Vaishnav Sunil on Islamophobia; Mariam Memarsadeghi on the Iranian women's rights movement; Katherine Mangu-Ward on legalizing marijuana; Ryszard Legutko on democracy run amok
The medical literature becomes more anti THC every day. The psychiatrists and addiction people present articles every day on the bad effects of THC. The European literature shows that ANY THC causes impaired driving. This agrees with the old USN studies from the 1970s on why carrier pilots who had smoked THC within 7-10 days were crashing into the carriers. (Survivors only, which took a while to get enough). Marijuana appears to be more carcinogenic for lung cancer than tobacco. 30% of people who use any THC products in States where it is not prosecuted have THC abuse syndrome, ie are defined as "addiction". This is higher than ETOH by far. The few studies which claimed no bad effect suffered from lag issues, ie too soon to show the effect. ER visits from THC and MVA involving THC are high and rising in Colorado. Her article is an example of "both sides syndrome" not an exploration of the issue.
It would be a rather strange thing to count on, in my view - this important (and perpetual?) divide between British and American Muslims.
Going to the grocery store in my hometown, the one in the hood* that Mother likes to go to against mild family objection, because: it's nearer; mostly a little cheaper; she thinks the produce is better; it has the Sunmaid raisin bread an old lady prefers to Pepperidge Farm - I find I am frequently surrounded by women in full niqab. This is obviously pretty immaterial but overall, if I were pressed to say how it feels to be surrounded by sand people from Star Wars, it is much more like being alone, than not.
This calls to mind an NYT article or editorial that someone paraphrased to me the other day. It reflected the NYT's very recent interest in the possibilities of the immigration "issue" for selling papers, via a fake concern that engages readers of more than one stripe, the barn door being open, the fertility of the newcomers being what it is, and thus the issue now moot - by framing it in a slightly novel, tilted-90 degrees fashion - because it went something like this:
*We have all this immigration. (The denial period is, I guess, over - again, for fiscal reasons.)
*But we could *not* have it.
*Like, right now we could not have it.
*No supporting evidence for these prior 2 assertions, so the implied suggestion that if we continue to "have it" - then it must be that you guys "want it". (Because the citizenry is so in control, lol, gaslight much, NYT?)
*But if we don't have it, prepare for there to be "no people".
*Would you like that - "no people"?
*That's right - the population would stabilize somewhere north of 350 million people - which is "no people" in the NYT's view. 350 million = "no people".
*It would be like when you were a kid, remember, when there were no people?
*Not like now, when you go to the store and have the pleasant community feeling that arises when you are in the company of faceless black-clad women. That's "having people".
Rather than be kidded in this way, I think I'd just as soon the NYT went back to the old script: the newcomers are better than you, die and make way!
“His concern is with the tendency for politics to take over every sphere of life (religion, family, and so on) under liberal-progressive government.” I would expect politics to take over every sphere of life if every child were to be educated in a government school and every college student were to attend a government run college. What would politics be like in a country with no government schools? I’d like to know.
A commenting physician at the link notes that the "we don't have the studies because it being Schedule 1 you didn't make it available to us" is something of a red herring because the last thing in the world the cannabis industry wants is to be subjected to studies, and thus to the usual pharmaceutical regulation.
"It can be true that all the Muslims you know are reasonable."
There are studies that look at all the ways Americans are different from Europeans. Many are focused on why a policy in one country might not work so well in another (here).
More than once or twice I have heard the ways in which Musloms in US are much different than those un Europe. Why would anyone write some like Sunil did other than out of Islamophobia or sheer ignorance?
Memarsadeghi's essay says everything you need to know about Iran and how the U.S. deals with it: "The Biden administration has consistently pursued a policy of appeasement of the regime." In addition to her list of how we placate Iran, look no further the the game of chicken we're losing in the Red Sea to the Houthi/Iranians. Nothing coming on a hot mic about them!
My experience is that Marijuana doesn't affect hand eye coordination or reaction time, but does affect information processing and short term memory function. It is absolutely not a good idea to drive with it in your system.
