Kevin Williamson, in the course of spanking Yahoo News for not looking up National Review’s long-standing opinion on pot*, finishes up with a nice pit of Parthian snark:
Likewise, there are those who apparently are surprised that in the case of homosexuals vs. Russians who wish to put them into ovens, Glenn Beck has taken the side of the homosexuals. If that is surprising to you, you really need to get out more.
They need to, but they won’t. More accurately, they don’t dare. Any kind of dispassionate look at the country and its various political subdivisions will quickly make one realize that there is at least a small inverse correlation between the fiscal/social health of any given municipality and how often they listen to advice from liberals. An obsessive sense of their own moral superiority is more or less all the Left has, um, left. Take that away and they’re absolutely bereft.
Via Instapundit, who sums up my observation nicely: “And the demonization is the point.”
Moe Lane
*Executive summary: “Keeping it illegal is not worth it, in money, time, and people’s lives.” I know that many people will argue with the National Review with that, but that’s actually not the point. The point is that this is a hardly a new position from NR.
If pot is legal, then the paramilitary SWAT/police forces won’t have as many reasons to break down doors, terrorize citizens and shoot their dogs in the middle of the night. Oh, wait, they don’t need a reason. Sorry.
I beg to differ.
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Take the standard apples and oranges comparison between alcohol and pot. Ethanol, as ethanol taken alone, has for some time been limited to the potency of 191 or 200 proof. Where pot is a bunch of different chemicals out of a plant, hence something that has changed significantly over time and also has significant variation at a given point in time.
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Attempting to model the ways a stoner harms others by the ways a drunkard harms others will underestimate at least one mechanism.
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Some of the chemicals that can be found in pot can cause learning impairments. Which means that someone who has their formative years and a key period of their education at the same time that they are using heavily and regularly may not have adsorbed as much of what they were exposed to. If they aren’t intellectually curious, and think that education can be finished, they may well carry those gaps for the rest of their life.
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Hence they might well have long term issues with understanding and functioning with reality compared to if they hadn’t.
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This might well explain Barack Obama. This might well explain critical fractions of those that voted for him, and of his apologists.
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Proceeding to the point, if pot is fully legalized, those who don’t use will have even fewer opportunities to keep users out of positions of trust and responsibility.
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This might in an a general societal decline.
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Alternatively, rather than letting users ruin the capabilities of society, and hence harm the personal fortunes of non-users, an ugly civil war might result.
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In short, it is not, as presented, a choice between a liberty harming, cold civil half war and a peace. The ‘peace’ option might well result in a liberty harming hot civil war.
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It is a difficult problem, and we lack the societal will and consensus for any of the simple options to be workable.
“has for some time been limited to the potency of 191 or 200 proof”
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Damned laws of physics.
The Left is also offended that conservatives are opposed to Iranian practice of slinging gays by their necks from construction cranes, of the Taliban practice of pushing walls over on gays, and the Palestinian practice of shooting gays in the street.
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All of these, we are told, stem from our hatred of Muslims, not from the belief that while many of us see homosexual activity as sinful, none of us think it should carry a death sentence.