On the Border of Madness (Today's Inquisition: War on Drugs)

[bronco61]

MRAT,

I don't believe there's a person on this forum that believes you could became a LEO while you were "vehemently" against the war on drugs. How could you possibly enforce laws which you felt were unjust? Two things had to happen:

1. You did not perform the full duties of your job (which means that you turned a blind eye on drug users and drug traffiking) until after you changed your feelings about the WO(s)D's.

or

2. Even though you were "vehemently" against the WO(s)D's, you were fully capable of performing duties against the very citizens you claim to protect and defend purely to maintain your paycheck.

I sure hope answer #1 is you. If your answer is #2 then it is completely obvious that no matter what your logic, moral beliefs, or constitutional beliefs of our Second Amendment are, you'll be beating down our doors with will-full glee should we lose this "right".

I myself had the opportunity to become a LEO in my college years, but changed my mind after driving with my cousin who is a LEO. I, personally could not put people in jail or trample on people's constitutional rights for a paycheck.

Please tell me sir, that you do NOT reside in Alaska!! It will make me sleep better at night.

[LawDog]

Enough.

I just shut the other thread down for personal attacks, it won't bother me in the least to shut this one down, too.

LawDog

[Cato]

posted by Munroe Williams:
>>In Japan there truly is a total war on drugs. This is one of the main reasons that they're wiping us out industrially and economically. Making machine tools leaves little room for error, and no room for the bland contentment with mediocrity that typifies the USA of today.>>

You do realize that Japan isn't a real western democracy but one of the worst police states? Here is what David Kopel writes about Japan http://www.i2i.org/SuptDocs/Crime/Ja...un_Control.htm
>>>>>>>
Illegal gun possession, like illegal drug possession, is a consensual offense. There is no victim to complain to the police. Accordingly, in order to find illegal guns, the Japanese police are given broad search and seizure powers. The basic firearms law permits a policeman to search a person's belongings if the officer judges there is 'sufficient suspicion that a person is carrying a fire-arm, a sword or a knife' or if he judges that a person 'is likely to endanger life or body of other persons judging reasonably from his abnormal behavior or any other surrounding circumstances'.[32] Once a weapon is found, the policeman may confiscate it. Even if the confiscation is later admitted to be an error, the firearm is sometimes not returned.[33](p.29)

In practice, the special law for weapons searches is not necessary, since the police routinely search at will. They ask suspicious characters to show them what is in their purse or sack.[34] In the rare cases where a policeman's search (for a gun or any other contraband) is ruled illegal, it hardly matters; the Japanese courts permit the use of illegally seized evidence.[35] And legal rules aside, Japanese, both criminals and ordinary citizens, are much the more willing than their American counterparts to consent to searches and to answer questions from the police.[36]

'Home visit is one of the most important duties of officers assigned to police...' explains the Japanese National Police Agency. In twice-a-year visit, officers fill out Residence Information Cards about who lives where and which family member to contact in case of emergency, what relation people in the house have to each other, what kind of work they do, if they work late, and what kind of cars they own.[37] The police also check on all gun licensees, to make sure that no gun has been stolen or misused, that the gun is securely stored, and that the licensees are emotionally stable.[38]

The close surveillance of gun owners and householders comports with the police tradition of keeping close tabs on many private activities.[39] For example, the nation's official year-end police report includes statistics like 'Background and Motives for Girls' Sexual Misconduct'. The police recorded 9,402 such incidents in 1985, and determined that 37.4 per cent of the girls had been seduced, and the rest had sex 'voluntarily'. The two leading reasons for having sex voluntarily were 'out of curiosity' for 19.6 per cent, and 'liked particular boy', for 18.1 per cent.[40] The fact that police keep records on sex is simply a reflection of their keeping an eye on everything, including guns. Every person is the subject of a police dossier.[41]

Almost everyone accepts the paradigm that the police should be respected. Because the police are so esteemed, the Japanese people co-operate with their police more than Americans do. Co-operation with the police also extends to obeying the laws which almost everyone believes in. The Japanese people, and even the large majority of Japanese criminals, voluntarily obey the gun controls.

There is no right to bear arms in Japan. In practical terms, there is no right to privacy against police searches. Other Western-style rights designed to protect citizens from a police state are also non-existent or feeble in Japan.

After the arrest, a suspect may be detained without bail for up to 28 days before the prosecutor brings the suspect before a judge.[42] Even after the 28 day period is completed, detention in a Japanese police station may continue on a variety of pretexts, such as preventing the defendant from destroying evidence. Rearrest on another charge, bekken taihö, is a common police tactic for starting the suspect on another 28 day interrogation process. 'Rearrest' may (p.30)occur while the suspect is still being held at the police station on the first charge. Some defendants may be held for several months without ever being brought before a judge.[43] Courts approve 99.5 per cent of prosecutors' requests for detentions.[44]

Criminal defense lawyers are the only people allowed to visit a suspect in custody, and those meetings are strictly limited. In the months while a suspect is held prisoner, the defense counsel may see his or her client for one to five meetings lasting about 15 minutes each. Even that access will be denied if it hampers the police investigation. While under detention, suspects can be interrogated 12 hours a day, allowed to bathe only every fifth day, and may be prohibited from standing up, lying down, or leaning against the wall of their jail cells.[45] Amnesty International calls the Japanese police custody system a 'flagrant violation of United Nations human rights principles'.[46]

The confession rate is 95 per cent.[47] As a Tokyo police sergeant observes, 'It is no use to protest against power'.[48] Suspects are not allowed to read confessions before they sign them, and suspects commonly complain that their confession was altered after signature. The police use confession as their main investigative technique, and when that fails, they can become frustrated and angry. The Tokyo Bar Association states that the police routinely 'engage in torture or illegal treatment'. The Tokyo Bar is particularly critical of the judiciary for its near-total disinterest in coercion during the confession process. 'Even in cases where suspects claimed to have been tortured and their bodies bore physical traces to back their claims, courts have still accepted their confessions'.[49]

In Japan, the legal system is, in effect, an omnipotent and unitary state authority. All law enforcement administrators in Japan are appointed by the National Police Agency and receive their funding from the NPA. Hence, the police are insulated from complaints from politicians or other citizens.[50] There is hardly any check on the power of the state, save its own conscience.

