more addicts is worse than all the negative effects of the war on drugs
this observation does not hold for pot, lsd, alcohol, nicotine
this observation does apply to cocaine, heroin, meth
i will grant you that coca tea is ok. it is very weak. the natives of bolivia, etc., didn't have the technology to make cocaine stronger than that. so coca tea is like khat: essentially harmless. but purified cocaine is pure addiction, and therefore should be outlawed
you don't understand addiction. people don't make rational decisions to take drugs. they take them in moments of weakness: the loss of a job, the loss of spouse. and then the chemical takes over, and controls your life
how can i say this? how if i told you about a class of people who were the most educated class of people on the issue of painkillers and drugs. and that this same MOST highly educated class of people, also had the highest rates of addiction for doctors. i'm talking about anesthesiologists
so how does that work? the people most educated are also the most addicted? the people who know the MOST about the pitfalls?
because education is not the deciding factor. simple exposure is. all highly addictive drugs need to addict is exposure. all they need is a moment of weakness. something we all have. it's an incredibly straightforward relationship: more exposure= more addicts
therefore, the most effective way to fight addiction is to make highly addictive drugs illegal. yes, you immediately introduce all of the negative influences of prohibition. and yet the negatives of higher exposure to coke, heroin, and meth are still greater than all the organized crime statistics you want to cite. with LESS addictive substances, prohibition's lessons apply: alcohol, marijuana
but not those lessons do not prevail when we are dealing with the vampires. not the drugs where simple exposure leads to addiction, regardless of willpower, experience, and education
you speak of economists. economists talk about rational decision makers in a rational marketplace. these arguments don't apply to addiction, because addiction is not a rational choice
in procrasti's world, "a hard choice" is what we call slavery
for example, a slave can choose not to work the fields today if he wants, but then he gets 20 lashings. he can choose to marry another slave that his master did not choose for him to mate with, but that's 50 lashings
so he's not really a slave see, he can still choose to do anything he wants just like a nonslave, it's just harder for him. a slave is as free as you and me, it's just that his choices are a "hard choice" because they involve lashings
i await your next piece of divine wisdom on why water is dry and the sun is dark
i have discovered the amazing truth from you that slavery is just a world like freedom, it's just full of hard choices
so you are saying that we can make cocaine and heroin legal, just as soon as human beings stop caring when people they walk by on their way to work are dying in the street
drug legalization: legal in a world without any human conscience
that seems to be your position
and i agree, it would be legal in such a world
but back here in this weird place called reality, you need to update your opinion to include the small nagging issue of people actually caring when someone is dying in the street
yes, 100% true: society gets to choose which behaviors are permitted and which are not, based on a prudent risk assessment
the risk of addiction is too high for cocaine, heroin, and meth. therefore, in the name of freedom (of the nonaddicts), it is illegal to zombify yourself and become a slave of a chemical
anything else i can help you with today in the realm of common fucking sense?
ask any recovering alcohol addict, nicotine addict, heroin addict, etc.:
forever, for the rest of your life, meeting a certain person from your past, seeing a certain street corner, it all suddenly comes rushing back to you, the urge will knock you off your feet
when you are depressed at the loss of a job, a girlfriend, the addiction is there waiting for you in your moment of weakness to relapse
you have to carry a burden, the rest of your life. the chance of relapse is huge, forever. it requires ocnstant effort, your entire life, not to go back. your freedom has been permanently diminished, your entire life
by becoming an addict to a chemical, you have made a permanent space in your brain the rest of your life for the full blown addiction to come back
such that the most intelligent social and personal policy is to never flirt with the chemical in the first place
anything else i can help you with today, oh champion of slavery?
