http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2011/07/05/ten-years-after-decriminalization-drug-abuse-down-by-half-in-portugal/

http://www.businessinsider.com/portugal-drug-policy-decriminalization-works-2012-7

http://www.alternet.org/story/151635/ten_years_ago_portugal_legalized_all_drugs_--_what_happened_next

>"Glenn Greenwald, the attorney and author who conducted the research, told Time: “Judging by every metric, drug decriminalization in Portugal has been a resounding success. It has enabled the Portuguese government to manage and control the drug problem far better than virtually every other Western country."

Steve Cohen lays it down on C-SPAN

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEASvdMQbfU#t=140

"With due respect, you all need to listen to scientists"

"You can't handle the truth. The truth is, the DRUG WAR FAILED."

"And until you deal with the truth, the kids aren't going to believe you at all."

Yes. Drug laws ruin lives, right down to the source. There are farmers in the middle east who are forced to grow the constituent plants in drugs to earn a living by their culture, and then imprisoned for life by that same culture. It's absurd. Plus, at least legalizing it would mean it could be regulated.

>>77154
There's not much we can do, preventatively, to stop bullying and persecution, other than have a sense of solidarity together, and try to be the change we want to see in the world.

Last edited at Thu, Feb 6th, 2014 01:05

>>77154
There was nothing any of us could do beforehand, since it was not public knowledge.

Furthermore, what would you propose as preventative measure? Is a collection of bronies - internet geeks, to be honest, many of whom are under 21 - really going to be able to influence bullying in schools across the USA and across the world?

No.

Generally I'm an optimist and I don't like cynicism, but I really think that the idea of bronies somehow being able to have an influence on bullying in schools is a complete pipe-dream.

As for "supporting" bullied children, that is unwise. It is far, FAR better for a bullied child to be supported by their parents or their teachers, not by unknown people of unspecified age and background across the internet. It is one thing for bronies to get actively involved in charity work, rights and tolerance and all that, but where other people's children are involved, that is a complete no-go zone.

Last edited at Thu, Feb 6th, 2014 05:02

>kid tried to hang himself
>guy on FB says "hang in there"
I'm so going to hell for having chuckled at this.

>>77143
>Frankly, the corporate world needs a reminder that if they refuse to negotiate reasonable prices, people will just take what they need.

That seems like the sort of mindset that would only discourage a corporation from selling in that market. It is why PC gaming is starting to flounder, because pirating has discouraged them from making games for that market. (I don't want a subject change, just an example)

>>77149
Well, perhaps then they'll think about the cost of losing entire nations as markets in future negotiations.

If, as the public statement of their CEO seems to attest, they're not interested in saving the lives of Indians, then India's government is left to do what's best for its people regardless.

Last edited at Wed, Feb 5th, 2014 18:53

>That seems like the sort of mindset that would only discourage a corporation from selling in that market.

What does this matter to the markets they weren't going to sell to in the first place? It should have more or less no consequence to them.

It seems clear this drug was never intended for cancer stricken indians because they don't have the kind of money to afford its price. The overwhelming majority of people on this planet don't.

If we are really trying to provide what patients need and we are asking if the patient can afford the medicine, treatment, procedure etc and the answer is no, the next best question as a provider to ask is 'can they obtain it?'

Last edited at Thu, Feb 6th, 2014 05:12

I'm missing something here- why? What is so different about humans than other animals? Why humans, specifically? All of them?

Why not go find a place of refuge somewhere where you'll never have to see another human again? Or does the very idea that they exist somewhere conflict with you? (Then, in the entire vastness of the universe, what would you make of the very likely existence of very humanlike species on some other far away corner of space?)

Does it have a philosophical basis or an emotional basis? Or perhaps it's a rationalisation?

>>77137
Humans are different from other animals because we are the most dominant, and the most poisonous to all of the other ecosystems on earth.

