Just as prohibition of alcohol failed in the United States in the 1920s, the war on drugs has failed globally. Over the past 50 years, more than $1 trillion has been spent fighting this battle, and all we have to show for it is increased drug use, overflowing jails, billions of pounds and dollars of taxpayers’ money wasted, and thriving crime syndicates. It is time for a new approach.
Too many of our leaders worldwide are ignoring policy reforms that could rapidly reduce violence and organised crime, cut down on theft, improve public health and reduce the use of illicit drugs. They are failing to act because the reforms that are needed centre on decriminalising drug use and treating it as a health problem. They are scared to take a stand that might seem “soft”.
But exploring ways to decriminalise drugs is anything but soft. It would free up crime-fighting resources to go after violent organised crime, and get more people the help they need to get off drugs. It’s time to get tough on misguided policies and end the war on drugs.
It’s time to acknowledge that the majority of politicians at home and abroad spend their time fighting battles—against decriminalisation, queer rights, and the like—that should have ended decades ago.
Julian Sanchez, writing for Cato @ Liberty, the blog of the Cato Institute:
Believe it or not, though, it’s actually even worse than that. SOPA, recall, does not actually shut down foreign sites. It only requires (ineffective) blocking of foreign “rogue sites” for U.S. Internet users. It doesn’t do anything to prevent users in (say) China from downloading illicit content on a Chinese site. If we’re interested in the magnitude of the piracy harm that SOPA is aimed at addressing, then, the only relevant number is the loss attributable specifically to Internet piracy by U.S. users.
Again, we don’t have the full LEK study, but one of Siwek’s early papers does conveniently reproduce some of LEK’s PowerPoint slides, which attempt to break the data down a bit. Of the total $6.1 billion in annual losses LEK estimated to MPAA studios, the amount attributable to online piracy by users in the United States was $446 million—which, by coincidence, is roughly the amount grossed globally by Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel.
So in a fantasy world where U.S. movie pirates don’t just circumvent blockage with a browser plugin, and SOPA actually stops all online movie piracy by American users, we get a $446 million economic benefit to the United States in the form of movie revenues, and presumably comparable benefits in music and software revenues? Well, no. Remember our old friend the Broken Window Fallacy. It’s true that some illicit U.S. downloads displace sales of legal products. But what happens to the money the pirates would have otherwise spent on those legal copies? They don’t eat it! As that same GAO report helpfully points out:
(1) in the case that the counterfeit good has similar quality to the original, consumers have extra disposable income from purchasing a less expensive good, and (2) the extra disposable income goes back to the U.S. economy, as consumers can spend it on other goods and services.
In other words: even if SOPA worked perfectly (which it certainly wouldn’t) and didn’t cause massive collateral damage (which it certainly would), the reasons given for enacting it are false, and the people responsible for enacting it are ignorant or corrupt.
Call your congressperson. Tell them to stop SOPA. Make it clear that your vote, and any future donations from you, are on the line.
59% of American Mormons say there is a lot of discrimination against gays and lesbians in the U.S., while only 46% say there is a lot of discrimination against Mormons.
I wonder what percentage of Mormons would say that there is a lot of discrimination against gays and lesbians in the Mormon church.
All I can think is: we gave you the Internet. We gave you the Web. We gave you MP3 and MP4. We gave you e-commerce, micropayments, PayPal, Netflix, iTunes, Amazon, the iPad, the iPhone, the laptop, 3G, wifi—hell, you can even get online while you’re on an AIRPLANE. What the hell more do you want from us
Take the truck, the boat, the helicopter, that we’ve sent you. Don’t wait for the time machine, because we’re never going to invent something that returns you to 1965 when copying was hard and you could treat the customer’s convenience with contempt.
Rival presidential candidate Rick Santorum’s Iowa coalitions director, Jamie Johnson, sent out an email saying that children’s lives would be harmed if the nation had a female president. He wrote it in June, but it surfaced on the campaign trail in the fall.
“The question then comes, ‘Is it God’s highest desire, that is, his biblically expressed will, … to have a woman rule the institutions of the family, the church, and the state?’ ” Johnson’s email said.
Johnson said the email was meant to be a private message to a friend, that he sent it from his personal email account, not his campaign account, and that he hadn’t intended it to be read by anyone else.
