Billy Beck [1] is way off base on this one. Read his posting through the link.
Here’s the quick version:
He’s suggesting people for keeping drugs illegal, are bigots. Bigots? Yep. He’s serious, too. His arguments are usually well thought out, but like Sullivan and homosexual behavior, sometimes he goes off the deep end, and this is one such time.
“Bigot? Ladies & gentlemen, “bigotry” is not essentially about booger-eating hillbillies who hate “niggers” or Teutonic skinheads who live to stomp “kikes”. Those are some of the more common manifestations of bigotry, but the principle of the matter is far more fundamental — lower-level, which means: it requires greater effort of logical analysis in order to (in the ordinary and apt colloquialism) “get to the bottom of it”, and it is essentially about two intimately connected branches of philosophy: epistemology and ethics.
The essence of bigotry is about a refusal to think”
So, Billy, Tell us; does that make people who take drugs bigots?
Doubly so, given that it’s a non-thinking act, given the grave risks involved for the returns, both to the individual and to the society as a whole…. and the very act is designed for one purpose… it turns one into even more of a mind-numbed non-thinking idiot, even on those occasions when the druggie doesn’t manage to inflict any damage on anyone else. The act of drug taking is an act designed to accomplish nothing more than, in Billy’s own words, willfully divorce one’s self from reality.
As I say, I’m interested he can’t see that rather gaping hole in his argument; he’s usually a very smart guy.
Then again, Sullivan is, too, except on one topic. Long time readers of this blog will understand the reference. Looks to me like a similar blind spot to me, on a different topic.
The similarities in the lack of logic on one topic, are disquieting.