To be honest, that is spectacularly illogical. Observing all of humanity in balance, I see not nearly enough grounds for disgust, loathing, contempt, animosity, bitterness, revulsion, abhorrence, enmity, or outright hostility. One particular problem is the superiority you exhibit, especially in your disgust, contempt, and revulsion. It's an unhealthy way of thinking.

But who am I to speak of a logical and healthy mind? I have spent a large chunk of my life with a very unhealthy mind that was incredibly illogical and bubbling with hatred. Not directed, like yours is, just blank hatred - which, when not turned on anything external, often turned on myself.

It's good that you confess it as a problem. If you'd come here and said "Why is humanity so hateable?" I'd say you're a douche and you need to rethink your opinion of the world. But I think you are right to acknowledge it as a problem, and that's the first step to solving it.

I'll suggest a few ideas. I have no professional qualifications but I do have some experience in cognitive behavioural therapy - that is, actively changing the way you think.

1) Think hard. Try to apply a bit of logic. Firstly, what's the point of hating 7 billion people? You'll never meet more than a few thousand and never know more than a few hundred. Even if you could meet them all, what would you do to them? Someone wise once said something like "Hating a person is like taking poison and expecting them to die". Your hatred is harming you far more than it harms them. Try hard to let go of your hate. Leave cynicism outside. Relax. Think about other things.

2) Do you have any close friends? A friend can reaffirm your faith in humanity. I know that friends are pretty much the number one thing to keep me out of depression. A friend can help to lighten your mood, and show you that people can be good, and nice. And also that doing good things with good people is more fun and productive than hating everyone. Also, you can tell your friend that you have a problem with hatred, and they can help you get over it.
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You. I like you. I've always thought this way, but nobody has put it as succinctly as you have.
I've dedicated my life towards learning as many things as I can. I've started with programming and I'm only moving forward from there.

What you're talking about IS epistemology. Welcome to the board, Erika~

In my conclusions there are four areas, and I would not say any one is more important than another.

Epistemology and knowledge, one flowing from the other. The body of scientific knowledge springs from the human conception of logic and mathematics. Common knowledge comes from conceptual metaphor and unconscious, automatic reasoning. Religious and ideological knowledge is perhaps grounded in acceptance of an authority.

Ethics and behaviour, one flowing from the other. The behaviour of a Stoic springs from the Stoic conception of virtue. The behaviour of a utilitarian from the utilitarian view of ethics. The behaviour of a Christian from Christian theology.

>>76245

Unfortunately, no.

I did just get a lead, though: Losing the Race, by John McWhorter. I'm looking into it now. Whether it has the actual story for which I'm looking or not, it could be a very useful source, and it does look promising as containing that story. I need to do some more checking, though.

>>76245

So in case you're still interested in this, it was something by Shelby Steele, an essay called "On Being Black and Middle Class" [l-adam-mekler.com] (links to a .doc file). I was looking through some old books while I was without internet for a while and found it in the same book in which I had found it the first time. My memory of it was a little inaccurate, but it's still an interesting read.

I'm definitely going to use some of John McWhorter's work in this discussion, but I'm also going to have to reference Shelby Steele.

Last edited at Mon, Feb 3rd, 2014 15:41

Interesting. You can also find it in PDF format format. http://www.smartercarter.com/Essays/Essay%20Documents/BlackandMiddleClass-Steele.pdf

>>76426
You are oversimplifying things. The Egyptian Royalty viewed themselves as gods incarnate. Many royalty viewed themselves in similar fashions, either ordained by their supernatural figures or carrying some other reason to explain why they exist outside of and above the rest of the world.

Their acts of incest, bestiality and more that goes against biological, cultural and societal reasoning was done because they believed that they had a right to do them due to their special existence whatever that may be.

Murder might be wrong for a mortal, but not for one who is a god or ordained by god. In fact, they can reason that it is their right to do as they please with their subjects and with themselves and each other.

I feel that when presented with something that might give the impression of 'this is wrong' to them, they would only lash out and do it with a stronger vigor to prove that nothing is wrong for them to do so long as it is good for them.

