Rottcodd

The other answers mostly sum it up - it was initially made illegal primarily as a way to establish an “other” with which to frighten conservatives.

There’s another thing that hasn’t been mentioned yet though that I’ve long thought is relevant - is part of the reason that marijuana specifically was for so long (and still is in some quarters) so condemned.

Imagine you’re a corrupt politician, and you want to sell your constituents on the idea of going to war in the Middle East (so you can collect some bribes from defense contractors and oil companies) or instituting mandatory sentencing (so you can collect some bribes from prison contractors) or cutting taxes on the wealthy (so you can collect bribes from rich people and corporations) or any of the other, similar things that corrupt politicians want to do

Who would you rather try selling that idea to? A bunch of pot smokers or a bunch of drinkers?

I think part of the issue is that marijuana appeals to a part of the population that really is, to corrupt politicians and their cronies and patrons, “undesirable.” When they want to get the people all fired up in support of their latest bullshit, they want somebody with a beer in their hand, drunkenly shouting, “Yeah! Kick their asses!” Not somebody with a joint in their hand, muzzily saying, “Hold on a minute - you want to do what?”

What “entitlement?”

I don’t expect anyone to start a web site or service or to give me or anyone else access to it at all, much less for free.

I’m just making the very narrow point that when a company chooses to do all of that, and manages to make enough money to build a plush corporate headquarters on some of the most expensive real estate on the planet and pay its executives millions or even tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, then starts crying about not making enough money, that’s self-evident bullshit.

If anybody’s acting"entitled" in that scenario, it’s the greedy corporate weasels who spend billions on their own privilege, then expect us to cover their asses when they come up short.

I expect a wave of internet users to get upset and call paying for used services “enshittification”, because people don’t realise how much running these AI models actually costs.

I am so tired of this bullshit. Every time I’ve turned around, for the past thirty years now, I’ve seen some variation on this same basic song and dance.

Yet somehow, in spite of supposedly being burdened with so much expense and not given their due by a selfish, ignorant public, these companies still manage to build plush offices on some of the most expensive real estate on the planet and pay eight- or even nine-figure salaries to a raft of executive parasites.

When they start selling assets and cutting executive salaries, or better yet laying them off, then I’ll entertain the possibility that they need more revenue. Until then, fuck 'em.

Then every single person who takes any action would make a difference in the world and change the situation, which obviousy isn’t true.

How did you not get my point?

We’ll try it this way:

Thirty people live in a town.

Ten of them, with a leader, want some policy implemented

Twenty of them oppose the policy.

The ten with a leader organize and push for the policy

The twenty who oppose it stand around with their thumbs up their asses, each of them telling themselves that they can’t accomplish anything by themselves.

The policy gets implemented

Or

The ten with a leader organize and push for a policy.

The twenty who oppose it each, individually, pull their thumbs out of their asses and stand up and say they oppose it.

Each of those individuals, making their individual choices, finds themselves surrounded by nineteen other individuals who made the same individual choice.

They easily outnumber the ten who want the policy and the policy fails.

That’s exactly how and why individuals going ahead and making their individual choices instead of failing to do it because “I can’t make a difference by myself” can make a difference.

All they have to do is stop waiting around for somebody to lead them, pull their thumbs out of their asses, and just go ahead and do it on their own, each one as an individual.

the other workers at the factories don’t change their opinion.

And some number of those workers have the exact same opinion that you do - they’re opposed, but they don’t think they can make a difference.

And if all of you stopped waiting around for some charismatic leader to tell you what to do and just went ahead and made the choice you prefer, you would make a difference.

No - it’s not ethical.

Very little evil is actually a direct result of evil people doing evil things. The vast majority of it comes to be through ordinary people doing banal things - things that, like building weapons, are questionable at best, but that they excuse because it’s “out of my control.”

The thing is that it’s not out of their control. Yes - if one individual makes the decision to not take part, that’s not going to have much of an effect, but if every person who feels the same way makes that same choice, that absolutely WILL have an effect.

And there’s only one way to make it so that every person who feels the same way makes that choice, and that’s for each one of them, individually, to look past that “it’s out of my control” bullshit excuse and go ahead and do it.

Everything on any significant scale is out of individual control. Individuals just possess a very limited amount of control over affairs on a national, much less global, scale. But that’s really entirely beside the point. The point is how you choose to exercise the small amount of control you have. Will you use it for good, or for evil?

why do people need so much money

Mental illness.

Really.

But FDR style Dems don’t collect big piles of soft money, and collecting big piles of soft money is now the one and only goal.

