I had so much fun taking apart that article from the Toronto Sun the other day I thought I might start a new regular feature here, wherein I take a look at the days events and give my take on the stories. This might work best for everyone if they read the linked articles, but feel free to just to read my comments if your time is at a premium, I'm probabbly more right than some of these hack journalists anyway.
Jury: Moussaoui is eligible for death
I believe in the death penalty. One of the great things about being an atheist is not having some book tell me what is and what isn't morally correct. As long as there hungry people in the world, evil sick bastards shouldn't be allowed to waste our precious resources. My wife argues with me that the death penalty is not a deterrent to commit heinous crimes because no one believes that they will be caught when committing a crime. My argument is that we should be less worried about deterring people from committing crimes and more worried about punishing the sick fucks of society when they do screw up. Serial killers: kill them. Mass murderers: kill them. Terrorists: Kill them. Repeat sexual offenders: kill them, any psychologist will tell you they can not be rehabilitated and will always be a danger to society. Pedophiles: Kill them, resuscitate them and kill them again for good measure.
"Carie Lemack, whose mother, Judy Larocque, was aboard the first plane that crashed into the trade center, watched the verdict on a closed-circuit broadcast to families in Boston, where both trade center flights originated.
"We don't want to make him a martyr," she told CNN. "The last thing that a lot of us want to see happen is to allow him to die with the name martyr by his side.""
Great so the other terrorists think of him as a martyr if you execute him, that's probably better than allowing him to live out the rest of his life as a prisoner, writing volume upon volume about how evil the western world is until he dies at a ripe old age at which point they'll still regard him as a martyr.
Sharon to undergo skull surgery
Hooray for modern medicine. We are at the point where we can keep someone "alive" months after they have actually died. Why do we do this and should we do it? We wouldn't allow an animal to suffer when it had no chance of recovery but we insist on keeping grandma or grandpa hooked up to a machine long past the point where it is obvious that they will never wake up.
"He has had several surgeries since he entered the hospital. On February 11, doctors had to remove nearly 50 centimeters (20 inches) of his large intestine after it was found to have become gangrenous because of a lack of blood flow."
That's the body trying to shut itself off. Let it. Ariel Sharon was a statesman and leader who served his country in many roles for half a century. Give the man some dignity and don't keep him on a ventilator, drugged and unconscious, delaying the inevitable. Let his people bury him in a way he deserves while they still remember who he is and what he did.
Pot decriminalization bill goes up in smoke in Canada
Ahhhh yes those evil hippies, always out smoking the ganja and destroying society by depleting our precious supplies of microwave burritos and Hostess snack cakes.
One of Harper's five priorities is to clamp down on crime. "We will not be reintroducing the Liberal government's marijuana decriminalization legislation," he told a meeting of the Canadian Professional Police Association.
Uhhhhh...so it's your belief sir that some teenager who gets picked up with a couple of joints on him is a "criminal"? All studies on the subject indicate that between a quarter and half of the Canadian population have at one time or another used marijuana. Do you really think it's a good idea to brand up to half of your electorate as criminals Stephen? That just doesn't seem to make good political sense.
"Under the Liberal bill, people found with small amounts of marijuana would have been fined but would not have received a criminal record.
Canadian police complain that judges often hand down lenient sentences on people found guilty of running operations to grow marijuana illegally."
Uhhhh...correct me if I'm wrong here but aren't these 3 entirely different issues?
A) People caught by the police with a little pot on them.
B) People who run an elaborate criminal enterprise.
C) Judges who don't actually use the high end of the statutes that they already have to punish B)
The liberal legislation was only specifically dealing with A) which should clearly be the least of anyone's concern.
"Estimates for the value of Canada's booming pot business trade vary widely, and some experts say it is worth $8.5 billion a year. "
Wait, hold on a sec here. I think I might have just come up with an idea. How about instead of scrapping the Liberal's bill you rewrite it as a complete legalization bill. Sell the shit in government run and regulated stores or Amsterdam style coffee shops and tax the shit out of it like tobacco and alcohol. Spend this tax money on the following areas:
A) Hiring more law enforcement, and paying the officers we have now a better wage.
B) Hiring more border security to stem the flow of hard drugs and weapons into the country
C) Increased spending on chemical dependency rehabilitation facilities, especially in major centers like Toronto or Vancouver.
Coupled with the savings from no longer prosecuting and incarcerating people for simple possession we should have enough resources to drop the crime rate throughout the entire country by a significant amount.
Jury: Moussaoui is eligible for death
I believe in the death penalty. One of the great things about being an atheist is not having some book tell me what is and what isn't morally correct. As long as there hungry people in the world, evil sick bastards shouldn't be allowed to waste our precious resources. My wife argues with me that the death penalty is not a deterrent to commit heinous crimes because no one believes that they will be caught when committing a crime. My argument is that we should be less worried about deterring people from committing crimes and more worried about punishing the sick fucks of society when they do screw up. Serial killers: kill them. Mass murderers: kill them. Terrorists: Kill them. Repeat sexual offenders: kill them, any psychologist will tell you they can not be rehabilitated and will always be a danger to society. Pedophiles: Kill them, resuscitate them and kill them again for good measure.
"Carie Lemack, whose mother, Judy Larocque, was aboard the first plane that crashed into the trade center, watched the verdict on a closed-circuit broadcast to families in Boston, where both trade center flights originated.
"We don't want to make him a martyr," she told CNN. "The last thing that a lot of us want to see happen is to allow him to die with the name martyr by his side.""
Great so the other terrorists think of him as a martyr if you execute him, that's probably better than allowing him to live out the rest of his life as a prisoner, writing volume upon volume about how evil the western world is until he dies at a ripe old age at which point they'll still regard him as a martyr.