>>76429
>You are oversimplifying things. The Egyptian Royalty viewed themselves as gods incarnate. Many royalty viewed themselves in similar fashions, either ordained by their supernatural figures or carrying some other reason to explain why they exist outside of and above the rest of the world.

No I am providing an example. If in a single case incest occurs we can look at it and think about how it managed to happen. Viewing themselves as gods is the excuse they used. Folks on the ground would have had their own excuses and that fact does not make the example of the Royalty become meaningless.

>Their acts of incest, bestiality and more that goes against biological, cultural and societal reasoning was done because they believed that they had a right to do them due to their special existence whatever that may be.

And just how do you think "incest happens"? That sounds like a possible formula to weaken an instinct to me, though I don't personally know if that description is accurate. Every time incest happens there are reasons and no singe example is illegitimate. They all matter.

>Murder might be wrong for a mortal, but not for one who is a god or ordained by god. In fact, they can reason that it is their right to do as they please with their subjects and with themselves and each other.

Same story for murder. Every time it happens where are reasons and you can't just rule an example illegitimate because they are high ranking humans and not street level humans. Sure some of the reasons for the actions change, but the reasons and actions still exist and we can still talk about them as singular examples of incest. …

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Sorry everyone but the site rules about explicit text still count here. Talking about sexual things is fine but if it starts sounding like you are narrating a porn then lines have been crossed. Derails into the explicit stuff from OP is also a problem.

If you want to have a thread about sex toys that would be the experiment that has not yet been run. We are trying to leave room for it but we still have the general rules to respect. Talking about them, not narrating your experience. I know it's tricky but it should be possible and over time we will find a balance.

Anyways...

I can safe search Pinkie Pie without finding porn. Turning safety off, I can find like a couple pics of Big Mac x Pinkie making cupcakes in there.

When I search for Trixie, there is ironically Fairly Odd Parents fetish stuff in there somehow. (I don't know, I never searched for FOP R34)

I do remember even at work that there was R34 Pinkie Pie macro in between safe searches; Felt more like troll images, though.

I still tend to believe that the fandom being overly sexalized is a more contrived issue than anything else.

I'm kind of frustrated, here. I typed up a dissertation on some of the replies I got here and just assumed that the thread had been deleted when it said that there was an invalid thread ID.

>>77108

In order to get to KYM, the kid would have to scroll (and I mean actually scroll) past much more likely sites, then to get to the pages that talk about explicit things, they'd have to scroll past several pages' worth of stuff that is, quite frankly, rather boring, then click on a very few specific set of links. Keep in mind that this wouldn't actually lead them to pony porn, just some fandom clop-related terminology that would use terms with which a four year old wouldn't actually be familiar.

>That's a textbook strawman.

Actually, no. It's called "recognizing a common theme." Pinkie Pony, IIRC, posted the first of these stories, and since then, quite a few people have started sending (usually anonymous) messages claiming the same thing. The stories follow a common theme, with some slight alterations. The vast majority of them refer to them finding it in an image search, and this story has all the same themes, but is missing that one detail. As an analogy, if I were to disprove an alien abduction story, would I then need to disprove one that followed all the same themes, but was missing one or two details?

>She thinks sex is gross? Well we live in a pretty puritanical culture and at four years old she's almost certainly been taught that her private parts are dirty and need to remain hidden. That could easily lead to her reaction.
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I know this sounds crass, but could someone give a summary? This conversation has been going on for over year, and there are multiple dissertations worth of conversation going on here. I just stumbled on this, I'd like to know other opinions, but I have a life, dammit.

>>77042
Wow nice argument eggheadron you sure convinced me with those hot opinions

>>77043
I'm sympathetic, but I doubt that a summary is possible. It's a screwed up issue that society has tons of problems talking about, let alone finding good solutions for. As a result there is very little in terms of social consensus. As a result of that the opinions in here are really all over the place, similar to the rest of society (speaking from a US perspective here).

