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You can now rate UV... and a few others in Blades of Avernum
Thuryl
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Member # 869
 written Saturday, June 18 2005 15:09 Profile Homepage #1
Don't forget CSR.

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The Empire Always Loses: This Time For Sure!
Posts: 9973 | Registered: Saturday, March 30 2002 08:00
Fun and weird! in General
Thuryl
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Member # 869
 written Saturday, June 18 2005 15:05 Profile Homepage #11
quote:
Originally written by Eagle, the author soul:

Yer art welcome. *Chortle* Anybody noticed the info in my signature? :D
I cannot help but find it ironic that you complained in your previous signature that your girlfriend seemed only to be with you for reasons of social status.

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Elections: The Registration Thread in General
Thuryl
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Member # 869
 written Saturday, June 18 2005 14:57 Profile Homepage #2
I can run and still vote, right?

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Elections: The Candidacy Thread in General
Thuryl
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Member # 869
 written Saturday, June 18 2005 14:48 Profile Homepage #1
I intend to be a candidate.

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Elections? in General
Thuryl
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Member # 869
 written Saturday, June 18 2005 02:28 Profile Homepage #86
You'll always be 21 at heart.

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Drug Debate Thread for the Rest of Us in General
Thuryl
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Member # 869
 written Friday, June 17 2005 19:53 Profile Homepage #28
quote:
Originally written by Mysterious Mod:

Has there been any effort to devise such drug tests?
Yes. A roadside saliva testing program for marijuana and amphetamines was recently trialled in Australia. The results were pretty embarrassing, with several false positives in the first few days after the system was introduced. Needless to say, the testing regime was declared not ready for prime time and scrapped soon afterwards.

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Drug Debate Thread for the Rest of Us in General
Thuryl
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Member # 869
 written Friday, June 17 2005 19:37 Profile Homepage #26
quote:
Originally written by Mysterious Mod:

The drugs in question are mind-altering drugs. Performance-enhancing drugs are a separate problem. (Incidentally, I don't see why they have to be illegal, except that sports teams don't like them).
As the classic examples of performance-enhancing drugs, anabolic steroids used to be permitted in sport. Then men started growing breasts, women started growing beards and everyone started having heart attacks, and everyone decided it'd probably be better if they all just stopped using drugs. Anabolic steroids are still legal for some uses, but their possession is heavily regulated due to the potential for abuse.

quote:
Driving drunk is no better and no worse than driving while incapacitated by any drug, and should be treated the same way.
It's worth noting that there's a practical issue here; most drugs can't be tested for as quickly and reliably as alcohol.

quote:
That does bring up the question of transit. If you can't drive yourself home after smoking pot (and you shouldn't), let alone using LSD, is this going to require major mass transit changes? But I digress.
Obviously, the sensible thing to do is the same as with alcohol: don't consume the drug if you might need to drive soon afterwards.

quote:
—Alorael, who didn't know about murder for necessity. Does that also permit cannibalism, by any chance?
Good question. Actually, the classic case in which the defence of necessity was created was the case of two starving sailors at sea who killed and ate their cabin boy. (The sailors who killed and ate their companion lost the case, but only because the court ruled they could have survived without killing him.)

[ Friday, June 17, 2005 19:38: Message edited by: Thuryl ]

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Drug Debate Thread for the Rest of Us in General
Thuryl
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Member # 869
 written Friday, June 17 2005 19:19 Profile Homepage #24
quote:
Originally written by Student of Trinity:

Oh, I agree that making things better would make them better -- that far, yes, the form of the argument is valid. But the argument as used assumes that some net pragmatic benefit would be sufficient grounds for legalizing something. I used to love this argument myself (and I'd still be happy if anyone rebuts my criticism and revives it). Now it seems to me that this ain't necessarily so -- you've first got to establish that a pragmatic calculus is the only relevant issue. And if you do manage to do this, you've essentially won the whole argument already then, anyway, inasmuch as you've shifted the discussion from crime (like murder) to control (like tobacco and alcohol).
I think you're the only one making this distinction, though. I'd be quite happy to legalise and regulate murder if it could be shown that in practice it led to fewer people being killed. In fact, the killing of others is already regulated under limited conditions, precisely because doing so reduces the amount of killing that's going on -- you can kill someone in defence of the life of yourself or others. The fact that we call the legal kind of killing "self-defence" and the illegal kind "murder" is purely a matter of terminology.

