Jubbergun wrote:
You're right. It's not a "source" at all. It's a fictional story, and it's ridiculous for someone constantly crying about other people's perspectives being based in popular fantasies attempting to cite it as a credible source of information.
The Odyssey is a source in the same sense black and white movies are a source. The Odyssey doesn't accurately represent the world of the Mycenaean Dark Age any more than a B&W movie represents the world of however long ago. What both do accurately represent is the same things those movies represent: a dead culture's ways of thinking and assumptions about the world.
If you watched a movie from 50 years ago, you might assume there were no black people and no one ever had sex. Likewise, if you read the Homeric Hymns, you might assume every disgruntled peasant is a Thersites (a stupid and physically ugly malcontent), every woman raped by invaders was a Briseis (who thought being abducted and held as a concubine was just awesome), and that armies were all noble and honorable when they raided whatever villages happened to have the misfortune to be near their staging area for food and supplies (something that, like sex in old movies, is mentioned in vague euphemistic terms but never actually shown on screen).
We can't get an accurate picture of the sex lives of people a century ago, or the daily welfare of the average peasant three thousand years ago, by listening to their stories. What we can get is an reasonably accurate picture of their value system.
Jubbergun wrote:
I've never heard of anyone overdosing on tobacco
Tobacco is not escapist in the sense alcohol or weed are.
Jubbergun wrote:
That "regulatory system" is the government, and I think it's strange that you don't believe you can trust the government with something as "potentially significant" as regulating cannabis (and Dear God, that's a very libertarian-sounding argument) but you're one of the people on these boards constantly squealing about how we should nationalize healthcare, which is something that is actually significant as opposed to potentially significant, and let the government run that sector of our economy.
I know that the government would not long be allowed to do its work unimpeded.
If people get healthcare, that's that, they can cry when they don't, let democracy do its thing. I realistically don't see a world where you see mobs outside the White House demanding breast implants and nose jobs. Uhh. Who knows. Maybe someone will read this in a century and chortle. Regardless, it seems unlikely.
But if weed is legal, how long until pressure is brought to bear to allow companies to make money on more potent concoctions?
Jubbergun wrote:
The premise isn't that we encourage people to curl up and die in a corner because they've chosen to destroy themselves, the premise is that there are going to be those people we'll realistically never be able to help, and creating larger problems for the sake of attempting to save them anyway is unwise.
This is a weak deterministic argument that people have been using literally forever (see: Thersites, or
Gone With The Wind)
Jubbergun wrote:
There's a black market for cannabis because people want it and can't obtain it any other way.
Okay, but why do they want it, why is this such a big deal?
Jubbergun wrote:
The "need for weed" isn't the factor motivating people to risk jail for it. Most of the people facing jail time for cannabis are dealers, and their primary incentive is that they can turn a significant profit on a cheap weed with little or no effort. The risk of jail time is just one of the costs of doing business, a risk they find acceptable due to their profit margins.
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Then wouldn't the more logical approach be to buff welfare?