In which I alienate half my readership

[sabotabby]

Try as I might, I just can't get excited over Proposition 19.*

I mean, this isn't an ideological stance or anything. I think that pot should be legal. The War on Drugs is ridiculous and responsible for the destruction of countless lives. It's just not an issue that I would, personally, get all activist-y about. The older and more curmudgeonly I get, the less I care and the more I wish people would get up in arms over things like convictions based on evidence obtained through torturing a child.

It might have something to do with so many of the most vocal potheads, and pot-legalization activists, are libertarian douchenuggets like this guy, and don't care about the human rights of anyone but potheads. Pot is almost worse than alcohol for bringing out the douche in people who already have latent douche tendencies. Also it smells godawful.

Anyway, those of you who are having elections right now, I hope yours go better than ours did.

* The fact that I'm Canadian might have a wee bit to do with that; Americans didn't exactly get excited over Ontario's municipal elections.

Comments

[tanyahp.livejournal.com]

I'm with you on the torturing-of-children thing. There was So Little Press on it yesterday/today, and the existing press so completely overlooking the fact that He Was a Child, I felt like pulling my hair out. How can people look their own children in the face after condoning such a thing? I have no idea.

[sabotabby]

Most adults seem to hate teenagers other than their own. That seems to have something to do with it. The same people believe in throwing the book at young offenders in general.

[tanyahp.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I think it stems from the time we lived in trees and alpha males threw rocks at the beta males who were younger and more virile than they were. But I could be wrong.

[akisawana.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm not going to lose any sleep over pot as long as it's legal to beat your children but illegal to get an abortion.

[akisawana.livejournal.com]

Having read the articles you linked, I really want to move to Canada, or some other, more humane country. I hear Vancouver is nice.

[sabotabby]

I think it's important. Just...way down the scale of importance.

[jackspryte.livejournal.com]

Exactly. As far as issues go it's of small import. If this was somebody's most "involved" flavour of activism I'd be somewhat less impressed.

Of course I'd never be disrespectful to them but being able to "get your pot on" just isn't as big a deal as, you know human rights, dignity, crimes against humanity, poverty etc. etc.

[tanyahp.livejournal.com]

I also will not lose sleep over pot legalization, but I think that it actually is illegal to beat your children.

[akisawana.livejournal.com]

Only if you leave marks. Even then, there needs to be evidence of a pattern documented by a third party. Unless you put the child's life in imminent danger, and that falls under reckless endangerment more often than not. I've never heard of someone being charged with criminal abuse of a child without rape and/or life-threatening injuries/deficiencies being involved.

A law is meaningless if it is not enforced.

[pofflewomp.livejournal.com]

Christ. Is it? Here (UK) it is legal to beat your children and legal to get an abortion. Oddly enough, I think the people who are pro beating-children tend to be the ones most anti-abortion. Very confusing. But generally people in the UK are pro legal-abortion AND pro-beating-children.

[yes-justice.livejournal.com]

Did someone expect you to get excited?

I know this dude in orange county. His wife has multiple scr. She uses pot for that. He felt it helped her and became a real believer in it as medicine. He opened a dispensary, and the feds raided him and have taken the kids away from the family. This was in 2009.

You know the laws were put in place to clamp down on mexicans and blacks yes?

I guess overturning racist laws that are actually still destroying peoples lives and wasting resources is important to me.

Its frankly fucking depressing that even the left doesn't care to fight that one. It'll lose cause most of the left feels like you do and the right would love to arrest more and fill the prisons.

I should just turn myself, my mother, my father, my friends, in and get it over with....

[sabotabby]

Quite a lot of the left seems to be excited over it. I'm an exception as far as I can tell.

Like I said, I think it should be legal, and I think the War on Drugs is bullshit. I think if I saw more people incensed over privatized prisons, institutionalized racism, U.S. foreign policy in Colombia, and perhaps some sort of proposition that had to do with that, I would be less cynical about the whole deal. But those issues aren't being touted as reasons to get otherwise apathetic young people to vote Democrat.

[yes-justice.livejournal.com]

Quite a lot of the left seems to be excited over it.

Everyone I've talked to is on the fence leaning to no. And, I tend to have "liberal" friends. The youth vote never has worked out in my lifetime. The prison union opposes 19, btw. Its one reason our prisons are full and they like full prisons.

I hear you though, not a single issue voter, but this one seems so cut and dry to me.

I notice that most of the teachers I know are against it because they think that students will do it more and they hate that idea. I think that it will free up law enforcement to concentrate on minors. I also don't think arresting children and parents (status quo) is helping - quite the opposite.

Opps, wrong planet!

[sabotabby]

Really? That's genuinely surprising. Even right-wing people up here tend to smoke pot and are in favour of at least decriminalization (though not legalization, because then there would be taxes.)

