Bearing The Burdens - Or - What Will They Do?

Dave has an outstanding post up dealing with the drug legalization question. I'm always interested in the comments as a very rough gauge of popular sentiment.

A legalization fear I see a lot these days is based on “if we leave those people alone what will they do?”

Of course the question started gaining a lot of ground when the communists started asking questions about the capitalists. Such as: “What are they going to do? It is unpredictable and could be bad. They must be controlled.”

And worst of all they like what they are doing. What more proof do you need for the need for control?

BTW it has been my experience that once a person gets to the above point mentally (what will we do with zombies run wild?) it is not long before they throw in the towel on prohibition.

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And Dave. Look up Nixon's methadone program. Reports back in the day said that 50% to 60% of the troops were on heroin in 'Nam. Nixon was worried about the "drug epidemic" this would cause in the US. So he did methodone. The program was a roaring success. "Free" government drugs and supervision vs the chaos of the street. But after a year or so it seems that something like 80% or 90% of the enrollees dropped out. To become street drug users? No. The environment was better in the US vs wartime 'Nam and they no longer needed drugs to cope. That left only the genetically susceptible.

Addiction Is A Genetic Disease

Everyone gets PTSD if the trauma is severe enough. The deal is: because of genetics 80% of us get over it in about 3 to 6 months. For the other 20% it can take significantly longer.

Always keep in mind that being in that 20% group is not enough. Genes don't make you automatically an addict of anything but food, air, and water (No - I'm not going to nit pick the left out details). For you to get long term PTSD you must be not only be genetically susceptible but also traumatized.

I don't know about you but Lets Make War On The Traumatized does not sound like marching orders. It sounds more like "I'm going to sit this one out". I will not volunteer. But change that to "lets put extreme hurts to users of unapproved drugs who use them for unapproved reasons" and the support is just phenomenal. About $75 billion from Federal, State, and Local Governments alone. Not to mention your lovely local neighborhood war zone (Interzone?) delivered to almost every city of any size in America.

So we come down to "who will bear the burdens of legalization" because we already know who is bearing the burdens of prohibition. The 10,000 or so murdered in the crossfire (2,000 just bystanders or sleeping quietly in a bedroom). The neighborhoods destroyed (only "those people" live there - in my town the shorthand is "West side" - when I lived in Chicago quite a few people actually called it "The Zone"), and the $75 billion a year taxpayers squander to keep the whole deadly farce running. And the folks who are generally anti-statist are those who most support the state on this question. Go figure.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Celery, DDT, and Gun Control

A Decline In Morals

I'm having an interesting discussion at Moral Authority about the homosexual plot to destroy American values and take down American civilization.

That is not the first time American civilization took the short road to decline. Marriages were once decided on the basis of economic interests and personalities mostly by parents. And then by 1830 or so romance was all the rage and parents had lost much of their say in the matter. Would America ever be the same?

Between 1708/9, when Samuel Gerrish courted Mary Sewall, and 1835, when Theodore Weld courted Angelina Grimke, the rituals of courtship underwent profound changes. Parental influence and involvement in the selection of their children's marriage partner visibly declined. Young women and men were increasingly free to pick or reject a spouse with little parental interference. At the same time that courtship grew freer, however, marriage became an increasingly difficult transition point, particularly for women, and more and more women elected not to marry at all.

In seventeenth and early eighteenth century New England, courtship was not simply a personal, private matter. The law gave parents "the care and power...for the disposing of their Children in Marriage" and it was expected that they would take an active role overseeing their child's choice of a spouse. A father in Puritan New England had a legal right to determine which men would be allowed to court his daughters and a legal responsibility to give or withhold his consent from a child's marriage. A young man who courted a woman without her father's permission might be sued for inveigling the woman's affections.

Parental involvement in courtship was expected because marriage was not merely an emotional relationship between individuals but also a property arrangement among families. A young man was expected to bring land or some other form of property to a marriage while a young woman was expected to bring a dowry worth about half as much.

As you can see we have never recovered. Decisions that were once made rationally are now consummated based on half-witted ideas like romance.

The Puritans had the right idea

Puritan New Englanders, in sharp contrast, did not regard love as a necessary precondition for marriage. Indeed, they associated romantic love with immaturity and impermanence. True love, the Puritans believed, would appear following marriage. A proper marriage, in their view, was based not on love and affection, but on rational considerations of property, compatibility, and religious piety. Thus, it was considered acceptable for a young man to pursue "a goodly lass with aboundation of money," so long as he could eventually love his wife-to-be.

Giving up the strict rules has lead to ruination.

By the middle of the eighteenth century, parental influence over the choice of a spouse had sharply declined. One indication of a decline in parental control was a sudden upsurge in the mid-eighteenth century the number of brides who were pregnant when they got married. In the seventeenth century, fathers--supported by local churches and courts--exercised close control over their childrens' sexual behavior and kept sexual intercourse prior to marriage at extremely low levels. The percentage of women who bore a first child less than eight-and-a half months after marriage was below ten percent. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the figure had shot up to over forty percent.

So as I stated in a comment to Moral Authority in response to this comment:

The legitimizing of homosexuality is one lynchpin in a program to undercut Western sexual morality, and to disrupt the legal and social constraints that give weight, strength, and stability to the family unit.

Dude,

You are not going to get that toothpaste back into the tube. The horse has left the barn. The culture has changed.

