Month: March 2010

Thoreau rejoices:

The marijuana legalization ballot measure is expected to make it onto the November ballot. Whatever else may happen, if this passes then 2010 will be a good political year, because it will be the year that the drug warriors suffer their worst setback ever.  If this passes, criminal organizations will lose money.  Police will receive fewer bribes.  Fewer harmless people will go to prison.  Police will have one less excuse to pull over a black man driving a car.  (They’ll do it anyway, but they won’t be able to drag him to jail if they happen to find something harmless in his car.)  And the propagandists will be revealed for the  liars that they are if weed is legalized and the sky does not fall.

Mark Blumenthal studies the latest CBS poll.

Tom Bissell reflects on being addicted to cocaine and video games:

What have games given me? Experiences. Not surrogate experiences, but actual experiences, many of which are as important to me as any real memories. Once I wanted games to show me things I could not see in any other medium. Then I wanted games to tell me a story in a way no other medium can. Then I wanted games to redeem something absent in myself. Then I wanted a game experience that pointed not toward but at something. Playing GTA IV on coke for weeks and then months at a time, I learned that maybe all a game can do is point at the person who is playing it, and maybe this has to be enough.

TNC responds:

I think this will be the last time I engage Andrew on this question, mostly because I don’t think I can access much more until I’ve read Strauss, Oakeshott, and Andrew’s The Conservative Soul. It shames me that I haven’t, and it shames me more that I don’t know when I’ll be able to.

One of the unfortunate things about being ravaged by some object of my curiosity, is the accompanying inability to think long and hard about anything else.

So for the past year and half, a large section of my brain has been occupied by the Civil War and Detroit. I’ll be done with Detroit soon enough (one hopes), but this Civil War thing will be counted in years not months. 

This is why looking at anyone’s book-list, or book shelf, and exclaiming “I can’t believe you don’t have xxxx!!!” will always–always–miss the point. There’s too much out there to know. You can’t possibly experience it all. For me this is more true. I have to leave space for my own stories, and guard against getting loss in someone else’s.

"No-one should be in any doubt that the Conservative party abhors homophobia, that we support equal rights, that we support civil partnerships, that we think that part of being a strong central right party in Britain today – one of the bedrock issues is being in favor of proper equality for people whether they are straight or gay, or black or white, or men or women, or whether they live in the town or the countryside or whatever God they worship – important points,” – David Cameron, Tory leader.

Patrick Ruffini thinks that Republicans  "have been seriously outgunned" on health care policy:

On economics, you always know what the conservative answer is: tax cuts and generally hands-off regulatory policies to spur economic growth…On health care, I have no idea what our basic guiding principle is. Seriously, I don't. 

We have tried ineffectively to stretch free market rhetoric to health care without appreciating that health care is already too far removed from a free market for the analogy to make sense. Real markets are sensitive to price. Health care isn't. The insurance companies hide the cost of actual care from the consumer.

And that couldn't have been pointed out, say, eight months ago?