiply established in all threads her eon the subject of censorship
that you can't or won't see the fucking obvious is either funny or depressing about human nature, i alternate between the two impressions
as for cocaine, meth, heroin: it would be nice if you could use those drugs and only destroy yourself. but when these highly addictive+highly inebriating drugs make you an addict (when, not if), you become a dead weight on those around you. or, if abandoned by your family friends and your job, you become a ward of society. in other words, it is a fallacy to say you only hurt yourself. you hurt us all
blotting out reality because of psychological pain is just slow motion suicide. not that i'm against euthanasia, but the obvious answer to suicide is this:
1. sound mind, unsound body: suicide ok. like someone with huntington's 2. sound body, unsound mind: suicide not ok. simply because the very mechanisms of choice are corrupted. no free will choice is being made, a pathology is making the decisions. given time, you might reconsider suicide. given suicide, you don't reconsider anything
the same observations apply to highly addictive+inebriating drugs. and its not a coincidence, all highly addictive+inebriating drug use is just a form of slow motion suicide, a devaluing and nihilism of the self. if this dmaage could be confined to the self, all would be ok with suicide and hardcore drug use. except that this is never the case. anyone who commits suicide and becomes a hardcore addict hurts family, friends, society. no man is an island. it is a colossal blindness to think you are only hurting yourself
"how could the poster have displayed that attitude towards child porn when he never mentioned child porn at all, even implicitly?"
you mean as opposed to mentioning it explicitly? gee, i dunno how someone can NOT allude to something WITHOUT mentioning it ?! LOL
"That's not pedantry. It's the truth. The sentiment was not expressed any more than the exact literal words were."
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
hey, fucking moron, how do you define pedantry? here's a fucking good definition: a mind that can't look beyond the narrow exact literal words on the page in front of him
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
hey, tool, maybe the inability to look beyond exact literal words is a LIMIT OF YOUR LITTLE MIND?
maybe this is the TRUTH:
ANY FUCKING MEANING ANYONE COULD EVER COMMUNICATE EVER involves thinking and making connections and looking beyond the literla meaning as written
maybe, asswipe?
so, as i already said, you are 1. intellectually dishonest (you are capable of making the obvious fucking connections, but you are willfully holding back out of cowardly stubbornness), or 2. a genuinely asperger's syndrome level narrow shrill pendant
fucking. hilarious. the comment above sums it all up
anyone intellectually honest sees a connection between the attitude i described and the attitude in every comment cited
of course you don't have to agree
but you're just being a stubborn tool, you're not arguing in good faith
as for microsoft, its just proof there is groupthink at slashdot, and it is rampant. censorship of kiddie porn=OH NOES HERE COME HITLER* is just a classic retarded slashdot meme you encounter in every censorship thread on slashdot in multiple variants all the time
please, disagree with me. even after overwhelming repeating evidence. who fucking cares? the world is full fo stubborn and stupid tools. no reason why you shouldn't be one more
meanwhile, its fucking obvious to anyone honest who reads the threads
please note: i did not use the exact same verbiage this time around to describe the attitude in question! this subtle variation in my theme can only mean one thing: the attitude i am talking about doesn't exist at all on slashdot! this pedantic splitting of hairs is a complete victory for my mediocre mind! LOL
as it painfully obvious to anyone intellectually honest that the atttitude of the quote in question is exactly what i'm fucking talking about, and cut to the chase:
"Do you really disagree with the notion that having a system in place to censor one kind of speech makes it easier for a government to censor another kind?"
yes. i disagree 100%
just like i disagree that making gay marriage legal means we are a heartbeat away from making bestiality or necrophilia legal. which some fear-addled morons believe
just like i disagree that marijuana legalization means we are going to legalize meth or coke. which some fear-addled morons believe
anyone who believes censoring kiddie porn means OH NOES TEH HITLER IS ALMOST HERE is a fucking fear addled moron
there is no such thing as a slippery slope. repeat: there is no such fucking thing as a slippery slope. a slippery slope is an appeal to emotion, not reason. its a propaganda tool used by demagogues
why? because you do not have a monopoly on reason. other people can actually fucking tell the difference between censoring kiddie porn and censoring political speech. yah really. just like they can tell the difference betwen gay marriage and bestiality. yah really. just like they can tell the difference between marijuana and cocaine. yah really
get your ignorant fear-addled panties out of a bunch you bloviating intellectually dishonest asshole
"Prohibition doesn't make it less available, it makes it more expensive, dangerous to get/be around, and difficult to get help if one needs it."