From the moral perspective of His Holiness (and most of the wildly differing, contradictory, and all equally human-originated and fabricated religions), homosexuality as a whole is “wrong”, and is at least partially sinful (I say “partially” because the current version of Catholic dogma fatuously distinguishes homosexual ‘tendencies’ as not being a sin, but homosexual intercourse being very much so - as if the two could or should be separated).
My own system of morality, however, regards the following as immoral acts:
Perpetuating institutionalised discrimination.
Indulging in the sophistry of equating morality with sexuality.
Perpetuating the deeply unhealthy doctrine of priestly celibacy, thus creating highly damaged, disturbed and repressed human beings.
Perpetuating sexist and homophobic attitudes under the guise of fabricated divine will.
Perpetuating the monstrous and intellectually criminal assertion that morality is conferred by faith, and absent without it.
Aiming the slander of ‘immorality’ against a harmless and normal state of being.
The idea that a consensual relationship, between adults of sound mind, could be somehow immoral is itself repugnant.
If the charge of immorality arises from nothing but the sexual orientation of those people, we must upgrade that judgement to literally criminal.
Later:
Indoctrination of children into religious belief systems is one of the great unpunished intellectual and social crimes of human history, and it continues almost unabated to this day. The word “indoctrination”, of course, means teaching someone to accept a set of beliefs uncritically - which is exactly what happens. To argue that a four-year-old, taken to Sunday School or such for the first time, is even capable of applying a critical analysis to the dogma is laughable. These children are victims, and the crime is one of morality.
Why do I hate Android? It’s definitely one of the questions I get asked most often these days. And most of those that don’t ask probably assume it’s because I’m an iPhone guy. People see negative take after negative take about the operating system and label me as “unreasonable” or “biased” or worse.
I should probably explain.
Believe it or not, I actually don’t hate Android. That is to say, I don’t hate the concept of Android — in fact, at one point, I loved it. What I hate is what Android has become. And more specifically, what Google has done with Android.
(I was tempted to subtitle this post “A Political Love/Hate Story”, but I decided that was a bit over the top. If you’d prefer to read a similar but prophetic article written by someone else back in October, which even predicted the Santorum surge, I refer you to Ross Douthat’s The Inevitable Nominee.)
Earlier this year, probably around the time Rick Perry joined the race, Bill Williams told me very seriously and very simply that Mitt Romney would be the Republican nominee for president in the 2012 presidential election. He said—I’m paraphrasing because I can’t find the conversation—that the decision had already been made in a smokey room somewhere, and that the rest of the campaign would really be for show. My immediate reaction was to scoff. Jacquelynn’s, when I mentioned to her what Bill had said, was to look at me like I was crazy and assure me that Bill was absolutely right.
When two very smart people tell me something that conflicts with my worldview, I like to reevaluate my worldview. So I’ve watched the Republican nomination campaign with great interest. Several of the candidates and potential candidates could be counted out early on: Sarah Palin was far too widely disliked to be electable, and Michele Bachmann made a lovely figurehead for the Tea Party movement, but was almost equally unelectable. Speaking quite frankly, a woman without at least Sarah Palin’s looks is not going to be the Republican Party’s nominee for at least another eight years; the core of the party is simply too sexist to elect a woman based on her actual achievements.
The list of definite “No”s didn’t end with Palin and Bachmann. Tim Pawlenty bailed out early, making room for Rick Perry, who was nearly unelectable even before it came out that his family was almost entirely unconscious of just how racist they actually were. Herman Cain, despite the fact that it took allegations of a consensual affair to sink a campaign that survived multiple allegations of sexual harassment and assault, was never a viable Republican nominee if only because the Republican Party is not yet ready to elect a black president; the fact that he was revealed as more ignorant even than Sarah Palin was only icing on the definitely-not-going-to-be-the-nominee-flavoured cake. Gary Johnson was simply too liberal in many of his views, and too similar to Ron Paul in the others, to be allowed to participate in the Republican debates.
Newt Gingrich’s campaign seemed dead out of the gate. He was revealed to have purchased most of his Twitter followers, and some number of his already small campaign staff walked out after Gingrich took too much time on vacation. It seems likely that he never intended to be a serious candidate, but found himself with substantial support from a desperate electorate and used the debates, where he initially presented a level-headed and professorial voice, as a springboard to relevance. It worked.
