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User talk:HelpJazz (view source)
Revision as of 07:02, September 25, 2008
, 07:02, September 25, 2008→Hi, Philip: On government involvement
:::It's your page, HelpJazz, so obviously you can do what you want with it, but if you're soliciting opinions can I vote "no?" I'm enjoying the relatively excellent signal-to-noise ratio you've got going at the moment. Put this on a debate page and the screeds will start pouring in. [[User:Aziraphale|Aziraphale]] 16:46, 24 September 2008 (EDT) ''<-My 2 cents... oh, and hi Bohdan! They're back. :)''
:::It's your page, HelpJazz, so obviously you can do what you want with it, but if you're soliciting opinions can I vote "no?" I'm enjoying the relatively excellent signal-to-noise ratio you've got going at the moment. Put this on a debate page and the screeds will start pouring in. [[User:Aziraphale|Aziraphale]] 16:46, 24 September 2008 (EDT) ''<-My 2 cents... oh, and hi Bohdan! They're back. :)''
::::I dunno. If it's on a debate page I likely won't really pay attention to it. [[User:HelpJazz|Help]][[User talk:HelpJazz|Jazz]] 18:50, 24 September 2008 (EDT)
::::I dunno. If it's on a debate page I likely won't really pay attention to it. [[User:HelpJazz|Help]][[User talk:HelpJazz|Jazz]] 18:50, 24 September 2008 (EDT)
Regarding government involvement, I do tend to lean toward what you are saying Arizaphale. However, there are two different situations here. If something is not illegal (e.g. taking a particular drug, or an abortion), then perhaps the government ought to be slow to get involved by restricting or banning it. The government ''not'' restricting or banning does not really provide any sort of endorsement of it either. Although this may not always be true if they are ''implicitly'' supporting it already by, for example, taxing it. The other situation is where the government has already restricted or banned it. In ''this'' case, decriminalising/unbanning/unrestricting it is sending a strong message that the thing (drug, abortion, etc.) is acceptable; that there's nothing wrong with it. Now there may be some way that a government can remove itself from being involved without providing tacit endorsement, but it's difficult to think of a way. Just by way of example, one way would be to decriminalise it but not tell anyone that they'd done so! But of course, both because government actions like this are not done in secret, and because there are always interested parties watching, it won't take long until this decriminalisation done on the quiet becomes very public, so that idea doesn't really work.
But then there's the question of the harm that it does. I mean, if it's accepted that murder is something ''very'' wrong, then surely it's proper for a government to take the safe course. I recall reading (many years ago now) about a medicinal drug that the government banned simply because test on mice had shown that it could cause problems at times. The drug was already being used (by humans) and was proving beneficial. Yet the government banned this ''beneficial'' medicinal drug because of the ''small possibility'' of bad side effects. Was that a case of the government getting too involved? Perhaps. But if that's any sort of precedent, then all abortions should be banned just on the ''possibility'' (and I believe it's more than a possibility; I'm just being hypothetical) that the fetus is actually a living human being. (And just in case anyone reads too much into what I'm saying, I agree with Tim above that the ''one'' acceptable circumstance in which an abortion is okay is when it really gets down to a choice between the baby's life and the mother's life. That is, if one or the other is going to die anyway, there's nothing wrong with choosing that it will be the baby and not the mother that dies.)
[[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 03:02, 25 September 2008 (EDT)
==Drugs==
==Drugs==