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theabortionatorSupporting helmet usage and pushing for mandatory helmet requirements aren't the same thing. I've been wearing a helmet for years. I wear a seatbelt when I'm in a car. That said I think helmet and seatbelt laws are retarded.
VinnieFplease stop using the seat belt in your argument since, if there's more than one person in the vehicle, someone not wearing a seat belt is directly putting their lives at far greater risk in the event of an accident. Yes it should be mandatory because of this simple fact, so constantly using it as an example isn't doing anything to support your points.
theabortionatorBecause it's soooooo likely. Better chance of the stuff on the roof rack ripping off and drilling some poor old lady crossing the street.
If you don't wear a helmet and you get hurt ski patrol has to risk their lives to bring you down on a sled. Make ski helmets mandatory.
.tomskisPut me in a car with someone not wearing a seatbelt? I'm much less safe.
FordBennettYOU CANNOT PROTECT ME FROM MYSELF
theabortionatorYou start off good but then say you think drug laws are necessary? LOL WUT?
If heroin wasn't illegal would you use it tomorrow? Probably not. Why the fuck would you support drug laws? The only thing the war on drugs has succeed in doing is making assholes rich, getting lots of people killed, helping people OD, and giving us a nice market for research chemicals. Lovely.
The war on drugs doesn't even work. People are still doing drugs they will always be doing drugs. People have been getting fucked up as long as they've been on the earth. The war on drugs wastes 40+ billion, incarcerates non violent offenders, turns some places into fucking war zones, and hasn't stopped people from using drugs.
When even marijuana is illegal you know your country is in a rough spot. We need to go through and get rid of all the bullshit legislation, get rid of all the wasteful spending, and severely scale back the government.
The idea of not changing things because "that's the way it's been" is senseless. We're doomed anyway so it doesn't really matter but still.
Hearing people say say the support the drug war makes me wut so hard.
/rant.
MiomoTo start off, I never took solid ground when I said they were necessary. That having been said, you can't say that there's absolutely no reason for drug laws.
The difference between helmets/seatbelts and drugs is the level of action taken. Someone who doesn't wear a helmet/seatbelt is doing so in "dis-action", but people who do drugs make a conscious decision to. Children are more influenced by action then dis-action. I don't have any sources, but I believe that's a fair assumption to make. If this child grows up seeing people shooting up heroin or smoking crack, then they'd probably be more likely to, themselves -- especially if it's one of their peers. Of course, age limit it, but if it's easier (and legal) for adults to get, then it's also easier for teenagers. I'm not saying this is going to be happening all over America, but in the less-than-fortunate communities? Definitely. Moreso than today.
And the thing is that I can't even take the whole Darwinism thing to this, because this is entirely dependent on nurture rather than nature. Children can't control what they hold on to in their early lives. Early experiences, and probably even those in the teen years, become ingrained in, and part of the person. It's not something that goes away. It's almost as much a part of a person as their genetics. The person is damaged before they even get a chance to do anything. It's no longer as much of a choice.
theabortionatorProtect yourself before you wreck yourself.
Also I'll be back on snow tomorrow so only a few more hours of me arguing nothing for no reason with strangers around the world.
theabortionatorYou're talking like .0000000000000000000000000000000000001. What if you drive around with a bowling ball in the car instead of being in the trunk? That would fuck you up, maybe even go through the windshield and into another car.
.tomskisYeah of course that would be unsafe, have you not seen anchorman 2?
https://www.newschoolers.com/videos/watch/741323/Anchorman-2--hilarious-RV-scene
.tomskisSkip to 1.56 for the action
adamwolynI independently choose to wear a helmet while skiing and believe ppl sud but making helmet laws will decrease helmet use. while this sounds very contradictory, hear me out. (I assume laws that only require helmets for minors; the gov't won't pay to have authorities monitoring every hill. They have bigger concerns)
Children are rebellious. Look at smoking rates. The rate decreased around our parents time because they firsthand saw their parents suffering from smoking. This generation however has seen a rise in smoking. Why? Because the children don't observe its short&long term effects. All they have is a bunch of "uncool" old ppl saying don't. The same old ppl telling them to stay away from violent things, eat vegetables, stay away from dangerous activities, etc. and they rebel. This rebellion sprouts from the tendency to believe that parents exaggerate naturally occurring consequences to actions (eating candy will make you fat) to prevent insignificant repercussions. And they often do.
