[thechat] protests?

Martin Burns martin at easyweb.co.uk
Tue Mar 25 05:39:09 CST 2003


On Wed, 26 Mar 2003, deacon b. wrote:

> And the assertion was "there's
> never been a war started in a Republican
> administration". (Which was only true for the 20th
> century.)

...if you ignore Gulf War I, and lots of other things not counted as wars.

> But it appears to me that the size of the drug market
> has blossomed, too.

Note my previous URL about availability heuristic.

> Has the "War On Drugs"  expanded faster than the market for drugs?

Yes. Particularly if you only include drugs covered by the War on Drugs
(ie not tobacco, alcohol or prescription drugs).

> My objection to the "War On Drugs" is not that it's
> big, but that it's the wrong solution to the problem.

Oh completely. The problems with drugs to *society* are generally caused
by the economic cost of obtaining it. If it were as cheap as booze and
fags, you wouldn't have the crime. And the arguments about 'parents on
$drug let their kids do $badstuff' apply (and have been applied) to
alcohol for centuries.

Generally btw, drug abuse is a symptom, not a cause, of social problems.

> When it comes to "intrusion into private matters", it
> occurs to me that the biggest and most blatant of
> the Republican sins involve wacko right-wing
> fundamentalist christianity.

indeed. Which is why the current republican party is no longer the
libertarian-based party it used to be. Even in Reagan's day, it was
possible for him to assert that what people did in private didn't matter
as long as it didn't happen in public and scare the horses.

>  If the Republicans'd stuck to their knitting, they would have removed
> Clinton from office;

Well yes and no - none of this would have come up. If it weren't for
republican revenge for the Anita Hill thing, Paula Jones and Monica
Lewinsky would have been non-issues, no need for Clinton to testify let
alone lie...

I mean - since when would you have expected a republican (particularly a
conservative republican) party to support a sexual abuse case..?

> but they were so outraged by his
> sexual behavior that they ignored his behavior as
> chief executive. Infidelity is, and should be, a civil
> matter between husband and wife. Someone
> needed to put up some billboards, "It's the perjury
> and obstruction of justice, stupid."

Sure. Let's just apply that all round, eh?

Cheers
Martin
-- 
"Names, once they are in common use, quickly
 become mere sounds, their etymology being
 buried, like so many of the earth's marvels,
 beneath the dust of habit." - Salman Rushdie



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