Alright guys, I’d suggest you read this as dispassionately as possible so you have a better chance of registering what I’m saying
“How do you even go about trimming your writing when the whole thing is a block of text without a single paragraph?
Paragraphs are free, Parodites! It costs nothing to use them!”
My models were always the great masters of English: Milton, Emerson, Thomas Browne, using the rhetorical teachings of Cicero mainly. I understand the modern paragraph is a little four sentence blurb but in the past, “paragraphs” often went on for an entire page or more. I am not going to limit myself to your attention span. You can’t help me, no; Phoneutria. I have already sought out publishers three times during the production of my main works and found success, though I am still quite busy with putting the various volumes together in some kind of more singular format, as I demand perfection. So the reason I guess I have come to this forum is that, because both of that and my own instincts, I believe there are still people who don’t want to be spoon-fed things and deserve being respected enough to neglect the five second modern attention span thing we seem to have going on now. My writing is dense and the things I write on this forum (Minus self-excerpts from the ten volume work of philosophy I have committed to writing) are a fraction of how dense it actually gets. I don’t think you’ve understood a single word I have said in this thread and this isn’t even… if you think this stuff is dense then I really don’t know where you’re at mentally. I feel I give people too much credit, instinctively.
I haven’t been rude or discourteous with you, and I see that the cognitive dissonance is getting you a little worked up. Maybe relax a little. And to phoneutria: you somehow associating anything I have said with the sovereign citizen movement or this guy. Look man, you really don’t seem to understand anything I’ve said either. Those guys believe that the Constitution is invalid (whereas I value it as the greatest legal document ever conceived and the basis of all US law) because there wasn’t a formal convention to disband the temporary government formed before the true Constitution was finally drafted up. I sit here just scratching my head that on a philosophy forum of all places, the idea of freedom and right is maligned? I don’t know what has happened to people. I have to argue against people about the fact that their rights, souls and freedom are… worth something?
" And because you agree, yes, you are trading “freedom for security”. Individual Rights are not absolute …"
I assumed you understood that the Federal and State level governments are… different, so I didn’t specify that point because it is elementary. I am sorry I gave you too much credit, but that doesn’t make my argument all over the place. I am not trading anything for anything, as you imply here. I am going to simplify what I said as much as possible because you’re still not getting it. Drugs should be legal at the Federal level because the Federal government was never invested with the authority, either by the Constitution or an Amendment, to make drugs illegal and violate an implicit right I have to ingest what I want. However, the State level government is free to create its own internal regulations about it. They are not given the power to make a drug illegal, but they are permitted to regulate its commerce. (They do this with alcohol and tobacco of course. One state could say you must be 18 to buy something, another that you must be 21, etc. The States do not have the authority to make a drug illegal- but, unlike the Federal government, they can regulate its commerce through internal laws.) And yes, my rights are absolute. Like I said, in a European state you have no rights as the US understands them. You merely have, like a child,- privileges, born out of a negotiation with the state- and privileges that the state can take away at any time, as Australia did when they criminalized firearms, as European states do all the time when they jail people for making a Nazi joke. So when you go on to say: “Because all actions, affect all others, no matter how small they seem.”
Well fortunately: unlike Europe, the US does not recognize the government as having either the responsibility or the power to engage in acts of social engineering “for our own good”. You see, we are granted freedom and self-determination here to form our own communities, states, and greater national identity from the ground up, without conformation to the totalizing vision of some governmental authority. Again, European governments work the way you seem to want this one to work.
“You may as well argue for your “individual right” to commit suicide, compared to narcotic or opioid drug consumption and abuse. Do you have a God-given-Right to commit suicide? To poison yourself? To self-harm or mutilate?”
Um, yeah?
youtube.com/watch?v=W1dXB_XpmXs
" Then I stipulated the primary reason for its illegality, not because of the nature of self-harm, but by the method these drugs are produced, controlled, traded, bought, sold, held, etc."
So it’s illegal because drugs are manufactured and sold nefariously when drugs are illegal. Man, that’s pretty stupid.
You skipped the part where, without having been modified by an amendment, the Federal government has no authority to pronounce a drug illegal.
You really need to stop assuming you know everything: or that you know anything.
So to unwrong: yeah you don’t understand the basic separation of Federal and State level authority. And to phoneutria: my paragraphs are too long. That all you got for me guys? It wasn’t uncommon for paragraphs to run for 1-3 pages in pre-1900’s English writing. Proust has single sentences that run that long. I am growing quite bored with the lack of challenge I receive on this forum, but then again, my own humor wasn’t my primary object in coming here. Apparently the most precious boons of the Life of the Mind have become despised and scary as of late, like our Freedom. I have come to defend such things for the benefit, perhaps not of those with “challenges” when it comes to attention span or education,- but of others