2024 Field
- Thread starter Jaw
- Start date
I’m more in favor of legalizing harder drugs than baby drugs like weed.
But crazy people shouldn’t be allowed to do drugs just like they’re not allowed to buy guns. If your brain is already so imbalanced, that doing drugs makes it worse, we as a society need to disallow it. Not everyone can handle it.
Tapate50
Well-known member
In the amounts I drank last night at our Christmas party, I agree. Total poison.
Yep, totally agree. Same goes for gambling and prostitution. Whatever some combination of consenting adults wants to do that doesn’t harm any third party should be legal.
I assume you’ll disagree, but I’d pair that legalization with some form of regulation like we have with things like alcohol and food.
Id just be concerned about downstream impacts like total productivity as a nation.
Maybe it doesn't impact it but even an individual action can have residual group consequences.
My counterpoint is that all these things already exist and are readily available to anybody focused on getting it. It’s just that right now the power is in the hands of the likes of the Cartel and that people have their lives ruined by getting caught with it. It’s not stopping people from doing it, though.
Jaw
It's OVER 5,000!
Rubio is trending NatPop
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/china-wto-experiment-failed-pro-american-capitalism-sen-marco-rubio
Politicians have also ignored that the tradeoff for temporarily lower prices at home was the collapse of American manufacturing. We have enjoyed cheap goods, but at the cost of human rights violations and diminished industrial capacity.
It’s in the decision to move production to China that we see another failure of the neoliberal consensus, one derived from the false belief that the stock market and corporate profits are the same thing as real economic growth and innovation.
Since 2001, the stock market has risen 130%, but middle-class Americans have seen only a 6% increase in income. Lower-income Americans have not seen growth at all. With the added effects of inflation, the decline in quality of life is stunning. Profits for corporate shareholders increased after the PRC’s entry into the WTO, but those profits were at the expense of ordinary Americans’ well-being and our country’s economic resiliency.
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/china-wto-experiment-failed-pro-american-capitalism-sen-marco-rubio
Politicians have also ignored that the tradeoff for temporarily lower prices at home was the collapse of American manufacturing. We have enjoyed cheap goods, but at the cost of human rights violations and diminished industrial capacity.
It’s in the decision to move production to China that we see another failure of the neoliberal consensus, one derived from the false belief that the stock market and corporate profits are the same thing as real economic growth and innovation.
Since 2001, the stock market has risen 130%, but middle-class Americans have seen only a 6% increase in income. Lower-income Americans have not seen growth at all. With the added effects of inflation, the decline in quality of life is stunning. Profits for corporate shareholders increased after the PRC’s entry into the WTO, but those profits were at the expense of ordinary Americans’ well-being and our country’s economic resiliency.
Jaw
It's OVER 5,000!
Oh he's the same slender reed he's always been, but you can tell which way the wind is blowing by which direction he's pointing. He'll never be in the forefront or on an extreme, so I take this as a good sign.
acesfull86
Well-known member
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/14/opinion/biden-age-election-2024.html
Is it a good idea for Joe Biden to run for re-election in 2024? And, if he runs again and wins, would it be good for the United States to have a president who is 86 — the age Biden would be at the end of a second term?
I put these questions bluntly because they need to be discussed candidly, not just whispered constantly.
In the 1980s, it was fair game for reputable reporters to ask whether Ronald Reagan was too old for the presidency, at a time when he was several years younger than Biden is today. Donald Trump’s apparent difficulty holding a glass and his constricted vocabulary repeatedly prompted unflattering speculation about his health, mental and otherwise. And Joe Biden’s memory lapses were a source of mirth among his Democratic primary rivals, at least until he won the nomination.
Yet it’s now considered horrible manners to raise concerns about Biden’s age and health. As if doing so can only play into Trump’s hands. As if the president’s well-being is nobody’s business but his own. As if it doesn’t much matter whether he has the fortitude for the world’s most important job, so long as his aides can adroitly fill the gaps. As if accusations of ageism and a giant shushing sound from media elites can keep the issue off the public mind.
It won’t do. From some of his public appearances, Biden seems … uneven. Often cogent, but sometimes alarmingly incoherent. What’s the reason? I have no idea. Do his appearances (including the good ones) inspire strong confidence that the president can go the distance in his current term, to say nothing of the next? No.
And many people seem to know it. On Sunday, my colleagues Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns reported on the Democratic Party’s not-so-quiet murmurs about what to do if Biden decides not to run. Aspirants for the nomination appear in the story like sharks circling a raft, swimming slow.
This is not healthy. Not for the president himself, not for the office he holds, not for the Democratic Party, not for the country.
——————
I agree
Is it a good idea for Joe Biden to run for re-election in 2024? And, if he runs again and wins, would it be good for the United States to have a president who is 86 — the age Biden would be at the end of a second term?
I put these questions bluntly because they need to be discussed candidly, not just whispered constantly.
In the 1980s, it was fair game for reputable reporters to ask whether Ronald Reagan was too old for the presidency, at a time when he was several years younger than Biden is today. Donald Trump’s apparent difficulty holding a glass and his constricted vocabulary repeatedly prompted unflattering speculation about his health, mental and otherwise. And Joe Biden’s memory lapses were a source of mirth among his Democratic primary rivals, at least until he won the nomination.
Yet it’s now considered horrible manners to raise concerns about Biden’s age and health. As if doing so can only play into Trump’s hands. As if the president’s well-being is nobody’s business but his own. As if it doesn’t much matter whether he has the fortitude for the world’s most important job, so long as his aides can adroitly fill the gaps. As if accusations of ageism and a giant shushing sound from media elites can keep the issue off the public mind.
It won’t do. From some of his public appearances, Biden seems … uneven. Often cogent, but sometimes alarmingly incoherent. What’s the reason? I have no idea. Do his appearances (including the good ones) inspire strong confidence that the president can go the distance in his current term, to say nothing of the next? No.
And many people seem to know it. On Sunday, my colleagues Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns reported on the Democratic Party’s not-so-quiet murmurs about what to do if Biden decides not to run. Aspirants for the nomination appear in the story like sharks circling a raft, swimming slow.
This is not healthy. Not for the president himself, not for the office he holds, not for the Democratic Party, not for the country.
——————
I agree
Jaw
It's OVER 5,000!
Yeesh. Media has their knives out for Biden now? It will be interesting to see who they start trying to build up. It has seemed like they wanted Pete but his Cabinet post performance hasn't given them much to work with. And they have to know they'll start a war if they try to skip over Kamala, right?