Joint Post
It might help your point to not be freshly emerging from a two-month binge when you deliver your belated moral panic on drugs.
Bobo Brooks, New York Fucking Times:
Weed: Been There. Done That.
Weed, man.
This might be the “fight” that best exemplifies the right. I mean, let’s be frank, there isn’t a generation left on the planet for whom pot hasn’t been a major social institution, so common in usage to be wholly unremarkable. And yet, despite the fact that pretty much everyone, young and old at least knows someone who blazes up, the conservatives still react like shrieking death monkeys to every slow incremental change to reflect that reality.
And the amazing thing is that for nearly all of them, they have personal knowledge of how inane this “battle” is and how obscene it is that a drug less harmful on a personal or social level than tobacco or alcohol is only just now starting to become legal for wide use on a state by state basis. Many of the fuckers screaming their head off about the evils of legalizing pot or how obscene it is that Obama or Clinton have lit up have lit up themselves or done harder drugs.
But they keep up the “battle” out of loyalty to a legacy. To the fact that conservatives of the past cared about the issue and railed against it, so by the transitive power of dumb, so must they carry the torch to the giant flame of failure.
And those old bigots of days yore only cared about the damn sweet leaf to begin with because as a drug it was more associated with queers, blacks, beatniks, hippies, and assorted young people. That was the only reason why they hated it and fought so hard for such strict criminalization.
So yeah, we’ve got idjits holding their hands athwart history yelling stop because they have inherited a legacy hatred that only got started because “liberals liked it”.
If there is anything that better exemplifies modern conservatism, then I’ve yet to see it.
And if there’s anything that better exemplifies the fact that weed really shouldn’t be facing the barriers to legalization it does, it might be irony-soaking works like this one from anti-meritocracy proof incarnate Bobo Brooks.
Shorter (or the last port before Jungle):
- Oh man, I remember when I used to smoke weed. God, that stuff’s so ubiquitous even a perpetual stuffed shirt like me lit up back in the day… oh wait, I’m supposed to be against it, because conservatism, right? Uh, weed is totes bad so we should like make it illegal, because morality and shit. I dunno, hey man, it’s puff, puff, pass, not hog the whole damn roach!
I wonder if the “olds” of the old anti-Boomer fights of the late sixties ever dreamed that their half-hearted smearing of the young would be lovingly protected by those same young who wanted to feel superior to their fellow young people who gave a damn about the world?
For a little while in my teenage years, my friends and I smoked marijuana. It was fun. I have some fond memories of us all being silly together. I think those moments of uninhibited frolic deepened our friendships.
We begin with fond memories of innocent activities. One that did little lasting damage and was an activity of fun even perpetual losers like Bobo could enjoy.
But then we all sort of moved away from it. I don’t remember any big group decision that we should give up weed. It just sort of petered out, and, before long, we were scarcely using it.
But this innocence was utterly marred as the reality of weed set in. Suddenly, straight A legacy admissions students free-riding through an Ivy League were struggling on the corner selling themselves for just another bong hit. The addiction setting in like a virus, and-
…
Or, you know people just moved on if they wanted to. Because pot isn’t really the threat to life and public safety that anti-drug programs paint it as. For all the blather of it being a “gateway drug” and not because people who smoke it realize that anti-drug programs are liars so why believe what they say about harder drugs, pot seems to suck quite a bit on hooking people down the rabbit hole to 24/7 heroin parties like it’s supposed to.
We didn’t give it up for the obvious health reasons: that it is addictive in about one in six teenagers; that smoking and driving is a good way to get yourself killed; that young people who smoke go on to suffer I.Q. loss and perform worse on other cognitive tests.
Yeah, it is WAY too late to try and back up and dump the Reefer Madness bullshit into this story. You were young, you got high, you stopped. If you hadn’t stopped, then sometimes when you got home from a rough day, you’d light up and stare at some blacklights for an hour instead of drinking a fifth of vodka and hitting your wife.
I think we gave it up, first, because we each had had a few embarrassing incidents. Stoned people do stupid things (that’s basically the point).
I believe you mean “Young people do stupid things” or more specifically “People do stupid things”. I mean, fuck, I once accidentally slept through a midterm because my clock got reset over night and I forgot to set a backup. Ended up getting a B+ in a class I should have gotten an A in over it. So yeah, even dry and sober idjits like myself have fucked themselves over in school doing something mind-numbingly stupid.
I smoked one day during lunch and then had to give a presentation in English class. I stumbled through it, incapable of putting together simple phrases, feeling like a total loser. It is still one of those embarrassing memories that pop up unbidden at 4 in the morning.
Um… yeah… I really don’t think that was the fault of the marijuana. Also, if you were the type to honestly be embarrassed about failing the English language then brother, I doubt you’d ever be able to wake up in the morning.
We gave it up, second, I think, because one member of our clique became a full-on stoner. He may have been the smartest of us, but something sad happened to him as he sunk deeper into pothead life.
Cool story, bro! Tell us also about the unicorn you saw at the Applebee’s salad bar.
Third, most of us developed higher pleasures.
You’re Bobo. Let’s be frank, pleasures of any kind, whether higher or blacker, I mean, lower are the kind of thing you kind of experience with all the intimacy and closeness of a stargazer with a far-off asteroid.
And frankly, I’ll eat my hat if he didn’t mean this in the way of “I replaced my ‘youthful’ drug habit with a more socially acceptable and ‘upper-class’ drug habit like joining a wine club or doing coke.”
Smoking was fun, for a bit, but it was kind of repetitive.
It’s a relaxant, a drug to instill minor altered consciousness or to alleviate physical pain or stress. It’s not a fucking hobby.
Fuck, only you could manage to do drugs as boringly as you live your life.
Most of us figured out early on that smoking weed doesn’t really make you funnier or more creative
I don’t know… I mean, based on your testimony, it seems like we’re supposed to compare (to quote Bill Hicks) all of the music ever made and most of the literature and art and compare it to you and the other squares pining for the days when you at least had this tiny dash of pre-packaged rebellion to your name.
