P.S. Michael Crichton also touched on this whole concept in State of Fear, as did H.L. Mencken:
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
I long ago realized that Time is just an organ for doing that.
And "Anthropogenic Global Warming" is the most imaginary of hobgoblins.
Oh, Just Settle Down: Since Time's 1984 cover story, the world's population has increased from 4.75 billion to 6.78 billion people. This year, the World Bank's Poverty Analysis reported, "Living standards have risen dramatically over the last decades. The proportion of the developing world's population living in extreme economic poverty...has fallen from 52 percent in 1981 to 26 percent in 2005.... Infant mortality rates in low- and middle-income countries have fallen from 87 per 1,000 live births in 1980 to 54 in 2006. Life expectancy in [low and middle-income] countries has risen from 60 to 66 between 1980 and 2006." According to the peace advocacy group Ploughshares, the number of armed conflicts across the globe has generally been in decline since the mid-1990s (PDF). As for "authoritarianism," with the fall of the Soviet empire, a far greater percentage of the global population lived under such regimes in 1984 than do today. Even the massive population in China is freer (if not actually "free") than it was in 1984.
My Summation: The world ain't perfect. But it's doing better than anyone gives it credit for. Especially Libtards
LOL -- word verif is "efight"... a new term for a flame war?
#7: Nobel Laureate economist Milton Friedman even theorized in the Wall Street Journal that it's actually the prohibition of cocaine that gave us drugs like crack, likening the intoxicant to the bathtub gin that soaked the black market during alcohol prohibition.
Indeed. In the college town I lived in in 1985, the local police shut down most of the available marijuana sources, to the point where I actually saw T-shirts saying "I survived the great xxx pot famine, summer, 1985".
Friends who smoked a lot more than I did didn't stop smoking pot, they switched to coke, which was still readily available.
Addictive people are going to get their stuff, no matter what the establishment does. The only technique which reliably works in cutting back the usage of addictive substances is peer pressure. Make it allowed/legal but socially unacceptable. Smoking is the obvious example, though I suspect we're going to get a backlash on that as the Boomers behind it die off, and Gen-Xers, many of whom smoke, come fully into power.
5 comments:
It seems if people start spending a lot of time on something, then all of a sudden it's an 'addiction.'
> It seems if people start spending a lot of time on something, then all of a sudden it's an 'addiction.'
'specially blogging :oP
P.S. Michael Crichton also touched on this whole concept in State of Fear, as did H.L. Mencken:
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
I long ago realized that Time is just an organ for doing that.
And "Anthropogenic Global Warming" is the most imaginary of hobgoblins.
Also, I find #6 to be one of the better ones:
Oh, Just Settle Down: Since Time's 1984 cover story, the world's population has increased from 4.75 billion to 6.78 billion people. This year, the World Bank's Poverty Analysis reported, "Living standards have risen dramatically over the last decades. The proportion of the developing world's population living in extreme economic poverty...has fallen from 52 percent in 1981 to 26 percent in 2005.... Infant mortality rates in low- and middle-income countries have fallen from 87 per 1,000 live births in 1980 to 54 in 2006. Life expectancy in [low and middle-income] countries has risen from 60 to 66 between 1980 and 2006." According to the peace advocacy group Ploughshares, the number of armed conflicts across the globe has generally been in decline since the mid-1990s (PDF). As for "authoritarianism," with the fall of the Soviet empire, a far greater percentage of the global population lived under such regimes in 1984 than do today. Even the massive population in China is freer (if not actually "free") than it was in 1984.
My Summation: The world ain't perfect. But it's doing better than anyone gives it credit for. Especially Libtards
LOL -- word verif is "efight"... a new term for a flame war?
#7: Nobel Laureate economist Milton Friedman even theorized in the Wall Street Journal that it's actually the prohibition of cocaine that gave us drugs like crack, likening the intoxicant to the bathtub gin that soaked the black market during alcohol prohibition.
Indeed. In the college town I lived in in 1985, the local police shut down most of the available marijuana sources, to the point where I actually saw T-shirts saying "I survived the great xxx pot famine, summer, 1985".
Friends who smoked a lot more than I did didn't stop smoking pot, they switched to coke, which was still readily available.
Addictive people are going to get their stuff, no matter what the establishment does. The only technique which reliably works in cutting back the usage of addictive substances is peer pressure. Make it allowed/legal but socially unacceptable. Smoking is the obvious example, though I suspect we're going to get a backlash on that as the Boomers behind it die off, and Gen-Xers, many of whom smoke, come fully into power.
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