The rule they're referencing is actually a pretty good one. It prevents postal workers with an agenda from selectively not delivering non-specifically addressed mail, which includes things like public hearings on land use and taxes, voting information, class action suit notifications, etc.
Unfortunately it's a little easy to exploit, but there's only 1-2 big mail advertisers per region and if you speak to your local post office you can easily opt out of the junkmail they send out.
Peter Thiel is an asshole! Fuck that guy! But he doesn't deserve the credit for taking gawker down, his suit was a wash except the judge ordered them to take down the sex tape that they had leaked. And then they refused to do that. And you know what, I'm not going to weep over losing them. They were integral to incubating the culture of paparazzi, and I have no sympathy for people that leak private videos like that. Hell, Thiel was pretty justified to sue them. He's a rich asshole and really I don't care what happens to him, but Gawker delighted in outing people in ex: popular memes, and that could easily get someone killed. I'm just disappointed they didn't get jail time for their shit.
Dude if you aren't a troll, go and sit and really think about what you just said, because it's both disgusting and absolutely insane. This is some deep trump cultist bullshit.
Hey now, don't be a dick - the polite thing to do is go around to their houses at eight in the christ-damned morning and ring their doorbell a few times.
is that, by and large, priests do not seek out people who are vulnerable
What are you talking about, every organized religion does this. If people weren't vulnerable to being deceived, there wouldn't be any religious institutions. And I'll spare you the longwinded rant about the pressure to tithe other than to say that it exists and it's extremely aggressive.
Also, you're very much proving their point unintentionally. Quote from the first sentence in the wikipedia article for the slang term 'basic' :
Basic is a slang term in American popular culture used pejoratively to describe middle class white people, especially women, who are perceived to prefer mainstream products, trends, and music.
You're using a gendered insult to dismiss their claims of bias based on gender lines. I usually try to be more constructive than this but wow are you off the mark here.
What a thing to see first thing in the morning. It's gonna be a good day.
Tired platitudes do not a foreign policy make, nor will they win a war. It would be nice if escalation didn't demand a response, but "turning the other cheek" is surprisingly ineffective when you're standing on heaping mountains of your own dead civilians.
I assumed it was a pun about chocking planes while they wait because there's other planes inbound / a storm / something on the runway?
Unfortunately for us all, you're very wrong. While all drugs are not truly tasteless, there's only a few that the taste can't be easily covered up by soda or similar. And the drugs that can be used as a date rape drug are so astoundingly numerous that nobody has a complete list. New recreational drugs are discovered all the time, too, and each one is potentially usable in that application. Strong psychedelics, which the most popular ones literally grow on trees, are effective. Certain popular children's toys, when consumed, metabolize into a GHB-related compound with similar effects (yes they know, no they don't care).
If this was possible, don't you think the most heavily policed country in the world would have even slightly been able to pull this off? When I say it's an impossible task, I'm not trying to be dramatic. It's simply too easy to get around any restrictions, and enforcement would require a truly omnipotent police force to be effective.
What would be the point of doing that, though? As soon as you mandate it for Ketamine, they'll just move to using something else (tbh theh probably won't be using it in the first place, ketamine really isn't a date rape drug). And then you're stuck constantly hunting down each new drug and mandating that one now be added to the list. You're constantly playing catchup, punishing the non-rapists and doing nothing to prevent the monsters from being monsters. And thats even aside from the DIY drug production or aforementioned 'big stick', which would still have no taste or odor (well, I suppose the stick might).
It's not a winning solution, its just the same cruel stalemate the US has been stuck in for the last sixty-plus years. We need a better system, desperately. Weed dispensaries have been shown to almost eliminate illicit weed production, even when they have higher prices. Implementation of a similar system for 'hard' drugs doesn't solve all the problems, but I'm not convinced there's a perfect solution at all. This is just one thing that might reduce the harm done, which is all we realistically can ever hope to achieve.
Fair enough! My 'war' point was more about enforcement of the prescription-only status and how we've seen that restricting recreational drugs via state violence just doesn't work. But pleasantly, we're finding that things like safe injection sites and injection instruction work really well. It's not quite doctor overseen administration but with purity testing and informed dosing, it's damn close!
Restricting drugs on their anesthetic or toxic properties is pretty pointless, though a good idea on the surface. A quick browse through my garage will net you dozens of odorless chemicals in various degrees of lethality (er... I admit my garage may be a bit of an outlier here) and off the top of my head I can think of five different weeds in my yard that can be easily reduced to what most would call a 'date rape' drug (and one that can be refined down to a weapon of mass destruction).
The sad truth is that restricting access won't deter anyone. Rape has been a constant throughout human history, long before we had anesthetics, and it will be a disgusting staple of society long into the future. We don't need drugs to rape people, we just need a big wooden club and societal acceptance. The harm we do to recreational users by demonizing drug use like this far outweighs the potential benefits of strictly restricting their use, even in the hypothetical world where prescription laws aren't casually circumvented like they are today.
I do understand where you're coming from though. IMO, the best solution I've heard is a registry for 'dangerous' recreational drugs that all dispensaries are required to use. Obviously there's some flaws with that, but that + marker DNA to trace batches would go a very long way to preventing casual roofie-ing. Though the most effective thing in preventing drug-aided assault has been, predictably, education.
Does it matter?