If you're going to reply that self-defence doesn't count because it's not the killing of an innocent, keep in mind that many countries also allow necessity as a defence to murder -- if you're on a boat in the middle of the ocean with someone and it's obvious there's only enough food for one of you to get home alive, you're allowed to throw your companion into the ocean, even though he's done nothing wrong. In general, legal philosophy leans heavily toward making just about any action permissible provided that it leads to a better outcome than the alternative.

[ Friday, June 17, 2005 19:29: Message edited by: Thuryl ]

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Drug Debate Thread for the Rest of Us in General
Thuryl
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Member # 869
 written Friday, June 17 2005 18:59 Profile Homepage #19
It's also worth noting that in the early 20th century, when heroin was available in pharmacies with an average dose costing about as much as a cup of tea, it's not obvious that its availability led to huge social problems.

[ Friday, June 17, 2005 19:22: Message edited by: Thuryl ]

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Drug Debate Thread for the Rest of Us in General
Thuryl
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Member # 869
 written Friday, June 17 2005 18:50 Profile Homepage #17
SoT, in case you missed it, my take on the drugs/hitmen thing is further up.

Stranger, I think Alec means full legalisation of every substance listed on Schedule I-V of the Single Convention:

http://www.usdoj.gov/dea/pubs/scheduling.html

After all, considering it's trivially easy to make explosives from chemicals you can purchase without even needing a permit, what justification can there be for restricting access to chemicals that people mostly only harm themselves with?

[ Friday, June 17, 2005 19:01: Message edited by: Thuryl ]

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Drug Debate Thread for the Rest of Us in General
Thuryl
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Member # 869
 written Friday, June 17 2005 18:29 Profile Homepage #11
http://www.ironycentral.com/cgi-bin/ubb/ubb/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic;f=1;t=002543;p=2

quote:
Originally posted by Alec:
I believe in full legalization of all currently controlled substances.
I'd say that's pretty clear.

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Drug Debate Thread for the Rest of Us in General
Thuryl
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Member # 869
 written Friday, June 17 2005 18:22 Profile Homepage #7
quote:
Originally posted (in the other thread) by Student of Trinity:
My point wasn't that buying drugs is like murder, except in being illegal but inevitable. It was just to criticise one particular argument, namely, the seemingly pragmatic appeal to bring something inevitable under control by legally accepting its inevitability. As far as I can see at the moment, this argument was one of the strongest ones for legalizing drugs, and it is now gone without a trace.

I regret this. I liked that argument, and I'd be happy to see it rebut my criticism and come back somehow. I just don't see how it will, at the moment, myself.
There are good non-legal reasons to avoid using recreational drugs (health, employment, etc). By contrast, there is no compelling reason not to kill someone you sufficiently dislike, other than the fact that you are likely to spend a long time in prison for doing so. Therefore, legalising murder is likely to have a more dramatic effect on the prevalence of murder than legalising drug use will on the prevalence of drug use.

(I oversimplify the matter, of course; even in a lawless society, people eventually wise up and work out that murdering people is a bad idea when they have friends who can do the same to you. Still, the threat of starting a vendetta is a rather uglier way of keeping murder down than the rule of law.)

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It is that time of the month again in General
Thuryl
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Member # 869
 written Friday, June 17 2005 18:12 Profile Homepage #27
If the objectionable behaviour is constant, then obviously it's not attributable to PMS.

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Drug Debate Thread for the Rest of Us in General
Thuryl
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Member # 869
 written Friday, June 17 2005 18:08 Profile Homepage #3
quote:
Originally written by An Upright stranger:

I just don't trust that people buying drugs will use moderation. Therefore the problems they create would cancel out benefits of controlling the sale of drugs. And hey, wouldn't this plan only work if the government did it perfectly? Since when has anyone done something perfectly?
People who buy drugs already fail to use moderation, partly because the variability in purity of their product prevents them from doing so. Safety of users can be improved with further initiatives such as supervised injection. Legalisation may indeed lead to some increase in drug use, but to determine just how large that increase would be, how about we conduct a survey?

