From: Arlo J. Bensinger (ajb102@psu.edu)
Date: Thu Dec 16 2004 - 23:18:26 GMT
Dan/Platt...
> Well, I wouldn't look to Europe for moral guidance given its recent
> history (20th century).
Ohhh... but look to America for its shining moral guidance. Uh huh. "Blind
patriotism" is the best you can offer in response to Dan's question?
> Nice smokescreen, but you haven't answered my question. Should all drugs
> be legalized? If not, why not?
Reductio ad absoluto, eh? Reduce the discussion to nonsensical absolutes. We've
moved past this, Platt, both Dan and I have cleared made our positions that
"legalization" is both a continuum with various potential levels of
restriction, and is something that needs to be addressed Intellectually for
each specific "drug" or substance.
Blanket statements like "all drugs should be legalized/criminalized" are merely
a rhetorical device to frighten people.
> Drugs are in the poorer neighborhoods because it's a way to make money
> illegally. I'm for legalizing drugs to put an end to that criminal
> behavior. As for drug "prevalence," it's not just in the slums by a long
> shot.
You are half way there, Platt. They make money on drugs in the poorer
neighborhoods for the same reason alcohol addiction and tobacco addictions are
significantly higher... because in the hopeless of the context, drugs provide a
temporary release.
I know you feel that anyone living in a ghetto can just get a job and move out,
but I'm willing to be you've never really spent time around one, or talking
with the people who live there (I have, near Cabrini Green in Chicago, and I've
worked tutoring inner city school kids in reading and math). I've met seven
year olds who told me they knew friends who were shot, and that they did not
expect to see their tenth birthday. When you can appreciate the hopelessness
THAT brings, you can begin to understand why so many turn to the escape of
drugs.
> > Yet, we stay away from "that part of town" because of
> > "those kinds of people". Yet, what if you talked with one of "those people"
> > and discovered they were highly intellectual? What if they were just
> > people that have always been faced with low Quality Static Patterns? And
> > please don't give the "everyone has a chance" BS.
>
> Your beginning to sound like those intellectuals that Pirsig talked about:
> "Phaedrus remembered parties in the fifties and sixties full of liberal
> intellectuals like himself who actually admired the criminal types that
> sometimes showed up. "Here we are," they seemed to believe, "drug pushers,
> flower children, anarchists, civil rights workers, college professors-
> we're all just comrades-in-arms against the cruel and corrupt social
> system that is really the enemy of us all." (Lila, 24)
Pirsig criticized the intellectuals of the sixties for siding blindly with
biological level patterns over social level patterns, which itself was a
blindspot created by SOM. I see nothing in Dan's MOQ-based inquiry that
indicates anything like this at all.
> I consider rock a primitive throwback to jungle music. Take away the beat,
> the amplifiers, the strobe lights and the pot and what's left?
Take away the beat??? That's like me saying "take away the melody from classical
music and what's left? Nothing, therefore it has no quality.
But take away the other things you mentioned, and umm..., fun? Dancing?
Enjoyment? Same with good ol' boys strummin' their banjos, or irishmen playing
their fiddles, or bavarians polka-ing. Ah, I can see now why you don't like it.
Victorians don't like having fun (oh, except for chess).
Arlo
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