Just Defiance

I am so bored of bipolar depression kicking my arse and killing my ability to commit to anything other than well-rehearsed denial.

I had an awesome semester last year, and this year I’ve only been able to function when I can manage to meditate — and the problem with depression is that you lose the will to do anything productive, which includes meditation. Such is fucking life with bipolar II.

Bipolar Affective Disorder II with rapid cycling, and ADHD. That’s my official diagnosis. Fortunately, I no longer experience rapid-cycling, and the medical literature will attribute that to the modest dose of lamotrigine I take. The ADHD is dying down too, and I take far less stimulant for it than I used to. That I’ll go out on a limb and attribute to some cognitive training I did last year.*

More here.

Apparently the “indigenous” British are currently the victims of genocide by immigration.

This is really fucking absurd. It’s offensive to suggest. It’s wrong.

It came to my attention when some arsehole linked to it in a Facebook group that I frequent.

We don’t believe in stifling free speech, so being a bigoted scumbag isn’t a bannable offence: it simply makes you fair game, provided the game is played with the sort of civility necessary for a rational discussion. I’ve grown to love this model and I wish society would adhere to it.

Anyway, back to the story.

My friend Simon responded to the post coolly, comprehensively and with the quality of references that would make my university professors swoon.

I didn’t do that. I went nuclear. Here’s how I responded:

You should be ashamed, you xenophobic semi-conscious coagulation of shit, toxoplasmic afterbirth and syphilitic semen.

I’m a British citizen; and since it clearly matters to you: my genealogy is public record, and I probably have more distinguished Briton blood in my ancestry than you and most of the people you know put together. You embarrass me. Go inject one of Christopher Monckton’s miracle cures into your grossly inflated amygdalae with a filthy needle.

You could have sparked a discussion about the spread of ideas - such as Islam, and while the issue of the Islamification of Europe is probably a transient illusion, it is a conversation we could have without defiling all the progress our species has made over the last half century. Instead you want us to sign a petition predicated on ethnicity. This is fucking retarded.

There is more genetic diversity among groups of bonobos in the same fucking jungle than there is among human populations all over the world. Of course, this doesn’t matter to bigoted anencephalic failures of contraception like you, but it is something you can look up, should you ever experience a moment of clarity.

Yes, I’m intolerant of your intolerance. Go chew on that treasured dry chunk of Nick Griffin’s stool you keep under your pillow.

I was warned over what I said, even though I doubt many people would have disagreed with the sentiment. I respect that, because rules against overt hostility are necessary to preserve the integrity of serious discussion groups. The administrator is my friend, but I respect his role as administrator.

I’m clearly proud of that insult. It was my best work for quite a while. But I’m not proud of making it someone else’s problem. I’m also not proud of potentially making the poster double down to protect his threatened ideology.

The thread was killed, probably by the original poster, so I’m not undermining anyone’s integrity (my own is unsalvageable, I assure you) by preserving this snapshot of my issues with reactive sub-psychotic rage here.

First, I’m not happy with the idea that I must be a user because I advocate legalising cannabis. I’m not a user. I also advocate gay rights, but I don’t do that out of self-interest either. I just believe that adults can make their own decisions, and I don’t believe in criminalising things just because they don’t float my boat.

I have experimented with drugs, soft and hard, and I had fun. I don’t use now, and it wasn’t hard for me to “quit” because I was never addicted; I was just curious. Because I was responsible, I never ended up with any health issues.

Most people who try drugs don’t get addicted, and very few occasional users end up addicts. The only drug I ever use now is alcohol, and I very rarely touch the stuff. I know *many* occasional pot smokers who function just as well as everyone else, but they don’t tend to talk about smoking pot because, well, it’s illegal and stigmatised. Who wants to be associated with potheads on the dole?

That’s why the only pot smokers we ever hear about are the ones who have serious problems with substance abuse. Substance abuse issues are substance-independent. It’s a genetic and/or psychological predisposition, and usually a symptom of an underlying psychiatric condition.

If you want to argue that we should protect vulnerable people at all costs, then you must argue that all mind-altering substances, along with pornography, the internet and sugary food must be criminalised. Do you want to do that? I’d rather spend public money on better mental health and public education schemes instead of more policies that will just clog the justice system.

The point I’d like to make here is that addiction is a medical issue, not a criminal one.

And even in terms of substance abuse: alcohol is far, far worse for the body and the brain than cannabis is. THC isn’t even a toxin - it’s neuroprotective and it’s actually not that physically bad for you. Nobody has ever died from THC poisoning. There are cases where cannabis has catalysed schizophrenia in people who were already predisposed, but there are also cases where the recommended dose of paracetamol has killed people with sensitive livers.

In contrast: alcohol is extremely neurotoxic and hepatotoxic, and it’s very habit-forming. Heavy cannabis use can impair cognitive functioning, but because THC just alters receptor sensitivity, normal functioning tends to return following withdrawal. In contrast, alcohol actually kills irreplaceable brain cells - so cognitive recovery, if it happens, usually takes much longer and it’s almost never complete.

And then there’s the issue of crime. Prohibition of anything for which there is a huge demand just breeds organised crime. If we legalise and regulate, we will deprive gangs of their major sources of income, and we’ll free up police resources, which will enable them to go after thugs and frauds.