If you, the reader of this post, don't use illegal drugs, and the only reason you don't use illegal drugs is because they're illegal, reply to this topic and say so. Let's see what proportion of SW's hundreds of active members fall into that category.

Furthermore, your claim that legalisation would work if and only if carried out perfectly (whatever "perfectly" means in this context) is an insubstantiated and rather implausible assertion.

[ Friday, June 17, 2005 18:10: Message edited by: Thuryl ]

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Drug Debate Thread for the Rest of Us in General
Thuryl
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Member # 869
 written Friday, June 17 2005 17:59 Profile Homepage #0
Since the Great Debate thread was explicitly intended as a debate between two people, if you are not Ash or Alec, please debate the merits or otherwise of drug decriminalisation in THIS thread.

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THE GREAT DEBATE, PART III in General
Thuryl
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Member # 869
 written Friday, June 17 2005 17:55 Profile Homepage #46
Aren't we all forgetting something here? The whole point of this thread was to be a debate between two people. If you want to debate this issue yourselves, start a spinoff thread.

EDIT: Here.

[ Friday, June 17, 2005 18:00: Message edited by: Thuryl ]

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Elections? in General
Thuryl
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Member # 869
 written Friday, June 17 2005 15:57 Profile Homepage #53
Isn't it a little premature to be supporting Dolphin when the candidates haven't even announced themselves yet?

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Exile 3 Reinstallation in Tech Support
Thuryl
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Member # 869
 written Friday, June 17 2005 15:44 Profile Homepage #1
Email spidweb@spiderwebsoftware.com with the name and address you originally registered with and they'll give you a new code. They're usually pretty good about this sort of thing.

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Posts: 9973 | Registered: Saturday, March 30 2002 08:00
Anyone Like Anime? in General
Thuryl
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Member # 869
 written Friday, June 17 2005 14:44 Profile Homepage #20
quote:
Originally written by Eagle, the author soul:

Yes it is. F is written as Fu, C is written as Ku and L is written as Ru. It's because Japanese do not have stand-alone consonants except from N'. L is missing in the japanese language and japanese people can hardly hear the difference between the L and the R. Therefore the L has been replaced with R.
Yes, but it's only "Engrish" if it was meant to represent English in the first place. There are several different stories about the origin of the title of the series, and one of them is that it's simply meant to represent a certain sound.

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It is that time of the month again in General
Thuryl
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Member # 869
 written Friday, June 17 2005 14:37 Profile Homepage #20
Severe cramping pains during menstruation can actually be a sign of endometriosis, so it's worth seeking medical advice about them.

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Books Being Made Into Movies in General
Thuryl
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Member # 869
 written Friday, June 17 2005 14:29 Profile Homepage #53
The movie has Hugh Grant in it. I'm not really sure what else you were expecting.

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It is that time of the month again in General
Thuryl
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Member # 869
 written Friday, June 17 2005 02:55 Profile Homepage #17
Most of the arguments I get into with women are started by me. This is not so much to do with hormones as it is to do with the fact that I am of a fundamentally cantankerous nature.

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THE GREAT DEBATE, PART III in General
Thuryl
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Member # 869
 written Thursday, June 16 2005 21:29 Profile Homepage #24
Also, you may as well clarify whether there are any presently legal drugs you'd like to see banned as well.

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BIG Bug in "Special Skills" in Blades of Avernum
Thuryl
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Member # 869
 written Thursday, June 16 2005 20:44 Profile Homepage #5
I actually did the numbers on it at one point. Depending on how soon you want your investment to pay off, it makes sense to start investing in Pole Weapons and try for Blademaster as soon as you reach 14 points in Melee Weapons (or vice versa).

[ Thursday, June 16, 2005 20:44: Message edited by: Thuryl ]

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Undead Topics Need Loving Too (aka "Give Me Your First-Born") in General
Thuryl
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Member # 869
 written Thursday, June 16 2005 20:39 Profile Homepage #663
Actually, you're conflating two different locations from NTH into one, but it makes a better story that way.

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