A point of constitutional philosophy: implicit protections.

That all sounds nice and dandy. But there are many arguments for and against drug-use. The Religious Majority and Moral Authority, argued in the 90s, that drug-use is a social ill, and on those grounds, were granted power and restricted drug use and abuse, against individuals for the benefit of overall society. Your position is very Libertarian. It’s the same as arguing ‘legality’ of suicide, or using experimental drugs for terminally ill patients (which was just approved by Trump by the way), or other forms of self-inebriation. Marijuana was and is being legalized as of the past few years. So it seems things are going in your direction.

There are many nuances to these positions. What is your grievance, exactly? I don’t think the Supreme Court would oppose you that you have a ‘Right’ to poison yourself and your body, “as long as it doesn’t infringe upon others”.

It’s basic Liberalism ideology.

" But there are many arguments for and against drug-use. The Religious Majority and Moral Authority, argued in the 90s, that drug-use is a social ill,"

Using the State to enforce social engineering programs and “reprove social ills” is a more um, Euro-fascist way of conducting government. So whatever arguments you are talking about have nothing to do with any of this constitutional philosophy.

" What is your grievance, exactly? I don’t think the Supreme Court would oppose you that you have a ‘Right’ to poison yourself and your body, “as long as it doesn’t infringe upon others”

What… I. Like. It’s illegal to possess certain drugs at a federal level, or even to grow them on my own land, by my own hand, for my own use- without ever even interacting with another person let alone infringing upon their rights. That is my grievance… My grievance is that a shitload of my implicit rights, granted to me by God himself and afforded from out of the hand of Nature to one and all, have been denied to me and sidestepped by bloated federal agencies that, from the vantage purely of constitutional philosophy, should not even be allowed to exist in the first place, since they were created solely through executive order and clearly violate the sphere of power dispensated to the Federal Government in both the Spirit and the Letter of the Law. Our Constitution states that any power not explicitly granted by it to the Federal Government is not legitimate: and it lays out very clearly a few very explicit powers that the executive branch is allowed to wield: the power to manage border security in whatever way the president deems fit, etc. Turns out that getting to decide what drugs are illegal or not, isn’t one of those powers; nor is hacking into all of our Iphones to spy on us.

You mentioned weed being legalized: yes, by states. There isn’t an inch of movement at the level of the federal government on that, which is the whole issue here. And drugs are just a very obvious example of what I have been talking about, ie. implicit rights and their being afforded equal protection by our constitution- just as much as any right that has been explicitly defined, like my right to free speech. So in short, my grievance is that the federal government has exercised constitutionally illegitimate and therefor illegal powers in denying me the implicit protections afforded to me by the founding documents of this nation,- me and so many others, on 1,000 different fronts besides the blatant and colorful example of the drug war. My grievance is that these illegitimate agencies should be immediately disbanded, and their entire illegal funding seized and granted to all the people of this country whose taxes have been used to fund them for so many years in the form of a kind of stimulus package; my grievance is that every federal agent who has participated in the illegal activities of these agencies (the DEA, FBI, CIA, NSA, etc. etc.) should all be brought before the Supreme Court and tried for treason against the United States as well as for aiding and abetting our sworn enemies in the case of CIA operators funding different terrorist organizations for example; etc. etc. etc.

" Your position is very Libertarian."

That’s a basic philosophical school,- not even a school of philosophy, just a general philosophic attitude. I am not making a case for, against, or about that in this thread. In this thread, I am talking about the nuances of administration: Federalism, Natural right, implicit and explicit protections, etc. The idea of, instead of using the logically untenable category of the Group (meaning “the social good” for example) to ground our legal system, (The European states work this way, that is why their governments freely carry out social engineering programs, toward the object of some group-based idea of the collective good; that is why they can jail you for refusing to address a transgender person by his preferred pronoun.) as inevitably resulted from the emergence of governments in the past merely though the blind evolutionary forces of nature that have shaped an equally blind history of mankind upon the Earth, (The US alone was born out of an act of Will and deliberation; it did not just evolve out of an endless series of conflicts like other nations. A group of men sat down in a room, planned it out on paper like architects designing a building, signed their names on it, and then waged a war whose sole purpose was to defend that newly inaugurated state.) using the category of the Individual as primary, and then developing a system of internal checks and balances meant to measure out a harmonious dispensation of authority in conformity with that primary category,- a system whose purpose is only to secure the rights of said individuals, as well as to protect our border and carry out the few other duties and exercise those few powers that have been so dispensated and granted to the Federal government by our foundational documents, leaving all else to the independent state-level governments.

