[ExI] playing psychologist

[John Clark]

On Sun, Aug 26, 2018 at 4:44 PM William Flynn Wallace <foozler83 at gmail.com>
wrote:

>
> I just have this one question for anarchists:  if you are totally opposed
> to socialism in any form, then we have to get rid of police departments,
> fire departments, street, food inspection and dozens more
>

At one time I was very big on Privately Produced Law and Private Protection
Agencies and I still think if we were starting from scratch that would be a
much better direction to go than where we are now, but the trouble is we
are very far from starting from scratch and once a standard has been
established its extremely difficult to change it. There is almost no chance
of completing such a radical change before the Singularity and without
copious amounts of blood flowing in the streets. So like it or not we're
pretty much stuck with the nation state system. Due to the vast amounts of
legacy software we can't switch to a brand new operating system at this
late date, so all we can do now is slap on the newest patch when things
crash and hope for the best.

>
> Re heroin and other drugs - I used to all for total personal
> responsibility and no laws at all about what one can put in one's body, who
> one can have sex with, and all the rest.  I have changed just a bit as a
> result of my early career in clinical psych:  there are drugs, and I would
> include heroin, crack, and meth, that are just too potent and too many
> irresponsible people who would not only ruin their own lives, but the lives
> of their spouses and children.  I hate making them illegal, but there is
> just too much temptation for many people.


But the choice isn't between people using dangerous drugs or making them
illegal because making them illegal will never stop people from using drugs
it just means you've abandoned the best way to regulate them and make a
very dangerous thing a little safer. I doubt there is a person on the
planet who would like to become a Heroin junkie but can't because he can't
find any Heroin due to it being illegal. And I've never even smoked a
marijuana cigarette but no drug relieves pain better than Heroin so I can
envision circumstances where it would be wise for me to become a junkie, if
I were diagnosed with terminal bone cancer for example. Thanks to the war
on drugs millions of people have died in far greater agony than was
necessary.

 John K Clark









>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20180827/8e01a939/attachment.html>