Sharon to undergo skull surgery
Hooray for modern medicine. We are at the point where we can keep someone "alive" months after they have actually died. Why do we do this and should we do it? We wouldn't allow an animal to suffer when it had no chance of recovery but we insist on keeping grandma or grandpa hooked up to a machine long past the point where it is obvious that they will never wake up.
"He has had several surgeries since he entered the hospital. On February 11, doctors had to remove nearly 50 centimeters (20 inches) of his large intestine after it was found to have become gangrenous because of a lack of blood flow."
That's the body trying to shut itself off. Let it. Ariel Sharon was a statesman and leader who served his country in many roles for half a century. Give the man some dignity and don't keep him on a ventilator, drugged and unconscious, delaying the inevitable. Let his people bury him in a way he deserves while they still remember who he is and what he did.
Pot decriminalization bill goes up in smoke in Canada
Ahhhh yes those evil hippies, always out smoking the ganja and destroying society by depleting our precious supplies of microwave burritos and Hostess snack cakes.
One of Harper's five priorities is to clamp down on crime. "We will not be reintroducing the Liberal government's marijuana decriminalization legislation," he told a meeting of the Canadian Professional Police Association.
Uhhhhh...so it's your belief sir that some teenager who gets picked up with a couple of joints on him is a "criminal"? All studies on the subject indicate that between a quarter and half of the Canadian population have at one time or another used marijuana. Do you really think it's a good idea to brand up to half of your electorate as criminals Stephen? That just doesn't seem to make good political sense.
"Under the Liberal bill, people found with small amounts of marijuana would have been fined but would not have received a criminal record.
Canadian police complain that judges often hand down lenient sentences on people found guilty of running operations to grow marijuana illegally."
Uhhhh...correct me if I'm wrong here but aren't these 3 entirely different issues?
A) People caught by the police with a little pot on them.
B) People who run an elaborate criminal enterprise.
C) Judges who don't actually use the high end of the statutes that they already have to punish B)
The liberal legislation was only specifically dealing with A) which should clearly be the least of anyone's concern.
"Estimates for the value of Canada's booming pot business trade vary widely, and some experts say it is worth $8.5 billion a year. "
Wait, hold on a sec here. I think I might have just come up with an idea. How about instead of scrapping the Liberal's bill you rewrite it as a complete legalization bill. Sell the shit in government run and regulated stores or Amsterdam style coffee shops and tax the shit out of it like tobacco and alcohol. Spend this tax money on the following areas:
A) Hiring more law enforcement, and paying the officers we have now a better wage.
B) Hiring more border security to stem the flow of hard drugs and weapons into the country
C) Increased spending on chemical dependency rehabilitation facilities, especially in major centers like Toronto or Vancouver.
Coupled with the savings from no longer prosecuting and incarcerating people for simple possession we should have enough resources to drop the crime rate throughout the entire country by a significant amount.
Well that's probably enough of my bizarre views for one day.
3 comments:
Pot decriminalization bill goes up in smoke in Canada
Funny, Naiomi and I were just talking about this subject (largely due to my purchacing season two of Bullshit - if you don't have it, go get it.) and we both had about the same opinion. Legalizing a drug will not make more people likely to use said drug - infact it's been show that decriminalization makes people less likely to use the drug. Take away the taboo and the intrest wains.
If they legalized drugs across the board, the streets wouldn't suddenly fill with junkies and gang wars. The same people who think drugs are bad would continue to think so and the people who want to use drugs would have to pay taxes on them and wouldn't be shooting up in a dirty alley behind my fucking school. (You'll have to excuse me. For some reason I have an issue with watching that sort of thing, on a daily basis and having to watch my step so I don't step on their dirty needles and needing guards at the doors so the junkies can't come in. But that's just me.) At most you'd see a spike in users for the first few months, if that, and then a return to normal and probably a drop in users.
Understand, I'm saying this and I'm not a drug user. I don't like them, I'm not interested in them, I certainly have no vested interest in seeing them legalized. I do however have a vested intrest in seeing the government taking advantage of a source revenue that would mean more police, less gang violence, a drop in "dirty needle diseases", and decrease in the prison population (for which we all are paying so very much), etc, etc, etc.
It's just beyond me that at this point the government has yet to figure out that making things like this illegal isn't stopping anyone, it's just creating a criminal society and breeding criminals.
Ya, the war on drugs episode of Bullshit was excellent, I love the part where they prove that the USA's war on drugs has only served to make drugs a) more potent, b) more available and c)cheaper. I can't believe a country can be run by people so stupid as to believe that you can correct a addiction problem by making said addiction a criminal act. They seem to not understand the definition of the word addiction.
I of course in no way endorse decriminalizing or legalizing anything except cannabis. Opiates, cocaine and the like are obviously a huge danger that need to be dealt with very seriously, but the addicts aren't the ones that should get the heavy jail sentences. I'd be cool with first and second time offences for possesion of hard drugs being dealt with by say giving the person mandatory drug counselling the first time and mandatory 45 days of detox the second time. After that I guess you have to send a harsher message but treatment should be attempted before you just throw someone in jail for being weak-willed.
They really do need to step up border patrols and inspections and crack down really hard on the organized crime groups that are responsible for bringing the heavy stuff into the country.
Well not that I think Opiates are a good thing at all, I still say that if the government was controlling the manufacturing and distribution of them there would be a serious drop in the problems associated with them. Better still, it wouldn't be a taboo thing to admit you have a problem with them and to seek treatment.
Are these drugs good for you? Should you take them? No, absolutely not. But for the government to shove its head up its ass about how many people use despite the legal (not to mention health) risks and to hand control of the substances over to criminals seems like a really fucking stupid idea to me.
I just think that our country needs to reassess its position on most street drugs and how to deal with them.
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