the last 3 points are absolutely true. and yet the fact that illegality makes it less available (sorry, that's obvious truth), and therefore creates less addicts, outweighs the 3 negative effects you list. in what way could i prove to you this fact? oh wait, YOU PROVIDE THE PROOF:
"Also, your classification of drugs is pretty terrible, alcohol is responsible for more deaths, family breakups, injuries, and heartbreak than all other drugs combined and it's legal."
correction:
"Also, your classification of drugs is pretty terrible, alcohol is responsible for more deaths, family breakups, injuries, and heartbreak than all other drugs combined BECAUSE it's legal."
do you see that? legality=higher availability=more addicts=more damage. you say so yourself
"Also, many high strung people use coke and get paid a lot of money for their jobs."
yes, and there's people who can drive 90 mph all the time and never get into accidents. statistical outliers and anecdotes don't mean a damn thing. pharmacological fact: heroin, meth, and coke are among the mostly highly addictive and inebriating substances known to man (as opposed to just addictive, like nicotine: legal, or just inebriating, like lsd: should be legal). a high percentage of users of these drugs, as opposed to a low percentage of marijuana or alcohol users, proceed to a shadow of a life where they can't maintain relationships or a job. thus, it is better to make these highly addictive/ highly inebriating substances illegal: with all the real and ugly damage prohibition effects create, prohibtion effects are still smaller amounts of societal and personal damage than increased addiction that legality creates. you have to look at the pharmacology: you can't treat something like meth like you do alcohol policy-wise. you simply can't. its a kind of clueless ignorance on your part about what these drugs really do to peoples lives (easily, as opposed to alcohol) to even begin to think that way
its harder to get. sure, if you are committed to get it, you'll get it no problem. but the issue is initial casual use, before you get addicted: if meth is harder to get, less people will try it up front: they have no bruning desire to seek it out (yet)
this influence has a real value
the effect: illegality leading to less use, therefore it leads to less addiction. all addiciton needs to mushroom in society is exposure. so limit exposure: less addicts. simple as that. and this effect outweighs all of the bad effects of prohition of meth (increase in criminal organization, glorification among retarded subcultures, self-stigmatism of addicts rather than seeking out health treatment, etc). all of the bad effects of illegality are real, but of lower negative value than the widespread addiction that legality would lead to
with a drug like alcohol meanwhile, which is far less addictive, the prohibition effects are worse than the increase in alcohol addiction due to easy access
it depends upon the substance in question. you just can't treat something like meth like you treat alcohol policy wise. you simply can't if you have any knowledge of the pharmacology involved
if you had any familiarity with what meth really does to lives, and how easily it does these things compared to alcohol, you wouldn't have this clueless cavalier attitude to something far more powerful and dangerous than alcohol
the whole point making it illegal is making it less available. yes, it is always available, there will always be drug use, but the point is to MINIMIZE it. illegality actually does make it less available. you can always get it, but casual use means you are less likely to try it if it is a little harder to get it. if you are less likely to try it, you are less likely to fall down the chemical rabbit hole. you are less likely to try coke if it is verboten then if it is freely available
and that's the whole point: for those people who are at empty stage of their lives, and might turn to a drug, the point is to keep them away from drugs, and allow them to get back to a full life again. but if you introduce drugs into the situation, you turn what might otherwise be a temporary bit of helplessness into a life-destorying chemical dependency
and this simple observation outweighs all of the negatives of prohibition in regard ot the truly highly addictive and highly inebriating drugs like meth, coke, heroin. not marjiuana, not alcohol, not lsd, not nicotine: these should be legal. the double whammy of high addiction and high inebriation makes it impossible to retain a relationship and a job on meth, heroin, coke, etc.