The exodus of Michele Bachmann’s ultraconservative followers did put the ailing campaign of one extremely unlikely candidate on life support: Rick Santorum. Between Bachmann’s former partisans and Perry’s beleaguered fans, the former senator from Pennsylvania has managed to build a patchwork coalition of the Christian right—the only thing that could have saved the campaign of a man whose name is synonymous with the undesirable end product (if you’ll excuse the pun) of a certain frowned-upon sexual act.
And so we come to the present: Mitt Romney has won both primaries to date, with Rick Santorum putting in a surprisingly vigorous showing in Iowa and Ron Paul walking away with solid second and third-place finishes that surprised only those who had not been following the polls. Newt Gingrich has remained in the race due only to his impressive powers of self-deception, or perhaps to keep his book sales up; it’s difficult to say for sure. Rick Perry’s campaign can be profitably compared to the walking dead, leaving—until tonight, at least—only one wild card: Jon Huntsman.
Jon Huntsman has been variously identified as a Mitt Romney Lite, a dutiful and largely non-partisan public servant, the most liberal and the most conservative of the Republican candidates. Due to his Mormonism, the perception of him as a more erudite (and thus less popular) Mitt Romney has only grown over the course of the season, lowering his chances of setting himself apart from the rest of the field. Nevertheless, the small momentum gain his campaign has seen in the last two weeks has fuelled some speculation among the “anyone but Romney” brigade and this morning he was endorsed by South Carolina’s largest newspaper.
And this is where it gets dicey.
It can certainly be argued that Herman Cain’s legs were taken out from under him just when he was becoming an inconvenient mascot for the Republican Party, but it can also be argued that his campaign was simply the victim of the vetting received by every top-tier candidate. The convenience of the timing could simply be a coincidence.
But this weekend’s events are too coherent a narrative to ignore. I’ve left two of them out of the summary above, so let’s take another look at how things went.
Saturday: Rick Santorum is endorsed by the Family Research Council, a group of conservative evangelical Christians.
Sunday: Jon Huntsman follows up on a modest rise in momentum by winning the endorsement of South Carolina newspaper The State, increasing the potential for him to split Mitt Romney’s vote in a state where Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul are already taking big chunks of the electorate and Rick Santorum is likely to see a bump from the FRC endorsement.
Later Sunday: Jon Huntsman’s campaign leaks his intention to leave the race and endorse Mitt Romney as early as Monday.
Consider these events in light of the fact that the media has essentially ignored Gingrich, Paul, and Huntsman as electable candidates for some time now. That leaves the possibility that the South Carolina primary will be pronounced essentially a tie if underdog Rick Santorum comes within a cool 10% of Mitt Romney—an undesirable outcome if Mitt Romney is the party’s chosen nominee.
The Republican Party has two conflicting needs regarding their ultimate nominee. First, if the candidate is a relative moderate (like Mitt Romney), he must have run against and soundly beaten at least one serious but wildly conservative and religious candidate in order to satisfy the religious right that he is the chosen candidate of the Republican base. Second, the candidate must have a clear mandate for his run against President Obama in the presidential election.
If Jon Huntsman didn’t drop out of the race before the South Carolina primary (donating a plurality of his followers and his endorsement to Romney in the process), there was the potential for either Newt Gingrich or Rick Santorum to upset Mitt Romney in the primary and upset the careful balance between serious competition and a clear mandate. Huntsman’s exit instead sets the stage for a clear-cut contest between five very different candidates—the electable moderate, the Clinton-era sore loser, the crazy libertarian, the religious social conservative, and the Texan bigot—thus providing voters with a simple choice, and Mitt Romney, assuming he wins, with a clear voice and mandate.
The evidence for Romney as the chosen and inevitable nominee is circumstantial, true; but it becomes increasingly convincing with every new favourable coincidence.
The media’s reaction to the allegations against Herman Cain has revealed something that I find telling and deeply troubling: the media has no sense of the difference between sexual behaviour between consenting adults and sexual harassment.
