House of Eratosthenes

The United Nations is sending out strongly worded letters to the movie business because some of the leading stars are on record with their controlled-substance habits.

The UN’s drug control agency said the easy ride given to stars by police, prosecutors and the courts sent out the wrong message to young people and generated cynicism over drug laws.

Well, I agree with the U.N. drug control agency, although this goes well outside of the mission & purpose I have in mind for the U.N.

And I think it’s interesting. If some slightly overweight, over-fifty, six-foot-tall straight white guy Republican governor of a southern state with a thick southern accent said exactly the same thing, we’d all know about it the next day and we’d all receive our instructions from our media overlords to put the hate on him and laugh at him.

But there’s a conflict here. The folks who are all cranky because we’re too national and not sufficiently international, are the same folks who are all cranky because we’ve got our evil insidious “War On Drugs.”

What’s the U.N. wanna do here?

The agency, which polices the way in which countries stick to international drug conventions, has been heavily critical of the Government’s failure to take a tough line in recent years.

Three years ago it said Labour was sending ‘wrong signals’ after downgrading the legal status of cannabis from class B to class C, which means that those caught with small quantities of the drug are unlikely to be arrested.

I note that many of the people who are vocally opposed to the War on Drugs are my tenth-amendment brethren, people who share my distaste for federal authority on matters where state or local authority is more appropriate. And yet I have to wonder how many among them will let this pass by without comment…a craven cowardly world council, trying to be a world legislative body, without having the stones to admit that is what it’s trying to be. World, not federal.

Should we legalize? No, not in my opinion. I’m tired of the druggies. It’s not the corruption of children that concerns me just yet, or the declining property values. I’m tired of their stupid crappy-ass opinions. It’s a form of pollution. They say the most inane stupid things, things in which they actually believe, because the drugs have been messing with their brains…stupid things like, drugs don’t mess with your brain. Or “if we legalized it and taxed it, we could pay off the national debt overnight” — you’ve heard that one before, haven’t you? The debt. Overnight. Sixteen billion dollars a minute is what that comes out to, you stoned-out old math wizard you.

In Barack Obama, we’re about to elect a President of the United States who is a drug, in all the ways that matter. I’d say that’s taking things plenty far enough.

Well, yes. We’re all very familiar with how stringent the UN is about making sure their own are keeping within not only the letter, but the spirit of the law.

All pigs are equal etc. etc.
- Duffy | 03/05/2008 @ 15:26
When the Star Trek series came back (Picard) I realized there was something about it I didn’t like, and it went all the way back to the Kirk days. It has to do with this thing they call “Starfleet.” It is such a venerable institution, such a chaos-free collective of disparate peoples. It works so well because the rules it makes are so fair, and one must presume the rules are so fair because the right people are in charge.

But I noticed whenever Starfleet gives an order to Kirk/Picard it always turns out there was an evil alien infiltrator masquerading as the Starfleet officer…or the Starfleet officer was nuts…should’ve been retired but wasn’t…whatever. Starfleet-to-Captain orders were always wrong, even though, with few exceptions, Captain-to-subordinate orders were always right. The message seems to be to support anarchy and individual-over-collective when dealing with one’s own superiors but to demand blind conformity and collective-over-individual from whoever might be subordinate.

That was a firm rule that Gene Roddenberry set up and fought hard to maintain during his tenure over the first two Star Treks: There is no petty infighting or antisocial behavior from any member of the crew. Basically, Roddenberry set the show in a future in which people had risen above all the kinds of behavior we would call “dysfunctional.” Essentially, everyone in the cast always behaved as I would have if I were at my best.

I read somewhere he was inspired by the United Nations. Indeed, the U.N. flag is just within a stone’s throw, in appearance, from the UFP flag. So I proceed with the assumption that it’s fair to inspect the spirit of that show, pre-Berman and otherwise, and regard what one sees as emblematic of the spirit of enthusiasm for the U.N. Whenever I manage to catch an episode or two, I only become more convinced of this.

And the spirit I see is one of selective anarchy. We are to demand consistency, uniformity and harmlessness from all others, and then as our own “Captains” we are each to go ahead and think outside of the box, and permit ourselves egomaniacal pursuits we would deny others. It is narcissism borne of a seemingly-innocuous desire for utopianism.

