… he does.
Remember the tragedy that I posted about a little while ago? A young man had been caught with a tiny amount of marijuana, and, aggravated by a police mistake, was in jeopardy of losing his career plans, so he committed suicide.
Well, Peter Hitchens responds with: If the law had been strongly enforced over the last 40 years, schoolboys like Edward Thornber wouldn’t risk toying with cannabis
Yeah, that’s right. Hitchens says that the problem is that the drug war wasn’t enforced enough.
If the law had been strongly and consistently applied during the past 40 years, schoolboys would never take the terrible risk of toying with this dangerous, mind-bending substance, increasingly correlated with severe and irreversible mental illness.
And many lives, not just that of Edward Thornber and his family, would have been spared tragedies of many different kinds.
Weakness is not the same thing as compassion.
I couldn’t read it all… the man has serious issues.
If you click on the link and see the article you will find that comments are not allowed for “legal reasons.” Also, aside from the idiotic drug rhetoric there is a section on the reintroduction of wolves to Idaho that paints these animals as dangerous bloodthirsty monster when in fact no one has ever been killed or attacked by a wolf in North America. Truly stunning level of ignorance on display here.
Peter Hitchens is a troll. Nothing but your garden variety, ankle biting internet troll, out to provoke a reaction. He just happens to be at the DailyMail.
His irrelvancy is betrayed by his obvious attempt to provoke a reaction, his craveness laid bare by the stifling of debate. At this point, he is merely a comic prohibitionist sideshow, writing at the Dailymail, like a court jester, for laughs and for occasional kicking. All for the amusement of us couch-folk at the Royal House of Pete. When it’s over, and he’s been beaten until he can no longer amuse, we will discard him with the scraps of our dinner. And from them he shall eat his evening’s meal. PFUIII.
Passeth me the Royal Bong.
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You’re a very generous man DC. If I were even slightly inclined to feed Mr. Hitchens the best I could do would be to sugar coat some turds for him. I’d also have to keep a sharp eye because there’d be no surprise here if SCTs are one of his favorite foods.
I see someone gave Peter Hitchens a “thumbs down”. Yes, I’m certain it’s for him.
Reading Peter Hitchens is discouraging. I often wonder how the human species can continue to survive with people like Peter Hitchens on board. I’ve encountered so many individuals who think and act as he does that the problem seems overwhelming.
Craziness is possible. There are examples of people with an obsessive compulsive disorder who are obsessed with extreme scrupulosity. Peter Hitchens seems to meet the criteria. In his article “Plebs…†, he says this about a member of the House of Commons:
Hitchens sounds like the morally exasperated 10-year-old Sunday school student who’s made it his holy task to snitch on everyone for every little thing, especially naughty words. There are indications of an arrested, moral character development on his part. At what actual age Hitchens stopped his social maturation would require professional evaluation. Unfortunately, as a rabid religious zealot, Hitchens is much like Scientologist Tom Cruise. He will never go near a mental health professional.
Does anyone else find it strange that Peter is so religious and his (now deceased) brother, Christopher, was an atheist?
I can think of another odd couple, Alec Baldwin and his brother Stephen. Alec may not be an atheist, but compared to Stephen’s religious fanaticism, he might as well be.
Stephen Baldwin, AKA The Jesus Freak of Hollywood, stood outside an adult entertainment store and photographed patrons, workers, and license plates, and threatened to publish the info in one page ads in a local newspaper.
He thinks he’s the victim of a vast anti-Christian conspiracy aimed at him and other Christians.
He’s a crusading prohibitionist.
On December 6, 2012, Stephen was arrested for tax evasion. He had not rendered unto Caesar. He owed $350,000. His not-so-religious brother Alec helped keep über-Christian Stephen out of jail.
As for being brothers in the same family, it doesn’t appear to mean much. Siblings differ. Probability rules. Some turn out well, like Alec and Chris, others end up like Stephen and Peter, sucking swamp water their whole lives.
Both of them were professional trolls, trying to provoke people and get attention for themselves. See the book Unhitched. Most of the sensible stuff that Christopher wrote was taken from other sources, often without credit. For instance, his book on Mother Teresa was just a rewriting of a manuscript by an Indian guy.
Peter is right. The ‘War on Drugs’ is a sham.
If the laws were strongly and consistently applied universally, everyone would be in prison:
“There is no one in the United States over the age of 18 who cannot be indicted for some federal crime,” said John Baker, a retired Louisiana State University law professor who has also tried counting the number of new federal crimes created in recent years. “That is not an exaggeration.”
Back in the world we live in, aside from a few Hitchens and Seebats, everyone else is coming to the realization that drug prohibition and attempts at strict enforcement simply do not achieve the desired results, and in fact produce worse results than the drug abuse they purport to control. It’s been 40 years, and it’s about time.
