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“The market will inevitably sort those weaker professionals - there's no woke remedy for such market forces - and society's poor will end up getting ever-shittier service by people who got crappy educations.

What's the point of all this? If it's about remedying the disservice "society" has done to minorities, this is exactly the wrong approach.”

Amen, Amen, Amen!

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There was a cult film some years back called "Idiocracy" such professional examples existed to support the plot that things had gone to hell in a handbasket (HIAH)

It was often a question of where the writer may have found the seeds of such an outcome.

One shudders to think what it might be like when your own medical crisis comes to pass,

and what passes for a 'medico' in PC scrubs,

with a stethoscope (sans bell) dangling round "its" neck

(you've got to believe it will be a (reality/binary/sex__choose any)-fluid creature)

Spouting 'duddddeeeeee' or 'totallllllyyyy' (or similar clueless exclamations) as your

BP goes sky high, bottoms out, and you pass painfully into the great beyond

with the likes of such a gargoyle; witless/dumbfounded; gawking at your passing.

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We are agreed about drugs, their attraction for some, the harms they cause, the failures of our attempt to regulate them. Still, I worry about the consequences of ignoring them ... of giving them free reign.

In an earlier time the Catholic Church established rules of behavior and enforced them, often in draconian fashion. Among some even today religious law holds sway to the detriment of personal freedom. The Founders divorcing of religion from government had more than one beneficial effect.

I love that ours is a system of laws rather than of men. And that We the People are in charge, that we are the government. But those truths leave no room for laissez-faire attitudes about anything.

In their invention of government the Founders established two distinct and conflicting realities: individual freedom and societal responsibility. We are rabid in our defense of the former, not so much in observance of the latter. More and more progressives urge our rejection of God and of the Western World's sense of morality. I fear we are nearing the abyss. And I see adding a cavalier attitude about drugs as another step in that direction.

There is an assumption of limitation on the individual in favor of protection for the whole. I admit I struggle with the how of it, but I continue to favor the intent of it. And since it is we who are responsible, it is we who must find a solution.

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Free rein does not carry with it immunity from consequence for harming others. THAT is where we should draw the line. When someone steals, no matter the reason, that someone should be punished. Same for violence against others, destruction of property, and on and on.

The too-common mistake is in excusing bad behaviors against others in tandem with the discussion about legalization. We don't excuse drunks who do harm to others, so why would we think that legalizing other recreational drugs (and let's be real, the "societal harm" if you want to call it that from alcohol is more substantial than from most other recreational substances)?

As to God and Morality - two different matters there. That's a long discussion, best saved for another day.

Finally, as for the "how," as I noted, it should start with the soft stuff - pot and psychedelics. Not half-measures, which leave structures and incentives as they are, but real, national legalization, so that the "legal" world can displace the "illegal" world.

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