What does the breadth of police powers have to do with gun controls? Japanese gun controls exist in a society where there is little need for guns for self-defense. Police powers make it difficult for owners of illegal guns to hide them. Most importantly, the Japanese criminal justice system is based on the Government possessing the inherent authority to do whatever it wishes. In a society where almost everyone accepts nearly limitless, unchecked Government power, people do not wish to own guns to resist oppression or to protect themselves in case the criminal justice system fails.

>>>>>>

The war on drugs may work in a totalitarian or semi-democratic state where people are used to having no rights, but never in a country with such strong individual rights as the USA.

[Munro Williams]

Hey there, Cato,

Do you really want Japan to wipe the floor with us? If not, then flush the dopers and encourage engineering. If so, continue to complain about how American dopers are persecuted.

East Asia only respects strength. They are out to get us. They have seized control of the world's technological-industrical base. They are our bankers, landlords, and employers. This is a serious problem.

American dope thinking only makes it easier for them to destroy us. C'mon man, read Roman history. Our nation can only stay strong and unconquerable so long as it is moral. Encouraging dopers destroys us. They are a threat to us all.

[John/az2]

Isn't part of morality respecting another's ability to choose?

[Master Blaster]

Hey Munro:
Japan never has and never will "wipe the floor with the us"
The japanese are experts at copying other peoples ideas, they are industrious as willing slaves. The serfs (japanese citizens) are obediant to the Shoguns to this day, these are their strengths. Auto production has been exported along with electronics manufacturing, and optics, to the the third world, and to the US. There are an awful lot of unempolyed factory workers and salary men in Japan these days. Well I gues they can mine coal or steel Opps I forgot no natural resources on the Islands of JAPAN!!! Hows the suicide rate there, students still killing themselves in droves when the Exam results come out???
Seems that the Japanese banking system which was the strongest in the world is on the verge of collapse, due to greedy speculation by the Shogun industrial lords of Japan,
errr unm I mean their corporate CEOS.

Munro you enjoy Japan I would never want to Live there, or be anything like the Japanese. Ps its very nice of them to hold US Treasury bills because they are subsidizing our higher living standard. I'm real worried that they might foreclose and come take California.

I prefer to be an individual not a member of the Borg I mean Japanese collective. Enjoy Munro. Remember you will be assimilated, resistance is futile. The nail that sticks up gets hammered down.

[Libertarian]

If it saves just one innocent life, Munro will accept any and all misuse of police power to support his hate and fear of a self medicated society

[Smokey Jones]

Alright, somebody here has to stand up for the 'dopers'.

There is so much that we have been taught in our society, that 'respectable' people would never ever use the illegal drugs but that somehow it's perfectly okay to use the legal ones no matter what harm they may cause.

I'm fairly young, so I can remember a brief anti-drug hysteria in the 80's ("Just say no!"). I remember this because of my parents, who were taken in by the anti-drug 'education'. Among my mother's notes from meetings with school officials I find interesting quotes, my favorite being "Marijuana is the most dangerous drug on the market today".

Marijuana is the most dangerous drug on the market??? Where the heck did this come from? What about cocaine, crack, heroin and everything else?

Starting with my teenage years, most of my friends smoked marijuana. I tried it a couple of times when I was in 8th grade, decided I didn't really care for it at the time, and went about my life. I did well in school, and it didn't really affect me. My many dope-smoking and non-dope-smoking friends did as well as you could expect: the losers didn't really go anywhere, and the ones with potential went on to do a lot more than I did. The weed didn't really make a difference at all. Most of them are still my friends today, and not much has really changed except that some of us have become older and wiser and some of us are just plain older.

I didn't really decide I liked the stuff myself until I turned 21 and became old enough to legally consume alcohol. I smoke a little bit of it on occasion, just like I drink on occasion, and it doesn't adversely affect my life one bit. Actually, I'd say I'm a little more laid back and easy-going because of it.

I go to work every day and work hard, pay my bills on time, have no debt, and basically try my best to do unto others as I would have them unto me.

But I am a criminal because I keep a small bag of marijuana for personal use?

According to the govt., which knows better than I do, I should be a raving lunatic devoid of morals and livlihood raping and murdering old ladies and stealing the change from their purses to fund my out-of-control drug habit.

The govt., I might remind the readers of this forum, also knows better than I do whether or not I need to carry a handgun for personal protection, when it's just my life and not valuable riches at stake.

So tell me, Munro and everybody else, why it is that I should be a criminal? Tell me why, if I am caught with my piddling little bag of marijuana, I should have to face harsher penalties than a rapist of women or a man who kills another while driving drunk?

And please keep your replies simple, for this little 'doper' (who, BTW, holds a respectable job in the IT industry) is so dope addled that he can only understand basic words with few syllables.