Yeah but Parodites, a dude would have to have some guts to … allow himself to think this way.

Im sobering up to that very basic notion, mostly what humans want is to stay out of trouble. They’ll go to jail for nothing, they’ll pay taxes so they can be thrown in jail for nothing, they’ll be slaves, as long as they can stay out of real trouble. Which is the sort of trouble you get into when you use your brain.

You can wax and wane libertine philosophy all you like. You may even convince the Supreme Court. But here’s the rub. When you grow or produce illegal substances on your personal, private property – it has almost nothing to do with “personal consumption non-impinging upon others” and mostly to do with Distribution and Sales, which is almost always the case. As soon as you turn profit, as soon as you make one sale, your position ends. And historically, one drug-dealer ruins it for everybody else’s “personal rights”. Which is why it is highly illegal, and regulated.

Drug consumption with a heart of gold, is rare-or-never. So again, although you may have a reasonable case, good luck with that. Most drug users and abusers will imbibe in their own private property anyway, and face the direct physical consequences. How are you going to sustain a drug-addiction long term, without turning profit? Eventually you’ll consume your finance and lose your property, ending up like the other 1,000,000 homeless drug abusers on the streets, looking for a fix.

Then you make the perfect counter-argument as to why Personal Liberty ought to be denied by the very institution that protects them.

" But here’s the rub. When you grow or produce illegal substances on your personal, private property – it has ,“”

Dude. The whole point of the thread is that… they shouldn’t be illegal. The Federal Government has not been granted the constitutional authority to pronounce certain substances legal or illegal, that is the whole point.

I have to ask Unwrong, are you a US citizen? The way you talk about this gives me the feeling that you might not be entirely familiar with how our system works, or is supposed to.

“As soon as you turn profit, as soon as you make one sale, your position ends.”

And then the position of the person buying it begins… and my entire argument is recapitulated in their stead. So I don’t quite understand your point. Do you mean to suggest that by entering into a voluntary commercial transaction with another adult human being who has sought out my services is somehow infringing upon their liberty or over-extending the gamut of that power invested to me by natural right? Because if there was no civilization as we know it, that is,- if we existed in a state of nature, to use the terminology of Hobbes- I could grow a drug, harvest it, and you could give me a piece of goat-meat for it and in this way pay me freely. That is what natural right means: anything that we can, as individuals, accomplish through our own power, without needing to call upon anything beyond that, or marshal the State to our ends. Plus, all the thousands of pages of Federal regulations (they deliberately bury the most pernicious elements of these regulations in 10,000 pages of banal tripe,- pernicious elements that carry the State’s real political intentions in passing these regulatory laws, which is simply to manipulate the economy in a way that convenient for them: thus they insidiously, and quite ingeniously, facilitate the rise of certain companies and the fall of others, simply by crafting these regulations to their purpose.) on commerce are tyrannical and illegal too.

The phenomenon of addiction is more related to psychiatric disorders and sociological problems than anything else. You seem to have this high-school DARE program view of drugs,- of a comically exaggerated junkie in your head. That’s a cartoon. I’d suggest that you read some papers on addiction both from a psychiatric and sociological perspective. At any rate: when you make a substance illegal, the people who will cultivate and/sell it to you are going to charge a 1000 percent markup due to the fact that they are breaking the law and putting themselves in great danger: you must pay them for taking the risk, not just for the substance. So the price of this substance becomes massively inflated. Combine that with the social taboos surrounding drugs and you create an underground into which you push people who are already disaffected and desperate: and as Dostoevsky tells us- everything that is pushed underground rots and putrefies; be it this, sexuality, or anything else.

