Posts by BenWilson
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I guess a reasonable comparison is suggesting that NZ could dominate the world in growing parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme. Do any countries even import those? Possibly extremely cold climates? I've got an oversupply problem from those just off $10 worth of seeds purchased 10 years ago.
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Hard News: But seriously, drug policy, in reply to ,
I just don’t think that dope is the answer to our lack of economic sophistication.
Yes, we'd have to sell an awful lot before it even raised its head as a significant crop, and there wouldn't be much of an export market in it - anywhere it would be legal to export to would already be growing it. And the global demand isn't likely to be anywhere near as much as even the most basic plant crops. People buy their cannabis by the gram or ounce, not by the kilo. A kilo would keep even a hardcore stoner going for a year. If truly legal and produced by professional farmers, its production cost would be around the order of what it costs to produce lettuce. Maybe a greedy retailer could get away with charging $20 per kilo. As an illegal crop that quantity is worth more like $10,000. Even then stoners mostly have as much weed as they want, and medical users too. Legalization would kill it as a profitable business immediately. I doubt that supply couldn't be matched even by casual home growers keeping a small patch in good sun and well tended. People who wanted it could easily grow it, and they could access the very best strains with great ease. It would probably be found growing wild in large stands, if those stands were not instantly ravaged by humans upon discovery, as they are now. Untidy building sites would probably have them cropping up amongst the belladonna and sorrell.
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I'm pretty sure you did mention it when you quoted Blackstone:
This is the foundation of what we call ethics, or natural law.
You also mentioned natural rights here, saying
The natural rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness can be restated as life, liberty, and the pursuit of justice (or ethical behaviour)
and here, with
My focus here is natural rights as they exist within the common law.
Which are an adjunct to natural law, relying on it even being true to exist. This post was the very start of our disagreement on natural law. I mentioned it immediately, having picked it from the post before.
Furthermore, the discussion has gone on about them for 5 pages now without you once trying to backpedal on this, despite being actively involved continually. If you wanted to make this distinction, the time was when you first started even arguing the case.
I don't even want to talk about the Law of Nature, if you wish to treat it as an entirely different topic, suddenly. It's foolishness that I've had enough of. Bullshit we weren't talking about natural law, and like Hell I'm going to talk about any more of this nonsense.
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Hard News: But seriously, drug policy, in reply to Rob W,
AFAIK there are no decent trials that show the medical benefits of smoking cannabis exceed the harms, but I’d love to be corrected.
How does that work, btw? Considering that the harms is cancer and the benefit is pain relief, how do they trade one off against the other in a medical trial? Is there a magic formula for acceptable change in pain levels vs acceptable lung cancer increase levels? How is such an acceptable formula derived in a lab? Surely it's a moral choice?
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Hard News: But seriously, drug policy, in reply to Matt Crawford,
Though, isn’t it amazing that all that public outrage, drama and energy at the start of the year has melted away to absolutely nothing just months later.
Well, they got what they wanted, so it's not that surprising.
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Up Front: Oh, God, in reply to WH,
It’s often what people think they know that gets them into trouble, and environments in which people are willing to challenge their own thinking because the costs of doing so are low are preferable to those in which people dig rhetorical trenches and feel unable to admit mistakes.
If I could think of anything at all that's good to say about the idea of natural law and a theistic source of validity to laws, I would probably try a bit harder to make a constructive debate out of it. But I honestly can't think of one single thing. It's fucked from stem to stern. It's an idea built to fuck people over in favour of their religion and their existing prejudice, and power structures they want. It's no surprise that it was argued in a blinkered way using only very old sources, and the conclusion that it drew was the invalidation of the entire political system I live under, in favour of one drawn up by a dictionary writer of the 19th Century in a country that isn't even the one that NZ was colonized by, let alone by the people who actually live here.
It's not a view I can agree to compromise on, because that compromise involves accepting a whole bunch of things I completely disagree with. It's not a new idea, so we don't need to waste a whole bunch of time on the preliminaries. I know what natural law means, and anyone who does a Google on the term will know pretty quickly. UT wasn't deviating from the usage in any original way. I already have an opinion on it formed when I studied Hobbes as young man decades ago. I might as well just tee off with it, with my number 1 wood and an almighty swing.
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Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to Australopithecus,
Wouldn’t the wiping of their student loans by Internet/mana interest them? It is certainly compelling for our under 18 year old sons.
For those with loans, I think it might.
I guess there’s also no specific statement that you have to vote “correctly”, only that you have to vote.
Yup, I've heard of elderly Australians who have written something about their objection to the process and then donkey voted every time for their whole lives, and never received so much as a warning for it. But my wife got fined for forgetting to cast her vote for the Frankston local body after living here for 5 years, and basically not giving the slightest toss about Frankston's local government.
I think compulsory voting is probably a good idea, but I'm not sure I would extend that to local body, when you're abroad. You're still an Australian and should let your wishes be known about the direction of the country (even if those wishes are that you don't care). But being forced to decide how to rank 30 unknown people who happen to preside over your last official Australian address, which is very unlikely to be your new address if/when you come home? Not so much.
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However much I may have disparaged harm reduction in favour of the human rights angle before, I still think the harm reduction angle is a vast improvement on the status quo, which is neither harm reduction, nor in favour of human rights. So that's a plus for IMP, even if it's not full marks in my book.
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Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to Lucy Telfar Barnard,
But you could also point out that it’s not actually all about them
I could hardly think of a better way to alienate them than to say that, which comes across as a put-down. But don't worry, I'll find a more diplomatic way to say something along those lines.
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Speaker: Telling Our Own Tales, in reply to nzlemming,
I did wonder.
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