"The historical data shows quite clearly that legal heroin, amphetamines and cocaine did not particularly cause any great social problems for most people"
heroin addiction as a tool of war
sounds like a social problem for china under the mandarins, no?
all natural freedoms are in natural tension with the freedoms of others
for example: your right to smoke versus my right to breathe smokeless air
the solution is you have to smoke where i can't smell your smoke
i have a right not to have to clothe and feed zombies
but there is no way to take coke/ heroin/ meth without risking addiction
therefore, in the name of a better understand of natural freedom than you seem to possess, it is right to make substances that are highly addictive and highly incapacitating at the same time illegal (therefore excluding isd, not addictive, and nicotine, not incapacitating)
it always amazed and perplexed me to see people argue, in the name of freedom, for substances that turn you into a slave
1. if you become an addict, you screw up my life as well as tyour own, because now i have to feed and clothe a zombie
2. the lessons of prohibition about the mafia is 100% true. i appreciate and acknowledge all of them. and it applies to marijuana, alcohol, nicotine, lsd, etc.: these drugs should be legal. however, substances that are both highly incapacitating AND highly addictive at the same time have negative effects so viral and devastating that the legalization of these substances (heroin, coke, meth) outweigh all the negatives of prohibition. it's a choice between the lesser of two evils. for most drugs, legalization is the lesser evil. for certian highly addictive and inebriating substances, it is prohibition
if i play halo all day instead of working, that's a choice
a nagging voice in my head that compels me to seek more incapacitating drug is not a choice
an addict therefore is not making a choice, an addict is a slave to a chemical
so a further argument against drug addiction from the point of view of natural freedom is that it is incompatible with the concep tof championing freedom to choose to do something which permanently incapacitates your right to be free
do you have a right to choose to be a slave? i say philosophically that you do not
as for the rest of your argument:
"You do not have a duty to provide food or housing or other such niceties for yourself"
wrong
you have that duty, from a point of view of natural rights and freedoms (and the lesser, unmentioned, but equally important, natural resaponsibilities)
go ahead, ask a champion of liberty: ask any libertarian
"Like the movies and tv shows and games they enjoy today will still be made if no one ever pays for them."
that's a colossal statement of your stupidity
they made music in the time of mozart you know. how many cds were around then?
and how much does it cost someone actually produce an album nowadays? hint: it's around the price of a laptop, because THAT'S ALL YOU NEED NOWADAYS
likewise, the golden age of movies occured when there were no dvds or vcrs (something which the movie industry fought tooth and nail, because it was going to kill their business... and now represents a huge cash cow for them... whu!?)
hmmm... making money off of pirates of the caribbean might involve theatres... theatres that continue to fill seats even though everyone has a television set (which people said were going to kill movies in the 1950s btw)
but of course, movie theatres are going to be dead because everyone wants to look at a crappy copy on their 17 inch monitor in their parents basement by themselves
it's right up there in the declaration of independence, produced by a bunch of men closer to an actual purtanical influence than anyone alive today
what the founding fathers knew about natural freedoms, which many drug proponents forget, is that all natural freedoms are in natural tension with other people's natural freedoms
for example, you are not free to shout "fire" in a crowded theatre: you risk my life
you are not free to smoke in offices now, because it is a natural right an dfreedom of mine to breathe fresh air as a nonsmoker
you are also not free to drive 120 mph on the highway, bceause you put the lives of people other than yourself in jeopardy
likewise, users of highly addictive substances risk turning themselves into wards of the state that my taxes must feed and clothe
so please, pursue happiness in all the ways happiness can be pursued, except for one class of actions: pursuits of happiness that are sought at the expense of my misery
and that's what you do when you risk addiction. you risk your ability to function and support yourself, risking you turning yourself into a zombie i and society must house and clothe. you decrease my freedom
so you don't get to take coke. sorry
this argument brought to you by a better understanding of happiness and natural freedom than you possess: it exists in a tension with other people's happiness and freedoms
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness: i worship these concepts
and in that worship, i know that you don't get to reduce my life or my liberty to pursue your happiness
that you don't understand how pursuing risky pursuits that flirt with drug addiction reduces my freedom is not a valid excuse
because you are risking other people's lives as well as your own
likewise, you don't have the right to risk turning yourself into a zombie addict that society must provide food and housing for
freedom is a concept that is constantly in tension with other people's freedoms
for exmaple: your freedom to smoke tobacco. well, what baout my freedom not to have to inhale smoky air?