every socioeconomic theohistorical geopolitical... every nook and cranny of human life you find drug abuse. people devalue themselves all the time. its even psychologically healthy to hold yourself back at times. but we all overdo it now and then, and wind up in a funk of despondency and hopelessness about our lives. this happens all the time in every society on the earth. there are addicts to nearly every kind of drug in all societies on the earth, present and historical. drug abuse is a constant, and it is a symptom of people who have given up in some way. they need society to keep drugs away from them in the first place: this is the most responsible public health attitude you can take towards drugs: lessen the availability, like innoculating from a disease
please provide to me your standards, oh great bloviating asshole, whereby someone might be able to say this is true, or not
in YOUR mind: is there a negative attitude towards microsoft on slashdot? yes or no?
answer that question
then answer this question: what is criteria for you to say your opinion, yes or no?
now, asshole: there is an obvious slashdot groupthink that censorship in the west of vile material is but a hearbeat away from the most authoritarian countries with the most vile restrictions on political and personal expression
multiple comments, modded up in groupthink, in every thread on the subject on censorship, reveals this to be mother. fucking. obvious
to anyone whose brain isn't buried in pedantic mediocrity
please, bloviate on. i can go in any thread on censorship on slashdot. i can find many comments, modded up in groupthink, directly alluding to the pantytwisting attitude that the west is heartbeat away from fascist mind control. its fucking. retarded. its fucking all over this site. its plain as day
please: tell me the sky is pink, tell me the water is dry. tell me the fucking obvious isn't obvious
Slashdot Mirror
i would downplay this notion of shims, and ballyhoo this notion of duct tape
shims just sound like a lame hack. using a shim means you've given up on elegance and respectability
but duct tape is awesome! if you use duct tape to solve a problem you are a manly mcgyveresque resourceful type
windows 7: the duct tape os, is a mark of pride dude!
being that cellulose itself is basically nothing but a plastic
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellulose
so you are telling me when fall comes in 6 months in the northern hemisphere fatalities won't skyrocket? you know this as a fact? the spanish flu of 1918 followed the same progression: percolating below the radar over the summer, exploding in the fall when the flu virus survives longer in the cold air
and even if the fatality rate of this flu is wimpy, which seems likely, you are telling me that when it first appeared in march/ april, your opinion of the disease was spot on about it being harmless? you knew all the unknowns?
you know right now that the flu doesn't hold the potential to not only go pandemic, as this wimpy one obviously is, but not also viciously fatal? the chance is extremely low? but not zero, right?
the spanish flu had a low mortality rate too. and yet it killed millions. what if the next pandemic the rate is slightly higher? and everyone gets it at the same time: all the tamiflu, all the mechanical respirators: swamped out of avialability. nothing to worry about, right?
so who survives when such a hypothetical flu DOES EVENTUALLY arrive? well, i know that answer: certainly not you. those who survive will be those who healhty adrenal glands, who panic, hide and flee. it MAKES SENSE, it is INTELLIGENT to overreact in the face of UNKNOWNS than underreact. then the only thing we have to suffer are the bloviating hindsight know-it-alls afterwards, even if our "overreaction" might be the behavior that prevented more deaths!
your opinion, your hindsight, your certainty upon reflection are useless and arrogant. when the next pandemic appears, and it will, could take 10 years, could take 100, the influenza virus has many more tricks up its sleeves, one of them just might have a high mortality rate. and when that killer first appears many years from now, it will be virtually undistinguishable from how this wimply one appeared in april
and yet we have to listen to more hubristic assholes like you talk about the unknowns afterward as if you knew it all along
you don't represent intelligence. you represent an ignorant false complacency just as stupid and deadly as the false alarmism you skewer. we all know the cautionary tale of the boy who cried wolf. we need a new cautionary fable: the boy who cried sheep when the wolves were eating the flock, because his life of never experiencing any disasters in his life led him to assume this was an unchanging fact of human existence. ignorant bias
you mean in china they dutifully and calmly walk out of burning buildings?
in india they react to men running around with machine guns in icy calmness?