However, children have trouble distinguishing when consequences are exaggerated or not from lack of experience. A reason why those kids smoke is because the incredibly high rates of disease sound way overblown to hide a secret benefit. Rebellion increases later when kids learn that benefits do exist in a lot of situations like drugs. "If my parents didn't tell me drugs can make you feel really good, what other fun things are they hiding from me?" If helmets are forced more on kids, they will be more inclined to rebel/not wear helmets when they can to find the secret benefits they weren't told about.
The less rebellious kids will also be tempted because of curiosity. If forced to wear a helmet, a kid will find it as a more extreme view and will be more curious to learn about not wearing helmets. This is because of a greater feeling of looking at only a small part of the picture. By associating helmets with radical views, they are less attracted to the idea and less likely to do so when given the option.
You can think of the law as a parent who is very aggressive towards their kids about wearing helmets. The aggressive behavior increases tension and negative emotions towards the parent. This method is ineffective because of a phycological process known as modeling. Modeling basically says that children tend to try to be like their parents. When their parents are aggressive towards them, they lose their modeling instinct and start to be oppositional due to a more complicated concept of cognitive dissonance.
However, parents should use modeling to their advantage as it is very powerful instead of a law. Something as simple as telling your kid early on something like "not wearing them is incredibly stupid, it is pointless" or a story of how not wearing one sent you to the ER (maybe a video showing someone with a disfigured head as a result) will be outstandingly more influential because they are more likely to agree when allowed to decide independently in addition to their drive to be like you. If you didn't know your father didn't like baseball and you told him one day at a young age that you were interested in playing, what would be more convincing? Him distinctly saying there is no way that you would ever play something so stupid, or saying "Oh, you'll hate it. It gets very boring very quick and it's the most played sport by girls... This sport is manlier; everyone thinks the athletes are the toughest...(maybe get older sibling input)
By giving very persuasive evidence (young kids are gullible) plus giving an opportunity to impress you and receive approval, the second is much more convincing.
I feel that a law or rule from the gov't is not what we need. We need newcomers to have a general sense that helmets are ok-which is an attitude that I feel is present(even better if helmets were regarded higher than no helmets). We also need more parents that know how to strongly persuade their children so the kids feel as if they want to wear helmets and they r getting wat they want.
adamwolynI'm having trouble quoting you, theabortionator. In between the hashtags is the quote and my response after
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If you want to clean things up legalize it. A lot of the sketchiness surrounding drugs is from them being illegal.
As far as seeing people use drugs everywhere, make it illegal to use them in public. Most places it's not even legal to drink in public yet alcohol is very much legal and widely used.
If you kept drugs at the prices they are now or even half of that and mass produced them you could kill it in taxes. Also the 40+ billion you're saving at the start.
If heroin was made legal tomorrow, would you go out and use it? Most people wouldn't. So is it really the law keeping you from doing it or your own judgement?
Throwing people in prison for years simply for wanting to do something on their own time with their own body is just insane. IT only seems rational because we're so used to it.
Are there problems with drug usage? Yes. Will there be problems even if they're legalized? Of course. Will it destroy the moral fabric of our society and destroy the earth? Probably no.
If something as simple as that is such a long process, it's pretty hopeless for progress in general. We should be able to look at something, if it doesn't fit axe that shit. But that's just not how things are done and one of the reasons we can never really seem to move forward.
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I cut out much of your post cause I don't have time to talk about everything. The leftovers is what I feel is easy to quickly refute with a quick simple argument. Each paragraph I write sud correspond to yours that I quoted chronologically. Hope we can have a constructive argument.
The sketchiness from drugs does come from being illegal but I feel that there is enough risk that comes from the actual effects of drugs and how they can possibly affect society negatively (decrease in productivity, accidents hurting ppl who don't do drugs, education standards,etc) that you can't just legalize them and remove a lot of the sketchiness. This is why there is conflict; many feel that decreasing the illegal activity isn't worth what the repercussions could be on society. Those who are for feel that it will be minor while opponents say either they will be or that we don't know enough to take the risk. State by state legalization is a good way to see but a state reaction can't represent the nation's or even how that state would do if it was legalized nationally at once.