Sign of the times: Over the weekend I saw the best COPS episode EVAH! A little old lady called the cops to report two of her marijuana plants stolen from her fenced back yard. She said she had a permit, which the two officers didn’t even ask to see, and that she thought she saw a neighbor toss them over the back fence. They found them in the neighbor’s back yard (he must not have had a permit — “That’s not mine, I’ve never seen them before!”). She got her plants back, didn’t want to press charges on her backyard neighbor, and the cops didn’t want to make a federal case out of it, so that was that.
One of the cops commented that we’ve come a long way when someone can call the police and get help recovering their missing marijuana! “A few years ago we’d have arrested them both!” Sure beats break-down-the-door-and-shoot-your-little-Toto SWAT team raids.
Wow. I’d say we’ve come a very long way if you can see something like that on “Cops.”
This does happen infrequently. I was visiting a terminal cancer patient in a non-medical state, and we shared a toke (bad idea, she was in a hospice). The cops came, talked to the patient and yelled at me, took the roach and left. No arrests. She died less than two weeks later.
Of course, that is one incident compared to hundreds of thousands of others where they do arrest the smokers.
Still, the journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.
It’s season 25, episode 11, titled “Dazed & Confused No. 5”
Wow, COPS has been on for 25 years now?
That was my reaction, too. I assumed it was cancelled already.
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I recall seeing an episode of C*O*P*S once. I don’t recall the circumstances but they had somehow ended up chasing a fellow who just didn’t like the idea of getting arrested. At some point in time the chase went into some residential backyards. One of the JBTs jumped a fence and landed in a garden of cannabis plants. Some poor grower smitten by the Axe of God. They did arrest him.
P.S. C*O*P*S may well be the first 100 season TV show barring a wholesale shift in the American psyche. It’s cheap to produce. It gratifies the heck out of the JBTs selected to appear. It satisfies the general population’s voyeurism and provides vicarious gratification of the perverted blood lust for “criminals” in their middles brains. Wait, did I say middle? I think I meant to say little.
Same thing happened to me here in the islands. Before I bought my house, had 15 mature beauties on my 3rd story condo balcony ripped (don’t know how they got up there, firetruck?). After much debate, called Kops. They did their best to keep a straight face and conduct an ‘investigation’.
Long story short, word of mouth led to the gardener’s son! We told the investigating officer that we wouldn’t press charges as he was still in high school (and he apologized). Plus, I think his dad tanned his hide as well.
Yeah, it was a temp loss for us, but why ruin a kid’s life over youthful disgression..
Maybe my MMJ helped him reflect on his ways, or he sold some to buy schoolbooks! HAHAHAHA RIGHT?!
“Weakness is not the same thing as compassion.”
And stupidity is not the same as total insanity.
Funny; comments were open when I posted mine —within 15 minutes of the article appearing.
The ‘Fanatic Factor’ at work; the more a fanatic loses, the more fanatical he gets.
As the prohibs lose ground in the DrugWar, courtesy of the generational shift in attitudes towards it, the prohibs will become increasingly weirded out…and downright weird, as well. And it is already happening.
The problem has always been the very big difference between the rhetoric and the reality, the ‘Great Disconnect’. The DrugWar is justified with words of glowing, shining, sterling moral uprightness…and it’s prosecuted with NSDAP-style Brown-Shirt gutter tactics. The latest generation – which has now reached its’ social and political majority – see that very clearly, and don’t hold with the hypocrisy.
But the prohibs are only tangentially addressing them; the prohibs are aiming their rhetoric at people of their own generation for whom the words they use have any meaning due to that generation’s subscribing to the same twisted system without critically examining it…as the latest generation have done, which is why the vast majority of them reject their parent’s DrugWar.
The Hitchenses of the world are preaching to a choir that is growing physically as well as politically deaf, and are losing their ‘voices’ courtesy of attrition making it harder to influence civic matters via the ballot box. He can rant all he wants, but his audience is growing noticeably smaller every day. And fewer and fewer people are subscribing for his dog-and-pony show.
Soon, his ilk will join all the other ‘Crazy Uncles’, the ones raving away in their rooms up in the attic, or at the assisted living homes, angrily and impotently shouting at bare (or rubber-paneled) walls about things that society has already decided on and moved beyond.
A pity there’s no such thing as an ‘Old Folk’s Home’ for the subscribers to dangerously obsolescent ideologies; as their twilight looms, they should be made harmlessly comfortable in their eventual – and inescapable – irrelevancy.
Oh, and one more thing. Hitchens’s comment about ‘weakness’ serves to illustrate the Social Darwinism that was always at the heart of the DrugWar, literally from the get-go. The same kind of Social Darwinism practiced by the racist crackers that fomented the DrugWar to begin with.
As the saying goes, “You are known by the company you keep.” Regardless of whether that company is physical or ideological…
they do have old folks homes for alzheimer sufferers based on retro themes like the 1950s with cars and decor of the period. perhaps they could have a drug war themed home for the likes of sabet and hitchens with swat raids and dog shootings so they remember where they are.
I have been searching my area for an object tall enough for them to jump off of as per Malcolm’s rant,,the only two things tall enough is the water tower and the grain elevator,,thinking about having a younger buddy climb the water tower and paint “prohib’s launch pad” on the side.
