I'm beginning to understand what ticks you guys off so much. Pot more important than wheat???

[HamdenRice]

I'm probably not as skeptical of certain things as most skeptics are, but I certainly see how sheer irrationality is a major factor in many people's thinking, including the thinking of many DUers.

There was one of those periodic marijuana threads, and someone posted that marijuana was the most useful plant in the world. I asked, "more useful than wheat?" and the poster said it was. Then the thread was locked.

So I posted a separate thread as a poll, sort of as a reality check, asking which is more important wheat or marijuana.

For much of the first day, marijuana had the lead. Now wheat has a slight lead.

WTF???????????

Do 40% of DUers really think marijuana is more important than one of the major food crops of humanity? I can't begin to fathom their mindset.

[TZ]

1. According to DU, pot is the wunderdrug that cures everything!

Of course I know that marijuana has some wonderful medicinal values, but its not a cure all far from it. I think part of the issue here, is that there are a lot of people who really enjoy smoking it, so they leap on anything that could possibly justify this habit, or strengthen the case for legalization.
Also, anything that is remotely critical of marijuana's effects is immediately jumped on as "politically motivated" by the right.
Rational discussion of the scientific merits of marijuana is impossible on this site. I have stopped trying.

[Q3JR4]

27. So sayeth the potheads....

:hippie:

Q3JR4.

[salvorhardin]

2. I've said this before and you derided it

Most of the pro-cannabis rhetoric, here and all over, is based on completely fallacious arguments. Almost all of it can be traced back to Jack Herer's The Emperor Wears No Clothes. Here's one good article that debunks the hemp conspiracy myth put forth by Herer, while simultaneously making the point that cannabis is illegal because of racism and culture wars.

Why, then, do so many people believe in the "hemp conspiracy"? First, it's the influence of The Emperor Wears No Clothes; many people inspired to cannabis activism by Jack Herer's hemp-can-save-the-world vision and passionate denunciations of pot prohibition buy into the whole "conspiracy against marijuana" package. Another is that many stoners love a good conspiracy theory; secret cabals are simpler and sexier villains than sociopolitical forces. The conspiracist worldview, a hybrid of the who-really-killed-the-Kennedys suspicions of the '60s left and the Bilderbergs-and-Illuminati demonology of the far right, is especially common in rural areas and among pothead Ron Paul supporters. Most people don't have the historical or political knowledge to dispute a conspiracist flood of detailed half-truths.

Counterculture people who see the evil done by corporations and politicians are often quick to believe that they are thus guilty of anything and everything -- that because the CIA tried to kill Fidel Castro with an exploding cigar, it's therefore indisputable that it killed Bob Marley by giving him boots booby-trapped with a carcinogen-tipped wire. Witness the multitudes who zealously argue that because George W. Bush gained a political advantage from the 9/11 attacks and told a thousand lies to justify the war in Iraq, it's proof that his operatives planted explosives in the World Trade Center and set them off an hour or so after the planes hit.

The Bush administration's attempt to link buying herb to "supporting terrorism" proved more laughable than lasting. Yet the racism-culture war combination is still very potent. Among the 360,000 arrests for marijuana possession in New York City between 1997 and 2006, the decade when mayors Rudolph Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg turned the city into the nation's pot-bust capital, 84 percent of the people popped were black or Latino, mostly young men. And the oft-cited statistic that there are more black men in prison than in college should be the equivalent of a doctor's warning that the nation has a cholesterol level approaching Jerry Garcia's after years on a diet of ice cream, cigarettes and heroin.
http://www.alternet.org/drugreporter/77339/?page=entire

[HamdenRice]

3. "I" derided it?

How ironic, because I'm generally considered to be hostile to marijuana as an unpleasant smelling, addictive, illegal drug.

That said, I do agree that it is very effective as an anti-nausea drug for chemo patients and as an appetite stimulant for AIDS patients.

Have a link?

[salvorhardin]

5. I don't. It was quite a while ago.

It was in context of my classifying the Dupont-Hearst story as a conspiracy theory.

BTW: Only about 10% of people who try cannabis become dependent on it, contrasted with "32 percent of tobacco users, 23 percent of heroin users, 17 percent of cocaine users and 15 percent of alcohol users" and the withdrawal symptoms are mild compared to other drugs.
http://www.alternet.org/drugreporter/80408

[trotsky]

4. Yeah, it's fucking annoying.

Irrational and/or wishful thinking is hardly the sole domain of one end of the political spectrum.

