This is pretty great. I mean, these are Brooks’ arguments? 1) Save The Children, and 2) Grown-Ups Don’t Do It, with a heavy dose of Maybe I’m Wrong as a caveat?
If this is the state of the rebuttal to the NYT editorial piece, it doesn’t hold much water. I think most of the people who would find this specious logic convincing wouldn’t listen to an alternative position to begin with.
David Brooks just demonstrated how airy the emperor’s clothes really are.
‘Pot makes you dumb. Hey guys, wanna go out for cocktails after the show?’
I’m surprised he’d ever HEARD of pot.
I mean, doesn’t he still live with his Mommy?
My senior year in Electrical Engineering was a piece of cake. I could have gotten straight “B” 's on ACID.
Why is he so concerned what others do with their lives?
A friend of mine recently got a speeding ticket on the Long Island Expressway. My jaw dropped when he told me it was $1,000.00. We are now using a public safety issue more as a revenue enhancer, because our local governments desperately need the money. It seems to me that legalizing pot, which is already in wide distribution, and regulating and taxing it, would be the sensible thing to do. Also, David, most of my friends are over 60 and have not “aged out” of pot usage. They still work and are productive members of our society. So take your armchair social theorizing and put it where the sun don’t shine. You too, Tina Brown.
This is all such (pardon the pun); “Smoke and Mirrors.”
No one ever talks about the (permanent) damage that Alcohol does to the brain, and it’s in lots of products.
There are four VERY powerful lobbies that don’t want Marijuana legalized:
I used to think this guy was worth paying a modicum of attention to because he spent his whole day reading books and studies and white papers and such about what’s going on in the world. But if he thinks there’s more than about 11 people in the country who aren’t smoking pot now but would if it were legalized, he’s not worth anyone’s time. Can pretty much anyone who wants pot buy it today, David? Yes. Can people buy bathtub gin? No. There’s no market for it. End of story. You dope.
One of the reasons that it has taken so long to finally get around to decriminalization of pot is because policy has been set by fools like David Brooks and others who were even dumber, or more vindictive, than him.
The idea of incarcerating people for the great sin of using a mildly euphoric herb, when the clear deleterious effects of incarceration on the individual, and on society, are far worse than any possible negative effect from the drug itself, is beyond nonsensical.
And that David Brooks holds himself up as someone qualified to opine on the issue is even more ridiculous.
I am glad that you went to a college that allowed you to skate through your senior year. However, at my college, I took Organic 3, Biochem 1 and 2, Inorganic, and Molecular Biology. No time allowed for slacking.
yep these are the same people who say pot bad !!! while swiggin down their scotch and soda
Because he’s a conservative.
"I could be wrong on marijuana. "
But that didn’t stop him from reciting myth after myth.
David Brooks: Wrong on everything. Al the Time. Forever. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. David Brooks has never gotten ANYTHING right. On national level. On international level. On factual level. On moral level.
David Brooks should have a special entry created for him by Guiness: The Most Wrong Every Time The Open Their Mouth Pundit Category.
There can be only one. And it David Brooks.
You can always count on him. TO BE WRONG.
If one felt too busy or was too lazy to review a variety of news and data sources, investigate their credibility, think critically about them, and engage in the deliberative contemplation necessary to form reasoned opinions on the issues of the day, just taking the other side of anything David Brooks and Ruth Marcus agreed upon would be an excellent shortcut.
Once upon a time I admired David Brooks. I saw him as a sensible voice for moderate ideas, an important part of the debate, even when I disagreed with him. But something happened to the dude. It’s like the histrionic criticism from the far right actually changed him and shifted him into stodgy almost-tea-party territory. I remember after the Newtown shootings he went on NPR and delivered the NRA talking points almost verbatim. It was nauseating. He’s lost his moral center, and it’s just sad.
Does he still get his weekly slot on NPR every Friday afternoon?
11 more people, sure. But that’s millions of people you can’t simply arrest for “smelling like marihuana”. When cops are being photographed while kicking the shit out of somebody, now they’ll have to go back to “smelling like alcohol”.
It figures that Brooks would assume that legalization would mean everyone, of a sudden, would start doing it all the time. Never mind that legal pot would make it harder for children to get it, rather than easier. While children can get alcohol, making it illegal wouldn’t make it harder for them to get, for instance. He talks about the effect it has on the teenage brain. That doesn’t change with legality.
The problem he ignores is that the government sanction is harsher than the harshest known effects of pot. Get caught and you can’t get a security clearance. Get caught and no subsidized housing for you, ever, in some states, no food or financial assistance. What Brooks is saying is, to protect against a possible harm, we will issue a definite, lifelong harm. The real issue is, do the State’s interests in defending against the ‘harms’ of pot justify the real effect that it’s actions have on people caught with it?
As long as alcohol and tobacco are legal, the anti-pot arguments are specious at best and disingenuous at worst.
Also, it’s crystal clear why MTP’s rating are shit. My God.