[glock glockler]

...no one is encouraging dopers, all that we are saying is that laws against dope are wrong and destructive. If you want to see America really start kicking some butt, ending the waste of countless dollars in a "war" that does nothing to prevent people from using drugs would be a good place to start. I dont approve of smoking, do you? Should we start a "smoke war"?

When you make something illegal, you create a black market for it, which drives up the price exponentially. That is what encourages pushers to push. I could even make the arguement that your stance on the issue contributes to more people using drugs than mine, after all, wouldnt less people be using if there were less people pushing.

We are not the Japanese, and we should Thank God for that. If you dont want to see the USA destroyed, why dont you let the scum of our society destroy themselves with drugs without drawing the rest of us in with them? Read some Darwin along with your Roman stuff.

[Don Gwinn]

Reread Cato's post. Then reread Munro's response. Munro, you simply have not refuted anything Cato wrote about Japan. How do you answer the charge that Japan is essentially a police state with very few of what we might call "civil rights" for ordinary people? If you can't answer it, how can you ask us to support an even larger assault on our neighbors and family for the crime of using drugs when your example of a successful assault is such a place?

Quite frankly, if I wanted to live in Japan, I could do so. I choose to live here for a reason.

It's REALLY time to let this thread die. I know we won't, but I thought it would be nice if someone said it again.

[Elizabeth Petersen]

hmmm...

been reading through this whole thread, and can understand the arguments on both sides.

One side wants to end the expensive - and so far, a dismal failure - WOD. They aren't advocating the use of drugs, just the decriminalization. I'm not sure how I feel about this yet, I'm still weighing all the factors.

(Personal opinion? Marijuana should never have been made illegal. It was made illegal in 1937 for purely political/economic reasons. Thank Mr. Hearst for that.)

On the other side are those, like myself, that fear if drugs are legalized, we will see an upswing in addiction problems, which will in turn put a heavy burden on our already overtaxed public health care system. Not to mention the possible upswing in certain crimes.

However, the point of this thread was the futility and rampant abuses of those waging this war. Despite my personal feelings on the subject of drug legalization, I simply can not justify the money, manpower, loss of life and liberties that are the cost of this futile "war".

Makes me think of a variation on a bumper sticker I once saw:

"Wouldn't it be nice if the schools had all the books and money they needed, and the DEA had to throw a bakesale to buy a black helicopter?"

Peace.

[Troy]

"Wouldn't it be nice if the [Government] schools had all the [Socialist and Revisionist] books and money they needed..."

I'm not happy about DEA's helicoptors, but neither am I about Gub'mint schools. I honestly thought my education was pretty good until I learned some of the things I was never taught.

Anyway, I'm a Libertarian who believes that the WOsD should end. Yet, it's not because I have any desire to use drugs, and I certainly don't advocate their use. I don't drink, smoke, or use ANY drugs (illegal, perscription, or otherwise) short of the caffine in my Pepsi. I don't use these because I choose not to, not because of their legal status. I could legally smoke or drink alcohol, but I don't, and I encourage others not to do so either. Far too many people assume that abolishing the WOsD is the same as advocating drug use, and that's absolutely false.

One of the big hurdles of even entertaining this idea is that most people are evaluating the impact of this change on our current socialistic society, and they have a point: it would certainly cause some problems with the existing system. BUT, that's because the existing system has major problems of it's own, that feed the others. Socialized medicine, for example, forces some people to pay, under threat of force, for the care of others. That is WRONG. It used to be that such care was provided by CHARITIES, who were supported by people who CHOSE to donate money and sevices. The government has, more or less, run these charities out of business, via increasing controls and interference, and by coopting the charity by substituting government-run versions (like, for instance, county hospitals).

Trying to remove government from one aspect of our lives while allowing it to remain in others IS a problem, but the solution is NOT to give up and accept the government intrusion. The solution is to remove the government from ALL aspects of our lives, except for those portions delegated to it via the Constitution. Of course, the concept of being free of government "comforts" (and the accompanying tyranny) is so foreign to most that they can't bear to even contemplate it. And, I can understand that, as I had some difficulties trying to "think outside the box" initially, but once break through that boundry into mental liberty, there's no going back.

-Troy

[mrat]

Bronco,
You can sleep better at night, I am not a LEO in Alaska. I will sleep better at night knowing you are not an LEO. I tend to take the "higher ground" in life, therefore I will ignore the rest of your insults and not engage you in a flame war.

[Munro Williams]

Japan is a police state run by Big Brother bureaucrats who want to control your every thought word, and deed. Everything Cato posted about police power is true. I deny none of this. Neither do I deny the fact that while America produced a generation of hot house plants they produced engineers.

They own our paper, virtually dominate the electronics world, and the only thing we have left going for us since Hitachi became a "joint partner" (nudge-nudge, wink-wink) with Cray is aerospace, which, if Boeing builds the plants they're planning to in Red China and in Russia, will join the other "once America's pride" industries. At that point we will have declined to technical and industrial irrelevance, which will have been hastened by marijuana smokers and their supporters.

The Japanese have become our employers, financiers, and main source of the manufactured goods which make civilized society liveable, at the cost of their own personal comfort and quality of life. In exchange they have been accumulating financial and technical leverage over the rest of the world, particularly the USA.

For the past thirty some odd years, what has been America's response to this? Usually it goes like "Well, at least we ain't Japanese. We got our freedom, by thunder." For many, perhaps the majority of today's Americans, that has meant unlimited license to engage in pathological, utterly self absorbed narcissism that tends to produce borderline psychotic mental states which, if unchecked, are irreversible. That self-absorption is most prominent in the Libertarian Party and the Left Wing of the Democratic Party.

