Drugs. We’re Hoping You Don’t Know Anything.
"I don't need no drugs in my system 'cause my dancing and didge sets me free."- Bruce AKA Boy BC.
Reading through the material the Australian government has provided to the public as part of various drug campaigns has been very effective in both testing my patience and draining my hope that policy disgraces of this variety can't persist for much longer. The fact that these campaigns are not subject to any serious scrutiny seems to suggest a level of misinformation about drugs that surprises even me. How anyone could process this shit and not be left at the very least confused is something I am having difficulty comprehending. To better illustrate what exactly I mean, here's some of the content on heroin from the most recent government mindfuck, entitled "Where's Your Head At?" (An understandable question).
Heroin is an 'opioid', which is a term that refers to substances similar to the drug morphine. Street heroin is mixed with other substances, such as glucose, caffeine, sugar and paracetamol. These additives can be dangerous when added to heroin.
Hold your questions, there's more...
Because there's no way to tell the purity of heroin being used, users can't gauge the amount they are taking and can accidentally overdose. Heroin overdose is one of the leading causes of death in Australia in 18 to 34 year-olds, and non-fatal overdoses are common amongst heroin users.
Other than perhaps the imprecise definition contained within the first sentence, this is accurate information. That is, information about the heroin supplied illegally under current conditions. It conveniently ignores two simple questions. Why is street heroin mixed with other dangerous substances, and why is there no way to tell the purity of heroin being used? The answers to these questions are simple (The market is furious), yet they expose the huge flaws in the conclusions that the government is attempting to convince the reader to accept. From that point, the real causes of the drug problem that don't receive any form of acknowledgement in the campaign materials at all become easily identifiable. The agenda falls apart from there, and the most important question of all eventually arises-
Wouldn't it be more effective to legalise all drugs?
Of course, getting that far also means the realisation that by maintaining a policy of drug prohibition the government is willingly causing countless preventable deaths. Oh dear!
Popularity: 18% [?]
We’re not red-headed stepchildren, so stop acting like it
Yeah, like every other dickhead with a keyboard I've decided to throw my own two cents of take on this whole Good vs Evil battle that's going down between the Opus-Dei, God's on our side Theocracy side of the Liberal party (Known colloquially as the 'uglies' or as my co blogger calls them, the 'fucked right') versus the Alex Hawke is basically Von Mises with better dental care and hair gel faction (or as my co-blogger calls them, 'my faction').
Jake's made me really angry because he's absolutely spot on in this blog post. I'm no member of the Liberal party, and that's not just because I have an aversion to being a joiner of things. He's absolutely spot on and correct in that, there are literally thousands of people out there like me, or people sympathetic to the cause of Liberty, but they are grotesquely outnumbered in Australia. This symbolic victory may lead to more stacks, more brainwashing of first years to the great *insert cause here*, but it means absolutely sweet, fuck-all.
Apart from the fact that the Australian public has shown time and time again that they are too comfortable with the concept of the government looking after them (We're a convict colony, for fuck's sake, we're used to asking the big boss man for permission to go hang a slash), this is no real victory for any solid friend of liberty. Sure the fucked right would like to slander anonymously on blogs, calling my ex-girlfriend a whore and my best mate a fucked libertarian, again, showing how lackluster their parsing of reality truly is.
And sure, the other right fires back, throwing allegations of membership of certain cults, irritation at gays and women and pointing out that Jessica Noot has a face shaped alarmingly like the moon (And similar in size, to boot!), but this is again the acts of drunken children pissing on a car-fire. It may seem exciting and it may seem to be something utterly flabbergasting, but it serves no real purpose and is generally frowned upon.
Putting aside the normal allegations against Mr Clarke of wanting to be the 'big man on campus', those who now celebrate the victory of the 'moderate right' need to seriously re-evaluate their positions. As Jake so succinctly put it, you're living in servitude. To those libertarians who have been sold a a bridge and have swiftly and eagerly sold themselves out in order to get ahead in politics, to those people who have sold out their integrity and their morals, you absolutely disgust me. To those who stay silent on matters of health, life and civil liberties, you are what has allowed things to get this bad. You holding your tongue and not standing up for what you believe in has put us in this situation.
This is not a battle of good versus evil, this is the lesser of two evils. For those women who read this (Analytics can smell your perfume, you dazzling beauties), I totally grok your position on the fucked right, they want to fuck with your life, they want to label you as less than human, they want to take away your right to control your own body, they want to take away your right to control your own destiny. I get that, and it fucks with me on a fundamental level, to the degree that I feel an utter wave of sadness and disgust when I read over some of the things they are saying. This is the problem, you have won a minor victory, but at the cost of your integrity.
It seems to be a continuous joke in the comment threads of posting as people with their homepage as the CDP or the LDP, as if this is some brilliant new destructive call on someone, to the degree of calling them a LINO/RINO. These poor attempts at humour are the sad refuge of individuals as devoid of humour as they are of a grasp on reality. If these individuals are supposed to be the apparent future of one of the major political parties in this country, there really is reason for cynicism and no reason for hope.
If those of you who claim to be libertarians continue to act in such a hobbled way and continue to act in such a politically expedient way by lobotomising what you feel morally compels you to hold such beliefs under the misguided notion that 'once we get into power we'll change it all', you'll just destroy whatever miniscule chance liberty had in Australia. When there is so tenuous a heartbeat remaining of the concept that you value and love the most in your being, why would you ever want to compromise?
Popularity: 16% [?]