I agree that it shouldn't be used in public areas;however, the point of no public drinking is to keep participating ppl in general areas where they will tend to stay while also reducing the amount of times drunk ppl are seen in public as most ppl don't find it pleasant seeing others drunk and it reduces promotion of drinking. While a bar for weed would work very well, there is no current useful way for determining if a person has recently smoked because traces are indistinguishably detected from a month before. So there is no way to validate a claim of someone publicly smoking by seeing if they are high. Yes you can check bloodshot eyes,mood... but those characteristics aren't consistent and reliable and they can be caused by other factors or linger after your not high.
Killing the prices in taxes will make the problem worse as ppl will stop buying from established businesses and go back to buying in secret private exchanges where taxes cannot be enforced. This will bring back the shady / illegalness but it can be countered by arresting those transactions not done by approved businesses which will charge taxes as required. However to make this system useful, you couldn't skyrocket taxes as that would increase illegal transactions and there we go back to fighting drugs even though they are legal. A reasonable rate would keep those illegal transactions minimal. If we stopped funding the programs completely, 40B is actually not that much compared to the size of our spending and tax revenues. If it was a significant amount, the increase in budget might get used poorly or even if large enough make our spending habits worse.
Most ppl wudnt do the heroin because of their judgement-nothing changes. Then there are ppl who are aren't doing it because of the law-increase in usage. Then there are ppl who will do less intense drugs because their understanding of acceptable substances is skewed-increase in drug usage. Then there are the future ppl that will now be more likely to use it because of no legal consequences-increase in usage. The increase of usage means a greater chance of negative effects on society.
Ppl aren't going to jail just because of something they do to themselves, it can affect others negatively such as more high ppl driving-> more unnecessary car accidents. You can't trust everyone to stay away from others while high. I agree that it can seem more rational because we are used to it and the difficulty to change will make it harder to progress to a society where ppl do drugs casually as if no big deal and responsibly so incidents are minimal but unless we develop effective life augmentation treatments soon, we will not live to see this come true.
This one is a quickie. Just because it doesn't kill everyone and destroy life on earth doesn't mean we should do it. If benefits somehow outweigh destruction then it would be plausible.
The system isn't flawed. Wats flawed is difference in opinion. We could say legalization doesn't work axe it, but we can't because that's not fair to the part that wants it. Most of the policy that almost everyone agrees on was highly disputed before like slavery and segregation. However this doesn't work with everything. Drugs are highly disputed and the process is slow because it's immoral to take a voice/vote from someone. We can't change too quickly because after a change, society adjusts and society can't make very big changes to support greater policy change. When society can't handle the change there is great conflict.
Let's keep this argument clean.
theabortionatorIf somebody isn't puffing on a blunt on the sidewalk, acting normal, why would you or anyone care if they smoked 5 minutes or 5 weeks ago? Hell I don't even care if somebody has an insanely high BAC, if they're acting normal it doesn't matter.
How often do people make their own beer or grow their own tobacco? There's a resurgence in home brewing but that is going along with people drinking better beer, caring about beer, wanting to be involved not cutting corners on price. People roll their own cigs to get around the price of packs but they buy the tobacco and papers in stores.
If the prices are similar, people are going to buy drugs from a store where it's packaged, quality controlled, has the purity and dosage recommendations labeled vs. buying something from some stranger in an alley. There would have to be some meetings to determine the costs and figure out a good price to set things at. My only point on that was you can still mark it up a bunch over cost and people will buy it from the legitimate source.
40 billion is an absurd amount of money. It's only small because we waste money like that on the daily.
PEOPLE ARE GOING TO JAIL FOR SOMETHING THAT THEY'RE DOING TO THEMSELVES ON THEIR OWN TIME. The driving thing isn't a good point because alcohol is legal yet you can't operate a car while drunk. For people staying away from other, there are public intoxication laws. If somebody is fucked up and causing a ruckus, that's illegal. Also people are already doing drugs everywhere so it isn't like that is a problem that's created by legalizing them.
If you're going to argue that the system isn't flawed on marijuana prohibition good luck. Nothing like putting people in jail for a plant that's been growing on the earth forever. That could be used for industry if we could get our heads out of our buttholes.
Society doesn't change because we only support the issues that fox, cnn or some shared facebook post tells us to. We vote for some an elephant or a donkey and that's a wrap. Why would we ever want to weed out the bs and simplify things, get rid of unjust or generally senseless legislation.
It's like making tulips illegal. Accept it isn't because tulips aren't anywhere near as useful as hemp. If we're going for the land of the trivial let's make bowl cuts illegal.
also I just took a shower so squeeky clean and ready to decipher some more whateverness
