Orson Scott Card - PING [please freepmail me if you want or don't want to be pinged to Orson Scott Card political articles]
Posted on 07/15/2004 8:58:38 AM PDT by Tolik
His own political website: http://www.ornery.org/index.html is heavily populated by American- and other Leftists who are delightfully annoyed by Mr. Card's conservatism. He does not post on that site and its moderated by somebody else. He is a registered Democrat upset with hijacking of his party by the Left.
His literary, non-political website: http://www.hatrack.com
His fresh articles appear in the Rhinoceros Times, Greensboro, NC: http://www.rhinotimes.com/greensboro/ (before being posted permanently on his The Ornery American website http://www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/index.html ). He has 2 columns in the RhinoTimes: one on political/international events, and the second one: reviews on movies, books, and anything he wants (!). I check his and Michael Medved's reviews and found myself reliably relying on them.
Thanks for the ping!
That's assuming Hillary isn't smart enough to promise Edwards the VP slot if he doesn't run.
"to show my contempt for people who flout laws designed to keep our society a decent place to live."
Hear, hear!
This society is fighting cigarette use through education and isolating it with legal restrictions. Why not the same for dope?
Calling lepton, calling lepton...
Just how many deaths are there from drunk driving, compared to the death rates on the roads overall, and the general death rate?
Where alcohol-fueled abuse of family members was vanishingly rare.
How common is it now?
A nation where almost no one lost days to hangovers or binges; where no one had to be fired because of alcohol; where marriages weren't destroyed by alcoholism, where children almost never had to sacrifice their childhood to take care of their drunken parents.
I was not aware these were common problems.
Here's the thing that the drug-legalizers conveniently forget: Drugs are devastatingly harmful whether they're banned or not.
Some are, some aren't. They don't all need to be legalized.
And if they were legalized, it is hard to imagine that the drugs themselves would not do far more damage to America than the crimes associated with drugs are doing right now.
Take a look around at the damage that drug prohibition does, in the huge amount of crime and deaths that result from it. It's hard for me to imagine that legalizing it would have a worse long-term effect.
A person on cocaine would still be unable to maintain a relationship or be reliable on a job, whether it was legal or not.
Why? Plenty of them do it now. And if it was legal, then they'd probably get found out more quickly and get some help.
A person on marijuana would still live in a haze of irresponsibility.
A person "on" marijuana? A joint or two on the weekends, which is what it would end up being for most people more than a year or so out of college, won't result in someone wandering around in a "haze of irrepsonsibility".
Children whose parents were on drugs would be just as neglected as the children of alcoholics.
So any use of currently illegal drugs at all equates one to the same state as a gross alcohol abuser?
Sane parents don't want to raise kids who become drug-taking machines, which is all that addicts function as.
Every drug user is an addict? Addicts function only as drug-taking machines? That should be interesting to all the coffee drinkers and tobacco smokers (almost all of whom are addicts).
Furthermore, since drug-takers are parasites on society, producing next to nothing, but consuming as much as any productive citizen, our whole society would limp along, dragging these useless anchors through the bottom mud.
Again with the analogy to coffee drinkers and tobacco users. And alcohol drinkers, for that matter. They're all parasites on society, I see.
Mr. Card is a wonderful writer, and I admire his fiction. But the above is short on facts and long on fine-sounding but illogical conclusions.
The drug-legalizers like to paint an idyllic picture of "harmless recreational drug use." But there is no such thing as harmless drug use.
There is for non-addictive drugs. There even is for addictive drugs such as caffeine.
One thing is certain: If drugs are legalized, their use will increase vastly over what we have today.
IIRC, when drugs were legalized in the Netherlands, there was a short term rise, but then levels subsided back down to pre-legalization levels.
So, sure, maybe the drug kingpins will be put out of business; but the toll in broken homes, traffic accident deaths, unproductive workers, and dampened national creativity will more than take up the slack.
What the hell is the toll from broken homes, shootings, and twisted national culture glorifying drug dealers and the addicts and whores they live off of now?
The funny thing is, the people whom I was trying to impress with my "tolerance" were actually grossly intolerant of me. That was made plain both then and later.
Then you were hanging out with pretentious assholes. I've been to parties where people were smoking weed, and if you didn't care to partake no one thought twice about it, anymore than someone who was at a picnic and didn't care to have beer.
While I agree with most of your points....I gotta take issue with this one. I saw it in college all the time - kids that were "on" marijuana more than they were off of it. They didn't last long in school. I'd say that among users, it was about 50-50 - kids that didn't know when to stop, and kids that only smoked occasionally.
I always thought it was a real waste. Lots of smart teenagers got into dope and eventually failed out of school.
To be honest, I think I probably saw it more with alcohol, though. Hard to pass your classes when you're out partying four nights a week. I know that much from experience - learned after failing a semester to limit my partying to vacations and weekends.
And, in a related point, My Dad went to college in the early 60s. He says he didn't even know anyone who had tried pot. I went to college in the early 90s. While I was in school, I only knew of 3 people (including myself) that hadn't used it. What a difference a generation makes.
As much as I like Card, and admire his outstanding knowledge of history, he seems oblivious to the omnipresence of inebriants in virtually all civilizations. Of course, no Mormons get high, do they?
I went to school in the '70's on the East coast. The majority of people I knew used weed. A few used too much, classified as blowing at least one semester of school. I damn near did, though, although I wised up. The only people I knew who actually flunked out, though, did it while abusing alcohol.
Concerning Prohibition, I recall reading that cirrhosis of the liver dropped by about half in that era, a good proxy for how much alcoholism is present in society.
Because it is an astounding failure? When I was a teenager, it was widely held among teenagers that only an idiot would smoke. By the time I graduated college, smoking was all the rage again. People were smoking everywhere they could get away with it.
That is still true today, kids are all smoking again.
OK, then make smoking illegal.
You can't equate caffeine with alcohol or weed. It isn't mind altering, and taking too much just makes you feel bad. While it is addictive, the addiction is mild and can be broken in a couple of days.
He's a Mormon, and Mormons - generally speaking - don't even drink coffee. He's coming at the question from a very staunchly anti-drug upbringing, so it's not too surprising that he's bought in to the prohibitionist propaganda.
He's a smart guy, and I would have expected better from him, but I'll grant him that it's hard to research serious and well-constructed counterarguments against that which is woven into your own sense of identity.
Caffeiene is mind-altering, remember - it increases your level of alertness and ability to concentrate, that's why so many businesses give that particular drug away for free to their employees.
Hahaha!!! Good one!
Take caffeine and you won't do something you would never do if you weren't taking it. Both alcohol and weed have that exact effect -- people do things they would not otherwise do.
Caffeine doesn't cause judgement lapses or auto accidents. Caffeine doesn't result in additional children by women other than your wife. Taking caffeine won't result in going to bed with an Indian princess and waking up with an African queen.
The Edwards article should have been posted by itself.
The second section on the WOD is "reefer-madness" psychobabble.
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