Dosage and chemical variations make big difference. For dosage, it's similar to alcohol, a small amount with food leaves one fine to drive. Five shots of fireball in half an hour, not so much. But unlike alcohol, for smoking dried leaf product, different strains have been bred to express different concentrations and ratios of a number of distinct cannabinoids, and some of those will make people much more drowsy with dulled reflexes, while others are much more psychedelic and tend to produce altered perceptions and aural and visual hallucinations. And for the variety of processed preparations for vaporization or ingestion (such as gummies), there is now even a wider variety of compounds and products with cocktails of those compound in high concentration. This state of affairs makes it extremely challenging to have productive conversiations about the safety or danger of what only seems like a single drug but is actually a term that in practice now designates a whole family of powerfully psychoactive drugs, a situation complicated even more by how differently people react to them both in the short and long term.
There are only a few areas in American law where the right to engage in some very widely practiced activity has been reframed from a liberty right into a state- granted revocable privilege that can then be restricted by the state on an individualized basis according to one's demonstrated inability to conduct oneself in a safe manner, the best example being drivers licenses.
That approach seems slightly better to me than either prohibition or full legalization (or whatever 'decriminalization' is supposed to mean) , though still not all that great, but then again human nature means that there just aren't any good answers to these questions.
"I came away from her essay with the impression that for every study, there is an equal and opposite study. Depending on which study you choose to believe"
So many "debates" end this way. "Studies" are supposed to be the be all end all of "I'm the real empiricist, not just some dude with like an opinion man."
But there are studies showing whatever you want them to show, and if you were to debunk one or point to another one, the person your talking to simply moves onto another "study" until exhausted you just give up.
Sometimes one tries to point to some general principal or some empirical fact that agree with and then logic showing that it must invalidate any studies showing the perceived opposite, but its never enough. The ideologue is confident that somewhere in a DC think tank or University there exists "evidence" that it turns out their priors were right all along.
There are games to play with the sample size, the population, and also the trick of just repeatedly sampling until you get the results that you want. Eventually, the dice will go in your favor, and you can just use that sample for your paper and pretend like it was random. There is also the option of just sampling different but similar data sets until you just get the result that you want.
Mermarsadegi: Maybe just a bit of the failure of the US to continue with the agreement limiting Iran's progress toward accusation of nuclear weapons. This is hardly relevant now, but might-have-beens are might-have-beens.
Sunil: No reason to doubt the number for UK (it attracts a different kind d Muslim immigrant from the US) but it (or a similar number) is not relevant to the kind of policies I'm used to considering, like should building a Mosque near the 9/11 site be permitted, should the FBI have been permitted to question the presumed murderers of Khashoggi.
I think part of it is that the US labor market is more open, more robust, and less regulated. The result is higher levels of labor participation in the US, which helps encourage assimilation among all immigrant groups. In contrast, in Europe assimilation is more optional as the labor market itself is more optional to participate in. It's easier to get on the public dole and stay on it.
Also don't discount the fact that due to the lack of an establishment clause in European constitutions, the government provides funding for religious schools, Christian and Islamic alike.
Maybe there is a tipping point where the people go from somewhat deferential to the host culture, to a sense of power in relation to it. There’s obviously a numerical difference in the two countries’ percentages - and near-future percentages.
That is curious, if true. (I haven't seen similar polling in the US.)
At a first pass: maybe the UK presented a void, to be filled up with another religion, up to and including its most extreme exemplars. (Correct me, but I am vaguely aware, the Church of England became officially embarrassed by the word "Jesus" some time back; I think you can now be archbishop of Canterbury and an atheist, or at least agnostic, without much controversy?)
Whereas, in the US, though its practice is certainly degraded on may fronts, there is still a commitment to the old-time religion, that has somehow acted as a bulwark.
You know that you can edit your own comments, thru the ellipsis lower right & Edit.
Donald Tusk, the elite, EU approved democrat of Poland, to be rewarded with €60 bln, to spread to crony capitalists pushing gender ideology and globalization. And mild anti-Christianity, stronger pro abortion.
I think it's essentially that the Feds don't have the resources to enforce Federal drug laws everywhere all the time. If a state removes its possession laws then the chance of prosecution for possession goes way down. Very similar to illegal immigrant sanctuary laws.
Wickard only established that 'interstate commerce' is both a dessert topping and floor wax usable when Congress wants to pass a law.
