I should like to thank Wodium. I cheerfully stole the idea of his holy symbol for a poltical arguement. It seemed a good response when someone was asking deliberately silly questions to respond by claiming to be a time-travelling follower, or potential follower of Eris.
Better still from the Erisian pov, I used it to promote a conservative pov. Perversity.
Thanks.
As the t-shirt says...
Chaos, panic, disorder....my work here is done.
How were these feats accomplished, learned sir?
I'm going to take this moment to say simply, "F'ing Discordians," and give you all an anime-style sweatdrop, which I know you'll all take as a compliment.
http://commentariat.specblogs.com/index.php/2008/11/21/real-future-conservatism-ideas/
If you look toward the end of the comments for the exchange between Noah and Tennwriter....
Its not a big, brilliant thing, but I had fun, and since I used your holy symbol, I felt obligated.
Mmm. Most of it's good, but it kind of sounds like you're down on homosexuals and/or down on love. The closest thing Discordianism has to sin is being a jerkface, and either of the above would qualify.
Also, I usually skip calling the dark hosts of madness and invite their guests, instead - they're a lot more fun.
I'm also down on using drugs for many of the same reasons. We're probably not going to agree as you would likely see it as essentially harmless, and I would see it as a couple steps better than skydiving without a parachute. Science supports the Bible, and all that. Why its almost as if the Bible were inspired or something. Silly thought, I know.
:)
If that makes me a jerkface, then I shall wear my button with pride, especially on Jerkface Pride Week which starts on April the 1st and ends on April the 15th.
The guests of the dark hosts of madness....okay, you've lost me there. You're officially wackier than I am.
In general, I'm down on drugs because they're dumb and hurt people. I'm not down on homosexuality; incidentally, it's not dumb and doesn't hurt people (or at least no more than the hetero kind does). I'm not sure what made you think I thought drugs were harmless.
No (non- self-referential) comment on science supporting the Bible. Not sure what that has to do with this, anyway.
Liking the Bible does not make one a jerkface. Love and reason are both good things to like, though, and Jerkface Board of Directors tends to sit up and take notice of people who don't.
(Remember: things aren't bad because they're orderly anymore than they're good because they're orderly. It's just that too many people think the latter and end up actively promoting bad things, like making kids take standardized writing-skills tests graded by computers.)
The guests of the dark hosts of madness....okay, you've lost me there. You're officially wackier than I am.
Well, if the dark blokes are the hosts, then the guests would have to be madness, right? It's right there in the name, really. All that darkness is a bit of a downer, but madness can't really say anything, because, y'know, they're guests, after all. Still, doesn't mean they'll turn down a chance to get away for a bit, know what I'm saying? And it's insane how much fun they are to have around.
As far as drugs, I use marijuana in therapy for my psychosis, and I've had really good success with it (And designed 2 worlds whilst doing therapy hahaha) Supposedly, LSD was invented to treat psychotics as well. Cocaine is an effective topical pain reliever, still in use by some dentists today. Heroin and all of its other derivative forms are also pain relievers (Morphine, Vicodin, etc.)
Don't say drugs are automatically bad. Using them incorrectly is bad. But that's the same with anything. You would be just as dead if I ran you over with my car as you would be if I emptied a 30 round clip from an AK-47 into you. Don't say things are bad. Nothing is good or bad. Just has bad uses.
I was speaking over-generally. Tad was (fairly obviously) talking about recreational use of controlled substances, and by responding to him specifically, I adopted that same context for my own statements.
If you want to ignore the context, why not tell me about Tylenol, insulin, and chloroform? I take your point, but you needn't have worried.
I was just saying that you can't say that something is automatically good or automatically bad. I would bet that even the most staunch supporter of gun control would never tell the police not to bring their guns when someone is breaking into their house.
Snake venom can kill you, but can also be used to treat intestinal parasites. A controlled dose kills the parasites, but will only make the host sick.
Tylenol can be deadly if an overdose is reached.
Personally, I am for the legalization of Marijuana. The medical benefits are uncountable. Every medicine that my doctor put me on either didn't work, or the side effects were worse than the psychosis. Marijuana therapy works, and I can most certainly live with the side effects.
In at least one case, the side effects of the medicine my doctor prescribed were potentially life-threatening. Another side effect that I had was extreme paranoia. That one I didn't even realize until I stopped taking it. Yet another side effect was that I was sleeping 16 hours a day. That one I didn't mind so much, but then when I stopped taking it, I couldn't sleep at all for 3 days. The therapy I'm doing, the side effect is that I feel really good, my imagination is in overdrive (as evidenced in the worlds I designed) and the effects seem to be permanent reduction of the psychosis, and not just a temporary fix that is gone when I run out of medicine.