This state of mind gave us the Clintons for eight years, (twenty percent of all Republicans voted for the Clintons. Yep, you read that right) and will bring Hillary to the White House in the next election. You can bet the farm on that.

In this context, when the future of the entire nation is in peril, the question must be asked, "What good is freedom?" Freedom is neither good or bad. Freedom is basically neutral. The value of freedom in general ,or of any particular freedom depends entirely upon how wisely it is used. The value of freedom to anyone is only as good as the judgment that person has. Freedom permits people to make mistakes. Freedom demands that people make moral judgements when they make choices. Freedom used wisely is the pinnacle of human development. Freedom used unwisely is useless or destructive.

Freedom employed to engage in actions which inherently produce chaotic or destructive consequences is worse than useless, it is the worst possible state of human social organization. It is making the USA a madhouse re-run of the Jerry Springer Show. It is allowing the Japanese to dominate us in technology. It turned Weimar Germany into the Third Reich. It will bring Hillary Clinton to the White House, at which time the fundamental reason for having the Second Amendment will be put to the test, and at which time dopers will be a brazenly obvious liability and menace. No one in their right mind wants to share a foxhole with a pothead. The soft and effortless lifestyle available today offers dopers an artificial buffer between themselves and the consequences of their behavior. This buffer will be quickly replaced by countless bits of flying metal in the air, and the ultimate incompatability of the doper mindset and the Second Amendment will be made plain to all.

But dopers aren't the real problem, are they? No, it's those of us who want to wipe out the drug trade who are the real enemy.

[John/az2]

Those who want to wipe out the drug trade by trampling the OTHER rights of the people are the real enemy.

The means don't justifiy the end in the WOsD as it is.

And for the record, I agree with the over-all effect of a doped up society, but I do not agree with the method that you advocate for ridding society of the addiction with self.

[Munro Williams]

So you agree, then, that smoking dope isn't a victimless crime after all?

BTW, you did read A. Keyes' comments about the WOD on that other thread that got closed real fast? He wrote the best analysis of the overall problem I've read in a long time.

Also got someone to admit that he wasn't a Constitutionalist, heh, heh, heh.

[John/az2]

No matter how the fight is waged, there will always be dopers among us. There will be those who use dope that create no other victims other than themselves and there will be those who use dope that will make vicitims of the innocent.

There will always be poor.

There will always be the drunk.

There will always be the pornographer.

There will always be the over zealous religious nut who would force others to see/live his way.

There will always be victims.

My upbringing taught me that education, choice and consequence was the best and most durable way to treat such social diseases, not force or coercion.

To me the advocacy of the WOsD is the same as advocating that Senator so-and-so who voted for gun/owner registration should be taken out on the steps of the Capitol building and shot. Frankly I believe that the execution of traitorous legislators would be a very good way of helping them keep within their oath of office, yet we (generally speaking) say, "No! Vote him out at the next election." We trust that the people will be educated enough take care of the problem without having to resort to violent means.

(Edit: And considering what I said in the above paragraph, and who was elected to office and HAS been elected to office in the past... maybe we are so self-indulgent and greedy that we are beyond the education stage... Damn.)

Force and coercion bring with them resentment and violence, something we hear about nearly every day regarding the WOsD.

"A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still." is probably a brutalization of the correct quote, but I hope you get the essential message of it.

I am certain that if "recreational" drugs were made legal that their use would jump. How happy and excited to the point of hysteria is a dog who is finally let off his leash after having been kept chained for so long. Or for a more classic example consider the Israelites when they were freed from the Egyptians. Their resultant celebrations violated all the values and morals that they had been raised with, then they were given strict rules that governed every aspect of their lives because they could not handle 10 guidelines that would have made their life so much easier.

Maybe we are in the same boat. Do the laws of the land reflect the morals of the people, or are these laws designed by the enlavers of men to lull us into a false sense of security, so that we don't feel the shackles placed upon our wrists and ankles?

"All is well in the good 'ol USA," we say as we are lead down to the salt mines.

On one hand I want to say, "Educate the people, trust them. When they break a law then let the punishment be swift and complete."

Then on the other hand I want to say, "Break them to good moral judgement!"

One is education and choice, then other force and coercion.

Never the twain shall meet.

But only one can be the advocate of freedom.

[Edited by John/az2 on 05-10-2001 at 02:07 PM]

[Politically Incorrect]

I'm still waiting for Munro's property to be confiscated without him being charged with a crime as in 80% of all asset forfeitures. Would you still be proud to wage a war against American freedom when your own is taken away?

You know, I believe Libertarian Sheriff Bill Masters really understands why our drug war is insane.

http://www.libertybill.net/mastersspeach.html

A few years ago I was invited to attend a meeting of investigators from all over the nation who were working on a serial murder case. We met at the FBI training academy in Quantico, Virginia. Each of the investigators at the meeting was working on a homicide that we all believed might have been committed by the same person, an ex-police officer. The meeting was arranged by the Child Abduction Serial Killer Unit (CASKU) of the FBI.

This unit has been featured in some recent books and movies where hundreds of agents with large computer banks bring up pictures of suspects and track their movements with satellites until they catch the guy in the act of commiting one of the gruesome murders. So it was a bit disappointing when I realize that the unit is in fact just a few overworked FBI agents and clerks with their desks piled high with folders full of pictures of mutilated young bodies and the happy young faces of the "before" pictures of missing, tortured, and murdered children.