Also, is anyone really arguing that pot makes you awesome in this day and age? I mean, most arguments I hear for weed is that it’s no more harmful than existing legal drugs and has some nice fringe benefits aside from the fun benefit of well, ooh, perception is slightly altered, trippy.
I mean, I want to check up on this because you make it sound like you are just repeating a legacy argument from some imagined form of the 60s passed down in wingnut mythology and… oh. I see.
(academic studies more or less confirm this).
Snrk.
We graduated to more satisfying pleasures.
Which are?
The deeper sources of happiness usually involve a state of going somewhere, becoming better at something, learning more about something, overcoming difficulty and experiencing a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment.
Life?
Or rather a privileged form of life.
I mean, yeah, there are universals buried in there. Deeply vague universals like becoming “better” at “something” or overcoming “difficulty”, but things like the state of going somewhere is something denied a lot of people. A lot of people end up stuck, professionally, personally, even romantically in things that cannot endure for them, but for reasons of economics, one must.
Economic situations on the very edge with no possibility of advancement or lateral career movement. Economic blocks preventing a bright and curious student reaching a college program they can improve themselves at. A lack of funds making it impossible to detangle oneself from an abusive marriage without putting the kids in a worse situation. A lack of time caused by endless part-time jobs to devote to hobbies or self-improvement or even the barest self-reflection. Yeah, there are a lot of people without Bobo’s freedom who are legitimately stuck and feel the powerless and denial of “deeper pleasures” that comes with that. And sometimes those people need a hit of a bud to endure and continue.
One close friend devoted himself to track. Others fell deeply in love and got thrills from the enlargements of the heart. A few developed passions for science or literature.
Okay, see, here’s the thing. These examples are so bloody broad that they don’t actually prove what Brooks wants. I mean, “sports”, “liking science and reading” or “falling in love”? These are the “deeper pleasures” that potheads couldn’t possibly understand? Say, the same potheads that Brooks uses as examples here.
I mean, I guess it’s the same old dance of cognitive dissonance, that argues his deadbeat pothead days were so much more benign and forgivable than some imagined right-wing fantasy of what a pothead looks like, but I have to wonder just what he’s imagining here.
That Jamil T. Stoner (and let’s not insult anyone’s intelligence by imagining that Brooks or any of the other right-wingers are imagining anything even approaching an upper-class white guy) is some wreck of a human, even incapable of enjoying reading or falling in love in voracious appetite for T-bone welfare steaks and passing up all those free jobs that are just lying around everywhere because it gets in the way of doing endless bong hits and playing Call of Duty?
And if so, why the fuck is someone so ignorant of even the reality of himself being given millions upon millions of dollars and a national platform in a once prominent newspaper?
Finally, I think we had a vague sense that smoking weed was not exactly something you were proud of yourself for.
One guy was like “duuuuuuuude, I think if we weren’t rich white legacy students, we could like get arrested for this shit or something” and we all like got really quiet for a sec before someone told us to look at our hands and it was the funniest thing ever.
It’s not something people admire.
And that’s really the reason he “stopped” or at least, became the kind of guy who wouldn’t bring up “distasteful” drug habits in the course of discussing which wine has the most robust character or how cruel the smoking ban is to wealthy Manhattanites.
Because all his life has been the chasing of social approval and a carefully constructed facade of “respectability” that is about as paper-thin as his intellect.
I don’t have any problem with somebody who gets high from time to time, but I guess, on the whole, I think being stoned is not a particularly uplifting form of pleasure and should be discouraged more than encouraged.
I don’t have anything against people who smoke pot, but I think they should be at constant risk for getting arrested and serving time in prison because I’m now at the age and career position where even if I do a kilo of heroin and crash a bus into an orphanage full of humanitarians, I’ll still be taken care of and protected from even the mildest of prison sentences.
Because the stress and panic of the lower-classes is really the only way I can get it up in this day and age.
We now have a couple states — Colorado and Washington — that have gone into the business of effectively encouraging drug use. By making weed legal, they are creating a situation in which the price will drop substantially. One RAND study suggests that prices could plummet by up to 90 percent, before taxes and such. As prices drop and legal fears go away, usage is bound to increase. This is simple economics, and it is confirmed by much research. Colorado and Washington, in other words, are producing more users.
And frankly, that’s disgusting. If it becomes cheap then the lower classes will be able to enjoy it and my one memory of pre-packaged rebellion will become tainted by its association with those whose bank accounts have less than 100,000 dollars in it.
Ugh, I can feel the poor person cooties already, working their way towards my brainstem.
But, of course, these are the core questions: Laws profoundly mold culture, so what sort of community do we want our laws to nurture? What sort of individuals and behaviors do our governments want to encourage?
Reefer Madness iz real! And if we don’t enforce the War on Drugs bullshit pipeline, then maybe darkies and young liberals may start thinking they are people and the laws should reflect reality instead of being used as a cudgel against them for innocuous things.
And this will not do.
I’d say that in healthy societies government wants to subtly tip the scale to favor temperate, prudent, self-governing citizenship. In those societies, government subtly encourages the highest pleasures, like enjoying the arts or being in nature, and discourages lesser pleasures, like being stoned.
Which is why I and other conservatives have always been the staunchest defenders of strong funding for the Arts even when it produces works that challenge our preconceptions or ask us to broaden our horizons. And we have been the ones always fighting for good stewardship of the environment, including more than adequate funding for our national parks (including large periods of time off, so that the nature isn’t overly encroached upon by tourists looking for a rare glimpse of green).
Or… uh… don’t be a druggie like me, kiddies, you’ll only end up writing embarrassing transparent bullshit for the Times.
…
Hey, this was fun, but it has been a veritable cornucopia of impressive fails lately as conservatives have belatedly arisen from their November-election induced stupor and been forced to acknowledge that it wasn’t a bad dream and those elections did actually happen and there are actual consequences stemming from them.
Sippy Cup, NY Daily Puff:
Pot could put progressives in a tight spot
Which, wow, it has been a long time since we’ve aired out the box for failed Stepford Wife S.E. Cupp.
Now to see if her argument is as dusty as her poor neglected servos.
