31–40 of 293 posts
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The largest private for-profit prison (CCA) has $1.7 billion in revenue. Apple makes $233 billion in revenue. Exxon has $268 billion in revenue. Walmart makes $482 billion in revenue.
https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D00002194... https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/summary.php?id=D000021754&c... Their revenue is less than 1% of Apple's, but their lobbying budget is 25%-75% of Apple's year to year.
Oh the hypocrisy. Drugs legalization being trendy, you play the libertarian card. Yet, when it comes to guns or privacy, the same arguments don't hold true anymore. Cherry picking at its best. Gotta love the HN crowd.
Please don't. The "crowd" includes you, and such generalizations are mostly bias.
Oh the hypocrisy. Drugs legalization being trendy, you play the libertarian card. Yet, when it comes to guns or privacy, the same arguments don't hold true anymore. Cherry picking at its best. Gotta love the HN crowd.
Much more meaningful to compare hand guns with explosives and other weapons, and drugs with alcohol and generally self-harm.
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By all means history should remember his failings here and elsewhere. I just mean the responsibility for the state of things today, and for improving it, lies solidly on other shoulders today. And that is where the focus should be. There should be no support for a narrative of "oh, but those were the bad old days, things are better now". They are not.
> By all means history should remember his failings here and elsewhere. The original post was discussing the history: > I think the disturbing part is people, even now, deny this is the reason Nixon pushed for it. I just can't understand it. :/ > Nixon basically shat on the results of his own commissions by members of his own party when he didn't like the results. History is littered with evidence this man had an age…
Literally the entire content of my post [beyond quotes] was discussing past history concerning a single president.
I believe it's fine as a historical exercise, but useless with respect to the state of drug policy etc. today. And think the effort much better targeted elsewhere as focusing on this piece of the history is, in my view, actively distracting from anything useful. Vilifying Nixon is easy and boring.
And yes, I think to the degree that it has traction, it does support a fallacious narrative about the current state of things - or at least is trotted out in support of it, which I'll grant is not quite the same thing.
Just my two cents.
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I think focusing on Nixon on at this point is actively problematic. Literally every administration since then has been complicit in this, and made it worse.
I think it's rhetorically effective, in that shallow thinkers have been trained for years to reflexively revile Nixon. If we argued merely on the merits, they might worry about LEO jobs or housewives hooked on patent medicines (i.e., stupid arguments we've seen before). It's best to short-circuit all that detailed disputation with a simple "Drug War = Nixon = Bad". Very few thinking people without a personal economic…
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I think focusing on Nixon on at this point is actively problematic. Literally every administration since then has been complicit in this, and made it worse.
I think it's rhetorically effective, in that shallow thinkers have been trained for years to reflexively revile Nixon. If we argued merely on the merits, they might worry about LEO jobs or housewives hooked on patent medicines (i.e., stupid arguments we've seen before). It's best to short-circuit all that detailed disputation with a simple "Drug War = Nixon = Bad". Very few thinking people without a personal economic…
Quite a lot of people still oppose legalization of other drugs. See http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/17/drug-legalization-p... for an example; I'm certain that more recent polls exist.
Oh the hypocrisy. Drugs legalization being trendy, you play the libertarian card. Yet, when it comes to guns or privacy, the same arguments don't hold true anymore. Cherry picking at its best. Gotta love the HN crowd.
We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course…
Most countries are past criminalising suicide, and self-harm is acceptable (as long as you are considered mentally able). Why is there a difference in risking one's health in every single way but by using psychoactive substances?
Especially considering that clearly the war on drugs was never limited to, or expanded to all substances capable of generating physical dependence.
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The largest private for-profit prison (CCA) has $1.7 billion in revenue. Apple makes $233 billion in revenue. Exxon has $268 billion in revenue. Walmart makes $482 billion in revenue.
https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D00002194... https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/summary.php?id=D000021754&c... Their revenue is less than 1% of Apple's, but their lobbying budget is 25%-75% of Apple's year to year.
There's something obscene about people's retirement funds depending on putting more people in private prisons. It further reinforces the division of society where the happiness of the rich is directly dependent on increasing other people's misery. It's not surprising that the industry has been caught on a few occasions bribing judges to increase sentencing.
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https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D00002194... https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/summary.php?id=D000021754&c... Their revenue is less than 1% of Apple's, but their lobbying budget is 25%-75% of Apple's year to year.
CCA spent $1 million per year. Apple spent $1.24 million in lobbying in three months. Facebook spent $2.44 million in three months. Microsoft spent $11 million on lobbying per year. Google spent $19 million on lobbying per year. http://appleinsider.com/articles/15/04/22/apples-lobbying-co... https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D00000011...
Also, that's pretty much what I said, isn't it? Apple is about $4 million/year and CCA is at about $1 million/year? Are you quibbling about 20 vs 25%, or trying to make some other point?