Pat Robertson Calls For Relaxed Marijuana Possession Laws

[saras]

47. It's why I don't let other people define my movements - especially long-dead people

Alcohol prohibition wasn't completely a fiasco - the problem it attacked (GIGANTIC amounts of hard liquor used to control the working class) got solved. Some OTHER problems showed up, as the rich were completely unwilling to go along, wanting a separate law for the poor, and youth culture, a new thing to the West at the time, was as susceptible to lifestyle advertising - smoking and drinking - as they are now. We had just invented the teenager, although we hadn't named them yet.

The thing about progressivism (assuming that such a thing exists anywhere but in the minds of the enemies of individual progressives - isms are an intrinsically antiprogressive way of organizing one's thinking) is that it doesn't have an overriding principle or direction except to start where you are and make things better. There's no guarantee that's a linear path, much as there's no guarantee that democratic voters are always educated enough to make good choices. Likewise, being a true Democrat means supporting the democratic choice of stupid, antidemocratic laws, or asserting that you actually have other principles than democracy that you think should overrule in this instance. In a country with no mass media and no advertising, I'd probably be a democrat, unless they had an anti-majoritarian diversity party.

One thing that really baffles me about conservatives is their insistence on hanging on to REALLY old ideas, and the individuals connected with them, as though there is a real cultural phenomenon that living people participate in, called Darwinism, for example. It's a bizarrely unrealistic way of trying to understand others' positions, rather like insisting that Newtonian astrology is all as true as his mechanics, and that you can't use one without the other.

Herbert Hoover had a "progressive" label tacked on him. Wikipedia calls him a leading conservative. As fixed political positions, they are mutually exclusive. But - given his background, Hoover could be considered "progressive" in that he was attempting to be more liberal than his background. He was also a mining engineer, which has always been a horribly antiprogressive, environmentally destructive business. And there's this fabulously progressive quote: If a man has not made a million dollars by the time he is forty, he is not worth much."

But in the real world, who or what Hoover was matters about as much as what Beowulf was.

Yeah, labels are really helpful.

Back at the beginning of the twentieth century, progressives made a couple of gigantic mistakes. One was to believe that corporate culture was malleable enough to be directed towards human progress, and the other was to believe that large institutions could be made as humane as they could be made precise. They were wrong on both counts. Medicine turned to eugenics, psychology turned into industrial behaviorism, industrialists turned to fascism, and by the end of the thirties most progressives had moved far beyond that, into exploring socialism.

The rest of America STILL believes that corporate culture is malleable enough to be directed towards human progress, and that bigger and more "efficient" is better.

And, BTW, I enforce a private "prohibition" around my personal space. I just cannot stomach drunks, in any capacity. When the human goes away (about 1 1/2 to 2 drinks) I just find the hairless monkeys that are left to be really revolting and unattractive, and they intuitively sense my dislike and start throwing poo. So I tend to sympathize with the goals of prohibition. I don't want to FORBID alcohol, I want to live among people who have outgrown (not repressed) the need for it.