Wow, that’s a post unto itself.
- mkfreeberg | 03/05/2008 @ 15:55
The War on (Some) Drugs, as our mutual friend van der Leun puts it, is asinine and a total waste of money. It’s a hot button with me, simply because of its asininity. The historical lessons are there…what with our experiment with Prohibition. Yet we seem to be able to (a) ignore those lessons and (b) perpetuate the madness. Personally, I think it’s because a lot of weak minds need The Other to look down upon and thereby raise themselves up…in part (see: “Dirty Hippies”). Of course it’s much more complicated than that, but I firmly believe that’s a good part of it. And then there’s that Tenth Amendment… but more than that, it’s completely WRONG that the Gub’mint…ANY gub’mint, state, local, or Federal… has the right to proscribe anyone’s choice as to which substances they ingest. Period, full-stop.

As for the UN? That body became totally irrelevant years ago. They can pontificate on anything and everything they want and I simply don’t care. It’s just an America-bashing forum for tiny little irrelevant Third-World countries and former empires who bemoan their lost glories while begrudging us our successes. F**k ‘Em. Twice.
- Buck | 03/06/2008 @ 15:57
I”m not really sure why you’d treat what’s ultimately a social problem with a military/police solution. It flat-out doesn’t work. As a parallel, let’s say we’re going to have a War On Obesity. It’s a big problem, right? Lots of money being wasted in the healthcare/insurance markets because people want to be big fat asses. You, Citizen! If you can’t get your weight down to x pounds for y height in z months, we’re going to garnish your food, refrigerator, couch, and television, and forcibly inter you at a government “fat camp” to make you lose the weight.
Smells like bullshit to me. I’ll point out that the argument for the national drug prohibition is precisely the same argument for a permanent national firearms ban:

“A person could be irresponsible with drugs and bring harm to themselves or others.”

“A person could be irresponsible with guns and bring harm to themselves or others.”

Drug abuse is ultimately a self-correcting problem. Minus a government safety net, people unable to maintain their life and livelihood due to substance abuse will simply die out.
- dcshiderly | 03/06/2008 @ 19:33
Pardon me,

My opinion here is a little bit multi-faceted and I’m not stating it with the clarity and multi-point perspective it demands.

I am against DRUGS the same way I am against ABORTION. Which is to say, I’d vote on a law against them, maybe even with gusto, but I would strongly prefer to be voting that way on a county ballot for a county initiative. Doing it at the state level would be inferior…enacting a city ordinance would be much better. I’m against the act itself, but the smaller the sphere of legislation, the closer the authority is to the community affected, the happier I am.

I see no reason for any of this stuff to be going on at the federal level. NONE. At that level, it’s just suckling at a money-teat.

And a world authority — out of the freakin’ question.

What I’m doing here is using this story to call out the blatant hypocrisy of folks who are Pro-U.N., as in, in favor of investing more authority in the world government, something even the U.N. itself can’t even come out and champion itself. And then, in the same breath, indulge themselves in the “they oughtta make it legal” argument. See my friend Buck, up there, he has a slightly different view from me about legalizing. But he’s consistent. Because he’s even more skeptical of the U.N. than I am, assuming that’s possible.

I just find them so frightening because they aren’t hindered by the most vocal popular viewpoints. If a Republican President muttered these things, why, by Sunday night you’d have enough editorial cartoons to choke a horse, and half of them would make direct references to Prohibition. The other half would make references to Nazi Germany. The U.N. takes the same position, posing a larger threat to individual freedom, universally — and they get a pass.

I’m waiting for a coherent explanation for this dichotomy. Perhaps you’ll be the one to provide it.
- mkfreeberg | 03/06/2008 @ 19:46
Oho, well there is no such thing. Ultimately, the UN is as toothless as it ever was, and the US tends to go along when the sitting politicians see a chance to improve their lot (as opposed to ours) or in cases where the goals of both bodies are parallel.
- dcshiderly | 03/08/2008 @ 04:08

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Wednesday, March 5th, 2008