in europe the sight of exploding buses causes relaxing, calming effect
howabout AS A SPECIES, as a creature, a fucking mammal with adrenal glands and a healthy flight or fight response mechanism, we react the way we do, as a simple consequence of what we are
that renders all your faux regret pointless and useless: people panic. people have always panicked. people always will panic. why? because its a simple unescapable fact of us as living creatures with adrenal glands. we flip out not because of any sociological or cultural convention, ro anything that was ever taught, but as a simple consequence of inescapable biology
1. you know its a shame we can't build cities under water, that we are culturally conditioned to breathe air
2. you know its a shame we can't fly by flapping our arms, such has the media and our society propagandized us to walk around on our legs
those two comments make exactly as much sense as your opinion of the nature of panic
panic is a simple inescapable comppletely natural psychologicla and biological phenomenon. get used to it, don't bemoan it. especially since YOU ARE JUST AS SUBJECT TO IT
oh, you're not? you're a fucking cyborg? pffffft
or the male seahorse getting pregnant
but my favorite is the deep sea anglerfish, where the males become nothing more than warts with eyeballs that embed in the female's flesh, nothing more than a pair of testes pushing sperm into her bloodstream ;-P
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglerfish#Reproduction
new york city has a solid, huge aquifer
but there's a lot of human populations that are exploding in regions which are not going to get more rainfall according to any climate model
get in the way of a stupid throwaway joke ;-)
you need to position yourself outside of the milky way galaxy, and far from the andromeda galaxy too
and even then, the light pollution from these gaudy neighborhood photon hogs spoils the good view
but take heart: nasa already has a plan to send a telescope outside the galaxy to get a good view, and it should be fully operational in 25,000 years
of course, there's the issue of the slight lag between taking a picture and the picture being transmitted back to earth, but top minds are working on that small problem, rest assured
mostly its the urban crime. it seems new york city cleaned up its crime act from the 80s and 90s but the hudson river cities have lagged, and are still stuck in that crime wave. but poughkeepsie is not as bad as newburgh. newburgh is scary. newburgh in fact just knocked one out of the ballpark in the sad state of urban crime in hudson river cities by giving us homegrown terrorists:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/22/nyregion/22terror.html
plus poughkeepsie has that big beautiful old railroad bridge they're opening this year to pedestrians for the 400 year celebration of henry hudson's arrival in 1609. pouhgkeepsie will have its renaissance soon enough
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/25/nyregion/25metjournal.html
we all know what water tastes like
but that taste is actually mouthfeel + the taste of various anions and cations (calcium, magnesium, chloride, etc)
steam distilled water actually doesn't taste like "water"
and high end spring water, especially the naturally carbonated variety, tastes like "soda"
but then i remembered poughkeepsie:
http://www.pokwater.com/new/history.html
poughkeepsie is the only city on the hudson that gets its water straight from the hudson, and they have done this for generations. everyone else uses reservoirs along the hudson
they in fact have problems during droughts not because there's no water, but because the salinity increases as the salt line moves further up the river from new york city and the ocean. but otherwise, a major city getting their water from the same place municipal sewage gets dumped into from huge cities upriver and downriver, and has been polluted horribly for decades by industry like of GE with its PCBs, not to mention all the agricultural runoff with its fertilizers and insecticides, doesn't seem like it is doing so bad:
http://www.pokwater.com/new/watercompare.htm
don't choke/ laugh. water shortages our are future. we are all going to be poughkeepsies soon enough, and poughkeepsie doesn't seem worse for the wear
http://www.pokwater.com/new/
but i think you'd have a problem if someone gave you a shit pancake to eat, saying it was ok, it was chemically treated to be nutritious and delicious
there is meaning in the massive amount of time and the massive natural filtration that goes into the process you describe, and the artificial tiny distance described in the article between what comes out your ass or your dick, and what winds up in your cup and on your plate
when that distance is reduced via technology, the squeamishness you haughtily assume to be superior to is really just a basic and simple form of empathetic discomfort. its intrinsic to the way your mind works. its simple psychology and its real, and you are in fact not superior or immune to it, unless you are a cyborg