Shorter (or the last port before Jungle):
- So, yeah, maybe we lost, sure, but look at your pot now. Doesn’t it kill as many unarmed grade-schoolers as guns? Boom! Gotcha, looney libs, now you’ll have to disappear five-evah, because clearly our growing meaningless is proof positive that it is conservatives who are on the upswing and winning all the elections. At least, that’s what my good, legal friend empty bottle of booze is telling me and you sh-you should hear him, because he iz super smart, yeah.
Ah, just as rusty and malfunctioning as the day she was made!
As Colorado continues its successful rollout of new state marijuana laws, it’s not just potheads who are eager to see if legal weed can work. Politicos, too, are wondering how all of this will shake out.
What was that? Weed legalization rolling out (ha) turns out to be boring and mundane in exact opposite to the apocalyptic warnings of assholes like me? And similar to the rollout of every liberal improvement ever despite the warnings and hyperbole of conservatives? Well, er…uh… IT’S TOO EARLY TO TELL ANYTHING YET! I mean, the lava rain is just around the corner, any day now…
Will pot smokers become a sought-after voting demographic?
You know, conservatives do such a good act of pretending they think that minority groups are literally invented the first time a major law protects them that I sometimes catch myself wondering if they actually do believe that the world works that way and the concept of potheads who vote was literally poofed into effect the day Colorado passed its legalization bill.
Will Republicans look like school marms if they oppose legal marijuana?
No, they will seem the same out-of-touch hierarchy-enforcing oppressive twits they have always been. Just more so, because in proper conservative fashion, they’ll decide to step up being against it just when everyone is looking around wondering how anyone could have opposed something with such universal approval and support.
I mean, unless you decide to radically deviate from your norm and actually try and be smart politically for once.
Will liberal supporters suffer when the law change inevitably creates more drug users? Or federal headaches?
There’ll be druggies everywhere and it’ll all be your fault. Like when alcohol was made legal and it created all those massive gang problems with people smuggling it in from other countries or…
Oh wait, sorry, wrong example.
That all remains to be seen, but some obvious extrapolations make it clear that the legal weed experiment could at least put the politics of progressivism – all the rage in liberal circles now – in a tricky spot.
You might seem all smug, because you managed to gain victory on a no-duh, we’ve been successfully prolonging for decades! Well, you’ll see! Soon you’ll be the losers! Because we say so! You, you, you, you! Stupid poopyheads!
Hey right-wingers, if the kindergartners I teach have better arguments than you, it might just be time to give up pretending to be anything other than that which you are.
For one, there are glaring inconsistencies between the liberal argument for pot legalization and positions on other issues.
Uhhhhhhh… how? No wait, don’t tell me, let me guess. Um, legalizing weed is hypocritical because Bloomberg who is totally a liberal you guyzzzz, passed a ban against smoking in bars because people were literally passing out in some enclosed locations? Um, legalizing weed is inconsistent with being against driving while drunk because ipso facto libertarian douchebag argument. Um, legalizing weed is against gay marriage because Free Mumia anchor babies? I don’t know, there is literally an infinite amount of crazy we could cut to here.
An obvious one is gun control.
Of course! That makes… perfect… um, no sorry, you’ve completely lost me there.
The same argument used against guns is used for pot:
Um… let’s see the argument for pot: “it doesn’t hurt anyone and you only oppose it because of racism and fealty to anti-young-people movements of the past”
Argument against guns: “they are penis-extension murder sticks you are hoarding over racist obsessions and we wouldn’t give a fuck about how you and your family off each other, but for the fact that you seem to keep going on sprees to kill the rest of us every few months.”
Um… I’m not quite seeing it… Er, should I be using some anaglyph 3D glasses or something?
that legalizing pot and making it more available will reduce crime. No good liberal would say the same of guns, though there is substantial evidence to prove more guns equal less crime.
Ah of course, that… argument. Which I guess is either a bastardization of the argument noting that non-violent drug busts (including for tiny amounts of marijuana) is one of the main tools of disenfranchisement of African-Americans and if we stop jailing brothers for getting high where they can’t hurt anyone, then maybe our prisons wouldn’t be so overcrowded and we wouldn’t have to keep building prisons and robbing the education fund to do so. Or it’s a bastardization of the note many comedians have made about the fact that it’s kind of fucking hard to be a murderous asshole on weed compared to being on alcohol or nicotine.
Either way, I just have to be amused that even with stacking the deck this much in her favor, it’s impressive that she still manages to waste all her chips on bad bets.
I mean, for fuck sakes, “more guns reduce crime” was a bitter joke before Sandy Hook. These days, it sounds like something Heath Ledger’s Joker would say right before blowing up a room full of mobsters.
And putting it smack up against pot really puts into sharp relief the bankrupt nature of the gun-fetishists position. I mean, they are pretending that their happy death sticks are harmless chewing toys whose only use is stopping “crime” at the same time they are arguing for the criminalization of a substance that actually has some level of medicinal use because… reasons.
And it also slams into sharp relief exactly how broad the definition of “criminal” they are using in their arguments for how “guns will help stop crimes”.
We’re told pot users will “responsibly” use marijuana in the privacy of their own homes.
Um… it’s very hard for weed to “accidentally go off”. If some reckless kid “uses weed irresponsibly” or some dumb fuck of a child finds daddy’s “collection” of pot, then the worst they can manage to do to themselves and others is get themselves super high.
Maybe they’ll make themselves super sick in public or pass out somewhere embarrassing or just make a fool out of themselves. But it’s not like they are going to be out killing people because they didn’t use a fucking joint “irresponsibly”.
But what barometer are they using to determine that persistent recreational drug users, who have presumably broken the law before by possessing marijuana, are responsible people?
They’re lawbreakers! Like those filthy beaners! That means we get to shoot them, right? RIGHT?!? I mean, my trigger finger is itchy and it needs to go sometime!
And why aren’t lawful gun owners afforded the same level of trust?
Because you dun fucked up.
We gave you carte blanche with the house. Even letting you throw a little party with some friends if you promised not to break anything or get the cops called on you and managed to burn though five buildings and a school.