I’m Citizen-enough to know common sense. When substances are sold to consumers, then it’s no longer a matter of “individual right”. It’s regulation of a drug. Are you implying that it could be ‘legal’ to sell narcotics to teenagers or kids? I presume you have a modicrum of common sense, to say no. Thus you refuted your own position, congratulations.

Once something, anything, turns into a commodity. It is no longer an “individual right” and then becomes subject to the rules and laws of commerce, which are in-fact, overseen, regulated, and monitored by the US government. If you don’t like it, then you can join Rand Paul and try to ‘free’ up a Libertarian society. Good luck with that, the vast majority of the voting public, want some regulations. This means rules, laws, illegality, and regulation, especially on mind-altering drugs, whether they are “recreational” or not.

Pharmaceuticals are one of, if not the biggest US industry. Perhaps they would side with you and your position. Haven’t they already? And haven’t they already put in billions of dollars into lawsuits to push and peddle their ‘drugs’?

Ask one of those corporations why you can’t buy, sell, and consume Oxycontin “freely” as is your “Constitutional Right” to do so. You should already know the end to this line of questioning.

You mention selling substances to underage children. I’m sorry, but what about alcohol and tobacco? Or any number of things? What are you talking about? Local state-level governments have the ability to regulate things of that nature. I won’t even bother saying anything more to that point, though it is difficult when you follow it up with “thus your argument refutes itself” like you got me or something. You understand that state-level and federal government are… not the same thing right? We’re talking about Federal government man. Individual states have the ability to regulate things like age of consent both in terms of sex and the use of drugs, but the federal government does not have the constitutional authority to pronounce drugs illegal. The drugs should all be legal at the federal level, and then individual states would create their own laws about what ages they can be sold to, the same as they do for alcohol and tobacco. From what you said in your post, it really doesn’t seem like you thought of that or were aware of how the State and Federal government are intended to interact in this manner, which is not a good thing. But you are not alone: almost nobody understands the actual rights the Constitution was intended to provide them with, nobody knows how much freedom they have lost; or not lost, for in legal terms it is still all right there where it was and will always be, ie. the Constitution;- freedom that has, to thus state it more apropos,- been taken from them,-- that has been stolen from them by men with guns and metal cages. Lick the steel boots of your captor and indulge your Stockholme syndrome as much as you want, for you are allowed to think as you like here. (Not in Europe!) But please, do so knowledgeably, because there is no way you could have been aware of what I just said in this paragraph and still have tired bringing up the line about children or people underage.

I would just add, going back to the outdated DARE-level understanding of the neuropsychiatric and sociological components of drugs and their users that your condescending and dismissive statements about those two things would apparently evince: the very notion of an illegal drug would have been insane to our founders. Throughout the entire history of the human race, there was no such thing, and only in modern times has this vicious cycle of addiction appeared because it is the creation of a horrible combination of sociological evils, tyrannical regulations, economic catastrophes, misunderstanding about the nature of drugs and their users, etc. etc. I hold in contempt those who would endorse these laws not only because it is a violation of our Constitution, but because the social consequences they have wrought have led to the creation of an entire secondary-citizen tier group of people who are shit on and stepped on every day after having already fallen through the cracks of this society. Not only should these substances not be illegal, but nearly-free clinics should be available with medical grade heroin, cocaine, etc. on site, twenty-four hours a day, to allow users to go in their, flash some kind of ID card and safely ingest their chosen substance at a facility administered to by trained nurses and doctors, at the expense of a kind of subscription service they would pay in advance in order to make use these clinics. Programs of that nature have already been experimented with and it turns out that drug users actually level off at a certain point and the vicious cycle of increasing dosages actually starts to reverse, plus they are able to continue functioning in a productive capacity, they don’'t magically spiral out of control and lose their job when their substance doesn’t cost 10,000 times more than it is worth, when the need to hide due to social taboo and the fear of imprisonment isn’t forcing greater and greater reliance on the oblivion induced by the narcotic so as to escape, when they don’t feel ashamed of themselves and need to keep using more and more just to avoid thinking about it, etc. etc. And those Pharm agencies you mention,- not only would they not side with me, but more: they work hand in hand with the Government in shaping their criminal regulatory pieces of illegitimate legislation. Why would they want a free society where anyone can encroach upon their business? And as long as they cut the Feds into their profit, why would the Feds stop working with them?