The medical literature becomes more anti THC every day. The psychiatrists and addiction people present articles every day on the bad effects of THC. The European literature shows that ANY THC causes impaired driving. This agrees with the old USN studies from the 1970s on why carrier pilots who had smoked THC within 7-10 days were crashing into the carriers. (Survivors only, which took a while to get enough). Marijuana appears to be more carcinogenic for lung cancer than tobacco. 30% of people who use any THC products in States where it is not prosecuted have THC abuse syndrome, ie are defined as "addiction". This is higher than ETOH by far. The few studies which claimed no bad effect suffered from lag issues, ie too soon to show the effect. ER visits from THC and MVA involving THC are high and rising in Colorado. Her article is an example of "both sides syndrome" not an exploration of the issue.
It would be a rather strange thing to count on, in my view - this important (and perpetual?) divide between British and American Muslims.
Going to the grocery store in my hometown, the one in the hood* that Mother likes to go to against mild family objection, because: it's nearer; mostly a little cheaper; she thinks the produce is better; it has the Sunmaid raisin bread an old lady prefers to Pepperidge Farm - I find I am frequently surrounded by women in full niqab. This is obviously pretty immaterial but overall, if I were pressed to say how it feels to be surrounded by sand people from Star Wars, it is much more like being alone, than not.
This calls to mind an NYT article or editorial that someone paraphrased to me the other day. It reflected the NYT's very recent interest in the possibilities of the immigration "issue" for selling papers, via a fake concern that engages readers of more than one stripe, the barn door being open, the fertility of the newcomers being what it is, and thus the issue now moot - by framing it in a slightly novel, tilted-90 degrees fashion - because it went something like this:
*We have all this immigration. (The denial period is, I guess, over - again, for fiscal reasons.)
*But we could *not* have it.
*Like, right now we could not have it.
*No supporting evidence for these prior 2 assertions, so the implied suggestion that if we continue to "have it" - then it must be that you guys "want it". (Because the citizenry is so in control, lol, gaslight much, NYT?)
*But if we don't have it, prepare for there to be "no people".
*Would you like that - "no people"?
*That's right - the population would stabilize somewhere north of 350 million people - which is "no people" in the NYT's view. 350 million = "no people".
*It would be like when you were a kid, remember, when there were no people?
*Not like now, when you go to the store and have the pleasant community feeling that arises when you are in the company of faceless black-clad women. That's "having people".
Rather than be kidded in this way, I think I'd just as soon the NYT went back to the old script: the newcomers are better than you, die and make way!
“His concern is with the tendency for politics to take over every sphere of life (religion, family, and so on) under liberal-progressive government.” I would expect politics to take over every sphere of life if every child were to be educated in a government school and every college student were to attend a government run college. What would politics be like in a country with no government schools? I’d like to know.
A commenting physician at the link notes that the "we don't have the studies because it being Schedule 1 you didn't make it available to us" is something of a red herring because the last thing in the world the cannabis industry wants is to be subjected to studies, and thus to the usual pharmaceutical regulation.
"It can be true that all the Muslims you know are reasonable."
There are studies that look at all the ways Americans are different from Europeans. Many are focused on why a policy in one country might not work so well in another (here).
More than once or twice I have heard the ways in which Musloms in US are much different than those un Europe. Why would anyone write some like Sunil did other than out of Islamophobia or sheer ignorance?
Memarsadeghi's essay says everything you need to know about Iran and how the U.S. deals with it: "The Biden administration has consistently pursued a policy of appeasement of the regime." In addition to her list of how we placate Iran, look no further the the game of chicken we're losing in the Red Sea to the Houthi/Iranians. Nothing coming on a hot mic about them!
My experience is that Marijuana doesn't affect hand eye coordination or reaction time, but does affect information processing and short term memory function. It is absolutely not a good idea to drive with it in your system.
Dosage and chemical variations make big difference. For dosage, it's similar to alcohol, a small amount with food leaves one fine to drive. Five shots of fireball in half an hour, not so much. But unlike alcohol, for smoking dried leaf product, different strains have been bred to express different concentrations and ratios of a number of distinct cannabinoids, and some of those will make people much more drowsy with dulled reflexes, while others are much more psychedelic and tend to produce altered perceptions and aural and visual hallucinations. And for the variety of processed preparations for vaporization or ingestion (such as gummies), there is now even a wider variety of compounds and products with cocktails of those compound in high concentration. This state of affairs makes it extremely challenging to have productive conversiations about the safety or danger of what only seems like a single drug but is actually a term that in practice now designates a whole family of powerfully psychoactive drugs, a situation complicated even more by how differently people react to them both in the short and long term.