We gave you the free reign you thought you had “earned” and you used it to murder with impunity everyone you could. Shooting congresswomen, unarmed black kids, and rooms full of white kindergartners. We gave you carte blanche and you responded by blowing a hole into everything and anything you could and now when we aren’t even talking about punishment but rather how to keep the burning roof from caving in on our heads, you’ve been whining about how we should be celebrating the fire and how we can’t take away your matches before the big date with Suzie.
And um, no. You fucked up your responsible rights, so now that patient little Alisha wants to have permission to de-stress with a little bud after cleaning her room responsibly for a couple decades straight, you don’t have the fucking high ground to be whining about “lawbreakers” and “responsibility”.
Fuck, you should just be grateful we don’t give her your allowance as well, you little spoiled hellspawn.
If progressives want to keep gun control in the crosshairs – and many have said they do – they’ll have to reconcile this intellectual incongruity.
Man, no one, but NO ONE does IT’S ALWAYS PROJECTION like gun nuts. I mean, you almost have to slow clap for the sheer amount of gall on display with shit like that.
One liberal whose positions are at least consistent is Michael Bloomberg (yes, I meant liberal).
So what if it’s untrue? He deviated from the wingnut orthodoxy on one or two issues that our paymasters care about and so must DIE!
He opposes guns and legal pot, even going so far as to once call medical marijuana “one of the great hoaxes of all time.”
Because he’s always been a racist conservative piece of shit, no matter how many times wingnuts try and pretend otherwise?
But for other Democrats who, like him,
Heh, now he’s a full Democrat, huh? Hey, do you have any famous New York monuments to sell me too?
promote an expansion of the health nut state,
It’s a shame that the current anti-being-healthy crusade amongst the right probably won’t kill them nearly fast enough.
but want to also support legal marijuana use,
Uh… because… people who are high have the munchies? I really have no clue where you’re going with this in-bred attempt at a “no, you’re the real hypocrites”.
does it really work to rail against trans fats and restrict the smoking of cigarettes but allow pot smoking (and the sloth and munchy-induced snacking that comes with it)?
Don’t expect Michelle Obama or Felix Ortiz, the New York assemblyman who proposed banning salt in restaurants, to rally for weed any time soon.
Holy shit, I got that one! Score one for the home team!
Speaking of the Obamas, there’s a reason you haven’t heard much from the President – who comfortably wades into all kinds of unnecessary controversies – on legal marijuana, except the news back in August that his administration wouldn’t challenge the Colorado and Washington state laws. It’s not very, well, presidential for a sitting President to get too vocal about legalizing drug use, and it’s unlikely any other serious, national political figure will.
Okay, fine, you hippies in Washington and Colorado can have your legally granted rights to smoke your little leaf, but we still have the high-ground! I mean, no national level politician worth his salt will stick their neck out for you as long as we continue insinuating unhealthy connections to “brown people” every time they make noise in that direction!
Victoire through ever moving goalposts has begun!
Obama did announce that the Justice Department would push for very robust regulations, which is all well and good, but there are already complaints in Colorado that pot is over-regulated and over-taxed. There’s a 15% excise tax levied on “average market rate” marijuana, a special 10% sales tax and the state’s general 2.9% sales tax will also apply. Yikes.
Uh, no. Sorry, mmm hmm, nope. You don’t get to rail about how disastrous and evil this vile drug being legal is and then pull out a whine about how your trip to the dispensary involved it oh noes being taxed like never happens when you have Carlos deliver your weekly dime bag.
But thanks for playing.
Economists suggest this could make Colorado’s pot industry too costly for the state and the consumer, in which case users rely on an inevitable black market to pop back up, making Colorado a tourism-only pot state. Will progressives really admit, in that case, that their own high taxes and burdensome regulations crippled an industry with so much potential?
But seeing as how these are the same “economists” who thought that “austerity” would somehow make Europe thrive after being tanked by America’s greed, we can safely move their “theories” on the matter to the same circular filing bin the rest of their “ideas” go.
On the flip side, if the Colorado experiment proves wildly successful, that isn’t exactly an affirmation of big government progressivism either.
Okay, maybe you’ll be right, like every time ever in history and it’ll just become yet another legal drug, like alcohol or nicotine with the same issues.
Well, neener, neener, that won’t necessarily mean you are right and we should listen to you, because everybody knows you are poopy-heads and we are always right, because we say. So there!
A Gallup poll from December found that 64% of respondents did not think the federal government should interfere in the implementation of state measures to legalize marijuana. A successfully-delivered state-run program would send a clear signal that government functions more effectively at the smaller, local level and that federal bureaucracy, whether in drug enforcement or, say, health care, can only muck things up.
And actually, some are suggesting the Colorado law could have a libertarian ripple effect. In the conservative National Review, which supports legalizing marijuana, editors hoped that “Colorado’s recognition of this individual liberty might inspire some popular reconsideration of other individual liberties, for instance that of a working man to decide for himself whether he wants to join a union, or for Catholic nuns to decide for themselves whether they want to purchase drugs that may work as abortifacients – higher liberties, if you will.”
If pot legalization emboldens libertarianism in just such ways, it would have a pretty devastating effect on progressivism.
I mean, sure, you are gaining important gains with positive improvements to people’s lives and we’re a bunch of whining pricks still fighting long lost crusades against individual rights while trying to pretend that we’re big damn “individual rights” heroes.
Fuck, we finally have the one damn thing that “libertarian” men can even manage to pretend to care about and they can’t help but fuck it up in service to the tribe, thus proving that there is not a single libertarian idea that isn’t bullshit and lies.
Thus ending your last ditch effort for slightly saving the image of conservatives and at all making yourselves relevant going forward.
So smooth move on that one, Einstein!
Don’t get me wrong; conservatives are confused, too. While there’s obvious support among libertarians, others worry about the moral implications of legalizing risky behavior simply because people are “going to do it anyway” and letting go of the last vestiges of Nixon and Reagan’s war on drugs.
I… is it over, mommy, so cold, so dark. Will I dream?
But as the left struggles with its identity –
Is what you must be saying! Because you won! IT’S ALWAYS PROJECTION and a raw kilo of uncut heroin is pretty much the only thing that kept me halfway functional through November, so sorry if this belated bit of horse shit is a little bit DATED.
is it the party of Bloomberg or Bill de Blasio? Elizabeth Warren or Hillary Clinton? Is it for efficient government or big government?
