IntenseDebate - MarkARKleiman

5 years ago @ The Reality-Based Comm... - How big a problem is h... · 5 replies · +5 points

Are you really unaware that cannabis was criminalized thirty years before Nixon took office?
Of course "we will never end alcoholism." So what? Reasonable alcohol policies to keep prices up and marketing down, and to compel problem drinkers who make their drinking a problem for others by drunken driving or drunken assault to stop drinking could massively reduce the death toll alcohol exacts from drinkers and their victims: about 88,000 deaths a year, per the CDC. See Philip J. Cook, *Paying the Tab*.

5 years ago @ The Reality-Based Comm... - The verdict against Mo... · 0 replies · 0 points

[Spam comment deleted.]

5 years ago @ The Reality-Based Comm... - The verdict against Mo... · 1 reply · +3 points

A good insurance policy covers all, and only, legitimate claims, and does so with minimal transactions costs.
Tort liability makes some big payoffs in cases that don't warrant it, misses lots of cases that do warrant it (especially those for thousands rather than millions of dollars or where causation is expensive to prove) and spends about two-thirds of the money litigating, delivering only one-third of what defendants pay to plaintiffs.

That's a very bad version of insurance.

5 years ago @ The Reality-Based Comm... - Does the Constitution ... · 0 replies · +2 points

I used to think that about the Prohibition Amendment, but at least according to Okrent that was a tactical decision by the Temperance forces to try to convert what they knew would be a transient majority into what they hoped would be a permanent policy change. But I agree that neither the Commerce Clause nor the Treaty Clause can stretch to cover the CSA, even though I also think that the regulation of recreational psychoactives ought to be national rather than state-by-state.

5 years ago @ The Reality-Based Comm... - Let's End the Condemna... · 1 reply · +1 points

I'd make an exception when the politician who is asked for comment is a supporter of the politician who has done something awful.

6 years ago @ The Reality-Based Comm... - "MAGA maggots" and my ... · 0 replies · +2 points

Thanks. Fixed. "Not a reliable source" sounds like English understatement.

6 years ago @ The Reality-Based Comm... - "MAGA maggots" and my ... · 1 reply · +3 points

Thanks for the information, though I really wish I didn't know that. Maggotry is bilateral, though not symmetric.

6 years ago @ The Reality-Based Comm... - The feds get Shortey · 0 replies · +1 points

"Moral panic" has a real analytic meaning, but in common usage means simply "people feeling more concern about this issue than I feel."

No one calls concerns about racism or homophobia or global warming "moral panics." That's not because anti-racists or gay-rights advocates or anti-global-warming activists never engage in threat-expansion rhetoric or witch-hunting, but because anyone who says "moral panic" is going to be on the right side of those issues. The question of how much damage is done to children by the commercial manufacture of sexual images ought to be resolved with facts, rather than question-begging jargon.

6 years ago @ The Reality-Based Comm... - Violent crime up secon... · 0 replies · +2 points

The evidence so far is discouraging. The beer distributors in Washington and Colorado seem to be doing just fine.

6 years ago @ The Reality-Based Comm... - Violent crime up secon... · 4 replies · +3 points

Thanks for the kind words. I'm as likely to run for office as to run a marathon; in each case, I have enthusiasm but lack stamina.
Even if I agreed with you that the lives taken by police are nearly worthless - which I emphatically do not - it's clear that police killings of civilians risk, under current conditions, social backlash that tends to raise murder rates across the board. That's a high price to pay, when there are clearly ways to avoid it without risking the lives of police. German cops rarely kill, and are rarely killed.

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