[HuckleB]

40. +1

[Codeine]

6. Welcome to Marijuana Underground.

It's sad to see so many otherwise intelligent people completely lose their shit on this subject.

[SemiCharmedQuark]

7. It's DU. People lose their shit on *every* subject.

I saw someone lose their shit because they thought people shouldn't be allowed to have a GPS.

[Silent3]

9. Dare I ask what this person had against GPS? n/t

[SemiCharmedQuark]

12. "Only idiots use GPS! Real people should know how to use a map! GPS units get thrown out and ceate

waste!"

[Silent3]

14. Now that you say that...

...the thread sounds familiar to me. Apparently no advantage of GPS over a paper map (I wonder how many lives, how much injury and property damage have been saved by people not losing control while trying to read a big fold-out map in a car?) was enough to "excuse" the existence of consumer GPS.

I never found out of using the stars and a sextant should be "good enough" for ships at sea. :)

[SemiCharmedQuark]

15. Astrolabes create waste!

[trotsky]

35. LMFAO

:thumbsup:

[Orrex]

16. My high school math teacher insisted that we become intimately familiar log tables

Because, you know, we might not have a calculator handy some day.

Uh. What?

In the 20 years since that time, I have never had a log table handy; similarly, I've never needed a calculator and not been able to find one.


I imagine that the same is true of maps and GPS. I don't yet have a GPS device, but only a fool would deny the value and utility.

[PVnRT]

17. I've heard the same argument on DU to "demonstrate" the need for learning slide rules

"Well, you might not have a calculator! What if there's a nuclear holocaust?"

Well, then, I don't really fucking care about multiplying 2998.4583 by 19.00034, do I?

[TZ]

19. LOL!

Same as I'm glad I have the software that generates a standard curve for me...If I don't have the software availiable I'm gonna have much bigger things to worry about.

[Silent3]

20. There will probably be a mutant fungus that eats most slide rules anyway.

What do you do if you survive the initial nuclear exchange, you're scrounging for food, and someone will only feed you if you solve multiplication problems for him? Or worse, he demands you compute logarithms?

I'll be ready with my platinum slide rule (that the fungus can't digest) and you'll be starving!

[SemiCharmedQuark]

21. In that case, I'll use this sophisticated device to take your slide rule

[salvorhardin]

23. After a nuclear exchange...

Wouldn't your nice platinum slide rule be radioactive, or be more likely to become radioactive?

One of these days I'd love to purchase a nice, vintage, metal engineering slide rule off EBay.

[PVnRT]

24. I have my reference books

Mathematics reference, CRC, Perry's...thou shalt bow before me.

[uppityperson]

36. In case of nuclear holocaust, rounding is acceptable. ps 60,000

[Silent3]

18. Ah, but what if you don't have a SCIENTIFIC calculator handy?

Didn't think of THAT smartypants, didja? :)

Fortunately for logarithmic emergencies, my iPhone has a scientific calculator. I'm such a nerd that I used to have a calculator wristwatch (damn thing didn't even have square root!), but I gave that up when I eventually realized that having my cell phone with me all of the time made a calculator on my watch superfluous.

My iPhone is, of course, an intrinsically evil device. Not only does it harbor the villainy of GPS, but, you know, people used to get along just fine stopping at the telegraph office now and then, so even the phone part is obviously a needlessly indulgent waste.

Hmmm... I wonder if anyone even publishes log tables and other such pre-calculator tables any more?

[Q3JR4]

29. Also makes one's watch superfluous...

Q3JR4.

[Silent3]

30. A wristwatch is still a bit more convenient for checking the time...

...than pulling out my phone, like it's some sort of overwrought pocket watch. :)

[SemiCharmedQuark]

I had a calculator wristwatch when I was a kid.

I had to go door to door selling fundraising crap to earn it with prize points, but I did it and that watch was cool as shit. It broke in about 2 weeks though. :(

[salvorhardin]

22. There is value to learning to solve logarithms and do trig with log tables

There is also value to learning to use slide rules.

That value is not because you may not have a calculator handy some day. The value lies in learning a different approach to solving the same problem. Learning both gives you a more comprehensive view of both trigonometry and basic math. I'd further say it leads to a more intuitive understanding of math in general. A "feel" for numbers if you will. It's the same reason we learn both algebra/trig and Euclidean geometry methods for solving the same problem or logic and set theoretical approaches (ultimately, everything comes down to set theory).