what you describe is not self-conscious immaturity, its basic human symbolic thinking. and you need to understand it (and know your own mind better), if you ever hope to remain meaningful to the human society around you
fish don't fuck
the females just crap all their eggs in your water
then the males come along and just jizz all over the eggs, in your water
you're not drinking fish fucked water
you're drinking fish circlejerked water
for billions of years, for billions of generations, strange archaic anaerobacteria and primitive algae slaved their entire lives, heck, their entire species, to make your atmosphere one fifth oxygen
all so you could one day watch the family guy on hulu.com at a starbucks in pasadena
doesn't seem just
the sleestak fossil revealed yesterday was a nice advertisement for the upcoming land of the lost will ferrell movie
and electing a vulcan as president of the united states was a nice pr coup for the star trek movie now playing
but when the armed forces start building real terminators just to plug the upcoming christian bale terminator salvation movie, this hollywood pr stunt business has gotten a little out of hand
i'm sorry i have to draw the line. what next? someone releases a global pandemic just to plug... oh wait
medically only. but treating them medically implies they have no limits on their freedoms like in a prison. the reason they need to be constrained is that an addict is an addict is an addict. that is, they have no free will. given free choice, they pursue the same damaging endeavour. and so you need some sort of constraint on their freedoms in order to treat them, which implies some sort of criminal confinement in addition to the medical treatment. not that your typical american prison is drug free, btw, i labor under no delusions. nor do i think drug addcits don't need some sort of medical treatment. but i am simply dispelling your notion that treating addicts only medically is pragmatic. it doesn't work because they relapse, the flunk out, they willfully fight the treatment, etc
as for death from overdose versus death from stalin: if you take an honest appraisal of all the lives destroyed by drugs on a regular background noise basis around the world throughout history and in all cultures, it would be as an ocean compared to the raindrop of the suffering caused by the cruel dictators who have ever lived. for real. drugs have destroyed orders of magnitude more lives than all the dictators ever. its just that dictators do big quick cruel things that grab headlines, while destruction via drugs is a constant low grade background noise of destruction. it adds up to a lot more
aka: an intellectually honest attempt at making dead obvious connections between word and meaning
you are either:
1. willfully intellectually dishonest. that is, you can see the obvious connection between the comments and the attitude i describe, but you choose not to admit what you see out of cowardly stubbornness
2. or you are a genuinely pedantic moron
you decide
but my point has been made, and is fucking obvious to any neutral party and is multiply established in all threads her eon the subject of censorship
that you can't or won't see the fucking obvious is either funny or depressing about human nature, i alternate between the two impressions
marijuana should be legal
as for cocaine, meth, heroin: it would be nice if you could use those drugs and only destroy yourself. but when these highly addictive+highly inebriating drugs make you an addict (when, not if), you become a dead weight on those around you. or, if abandoned by your family friends and your job, you become a ward of society. in other words, it is a fallacy to say you only hurt yourself. you hurt us all
blotting out reality because of psychological pain is just slow motion suicide. not that i'm against euthanasia, but the obvious answer to suicide is this:
1. sound mind, unsound body: suicide ok. like someone with huntington's
2. sound body, unsound mind: suicide not ok. simply because the very mechanisms of choice are corrupted. no free will choice is being made, a pathology is making the decisions. given time, you might reconsider suicide. given suicide, you don't reconsider anything
the same observations apply to highly addictive+inebriating drugs. and its not a coincidence, all highly addictive+inebriating drug use is just a form of slow motion suicide, a devaluing and nihilism of the self. if this dmaage could be confined to the self, all would be ok with suicide and hardcore drug use. except that this is never the case. anyone who commits suicide and becomes a hardcore addict hurts family, friends, society. no man is an island. it is a colossal blindness to think you are only hurting yourself
"how could the poster have displayed that attitude towards child porn when he never mentioned child porn at all, even implicitly?"
you mean as opposed to mentioning it explicitly? gee, i dunno how someone can NOT allude to something WITHOUT mentioning it ?! LOL
"That's not pedantry. It's the truth. The sentiment was not expressed any more than the exact literal words were."
