tom

That is all true. Read Terry Parssinen's "Webs of Smoke" for the gory
details.

However, it is a blunt fact that Chinese users happily consumed the
drug (poppies from India were considered best; chinese poppies were
low-grade), and as a result, their culture, pride, and manhood were
wasted. It left a cultural mark of shame that lasts to this day.

So the point is, maybe it's not so good for millions of people to get
high, regardless of the cause :-) I'm arguing that it's okay to do pot
only insofar as it is severely limited, by law and by cultural norms.


--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-request@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org

david palmer.

On Thu, 13 Nov 2003 15:15:18 -0800


It is also one of the major motivating factors for selling it back to
'the round eyes' these days. Or, so they have told me.


Having worked with street people for a lot of years, and having been
around a little myself, please let me elaborate on a point.
We live in an extremely alienating, fragmenting form of society. There
are reasons for this that I won't elaborate on because this is a precis
of the situation, and a full blown account would fill volumns.

There is no doubt that the world has arrived at a nadir, and the average
persons' existence has also come to the point where that is virtually
all it is.
There is a requirement to escape from an unpleasant scenario, and when
we feel powerless to bring about a positive change in our existence, we
have no choice but to do so. This escapism, varies with the individuals'
belief in their ability to deal with the reality within which they find
themselves. It may only be the requirement to identify with a character
in a book, to that last fit that drops them in the gutter. But it is all
escapism.

The environment is merely a reflection of the individual within it.
Until we are capable of bringing about a change in the way we think, we
are always going to be swimming in a cess-pool.

The worlds' history is full of examples of nations trying to change
nations, families trying to change families, individuals attempting to
change individuals, but the only revolution that counts, is effective in
any measure is the one within the individual, brought about by the
individual.

Until we mature enough as a species to assume the full responsibility of
our existence, our situation will never improve. Any employment of
escapism is merely a symptom of the disease. Cure the disease and the
symptoms will disappear.
Regards,

David.


--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-request@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org

ron johnson

It hasn't happened in the last 100k years, what makes you think
it will happen when there are 10x as many people now as there were
100 years ago, and there will be another 6-9B people in the next
45 years.

--
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Ron Johnson, Jr. ron.l.johnson@cox.net
Jefferson, LA USA

Spit in one hand, and wish for peace in the other.
Guess which is more effective...


--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-request@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org

alex malinovich

Familiar with the theory of (I might be off on the numbers) a million
monkeys, typing on a million typewriters for a million years? Maybe with
enough people, there will be enough of us "maturing" to achieve critical
mass? Or we're all completely off and have no idea what will actually
happen. (I'd put my money on the latter.

--
Alex Malinovich
Support Free Software, delete your Windows partition TODAY!
Encrypted mail preferred. You can get my public key from any of the
pgp.net keyservers. Key ID: A6D24837


-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.3 (GNU/Linux)

iD8DBQA/tI1vBPYwh6bSSDcRAl3BAJ0V86F/F3iMphLkbj4Bijc1Oa6KOQCeJp+w
mw0hQqKkhKF645UoCRbpR4c=
=pAqV
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

arnt karlsen

...9B more is manageable, and easier if mankind shares its wealth.
20B more, would be a "handful" on this planet. This will not happen,
as sharing a good life etc means mankind volonteers to back off on
breeding, capping the population at I guess 15B, and easing it down
to the long term sustainable 10B.

...carrying on like we do now on old fashion European combustion
technology and stolen oil, it'll peak at 8 to 12B and drop to 5 to .2B
in the next 2 decades, or if Bush stays in power, in his next term,
I'm guessing he and the RRR will try make their crusade nuclear,
to avoid war crime trials and death row.

--
...med vennlig hilsen = with Kind Regards from Arnt... ;-)
....with a number of polar bear hunters in his ancestry...
Scenarios always come in sets of three:
best case, worst case, and just in case.


--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-request@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org

tom

I recently discovered a couple of great sites:

http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/appeal-to-tradition.html
http://www.infidels.org/news/atheism/logic.html#antiquitatem

This one sounds like "Argumentum ad antiquitatem", or the "that's the
way it's always been" fallacy. Or, as they say in the Stock Market:
"past performance does not predict future results" :-)


--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-request@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org

alex malinovich

Are you referring to my post or the one I was replying to? I checked the
two links that you provided and, assuming you were, in fact, referring
to my post, I don't quite follow the logic I'm afraid. If that was the
case, could you elaborate please?

--
Alex Malinovich
Support Free Software, delete your Windows partition TODAY!
Encrypted mail preferred. You can get my public key from any of the
pgp.net keyservers. Key ID: A6D24837


-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.3 (GNU/Linux)

iD8DBQA/tKU8BPYwh6bSSDcRAgK1AJ9l7g481ei1gp9zL7PGhiILjrBHGw Cff7l8
P+oWtHXyIt6bmyHkJRvxqJc=
=fLDE
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

tom

The one you replying too, I'd already deleted Ron's post. Shoulda
snipped.

All this talk about drugs has got me missing the good old days. I'm
reading Brave New World, which apparently came out this year on Project
Gutenburg. Good old Soma :-)

I tell ya, if you've never had a dogbone or a football and a joint and a
cup of coffee on fine spring morning, you don't know what you're missing
:-) But now I've got to be all *good* Dammit


--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-request@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org

alex malinovich

Actually, I haven't and I therefore don't. And thanks for those links. I
just got done reading both. Some very interesting fallacies listed,
especially on the Atheism Web one. And speaking of fallacies:

You don't know what you're missing

This carries the implication that the topic at hand is in some way good.
But I could just as validly state that, "If you've never been shot in
the head with a shotgun you don't know what you're missing!". Because,
really, you wouldn't know what you were missing until after you'd
experienced it.

Or to go at it from a different angle, asserting that something is great
while under the influence of something that makes EVERYTHING seem great
tends to dilute the assertion. Now, if you can take an extremely potent
downer; one that will make you suicidal and make everything around you
seem terrible, and THEN still state that it's great, well THEN you're
lending at least a bit of extra strength to your statement.

As if we weren't OT enough to begin with, I come along and OT the OT
thread.

--
Alex Malinovich
Support Free Software, delete your Windows partition TODAY!
Encrypted mail preferred. You can get my public key from any of the
pgp.net keyservers. Key ID: A6D24837


-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.3 (GNU/Linux)

iD8DBQA/tKv+BPYwh6bSSDcRAmtwAJ9L8zMcDHYf7TN4SioB2hyx11L4cw CeNGKB
gkl6NdpAsOXpKFiKVaUty1s=
=ACIJ
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

juergen stuber

Alex Malinovich <demonbane@the-love-shack.net> writes:


That might be about enough to crack a single 64 bit secret key,
assuming each monkey takes a little more than a second per key.


Jürgen

--
Jürgen Stuber <stuber@loria.fr>
http://www.loria.fr/~stuber/


"se"


--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-request@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org