On August 11, 1972, the last of American ground combat troops exited South Vietnam.
The Biden Administration wants to make sure that marijuana users do not own guns.
Florida Commissioner of Agriculture Nikki Fried, a Democrat, is not with the administration on this matter. Her department oversees concealed carry permits as well as some cannabis regulation, and she “argues that prohibiting all cannabis consumers from owning guns violates the Second Amendment” as well as violating “a congressional spending rider, known as the Rohrabacher-Farr Amendment, that bars the Justice Department from interfering with the implementation of state medical marijuana laws,” explains Jacob Sullum for Reason magazine. Fried has sued the federal government to allow Florida to grant concealed carry permits to marijuana users — something the federal government disallows.
The Justice Department has now asked the courts to dismiss the case.
This is especially rich, since President Biden himself has been on the liberal side of marijuana regulation — though certainly not with guns, where he’s on the tyrants’ side.
Among many inconsistencies, current law does not prohibit people addicted to legal psychoactive drugs from owning guns, as Sullum notes, nor make a big deal about alcohol, the abuse of which has a well-understood linkage with violence, while marijuana does not.
One could go through all the inanities, here, but we should not assume government makes sense on these issues. The federal government should generally not be in the business of regulating either gun ownership or drug usage.
States that recognize “constitutional carry” show how Florida could advance beyond the current mess of too much government interference in this realm.
It wouldn’t be an issue were Florida to get out of the concealed carry permit racket.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Herbert Spencer
Political fetichism will continue so long as men remain without scientific discipline — so long as they recognize only proximate causes, and never think of the remoter and more general causes by which their special agencies are set in motion.
Herbert Spencer, “Political Fetichism” in The Reader (June 10, 1865) and in Essays: Scientific, Political & Speculative, Volume III (1891).
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Independence
On August 10, 1809, Ecuadorians attempted independence from Spain with the Declaration of Independence of Quito, but failed with the execution of all the conspirators a few days less than a year later.
Independence was finally achieved in 1822.
What if CRT were precisely about what its advocates say it is?
“Far-right white people are in a moral panic over Critical Race Theory,” Pennsylvania educators are being taught, “because they fear losing political power.”
Beth Brelje, at The Epoch Times, explains that this is the lesson of a “a webinar presented by Justice Leaders Collaborative, a Michigan-based social justice training organization.” Ms. Brelje quotes Shayla Reese Griffin, the webinar leader, who states that these “far-right white people” are “really just using Critical Race Theory as a kind of an umbrella term for any kind of cultural things that the far-right isn’t interested in.”
This is, of course, disingenuous. Critical Race Theory is not merely an umbrella term. It is a theory of power that tracks oppression (which is a specific variety of power) along rigid class lines, the classes being defined by race.
And it is a movement of the “far left.”
Which is why CRT’s defenders and obfuscationists identify their opponents as “far right.”
Heaven forbid were moderates and centrists also to object!
It’s a bluffing tactic, this extremist-identification, aiming to make moderates, centrists, and just normal, non-political people ashamed to criticize CRT.
It’s manipulative.
CRT’s way off, since power, broadly defined, is everywhere and omnipresent and omnidirectional — everybody has some power, nobody has all power. Critical race theorists aim to ply victimhood status as leverage against innocents who do not want to harm anyone; too often they pretend that everybody on one side of a racial divide is a victim and everybody on the other side is an oppressor. It’s a repackaging of a too-familiar “guilt trip,” as we used to say in the Sixties.
As for parents in most school districts, they’ve discovered they have little power to lose. But by confronting the people they vote onto school boards, they gain more.
Democracy proves itself as one method of holding the powerful to account.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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F. Marion Crawford
There is no such consolation to a born coward as a logical reason for not doing what he is afraid to do
Francis Marion Crawford, Marietta: Maid of Venice (1901).
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Gandhi and Yeltsin
On August 9, 1942, British forces arrested Mahatma Gandhi in Bombay, spurring the Quit India Movement into nationwide action.
In 1999, Russian President Boris Yeltsin fired his Prime Minister, Sergei Stepashin, and his entire cabinet.
A novelist lost access to the novel she was working on. Though almost finished, she had placed her draft in “the cloud” . . . and her Internet service decided to lock her out.
Suddenly, her million words were no longer hers.
That should be a lesson to us all about cloud storage (keep local, off-line back-ups of precious data!), but it’s especially a lesson about China.
While other governments and companies have already begun to emulate China’s censorship of social media and social credit scores, China’s remains at the cutting edge. Chinese writers are losing access to their work because a cloud-based software, WPS, is censoring at the behest of the Chinazi government.
The first to report the development was the novelist with the pen name of Mitu, mentioned above. Writers are being locked out of their manuscripts because the technology has spied illegal content.
Technology Review observes that the ensuing controversy has “highlighted the tension between Chinese users’ increasing awareness of privacy and tech companies’ obligation to censor on behalf of the government.”
An odd way of putting it. But yes, there’s often tension between persons who want to be free to act and others eager to repress.
Could it happen here?
We’re past the point of regarding any form of Big Tech-enabled censorship on behalf of the American state as unthinkably beyond the pale. When they’re routinely gagging scientists for discussing research inconsistent with government-approved doctrines about COVID-19, that’s a strong clue about how far they’re willing to go.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Herbert Spencer
A fundamental error pervading the thinking of nearly all parties, political and social, is that evils admit of immediate and radical remedies. “If you will but do this, the mischief will be prevented.” “Adopt my plan and the suffering will disappear.” “The corruption will unquestionably be cured by enforcing this measure.” Everywhere one meets with beliefs, expressed or implied, of these kinds. They are all ill-founded. It is possible to remove causes which intensify the evils; it is possible to change the evils from one form into another; and it is possible, and very common, to exacerbate the evils by the efforts made to prevent them; but anything like immediate cure is impossible.
Herbert Spencer, “From Freedom to Bondage,” Essays: Scientific, Political & Speculative (1891), and in Thomas Mackay, editor, A Plea for Liberty (1891).
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Born & Died
Francis Hutcheson, philosopher of the Scottish Enlightenment and a great influence on David Hume and Adam Smith, was born in Ireland on August 8, 1694. He died on his birthday in 1746.
Followers of Mahatma Gandhi launched the Quit India Movement against the British rule on August 8, 1942.
On the same day in 1974, President Richard M. Nixon resigned.