Let’s take a brief step back in time and consider the media firestorm that occurred around Anthony Weiner’s sexting scandal. The politician in question had exchanged more or less explicit photos and texts with some number of women, none of whom apparently asserted that he had done so against their wishes. His decision to engage in that behaviour was certainly unwise and encouraged us to question his good judgment; that much is true. But despite a perfect storm of media attention, none of the women involved stepped forward and indicated that his behaviour had constituted harassment. Nevertheless, Anthony Weiner was encouraged to resign—and eventually did so.
Now consider Herman Cain.
Herman Cain has so far been accused of sexual harassment by three women. The first two are now silent (and until Karen Kraushaar was outed by the media, anonymous), following a settlement with the National Restaurant Association that barred them from speaking about their accusations. The third, Sharon Bialek, has made a public accusation of what amounts to sexual assault on Cain’s part; reaching under her skirt and pulling her head toward his crotch certainly qualify as “sexual acts committed without consent”. Additionally, several other women have come forward asserting that Cain invited them to his room or otherwise propositioned them.
The Cain campaign has come out swinging against the women who have come forward. Karen Kraushaar is being questioned about workplace complaints she made in another job; Sharon Bialek’s financial history is under scrutiny thanks to a document published by the Cain campaign. Most troublingly, Cain’s lawyer, L. Lin Wood, has warned other potential accusers to “think twice” before coming forward, and threatened them with legal action.
In summary, Cain stands accused of sexual harassment and sexual assault in addition to simple ill-advised sexual behaviour—and now he is publicly intimidating potential witnesses. Nevertheless, the media continues to refer to this situation simply as “sexual allegations against Mr. Cain”.
I hope I don’t have to point out the difference between accusations of sexual impropriety—that is, sexual contact between consenting adults—and what Cain is accused of. The term “sexual allegations” doesn’t cover it. Herman Cain is accused of sexual harassment against multiple women, and sexual assault against one. The issue at play isn’t poor judgment; it’s an inability to understand that “no” is a valid answer, and that women are people.
And yet, where Anthony Weiner was encouraged to resign from office for sexual behaviour between (apparently) consenting adults, Herman Cain remains the frontrunner in the race for the Republican presidential nomination despite credible and repeated accusations of non-consensual sexual behaviour. Since the accusations became public, his campaign has received more donations than ever.
This inability to understand the difference between ill-advised sex and non-consensual sex is no longer just the media’s problem. It is America’s problem.
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“I think [the charges against Cain are] mostly garbage that they throw at people who want to be president,” James Kindsch, from Middleton, Wis., said in a follow-up interview.
“I don’t believe it,” said Paul Bradley from Fishersville, Va., adding: “The further in the past they happened, the less accurate they are.”
In the poll, a majority of Republicans — 55 percent — see reports of Cain’s alleged misconduct as “not a serious matter,” and 70 percent say the situation makes no difference in their vote.
Let’s be clear: two women were given a year’s pay to leave the organisation they were working for and not speak about something ever again. That is a fact; it is not an allegation. Something happened that was sufficiently troubling to Cain and the National Restaurant Association that they paid off the two women involved and put them under a gag order. That’s not a matter of belief. It’s a matter of proof.
It is another fact that Cain tried like hell to avoid admitting that he knew what reporters were talking about when first asked about the subject. And it is still another fact that several other women have since come forward to state that Cain said or did things to them that made them uncomfortable. Could they be lying? I suppose they could. But to what end?
Also from the article:
Although Republican men and women have similar views about whether the allegations against Cain represent a serious matter, GOP women are about twice as likely as men to say the whole situation makes them less apt to vote for Cain (25 to 12 percent).
I can’t see how to read that other than that the men polled don’t consider (charges of) sexual harassment as significant an issue as women. Now, I’m not making charges against Republican men specifically here; without seeing a similar situation among Democrats—anyone want to find me the numbers on President Clinton?—that would be silly and partisan. But it’s clear that among at least this particular male demographic, there is a significant gender gap concerning the perceived importance of sexual harassment.
Most depressingly, though:
A Quinnipiac poll launched before the scandal broke and ending Monday had Cain at 30 percent among registered voters, up from 17 percent in early October (he also polled at 17 percent in a Post-ABC poll in early October).
