you're not very good at this thinking thing, are you?

here, i'll explain it in simple terms for you:

because cocaine use was perceived (rightly or wrongly) as being mostly used by blacks, marijuana by mexicans, opium by the chinese. the original banning of cocaine, for example, was "justified" with lots of propaganda about cocaine-fueled blacks raping white women.

it demonises the users (and their entire race or subculture - "dirty hippies") and gives the cops an excuse to arrest them and the courts an excuse to convict and sentence them....and for the last few decades with for-profit privatised prisons it's a way to legally enslave them.

(it's not just corrupt cops and politicians and high-level drug dealers who are against legalisation of drugs, the private prison lobby is dead set against it because legalising drugs would greatly reduce the number of potential slaves)

it's not the USE of the drugs that suppresses people, it's the fact that certain drugs associated with particular subcultures were made illegal - the same way, for example, that banning rap or hiphop music (while laudable in itself) would disproportionately affect black people. or, for a real world example, the refusal to play black music like jazz on radio until whites like presley started appropriating it in the 1950s.

Most voters are deeply reactionary (in the sense that they are very reluctant to accept any change from status quo, whether good or bad), and the current view of most ordinary people is that 'drugs are bad'.

that's largely because of nearly a century of anti-drug propaganda.

same as socialism is now a dirty word in america, but up until the 1940s it was still a large and fairly mainstream political movement.

non-stop propaganda is effective.

Drug barons

a very loaded propaganda term in itself, guilt by association with your monopolist robber barons.

Legalising drugs in any form would hurt their business

which, of course, is one the many reasons why drugs should be legalised. it's reason enough in itself, without even considering the human rights issues involved.

you know, nobody in the entire history of the world has EVER seen or heard drug dealers talk or act like that outside of moronic american movies and TV. it just doesn't happen, ever.

that's because addiction doesn't fucking work like that. it takes a lot more than a few hits of ANY drug to addict someone - and even then the addiction potential has a lot more to do with social and environmental conditions (like poverty, or hopelessness) than it has to do with the drugs themselves.

get yourself fucking educated on the topic before opening your idiot mouth.

no, your government bans drugs because it's a useful way of suppressing blacks, mexicans, chinese, hippies, dissidents and other undesirables.

it's also a great way of disenfranchising them from their vote when posession is treated as a felony.

it's nice to see the americans in the crowd demonstrating their unrivaled capacity for insightful and witty commentary. thank you for your valuable contribution to the discussion.

"benefits" are something that undeserving human scum get due to society caving in to their entitlement issues.

"bennies" OTOH are something entirely different, something that nice people get as a reward for their talent, hard work, and general awesomeness.

it's not surprising that he'd want to avoid applying the bad word to himself - a lot of money has been spent on cultural programming to achieve that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...

no, but 10000 cases because of all the fuckwit anti-vaxers would be.

because vaccines have been so successful, people have forgotten how deadly and devastating diseases like mumps, measles, rubella, polio, smallpox and many others *were* - note that past tense, they were major killers now they're almost non-existant. however, they'd make a comeback if people stopped vaccinating against them.

the idiot population focuses on self-serving fake research like Wakefield's "vaccination leads to autism" bullshit and on the one in a million that has a bad reaction to vaccines, whilst completely ignoring the millions who are prevented from being killed or cripppled or born deformed because of easily preventable diseases.

vaccinating against diseases serves a useful, life-saving, purpose. it works for those who are immunised and it also works for those who, for whatever reason, can't be vaccinated (or the vaccination didn't work - e.g. vaccines often don't work for transplant patients because of the drugs they have to take to suppress their immune systems to prevent rejection) because it reduces their risk of exposure.

otoh, vaccinating against drugs is just inflicting someone else's "morality" on people.

yeah, but that doesn't matter because it'll be in the next financial quarter - and management can always fire a few more workers to cover the difference.

the borg only "exist" so that the star trek universe could remain happily socialist whilst still giving american viewers an evil communist menace to fear.

(also, the zombie obsession is ultimately a reflection of american paranoia about fifth-column infiltration by communists....any contact - or a bite, in the case of the zombie commies - with them and their insidious ways will doom you to become one of the enslaved communist hordes)

That's a lot of projects created to replace something that didn't need fixing. Seems to me there must have been a lot of affected people, not "a vanishingly small number" to make all those projects happen.

and NONE of them (with the possible exception of upstart because it was the default on ubuntu) gained a "market-share" of more than a few percent *UNTIL* systemd forced itself on people by becoming a hard dependency for consolekit/logind, gnome, and soon udev.

that indicates to me that whatever problems sysvinit might have, they're not annoying enough for most people to care about....and certainly not annoying enough to do anything about.

Sysvinit requires a f'ing shell to operate.

no, it doesn't. there's nothing in sysvinit that requires init.d scripts to be shell scripts - they can be perl or python or anything else. they don't even have to be scripts, they can be compiled binaries.

the fact is that people write shell scripts - for sysvinit and for other tasks - because it's an easy and convenient language to write in.

ps. sysvinit isn't the only alternative to systemd. there are others, like openrc, that offer the fairly trivial init & cgroups features of systemd without the huge disadvantages of monolithic borging of networking, logging, ntp, udev, login etc.

the two most important things you're forgetting are a) that 99% of that functionality is in the kernel, not systemd and b) it's possible to have an init system that assists configuration and use of those kernel features without borging dozens of other unrelated functions (like logging, ntp, networking, firewall, udev, consolekit, and many more)...openrc manages to do that, for example.

if systemd restricted itself to just init+cgroups, it wouldn't be hated anywhere near as much as it is - because there would be nothing to really hate.

where the fuck do these idiot boosters get their moronic examples of how wonderful IoT would be? nobody would want their fridge to turn off if the electricity price went up.

my fridge needs to keep things cold even if the price of electricity goes up for a few hours.....ruining hundreds of dollars worth of food to save 10 cents on electricty is not a good idea. food poisoning's no fun, either.

it doesn't have to be conscious and deliberate to be propaganda. simcity definitely pushes specific beliefs about how cities work and people behave. to play the game, you have to internalise those beliefs, at least for as long as you're playing.