During the breaks in our meeting I wandered through the building. Hundreds of good looking, bright, enthusiastic young people swarmed the hallways. They are all going through the FBI academy training. At lunch we would all go up to the large cafeteria in the academy building, once again surrounded by a sea of new recruits. On one occasion I sat with one of the CASKU agents to drink coffee. I commented that maybe when all these new recruits graduated from the academy the CASKU unit might get some more help investigating the crimes that drive fear and despair into every parent's heart, if their child is missing for even a moment while at the park or shopping mall.

The agent said, "Sheriff, these aren't FBI agents -- they are all DEA agents. The Drug Enforcement Administration is using the FBI Academy to train more agents for the drug war."

Through the rest of the day the CASKU agents and I went over homicide cases as pictures of murder victims flashed on a screen. The next day on the plane home I stewed silently and thought: What kind of peace officer, what kind of society would allow a peace officer to use one minute of time, spend one dollar, or use any jail cell for a marijuana smoker, when vicious child murderers are on the loose?(emphasis mine)

Let us look at all our unsolved murder cases, missing children, and other unsolved violent crimes and thank God that we at least got some drug offenders off of our streets.

Of course, we do have sensible judges:

From http://www.november.org/Judges.html

• Federal Judge Richard Neville, of Chicago; March 1996 he told USA Today, "the markup on illegal drugs and their enormous profits to sellers create ten replacements for every offender thrown in prison. No matter how may we put in jail, that isn't going to change."
  
• Federal Judge Richard Posner, told USA Today, "It is nonsense that we should be devoting so many law-enforcement resources to marijuana. I am skeptical of a society that is so tolerant of alcohol and cigarettes should come down so hard on marijuana use and send people to prison for life without parole... Prison terms in America have become appallingly long, especially for conduct that, arguable, should not be criminal at all . . . Only decriminalization is a sure route to a lower crime rate . . ."
  
• Federal Judge George Pratt of the 2nd Circuit said of police searches in the Buffalo, N.Y. airport, "It appears that they have sacrificed the Fourth Amendment by detaining 590 innocent people in order to arrest 10 who are not - all in the name of the 'war on drugs.' When, pray tell, will it end? Where are we going?" (To Reason Magazine, February 1994)
  
• Judge Robert W. Sweet, District Judge in New York City; served as an Assistant US Attorney and as Deputy Mayor of New York City under John Lindsay; a graduate of Yale and of Yale Law School. "Congress should end the criminalization of marijuana, which is now widely acknowledged to be without deleterious effect. That reform alone would take 450,000 arrests out of the system."
  
• US District Judge Thomas Wiseman, quoted in The Tennessean, "We've just about lost a generation of young people. We're building new prison beds at the rate of about 1000 a week and we're still overcrowded... We've spent $100 billion on the war on drugs and we're losing it."

[bronco61]

MRAT,
My response to your post was an observation.

[Edited by bronco61 on 05-10-2001 at 05:03 PM]

[TheBluesMan]

Originally posted by Don Gwinn
It's REALLY time to let this thread die. I know we won't, but I thought it would be nice if someone said it again.

It is still technically on-topic since the discussion of rights and legalitities is still ongoing, but it really is becoming a divisive issue.

I agree, Don. It is time to let it go.

In essentials, Unity.
In non-essentials, Liberty.

[duck hunt]

So, Japan is superior to us because they're anti-drug?

Great, then, let's emulate them. I for one would be simply thrilled to be able to buy used schoolgirl panties from a vending machine on the corner.

What was that again about the "dopers" being the cause of our moral decline?

[gitarmac]

If you think there is a war on drugs because of the dangers in the workplace then you are as niave as the ones that fall for the antigun propaganda. Here's an example. My friend works in a paper mill. They used to have drug testing for accidents and cause. Of all the accidents (there are quite a few cause high traffic forklifts are involved) there was nary a one where the drug test was positive. Now they have random tests, there have been a couple terminations because of drug screens. It looks to me like the accidents arent' caused but the "dopers" at all!!!

Now they have a mandatory overtime and on-call policy where employees have to come in after working 12 hours shifts for several days, and work after only being off for 4 hours, but I guess since that's not politically incorrect, it's ok.

The "war on drugs" is just another form of political correctness. Thank you Ronnie!

[scud]

I for one would be simply thrilled to be able to buy used schoolgirl panties from a vending machine on the corner.

May a plague of 1000 Godzillas be upon them.

That is just too much, wonder if I could get anything for my used kleenex ?

[Oleg Volk]

http://www.chaparraltree.com/vending/

I am looking forward to vending machines with ammo and magazines...might be a long wait, though.

[Munro Williams]

This thread is convincing no one of anything, but because some (like me) are compelled by conscience to respond again and again and thus make it stretch out to the crack of doom, the following tangent related to Japanese and East Asian growth concurrent with America's demise will throw this thread so far off topic that Admin will be forced to close it. I hope all will find this an amenable solution.

I argue that legalized recreational drugs will be domestically and geo-politically catastrophic for our United States. I've posted so much on the social psychological effects of the widespread usage of such drugs, that no more can be added. Yet some responses to my observations about the Far East, particularly Japan, are entirely too flippant to let slide. I am curious as to why this is so. After all, Japan has been around in its essential form for a very long time. The current Emperor of Japan can trace his line back some 1800 years, to the time of the Roman Emperor Diocletian. Rome is no more, but Japan is still around.

