The best way to change that is to legalize all personal drug use. If the War on Drugs was successful at accomplishing any of its stated goals then we could have a debate about this, but it isn't, and no honest person who looks into the matter would conclude otherwise. Anyone who wants to do drugs can easily obtain them.

The only things we can control are whether criminal gangs or legitimate businesses will profit from this, and whether law enforcement gets to keep its single biggest excuse for militarizing itself. The idea that we can stop people who want drugs from using them is a dangerous fantasy with staggering social costs and always has been.

If you really want to minimize the impact of the portion of drug users who are irresponsible, a small fraction of what we spend now could be put towards treating it as a public medical/mental health issue, not a criminal/law-enforcement issue. Treatment can be offered to those who need it. Legal drugs would be cheap, plentiful and unadulterated, making their use safer and removing the incentive for the worst of addicts to rob and steal to obtain them. It would also go a long way towards creating the expectation that people should be responsible adults who do not need to be told how to live by a paternalistic government that parasitically profits from their problems.

I can't speak for that poster but I can guess why he spelled it that way. "Liberal" used to mean something more like "libertarian" before its meaning was perverted and distorted from "liberal exercise of civil rights" to mean "liberal imposition of government power". Sometimes the term "Classical Liberal" is used in an attempt to reverse this deliberate and underhanded confusion.

Even "libertarian" itself has been deliberately distorted from "advocates a small government limited to a) public works, b) national defense, and c) law enforcement and those things only, imposing only those restrictions which are truly necessary for a healthy society" to its new co-opted meaning of "anarcho-capitalist who wants even police to be private security that not all can afford". The intent there is obvious: change it from something hard to really argue against to something easily demonized that most people will learn to dismiss without thought or examination.

You'll find that the more an ideal threatens the use and expansion of power, the more propaganda is applied to change the meaning of words until they finally represent the very opposite of what they once stood for. It's the real-life equivalent of George Orwell's Newspeak. The "languages evolve so absolutely every change is totally legitimate and should never be resisted!" crowd are more or less Satan's little helpers here. Like most of Satan's little helpers, they think they're doing a good thing and would be horrified to see the money changing hands, the intentional authors of propaganda (called "PR"), and the concept of "manufactured consent" that established itself in this nation during the days of Woodrow Wilson.

So anyway, I read that to mean "ill-liberal" as in "not liberal" and certainly not "Classical Liberal" like what that word once meant.

That's generally a bug, not a feature. You seem to like this show so you are probably inclined to tell us how they got it right, but still. This aspect is rarely done well in any show.

But to comprehend that, people would have to actually read and understand something before deciding to be against it ...

With a few rare medical exceptions, people who can take responsibility for their own actions generally don't get fat in the first place. If they do at all, it's only a little, then they say "oh guess I need to correct this" and it never becomes a real problem.

It's a truly weak and spineless person who cannot take charge of their own life, including identifying and effectively working to change one's own weaknesses and shortcomings. Excuses and explanations for why something's not your fault (as though fault and blame had anything to do with what needs to be done) are so much less effort. This childish preoccupation with blame and how to escape it prevents people from realizing how much an individual can change.

This is one of those things the older generations generally understood that the younger ones generally do not. This represents a devolution of the society. And yes, I have personally made major changes in my life. I did this more than once precisely because I didn't give a shit about blame and fault. What I cared about is what actions I could take to manifest real change. I was proud to call something "my fault" because that meant I had the power to change it. What I can do, I can also learn not to do. I didn't have this infantile desire to escape blame and garner sympathy from others to make myself feel better. I felt better by fucking doing something about it.

It's called growing up and being a man or being a woman, taking responsibility like actual adult people do. Why, this might even include the foresight to take a hint and embrace a healthier lifestyle when you're only a little overweight, instead of waiting until you're morbidly obese to conclude that what you are doing isn't working. This kind of adulthood is an increasingly rare sight. This does not bode well. You now have an entire culture that rejects this idea rather than viewing it like a best friend and an ally. The culture can feel however they want; no one escapes the actual cause-and-effect. There is no way a morbidly obese person feels better day-to-day than a healthy person. All of the "fat acceptance" in the world won't change that reality. But you can work with reality instead of demanding that people make you feel good about denying it just for the sake of inoffensiveness and phony blamelessness.

That businesses are capable of projecting the long-term impacts of various options and then, based on that data, make decisions that are intended to increase their own revenues is not a "conspiracy theory". Now maybe the GP poster is correct and maybe he is misinformed -- that is to be settled by actually looking into the subject, not by hand-waving and insisting that no speculation you dislike could possibly be true. There is nothing he has said that violates the laws of physics or is inconsistent with the observed behavior of other businesses.

This kind of planning is mysterious and ominous only to people who never engage in any medium-to-long-term planning in their own lives. Considering the long-term repercussions of a sale is simply being smart. Dealers like to make money just like other businesses. They'd rather you come to them frequently for profitable service than infrequently or not at all. There's nothing absurd about that.

Yes, there is. Apply a simple test: is he being promoted by one of the two major parties? If yes, then he is not genuine.

There has been no meaningful exception since Kennedy. The way that ended simply proved what could happen if the candidate double-crosses the monied interests (the real power) that got him into office.

I've met more than one person with a high IQ who possessed neither the emotional maturity to perform any sort of introspection nor the courage of character to think for themselves and question everything that someone else taught them to believe. People like this are shrewd and highly effective at getting what they want but have all the same unwise, shallow, and childish tendencies/priorities so common in the rest of the population.

But I'm really not surprised that the police departments find intellectual ability undesirable. I would assume that obedience is their favorite trait, followed by the belief that what is legal is always exactly the same thing as what is right.

Does that place him on their payroll? And, what happens if he immediately responds to that by resigning?

The nation is full of people who cannot even control their own waistlines, let alone something with a will of its own like this.

I really hope people are waking up and deciding to stop being so passive and unwilling to take a little responsibility. I really do hope so. If that is happening, it's not the sort of thing that would get reported by the mainstream corporate media. After all, that might encourage it.

Because the police state apparatus could not function if these people remembered their humanity.

"Seized the records" probably means the same thing it means when individuals are raided for computer crimes: grab all hard copies, all hard drives, and all other electronic storage media believed to be holding said records.

Maybe the next Snowden works for one of these police departments.

What I wonder every time I see this: do the law enforcement officers involved ever think something like, "wow, by doing this I become one of the jack-booted thugs working hard to bring tyranny and corruption to this nation!" Are they complete myrmidons? Are they "true believers" who really managed to convince themselves this is all for some kind of nebulous greater good? Are they simply sociopaths with no conscience? Are they somehow brave enough to take on an armed criminal yet too cowardly to refuse bullshit orders?

What exactly goes through their minds? That's what I wonder.

Only those who wish to force their beliefs on others have an obligation to back them up.