Danger Is My Middle Name--And So Is Yours
Glenn Allport at Strike the Root - on the absurdity of criminalizing "dangerous" behavior, especially drug use, which is far less dangerous than many common activities. Of course we should all know that prohibition has nothing whatsoever to do with safety. It's all about power and money, just like everything else the state does. [root]
Given that the State has always been, by far, the most dangerous and deadly human invention, it is especially strange and distasteful that the State forces its alleged concern for our safety upon us at gunpoint. One might gauge the sincerity of this concern for human safety and well-being by observing the behavior of governments. For example, governments murdered over two hundred and sixty million people in the 20th Century, and waged dozens of wars in which millions more people died, and in which millions beyond that were maimed or injured or traumatized or impoverished or otherwise harmed. The United States dropped atomic bombs on the mostly civilian residents of two large Japanese cities and fire-bombed other cities in both the Pacific and European theaters during World War II, burning to death hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children in firestorms that did little if anything to help win the war. The U.S. government has killed 11,000 or more of its own citizens as a side effect of building and testing nuclear weapons, and continues to use radioactive and chemically poisonous depleted uranium in the Middle East and at target ranges in the United States and many other parts of the world. FDA-approved drugs and government-licensed and -regulated doctors kill, combined, perhaps 200,000 Americans per year -- and the list of government-caused death and misery goes on and on.
If I want safety advice, I'll get it from another source than coercive government, thank you.