Focus on the dog whistles and the enemy lists, you little marks. And pretend this is at all about liberals or that this sentence would even be comprehensible to them on any important level (I mean, for fuck’s sake, Warren or Clinton? I don’t even know what misfired synapse that was about beyond, these are scary women who are women and that’s scary so hate them random octogenarian white men who are our only remaining audience and forget that we have no point and no means of defending against the slow march of time).
– it will have to confront some strange idiosyncrasies in its position on pot, and just how far out on a limb they’re willing to go to defend it.
If pot isn’t making progressives at least a little bit paranoid, it should.
Be afraid! Be afraid! It’s your out-dated and unpopular views on pot that will doom you. Not ours! And you’re the ones who lost in November, not us. Also, we are the ones who are ascendant and whose policies reflect reality. And we’re the pretty ones and we have everything we could ever want and you’re the ones all bitter and jealous at people living their lives where you can’t control them. AND IT JUST MAKES ME SO MAD!
…
Seriously, you could shorten the whole last half of this shit with “IT’S ALWAYS PROJECTION” pasted over and over again.
‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. It feels somewhat ironic for me to be writing in weed’s defense seeing as how I’ve never actually smoked it or done any harder drugs than caffeine (though boy howdy, did I abuse the fuck out of that). But I suppose no more ironic than the various pill-popping, coke-snorting reprobates on the right trying to adopt a moralist pose on drugs, because they are scared this spells the end of their “jail all the black people for innocuous bullshit” scam. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™
Don’t Bogart that post.
Too bong; didn’t weed.
In what bizarro alternate universe is Michael Fucking Bloomberg a liberal?
In what bizarro alternate universe is Michael Fucking Bloomberg a liberal?
in the same one where dr. keith ablow is a credible pyschiatrist…
i generally ignore ms. cupp, but could she be any stupider?
I hate to state the obvious, but if 30,000 Americans were killed by marijuana each year, she might just have a leg to stand on here.
Obama and Clinton lit up, Bush might not have, but he did do cocaine. That’s basically the rich man’s marijuana.
the transitive power of dumb
It’s a delight to encounter gems like this in your writing, Cerb.
Usually I limit myself to reading Cerb’s commentary (or whichever Sadly is making the post), only skimming the wingnut portion of our program, for the same reason driftglass is famously
This time, I actually read Bobo and Sippy’s spew. I think I could feel brain cells leaking out my ears toward the end there. It gave me the same feeling I get from riding roller coasters or trying to read Ann Coulter columns — that I was doing a lot of traveling, only to end up right back where I started, with nothing to show for it save a spinning head, a roiling stomach, and several minutes of life I would never get back.
I don’t know how you do it, Cerb. You must be made of twisted blue steel and dynamite, that’s all I can figure.
the obvious health reasons: that it is addictive in about one in six teenagers; that smoking and driving is a good way to get yourself killed; that young people who smoke go on to suffer I.Q. loss and perform worse on other cognitive tests.
There are links to studies here, right? Right?
(academic studies more or less confirm this).
And here, too?
For a little while in my teenage years, my friends and I smoked marijuana. It was fun. I have some fond memories of us all being silly together. I think those moments of uninhibited frolic deepened our friendships.
But then we all sort of moved away from it. I don’t remember any big group decision that we should give up weed. It just sort of petered out, and, before long, we were scarcely using it.
i think bobo trying to tell us he and his bros had teh ghey sex? it seems to me that’s what he’s saying here…
I stumbled through it, incapable of putting together simple phrases, feeling like a total loser.
as cerb pointed out, somethings never change…
I think a requirement of modern conservatism is to pretend that anything that liberals like is a terrifyingly newfangled, completely untested concept, ignoring real-world examples like, oh, the Netherlands, where the de facto legalization of pot not only didn’t destroy society, but resulted in a country with plenty of upper-middle-class white racists with whom Bobo et al would probably get along swimmingly. See also the ACA, and conservatives screaming about how no country in the history of the world has ever successfully provided health care for its populace so why even try.
Oh hey man, like way back in the early 70s dude, me and a friend, we like ate a few hits or Purple Haze and you know we like soared through our English lit seminar the next day where we had to present the chapter of a novel we wrote while zonked. Dude it was awesome we had the prof in tears he was laughing so hard 🙂
(Got an A+ on that course – good thing the prof was a stoner LOL)
I miss Seb; he would enjoyed these comments.
Okay, Dave. By these standards alone, it is abundently clear that the United States is NOT a ‘healthy’ society.
Temperate? Prudent? Self-governing citizenship?(*) Do these words even remotely describe political discourse, institutions, and governance in the United States today? C’mon Dave, I mean, seriously WTF?
(*) Btw, Dave, what exactly does that third phrase mean? I’ve been trying to parse it any number of ways. I’ve come to the conclusion that ‘self-governing citizenship’ is bloviating gas that feebly mimics some half-remembered blanditude from high-school civics.
My, you’re an arrogant sonuvbitch, aren’t you, Dave? Chew on this: Do you think it is possible to enjoy the ‘highest’ pleasures and ‘lesser’ pleasures simulataneously? 30 years ago I taught myself art history and architecture by wandering in Europe’s great galleries, museums, palaces, ruins … stoned on hashish, which heightened my pleasure and suggested patterns, textures, and connections I might not have otherwise noticed. Tell me, Dave, can you distinguish between Veronese and Tintoretto, between Rapheal and Titian, between Velasquez and Murillo? If not, then STFU
Well, you ARE an arrogant sonuvabitch. How do you know what sort of person ‘most of us’ want to be? Are you even aware of the toxic ‘moral ecology’ in the swamp that is the United States?
I was going to go through the garbage again to highlight Dave’s appeal-to-authority assertions, backed up by zilch. Also the way he loads his language. But then it occurred to me that I should read the second article.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA !!!
Dudette, legalization is going to strengthen progressives. Betcha it also enlarges our numbers and reach.
