Cheung Mo
28th March 2007, 21:22
Recently, I heard about a chain of pizza restaurants in the U.S. whose owners and managers have faced death threats from conservative Whites angry about the fact that they are allowing their customers -- 2/3 of which are Hispanic -- to pay for their orders in Mexican pesos if they wish, and it got me thinking...
Aside from the left flank of social liberalism and the left proper, I find a lot of people who have a difficult time wrapping their heads around the fact that allowing the KKK to exist and not persecuting its members does more harm to individuals and to society as a whole than smoking, cultivating, and distributing cannabis does.
When I make statements like "In the U.S., you can join the KKK, you can dump tons of toxins into the environment, you can get rich developing technology to help Beijing censor the Internet, but you can go to jail for a year or two just because you sold a joint to your buddy," I often get called a a hypocrite or a selfish hippy who only cares about my own freedom while holding contempt for the liberties and the values of those who think differently than I do.
But I don't think it's moral imperialism on my part to think that all of the money going to drive cannabis underground can feed millions of starving people, can be used by the government to make life Hell for racialists and others on the far right, and can be used to curtail the abuses of crony capitalism throughout the world: I just think it's common sense.
Aside from the left flank of social liberalism and the left proper, I find a lot of people who have a difficult time wrapping their heads around the fact that allowing the KKK to exist and not persecuting its members does more harm to individuals and to society as a whole than smoking, cultivating, and distributing cannabis does.
When I make statements like "In the U.S., you can join the KKK, you can dump tons of toxins into the environment, you can get rich developing technology to help Beijing censor the Internet, but you can go to jail for a year or two just because you sold a joint to your buddy," I often get called a a hypocrite or a selfish hippy who only cares about my own freedom while holding contempt for the liberties and the values of those who think differently than I do.
But I don't think it's moral imperialism on my part to think that all of the money going to drive cannabis underground can feed millions of starving people, can be used by the government to make life Hell for racialists and others on the far right, and can be used to curtail the abuses of crony capitalism throughout the world: I just think it's common sense.