Space Needle.
The Daily Mail’s readers may be old but they do vote. And they are living longer and longer.
Peter Hitchens is a hack – he is catering to the reactionary fearful. If you fear the future (because all you can see in your personal future is death), then you also fear the living young. And you are open to prohibitionist crap that Hitchens spews forth, because it provides justification and solutions for your fears.
It’s pathetic, really.
And the Mail reveals its fascist tendencies by closing comments. Scum.
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Yeah, but most of the Mail’s readers vote in British elections. Just sayin’.
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Tommy Chong thinks that a rest home for old hippies would be a great investment. Cheech Marin suggests that it be named “Laidback Manor.”
At 1:20: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZ8kJRxQgAc
the mail online is apparently the most widely read internet news media in the world. i suspect that much of its readership votes in the US. now doesnt that make you feel better?
Sheesh, I should know better than to localize stuff on the World Wide Web. Never mind.
Is he gonna be put in the same attic as Wiggles?
It’s not nice to torture the lower life forms. Why in the world would we do that to the poor wiggle dude?
Revenge?
while I have my own suspicions about this Mr Wiggles, I had forgotten that George Clinton and Funkadelic had a Mr Wiggles that went back a ways. (I am forever thankful to my fellow GIs that introduced me to Maggotbrain at the same time they introduced me to LSD – Green Mystery, Austin, TX, 1971)
Mr Wiggles, the early years
Mr Wiggles in 2011
I do kinda miss not having to enter me name and e-addy ever’time I comment. But no complaints, I loves me DWR
Didn’t Batman count The Wiggler among the members of his rogue’s gallery of arch-criminal nemeses?
Maggot Brain?!? That’s a blast from the past. That long d-minor progression, simple and yet anarchic. It was a fave of our alt HS band – “Blind Mental Nicky Lava & The Red Hot Metamorphic Rocks”.
Nicely put Mr. Gavin Newsome: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Cwzs3Y9eOTA
OT: Biden marches against Jim Crow.
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2013/03/biden-defends-voting-rights-act-provision-in-selma-alabama/
Irony?
— “That the courage to look evil in the eye, fight against it, never give up.”
Is he actually starting to look in the mirror?
First of all, it’s just his *assumption* that more enforcement would make “schoolboys never take the risk of toying with marijuana”. Many countries *kill* people found with marijuana and yet people in these countries still buy, sell and use it. If this repugnant law actually worked, we’d NEVER hear about these countries killing anybody over marijuana. But the fact is that even killing people for marijuana DOESN’T stop people using it, and this undermines the entire basis of Hitchens’ argument that more enforcement would eliminate marijuana use.
The second thing is that humans have used marijuana for more than ten thousand years and many many people see no reason to stop, regardless of what the law says. There is NO evidence that making the law “stronger” would change this.
And the third thing is that marijuana is safer than coffee and FAR safer than alcohol. Why are we talking about making the laws even more draconian when there’s no justification for making marijuana illegal in the first place? We should NOT have laws that cause more harm than good, and this is exactly what the federal marijuana prohibition does!
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Were the comments open I would have had to go figure out the reality of cannabis law in 1960s Great Britain. Had Mr. Hitchens been an American I would have demanded that he explain the 1960s rise in the popularity of cannabis in the face of felonies with decade(s) long prison term. Not enforced? I recall one of the original LEAPsters opining over how it felt to go to youth parties in New Jersey undercover and later arrest anyone who passed a joint for narcotics distribution.
The prohibitionists seem doggedly determined to convince me that the phrase “in denial” actually has meaning. Mr. Hitchens may as well demand the decapitation of people who choose to enjoy cannabis from time to time. It’s got exactly as much chance of being implemented as his proposed draconianism, and it’s much more inflammatory.
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We all know just how dangerous hysterical rhetoric can be in the hands of a Know Nothing prohibitionist. But just a few moments ago I found out something so scary that it made me wet myself from fear. It appears that the Know Nothings have had their Frankensteins hard at work and soon we’re going to have to deal with synthetic hysteria! May the gods have mercy on us and the future of civilization. Now I need to go change my pants.
Quinn Norton, Aaron Swartz’s former girlfriend and an excellent journalist, has written an article for The Atlantic detailing her and Aaron’s victimization at the behest of U.S. prosecutors indicting him for computer open access crimes.
It turns out Quinn’s father died in prison after being sentenced for a drug arrest. She was 17 when he went to prison, and he died when she was 23. She works her father’s story into the narrative, which provides useful details of the treachery and social indifference of federal prosecutors that is common to prosecutions in the United States:
Ms. Norton learned the hard way. Her mistakes, observations and the clever countermeasures she used to defuse the Swartz prosecution are on the need-to-know list for the self-defense of every U.S. citizen who currently faces a judiciary as corrupt as anything discoverable among the inquisitions or Roman Empire.
http://tinyurl.com/d2ep3kq