I don't think kids could possible smoke any more than they currently do, honestly, regardless of whether it was legal. This is part of the reason why I have such a visceral reaction to the smell now.

[yes-justice.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I'm hoping the libertarians vote for it, but I am pretty much expecting a loss. I want the taxes from pot actually. We're closing too many schools and pay teachers shit, maybe the pot money will help?

Naive, I know.

My father hates the smell too. I cant stand tabacoo when I'm not using it regularly. Go fig.

[sabotabby]

I think if schools held pot-brownie bake sales, we might actually be able to afford textbooks.

I am slightly more tolerant of tobacco, but only post-tobacco ban. When you couldn't go to a bar or restaurant without your clothes reeking of it, I couldn't stand it. Now I don't mind.

[yes-justice.livejournal.com]

I think if schools held pot-brownie bake sales, we might actually be able to afford textbooks.

LOL! My co-workers are laughing with your wisdom!

When you couldn't go to a bar or restaurant without your clothes reeking of it, I couldn't stand it. Now I don't mind.

Oh, and how the smokers bitched too! When they have to hide in a sewer to smoke (like pot smokers sometimes have to), then they can bitch!

[zingerella.livejournal.com]

See here, the pot smokers hide, ummm, in deck chairs beside their houses or on their balconies. As do the cigarette smokers. The next door neighbour (the nice one who lives in the basement apartment, not the one with anger management issues who lives in the other side of our duplex) has a little smoking station outside her door, in the lane between houses where I keep my bike. Some days it's tobacco, other days it's pot. Whatever. It's not inside and she's really nice, so I don't mind. And it's just pot, so nobody really bugs her.

You do see/smell far fewer people smoking pot than smoking tobaccoo outside office buildings.

[yes-justice.livejournal.com]

I'm moving! ;-)

[yes-justice.livejournal.com]

Also, the thing you linked is off the charts crazy. The war machine marches on....

[sabotabby]

I look at that and I see the entire structure of empire taking out its impotent anger on the body of one child. And no one seems to give a fuck.

[yes-justice.livejournal.com]

People definitely give a fuck. Well, I do. Re-convincing young men with guns is really difficult work.

Every so often one of my circle comments about Iraq and how it could be viewed in a good light. Then I start citing numbers and incidents and before long they are telling me that they don't want to hear it. I think people support the war machine because its effects are invisible to them and they wont force themselves to look. I've gotten to the point where I dare people to ask me details about the war they support. Not sure its an effective tactic though.

[sabotabby]

Almost everyone in Canada agrees that the war on Iraq was a bad idea, but while surveys keep reporting that most Canadians want to pull out of Afghanistan by 2011, the majority of adults I encounter outside of the left still think it was a good thing that we gave it a go. And judging by the number of yellow ribbons I see outside the downtown core, the polls aren't really all that accurate.

I'm not sure what works, really. I am regularly shocked at just how invested (white) people are in authority and in being part of an in-group. Just the other day I had someone tell me, in a discussion of the G20, that sometimes democracy goes too far.

[yes-justice.livejournal.com]

Of all places to hear that...

Its a Stockholm syndrome. Please help us get the jobs you outsourced rethuglicans! Please help us find peace soldier!

"the poet and the wise man hide behind the gun" - jethro tull.

[zingerella.livejournal.com]

I was dismayed that we ever got involved. I wrote angry letters.

[kadath.livejournal.com]

US prisons are stuffed with non-violent drug offenders, the majority of them black. Legalizing or at least decriminalizing pot will keep a whole lot of people out of jail whose only crime is liking a drug that doesn't have corporate backing.

Not that California's referendum process isn't incredibly fucked up, mind you. But our system is such that often a big state can give the push necessary for national change.

[sabotabby]

...somehow I think they will still find a way to put them in jail. Case in point being that there are a lot of white people who smoke or deal pot, and they tend to not end up in jail, or at least not for very long.

I do think it's progress if pot is legalized. I don't think it's as important or as significant a change as people are making it out to be.

[kadath.livejournal.com]

Maybe I have an overly optimistic view of things, I don't know. I'm not excited about pot legalization, but I see it as an encouraging sign that the War on Drugs (Used By Brown People) is starting to be dismantled. On the coasts, anyway.

Of course, I have incredibly low expectations of the American electorate. So I find myself encouraged when my fellow citizens behave better at the polls than rabid wolverines.

[sabotabby]

Fair enough. I do hope it all goes well.

They decriminalized pot here once. I think it lasted a whole summer. Prisons and law enforcement are quite profitable, so I don't think it changed a thing.

[kadath.livejournal.com]

Decrim seems to be working okay in Massachusetts, but it's only been a year. We'll see.