Everything can be good. Everything can be bad. It's just a question of who is using it and for what purpose.
The psychosis was (on a good day) like having a radio tuned to a static station playing inside my head constantly. On a bad day, I would spend hours in intense pain and be screaming obscenities the entire time. (I had a 5 year old kid living next door to me for a while. I'm so sorry he had to hear that.)
The therapy involves putting myself into a controlled psychotic state, in a controlled setting, under controlled conditions, and teaching myself to learn from and control the psychosis. After three years of therapy, the radio playing inside my head is (mostly) turned off. A bad day involves screaming obscenities for (at most) a few minutes. My doctor thinks I'm full of horse manure, but she did document the improvement.
Someone called me "A Crazy Pot-Head" once. Well, if the shoe fits, I'm more than willing to wear it. I just wish I could find someone who would research the therapy with me.
Right. You see it as essentially harmless, or no more so that hetero. I disagree. From this both our differing viewpoints on policy are quite predictable. I compare it to recreational use of controlled subtances which is bad for the person and bad for the society.
But I don't really want to argue this with you.
In my original piece I said Revelation, Tradition, and Science support my viewpoint. Revelation is obviously the Bible.
Your Revelation comes from Eris, of course, unless it comes when you speak as Pope. Not sure how that works really. I don't know that I'm supposed to as Erisian viewpoints might seem to be deliberately illogical.
Upon being asked by one of my players who had heard some friends say they were thinking about going rioting on Election Night as to what I would do...I said that I was a Lord of Order. Civilization is hard, barbarism is easy.
More accurately, I'm very laissez-faire within well-defined boundaries.
One really brilliant book (and short to boot) that I read a couple years back ...The Rules....not sure if thats the title. The theses was that Americans were trying to create the Big Book of Rules that would cover every possible situation, and remove human judgment from the scene. And that this was impossible. The author blamed neither the Right or the Left, or more accurately he blamed both, and I think it sorta happens as a default. We do it when we don't have a better idea. Problem. Not sure what to do. Make a new rule.
It was an excellent book and it made a fair bit of a stir. I don't think it stopped the Project tho', unfortunately.
Edit: No I did not think you were approving of recreational drug use. I was comparing...homosexuality=recreational drug use, and both are bad.
My position on the homosexuality issue is well stated in two papers, Christianity, Homosexuality, and the E. L. C. A., and In Defense of Marriage. I probably have more to say on the subject by now, but this is not the place.
There are reasons why illegal drugs are illegal, and they fall into a few main categories.
- In many cases, the potential positive uses of the illegal drugs are better served by other drugs that are legal. We do not use heroin to control pain because morphine and hydrocodone do it more precisely with less danger.
- In some cases, it is difficult to isolate the beneficial effect from the undesired ones. THC is wonderfully anti-emetic for patients on cancer treatments, and works where many other anti-emetics fail; it also creates a euphoric state that can be life threatening in the event of a hazardous situation. My mother is allergic to many medications. On one occasion when she had toddlers in the house she was put on a medication to which she had a euphoric allergic reaction, and for several hours was completely unaware of the circumstances of her children. Fortunately nothing happened; however, in a country where we put warning labels not to drive or operate heavy machinery on cough medicines for children, we are clearly sensitive to the danger that someone in such a state would harm or kill himself or someone else entirely by accident.
- Many medications, particularly those which work by influencing brain chemistry in some way, create highly desired states. That is, people enjoy getting high to the point that if they do it enough, not being high is an intolerable state. Cocaine, I am told, is not actually physically addictive--not even crack cocaine. Its addictive properties are entirely that people who have experienced the "high" and are experiencing the letdown (which occurs because the neurotransmitter which the drug forces to be released in the brain becomes depleted, creating a natural depression until it is replenished) become desperate to restore the high. They will lie, steal, and--well, let's just say that there is not much a cocaine addict cannot be induced to do by the promise of the drug. Because many drugs have effects of this sort, the people who are taking them being under the influence of a substance that impairs their judgment cannot be trusted to use that substance safely. We thus control as many of these substances as we can, to protect people from that effect.
- There is an availability problem that is addressed by levels of control. One of the most abused drugs is hydrocodone. It is listed as a controlled substance (I think they call it a schedule A drug) because it is narcotic. Not only can you not get it without a prescription, your doctor cannot call in the prescription--you must bring the handwritten prescription from the doctor to the pharmicist. Most states track those prescriptions, watching for doctors who write too many and patients who get too many written. Yet there are hydrocodone tablets in every pharmacy and hospital in America, and these get out onto the street fairly easily. Morphine is harder to get. This is because you can't get a prescription for morphine to administer at home--you can only get it in a hospital or similar supervised situation, ordered, not prescribed, by a doctor and administered by qualified medical personnel. Some of it still gets out, but a lot less than the hydrocodone. Alcohol, by contrast, is available to any seventh grader who wants it, because it is ubiquitous. They can steal it from their own homes, get irresponsible young adults to provide cheaply, acquire it using false IDs. Alcohol kills more people than any other drug, because it is so available. (It is also one of the few that actually are physically addictive, and one of only two for which withdrawal itself, and not the side effects of withdrawal, can kill you.) Thus it is important to control drugs which do not have approved uses, because the more available these are legally, the more available they become to everyone.