Japan was the first Asian nation to reach technical parity with the modern West when she advanced herself from a politically imposed Bronze Age to the Industrial Revolution in less than fifty years, was the first Asian country to defeat a Western nation in modern times, was the only nation ever to attack the USA, killed about fifteen million people as she built the geographically largest empire in world history, changed the political map of Asia, and today is well on the way to technological, industrial, and financial domination of the planet. Yet Japan and the rest of Asia is largely ignored. Certainly, a knowledge of so dynamic a political entity is no luxury.

The following is a brief overview of Confucian Hegemonism in the 21st Century. Don't know what that is? You should, and BTW, will y'all please keep your semi-automatic shoulder arms and ammo stocked in a rust-free environment? They stay awake late at night trying to figure out ways to take total control over us, while we carry on as to whether dope should be legalized. That frightens me, folks.

For the record, I endure, rather than enjoy, living in Japan, but I do find TIG welding a challenging and rewarding way to make some money and make the days pass more quickly.

This is from a largely ignored group of scholars at the Japan Policy Research Institute. http://www.jpri.org

After Liberalism: What if Confucianism Becomes the Hegemonic Ethic of the Twenty-first Century?

by Richard Madsen

Although the international system is often characterized as fundamentally anarchic-a shifting balance of power among interest-maximizing states-underlying any stable international regime is a framework of international institutions: treaties, agreements, covenants based on a common language of international discourse and on some minimal consensus on norms of legitimate international conduct. This web of international institutions usually purports to be based on universal values. In reality, of course, the values are those central to the societies that dominate the international institutions. Currently, this means that the world's international institutions are dominated by the West, which is still led by the United States.

This web of institutions is currently called the "community of nations." The ultimate task of diplomacy is seen to be the integration of wayward societies into this community of nations. As President Clinton said in announcing his decision to normalize relations with Vietnam, "By helping to bring Vietnam into the community of nations, normalization also serves our interest in working for a free and peaceful Vietnam in a stable and peaceful Asia." Such rhetoric assumes that the central values are "our" values, irrespective of the values of the nation being integrated into the community. Central to the political cultures of Western nations, led by the United States, which currently dominate the international community, is the notion that these nations are founded on contracts between rights-bearing citizens, and that this contractarian way of life is the basis for their moral superiority.

Until recently, the main rhetorical strategy used by weaker, non-Western countries against the West was the accusation of hypocrisy. For instance, third world revolutionaries borrowed the Western language of self-determination and human rights to attack Western colonialism. In doing so, however, they implicitly conceded that values central to a Western sense of moral superiority were indeed universal. More recently, East Asian societies (and Middle Eastern, Islamic societies as well) have begun to attack the very notion of human rights central to Western political thought. China, for example, initially reacted to American attempts to pressure it to correct human rights abuses by denying that such abuses took place. Then, when the evidence of the abuses was too obvious, China took refuge in the prerogatives of national sovereignty. But this rhetorical strategy conceded that China should be on the defensive about failing to live up to internationally accepted norms. Within the past four years, the Chinese government has taken the offensive. It is trying (with some success) to lead a movement among Asian and Middle Eastern countries to get international institutions to change their very definition of human rights to one that emphasizes the need of societies to maintain social order for the sake of prosperity for all.

For the time being, they have not completely succeeded. At the UN Conference on Human Rights held in Vienna in 1993, representatives from the leading Western nations overcame a bold challenge from a coalition led by China-including Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, and Pakistan-to change the language of the UN resolutions in such as way as to emphasize the subordination of individual civil and political rights to the need for law and order. Beijing's bid to host the Olympics in the year 2000, although strongly supported by all Asian countries and by most of the developing world, was narrowly defeated by a majority of Western countries, partially on the grounds that China was guilty of serious human rights abuses. But as the economic and political power of East Asia increases, we can assume that East Asian countries will be in a position to force changes in the norms about human rights advocated by international institutions. In fact, Japan, China, and the East Asian newly industrializing countries will probably be able to change international norms on a whole host of issues, such as trade and international security.

The East Asian nations by no means constitute a straightforward united front. The region is riven with economic, political, and ideological rivalries-as is the West. But the terms of debate among East Asian societies are somewhat different from those of the West. A shift may be underway as profound as that of the seventeenth century, when the hegemony of Catholic Spain and Austria gave way to that of a Protestant, and eventually increasingly secularized, Northern Europe (which was initially multipolar but later came to be dominated by a hegemonic Britain). Before this happened, the standards for success in acquiring global wealth and power were set by a culture that embodied aristocratic values, employed patrimonial modes of organization to control its empire, utilized mercantilistic policies to ensure its economic dominance, and justified the whole enterprise with a religion and philosophy that sacralized hierarchy and emphasized the primacy of faith over reason.

Afterward, what we now recognize as Western liberal culture gradually came to set the standards for global enterprise. It was a culture that embodied bourgeois values, employed bureaucratic modes of organization, utilized free trade to tie its economic regimes together, and justified its institutions with a religion that emphasized the equality of every individual before God and a philosophy that asserted the primacy of reason as the basis for understanding worldly affairs. Up to the present time, societies that could not accept this culture were on the defensive. Those societies that remained bound to the Spanish tradition lagged economically and politically behind those of Northern Europe and North America, and the world's leading scholars (coming from the leading universities in the hegemonic North) argued that this was at least in part because they lacked the values essential for modernization.