[florence-craye.livejournal.com]

I didn't even know there was some new prop up out there. huh. I guess I didn't care, and I'm even an American. woo?

[sabotabby]

Different state. Disproportionate amount of media attention, though.

ah ha!

[florence-craye.livejournal.com]

I also don't watch or read the news. N informs me that it is in CA. CA always gets media attention.

We got a hunt n fish amendment added to the state constitution. As if the right to hunt or fish legally was ever in danger. People sure are stupid!

[terry-terrible.livejournal.com]

It might have something to do with so many of the most vocal potheads, and pot-legalization activists, are libertarian douchenuggets like this guy, and don't care about the human rights of anyone but potheads. Pot is almost worse than alcohol for bringing out the douche in people who already have latent douche tendencies. Also it smells godawful.

QFT.

It's not going well, we now have a Randroid senator in Kentucky and here in Nevada my new Senator will be a moronic Christian Dominionist who thinks that the government should do....um basically nothing but fill potholes and keep people from invading us. Oh yeah, she also also believes that there is no separation between church and state (which in my book would put her in dominionist territory).

[sabotabby]

a moronic Christian Dominionist who thinks that the government should do....um basically nothing but fill potholes and keep people from invading us

You know what totally sucks? Politicians like that never actually fill potholes. You'd think if there was one thing they could manage, it'd be filling in potholes. But no, it's much more important to make sure that no one has sex in the butt.

I think about this a lot on my commute to work. Potholes, I mean, not buttsex.

[symbioid.livejournal.com]

What, was that Chinese or Mexican language you're speaking, it's sooooooooooo hard to tell!

(Ugh. I guess - does that mean Harry Reid won't be the Senate Leader? That's one tiny glimmer of hope!)

[symbioid.livejournal.com]

I feel the same way - I have to admit I'm a little disappointed w/my girlfriend who seems so focused on Prop 19 and thinks it's some panacea.

I have hope for it, I think it's the right thing to do, I think the drug was is the cause of a LOT of problems (prison-industrial complex, militarization of the police, imperial low intensity conflict/small scale warfare, drug kingpins and murder/rape of innocent (mostly brownskinned) people around the world and on and on) so I think it's *very* important.

But I am saddened that it's wrapped up mostly as "I can smoke when I want" privilege attitude, or some hippie-dippie "hemp EVERYTHING will save the planet" Both are good and right, but not, to me as important as the other issues at play in the legalization issue.

And the primary focus on this is a little disheartening, because, as you said, there are so many more issues that we have to deal with.

My vote in Dane County to help push the State Legislature to take up a Medical Marijuana bill (futile and small as it is) is one of the few good moments of my voting tonight, to be crushed by a horrid defeat by teabaggers, and the worst - my own great Senator... Feingold... being defeated by one of these Teabaggers. Sickening.

Gonna go drink now. *sigh*

What were we to get excited about? That douchebag for mayor of Toronto??? ;P

It's depressing. Why the fuck are we not climbing out of this god-forsaken mess? Each step we take forward seems we keep going back. Merkel and her anti-immigrants policies, France and Sarkozy and his anti-Roma/immigrant policies, the destruction of the Commons by the Tories and their lovely "Liberal" allies... Disgusting.

At least the French and Greeks know how to fucking protest, yet.

[krinndnz.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty much with you on this. I voted for Prop 19, because I live here, and I would like the War on Drugs to be shut down - but there are far more important things, and they can't be summed up into "Proposition 189428423: A Modification To The California State Constitution To Renounce Being A Fucking Empire."

[firinel.livejournal.com]

As someone who has several friend who use pot medicinally, and someone who'd more likely than not really benefit from it but can't be arsed to do something illegal that might risk the pet immigrants she keeps, I find myself more concerned with it than a lot of liberal Americans are. Honestly, down this way, it doesn't seem to be the sort of 'everyone's for it' thing that you're describing, at least not that I've noticed.

[zingerella.livejournal.com]

I'm getting really worried about the guy next door. His outbursts seem to be getting more frequent. I'm not sure what one can do about it, though, as he doesn't seem to be actually physically violent. As far as I'm aware, there are no bylaws or statutes against screaming at your dog and slamming doors. And in the two and a bit years that we've lived here, I've never heard anything turn more violent than that (unlike at the Eyrie, where things downstairs did sometimes), so I just don't know.

Why are so many people so angry and apparently incapable of managing their anger?

[yes-justice.livejournal.com]

Testosterone?

[ltmurnau.livejournal.com]

Well, you didn't alienate me. I hate the smell of the stuff too. And Prop 19 failed anyway.

