I’m at a conference at the White Oak Plantation this weekend, so blogging may be slow. Anyways, it’s spring why would you be reading blogs anyway?

Dave Weigel takes an informative look inside Arlen Specter’s pre-primary efforts to remake himself into a more conservative figure, the better to fend off a strong challenge from former Congressman Pat Toomey. The basic gist of Specter, as I understand it, is that Pennsylvania conservative see him as fundamentally a liberal squish who dashes right whenever he’s facing a challenge from the right. Pennsylvania progressives, meanwhile, see him as fundamentally a conservative who dashes left whenever he’s facing a challenge from the left. Everyone hates him, in other words, except the voters of Pennsylvania who seem to like him just fine.

The fundamental situation looks quite good for Toomey to me. He almost beat Specter in 2004 at a time when a very popular conservative incumbent president was strongly backing the more moderate choice. Without those kinds of friends in high places to back him up, Specter should be in big trouble. The question then becomes whether or not a top-tier Democrat will emerge to run against Toomey. There’s no real evidence that an orthodox conservative can win in Pennsylvania anymore than an orthodox conservative could win in Maryland or Delaware or New Jersey. But Specter is hugely popular so PA Democrats haven’t been clamoring to get into a hard-to-win race against him. Toomey, by contrast, would be very beatable if a solid candidate emerged.

Will Wilkinson has a good essay on marijuana in The Week:

Marijuana is neither evil nor dangerous. Scientists have proven its medical uses. It has spared millions from anguish. But the casual pleasure marijuana has delivered is orders of magnitude greater than the pain it has assuaged, and pleasure matters too. That’s probably why Barack Obama smoked up the second and third times: because he liked it. That’s why tens of millions of Americans regularly take a puff, despite the misconceived laws meant to save us from our own wickedness.

The Atlantic Monthly’s Andrew Sullivan has been documenting on his blog the stories of typical, productive Americans—kids’ football coaches, secretaries of the PTA—who smoke marijuana because they like to smoke marijuana, but who understandably fear emerging fully from the “cannabis closet.” This is a profoundly necessary idea. If we’re to begin to roll back our stupid and deadly drug war, the stigma of responsible drug use has got to end, and marijuana is the best place to start. The super-savvy Barack Obama managed to turn a buck by coming out of the cannabis (and cocaine) closet in a bestselling memoir. That’s progress. But his admission came with the politicians’ caveat of regret. We’ll make real progress when solid, upstanding folk come out of the cannabis closet, heads held high.

So here we go. My name is Will Wilkinson. I smoke marijuana, and I like it.

For my part, I’ll say that my name is Matthew Yglesias. I have smoked marijuana in the past, and enjoyed it on occasion, but mostly I haven’t really liked it so I don’t expect I’ll smoke any more in the future. That said, there’s still no really compelling reason that people who do enjoy it should be legally prohibited from doing so.

Is it really true that marijuana isn’t dangerous? Well, yes and no. I’m not a libertarian. I believe in paternalist measures for the sake of public health. And smoking marijuana is not a healthy undertaking. But it ought to be put on a spectrum that includes other unhealthy things that many people enjoy—neither beer nor cigarettes nor M&Ms are good for you. My understanding is that pot is more dangerous than candy, but less so than tobacco (which is more addictive and involves similarly bad-for-you inhaling of smoke) or alcohol. I’m inclined to think that all such substances should be legal, and subject to taxation and restrictions on permitted forms of marketing, with the level of taxation roughly scaled to the actual scope of the public health issue.

Joshua Keating makes the common observation that latter-day western protest movements—either the diffuse group that protests at major international gatherings, or the anti-war street demonstration in the United States—haven’t had much success. And he offers a common diagnosis: They’re too vague and slipshod:

Collins names Gandhi’s march to the sea and Martin Luther King Jr.’s march on Washington as the ultimate effective demonstrations in this sense. They mobilized huge groups in support of a defineable and acheivable goal rather than opposing an amorphous concept like “capitalism.”

The fact that much of the street activism against the U.S. war in Iraq has been led by a group called Act Now to Stop War & End Racism is a good indication of why the antiwar movement has never really been a factor in debates over U.S. foreign policy. Rather than organizing around a specific political goal, ending the war, these marches tend to devolve into general lefty free-for-alls encompassing everything from Palestine to free trade the environment to capital punishment.

I don’t really think that’s right. Both Gandhi and King led movements that were committed to vaguely defined and quite sweeping visions of social change that, among other things, included opposition to capitalism and all forms of war. Their goals look well-defined in retrospect because they achieved a great deal so, in retrospect, MLK’s leadership resulted in the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act and Gandhi’s leadership led to independence for India. But all mass-movements are prone to ill-defined goals.

The difference is that the methods of King and Gandhi were quite different from sporadic sign-waving and noise-making, and also quite different from sporadic destruction of property. Both men led sustained campaigns of non-violent resistance. The point in both cases was that unjust systems, be they apartheid in the southern United States or British rule in India, couldn’t actually be made to work without the cooperation of the subject populations. You might have a rule against black people doing this or that, but uniformly enforcing the rule would be completely impractical. But the threat of enforcement was enough to keep violations of the rules rare, and thus the system worked. When enough people are mobilized, however, you can overwhelm the system’s ability to operate and force people to make changes.

In practice, this is just about the most difficult thing in the world to get people to do. Individually, it’s rational to mind your own business and just cope with mistreatment as best you can. And to get people out of that mode normal involves switching them into a mode of angry, violent resistance that stiffens the desire of the oppressor to beat the subjects down. Organizing people around disciplined, consistent non-violent resistance in which you neither meekly submit to injustice nor angrily lash out against it, but instead move in a calm and determined way to challenge it is extraordinarily difficult. But it works. Getting people to come out every once in a while hold a “protest” is, by contrast, pretty easy. And in the right frame of mind, it’s even fun. I’ve had fun doing it. But it doesn’t really change anything.