if you can articulate a concept of freedom and drug use that does not imply that you are decreasing the freedoms of those around you, you have a valid argument
but if you leave the freedom of nonaddicts, who are forced to care for addicts, out of your formulation on a discussion of freedom, you have an invalid grasp on the philosophy of natural inherent freedom
in other words, my argument, in forcing people off cocaine, is actually more in line with a solid understanding of people's inherent freedoms, than your pov is
only meth, coke, and the opiates carry the double whammy of viral addictiveness and incapacitation
such that even though the lessons of prohibition apply to all drugs, only these 3 drugs with the special double combo have real world effects worse than the negative effects of prohibition, and only those 3 therefore should remain illegal
you have to be in the upper right quadrant to be illegal: the special evil cocktail of high addiction, high incapacitation
everything else should be legal (lsd: highly incapacitating, but not addictive: legal, nicotine: highly addictive, but not incapacitating, legal)
only meth, cocaine, and the opiates carry the double whammy of viral addictiveness and heavy incapacitation
such that even though all the lessons of prohibition apply to these 3 drugs too, the negative effects of the actual drugs themselves are still worse than all of the lessons of prohibition
where polotically correct in this sense is sensitivity to the dying music industry: maybe there really is no more money in this business
we all talk about "embracing new models", and anger at the industry for seeing napster and fighting them tooth and nail, rather than changing their business model. we yell at the music industry for not using the internet to their advantage... well what if the suits are right? there is no advantage in the internet. that it's simply death for them?
of course there is still money in concerts and movie theatres, those are real world venues. also advertising plugs. but everything that goes on media: movies, music, maybe there really is nothing but a black hole of no cash for the music and movie industries
not that the industries can do anything about it
and copyright of course means shit: it's simply unenforceable. you can trap a few scurrying mice here and there and extract a few pennies from soccer moms and college kids, but everyone will trade anyways, with just more and more bulletproof protocols and apps
not that i'm worried or complaining about this new world. one music exec assholes financial riches gone means our cultural riches greatly improved. there's more than one way to measure richness than just cash in the bank
it's a wonderful new world in fact
long live the death of the music and movie industries
this is really wonderful
maybe they should merge RTF and OOXML
on
RTF Vs. OOXML
·
· Score: 4, Funny
and i'll tell you why: i'd rather have a corrupt, compromised, bought and sold media with an agenda, chock a block with propaganda, and a public wary and untrustworthy of it
than a media supposedly annoited as impartial and fair
oh really? who says they are fair and impartial? who carries that governmental seal of approval?
no one does. all media, all the time, and forever more, is opinionated
an impartial media is something that can never exist
do you want people to stop thinking and mindlessly accept what they see on the teevee?
well then why do you want to push the burden of critical distrust in the media departments, rather than in the mind of the public
the media is a lost cause. philosophically, it cannot be depended to be imaprtial. the real battle is in the mind of the general public
and in such a pov, an imperfect does us all a service: it makes sure they think. it keeps pushing the envelope on what bullshit it tries to shove down the public's throat, keeping their minds awake and untrusting, making sure someone somewhere is saying "hey, wait a minute, this is bs...cue the usual suspects here who believe the public is dumb and stupid and believes everything they see on the teevee anyway
as if shitting on the general public is supposed to win you any points other than to prove you are an elitist in an ivory tower, and therefore disconnected from what really matters in the first place
Slashdot Mirror
anyone else would have realized by now that redefining your terms to have the exact opposite meaning is a sign of defeat
but you keep right in bulldozing, congratualtions to hard headed stubbornness
procrasti you need to learn the value of honesty
here, this guy has the same opinion you do, but at least he is honest about what his position means, about what your position means:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=404888&threshold=3&commentsort=1&mode=nested&cid=21898958
slavery to drugs is not a kind of freedom where you have "hard choices"
fucking incredible stubbornness in the face of complete defeat
redefine slavery as freedom, and you keep right on chugging
in your own maladaptive display of colossal stubbornness in complete defeat, where you wind redefining slavery as freedom, you're kind of awesome
kind of like a massive carwreck with lots of decapitated bodies is awesome
more exposure leads to more addicts
more addicts is worse than all the negative effects of the war on drugs
this observation does not hold for pot, lsd, alcohol, nicotine
this observation does apply to cocaine, heroin, meth
i will grant you that coca tea is ok. it is very weak. the natives of bolivia, etc., didn't have the technology to make cocaine stronger than that. so coca tea is like khat: essentially harmless. but purified cocaine is pure addiction, and therefore should be outlawed
you don't understand addiction. people don't make rational decisions to take drugs. they take them in moments of weakness: the loss of a job, the loss of spouse. and then the chemical takes over, and controls your life
how can i say this? how if i told you about a class of people who were the most educated class of people on the issue of painkillers and drugs. and that this same MOST highly educated class of people, also had the highest rates of addiction for doctors. i'm talking about anesthesiologists
so how does that work? the people most educated are also the most addicted? the people who know the MOST about the pitfalls?