The power of Northern European liberal hegemony is manifest in the extent to which it is taken for granted. It has been casually, self-evidently identified with modernity itself. As the philosopher George Parkin Grant has written in his English Speaking Justice (University of Notre Dame Press, 1985, p. 48), "Members of classes are likely to consider their shared conceptions of political goodness to be self-evident when their rule is not seriously questioned at home, and when they are successfully extending their empires around the world." What is changing now is this taken-for-grantedness. Western liberalism may well survive, but it is no longer immune from serious self-questioning. Philosophers and social scientists are now compelled to debate its premises and to search for its underlying foundations. To a significant degree, this is occurring because other non-liberal societies, like the East Asian countries, seem to be proving that modernization is not identical with Western liberalism. There are other, perhaps even more powerful, ways to become modern, which may indeed challenge the economic and political hegemony of the West.

From Western Liberalism to Asian Communitarianism

To understand what is at stake, let me articulate briefly the principles of Western liberalism and show how these contrast with East Asian principles of political and economic organization and social philosophy.

The first principle is that of individualism. The individual is prior to society. Each individual is morally autonomous, free to choose his or her own life goals, and to pursue these in any way the individual wants, so long as he or she does not interfere with another's pursuit of goals. Societies come into existence only because of voluntary contracts of individuals trying to pursue more effectively their individual goals.

A second assumption is rationalism. The individuals who constitute societies are rational agents. The rationality they possess is primarily instrumental-the capacity to calculate the most effective means to achieve their ends. The way to establish public order is to increase, through a secular scientific education, the capacity of each individual for this kind of rational action. That way, each individual will see that he or she needs to follow similar procedures.

The rational individual will recognize the need to organize the pursuit of his or her goals through entering into contracts. Thus contractualism is the third principal assumption of liberalism. Stable social relations are formed because individual parties enter into agreements to provide mutual benefits. Aggregated, all of these micro-level contracts constitute the social contract that is the basis of society itself.

Legitimate contracts must be based on voluntary, rational choice-the ability of the individual to choose what is best for him or herself from the widest set of alternatives, without having any alternative arbitrarily excluded. In other words, choice must be based-the fourth principal assumption of liberalism-on universalistic rather than particularistic criteria.

Government, according to these assumptions, should maximize the capacity of individuals to achieve their private goals. It should provide the basic security necessary for this pursuit, and it should establish the procedures necessary to make the pursuit orderly, but otherwise it should interfere as little as possible. When governments impose limitations on some of the freedoms of individuals for the sake of maximizing the overall possible freedom, these choices must be legitimated through democratic procedures, which are based on the aggregation of individuals' choices through voting.

These are the principles that govern relations between individuals and society in a liberal nation state. Scholars and statesmen working within the liberal tradition assume that the path to a peaceful and just global community is an expansion of these principles to the world order: the world system is made up of a set of nation states that are like individuals writ large, sovereign and self-determining. These nations enter into contractual relations with one another based on their perception of self-interest. A healthy world economy depends on the capacity of such nations to trade freely among each other in an unfettered open market. A healthy world political system entails the ability of such nations to make free contractual agreements-"open covenants, openly arrived at." Norms governing international trade and international security should ideally be established by an international deliberating body like the United Nations. (Realistically, they are established and backed up by the power and for the interests of the most powerful nations.)

These liberal assumptions are beginning to be called into question within the West because they correspond less and less to the experience of people anywhere in the modern world. As self-doubt deepens, East Asian societies are providing alternative models of the successful pursuit of wealth and power-models that challenge and may supplant those of the faltering West. For all of their differences, people in East Asia seem to share certain half-articulated, taken-for-granted general assumptions about how to pursue a good life, how the individual relates to society, and how societies should pursue wealth and power.

The first of these assumptions is that society is prior to the individual-that individuals cannot have any substantial identity apart from social relationships, especially familial but also (broadly conceived) political relationships. Although there would be enormous controversy over what this means in practice, Asians share a vaguely defined sense that the interests of society as a whole can, and sometimes should, take precedence over individuals' private interests.

A second assumption has to do with the nature of reason. The Confucian tradition stresses the rationality of humans, but it lays great emphasis on a moral rationality-not technical reason but the kind of reason that enables one to understand the rightness of the moral duties connected with one's role in society. In societies as different as Japan, China, and Malaysia, it is assumed that education should inculcate moral values rather than simply teach techniques. Although the specific content of those values may differ from society to society, it is assumed that the best and the brightest graduates of the educational system should be generalists with a firm grasp of the responsibilities that go with leadership rather than specialized technical experts.

Social relationships, it is widely assumed, are ultimately based not simply on voluntary contracts between individuals, but upon responsibilities toward the society as a whole. People need to share not merely common procedures to pursue their own private self-fulfillment, but common public goals, and a common commitment to the social relationships that anchor their individual identities. It is one of the government's more important responsibilities to create this consensus. The state is a paternalistic educator, not just a neutral referee. The government-as long as it is doing its job correctly and has not become corrupt-is a guardian of a moral order that makes citizenship possible.

Since East Asian societies have not had the capacity to play a truly global role for most of this century, it is less clear how Asian scholars and diplomats will translate the above principles for a good national society into global norms for international conduct. The attempt by China to mobilize other East Asian nations in an effort to change international human rights standards gives one indication. As their wealth and power increases, Asian regimes will try to insist that individual rights are less important than the right of whole societies to maintain order as the foundation for economic prosperity. Like Kishore Mahbubani, Singapore's Deputy Secretary of Foreign Affairs, they may argue that the West is foolishly destroying the foundations of its wealth and prosperity because of its obsession with "the idea of individual freedom."

