...practical purposes and thus rejecting the existence of abstract natural laws that govern human behavior. Since there is no higher moral authority than the state itself, human rights are not deemed universal. In fact, a realist would argue that the UN Charter prohibits states from intervening in matters that are not explicitly contained in the domestic sphere, thus negating any claim to jurisdiction over citizens of another state. Due to these characteristics of realist theory, a follower of this school of thought would argue against intervention in Kiribati....
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...legalizing it and therefore taking away the drug cartels number one source of income. The U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy ... says that more than 60 percent of the profits reaped by Mexican drug lords are derived from the exportation and sale of cannabis to the American market (Armentano2). It is ridiculous to think that the United States can put out a statistic like this and ignore the fact that if they legalized the drug there would be less violence because there would be no point for Mexican drug cartels to try and smuggle the drug into the U.S. In the article “Blame Prohibition, Not Pot Smokers for Violence in Mexico”, published by AlterNet.org, Tony Newman tells us how the people who run the “Just Say No” campaign against drugs have a new scheme in which they plan to blame people who smoke pot for the violence in Mexico. They are hoping to stop younger people from smoking marijuana if they associate it with the murder of people by the drug cartels in Mexico. There are a few problems with these campaigns: They are inaccurate in some cases, and downright dishonest in others.Office of National Drug Control Policy It is disingenuous to connect the average American's marijuana consumption to the horrific violence of Mexico's drug war. The average pot smoker's growing and purchasing of marijuana has no relationship to the violence along the border that is the result of large-scale drug trafficking. It isn’t hard to understand that the legalization of marijuana...
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...Position Paper Khadijah Shabazz CNSL 5203 Dr. Sampson Prairie View A&M University 9/20/2015 The legalization of drugs is one of the most controversial and debated topics of the 21st century. There are both negative and positive reasons to legalize them as well as negative and positive reasons to keep them prohibited. According to LEAP, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, drug prohibition is the true cause of much of the social and personal damage that has historically been attributed to drug use. It is prohibition that makes these drugs so valuable – while giving criminals a monopoly over their supply ("Why Legalize Drugs? | LEAP").LEAP goes on to say that criminal gangs are driven by the huge profits from this monopoly, criminal gangs bribe and kill each other, law enforcers, and children and as such their trade is unregulated and they are, therefore, beyond our control ("Why Legalize Drugs? | LEAP"). It is LEAP’s belief that by eliminating prohibition of all drugs for adults and establishing appropriate regulation and standards for distribution and use, law enforcement could focus more on crimes of violence, such as rape, aggravated assault, child abuse and murder, making our communities much safer ("Why Legalize Drugs? | LEAP"). Another positive aspect of the legalization of drugs is financial gains. According to the International Business Times in a study for the Cato Institute, Jeffrey A. Miron, senior lecturer on economics at Harvard University and a senior...
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... But there have always been varying ulterior motives. According to Baylor University Professor of Sociology, Dr. Diana Kendall, the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 was passed solely to criminalize marijuana by taxing it; this would dissuade migrant Mexican workers who smoked marijuana to seek employment elsewhere and not take jobs from U.S. citizens as the country struggled during the Great Depression (Kendall, 2010). Last year, voters in Colorado and Washington State approved legislation that supported the commercial growth, sale, possession and use of recreational marijuana. In response, United States Department of Justice, Deputy Attorney General James Cole, promulgated policy that established the posture for enforcing marijuana laws against people or organizations to that: Distribution of marijuana to minors; revenue from the sale of marijuana from going to criminal enterprises, gangs and cartels; the diversion of marijuana from states where it is legal under state law in some...
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...Global Politics: The feasibility of universal drug liberalization as an emerging phenomenon RWaterhouse Globalization & The War on Drugs: Assessing alternatives to criminalization The purpose of this paper is to address universal drug liberalization as a feasible alternative to the current drug control regime specifically in North America and potentially applicable elsewhere. With an in depth analysis of the historical regulation, implementation of law, and resulting consequences we will be able to see how nations are effected by complex drug politics and why there has been a global paradigm shift in looking spiritedly at the ideal of decriminalization. I argue in favor of liberalization by bringing to attention the violence associated with the commodification of illegal drugs, what the re-directed costs of control could mean for domestic investment into proactive drug awareness education, and finally recognizing Portugal’s success and weaknesses in the adoption of a compete legalization agenda. Following will be a discussion of concluding thoughts centered on the efficacy and feasibility of universal liberalization in today’s globalized world. Historical Context Libertarianism has almost always had position in political discourse but has been majorly popularized through public attention within the era of globalization. (article) Control of drug consumption has always been a contemporary ingredient in the political reform of Canada and the America’s and...