At the very least, legalization will blow to smithereens all the wingnutty omigod-the-sky-is-falling hysterics about how legalization will bring with it the Inevitable End of Western Civilization. Seems to me that their past hyperbole will put right-wingers in a ‘tricky spot’
Shorter Sippy Cupp: Heads Republicans win, tails Liberals lose.
First phone comment for me
Or the United States prior to, I think 1940, before marijuana became illegal.
I’d say that in healthy societies government wants to subtly tip the scale to favor temperate, prudent, self-governing citizenship.
Sounds like a society in which adults can choose for themselves, where the government makes reasonable laws on age and situational legality, funds real research to allow people to choose intelligently, and provides a support system for people who discover they made the wrong choice.
Or we could just subtly ban it based on your feelings of what the science, more or less, SHOULD say and on your being a moral scold and hypocrite. That sounds reasonable.
In those societies, government subtly encourages the highest pleasures, like enjoying the arts or being in nature, and discourages lesser pleasures, like being stoned.
By, say, taxing the lesser pleasures and funding the higher? Nah, let’s stick with doing away with arts and park funding and throwing folks in jail for a joint.
By, say, taxing the lesser pleasures and funding the higher? Nah, let’s stick with doing away with arts and park funding and throwing folks in jail for a joint.
in mn there is a huge initiative to get people to quit smoking…but cigarettes are the first thing that is taxed when more revenues are needed…i just wonder how longit will be before someone says, ‘hey…nobody smokes cigs anymore and we need more money…hey, what about weed?!
I hadn’t realized how innane the actual laws about pot were until I read them. I mean I had known they were clearly stupid, but I figured it was just a case of the legal line being drawn too broadly.
Oh no, not at all. The Pure Food and Drug Act, which is the basis of all (almost) legal and illegal drug laws, classifies Schedule I drugs (confusingly called narcotics) as chemicals with no medicinal value and a high connection to crime (someone going on a meth binge and beating people for example). Schedule II drugs have the same connection to crime but have a medical value (morphine and its family for example), so legal with a crapton of restrictions. Thereafter the schedules are mainly about limiting distribution for reasons of medical safety and aren’t especially related to crime. So which is pot?
None of the above. In fact it’s deliberately left out the schedules because there is no connection between pot and crime that would satisfy the requirements of PFDA. Marijuana is covered under an entirely separate set of laws. The only crime it’s associated with is the fact that the substance was declared illegal. So even the government can’t come up with a decent justification for criminalizing pot.
What do people think about legalizing or de-criminalizing heroin? Many of the problems that come from heroin are the result of it being illegal. Heroin overdoses come from the differing quality of the black market product; users used to weak heavily-cut heroin take too much when they get purer stuff. Infection and AIDS comes from not having access to clean needles. Heroin users waste their lives search for more of the illegal product. The UK took a long time making heroin illegal and they didn’t have any problems until they did. Soldiers in Vietnam did heroin at a high rate but when they got back to their warm and loving homes many quit. Withdrawal is terrible but in itself it isn’t fatal (unlike alcohol withdrawal).
I don’t know about the Pure Food and Drug Act, but pot is Schedule 1 in the Controlled Substances Act.
@histrogeek – for bonus funz, check out the arguments that were used to pass most of our drug laws in the ’30s. They’ll sound really familiar – blatant racism, “we must protect our white wimminz”, and even some direct handouts to the 0.1% (hemp production was threatening Hearst’s wood-pulp biz, so suddenly hemp cultivation was illegal).
for bonus funz, check out the arguments that were used to pass most of our drug laws in the ’30s.
Oh mang, I need to get buzzed and watch Reefer Madness again. Haven’t done that in over 30 years.
Oh mang, I need to get buzzed and watch Reefer Madness again. Haven’t done that in over 30 years.
oh, damn…you beat to me it…i was going to argue that ‘reefer madness’ made it clear why pot has been criminalized re:
So even the government can’t come up with a decent justification for criminalizing pot.
And those old bigots of days yore only cared about the damn sweet leaf to begin with because as a drug it was more associated with queers, blacks, beatniks, hippies, and assorted young people. That was the only reason why they hated it and fought so hard for such strict criminalization.
Not the only reason- the plant is goddamn useful. Dupont had recently patented nylon and wanted hemp fibers off the market. William Randolph Hearst had extensive wood pulp paper mills and wanted hemp fiber paper squashed. Making marijuana illegal was a two-fer- it took a useful source of materials off the market and made it even easier to jail Messicans, Knee Grows, and hepcats.
Shoulda oughta read Matt’s comment re Hearst and pulp mills.
What do people think about legalizing or de-criminalizing heroin?
Heroin is actually a trademarked name- Bayer developed the stuff from opium, the substance was supposed to make one feel “heroic”.
I’m for across the board legalization, the regulation of everything, and the problem of addiction being considered a public health matter. I’ve even heard methamphetamine being dispassionately described as “not as bad as it’s made out to be”. Hell, a lot of tweakers use meth for late shift or long-haul trucking work. The stuff was given out like Pez to long-range bomber crews in WW2.
Dr Carl Hart of Columbia University is the go-to guy for a dispassionate analysis of illegal drugs. He presents a contrarian view, free from media hype and fearmongering.
Dave’s not here, man.
Also, too: What BBBB said @19:31
Don’t expect Michelle Obama or Felix Ortiz, the New York assemblyman who proposed banning salt in restaurants, to rally for weed any time soon.
huh…one would think that if michelle is against it, the wingnuts would be all for it!
Me three. If plants cause health problems they should be addressed as health issues not excuses for security state bureaucratic empire building.
Does that mean if libertarians in office were more than conservatives trying to hide behind a new label thinking they’ll trick votes out of the non-existent hordes of people who object to the word “conservative” but will accept conservative policy if you call it something else and if progressives really were as stupid and easily frightened as Libercons want to think they are?
Yeah. In a wholly imaginary situation that doesn’t fucking exist, legal pot would be awful for the progressive movement. I am scared. Help. Help.