Out here in BC we're concerned over a few things: the violence by gangs over the control of distribution and sale of pot, and/or smuggling it into the US; the socioeconomic effects (BC Hydro estimates that about $100 M of electricity is stolen each year by the thousands of grow-op houses. Also, those thousands of indoor grow-ops are almost exclusively in rented houses, meaning that there is very little affordable rental housing for people in this province.); and the plain economic effects (legalizing it in California would probably reduce the profitability in the short run, undercutting a BC industry that is worth billions of black-market dollars, some of which actually gets spent here to prop up what's left of our strip-mined, clear-cut landscape and people).

Legalization in BC might do something about the latter two issues, but I don't believe the hype about how legalizing marijuana will magically make all the violence and mayhem associated with its illegality go away overnight. Repealing Prohibition didn't make the Mob go away. And since last year Mexico has decriminalized the possession of small amounts of drugs for personal use (marijuana, cocaine, heroin, ecstasy, etc., even meth), putting the legal stamp on what has for some time been a civic fait accompli. Yet the violence within Mexico itself, far from all of it tied up with supplying the USA with drugs, gets worse every week.

Decriminalizing an act because the laws surrounding it are hard or expensive to enforce, or because you think you could get a nicer and fatter revenue stream out of it than you could in keeping it illegal, does not make the act, or the activity surrounding the act, inherently less harmful to people or the community they live in - or another community: if Prop 19 had passed, marijuana would still be illegal in the rest of the USA, and therefore still fantastically profitable to produce and smuggle into that country. (I also note that California's Proposition 19 was all about domestic possession, sale and production: it maintains the existing laws against transporting it across state or national borders.)

Dope will still be a product in demand, and people (currently, people involved in organized crime) will compete to supply that demand, and be aggressive in, well, let's call it "securing market share" (though someone living in the crossfire in Abbotsford or Surrey might have a different name for it).

And yet, when you think about it, legalization is actually a fabulous method of social control for government to get into. People are already quite accustomed to and comfortable with their own government selling them, or profiting from the sale of, substances more harmful and addictive than pot. And yes, pot smokers don't make a fraction of the trouble drinkers do, but they don't get up to much of anything but shambling around looking for snacks and more pot, or going to one of those asinine pro-hemp rallies. Ideal if you want your population to be quiescent, socially and politically disengaged, law-abiding (since we've abolished that law) zombies. And They profit off it too.

All of this, of course, dodges the most relevant question - why there is in the first place such an apparently insatiable demand for substances that screw people up.

[yes-justice.livejournal.com]

but they don't get up to much of anything but shambling around looking for snacks and more pot

That's all Carl Sagan, Lenny Bruce, or Louis Armstrong ever did?



demand for substances that screw people up.

Like this stuff, or just drugs?

Its because the vast majority of users are not screwed up.

[ltmurnau.livejournal.com]

That's a bullshit argument. For every Carl Sagan or Lenny Bruce there are ten or a hundred nameless stoners who are still living in Mom's basement and think they need to smoke up so they can tie their shoes. Pot didn't make Carl Sagan who he was, no more than whiskey and cigars made Winston Churchill who he was; I'm willing to bet it may have prevented others from reaching his level.

Maybe those losers in the basement might still be sitting there drinking Olde English 800 or huffing glue instead of smoking pot; they're useless to the rest of us regardless. And to quote your Carl Sagan, marijuana is worth Billions and Billions of dollars to - well, the people who are willing to pay for it, and the people who are willing to do whatever it takes to supply that demand. But a society that spends as much time, effort and money as ours does to derange its senses with alcohol and narcotics is a sick one.

[yes-justice.livejournal.com]

That's a bullshit argument.

Okay. Its actually your assertion:

You: 'stoners never accomplish stuff'

Me: 'yes they do, here are three heavy users who credited their success directly to pot"


there are ten or a hundred nameless stoners who are still living in Mom's basement and think they need to smoke up so they can tie their shoes.

The same is true of people who don't smoke pot. A few make great individual contributions to society, but most dont.


Pot didn't make Carl Sagan who he was

Well, he claims it did, so did Louie, so did Lenny. Carl's wife was so convinced, she helps run NORMAL these days.

they're useless to the rest of us regardless.

Maybe they're having a good time? How much of your life is measured by how useful it is to others?


a society that spends as much time, effort and money as ours does to derange its senses with alcohol and narcotics is a sick one.

Even if so, locking people up for being sick is basically shitty.

[ltmurnau.livejournal.com]

I can see we're not going to come to any meeting of minds here - except wrt medical marijuana, which I consider a legitimate therapy (though even then it seems to me that THC, which we've been able to synthesize in the lab for a long time, could be better administered to people in exact measured doses via puffers, pills or patches instead of smoking whatever you can get, whenever you can get it). Shine on, you crazy diamond you....