because education is not the deciding factor. simple exposure is. all highly addictive drugs need to addict is exposure. all they need is a moment of weakness. something we all have. it's an incredibly straightforward relationship: more exposure= more addicts
therefore, the most effective way to fight addiction is to make highly addictive drugs illegal. yes, you immediately introduce all of the negative influences of prohibition. and yet the negatives of higher exposure to coke, heroin, and meth are still greater than all the organized crime statistics you want to cite. with LESS addictive substances, prohibition's lessons apply: alcohol, marijuana
but not those lessons do not prevail when we are dealing with the vampires. not the drugs where simple exposure leads to addiction, regardless of willpower, experience, and education
you speak of economists. economists talk about rational decision makers in a rational marketplace. these arguments don't apply to addiction, because addiction is not a rational choice
the movie industry needs dvd income in order to survive?
oh great genius: how did they ever make massively expensive movies when there was only movie theatres?
i await your divine wisdom
or did you actually just make the straight faced argument that slavery is superior to freedom?
in procrasti's world, "a hard choice" is what we call slavery
for example, a slave can choose not to work the fields today if he wants, but then he gets 20 lashings. he can choose to marry another slave that his master did not choose for him to mate with, but that's 50 lashings
so he's not really a slave see, he can still choose to do anything he wants just like a nonslave, it's just harder for him. a slave is as free as you and me, it's just that his choices are a "hard choice" because they involve lashings
i await your next piece of divine wisdom on why water is dry and the sun is dark
i have discovered the amazing truth from you that slavery is just a world like freedom, it's just full of hard choices
for example, going 60 mph is legal, going 120 mph is not
risking addiction with alcohol or pot should be legal, risking addiction with coke or heroin is not
it's about the fact that alcohol/ pot=mildly addictive, heorin. coke=wildly addictive
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_addiction
now that you have this wonderful concept called "scale" before you, maybe you can rework what you said above to make some sense
so you are saying that we can make cocaine and heroin legal, just as soon as human beings stop caring when people they walk by on their way to work are dying in the street
drug legalization: legal in a world without any human conscience
that seems to be your position
and i agree, it would be legal in such a world
but back here in this weird place called reality, you need to update your opinion to include the small nagging issue of people actually caring when someone is dying in the street
when you've done that, get back to me
or perhaps, you have a false sense of security
hmm...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_addiction
yes, 100% true: society gets to choose which behaviors are permitted and which are not, based on a prudent risk assessment
the risk of addiction is too high for cocaine, heroin, and meth. therefore, in the name of freedom (of the nonaddicts), it is illegal to zombify yourself and become a slave of a chemical
anything else i can help you with today in the realm of common fucking sense?
ask any recovering alcohol addict, nicotine addict, heroin addict, etc.:
forever, for the rest of your life, meeting a certain person from your past, seeing a certain street corner, it all suddenly comes rushing back to you, the urge will knock you off your feet
when you are depressed at the loss of a job, a girlfriend, the addiction is there waiting for you in your moment of weakness to relapse
you have to carry a burden, the rest of your life. the chance of relapse is huge, forever. it requires ocnstant effort, your entire life, not to go back. your freedom has been permanently diminished, your entire life
by becoming an addict to a chemical, you have made a permanent space in your brain the rest of your life for the full blown addiction to come back
such that the most intelligent social and personal policy is to never flirt with the chemical in the first place
anything else i can help you with today, oh champion of slavery?
please choke to death on your vomit
k thx
"A drug addict is still free to make the choice, its just a damn hard choice."
that's wonderful doublespeak for admitting that drug addiction impairs your freedom
you keep championing slavery, i'll keep championing freedom
agreed?
