Prohibited or Inhibited? Or just reluctant?

On and on it goes. Mr 'Beaufrere' claims to be 'honestly'  unable to understand my position on alcohol.  Well, I am 'honestly' unable to help him further. Can anyone else explain it to him? I doubt it. His problem is not with the explanation, but with his determination, derived from received wisdom and so not susceptible to examination, to believe that the existence of legal alcohol is an absolute obstacle to laws against cannabis. Against such an obstacle, the intelligence of Einstein, the forensic power of Sherlock Holmes and the eloquence of Abraham Lincoln cannot prevail. Let alone me.

It is perfectly simple and has been stated here more times than I care to recall. If there were any words of fewer than one syllable which I could use for the purpose, I would do so. Nor do I think that Mr Badger's query, accompanied as it was by one of those ghastly Internet winks, was seriously meant.

I usually find that when people claim to be unable to understand something, they are in fact unwilling to do so.

Oh. And 'commit' is a reflexive verb here. I don't know why its reflexivity has been abolished elsewhere, but on this weblog the only thing one commits, without a reflexive pronoun, is a crime, or a solecism or a faux pas. I commit myself to maintaining this proposition.

I suppose it happened about the same time that 'The 1800s' an expression referring to the years from 1800 to 1810, began to be used to refer to the entire 19th century (etc.). Was this introduced because it became too difficult to explain to uneducated children how the centuries had been numbered before?

Likewise I stand by my view that active campaigning to weaken the law against cannabis, for your own benefit, means that you are happy to see the human destruction that you know will result.  The comparison he attempts to make (whereby I decline to support war on foreign countries because I don't like their governments and am therefore said to be 'happy' about the regime of the Third Reich)   doesn't work. The element of active campaigning for the ease of one's own pleasure, at the expense of others,  is absent. So not a slur. A statement of fact. Cannabis legalisers are, axiomatically,  selfish and wicked.  I know some claim, incredibly, to support this campaign without any element of self-interest. If this is true( which, as I say, I very much doubt) then they are deluded and credulous. Take your choice.

Mr Slane asks how a Christian can be in favour of prisons. It's not a matter of principle (though his alternative appears to be sale into slavery, which doesn't strike me as specially Christian (***UNDERSTATEMENT WARNING***) ).

This is where we start from. Our system has arrived at prison as its principal weapon against wrongdoing (in fact prisons are a liberal idea, see my 'Abolition of Liberty'). The Christian surely seeks to make that system conform as closely as possible to Christian principles. 

An eater of vegetables says (first quoting me): ' "It is simply false to pretend that the Second World War was fought out of idealism. This falsehood is spread by people who want to start wars for idealistic reasons now."- Peter Hitchens.
- That's a silly thing to say.'

That is the view of this person. But it isn't necessarily true because he or she says it is. Can he or she tell us why he or she thinks it is silly? It seems perfectly sensible to me, and true,  and I have explained why here in the past (see index). Briefly, is this person really unaware of the use of 'appeasement' and of Churchillian rhetoric, accompanied by the presence of a bust of Churchill on George W.Bush's desk, the gift of our Washington Embassy,  in fomenting the Iraq war?

I don't think those who disapproved of Charlie Gilmour's abuse of the Cenotaph, and subsequent behaviour, would have been satisfied by a fine, which he (or his parents) would have had no difficulty in paying.

Mr Platt cannot find anything in the index about fox hunting because I haven't (n as far as I can remember) written anything about it since this blog started, and probably long before that. I seldom do. I care very little about it. My general view has always been that slaughterhouse cruelty is far worse, if you want a cause. Likewise the living conditions of many pigs and chickens. These things can be ameliorated by buying meat more carefully;  and that the keepers of cats are responsible for far more hideous torture of small animals and birds than are foxhunters.

But as a suburban person I have no strong feelings about fox hunting, though I would welcome a method of stopping them relieving themselves in gardens and strewing mangled fast food cartons about the place. A hunt would probably be impracticable for this purpose. 

Mr Platt goes on to ask 'If the owner of a B&B turns away a homosexual couple on religious grounds does Mr. Hitchens consider the owner to be immoral, or is the imposition of such a law incompatible with a free society?'

I don't see the comparison. Nobody suggested that the B&B owners refused unmarried guests (heterosexual or homosexual) to pursue pleasure. They did it because they believed it was their moral duty.