One bit of consensus on the professional front is that there is a difference between a pedophile and a child molester. The pedophile has an attraction, the child molester acts on that attraction. So society has to deal with the problem of how to interact with people that have an attraction that they never act on. Those people exist and are not criminals. The way that the issue gets skirted and freaked out about prevents this issue from being actually solved.

How the suffering breaks down in reality as far as objective sources are concerned there is less consensus on. My personal view is that certainly there is a social component. Everyone freaking out about a person having an experience that they do not understand will make someone feel worse about it, so going on like someone has been damaged will mess with someone (role-modeling courage about facing it and figuring it out is better, but pretending that the child's actual emotions are not there is always bad too. The reality of a persons emotions needs respected and moving on from there is complicated by whatever the reality looks like.)

In my view (so beware, there will be other opinions different from mine above), we humans are programmed to respond to elders as authority figures when we are young, and the young are absorbers of rules and social information. Engaging in sex with a child is tantamount to brainwashing and imprinting a child with an adult's sexual tastes, essentially using them for a sex toy because there can be no relationship of equals there. It's part of the reason that the young are not legally considered persons and allowed to get into contracts and such. They…

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>>77053
Wait, really?

That's odd. I used the exact name..

I"m sorry for my mistake. I will do another search.

>>77053
I think I found a third answer. Both I and Graham were wrong.

It seems that what the media did with the survey is exactly what the survey is warning about! 'Sexy headlines' without proper context.

http://reliablesources.blogs.cnn.com/2012/05/25/facts-and-fiction-how-one-survey-was-reported-in-the-media/

The entire thing is well written enough to warrant an entire read. And I'll admit that there are shows on Fox as much as there are shows elsewhere that are opinion focused more than fact focused. Bill O'Reilly and Hannity are examples of this. The only shows I would say is almost completely free of opinion are the ones that run prior to the Prime Time Hours. However, this is going to be the fact of the matter as people enjoy them. (You can't deny their massive ratings).

The reason why sources like NPR got higher answers is that they usually delve into international news more often than others.

So.. ya. There you go.

>>76969

You're thinking a little too closely along the lines of "it's a study so it's true." The survey questions are extremely important in a study like this. If the questions are about things that are of greater interest to one party, this can result in a biased survey.

As it is, however, the questions are mostly generic and reflect less of political issues and facts related to those issues and more just general political trivia. For example, this question: "K6B. It took a long time to get the final results of the Iowa caucuses for Republican candidates. In the end, who was declared the winner?" is mostly of interest to Iowans, which is a largely Democratic region in the first place and Democratic Iowans would be much more likely to know this than anyone in, say, Texas, a Republican stronghold. There are a few questions in there that do test political knowledge of the issues at hand, but considering how few questions there are, the existence of any that can be considered "political trivia" or slightly biased isn't exactly promising.

Furthermore, if you look at the breakdown, you'll see that Fox News watching Republicans are, in fact, more informed than the "no news" group. It's the Democrats watching Fox News that brought down the average. There was a similar effect with Republicans watching MSNBC, but it was less than that of the other, at least in international questions. In fact, anyone not crossing idealogies scored better than "no news" in both areas.

Last edited at Sun, Feb 2nd, 2014 17:13

>>77026
I mean much more significant choices such as who to marry, what house to live in or whether or not to go to school.

>>77027
Of course you have those choices as well. But you are mistaking your understanding that there are better choices than others for having no choice at all.

I'd like to state that I'm actually playing devil's advocate here for the purpose of discussion, because no belief is worth holding if it can't be defended.
>>77026
But when you think about any given choice you have made, there are reasons why you made that choice rather than another. The practical reality of the situation, your emotional state at the time, your prior history with similar choices.

By manipulating one of these factors, through changing the situation so only one responce makes sense, or provoking a specific emotion at a specific time, or by conditioning you through brainwashing or torture, a person who understands your psychology can gain effectively total control over your actions. Arguaby this is the method and goal of totalitarian governments.

If your choice is always the predictable output from a number of inputs, what differentiates it from a very complex mathematical equation?