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
hey, fucking moron, how do you define pedantry? here's a fucking good definition: a mind that can't look beyond the narrow exact literal words on the page in front of him
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
hey, tool, maybe the inability to look beyond exact literal words is a LIMIT OF YOUR LITTLE MIND?
maybe this is the TRUTH:
ANY FUCKING MEANING ANYONE COULD EVER COMMUNICATE EVER involves thinking and making connections and looking beyond the literla meaning as written
maybe, asswipe?
so, as i already said, you are
1. intellectually dishonest (you are capable of making the obvious fucking connections, but you are willfully holding back out of cowardly stubbornness), or
2. a genuinely asperger's syndrome level narrow shrill pendant
fucking. hilarious. the comment above sums it all up
anyone intellectually honest sees a connection between the attitude i described and the attitude in every comment cited
of course you don't have to agree
but you're just being a stubborn tool, you're not arguing in good faith
as for microsoft, its just proof there is groupthink at slashdot, and it is rampant. censorship of kiddie porn=OH NOES HERE COME HITLER* is just a classic retarded slashdot meme you encounter in every censorship thread on slashdot in multiple variants all the time
please, disagree with me. even after overwhelming repeating evidence. who fucking cares? the world is full fo stubborn and stupid tools. no reason why you shouldn't be one more
meanwhile, its fucking obvious to anyone honest who reads the threads
please note: i did not use the exact same verbiage this time around to describe the attitude in question! this subtle variation in my theme can only mean one thing: the attitude i am talking about doesn't exist at all on slashdot! this pedantic splitting of hairs is a complete victory for my mediocre mind! LOL
as it painfully obvious to anyone intellectually honest that the atttitude of the quote in question is exactly what i'm fucking talking about, and cut to the chase:
"Do you really disagree with the notion that having a system in place to censor one kind of speech makes it easier for a government to censor another kind?"
yes. i disagree 100%
just like i disagree that making gay marriage legal means we are a heartbeat away from making bestiality or necrophilia legal. which some fear-addled morons believe
just like i disagree that marijuana legalization means we are going to legalize meth or coke. which some fear-addled morons believe
anyone who believes censoring kiddie porn means OH NOES TEH HITLER IS ALMOST HERE is a fucking fear addled moron
there is no such thing as a slippery slope. repeat: there is no such fucking thing as a slippery slope. a slippery slope is an appeal to emotion, not reason. its a propaganda tool used by demagogues
why? because you do not have a monopoly on reason. other people can actually fucking tell the difference between censoring kiddie porn and censoring political speech. yah really. just like they can tell the difference betwen gay marriage and bestiality. yah really. just like they can tell the difference between marijuana and cocaine. yah really
get your ignorant fear-addled panties out of a bunch you bloviating intellectually dishonest asshole
"Prohibition doesn't make it less available, it makes it more expensive, dangerous to get/be around, and difficult to get help if one needs it."
the last 3 points are absolutely true. and yet the fact that illegality makes it less available (sorry, that's obvious truth), and therefore creates less addicts, outweighs the 3 negative effects you list. in what way could i prove to you this fact? oh wait, YOU PROVIDE THE PROOF:
"Also, your classification of drugs is pretty terrible, alcohol is responsible for more deaths, family breakups, injuries, and heartbreak than all other drugs combined and it's legal."
correction:
"Also, your classification of drugs is pretty terrible, alcohol is responsible for more deaths, family breakups, injuries, and heartbreak than all other drugs combined BECAUSE it's legal."
do you see that? legality=higher availability=more addicts=more damage. you say so yourself
"Also, many high strung people use coke and get paid a lot of money for their jobs."