“Once something, anything, turns into a commodity. It is no longer an “individual right” and then becomes subject to the rules and laws of commerce, which are in-fact, overseen, regulated, and monitored by the US government. If you don’t like it, then you can join Rand Paul and try to ‘free’ up a Libertarian society. Good luck with that, the vast majority of the voting public, want some regulations”

It is all a dreary affair. The fact that you and the “majority” of this population have forgotten or simply never been taught the real power of the US legal framework, the very reasons for which this nation was born and our founders risked their lives in so creating it, and actually want to exchange your freedom for “security” so that you can feel safe- the fact that parents for example want the US government to run their little mandated public school psyops and essentially raise their own children for them so that they don’t have to worry or think about it … (Contributing in no small part to this: the fact that everyone just accepts their dwindling freedoms like it’s a virtue and basically thinks the same way about everything. That’s what happens when you have a single entity raising the children of an entire 300 million strong population.) it really doesn’t change anything about my argument does it? And most importantly: your argument is malformed, logically. I have an individual right to sell and grow something, you have an individual right to buy and use it. Now, if I were to create a company, and then start doing so industrially, that would fall under the sphere of certain powers invested to Federal government: but not to the extent that companies are regulated now, by various illegal federal agencies. And that doesn’t even take into consideration the fact that these substances should not be illegal in the first place, based solely on the constitutional affordances granted to the federal government in terms of their sphere of legitimate powers. Again, you didn’t seem to understand my argument, or be aware of how the Constitution differentiates the power invested to the Feds and the State: drugs should be legal, as a matter of Federal law, with each individual state in the US then creating their own internal regulations about what age they can be sold to, just as they do with regard to tobacco or alcohol.

Your arguments are all over the place. Don’t blame me for your lack of cohesion.

You went from Federally granted Individual-Human-Rights-Bestowed-By-God-As-Declared-By-Our-Constitution to State regulation of controlled substances as-if there aren’t countless gaps in-between.

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? Perhaps, and perhaps you can already do such, in the privacy of your own home and property. 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. You skip over the obvious. It should be illegal to sell drugs to kids. And because you agree, yes, you are trading “freedom for security”. Individual Rights are not absolute, despite your interpretation otherwise. Because all actions, affect all others, no matter how small they seem. When you create a powerful, addictive drug, yes it can destroy other people’s lives, especially when a drug-dealer intentionally moves his product for a profit.

The fact that you ignore the Pharmaceutical industry, demonstrates to me, that you’re not really serious about the most practical and relevant applications of your hypothetical position and argument.

Parodites is ~The Natural Living Man~

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuy_2Cq8HAA[/youtube]

Parodites exposed:

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahVfkwxy6aw[/youtube]

Great, so people on a philosophy site have now overtly turned against writing and reading. I saw something like this coming but to witness it is really… boring.

Don’t kid yourself, you wouldnt know what an argument is, let alone how to work through one. Like the other socialists who came in barking and went away with their tails between their legs, you weren’t even able to read the posts and are just seeking excuses to make to yourself for that.

You, Kropotkin, Tab, promethean, since I invited Parodites here to talk about memes, and he went out of his way to say some more stuff, people that before seemed to have pretty big intellectual egos, now just basically come out and say they don’t like or trust sentences with a lot of words in them. Its like Maos list of 9 with you guys, where the intellectuals were listed as the lowest specimens.

Now you post some video to, in your mind, shame a man for being a good and thorough writer, because you actually take pride in being half illiterate and in not knowing what the federal government is. Mao for the win.

