Tim Starr, You call my math "simplistic" but you don't explain. What figure do you dispute?
You call my time frame "cherry picking" but you get it backwards. Your narrowing of the time frame to maximize terrorist incidents is TRUE cherry picking. Your newest attempt to minimize the drug-war threat is the same non-point as your last one, which I rebutted with this: "I'm afraid that ignores prohibition's main threat: being a non-consensual victim of drug-war related crime." You simply ignored my rebuttal and reworded your non-sense. Your first disagreement with my "20,000 national murder average" makes no sense. Are you disputing my average or what? Your second one makes even less sense. "A time period ... under Nixon and Reagan ... when drugs remained legal"? What are you talking about? Please check for a major typo. And what's with "a 33% decline"? Are you disputing my average or what? You claim "a good deal of the homicides you cite as part of the total has little or nothing to do with the drug war." I don't get it. Are you disputing that 50% of homicides are drug related? Even though your points are mysteries, you criticize my lack of sources. Please indicate which figure you are disputing and refute it with some clear logic and I will supply a source. But your third is the ultimate in pseudo-sophisticated hogwash. Good luck using your shameless prohibitionist prejudice to gain any credibility here. You obviously reject the MOST FUNDAMENTAL historical lessons taught by alcohol prohibition. Your last three points are just as hazy. If you can't come up with a better argument than a vague accusation that I've "probably exagerrated the size of the true number involved, by an unknowable extent", I need not even perform a direct rebuttal. The one thing apparent is your futile attempt to argue the numbers, but here's how ridiculous that argument is: I could concede every single one of your attempts to maximize terrorist fatalities and minimize drug-war fatalities, and the drug war would STILL be many many many times more fatal/dangerous to all Americans. AND FURTHERMORE: Even if you were to somehow refute the laws of mathematics and make the number of terrorism fatalities equal to the number of drug-war fatalities, your argument would still fail. The fact remains that our own government commits terrorism on US via their drug war ON OUR OWN SOIL. That fact alone at least indicates atrocious priorities. ---------------------------------- > >Tim Starr, > >It's not hard to see how you make your "points": by conspicuously >leaving out NUMBERS. So allow me to easily rebut you by supplying >what you omit: simple math. Simplistic math, that is. >If your post changes anything, it increases the number of >terrorism fatalities. So let's give your position further benefit >and maximize the number of terrorist fatalities at 6000 for the >past four decades. Nice cherry-picked timeframe you've got there. That includes periods when the US both was and was not doing much counter-terrorism, and is thus not indicative of the threat in the absence of US counter- terrorism. The reason I picked the time periods before & after 9/11 is that between 1993 and 9/11 the US wasn't doing much counter- terrorism, and afterwards the US has been doing a lot. Thus, the two time periods are indicative of the relative risks. Most of those 6,000 deaths to which you refer occurred during the 1993-2001 timeframe, when the US wasn't doing much counter-terrorism. >Now let's do an HONEST comparison to fatalities resulting from >drug-prohibition. It is curious for you to accuse me of >minimizing when you greatly minimize the drug war threat down to >the risk of getting arrested for a consensual choice to do drugs. >I'm afraid that ignores prohibition's main threat: being a >non-consensual victim of drug-war related crime. Most drug-related homicide victims are involved in the drug trade (drug dealers killing each other). To avoid being such a victim, pretty much all you have to do is stay out of the illegal drug trade. >There were 16,692 murders in the US in 2005. Since there were 23,326 >in 1994 and 25,000 in 1972, we can safely average it at 20,000 per >year. 1) Homicides are normally tracked by criminologists as rates per 100K population, not absolute numbers. Since the US population was smaller in 1972 than in 1994, and in 1994 than in 2005, the homicide rates were even higher back then than can be told from the decline in the absolute numbers that you present. 2) The figures you gave (without any source, BTW) indicate a 33% decline, in a time period when drugs remained legal, and drug law- enforcement was fairly strict for much of that time (under Nixon, and since the Reagan administration). This indicates that a good deal of the homicides you cite as part of the total has little or nothing to do with the drug war. 3) The demographic distribution of homicide rates within the USA and other countries belies the claim that drug prohibition is the primary driving factor. The non-hispanic white homicide rate in America is considerably lower than the rates for blacks & hispanics, about the same as the homicide rates for Canada & Australia, which have similar non-hispanic white populations. Within the American non-hispanic white population, the homicide rate is higher in the South than in the North. Yet drug prohibition applies to all races in America, and also exists in Canada & Australia. The black homicide victimization rate in America is about 6 times that of the non-hispanic victimization rate in America. What's the difference? Not genetics. It's that blacks & hispanics in America are far more likely to be involved in the illegal drug trade. But that's a function of the cultural differences between the ethnic groups, not the laws themselves. People who are willing to kill each other over drugs will be willing to kill each other over other things if drugs are legalized. Thus, drug legalization will not lead to that great a decline in the homicide rate. >Let's give you another advantage and minimize the percent of >those related to prohibition at only 50%. That's 10,000 per year. >10,000 times 40 years = 400,000. That's 400,000 drug-prohibition >FATALITIES. (Your referral to "magnitude" is funny, since we are >talking FATALITIES. There ain't no greater "magnitude" than DEAD... I meant quantity of fatalities. >my friend.) My math tells me that 400,000 is about 66 times more >than 6000. 1) You've probably exagerrated the size of the true number involved, by an unknowable extent. 2) However, drug-dealers have already been pretty much doing everything they can for quite a while to maximize their operations/ profits, and American homicide rates have been in pretty steady decline since the early 1990s. 3) Terrorists, on the other hand, have not been doing all they can to inflict harm upon Americans for very long. When they were doing so pretty much unopposed by the Clinton administration (and before Bush had a chance to do much about terrorism), they racked up quite a number of casualties, and were rapidly improving the lethality of their capabilities (the US found anthrax labs in Afghanistan that Al Qaeda was running under the Taliban's protection, among other things). If the US were to return to doing virtually nothing to stop terrorism, then terrorists could acquire WMDs from their state sponsors quite rapidly, and attack the US with great success & impunity. Tim Starr Fight for Liberty! http://groups.yahoo.com/group/fightforliberty/
