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.
This is why we would rather have a depressed person commit suicide than to use "drugs" -- because drugs, after all, are not dealing with the "real" problem. The patient may SAY that drugs make them feel good, but we need microscopes to find out if they REALLY feel good.
Ug! Fire bad!
There were 4,731 fire-related deaths in America in 2023.
Learn more at the Partnership for a Death Free America.
The "scheduling" system is completely anti-scientific and anti-patient. It tells us we can make a one-size-fits-all decision about psychoactive substances without regard for dosage, context of use, reason for use, etc. That's superstitious tyranny.
The 1932 movie "Scarface" starts with on-screen text calling for a crackdown on armed gangs in America. There is no mention of the fact that a decade's worth of Prohibition had created those gangs in the first place.
Prohibition is a crime against humanity. It forces us to use shock therapy on the severely depressed since we've outlawed all viable alternatives. It denies medicines that could combat Alzheimer's and/or render it psychologically bearable.
Antidepressants might be fine in a world where drugs were legal. Then it would actually be possible to get off them by using drugs that have inspired entire religions. In the age of prohibition, however, an antidepressant prescription is usually a life sentence.
The FDA approves of shock therapy and the psychiatric pill mill, but they cannot see the benefits in MDMA, a drug that brought peace, love and understanding to the dance floor in 1990s Britain.
Politicians protect a drug that kills 178,000 a year via a constitutional amendment, and then they outlaw all less lethal alternatives. To enforce the ban, they abrogate the 4th amendment and encourage drug testing to ensure that drug war heretics starve.
People are talking about re-scheduling psilocybin, but they miss the point. We need to DE-schedule everything. It's anti-scientific to conclude in advance that any drug has no uses -- and it's a lie too, of course. End drug scheduling altogether! It's childish and wrong.
"Drugs" is imperialist terminology. In the smug self-righteousness of those who use it, I hear Columbus's disdain for the shroom use of the Taino people and the Spanish disdain for the coca use of the Peruvian Indians.
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