Now, it does happen that illegal drugs become legal, and legal drugs become illegal. Clinical experimentation does proceed with drugs that are "illegal", investigating potential beneficial uses and comparing them to other drugs, weighing the impact of side effects and the degree to which the drug is subject to abuse. Nothing is written in stone in this. As it stands, heroin has no medicinal use for which there are not drugs as good with fewer complications. Marijuana is still being analyzed, but it is a complex substance and it is not clear whether the THC is the chemical that does everything or how the effects and side effects can be modified. There probably will be treatments based on the THC molecule in the not too distant future--and they will be controlled substances due to the potential for abuse. Once there is an approved medicinal use, there will be additional clinical trials for other uses. So maybe it will become a standard treatment someday. Or maybe it will fail to measure up to some other treatment yet to be discovered.
--M. J. Young
I can easily envision a world in which Marijuana is legal, and alcohol is illegal.
Less violence, less intelligence, less ambition, more chocolate brownies.
I don't say 'less car accidents' because 1)Marijuana would as MJ ably explains probably have a number of problems there. 2)Car accidents are in large part a function of zoning laws that turn the drunk walking home, a comic figure, into the speeding drunk killing a family. In other words, tis better to have a bar on the street corner where everyone in two blocks radius can go and kick back on Saturday night then limit them to a certain area of town far from schools.
This will also have the side effect of forcing the bars to try to be respectable.
And thanks MJ for your precise logic.
I never understood why you would want to go to a bar to get drunk anyway. For the price of one beer there, you can get a six pack and stay at home. Problem solved.
I can easily envision a world in which Marijuana is legal, and alcohol is illegal.
Less violence, less intelligence, less ambition, more chocolate brownies.
More psychotic people too. I mean genuine psychotics like me. Not the generic definition of "Psycho". I've been psychotic all of my life. I didn't start having actual episodes until I started smoking marijuana. Now I'm using it to help me to control the episodes. However, my psychosis is more under control now than it was before I started smoking.
Who would have thought something that causes psychosis could be used to help someone control it?
I think there's a saying about how sometimes the 'dose makes the poison' and something to the effect that a small dose is sometimes the cure to a larger dose, or something like that. And no that's not 'the hair of the dog that bit you'.
I do suspect that the concept you're describing is a somewhat general phenomenon across the medical field.
=========
You offer an interesting bit of data, one of those unpredictable wrinkles, that make for authority and interest in a setting. A world shouldn't be wholly predictable, or more accurately, its better if its not.
I think people don't go to a bar to get drunk. I think they go to the bar to get drunk in company with other people. It is the social aspect that matters. Even those who sit alone are in the company of others sitting alone, and it makes them feel more a part of the world.
In a small Irish village a newcomer arrived. Everyone was of course curious, and the first night he was there he went to the pub, ordered three pints, sat by himself in the corner and drank them, then ordered three more and did the same.
He did this again the next night.
Of course everyone in the village was talking about this strange behaviour, so they got the barkeep to ask. "We noticed," he said, "how you always buy three pints, and drink them in threes. We wondered why that was."
"Oh, it's no mystery," the young man replied. "See, I have two brothers. One went to America, and the other to Australia, so we're separated, spread around the world, don't you know. But we agreed that we would keep connected to each other by this, that each night we would order a drink for ourselves and one for each of our brothers, and drink them all. So I'm doing it here, and they're doing it in America and Australia, and it keeps us connected, you see."
Well, the villagers were quite taken by this tale, and all the talk was about what a wonderful family tradition it was.
Then one day in the spring the young man ordered two beers. He drank them, and ordered too more. The pub was silent.
He did this again the next night.
The third night, the barkeep said, "We want you to know, we're all terribly sorry about your brother."
"My brother?" he asked, apparently surprised.
"Yes, well we saw that you were only ordering two beers, and we thought...."
The young man brightened up. "Oh, no, it's not that," he said. "Me brothers are both fine. But me, I've given up beer for Lent."
--M. J. Young
http://www.ebaumsworld.com/video/watch/80423278/
Anyone interested in the War on Drugs should watch this video. I can testify from personal experience to a lot of what they are talking about here.
WARNING: The video contains profane language!!!!