"The historical data shows quite clearly that legal heroin, amphetamines and cocaine did not particularly cause any great social problems for most people"
heroin addiction as a tool of war
sounds like a social problem for china under the mandarins, no?
all natural freedoms are in natural tension with the freedoms of others
for example: your right to smoke versus my right to breathe smokeless air
the solution is you have to smoke where i can't smell your smoke
i have a right not to have to clothe and feed zombies
but there is no way to take coke/ heroin/ meth without risking addiction
therefore, in the name of a better understand of natural freedom than you seem to possess, it is right to make substances that are highly addictive and highly incapacitating at the same time illegal (therefore excluding isd, not addictive, and nicotine, not incapacitating)
it always amazed and perplexed me to see people argue, in the name of freedom, for substances that turn you into a slave
1. if you become an addict, you screw up my life as well as tyour own, because now i have to feed and clothe a zombie
2. the lessons of prohibition about the mafia is 100% true. i appreciate and acknowledge all of them. and it applies to marijuana, alcohol, nicotine, lsd, etc.: these drugs should be legal. however, substances that are both highly incapacitating AND highly addictive at the same time have negative effects so viral and devastating that the legalization of these substances (heroin, coke, meth) outweigh all the negatives of prohibition. it's a choice between the lesser of two evils. for most drugs, legalization is the lesser evil. for certian highly addictive and inebriating substances, it is prohibition
if i play halo all day instead of working, that's a choice
a nagging voice in my head that compels me to seek more incapacitating drug is not a choice
an addict therefore is not making a choice, an addict is a slave to a chemical
so a further argument against drug addiction from the point of view of natural freedom is that it is incompatible with the concep tof championing freedom to choose to do something which permanently incapacitates your right to be free
do you have a right to choose to be a slave? i say philosophically that you do not
as for the rest of your argument:
"You do not have a duty to provide food or housing or other such niceties for yourself"
wrong
you have that duty, from a point of view of natural rights and freedoms (and the lesser, unmentioned, but equally important, natural resaponsibilities)
go ahead, ask a champion of liberty: ask any libertarian
"Like the movies and tv shows and games they enjoy today will still be made if no one ever pays for them."
that's a colossal statement of your stupidity
they made music in the time of mozart you know. how many cds were around then?
and how much does it cost someone actually produce an album nowadays? hint: it's around the price of a laptop, because THAT'S ALL YOU NEED NOWADAYS
likewise, the golden age of movies occured when there were no dvds or vcrs (something which the movie industry fought tooth and nail, because it was going to kill their business... and now represents a huge cash cow for them... whu!?)
hmmm... making money off of pirates of the caribbean might involve theatres... theatres that continue to fill seats even though everyone has a television set (which people said were going to kill movies in the 1950s btw)
but of course, movie theatres are going to be dead because everyone wants to look at a crappy copy on their 17 inch monitor in their parents basement by themselves
pffffffffft
you sir, are an idiot
you don't understand your subject matter
it's right up there in the declaration of independence, produced by a bunch of men closer to an actual purtanical influence than anyone alive today
what the founding fathers knew about natural freedoms, which many drug proponents forget, is that all natural freedoms are in natural tension with other people's natural freedoms
for example, you are not free to shout "fire" in a crowded theatre: you risk my life
you are not free to smoke in offices now, because it is a natural right an dfreedom of mine to breathe fresh air as a nonsmoker
you are also not free to drive 120 mph on the highway, bceause you put the lives of people other than yourself in jeopardy
likewise, users of highly addictive substances risk turning themselves into wards of the state that my taxes must feed and clothe
so please, pursue happiness in all the ways happiness can be pursued, except for one class of actions: pursuits of happiness that are sought at the expense of my misery
and that's what you do when you risk addiction. you risk your ability to function and support yourself, risking you turning yourself into a zombie i and society must house and clothe. you decrease my freedom
so you don't get to take coke. sorry
this argument brought to you by a better understanding of happiness and natural freedom than you possess: it exists in a tension with other people's happiness and freedoms
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness: i worship these concepts
and in that worship, i know that you don't get to reduce my life or my liberty to pursue your happiness
that you don't understand how pursuing risky pursuits that flirt with drug addiction reduces my freedom is not a valid excuse
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=methamphetamine+addiction
because you are risking other people's lives as well as your own
likewise, you don't have the right to risk turning yourself into a zombie addict that society must provide food and housing for
freedom is a concept that is constantly in tension with other people's freedoms
for exmaple: your freedom to smoke tobacco. well, what baout my freedom not to have to inhale smoky air?
