Interesting Links for 31-03-2016

[andrewducker]

Schools charging parents for children to eat their own packed lunches | News (tags: food children school OhForFucksSake money ) ​Microsoft and Canonical partner to bring Ubuntu to Windows 10 | ZDNet (tags: microsoft linux wtf ) Is the War on Drugs really a war on black America? (tags: drugs racism society usa ) The US radio market is on the

Comments

[bart_calendar]

Here's my understanding of the initial causes of the war on drugs - and, yes, much of it is racist

[andrewducker]

That makes a lot of sense to me.

(Although there were probably a bunch of other things also going on.)

[bart_calendar]

Oh, I'm sure.

I suspect that Giancanna and the CIA were to a large extent exploiting American puritanism and American racist attitudes that already existed.

[danieldwilliam]

The US seems to have had a large stripe of temperance attitudes going back to the frontier days of the 19th century.

Many rowdy young men getting drunk in frontier saloons and causing trouble or just drinking the profits.

It wouldn't surprise me if that prohibitionist mindset was pretty deeply engrained as a part of USian culture.

[bart_calendar]

Yep. That's what made Sam Giancanna rich.

Make gambling, drugs and prostitution illegal and the man able to provide it anyway will be able to charge anything he wants for forbidden fruit.