NY Comptroller: Legalise marijuana, tax it and end wrongheaded war on pot • Hacker News Board

Re: NY Comptroller: Legalise marijuana, tax it and end wrongheaded war on pot

#141

Post by ferdo » Sun, Aug 18, 2013, 10:48 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #139

jlgreco wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So your mom didn't lap up Nancy Reagan's "Just say no." ? "Just say no" was a propaganda campaign and you rightly describe it as widely influencing the population. Somebody told your mom that "pot causes young men to give up on life and not get jobs or girlfriends and just play video games all day" , she didn't dream that up all by herself.

Um, I hate to be the one to tell you this, but pot really does cause some young men to "give up on life" (whatever that means) and not get jobs or girlfriends and just play video games all day. There actually is a such thing as a stoner. I don't hate them or want to outlaw them or anything, but they do exist. Nancy Reagan didn't invent them.

I've known kids that give up on life, not get jobs and play video games all day without weed.

Weed isn't the problem here. The kid and/or his family is generally the problem.

Re: NY Comptroller: Legalise marijuana, tax it and end wrongheaded war on pot

#142

Post by engrenage » Sun, Aug 18, 2013, 10:49 PM UTC

oleganza wrote: post #131

engrenage wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this just a protection racket? The water company will turn off your water supply if a richer group asks for it. That sounds like a nightmare.

Stop for a second and think why would abstract "richer group" ask for it and how would abstract "poorer group" prevent this from happening? E.g. if the "richer group" got rich not via favors from monopoly of violence, but from efficiently servicing "poorer group", why would they risk massive boycotts and end of well-running business for a short-term benefit? Imagine if Amazon suddenly decides to print books using blo…

This has nothing to do with preferences. The world is full of rich groups and governments that got there thorough favors and exercise of power if not violence.

Re: NY Comptroller: Legalise marijuana, tax it and end wrongheaded war on pot

#143

Post by jlgreco » Sun, Aug 18, 2013, 11:22 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #139

jlgreco wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So your mom didn't lap up Nancy Reagan's "Just say no." ? "Just say no" was a propaganda campaign and you rightly describe it as widely influencing the population. Somebody told your mom that "pot causes young men to give up on life and not get jobs or girlfriends and just play video games all day" , she didn't dream that up all by herself.

Um, I hate to be the one to tell you this, but pot really does cause some young men to "give up on life" (whatever that means) and not get jobs or girlfriends and just play video games all day. There actually is a such thing as a stoner. I don't hate them or want to outlaw them or anything, but they do exist. Nancy Reagan didn't invent them.

Typical strawman from tptacek; I am not disputing that pot, alcohol, television, or plain laziness sometimes cause people to become burntout bums. The myth is that all, or even most, people who smoke pot become burnout hippy bums and that it is a phenomenon uniquely caused by pot.

You are both absolute lunatics if you think government run propaganda campaigns have nothing to do with that perception.

Let's review:

1) rayiner describes the 'status quo' as stereotyping pot users, calls out media campaigns as one cause of this, and calls out his mother specifically as an example of this.[1]

2) I agree with rayiner.[2]

3) rayiner does not like it when people agree with him, and backpedals.[3]

4) I call him out for backpedaling.[4]

5) You "jump into the fray" damn near a day after rayiner's comment with a red herring large enough to make a professional fisherman blush.

Try reading the goddamn conversation before tagging in for your buddy.

[1] "The votes come from everyone who bought into Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" campaign. People like my mom, who thinks pot causes young men to give up on life and not get jobs or girlfriends and just play video games all day, and supports keeping it illegal because she thinks that's bad for the country."

[2] "The government runs propaganda campaigns (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Youth_Anti-Drug_Media_...) to convince people like your mother that drugs are the worse thing imaginable. Those people then turn around and support the government in its opposition to drugs."

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6233377

[4] "So your mom didn't lap up Nancy Reagan's "Just say no."?"

Re: NY Comptroller: Legalise marijuana, tax it and end wrongheaded war on pot

#144

Post by rayiner » Mon, Aug 19, 2013, 1:40 AM UTC

jlgreco wrote: post #143

tptacek wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Um, I hate to be the one to tell you this, but pot really does cause some young men to "give up on life" (whatever that means) and not get jobs or girlfriends and just play video games all day. There actually is a such thing as a stoner. I don't hate them or want to outlaw them or anything, but they do exist. Nancy Reagan didn't invent them.

Typical strawman from tptacek; I am not disputing that pot, alcohol, television, or plain laziness sometimes cause people to become burntout bums. The myth is that all, or even most, people who smoke pot become burnout hippy bums and that it is a phenomenon uniquely caused by pot. You are both absolute lunatics if you think government run propaganda campaigns have nothing to do with that perception. Let's review: 1)…

You're taking my comment about Nancy Reagan out of context and putting words in my mouth by characterizing it as propaganda. The sentence before that was "It's phat to blame the prison industrial complex, but they're just taking advantage of the Puritan strain in American society."

I don't think "Just Say No!" created the demand for drug prohibition nor do I think it is propaganda. I think for most people who push the message, Nancy Reagan included, it is a genuine and organic sentiment, consistent with Americam Puritanism. When I say my mom and others "bought in" to the message, I don't mean that government propaganda convinced them to believe something they would otherwise not. Rather, I think what you have is a group of voters with Puritan tendencies and authoritarian dispostitions who "bought in" and got behind a program that plays to those characteristics.

I think chalking it up to propaganda is short sighted, because it punts on the issue of how to convince the electorate. It makes it seem like if the propaganda went away, the drug war would go away. But the fact is that my mom and many people like her believe its the governments job to keep people from doing harmful things to themselves. They see drugs (along with alcohol and sex and a raft of other things) as something the government should regulate for the betterment of society. The culture associated with marijuana use, which is in many respects antithetical to what tjhey think is healthy for society, reinforces their belief that it should be made illegal, for people's own good.

Look, we live in a country where until recently I couldn't buy beer on Super Bowl Sunday in downtown Atlanta. A place where you can be arrested for walking down the street with a cup of beer. It's not big money and the DEA perpetuating that status quo. It's grass roots. You think the voters who passed blue laws all over the country need propaganda to decide people shouldn't be allowed to get baked?

Re: NY Comptroller: Legalise marijuana, tax it and end wrongheaded war on pot

#145

Post by brazzy » Mon, Aug 19, 2013, 10:55 AM UTC

bjourne wrote: post #132

brazzy wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't care what the "crime" was, a criminal record just disqualifies you. It's the same kind of HR idiocy that would forego hiring someone who has 5 years of Rails experience but did not list HTML as a skill, because HTML is in the checklist.

The reason for that is because HR departments doesn't know the difference between RoR and HTML and therefore doesn't think someone lacking the latter is capable of performing the job. Ignorance in other words. Are you claiming it is the same kind of ignorance that causes companies to not hire weed smokers?

I think both have the same root cause: not ignorance but laziness. Bad HR people tasked with filtering resumes don't want to hire the best people, they want to do as little work (and as little thinking) as possible while appearing to do a useful job.

So they just love rules that filter a lot of resumes, can be applied without thinking and make superficial sense. Understanding how skills relate is more work than comparing lists, looking at the specifics of a criminal conviction is more work that just using it as a binary exclusion criterium.