Orson Scott Card - PING [please freepmail me if you want or don't want to be pinged to Orson Scott Card political articles]
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!
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.
The Edwards article should have been posted by itself.
The second section on the WOD is "reefer-madness" psychobabble.
Sorry, Orson. The end doesn't justify the means. Either the government DOES have the right to regulate what people do to their own bodies (without harming others), or it DOESN'T.
I hold the latter view. That doesn't mean that I think drugs aren't harmful -- it means that I regard personal responsibility more highly than state nannyism, and am content to let junkies suffer the rightful consequences of their stupid choices. If they break into people's houses or whatnot, then shoot them. Otherwise let them rot away.
What a dork.