if you can articulate a concept of freedom and drug use that does not imply that you are decreasing the freedoms of those around you, you have a valid argument
but if you leave the freedom of nonaddicts, who are forced to care for addicts, out of your formulation on a discussion of freedom, you have an invalid grasp on the philosophy of natural inherent freedom
in other words, my argument, in forcing people off cocaine, is actually more in line with a solid understanding of people's inherent freedoms, than your pov is
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_addiction
x & y: addiction potential and incapacitation potential
lsd: highly incapacitating, barely addictive: legal
nicotine: highly addictive, barely incapacitating: legal
marijuana, alcohol: moderately incapacitating, moderately addictive: legal
only meth, coke, and the opiates carry the double whammy of viral addictiveness and incapacitation
such that even though the lessons of prohibition apply to all drugs, only these 3 drugs with the special double combo have real world effects worse than the negative effects of prohibition, and only those 3 therefore should remain illegal
alcohol is moderately addictive
marijuana is also moderately addictive
nicotine is highly addictive, but it's not incapacitating
here, some help for you
you have to be in the upper right quadrant to be illegal: the special evil cocktail of high addiction, high incapacitation
everything else should be legal (lsd: highly incapacitating, but not addictive: legal, nicotine: highly addictive, but not incapacitating, legal)
only meth, cocaine, and the opiates carry the double whammy of viral addictiveness and heavy incapacitation
such that even though all the lessons of prohibition apply to these 3 drugs too, the negative effects of the actual drugs themselves are still worse than all of the lessons of prohibition
talk about treating highly addictive drugs and their addiction as a disease, and not a crime
what say them to this? interesting revealing of the colors here
aside: my belief is that marijuana, lsd, anything nonaddictive should be legal, but highly addictive drugs like coke, meth, heroin should be illegal
where polotically correct in this sense is sensitivity to the dying music industry: maybe there really is no more money in this business
we all talk about "embracing new models", and anger at the industry for seeing napster and fighting them tooth and nail, rather than changing their business model. we yell at the music industry for not using the internet to their advantage... well what if the suits are right? there is no advantage in the internet. that it's simply death for them?
of course there is still money in concerts and movie theatres, those are real world venues. also advertising plugs. but everything that goes on media: movies, music, maybe there really is nothing but a black hole of no cash for the music and movie industries
not that the industries can do anything about it
and copyright of course means shit: it's simply unenforceable. you can trap a few scurrying mice here and there and extract a few pennies from soccer moms and college kids, but everyone will trade anyways, with just more and more bulletproof protocols and apps
not that i'm worried or complaining about this new world. one music exec assholes financial riches gone means our cultural riches greatly improved. there's more than one way to measure richness than just cash in the bank
it's a wonderful new world in fact
long live the death of the music and movie industries
this is really wonderful
call it ROTFL
and i'll tell you why: i'd rather have a corrupt, compromised, bought and sold media with an agenda, chock a block with propaganda, and a public wary and untrustworthy of it
...cue the usual suspects here who believe the public is dumb and stupid and believes everything they see on the teevee anyway
than a media supposedly annoited as impartial and fair
oh really? who says they are fair and impartial? who carries that governmental seal of approval?
no one does. all media, all the time, and forever more, is opinionated
an impartial media is something that can never exist
do you want people to stop thinking and mindlessly accept what they see on the teevee?
well then why do you want to push the burden of critical distrust in the media departments, rather than in the mind of the public
the media is a lost cause. philosophically, it cannot be depended to be imaprtial. the real battle is in the mind of the general public
and in such a pov, an imperfect does us all a service: it makes sure they think. it keeps pushing the envelope on what bullshit it tries to shove down the public's throat, keeping their minds awake and untrusting, making sure someone somewhere is saying "hey, wait a minute, this is bs
as if shitting on the general public is supposed to win you any points other than to prove you are an elitist in an ivory tower, and therefore disconnected from what really matters in the first place