yes, and there's people who can drive 90 mph all the time and never get into accidents. statistical outliers and anecdotes don't mean a damn thing. pharmacological fact: heroin, meth, and coke are among the mostly highly addictive and inebriating substances known to man (as opposed to just addictive, like nicotine: legal, or just inebriating, like lsd: should be legal). a high percentage of users of these drugs, as opposed to a low percentage of marijuana or alcohol users, proceed to a shadow of a life where they can't maintain relationships or a job. thus, it is better to make these highly addictive/ highly inebriating substances illegal: with all the real and ugly damage prohibition effects create, prohibtion effects are still smaller amounts of societal and personal damage than increased addiction that legality creates. you have to look at the pharmacology: you can't treat something like meth like you do alcohol policy-wise. you simply can't. its a kind of clueless ignorance on your part about what these drugs really do to peoples lives (easily, as opposed to alcohol) to even begin to think that way
its harder to get. sure, if you are committed to get it, you'll get it no problem. but the issue is initial casual use, before you get addicted: if meth is harder to get, less people will try it up front: they have no bruning desire to seek it out (yet)
this influence has a real value
the effect: illegality leading to less use, therefore it leads to less addiction. all addiciton needs to mushroom in society is exposure. so limit exposure: less addicts. simple as that. and this effect outweighs all of the bad effects of prohition of meth (increase in criminal organization, glorification among retarded subcultures, self-stigmatism of addicts rather than seeking out health treatment, etc). all of the bad effects of illegality are real, but of lower negative value than the widespread addiction that legality would lead to
with a drug like alcohol meanwhile, which is far less addictive, the prohibition effects are worse than the increase in alcohol addiction due to easy access
it depends upon the substance in question. you just can't treat something like meth like you treat alcohol policy wise. you simply can't if you have any knowledge of the pharmacology involved
if you had any familiarity with what meth really does to lives, and how easily it does these things compared to alcohol, you wouldn't have this clueless cavalier attitude to something far more powerful and dangerous than alcohol
the whole point making it illegal is making it less available. yes, it is always available, there will always be drug use, but the point is to MINIMIZE it. illegality actually does make it less available. you can always get it, but casual use means you are less likely to try it if it is a little harder to get it. if you are less likely to try it, you are less likely to fall down the chemical rabbit hole. you are less likely to try coke if it is verboten then if it is freely available
and that's the whole point: for those people who are at empty stage of their lives, and might turn to a drug, the point is to keep them away from drugs, and allow them to get back to a full life again. but if you introduce drugs into the situation, you turn what might otherwise be a temporary bit of helplessness into a life-destorying chemical dependency
and this simple observation outweighs all of the negatives of prohibition in regard ot the truly highly addictive and highly inebriating drugs like meth, coke, heroin. not marjiuana, not alcohol, not lsd, not nicotine: these should be legal. the double whammy of high addiction and high inebriation makes it impossible to retain a relationship and a job on meth, heroin, coke, etc.
every socioeconomic theohistorical geopolitical... every nook and cranny of human life you find drug abuse. people devalue themselves all the time. its even psychologically healthy to hold yourself back at times. but we all overdo it now and then, and wind up in a funk of despondency and hopelessness about our lives. this happens all the time in every society on the earth. there are addicts to nearly every kind of drug in all societies on the earth, present and historical. drug abuse is a constant, and it is a symptom of people who have given up in some way. they need society to keep drugs away from them in the first place: this is the most responsible public health attitude you can take towards drugs: lessen the availability, like innoculating from a disease
on slashdot towards microsoft"
please provide to me your standards, oh great bloviating asshole, whereby someone might be able to say this is true, or not
in YOUR mind: is there a negative attitude towards microsoft on slashdot? yes or no?
answer that question
then answer this question: what is criteria for you to say your opinion, yes or no?
now, asshole: there is an obvious slashdot groupthink that censorship in the west of vile material is but a hearbeat away from the most authoritarian countries with the most vile restrictions on political and personal expression
multiple comments, modded up in groupthink, in every thread on the subject on censorship, reveals this to be mother. fucking. obvious
to anyone whose brain isn't buried in pedantic mediocrity
please, bloviate on. i can go in any thread on censorship on slashdot. i can find many comments, modded up in groupthink, directly alluding to the pantytwisting attitude that the west is heartbeat away from fascist mind control. its fucking. retarded. its fucking all over this site. its plain as day
please: tell me the sky is pink, tell me the water is dry. tell me the fucking obvious isn't obvious
fucking pedantic little shrew