Dr Carl Hart of Columbia University is the go-to guy for a dispassionate analysis of illegal drugs. He presents a contrarian view, free from media hype and fearmongering.
that was pretty interesting…of course i read the comments and this one raises good questions:
and i daresay the ‘food’ we consume daily is harming and/or killing more people than drugs…
of course, as in any comment section there is going to be some assholes. this guy, in a reply to someone who opined that meth was a better treatment for his bi-polar condition than rx drugs, could easily win asshole of the decade:
hmmm…me also wonders how tags work…
Or tobacco, which is extremely addictive and very harmful but we can’t outlaw because the tobacco industry won’t allow it.
Just noticed that the mandatory Booboos in paradise link is absent. Shame on you, Cerberus.
Chicago just banned Ecigs indoors. I’ve been around them only a little and the smell a lot worse than I would have expected (although not as bad as the real thing).
Wonder what kind of testing has been done on those products? Maybe I’ll have to add it to my weekend reading if I can take myself away from “The Lies of Locke Lamora”
The fact is marijuana use has eroaded the American family values that Conservatisism fights to protect everyday. Libs want schoolchildren to be dependent stoners of the nanny state that sucks the lifeblood out of hard work and sobrieity. True Americans will not allow those people who want to get stoned on goverment checks to have a place in decent sosighity.
No matter how much fun he personally may have had getting stoned back in his salad days, Bobo has to slag teh cannabis because EWWW HIPPIES, so no big shocker there. “Academic studies more or less confirm” = “it is obvious that I have no fucking clue what I’m talking about” … & keep in mind this ethical skidmark just recently spent an entire column describing how he strews about big piles of reference matter all over his floor to refer to for every new steaming triple-coiler of fail he extrudes.
If you overdo it, the new weed can indeed mess your shit up … which is why smart stoners go for titrated doses which make it much less hazardous to their lungs than that ol’ windowsill homegrown was. The proven therapeutic benefits of A Few Good Bowls are manifold & quite non-trivial in an aging population – they include pain relief & appetite stimulation, either of which side-effects alone can save many lives. Epilepsy, muscular dystrophy, glaucoma, Lyme Disease … the list is long & probably still incomplete. The cognitive deterioration evidence for Le Ganja is sparse to nonexistent compared to, say, extended television viewing, where it’s both abundant & scary as hell. Addiction would be either psychological or to the ambient nicotine, not the THC, & could be rendered academic by simply vaping it. There’s exactly ONE systematic long-term study of weed-plus-driving & it shows a very slight decline in serious crashes. Also keep in mind that you can eat it, a method which eliminates any respiratory risk whatsoever (as well as rendering you quite seriously gazoomed for a loooooooong time).
As for S.E. Cupp? Oh Sweet Boneless Jesus, what a 24-karat schnook … I’d’ve been ashamed to turn in a piece of drivel like that back in Grade 10 – guns are about as apt an analogy for weed as chameleons or cyclotrons. There just isn’t a bong with a bowl big enough to help make ANY of that argument parse.
sosighity.
really? sure you’re not stoned right now, gary?
Thanks to jim we can now shut the whole joint down.
The taco salad is really good for the munchies.
I think the FDA is due to issue a proposed rule on them, that’s where I’d look for study results.
I just realized I saw an ad for them on TV, which of course is verboten for tobacco.
I’m guessing the “GET A JOB” commenter has no idea what bipolar is giving that he lists depression and schizophrenia as “real” disabilities and yet somehow thinks bipolar doesn’t count. In that case, the guy should STFU at least until he reads a goddamn wikipedia article.
Thomm Harttmann mentioned on his show that during the Golden Globes they kept panning to Julia Louis-Dreyfuss puffing on an e-cig. Apparently there’s an FCC rule that bans the depiction of smoking on network tv. Guess there’s a lot of catching up to do.
Bobo’s story is a prime example of just how (mostly) non-addictive pot is. He and his friends more or less just *stopped*, because they got bored with it or decided to try other things, or because it had an effect on them that they disliked more than they liked the high they got.
If he struggled with quitting at all, he’s not saying. And I think that if he did struggle, he would say something.
People struggle to quit alcohol. People struggle to quit nicotine. Millions of people *want* to quit, but *can’t*. Billions of dollars are spent every year on various accessories, books, plans, or even full-out rehab because people need help walking away from something that they realize they neither want nor need, but at the same time cannot go without.
Compare this to Bobo and his buddies deciding they want to quit, and then quitting.
I’m guessing the “GET A JOB” commenter has no idea what bipolar is giving that he lists depression and schizophrenia as “real” disabilities and yet somehow thinks bipolar doesn’t count. In that case, the guy should STFU at least until he reads a goddamn wikipedia article.
my thoughts exactly…
I just realized I saw an ad for them on TV, which of course is verboten for tobacco.
my favorite is the blu ads with that one guy on the beach…looks like he just rolled in with the tide after a night of drinking…and now i see jenny mccarthy is a promoter of them also…so, i guess now we know e-cigs are better for you than vaccines!
If he struggled with quitting at all, he’s not saying. And I think that if he did struggle, he would say something.
gads…this brings up some imagery that my brain does. not. want.
bobo in the grips of withdrawal could only be depicted accurately in a lifetime movie…
Is that McCarthy claiming it is your right to smoke?
Cripes, what an asshole.
Wow. Even when I was on 2+ packs a day, I took pride in the fact I could (with the assistance of a patch) go long periods without lighting up. Sounds like ecigs have already become the latest Lookit Me I’m Cool accessory and should be banned from indoor use for no other reason than that.
Oh yeah, she seemed to think she was the bees knees. Apparently a bunch of D-congress critters wrote a stern letter to the network chastizing them for glamorizing esmoking.
I think our government would work much better if every member of Congress had to get stoned before every session.
A joint session, as it were…
Is that McCarthy claiming it is your right to smoke?
Cripes, what an asshole.
yes, here’s a link to the straight dope (ha!) and the happy skanksgiving* e-cig ad…
*this is my code name for her…shut up don’t judge…
I’ll ready my throwing arm.
I’ll ready my throwing arm.
Paging doktor trebuchet.
Headline of the day: Alabama pastor charged in wife’s stabbing was fleeing US to marry his boyfriend
Headline of the day: Alabama pastor charged in wife’s stabbing was fleeing US to marry his boyfriend
you just can’t make this shit up…
So prosecution’s theory is rather than file for divorce and leave the country, or leave the country and file for divorce, or bring his boyfriend here and file for divorce or file for divorce and bring his boyfriend over, he first stopped to kill his wife because … ?