There are only a few areas in American law where the right to engage in some very widely practiced activity has been reframed from a liberty right into a state- granted revocable privilege that can then be restricted by the state on an individualized basis according to one's demonstrated inability to conduct oneself in a safe manner, the best example being drivers licenses.
That approach seems slightly better to me than either prohibition or full legalization (or whatever 'decriminalization' is supposed to mean) , though still not all that great, but then again human nature means that there just aren't any good answers to these questions.
"I came away from her essay with the impression that for every study, there is an equal and opposite study. Depending on which study you choose to believe"
So many "debates" end this way. "Studies" are supposed to be the be all end all of "I'm the real empiricist, not just some dude with like an opinion man."
But there are studies showing whatever you want them to show, and if you were to debunk one or point to another one, the person your talking to simply moves onto another "study" until exhausted you just give up.
Sometimes one tries to point to some general principal or some empirical fact that agree with and then logic showing that it must invalidate any studies showing the perceived opposite, but its never enough. The ideologue is confident that somewhere in a DC think tank or University there exists "evidence" that it turns out their priors were right all along.
There are games to play with the sample size, the population, and also the trick of just repeatedly sampling until you get the results that you want. Eventually, the dice will go in your favor, and you can just use that sample for your paper and pretend like it was random. There is also the option of just sampling different but similar data sets until you just get the result that you want.
Mermarsadegi: Maybe just a bit of the failure of the US to continue with the agreement limiting Iran's progress toward accusation of nuclear weapons. This is hardly relevant now, but might-have-beens are might-have-beens.
Sunil: No reason to doubt the number for UK (it attracts a different kind d Muslim immigrant from the US) but it (or a similar number) is not relevant to the kind of policies I'm used to considering, like should building a Mosque near the 9/11 site be permitted, should the FBI have been permitted to question the presumed murderers of Khashoggi.
I think part of it is that the US labor market is more open, more robust, and less regulated. The result is higher levels of labor participation in the US, which helps encourage assimilation among all immigrant groups. In contrast, in Europe assimilation is more optional as the labor market itself is more optional to participate in. It's easier to get on the public dole and stay on it.
Also don't discount the fact that due to the lack of an establishment clause in European constitutions, the government provides funding for religious schools, Christian and Islamic alike.
Careful, that veers dangerously close to received wisdom about the value of a job to a man - which is definitely not an economist-approved sentiment.
Maybe there is a tipping point where the people go from somewhat deferential to the host culture, to a sense of power in relation to it. There’s obviously a numerical difference in the two countries’ percentages - and near-future percentages.
That is curious, if true. (I haven't seen similar polling in the US.)
At a first pass: maybe the UK presented a void, to be filled up with another religion, up to and including its most extreme exemplars. (Correct me, but I am vaguely aware, the Church of England became officially embarrassed by the word "Jesus" some time back; I think you can now be archbishop of Canterbury and an atheist, or at least agnostic, without much controversy?)
Whereas, in the US, though its practice is certainly degraded on may fronts, there is still a commitment to the old-time religion, that has somehow acted as a bulwark.
That is interesting and could not be explained by anything on this end.
You know that you can edit your own comments, thru the ellipsis lower right & Edit.
Donald Tusk, the elite, EU approved democrat of Poland, to be rewarded with €60 bln, to spread to crony capitalists pushing gender ideology and globalization. And mild anti-Christianity, stronger pro abortion.
I think it's essentially that the Feds don't have the resources to enforce Federal drug laws everywhere all the time. If a state removes its possession laws then the chance of prosecution for possession goes way down. Very similar to illegal immigrant sanctuary laws.
Wickard only established that 'interstate commerce' is both a dessert topping and floor wax usable when Congress wants to pass a law.
They perhaps have bigger fish to fry. Here was a recent operation in my state:
https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndtx/pr/17-charged-abilene-drug-bust
ETA: And Abilene, which should be a pleasant enough town, does indeed have a zombie wasteland feel.