Repetindo os efeitos nefastos da Proibição

James Delingpole, na Spectator:

"At first I assumed that this was because I was becoming a lightweight with old age, but, asking around, I’ve discovered that a lot of people feel the same way — even connoisseurs like David Crane of the cannabis campaign organisation The Hempire. ‘I never smoke it if I can help it. It interferes too much with regular life,’ he says. Unfortunately, these days skunk is virtually the only form of marijuana you can buy. Because it is so quick and easy to produce indoors under grow lamps, it has driven most imported weed (save pernicious soap-bar hash) out of the marketplace. This is not dissimilar to what happened in America during Prohibition, when beer virtually disappeared and hard liquor was king: the potential profits were greater, the risks (because near-neat alcohol is less bulky and therefore easy to smuggle) smaller. Once Prohibition was lifted, alcohol consumption by volume increased massively. But the more significant statistic is that at the same time incidence of cirrhosis of the liver fell.

"And there are lessons here to be learnt about cannabis prohibition. The government’s attempts to stop cannabis consumption have, it goes without saying, proved a total failure. Rather, they have actually managed to make matters worse by helping to drive the mildly intoxicating forms of the drug from the market and replacing them with a superstrength version 20 times more powerful than the one pot-heads smoked in the Sixties."

Mais um exemplo de como nunca se aprende com os equívocos anteriores da intervenção estatal. Exatamente como, durante a "lei seca" americana, aumentou a produção de bebidas mais concentradas, porque os riscos eram menores e os lucros maiores, aumenta a produção de drogas mais pesadas, em função da proibição. Ah, sim, claro, alguém aí vai dizer que a solução é aumentar a fiscalização, criar novos mecanismos de repressão ou (a nova panacéia) de tratamento dos "viciados", e assim por diante. Afinal, ninguém nunca aprende com os erros anteriores do Estado. Mais ainda: ninguém nunca percebe que a solução para os problemas criados pelo Estado NÃO é ter mais Estado.
postado por Alvaro Velloso 8:09 PM

Mera ingenuidade?

Um editorial do "Globo" desta semana dizia que as últimas declarações do presidente americano sobre Israel foram infelizes, porque, no conflito entre israelenses e palestinos, o papel dos EUA é o de "mediador imparcial".

Ia escrever que é preciso ser muito idiota para escrever uma coisa dessas. Mas não creio que se trate de uma questão de idiotice; é mais uma questão de cara de pau.

Afinal, a atuação americana no conflito é tão imparcial quanto a de um torcedor fanático assistindo a um jogo de seu time.
postado por Alvaro Velloso 8:00 PM

Causa para impeachment

Matt Taibi, no New York Press:

'Now let’s jump out of the sports world and look at real life. Here, things are different. You can do just about anything in the real world and get away with it. This is particularly true if you’re the president of the United States. Forget about lying about a job interview with the 49ers: You can lie to the entire world, for a full year or more, in order to send thousands to their deaths in an insane military adventure, and be fairly confident that that terrible Monday morning–in which you wake up with the whole world clamoring for your dismissal–will never come.

(...)

'If Bush indeed lied in his State of the Union address when he repeatedly declared unequivocally that Iraq possessed large quantities of chemical and biological weapons, and that it was "reconstituting its nuclear weapons program," then that would clearly be an impeachable offense.

'Former White House counsel John Dean, who ought to know, said as much in a little-circulated article published on the CNN website. "Manipulation or deliberate misuse of national security intelligence data," he wrote, "if proven, could be ‘a high crime’ under the Constitution’s impeachment clause." Dean added: "To put it bluntly, if Bush has taken Congress and the nation into war based on bogus information, he is cooked."

'Despite a seeming legal basis for it, the Democrats have yet to so much as threaten impeachment, settling for timid calls for an investigation. There are no Newt Gingriches or Ken Lays out there emptying the armories for a fight. Bush would appear to be safe there until election season, when of course the Democratic candidates will make whatever they can out of the issue without causing any actual damage.

'And the media? With a few exceptions–the shame-covered Times among them–the press has universally responded to the weapons of mass destruction story by asking not did Bush lie, but where are they? Try it yourself: a simple Google news search on the phrase "Saddam’s weapons" turns up, at this writing, 908 hits. The simple lingual trick of continually referring in an affirmative manner to "the weapons of mass destruction," presupposing at the sentence level that they not only did exist but still do in some form or another (in some cases, the present-tense reference to the weapons seems to indicate not even their existence, but their continued political viability as a war excuse), is itself a clear expression of support for the Bush position. And almost every paper in the country uses it.'

É inegável que as mentiras do governo Bush sobre as "armas de destruição em massa" no Iraque são infinitamente mais graves do que as mentiras que marcaram o governo Clinton. Mas a mídia permanece servil (a revelar, pela enésima vez, que, ao contrário da choradeira neoconservadora, a mídia não está a serviço da esquerda; ela está a serviço do Governo, seja qual for seu ocupante), e a oposição não ousa tratar o assunto com a seriedade que ele merece. E ainda temos de ler por aí sobre a magnífica vitória da democracia e sobre os planos para expandir a guerra. Que piada.
postado por Alvaro Velloso 7:53 PM

Por uma História menos infantilizada

Frank Johnson, na Spectator:

"Weidenfeld and Nicolson is about to publish a big biography of Mussolini by my friend Nicholas Farrell, which contains the following passage: ‘Just as none of the victorious powers went to war with Germany to save the Jews neither did Mussolini go to war with them to exterminate the Jews. Indeed, once the Holocaust was under way he and his fascists refused to deport Jews to the Nazi death camps thus saving thousands of Jewish lives — far more than Oskar Schindler.’

"Mussolini saved more Jews than Schindler! For once, the word ‘controversial’, so often used to describe any old bit of routine leftism, is justified. That Mussolini saved Jews has long been known, especially to non-left-wing Italians, though that includes few Italian intellectuals. But not known widely; it is not something which Anglo-Saxons emphasise about Mussolini.

(...)

"That a right-wing dictator could save Jews is the sort of information that has not been allowed to enter the Anglo-Saxon consciousness because it is politically inconvenient. Politically Convenient historiography does not take account of shades of white and black. No grey is allowed. Once it is agreed that someone was a right-winger, anything good that he does is either not emphasised or it is suppressed. It is Politically Inconvenient that Mussolini saved Jews.

"During the war, many Jews from various parts of Europe saved themselves by reaching Franco’s Spain. Some made their way to Argentina, including Perón’s Argentina. The recently deceased Lord Bauer — Peter Bauer, the dissident free-marketeer among LSE economists, himself born a Hungarian Jew — delighted in telling me of a Hungarian Jew who made his way through Franco’s Spain to Cuba (another right-wing dictatorship), later to help invent the contraceptive pill."

Sim, Mussolini ajudou os judeus. Franco também. Observar isso não serve para justificar suas atrocidades - serve para que se perceba que existe uma gradação no mal, e existem nuances na História que o infantilismo reinante não prefere ignorar.
postado por Alvaro Velloso 7:47 PM