I am so not going to enjoy what the Wingfucks do with this story.
Duh. Because gay marriage destroys traditional marriage.
best comment:
And somewhere in Minnesota…Michelle Bachman is cutting this story out of her husband’s morning newspaper!
and, wow, dude has to live with his mom under house arrest?
Food pron for those of you with the munchies.
Prosecution doesn’t seemed too concerned about him as a flight risk. Or a killing again risk.
This shit reeks of some homophobe getting a wild hair and then either thinking better of it or being made to think better of it.
This shit reeks of some homophobe getting a wild hair and then either thinking better of it or
‘ohjesusohjesusohjesus! why didn’t i just divorce the bitch?!?!?’
LOLworthy:
Nancy Grace: People on pot shoot each other, strangle each other, and kill whole families
in other words, just like ______________…
Thanks OBS now I won’t rest til I get a banana split.
or a cock
OBS very NSFW offering is very appropriate given the title of this post.
NSFW? It’s a completely innocent plate of food.
NSFW? It’s a completely innocent plate of food.
one of my nieces and i did the same sort of thing with sausage and meatballs at a recent family gathering…
Nancy Grace: People on pot shoot each other, strangle each other, and kill whole families
in other words, just like ______________… never happens. It can make you say dumb shit, though, so PUT DOWN THE BONG, NANCE.
People who watch Nancy Grace shoot each other, strangle each other, and kill whole families.
It’s at least as accurate as the previous statement.
HAHAHAHAHA
oops. linky http://www.advocate.com/politics/transgender/2014/01/17/trans-woman-dares-bible-quoting-councilman-stone-her-death
I used to live in Shreveport. This doesn’t surprise me in the least.
I now have a new personal heroine.
Ms. Raintree is awesome.
True, but killing people who are watching Nancy Grace is an act of mercy.
More delicious blog-whorish food pron. Sadly, no PENIS in this one. Sorry.
More delicious blog-whorish food pron. Sadly, no PENIS in this one. Sorry.
That looks gloriously trashy. Were you stoned when you made it? I love the juxtaposition between the Fritos, the canned chili, and the fine cheese.
She brought the first stone. Webb was spared the humiliation of being all, like, “I’d totally stone you, but I don’t have a stone. Does anyone have any stones? No? Oh well. I’m just gonna withdraw my repeal measure, since I won, somehow.”
Were you stoned when you made it?
Sadly, no!
There was/is good beer involved, unsurprisingly.
She brought the first stone. Webb was spared the humiliation of being all, like, “I’d totally stone you, but I don’t have a stone. Does anyone have any stones? No? Oh well. I’m just gonna withdraw my repeal measure, since I won, somehow.”
Truly, a bravura performance on her part.
Just saw Bob Mould. That dude is a powerhouse.
And THAT, my friends, is how one deals with bullys.
Let us learn.
Hi y’all. I’ve got a lot to ketchup. As I’m doing so, I’ll do a Battle of the Bands search….
Battle of the Bands
These are all taken from Cerb’s Post. Now I’m going to get some coffee and ON TOPIC sweet smoke. Then I’ll search the Comments thread for the Band Names y’all left there.
From Cerb’s post
Let’s Be Frank
Death Monkeys
Down the Rabbit Hole
Eat My Hat
Neglected Servos
Lava Rain
All the Rage
Misfired Synapse
Big Date with Suzie
Out On a Limb
Just saw Bob Mould. That dude is a powerhouse.
I never got a chance to see Hüsker Dü live, but I did see Sugar play back in the day. He is a powerhouse. Did he play Dog on Fire? Damn, I wonder how much he makes in royalties from the “Daily Show”…
Battle of the Bands from the Comment thread
Surprisingly short list of bands so far! To keep the list tight, I pitched about half the possibilities I spotted.
Twisted Blue Steel
Untested Concept
Ethical Skidmark
Meth for Late Shift
Chameleons or Cyclotrons
Bobo and His Buddies
Doktor Trebuchet
Get a Banana
It’s on.
That screeching sound you hear is various anti-legalized pot bobbleheads pulling a youie so they can explain why any attempt to limit tobacco use is mean nasty and bad.
Great, now the wingnuts will have a whole new skree; “First it was tabaccy, next is yer gunz!”
You wanna smoke anywhere you like in this country?
Introducing: Tobacco Gun! Smoke it! Shoot bullets from it!
Exercise two rights for one low price! Do you like menthol, punk?
That screeching sound you hear is various anti-legalized pot bobbleheads pulling a youie so they can explain why any attempt to limit tobacco use is mean nasty and bad.
Messicans! Blah people! Hippies!
Hey BBBB regarding “Dog on Fire” if he played it I didn’t notice. I’m not that deep into his music but after last night holy cow. It was just him and an electric guitar and a bunch of 40-50 somethings for two hours.
He did play “Makes No Sense at All” at the end which was great
The fact is, the liberal media shills for potheads as it limits the freedoms of partiots who are the gun owners of America. We are protecting your way of life, liberals, if we did not then fear the rough men who would smash your face with sticks abd rape your children
Gary sounds a little too excited when he starts talking about “rough men”.
Too bad Breitbart’s no longer alive as somebody who regularly “did the harder stuff” to contribute to the collective right wing pants-wetting. I imagine he’d explain that (a) it’s okay for Reich-wingers to experiment because they have a safe ideology that will prevent irrational drug exuberance, and (b) we gotta keep the laws we have to keep the n—–s and other members of the underclass who can’t handle “illicit” substances in line.
Why couldn’t they cremate Andrew B. as he’d wished for? The corpse’s high alcohol content created too great a fire hazard. (I think this quip came from the Rude Pundit)
Too bad Breitbart’s no longer alive
You trying to start an argument?
New post? Already? What spore of madness is this?
cerb !
“We gave you the free reign you thought you had ‘earned’…”
Free REIN.
Free REIN.
Free REIN.
That is all.
http://www.dailywritingtips.com/free-rein-or-free-reign/