Legalize It All • Hacker News Board

Re: Legalize It All

#101

Post by gardano » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 9:47 PM UTC

13of40 wrote: post #82

narrator wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stalin was by all accounts a dictator, but he operated differently. When the NKVD secret police would arrest someone who had made a political joke that somebody heard and reported, they weren't sent to freeze to death in a gulag in Siberia for the joke. No, they were forced to confess under torture to all sorts of laundry lists of ridiculous accusations of sabotaging production and acting as a spy for foreign governm…

> in the constitution of the Soviet Union there are all kinds of rights and legal protections and such > They just say that someone belongs to an illegal non-harmonious organization like Falun-Gong or whatever and that's illegal. It seems like governments are somewhat uniform in the laws they pass, but fundamentally fickle about which laws they choose to enforce. In my state, for example, it's a felony to be a member…

That's something I never understood (and admittedly never researched either). Isn't there something in the constitution about freedom of association?

Re: Legalize It All

#102

Post by Aelinsaar » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 9:52 PM UTC

narrator wrote: post #22

krylon wrote: post #3

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…

The thing I find interesting (INTERESTING, not necessarily moral or otherwise) about China is that when they want to do something controversial they are open and straight forward about it. They openly attack and arrest groups that they find disruptive to the social order. In America, the leadership has to invent all sorts of crafty subterfuge to accomplish their goals of persecuting and imprisoning groups that they c…

You shouldn't assume that they don't also engage in a truly staggering amount of covert violence.

Re: Legalize It All

#103

Post by pasquinelli » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 9:55 PM UTC

hjhgjtyhgdfi wrote: post #42

SwellJoe wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at how much money CCA spends on lobbying and supporting candidates that are friendly to their business. It is vastly larger per dollar of revenue than Apple (or Walmart). So much so, that it's one of the things people talk about when taking about whether Hillary Clinton (for example) is influenced by the money coming from the prison industrial complex. Nobody is accusing Hillary of being bought by Apple. Though…

Teachers unions spent $20 million on the 2012 election alone, no doubt funding candidates who were friendly to their pensions. I can go down the line and list off several more trade unions and their political spending. http://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.php?ind=l1300 Why is there seemingly not a peep about this from those who oppose the private prison complex?

because people who oppose the private prison complex don't oppose public schools.

Re: Legalize It All

#104

Post by cooper12 » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 10:02 PM UTC

charonn0 wrote: post #100

jessaustin wrote: post #26

After telling the BBC in December that “if you fight a war for forty years and don’t win, you have to sit down and think about other things to do that might be more effective,” Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos legalized medical marijuana by decree. In November, the Mexican Supreme Court elevated the debate to a new plane by ruling that the prohibition of marijuana consumption violated the Mexican Constitution b…

As a counterpoint, compulsory free education for all children is a public good that couldn't be accomplished or sustained for decades without the state intruding upon the personal autonomy of the child and the parent (and childless taxpayers.)

Is it really as much of a necessity? In my opinion most people learn the bare minimum required for exams, and then regurgitate it. I only remember tidbits of history and a little Shakespeare from my school days. Even in college most of my professors just read off powerpoints and I was forced to learn anything useful at all for my career on my own time. Schools force people to learn things they aren't interested in like STEM over useful life skills like personal finance or cooking. I think homeschooling or self-directed education [0] could be much more effective at stimulating learners and equipping them with necessary knowledge. In my opinion the only benefit of school was the social aspect, but thats to be expected since thats where everyone else is, not to mention the drawbacks such as bullying.

Education really isn't as much of a virtue as people think; do I really need a degree to talk to people, to appreciate literature or art, to vote? (And even with the prevalence of education, people still end up misinformed or lead by personal bias) Most people are capable of learning what they need, especially when all the resources are out there and not just in schools. All the different levels of education that are established just serve as poor markers for employers to differentiate people and time-and-time again I've read about educations being ill-suited in preparing people for careers.

Like the parent commenter, I think people are quite capable of organizing and preparing themselves just as well without a state, and many communities and generations have been doing this for centuries.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unschooling (just one interesting example)

Re: Legalize It All

#105

Post by md224 » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 10:05 PM UTC

This seems like a good time to mention that I own the domain name TheTruthAboutPot.com and have no idea what to do with it. Suggestions / buyers welcome!