Western sexual morality as you think you remember it (I saw a study once that in the US in the 1700s about 1/3 of the brides were already knocked up - true? I haven't cross checked - [see above]) is gone.

You want to do something about Western morality? Forget gays. The bigger hole is adultery and divorce. If we could bring back stoning for adultery and 40 lashes for fornication we might get somewhere. It all started going bad long before women got the vote. But it didn't help.

Cross Posted at Power and Control

Against Fear

Here is a little something to help you deal with your fears.

Litany Against Fear

I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

From Dune

H/T BenTC at Talk Polywell

Local News

The Sterling, Illinois man who went on a murder spree has been captured.

GRANITE CITY, Ill. - Police and FBI agents captured an ex-convict suspected of killing eight people in two states as he smoked a cigarette outside of a southwestern Illinois bar Tuesday night.

Nicholas T. Sheley, who was the subject of a multistate manhunt after authorities linked him to the deaths of eight people in Illinois and Missouri, was arrested around 7 p.m. outside of Bindy's, a Granite City bar, said bartender Katie Ronk.

Sheley ordered a glass of water and went to the bathroom before another bartender and customer recognized him, Ronk said. The customer, Gary Range, said he left the bar and notified a police officer parked in the lot outside,"I told (the police officer) the description and the officer said, 'That's him.' He got on the radio and eventually there were police all over the place," Range said.

I think this points out a few of the most salient facts of life. If you are going to go on a murder spree don't hang out in bars, don't drink anything, don't go to the bathroom, and don't smoke cigarettes.

Seriously though, I had read about this guy today and of course as irrational as it is you start worrying about your friends and family.

We live about 50 miles from Sterling and have a close friend from that area (who lives in Rockford). So your mind starts going into those dark alleys. The vast majority of which are actually blind alleys. I think this points out the old military dictum made famous by Patton, "Never take council with your fears." The best thing to do is face them, realize most won't come to pass and if you are still worried, take what steps you can to strengthen your defenses. Even if it is only mental preparation. "What would I do if...."

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Rationality

An off topic discussion at Climate Audit was considering Fenton/Soros and their relationship to the AGW (man made global warming) movement and how Soros intended to profit from his rent-a-mobs:

If I was a savvy investor with inside connections I wouldn’t place my bets until my objective was nearly a sure thing.

First generate a “popular” demand. Await political developments. Invest.

The job of Fenton is to create political rent-a-mobs.

It has to do with human nature - (how far off topic can you get?). It seems humans want a belief structure that gives order to knowledge. Living with uncertainty is not satisfying for the vast majority. For most folks rationality is hard. Very hard. People want certainty. It is why astrologers still exist at this late date. I used to dabble in those “sciences”. Got rather good at it. It was never about reading the cards. It was about reading the people asking the questions. Obviously this is very prone to manipulation. Since I never got a lot of satisfaction out of manipulating people, I gave it up. There are others who find such manipulations satisfying and profitable.

To understand what is going on a study of human nature would be much better than studying CO2.

So let me start with the main driver. In humans fear of loss is a much stronger driver than hope of gain. It explains why newspapers focus on bad news despite the fact that for most of us most of the time the news is good. If AGW was proven today to be bad science, there would be a new scare tomorrow.

There also seems a propensity to magnify the opposition. We need devils. No one is immune. For many here (myself included) it is the AGW folks. For the AGWists it is the deniers and the oil companies. We all want our devils, because devils is a “better” explanation than error coupled with self interest. Evil intent is much more satisfying than human bias towards the stupidity of the day.

Let me add another biasing mechanism. Youth likes novelty and change. Age likes stability. The dividing line seems to be around age 20 or 25. One of our most famous modern poets put it to music in a song called “My Back Pages” - you can look it up.

With all this going on it is a wonder we manage any rationality at all.

Let's Do It On the Cheap

Dr. Sanity is discussing denial. She says that it is a cover for something we don't want to look at. Hiding under the covers.

The most interesting thing to me is in the comments.We have alleged Muslim Supremacists and good old American Defeatists. Commenter Phoenix comments on a post farther up the thread including a dig at the Muslim:

"Jesus talked of love. You talk of denial. And he lived in a world far more brutal than this one."

Sidney,

How can you say Jesus lived in a world far more brutal thing this one? That's nuts. Any era that has embraced wishful thinking and denial has been a brutal era. That means we've had nothing but increasing brutality from BCE to now. Jesus didn't have a thing to do with the brutality other than to think he could mitigate it by love. And to think that love might have engendered brutality? No, never, I'm sure you'd say. Men never kill in the name of their religion, right? Whatever. The thing we know for sure is that we can now kill many more with much greater efficiency. That's a fact not based on denial or wishful thinking. Hmmm.... I wonder if that's considered a truth? Hell if I know....

Phoenix - 01.19.07 - 8:35 pm

So I replied to Phoenix:

En fuego!

Which if you think about it is kind of a pun.

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To the rest:

Want to know how America can fight when it gets pissed?

Look at the campaign against the Japanese in the Pacific - WW2 after the first 3 months.

No quarter asked, none given. Shoot the wounded.

Nuke 'em if they complain.

Really, you had better hope we suceeded on the cheap, because it could go much worse for the bastards.

Do you suppose they are listening? Is De Nile a river in Egypt?

Cross Posted at Classical Values