We can also look the effects of decriminalisation in other nations:

“Health experts in Portugal said Friday that Portugal’s decision 10 years ago to decriminalise drug use and treat addicts rather than punishing them is an experiment that has worked.

“There is no doubt that the phenomenon of addiction is in decline in Portugal,” said Joao Goulao, President of the Institute of Drugs and Drugs Addiction, a press conference to mark the 10th anniversary of the law.

The number of addicts considered “problematic” — those who repeatedly use “hard” drugs and intravenous users — had fallen by half since the early 1990s, when the figure was estimated at around 100,000 people, Goulao said.

Other factors had also played their part however, Goulao, a medical doctor added.

“This development can not only be attributed to decriminalisation but to a confluence of treatment and risk reduction policies.”

(From Forbes.)

In a round-about way I did address the gateway drug hypothesis. Studies that do claim to suggest that there is a gateway effect readily confuse correlation with causation. More thorough studies actually discredit the gateway drug hypothesis entirely by comparing it to other models and examining other variables - such as which drugs are more readily available and the attitudes of users. These studies suggest an underlying medical problem rather than mere Skinnerian causality. People aren’t (always) like pigeons.

The takeaway here is that we have a cumulative negative result and the suggestion of deeper complexity than such studies can probe.

A user looking to escape from life will try everything until they find something that hits the spot, and stick with it. That’s a sign of something like dysthymia, borderline personality or unipolar depression. Someone looking to chill out with friends will not do this, and is probably very mentally healthy.

So yeah, I think I’ve made my case.

I just posted these comments on Facebook in response to my former martial arts instructor, who had weighed in on an anti-prohibition Condescending Wonka meme I’d shared. I respect the shit out of him so I wanted to be as thorough as I could. This post consists of several of my comments edited and spliced together.

I cannot understand why we idle discussing religion. If we are honest—and scientists have to be—we must admit that religion is a jumble of false assertions, with no basis in reality. The very idea of God is a product of the human imagination. It is quite understandable why primitive people, who were so much more exposed to the overpowering forces of nature than we are today, should have personified these forces in fear and trembling. But nowadays, when we understand so many natural processes, we have no need for such solutions. I can’t for the life of me see how the postulate of an Almighty God helps us in any way. What I do see is that this assumption leads to such unproductive questions as why God allows so much misery and injustice, the exploitation of the poor by the rich and all the other horrors He might have prevented. If religion is still being taught, it is by no means because its ideas still convince us, but simply because some of us want to keep the lower classes quiet. Quiet people are much easier to govern than clamorous and dissatisfied ones. They are also much easier to exploit. Religion is a kind of opium that allows a nation to lull itself into wishful dreams and so forget the injustices that are being perpetrated against the people. Hence the close alliance between those two great political forces, the State and the Church. Both need the illusion that a kindly God rewards—in heaven if not on earth—all those who have not risen up against injustice, who have done their duty quietly and uncomplainingly. That is precisely why the honest assertion that God is a mere product of the human imagination is branded as the worst of all mortal sins.

Atheism is far more moral than theism because atheism doesn’t make virtues out of believing things on bad evidence, regardless of how good they make a person feel, or on blind obedience. Moreover, since the abolition of slavery, nobody actually lives by theistic ethics any more.

Obviously it’s possible for religious people to be highly moral; but they aren’t getting their morals from their holy books.

Theism’s claim to morality falls flat philosophically when confronted with the Euthyphro dilemma; and the idea of a benevolent creator was definitively discredited by Epicurus’s elucidation of the problem of evil. From this, we can deduce that there is simply no philosophical basis for ethics in theism.

Atheist ethics can be deontological, consequentialist or some combination of the two - ethics is actually a vibrant academic discipline, and you will find very few theists publishing highly-regarded theistic accounts of ethics in peer-reviewed journals.

It’s true that humans are naturally inclined towards morality, so the argument that society will collapse if everybody decides that the Bible is bullshit and the Koran is a lie, and that the Bhagavad Gita did not fall from the sky (heh) is scientifically untenable. (Yeah, I have a weakness for the Upanishads, but for their poetry and interest to me as a monist practitioner of meditation.)

As for Hume’s is-ought problem, which is a staple of theistic apologetics: it clearly only applies to deductive reasoning on moral questions. That’s why Hume’s ethics were derived through induction. There’s nothing wrong with induction, either; especially when you remember that the fact of Darwin’s evolution by natural selection does violence to our intuitive notions of teleology.

Until someone points me to a society where people have suffered for becoming too reasonable, it’s to me clear that atheism and the values it promotes can actually make a claim to ethics while theism simply cannot.

(This is a copy of a post I made in a Facebook group dedicated to the discussion of such topics. Like any extemporaneously-produced essay, it’s a bit of a mess. Still, it’s a post.)

Which I don’t have the time to write about just this minute.

I’m going to actually spend an hour playing video games, such is the magnitude of my anger.

I was going to write about my perspective on the Sam Harris TSA profiling drama, but it got long.

It got long because I also wanted to write about the reaction to Harris in the context of free speech. This turned into a disquisition on why free speech is worth holding on to regardless of the costs.

Then I witnessed a piece of shit report on the national broadcaster, and promptly took to Twitter to vent with other discontents.

So I’ll have to put my rage on hold for this evening, lest my usually cool mind rages out.

OK, I’m not liable to rage out. I have more than enough rage to last me well into this century.