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...The so-called “War on Drugs,” as declared by the Nixon administration in the signing of the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970, marked the beginning of the current era of mandatory minimum sentencing, racism, privatized prisons, and a powerful constituency that profits as a result of the prohibition of drugs. Psychoactive substances have been apart of the human experience as long as humans have walked the earth. There is little hope that drug production will ever be curtailed, so long as there is a demand; a demand that has remained steady even though it has been forty years since the beginning of said war. As Judge James P. Gray from the Superior Court of Orange County has so plainly put it: “Where did this policy come from? Unfortunately I have conducted an inquiry into this and I have determined that drug prohibition laws came for reasons of racism, empire building, and ignorance.”(Booth) The War on Drugs is politically motivated as a means of profiting. One may ask them self how government can financially benefit from such policies. In fact, they benefit in a myriad of ways. The government spends an exorbitant amount of money in an attempt to combat drug production and drug usage. The U.S. government has spent over a trillion—that’s right a trillion—dollars in its attempt to eradicate the drug problem. With so much time, effort and money there should be something to show, right? Wrong. Today drugs are more prevalent, more potent and cheaper than...
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...what we observe, then it will soon cease to be a viable candidate. o What is it about our accepted theories that make them predictively reliable? 1.2 Realism and Anti-Realism • One point of difference between realism and anti-realism concerns the interpretations of theoretical terms in claims of science. • Interpretation of theoretical: the way in which claims about unobservable entities (such as magnetics fields or electrons) are to be understood. • If a successful scientific theory utilizes the theoretical term neutrino then the realist infers that such objects exist, as described by the theory, in the world. • Anti-realists, typically deny that theoretical terms can be understood as actually referring to real objects in the world, though many insist that scientific theories must be understood as purporting to describe real objects in the world. • Another point of contention btw realist and ant-realists concerns the confirmation of scientific theories. • Anti-realist argues there are an infinite number of possible theories, with radically different claims about unobservable, which could entail the observed consequences. • Thus, we must remain agnostic about the claims a theory makes about unobservable entities, for that which we can observe speaks nothing about that which we cannot observe. o This argument, in its various...
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...universals is indispensable to our ability to construct propositions, we draw upon three main positions. These are realism, nominalism and conceptualism. The realist school would claim that universals are real, and they are different from the particulars that instantiate them. The types of realism I will reference here are Aristotle’s ‘strong’ realism and Platonic realism. In contrast, the nominalist would assert that only particulars exist and deny that universals exist as real entities. Conceptualists urge that words that might seem to refer to universals actually refer to concepts. They are mind-dependent classificatory schemes. Realists tend to argue that universals must be distinct entities in order to account for various phenomena. For example, a common realist argument is that universals are required for certain general words to have meaning and for the sentences in which they occur to make sense. Words such as ‘to’, ‘on top of’, ‘honesty’, ‘rationality’ etc. cannot be labeled as particulars because there are no particular ‘things’ that they reference. The most famous of realists was Plato, who argued that for us to know something, that which we know must be unchanging. Since material individuals are subject to change, Plato argued, there must be things that don’t change, suitable as objects of genuine knowledge. Here fit universals. In terms of Platonic realism, he believes that in order to explain the qualitative identity of distinct individuals, we must accept there is...
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...Among my peers I would see a major distaste for art they would see as lazy or uninteresting. The main debate within this topic is whether modern/postmodern styles of art, or other contemporary styles, can even be considered art, mostly due to their simplicity or seeming lack of imagination. I have seen many arguments against contemporary art, one of my articles, the one by Michael Bise, is especially harsh in its criticism towards the works of Josephine Meckseper. The author of this article went on to talk about how there was no meaning behind this simple art, and that the “art was bad” (Bise). I have not, so far, been able to find any scholarly or credible resources on why modern art is good and can be considered art, but I will continue to support this idea with factual statements alongside my own opinions and definitions. Many of the arguments used in the art world as bias against modern art forms is that it isn’t simply as good as traditional or classical art. In my opinion, modern art is just a different form of art, not necessarily good or bad wholly, but just different, and it differs enough that it shouldn’t be compared to the stunning idealistic realism of renaissance art movements, because that isn’t what modern art is about. An article by Karsten Harries describes modern art as no different than the classical forms that preceded it. The author outlines the ideas that art is a representation of the ideal form of man, and “as that image changes, so must art” and...
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...metaphysics and is the foundation around which he constructs his notion of transcendental idealism laid out in his Critique of Pure Reason. Written in response to the previous ‘realist’ conceptions of space Kant challenged strongly the view of its ultimate reality and served to shift the scope of the ontological argument from one of ‘absolutism’ versus ‘relationalism’ to a more developed debate of ‘realism’ against ‘idealism’ as he brought the relationship between space and time, and the mind strongly to the fore. In this essay I am going to contrast this Kantian notion of space as being ‘transcendentally ideal’ against the branded ‘transcendental realism’ of Newton and Clarke. Starting with the latter I’ll go on to bring in the former then proceed to analyse the developments Kant forges past his predecessors. I will then conclude by assessing how and why his view holds more metaphysical depth than that put forward in the Newtonian model by looking at how he accounts for the scope and perspective of human consciousness and the epistemological limits inherent within it. To begin however I will now go to the absolutist models put forward by Newton and Clarke. Prior to Kant, the arguments with regards to spaces ontology were primarily orientated around whether space was absolute (i.e. real in its own nature and independent of objects) or relational (merely relations of objects and nothing more). While both of these were seen as transcendentally real perspectives by Kant the particular model...
