Free Republic

Well, this gets more and more interesting...

The ONLY purpose for illegal drugs is to get high, which makes one much more dangerous than one would be if one were NOT high.

But didn't you just concede that it's possible that some currently illegal drugs could be used as prescription drugs treating a variety of ailments, as long as they passed drug testing standards? How did you come back to "only one use" after one post? As long as they're fully illegal, they'll never have any other uses, because further drug testing can't be implemented under threat of incarceration. Funny how the government works...

I fully agree that using illegal drugs to get "high" can make one more dangerous to others. The notion that it does, without fail, is absolutely absurd. A thirty year old man sitting in his living room watching TV while using marijuana is no more dangerous to others than a thirty year old man doing the same thing while perfectly sober. If he gets behind the wheel of a car, maybe the risk of an accident is higher (although many recent studies seem to dispel that notion). That's why driving while under the influence is illegal, which was my initial point. The laws currently in place protect against and punish the things you're afraid of.

And, just to clean house, as for the first question of your previous response: I didn't respond to the portion of your post dealing with "culling the weak". I responded to a second, completely different point. You can handle two thought processes at once, can't you? (insert silly smiley face to let you know I'm only kidding here)

Sounds a bit like the Garbage Pail Kids trading cards I collected as a kid. Ah, Pat Splat...

Are we not talking about culling the weak any more?

"We" were never talking about culling the weak. Neither the words nor the sentiment ever came from this direction

Illegal drugs have only one use - to make someone high, and thus stupid.

I could point you to some of the thousands of doctors, scientists, and researchers that believe that some currently illegal drugs could be used as, among other things, pain relievers and mood stabilizers, if you'd like.

I could also point to the currently legal drugs that "only have one use", alcohol chief among them. After all, any amount of alcohol makes one drunk and stupid, right? Or do you admit that there are different levels of alcohol use, but hold the contradictory belief that there is only one level of drug use?

Guns have many uses.

No, they pretty much do one thing - shoot a bullet or bullets. What you choose to fire those bullets at or away from, or whether you choose to fire them at all, is another matter entirely, but they "only have one use". Unless you have knowledge of a gun that doubles as a blender or CD player...

Ouch! I am cut to the quick! You are the VERY FIRST FREEPER to ever use that oh-so-clever line! I must now go and commit suicide since I am in such pain from the force of your lingustic riposte! I must leave FR forever since I have been soooo put in my place!

It's called decaf. Look into it. Unless, of course, you own stock in an exclamation point distributor, in which case, carry on!! Really! It's fun! To blindingly overreact!! In lieu of an actual argument!!

From your support of this drivel, I gather you are a racist?

No, just an opponent of embarassingly uninformed blanket statements, particularly when the maker of such statements has absolutely no argument short of "It's true. I'm right. Even if you show me evidence to the contrary.".

Any non-white person who listens to rap is a racist.

Good to see you living up to your FReeper name.

Found another one for my homepage, guys...

And by the way, people who are high (either by drugs or alcohol) can and do harm others through the things they do while high.

Which is, of course, why those things in and of themselves are illegal. After all, people who own guns can and do harm others through the things they do while holding a gun. Which do you prefer to be illegal: the holding of guns, or the harmful things that some gun owners do while holding them?

Yeah...where's my thirteen dollars?

Hopefully, Warren Zevon was the first last week. Although the "threes rule" seems to be frequently violated this year - they just keep coming in fours and fives...

(premature retraction)

Don't worry, it happens to every guy now and then. I blame the Illuminati...

It's a distinction without a difference.

Not to the artist who previously found himself owing his record company thousands of dollars after a successful debut album. Are you saying it's irrelevant that musicians will make more money for their work under a non-RIAA-dominated system, because the DNC is going to profit somewhere down the line anyway?

Regardless of how you feel about file-sharing, the fact that the current RIAA campaign uses "Don't you care about supporting the artists you like?" as a selling point is ridiculous, given that the RIAA and major labels conspire to wring from those artists as much money as they possibly can before they begin to pay them for their work. Artists don't make money from record sales; they make money from touring and merchandise sales, if that.

I sell used CDs for $3.00

Then you're breaking the law. Even moreso than P@P file-sharers, in fact, since you are actually making a profit on the physical product created and distributed by the record company, rather than an abstract form of the data within the product.

You're not alone, of course: there are thousands of used CD stores in the US, and every one of them is reselling a copyrighted product without the express consent of the copyright owner. Yet the RIAA isn't filing mass lawsuits against the owners of your local Second Spin.

If I didn't know any better, I'd think the RIAA was suing schoolkids and grandparents because it's easier than making a valid case, both legally and in the court of public opinion, subject to counterpoints and scrutiny. Much easier to scare a kid's mother into paying $2000 than going to court against a legitimate business and proving that the CD would have brought them $2000 had it not been resold.

There's already an easy way around the problem for P2P users. A 2-minute Google search will bring up at least a half-dozen websites that track working "dummy" ISPs, used by dozens of people at a time and completely anonymous. Change your computer's static IP, and voila! No RIAA lawsuit. These guys are going after schoolkids and grandmothers because they are easy targets. All they're going to do in the long run is make more and more aware of how not to be an easy target.

That's interesting, considering I've been paying $1.49 for over a week now.

Well, I've been paying $1.67 for the past two weeks. So, the two of us pay a national monthly average of over $1.50.

Well, to play devil's advocate (poor choice of words, I know), this priest was clearly guilty. He solicited sexual favors from an undercover cop; no room for he-said she-said there. The allegations of child molestation are just that, allegations, made several years after the fact in some cases, and with no clear proof. While I believe most of the accused priests are guilty, it's quite obvious that there's a difference between accusations of abuse and concrete proof of illegal activity.

Well, you can exist for years without sex, but I damn sure wouldn't call it "living"...

I quess I do know alittle more than you I, can spell wasting.

You can't, however, spell (or at least use in the correct context) "what" (what's), "they're" (their), "woman" (women), "fathers" (father's), or "guess" (quess). The next time you decide to play the grammar card in lieu of an actual argument, you may want to make sure that, at the very least, there isn't a misspelled word and two other grammatical errors in the sentence you're using when you play it.

Care to elaborate? The original poster's point was very clear - the values held by many in the black community are much more in line with conservative views than with liberal views. The vast majority of the middle class black families that I've known (and I grew up in a town with, at the time, a nearly 45% black population) hold conservative views about family, education, and religion. They vote Democrat because, like many other liberal voting bases, they buy into the Democrats' caricature of conservatives as racist WASPs who only care about the rich. Illustrating the harm that liberal policies (including, unfortunately, many enacted or propped up by our current "conservative" President") have done to the black community is a sound strategy.

If rape were decriminalized, women would behave differently.

Holy crap. There's one for the home page...

He doesn't have to, since that's not what the quote says. It says, in fact, "socialist community", not "socialist society", and it means, quite simply, that under libertarian government, communities/cities/states that wished to set up their own socialist construct, and had enough willing members to do so, would be free to live in a "socialist community", and to outlaw or regulate whatever they wished. Under the current socialist government, libertarians don't have that same right.

Whether or not any of us agree with THAT sentiment is an entirely different question, and one you're free to ask.