Western social theory predicts that authoritarian societies will be less productive than ones that emphasize individual freedoms, because modern technologies require the kind of creativity and initiative that can only flourish in a free society. If authoritarian Asian societies continue their advances in productivity, they may force the theorists to modify their ideas. They may also push Western societies to modify the bases of their social contracts. Asian societies keep wages relatively low by suppressing the capacity of workers to organize into independent labor unions. They provide limited social welfare benefits, expecting intact, mutually loyal families to take care of members in need. Thus labor costs are low in comparison with most Western countries. In the name of keeping pace with "international competition," Western countries like the United States are breaking the power of labor unions, dismantling much of their welfare states, and "getting tough on crime" by suppressing previously accepted liberties. They are beginning to let Asian forms of social organization set the world standard for labor practices.

Besides changing the international moral balance between rights and responsibilities, and individual and society, the Asian societies are shifting the balance between particularism and universalism. Businesses award contracts not simply on the basis of universalistic, open competitive bidding, but because of long-standing particularistic relationships, sometimes based on near or distant kinship. Consumers, too, often base their buying decisions on long-standing loyalty, rather than simply on price. The result is the myriad of informal barriers to open trade that so upsets American business interests. The Japanese, especially, are weaving these patterns into regional trading blocs.

If the United States and Western Europe were to become largely shut out of this latter day version of a "Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere," they might have to concentrate their economic energies in their own regions, thus building on an expanded NAFTA in the Americas and the EEU in Europe. Expectations about what constitutes a good international economic system would change from a single open market to a regionalized world economy.

Changes in this economic "substructure" might generate changes in cultural-ideological superstructure. Economists might start to recast theories that assume that economic life everywhere follows a single set of universal laws. They might "discover" more contextualized economic principles. This would accelerate the move toward various forms of cultural relativism that has already begun in the other social sciences. The centrality of universalistic, instrumental rationality in education might change, as the philosophy of Western scientific education no longer set the standard for modern education throughout the world.

Cultural Consequences for the West

If the economic and then political hegemony of the East Asian region led within the next fifty years to some such changes in the norms and standards that governed global institutions, what would be the cultural consequences for Western societies? The United States would be the most affected, because for the second half of the twentieth century it accepted the burden of being the civilizational leader, the "powerhouse of the ideals of Freedom and Justice." Undoubtedly there would be profound loss of confidence and the cacophonous, confused social debate of societies faced by unprecedented social situations. For precedents, we would have to look outside the modern West to the experience of Asian or Middle Eastern societies suddenly faced with the intrusion of the West in the nineteenth century-or perhaps to the experience of Spain when hegemony shifted to northern Europe in the seventeenth century.

Out of the confusion would emerge several kinds of reactions. Initially, perhaps, the most pervasive reaction might be a kind of fundamentalism. One part of the Spanish response to its loss of hegemony was the institutionalization of a rigid, dogmatic Counter-Reformation Catholicism. Similarly, in China in the 1870s there was a movement on the part of elites to return to the fundamentals of Confucianism.

Perhaps in the West we are seeing the beginnings of a similar reaction in religious fundamentalism and also what one might call political fundamentalism-for instance, the militia movement in the United States, with its celebration of an idealized eighteenth-century individualistic republicanism, its xenophobia and potentially its militarism. Such movements might become even more prevalent as the gnawing realization set in that American political culture really had lost the ability to set the standards for the rest of the world. As the historical record suggests, this kind of fundamentalism eventually is self-defeating. It leaves the society that embraces it isolated from the most dynamic sources of wealth and power in the world and causes it to lag further and further behind-which may even lead to economic crisis or military defeat.

Another kind of reaction is abject imitation of the new hegemonic culture. One sees signs of this in the United States not only in superficial adaptations of organizational methods, such as "quality circles" in industry, but also in calls to dismantle the welfare state, reduce ethnic diversity, and weaken organized labor. The problem with abject imitation is that it usually is self-defeating too, because the imitating society does not have the underlying habits that can make the foreign forms work. Thus, when countries in Latin America that are heirs to the Spanish colonial heritage have tried to adopt Anglo-American forms of government and economic organization, they have often continued to lag behind their powerful neighbor to the north. They simply cannot make use of the foreign organizational forms as well as the foreigners can. Thus, I would predict that if the United States tried to adopt the authoritarian forms of labor organization that work so well in Japan or Singapore, the result would increase confusion and conflict in American society rather than increasing productivity.

A final kind of reaction would be one of synthesis: an updating of one's cultural norms that takes account of insights learned from others as well as the deepest meaning of one's own culture. Thus, in the 1960s, in Spain and the other Catholic countries of Europe, the "aggiornamento" brought about by the Second Vatican Council enabled the Catholic Church to cast off some of the trappings of Counter-Reformation dogmatism. In Spain, this cultural transformation was a key factor in what Victor Perez-Diaz has called The Return of Civil Society: The Emergence of Democratic Spain (Harvard University Press, 1993). Some cultures take longer than others to carry out these updatings. Japan did so relatively quickly in the Meiji restoration of the 1860s. Other Asian societies have taken much longer. Usually, the resort to this kind of updating takes place only after fundamentalism and abject imitation have failed-300 years in the case of Spain. One would hope that liberal Western democracies might reinvent themselves somewhat more quickly.

RICHARD MADSEN is professor of sociology at the University of California, San Diego, and one of the United States's best known specialists on modern Chinese society. Madsen's work has been distinguished by his interest in what he calls "moral anthropology." He is coauthor, together with Robert Bellah, William Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven Tipton, of the award-winning book Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in America (University of California Press, 1985). Among his other works are Chen Village (coauthored with Anita Chan and Jonathan Unger) (University of California Press, 1984), Morality and Power in a Chinese Village (University of California Press, 1984), and China and the American Dream: A Moral Inquiry (University of California Press, 1995).