By clicking here, I acknowledge that I am going to read the text that follows with an open mind, secure in the knowledge that the guy who wrote it believes in equality for all people and that, yes, he's fully aware that Native American people, like most other minority groups in the world, have gotten a raw deal so far from the powers-that-be...
The following is a hot-button email that I sent to a friend of mine this morning in Northern Virginia. Hopefully, it was inspired by a misunderstanding of a national news story that I browsed a few days ago -- in which case, like Roseanne Roseannadanna on Saturday Night Live, I will soon be posting an apologetic addendum to this page featuring her trademark disclaimer, reading: "Never mind." But even if I have misunderstood the story in question, this email should convey my misgivings of what I take to be the current left-wing excesses, bearing in mind that the author thinks that the greatest current threat, by far, is not from the left but rather from the right: viz. the desire to get rid of democracy and replace it with a cult of "personality" (for want of a better word) by empowering the one man in this world who has apparently never done anything wrong in his entire life: "Donald 'the Infallible' Trump."
Okay, I've done my best to soften the blow, so read on! [sigh]
Speaking of left-wing overreach, what's this talk about getting rid of Native American exhibits at the Smithsonian? It sounds to me like the rationale is as follows: "Only Native Americans can tell us about Native Americans." So why then does the Smithsonian purport to tell us about the Finns and the Russians?
I can see why the Smithsonian would want to employ Native American advisors in staging such exhibits, but it seems like the worst kind of identity politics to say that non-Natives can have no input on such things. We certainly do not say that Caucasians would be better off if they did not get the viewpoints of other cultures. Moreover, the most insightful book about Americans was written by a Frenchman1. There are certain benefits to being an outsider.
To me, it's another sign that America is living through a self-imposed Dark Ages of its own. When it comes to drugs, we think that the best policy is to lie. (That's why we have a National Institute on Drug ABUSE rather than a National Institute on Drug USE.) We think the same thing when it comes to history. And why? Because the affirmation of identity has become more important to us than mere facts -- and particularly facts that might suggest that a given minority group (like any group, minority or not) is less than perfect. We thus get a warped view of our history, through the lens of a psychologically dishonest sanctification of the people concerned.
But then such politicization of history probably comes naturally to a people who have been brainwashed by the cult of the Drug War, which is all about politicizing the subject of drugs.
Author's Follow-up: January 28, 2024
This identity politics is even more directly related to the War on Drugs than I've suggested, since even as I type, Caucasians are not allowed to use peyote in America while Native Americans are2. Thus identity politics collaborates in the racist and xenophobic ideology of the Drug War. It makes one ask: how anti-American does a law have to become before it will be rejected by our courts? This is clearly a direct blow at my freedom of religion 3 -- and yet no one is pointing this out. This should be front page news. But then this is the same Supreme Court, ideologically speaking, that told us in the '90s that merely riding a Greyhound Bus constituted probable cause for a drug search4.
Laughing gas is the substance that gave William James his philosophy of reality. He concluded from its use that what we perceive is just a fraction of reality writ large. Yet his alma mater (Harvard) does not even MENTION laughing gas in their bio of the man.
All drugs have potential positive uses for somebody, at some dose, in some circumstance, alone or in combination. To decide in advance that a drug is completely useless is an offense to reason and to human liberty.
The Drug War is one big entrapment scheme for poor minorities. Prohibition creates an economy that hugely incentivizes drug dealing, and when the poor fall for the bait, the prohibitionists rush in to arrest them and remove them from the voting rolls.
I'm told that science is completely unbiased today. I guess I'll have to go back and reassess my doubts about Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.
Psychiatrists keep flipping the script. When it became clear that SSRIs caused dependence, instead of apologizing, they told us we need to keep taking our meds. Now they even claim that criticizing SSRIs is wrong. This is anti-intellectual madness.
Americans love to blame drugs for all their problems. Young people were not dying in the streets when opiates were legal. The prohibition mindset is the problem, not drugs.
We've created a faux psychology to support such science: that psychology says that anything that really WORKS is just a "crutch" -- as if there is, or there even should be, a "CURE" for sadness.
Why don't those politicians understand what hateful colonialism they are practicing? Psychedelics have been used for millennia by the tribes that the west has conquered -- now we won't even let folks talk honestly about such indigenous medicines.
People talk about how dangerous Jamaica is -- but no one reminds us that it is all due to America's Drug War. Yes, cannabis and psilocybin are legal there, but plenty of drugs are not, and even if they were, their illegality elsewhere would lead to fierce dealer rivalry.
Addiction was not a big thing until the drug war. It's now the boogie-man with which drug warriors scare us into giving up our freedoms. But getting obsessed on one single drug is natural in the age of choice-limiting prohibition.
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