Keep virtue-signalling. Peace.

Yes I was drunk , but like a Chinese Zen version of Socrates , I would like to get reinvolved in this very interesting topic. Sorry for giving you a wrong impression.

Added material:

The very perfunctory evidence against. a jump into constitutive material in support of the co injunction of principles with process (democratic) is contraindicated by said separation of Rights (bill of) from the economy to sustain them, -if the so called naturally derived rights have been transformed from inherited ones to materially earned ones.

The transcendence of formal dialectical objectives have been nullified by this as a result, and the question. Is beyond the principal derivation , of the dialectic, and transposed into the derivation of the of the Principle , or Capital.

This transposition to Democratic ideals, has reduced the coherency with Republiican ideals of the content of what Natural rights of Man are, Their ‘re-publican’ association literally evokes a prior state of what ‘natural’ means.

As Capital fails on a wide arrayed social ideal, it needs to expand markets , but only by sustaining present levels of social distribution of profits.

This process, or procedure is constitutionally left vague , and it is nothing else but a new version of hereditary rights. (For unlimited accumulation is structurally and effectively the same as it was before the ancien regime.

Successfully managed families of capital holding , do tend to resemble that , against which the Revolution was fought.

Logically, the illogic born of such process, tends to diminish the question of procedure, apparently based on an intentional connection, such that exists from Intentionality toward it’s cover- that which posits intention to a hidden transcendental , a far off in the future plan by designers who always meant to keep this monarchical rule, albeit in a different form. The support for this is found in the long term profitability of near term objectives . that this inversion. Is causing a constitutional dilemma of interpretation, does not occur to either party, and as such, tho contradiction becomes useful on many levels.

The disjunction of the logical synthesis demotes the illogic of natural rights, and raises it to the level of identifiable subsequent reification, thereby having everyone fooled.

This Is why the necessary executive interpretation. Is solididified , and it seems the only way to balance and compensate for the ever lowering expexrative short term objectives of the worker/producer.

I find that Nietzche’s approach of transvaluing moral philosophy into the social philosophy of Marx, has this contingent option to automatically shift public awareness into a relative safe harbor.

The end of a posteriori democracy therefore necessitated into an a priori alternative, gyneologically loaded, but only by the use of general principles.

Such was similar in the Democracy of archaic ideal states that come up in defense of.

Therefore , conventional wisdom rules, and social justice will suffer.
It is not a contestible view at this point, but a necessary development , whereupon ideal social philosophy of Marx can finally be put to rest.

For the record, my video was pertinent to the subject in the OP.

Regarding long text, in my opinion the problem with Parodites writing is not that it is long. It is that it’s absolutely monolithic.

Please note that I am not at all criticizing the content of the text.

In my own experience in writing (I was at a point in my life an academic), I have learned that in order to write well, you must be prepared to throw away 50-80% of what you write in order to create clear, coherent, and strong material. If you don’t, you run the risk of drowning the crux of your thought in your own verboseness.
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!

Admittedly I have prejudice about this as well, though in my defense I’ll say it is based on statistics.
If a person can’t break their text into paragraphs, it is possible that they can’t break their thoughts into paragraphs, and that signals a difficulty in organizing thoughts in a logical sequence.
Can’t know that without reading, of course, but if it looks dense both in content and structure, I’ll skip it.
I’d rather save my dense reading time for published work, which has already gone through the scrutiny of editing, than to spend it on a forum and at the end of parsing the whole mess to find that the dude is a quack and it was a waste of time. Time is precious.

Parodites, dude, I’m only typing this out because I think it can benefit you.
If you think I can help you with editing, let me know.

More of the same Phon. “Im not capable of processing all this thought and let me see how I could make it sound like my weakness is your weakness.” And to add to the insult, and bolster your own ego, you pretend youre doing the man a favour.

You’re not the firs to try this approach. Fact it that some things just are rather complex. Its the fact that it is now normal for people to dismiss complexity and literary discipline that the world goes to shit.