>>75614
>making your message more abstract in order to allow the audience to become part of the creation process, giving them the freedom to create new interpretations or meanings that are still rooted in the truth of the original intended message.
That's what I was going for. I had a feeling that the audience's involvement was important in certain occasions, but couldn't think of a way to describe it.
Then, I think, some art is primarily defined by what the artist wants his audience to see, and others by what the audience chooses to see.

Also, I didn't mean to sound like I wanted to give art an objective definition per se, just one that's more concrete than "people like it".
>>75616
>>75617
>>75618
Well, I don't think Diddo just made a crack head (ha) for the heck of it. It doesn't seem like he didn't have a point to make, but it's more likely that the point was for the audience to see their own message in it. I might interpret it as a metaphor for the dangers of substance abuse, someone else could possibly see it as "our animal side laid bare by comfortable excess".
Although, admittedly, one is a heck of a lot easier to see than the other, an interference on the part of the artist in actually stating what the piece was about could destroy the element of limitation by the medium. It's counterproductive to the artist by telling people how to interpret the art.
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>>75627
Like I said, I don't think there was a singular "point" he was trying to make ("I'm not trying to communicate a single idea, or induce a specific way of thinking"). Or, if there was, he doesn't want to impose that interpretation on the audience.
Maybe the point was to not look at symbols in a purely conventional way. Symbols can represent plenty of different meanings.
And, technically, prose is a subset of poetry.

I think that the issue is really that the term 'art' has been elevated to too high a standard in common use, and the root of many discussions of whether something is art or not really boil down to an attempt to dismiss a class of works, so that works that one wants to censor can be lumped in with that class of works and thereby lose the protection that people feel works of art deserve.

I like 3 and 8. Why, is Vermont proposing to seceed again?

Also, this one.

>>76989
I like number 1 the most. Heraldic flags are awesome.

I think the other ones with the shield are too crowded. I don't like the zigzag field.

>>76962
I'm opposed to Democracy because it's mostly mob rule anyway, can we change the term from Democracy to Constitutional Republic? At least when I'm speaking on it. Just a personal preference.

First, we need to address what Capitalism is. At it's core, Capitalism is merely an economic system where private ownership is the main ownership in trade, industry and the means of production. It is also an economic system where people are free to invest in those private ownerships with an expectation for a return at a later time. These people are known as 'Capitalists' because they devote 'Capital' to these private businesses to help them start up.

What this requires, however, is a Government that respects completely the right to private ownership and fights to fiercely defend it. These are typically governments that grant the most freedom, such as Constitutional Republics. So it isn't so much a paired system or one against the other. It is more that one system naturally follows the other.

I don't see capitalism as compatible with either democracy or freedom. Just tossing things around at random here, but...

Nor do I see capitalism as compatible with national sovereignty, as inevitably the private ownership grows big enough to expand into the nation's own political system and into other financial opportunities in foreign lands - even if they don't want it, such as the opium wars. You can only grow so much, so fast, in a limited area before you need to find ways to expand - and capitalism is about growth, and hence, expansion.

The individual/private ownership focus of capitalism makes it incompatible with freedom - and freedom is incompatible with capitalistic entities whom grow large enough to need restraints. Lobbying for more prisoners to fill your private, for profit prison enterprise? Hardly seems like something a 'free society' might do. Unless the freedom belongs to that corporation and the lawyers, but not to the people they govern and house.

Democracy doesn't seem compatible as long as financial prowess from private corporations determines candidates, election outcomes, and ultimately law.

In capitalism, dollars have power over the people that own them - ownership has power - if you don't own, you're the one being owned, and if you own enough, the state can be purchased, disempowered, or otherwise manipulated. Clearly not a democratic situation. Looking at most people's work relationships, most people go to work for an 'owner' and own nothing of the enterprise they are devoting their lives to - the people do not end up owning the fruits of their own production, private enterprise does - shareholders and executives do.

> sits back and wonders if all this popcorn is going to go to waste

http://objection.mrdictionary.net/go.php?n=7155926