But yeah, on an everyday practical level, I haven't needed a log table, trig table or slide rule in the greater than 20 years since I graduated. But I'm glad I learned to use both.

[Orrex]

25. If that's the case, then that's what he should have told us

instead of trying to spin some yarn about the relative availability of calculators versus log tables.

The way he did it, though, I'm left with a two-decade impression of a preposterously out of touch teacher, rather than an instructor who saw the value in teaching multiple approaches. I don't doubt that you're right about your assessment, but to this day I feel that he presented the lesson poorly.

[salvorhardin]

26. There's always techo-reactionaries who think a labor-saving tech will lead to the downfall of humans

I think people who think this way, who believe for instance that calculators will lead to a society of people unable to do basic math, are reacting out of fear of a change in the social order. Adoption of new technologies leads to changes in the way society works and that is to be feared for many people. It makes them feel alien in their own culture, especially if they are not able to adapt. This often leads to expressing their fear as a threat to their morality. The technology becomes a wrong that must be fought. Convince enough people of this and a moral panic breaks out.

[SemiCharmedQuark]

28. I do think there has to be a happy medium.

I am always dismayed when I come across an adult who can't figure out what 10% of something is. People should be able to add and multiply without a calculator.

Let me clarify: People should be able to multiply basic numbers, not pi times e or something like that.

[salvorhardin]

31. Oh definitely.

One would hope a solid basic math education would give people a good enough knowledge that they know things like multiplying by a power of ten always means you just move the decimal point, or that multiplying by a multiple of a power of ten just means move the decimal point, and then multiply.

I do have to wonder though if the majority of people were really better at basic math and using it in their lives in the past, or if it's a form of bias. After all, a checkout clerk had no fancy cash register to dispense change for her automatically in 1950. Yet everybody always says how much better checkout clerks were at making change in the past. It's something I've noticed myself. But are today's checkout clerks really worse? Or was it that in 1950, everybody who worked as a checkout clerk got lots of practice making change (almost every single transaction!), so they got quite good at it. If they couldn't do it when they asked for the job, they probably weren't hired and if they didn't learn it on the job, then they probably were fired. So the result is that all the checkout clerks are really, really good at making change. Today however, checkout clerks rarely have to make change or if they do, the register tells them how much change to give. So they never really learn that skill. Are they worse at doing basic math than their 1950s counterpart? Probably not. I think most people in the past were as equally bad at basic math as most people today are. It's just that the people we interact with the most are not selected for or against based on their numeracy any more.

At least that's my theory. It may be utterly wrong.

[SemiCharmedQuark]

33. I think you're spot on.

My grandfather is pretty much illiterate, my grandma never finished 6th grade, but neither of them were ever given a job where their lack of education came up. My grandma was a maid and my grandpa worked as a laborer. However, when people remember the "good old days", they only think about the people whose job depended on said skill.

[Orrex]

8. Well, a small fraction of people are allergic to wheat.

Therefore it should be globally outlawed or something. But marijuana, on the other hand, is all good things for all good people, and it should be grown on every rooftop and windowsill.

[Silent3]

10. I'd imagine at least some people answered marijuana...

...simply because they thought that was a more amusing answer than wheat.

Not to say that irrational pot-can-save-the-world thinking isn't a likely part of the response too.

[Odin2005]

11. It's the most extreme example of "natural medicine" woo.

[Anarcho-Socialist]

13. It probably really isn't 40%

I think pro-pot posters tend to seek out those threads. But like other posters above have more eloquently stated than myself, there is a vocal minority who can't see any wrong in the drug.

There's a debate whether its effects are not as bad as nicotine, but if that is the case then depression and memory loss aren't effects to be ignored either.

[DU GrovelBot]

32. ## PLEASE DONATE TO DEMOCRATIC UNDERGROUND! ##

This week is our fourth quarter 2009 fund drive. Democratic Underground is
a completely independent website. We depend on donations from our members
to cover our costs. Please take a moment to donate! Thank you!

[SemiCharmedQuark]

34. Get outta here, Grovel Bot! Or I'll vaccinate yas.

[TZ]

37. Here's a new one: "No ones ever died of allergic reaction to Cannibis"

Really? You know every medical case ever recorded? Cannibis is some magical plant that has been god kissed so that it behaves differently from the rest of the botanical world? :banghead:

[Odin2005]

38. That one was a doozy!

:banghead:

[PVnRT]

39. Cannabis is magic. Like Jesus!