Re: Legalize It All

#106

Post by jessaustin » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 10:05 PM UTC

charonn0 wrote: post #100

jessaustin wrote: post #26

After telling the BBC in December that “if you fight a war for forty years and don’t win, you have to sit down and think about other things to do that might be more effective,” Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos legalized medical marijuana by decree. In November, the Mexican Supreme Court elevated the debate to a new plane by ruling that the prohibition of marijuana consumption violated the Mexican Constitution b…

As a counterpoint, compulsory free education for all children is a public good that couldn't be accomplished or sustained for decades without the state intruding upon the personal autonomy of the child and the parent (and childless taxpayers.)

...compulsory free education...

I'm not sure what aspect of this situation this comment is meant to address. We're not absolutists; we just want the State to do less evil shit. Perhaps there have been lots of egregious abuses by, I don't know (sorry but I'm not exactly sure what we're talking about), truant officers? Nevertheless those pale in comparison to the harms of Drug War enforcement.

Re: Legalize It All

#107

Post by metaphorm » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 10:07 PM UTC

merpnderp wrote: post #79

I'm completely against the war on drugs for most of the reasons stated in this article, but I find it's blaming of Nixon and racial/ideological politics as the worst most unproductive form of cynicism. As if there are no well meaning, well founded reasons to outlaw drugs. People often forget that poor, minority neighborhoods were often instrumental in getting tough drug laws passed. Because they often faced the brunt…

I'm not sure I understand your critique. In the article a primary source (Nixon's domestic policy advisor Ehrlichman) just outright admitted what their motivations were. How is it cynical to cite a primary source?

What is the argument you're trying to make? That the war on drugs would have been justified through public health concerns even if it wasn't actually implemented for political and racial reasons? I'm not sure you're going to find much agreement on that stance, and certainly not enough political agreement to justify a policy of mass incarceration and proxy war violence in the third world to go along with it.

Re: Legalize It All

#108

Post by elipsey » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 10:12 PM UTC

JorgeGT wrote: post #89

narrator wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stalin was by all accounts a dictator, but he operated differently. When the NKVD secret police would arrest someone who had made a political joke that somebody heard and reported, they weren't sent to freeze to death in a gulag in Siberia for the joke. No, they were forced to confess under torture to all sorts of laundry lists of ridiculous accusations of sabotaging production and acting as a spy for foreign governm…

> acting as a spy for foreign governments and being the ringleaders of vast insurgent organizations Bear in mind that for each of the prominent people made to confess all sorts of crazy things in the Moscow Trials, hundreds of thousands were more or less straightforwardly sent to the Gulag: - Did you refer to Comrade Stalin as a fool in your letter to A? - Yes I did but look... - Art. 58, 25 years.

"Comrade Brezhnev, is it true that you collect political jokes?" – "Yes" – "And how many have you collected so far?" – "Three and a half labor camps."

ba-dum bum

Re: Legalize It All

#109

Post by pessimizer » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 10:14 PM UTC

ska wrote: post #11

fweespee_ch wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? > That sums it up pretty well. It never was about fighting drug use or preventing the harm it can do. Can we now, please, get that behind us and move on? If we only spent 10% of what we now spent on prosecuting drug use on prevention and rehabilitation, that would be…

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 important to know that this was explicitly designed to target black people, not an accidental overreaction of well-meaning but not-modern, not-PC white people to a terrible problem. If you take Nixon out, you don't have that.

A terrible fact is that elites still love Nixon. They don't want him brought up because he undermines them morally: they supported him at the time, and they still share his political outlook. He left so many candid recordings behind that there's no denying that he was a vicious, stupid, paranoid, superstitious man, and that the views of his contemporary detractors were more than completely confirmed (even they couldn't imagine that he was literally screaming about the niggers and the jews during policy discussions.)

Nixon created the strategy that has culminated in this Republican primary. Ignoring Nixon is a problem.

Re: Legalize It All

#110

Post by zbyte64 » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 10:19 PM UTC

hjhgjtyhgdfi wrote: post #13

Delmania wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can we now, please, get that behind us and move on? What, and disrupt the massively profitable prison industry?

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.

How is this not a red-herring? Does "massively profitable" mean the same as "the most profitable"?

OP's point is that there is allot of money on the line and that serves as inertia to keep the highly punitive measures in place. $1.7 billion is allot of inertia. It might not be as much as Exxon who wants to deny global warming, or Walmart who wants more "free trade" but are we to ignore mass incarceration because there are more profitable moral hazards?