Parodites is evidently the best writer on this board. Id be quite ashamed before him of having invited him here, if he gave much of a shit. But he is just bored by how little counterplay he gets. The guy is tough.

The world is full of brilliant people who are terrible at communication, Fixed.
It’s a rather common problem among intelligent folks.

It does him no favor for you to defend his obvious fault, and instead allude to my inability to understand complex text.
The fact is that he can write 100 pages of brilliant arguments, but if it arrives to an editor as a solid mass of text, it will not publish. It won’t even be read.

Is it really, in your opinion, too much to ask of him to every now and then hit the ‘enter’ key?

I might put myself through the drudgery of reading one of his longer posts, on your word that it is indeed worth the time.

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

Phon - plenty of people here have already expressed admiration for his writing. Your modest intellectual capacities are not his fault, let alone obviously so.

Also this idea that you cant judge for yourself whether something is good, but have to rely on whether its published, that is like, only taking people seriously if they’re on tv. Not your friends, family, no they cant make sense, just your news anchor because he or she gets paid.

Anyway Im probably interfering here with P.

I want Phoneutria to respond to what I said. I already got in touch with publishers- three times during the last 10 years I have spent putting my 10-volume work together, so I already know that people can handle a large paragraph. Paragraphs have become these little four sentence blurbs in modern times, but I mean. It isn’t uncommon to have a paragraph go on for 1-3 entire pages without interruption in pre 1900s English writing. Proust had single sentences that ran that long. (What are you going to do with a 3-4 page long paragraph full of untranslated Latin quotations and academic jargon to boot Phone! I looked through your user posts and, you don’t really have anything. I am not trying to be aggressive but it is clear that this stuff isn’t your thing, so if you’re not interested in humbling yourself and learning like my signature says *Qui non intelligit, aut taceat, aut discat." and you also have no interest in this kind of academic level writing, then what do you want exactly? Arrogance in a female is one of the few truly unforgivable faults in their nature, and I would only suggest that you simply not make your asinine connection of anything I have said with the natural man thing if you are not willing to, again citing my signature: Be silent or learn. I searched through your entire user post record and it is very clear to me that this really isn’t your thing, so: Be silent or learn, or go back to whatever it is you do on this forum and don’t unnecessarily derail my thread. ) Does phoneutria, just. Is she not familiar with that? Anyway, I simplified my posts as much as possible in my last one, and I would like to see both Unwrong and Phoneutria respond to it. If you two still cannot understand what I am talking about after that, then I will have to politely suggest that you simply leave the thread.

Whether drugs are illegal via State or Federal laws is not the same topic or matter of fact whether you have an individual right to consume illegal substances by means of Constitutionally granted individual Rights, and especially not furthermore, by mere personal opinion as to the interpretation of those “God-given” rights, which was the center of your presentation and argument.

If you can’t stay-on-point, then no amount of convolution is going to help your case.

“Whether drugs are illegal via State or Federal laws is not the same topic or matter of fact whether you have an individual right to consume illegal substances by means of Constitutionally granted individual Rights,”

Yes… yes it is, man. Unwrong, it is the same topic. Jesus Christ. And the term is implicit right. I have an implicit right to self-medication, therefor: while an individual state can create internal legislation about the commerce associated with drugs, or with anything else, it cannot revoke my right to self medication, nor does the Federal government have the authority to revoke or modify any implicit or explicit right that I have, at least not without an Amendment that would grant it the extra power required to do so. Unwrong, the legality and constitutional viability of drug laws is the same topic as my implicit protections in using, buying, or selling said drugs. And Phoneutria, I will be waiting on your response.

And this isn’t my “interpretation.” Lets read the Bill of Rights unwrong:
[b]
"Article the eleventh… The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Article the twelfth… The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."[/b]

So the first one says that other rights are retained by we the people and the fact that the Bill, Constitution, and Declaration only have a few explicitly written down, should not be taken as implying that our implicit rights are any less protected. Then the second one there says that any power not granted to the Feds by the Constitution (like assigning drug laws) is what- what does it say? Reserved to the states. Any objection Unwrong?