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... The following three theories are key to international relations and contribute to the framework of ideologies within it: realism, liberalism and critical theory. These three theories shape the views and consensus of International Relations and tend to categorise the general public into one of the three groups. However, this is a highly controversial statement due to the fact there are no clear definitions of realism, liberalism or critical theory, just differences throughout them. For example a key difference would be that realists make the basic assumption that the international system is anarchic where as liberals believe in institutions such as the U.N. can intervene effectively on state issues, there are also conflicting views between the three on issues such as war, the economy and major corporations. Within realism there is this sense of belief of “self-interest” this is a theme seen throughout Mearshermiers article Australians should fear the rise of China. Mearshamiers opening statement quotes “It is likely to lead to intense security competition with US – and considerable potential for war”. In a brief summary Mearshermier talks about how with this augmentation of Chinas power, surrounding countries such as the United States of America and Australia should be prepared to take action and prepare for war. This is a key ideology of realism, as although they do not encourage war in anyway they believe that war will always exist and it is necessary for states to prepare...
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...CONMETA Midterm Qs This exam tests your knowledge of the topics we have covered so far. It also tests your ability to construct plausible arguments for or against a particular metaphysical view. GOD 1. Suppose that you’re sympathetic to Anselm’s ontological argument. How would you reply to charge that the concept of the being that than which nothing greater can be conceived, like the concept of the largest natural number, is incoherent? 2. Some philosophers have raised problems for defenders of the cosmological argument. Particularly they have showed three ways to resist the premise that if the universe is contingent, it must have a cause. One option is to show that the universe is eternal. Another is to show that, given what our current science tells us, the universe might be contingent yet uncaused. And finally, show that the universe is indeed contingent and is caused, the causal chain involves a loop. Suppose that you’re a defender of the cosmological argument. Show that at least one of these options do not work to shoe that it is false that if the universe is contingent, it must have a cause. WHAT ARE WE? 1. Suppose that you’re a constitutionalist. How would you address the issue of whether the animal that constitutes you is (self-)conscious? Recall that there is a dilemma her: if you were to deny that the animal that constitutes you is not conscious, you would then have to account for how mental states depend on the physical going-ons in the animal’s brain;...
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...science itself was infected with arbitrariness and irrationality. 2. Does Searle accept the enlightenment vision? Yes 3. What are Searle's three objectives in his book? First, advance a series of theoretical claims, both about nature of mind, language, and society and about interrelations among them. Second, exemplify a certain style of philosophical analysis. Third, pass a series of observations about nature of philosophical puzzlement and problems. How to do phil, special problems doing it. 4. What is a "default position"? What five propositions make up the default position according to Searle? Default positions are views we hold prereflectively so that nay departure from them requires a conscious effort and convincing argument. There is real world that exists independently of us, of...
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...In metaphysics, there have been countless arguments to prove the existence, or absence, of certain kinds of things, such as universals. There have been several attempts find a solution to the problem of universals, an unresolved issue which revolves around the question of whether or not universals actually exist, and if so, which particular form they take. Though there are many possible solutions to this question, in modern metaphysics one of the most popular stances on the issue is Realism, which can be further boiled down into two popular schools of thought, Aristotelian realism and Platonic realism. Although both forms of realism agree that universals are actual entities, they are distinguished by their contradictory views on the independence of universals. Aristotelian realism asserts that universals exist exclusively as properties instantiated by particulars, while Platonic realism suggests that universals can exist as entities separate of their particulars. However, with regards to the problem of universals, this distinction is negligible because both forms of realism use the same essential logic to attempt to prove the existence of universals. Realism hinges upon the idea that in order for certain phrases and ideas to be true, universals must be considered distinct entities. For example, consider the statement “the sky is blue.” There is a known entity, the sky, that, in all senses of the word, can be accurately described as being blue. This much is indisputably true. But...
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...Mearsheimer: The Tragedy of Great Power Politics In The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, author John Mearsheimer outlines a new theory of international relations which he calls “offensive realism.” Mearsheimer’s theory is a spin-off of Kenneth Waltz’s neorealism, also known as structural or defensive realism. Mearsheimer follows on the premises of Kenneth Waltz’s theory by deriving the behavior of states from the “structure” of the international system. Mearsheimer outlines five assumptions or premises comprising his theoretical foundation: 1) the international system is anarchic (no world government) 2) all states posses some offensive capability and are thus capable of using force against other states 3) no state can be certain another state will not use force against it 4) survival, territorial integrity, and domestic autonomy are the primal goals of all states and 5) great powers are rational actors (Mearsheimer 2001, pp. 30-31). It is difficult to definitively discern what conclusions Mearsheimer thinks follow from these premises (Wagner 2007, pg. 14). He argues for perhaps three conclusions: 1) great powers have powerful incentives to “think and act offensively with regard to each other…In particular, three general patterns of behavior result: fear, self-help, and power maximization (Mearsheimer 2001, pg.32)” 2) even states that want only to survive end up pursuing hegemony as the ultimate insurance for survival 3) even states that care only about their survival may...
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