Of course there are psychopaths out there and they truly are a different breed, but that is not a significant factor at a nation state, ethnic, or theological level.

I don’t think that’s true.

The thing is that, all other things being more or less equal, psychopaths have an inherent advantage in competitions for position in hierarchical systems, since people with empathy and morality will have choices they will be unwilling to make in pursuit of power, wealth and status, while psychopaths will not be so constrained - they will be willing to do absolutely whatever it takes to succeed, guided only by their desire, with no concern for any moral or ethical questions or for the well-being of others.

That means that psychopaths are over-represented among the wealthy and powerful.

And in fact, one need not look far at all to find wealthy, powerful and influential people who are rather obviously psychopaths, including but by no means limited to Netanyahu, Putin and Trump.

That’s what initially set me on this line of thought - the observation that Trump and Putin, and later Netanyahu, are bludgeoningly obviously profoundly mentally ill, and mentally ill in very similar ways - all defined by their complete disregard for the suffering and deaths of those against whom they very obviously very deliberately direct the hatred, violence and murderous tendencies of their followers. They very obviously sow hatred and violence - feeding it and directing it in ways designed solely to further their own ambitions - their own lusts for power and wealth. So by any reasonable standard, they are each and all very obviously profoundly mentally ill, and specifically psychopathic - completely devoid of moral constraint or concern for others.

And they’re not even notably anomalous - they’re exceptional really only by the relative degree of their psychopathy and the notable positions they’ve attained, but the basic dynamic of willingly bringing harm and death to others in pursuit of their own ambitions is a thing one can see over and over in hierarchical systems - governments, corporations, religions… It’s arguably even more the rule than the exception, with those who are highly ranked in such organizations who display actual empathy and moral constraint being very much the exception.

I grow more convinced every day that I’ve somehow been stranded among a bizarre race of insane savages.

That’s really the only feasible explanation I can come up with. There’s no way that a race of even reasonably intelligent and rational beings could fail to recognize that Netanyahu, for example, is profoundly and dangerously mentally ill - a clear psychopath - and shouldn’t even be allowed out in public unaccompanied, much less granted power over others. So it can only be the case that human beings by and large - at least the not inconsiderable portion of them that support Netanyahu (or Trump or Putin or any of the other vividly insane people in power) - are both stupid and insane.

And somehow, I, with a working brain and an actual set of functioning moral principles, have ended up trapped among them.

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I guess by that I use fingertip, but I think it’d be more accurate to say that I use palm adapted for big hands.

The few times that I’ve had a mouse big enough to palm it without my fingers sticking out too far, that’s what I’ve done, and that’s definitely my preference. It’s just that the vast majority of mouses are too small for that.

What the fuck?

Even setting aside the cultural/religious issues, didn’t the US outgrow this ludicrous obsession with boys’ hair like 50 years ago?

I saw in another article too that after they admitted that it had in fact happened, they claimed that the problem was that Media Matters had made it seem to be more common than it in fact was.

The reality of course is that MM just reported that it had happened. And used-to-be-twitter has already admitted that much.

So yeah - they’re going to get their asses handed to them in this lawsuit.

The problem though is that we’re now in a timeline in which the fascism-adjacent demagogues who support Musk are so invested in their narrative that they’re going to view the failure of the lawsuit as some sort of contrarian proof that it was justified. To them, it’s not going to fail because MM’s accusation was in fact legitimate, but because “blah blah blah deep state something something great replacement yadda yadda woke mob.”

…launched what he called a “thermonuclear lawsuit” against Media Matters, which accused it of artificially manipulating the social network’s algorithms to achieve the contentious juxtapositions (while admitting that they had in fact occurred).

This is my favorite part of this whole story.

It’s like the narcissist’s prayer directly translated into a lawsuit.

I was just thinking the other day that it’s about time to replay this game. So I guess it is.

Pshew - look at that pendulum swing…

Ironic that the thread is about men dying on average younger than women, and the majority of the responses are people completely ignoring that fact and instead just taking an opportunity to negatively stereotype men so they can shit on them collectively.

Ah… the venerable old “make a ‘loan’ then forgive it” strategy for paying bribes.

At this point Thomas might as well have a tattoo across his forehead that says “I am corrupt.”

If he had even a speck of integrity, he’d resign.

I was going to say this, but I figured I could just scroll until I found where someone else inevitably said it.

By the end, I was just letting the drama wash over me and not even trying to sort out which version of who was doing what in which timeline.

And honestly, I suspect that that’s the best way to appreciate it anyway.