But to Hitchens: why not school people in precisely how the human mind does work at this point in the argument? It certainly does obey laws—laws so material that the notions of subjectivity and consciousness on which the theist’s argument rest get blown to smithereens. If a human subject with a “mind” who makes ethical decisions that transfer to his or her immortal soul suffers a brain injury impairing his or her interpretive systems, ability to read human emotions (key to the brain response we know as ‘compassion’) then what’s happened to the soul? If I can remove the part of a person’s brain that enables ethical judgment, have I not surgically removed their moral soul? This connection between what the religious call the soul and what is known about material brain functionality severely undermines the theist’s notion of the “I” that makes choices that bear on “my” eternal soul. If I’m a neuroscientist, I can plug your immortal soul into a machine and map it’s [sic] electricity.

Descartes believed that somewhere in the brain there was a driver’s seat for the soul—the site where “you” make the decision to act, whether morally or immorally. But the “I” that so many take for granted is known to be nothing more than the brain’s interpretation of its own complex functioning. Multiple things occur in the brain that the “I” isn’t aware of and couldn’t control no matter how hard it tried. The notion of heaven, this place where all the “I”s will someday go because of things they did or didn’t do, is not commensurate with what is known about the brain. The human “I” in other words is little more than the transcendentalizing of an evolved brain phenomenon. If one accepts evolution, as D’Souza does, then one must also accept that these brains once had no ability to conceive of themselves in this way, much less to glorify it so. And so grows a new problem for the theist—not the atheist—to explain, one that isn’t unlike the ensoulment debate regarding abortion. Whence did the soul of the “I” come into being in terms of human evolution? And how can something be transcendent if it can be surgically removed?

Many have charged the new atheists of wearing out an old argument and passing off as if its [sic] new. But these questions are completely current. Francis Crick proclaimed the brain to be the great frontier of the 21st century and it has only been with the advent of computers in the last 20-30 years that the intensive acceleration in learning has taken place. Hitchens, Dennett, Harris, and Dawkins are not beating dead horses by the name of Russell or Nietzsche. They are pushing back the post-everything world’s increasing tendency to accept bullshit. And their rebuttals to this trend stand on foundations that aren’t hundreds or thousands but mere tens of years old. Hitchens could have been a bit more forward with some of this information. D’Souza could stand to be a bit more aware of it. But hey, the best bullshitters are the ones who believe their own bullshit.

• If we could ever duplicate the information processing in the human mind as an enormous computer program, would a computer running the program be conscious?
  
• What if we took that program and trained a large number of people, say, the population of China, to hold in mind the data and act out the steps? Would there be one gigantic consciousness hovering over China, separate from the consciousnesses of the billion individuals? If they were implementing the brain state for agonizing pain, would there be some entity that really was in pain, even if every citizen was cheerful and light-hearted?
  
• Suppose the visual receiving area at the back of your brain was surgically severed from the rest and remained alive in your skull, receiving input from the eyes. By every behavioral measure you are blind. Is there a mute but fully aware visual consciousness sealed off in the back of your head? What if it was removed and kept alive in a dish?
  
• Might your experience of red be the same as my experience of green? Sure, you might label grass as “green” and tomatoes as “red,” just as I do, but perhaps you actually see the grass as having the color that I would describe, if I were in your shoes, as red.
  
• Could there be zombies? That is, could there be an android rigged up to act as intelligently and as emotionally as you and me, but in which there is “no one home” who is actually feeling or seeing anything? How do I know that you’re not a zombie?
  
• If someone could download the state of my brain and duplicate it in another collection of molecules, would it have my consciousness? If someone destroyed the original, but the duplicate continued to live my life and think my thoughts and feel my feelings, would I have been murdered? Was Captain Kirk snuffed out and replaced by a twin every time he stepped into the transporter room?
  
• What is it like to be a bat? Do beetles enjoy sex? Does a worm scream silently when a fisherman impales it on a hook?
  
• Surgeons replace one of your neurons with a microchip that duplicates its input-output functions. You feel and behave exactly as before. Then they replace a second one, and a third one, and so on, until more and more of your brain becomes silicon. Since each microchip does exactly what the neuron did, your behavior and memory never change. Do you even notice the difference? Does it feel like dying? Is some other conscious entity moving in with you?
  

Beats the heck out of me! I have some prejudices, but no idea of how to begin to look for a defensible answer. And neither does anyone else. The computational theory of mind offers no insight; neither does any finding in neuroscience, once you clear up the usual confusion of sentience with access [to information] and self-knowledge. [1997, p. 145-147]

Labels: Lib, MorPa, OnVi, OthBlo, RS, Sc

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 2:50 PM

October 19, 2007

Guerrilla warfare has done for me what psychotherapy never could

A month ago tomorrow, I changed the outgoing message of my phone answering machine, making it even angrier than it had been. It was good for me. I think I’ll keep it.

In a certain manner of speaking, a poltergeist invades my psychic space several times a day. After learning too well the lessons in spinelessness of America’s oppressive public school system, I accumulated countless memories of failing to resist abuses of authority—even at home. Too many memories of one’s own cowardice, and the world becomes a scary place all the time. Minor setbacks and frustrations in everyday life become sources of great terror, confusion, shame, guilt, and rage. When I hesitate unreasonably out of these feelings, I sometimes make horrible new memories of being a coward, too.

In 2007, middle-class Americans are expected to take their unseemly emotions to a therapist’s office. But I say no. In the spirit of my anti-therapy post of yesterday, I reaffirm my right to take my madness to the streets instead. My suffering is not my problem alone. My suffering is the entire community’s problem. Otherwise, a lot of squeaky wheels may never get greased.

Besides the political argument against therapy, I now have an empirical, practical one. This past month, I’ve felt stronger, more effectual, and more capable than ever. I have every reason to believe the trend will continue. As a therapy veteran, I think a therapist who would have endorsed my angry phone message, or anticipated its benefits, before the fact would be hard to find. To paraphrase Dickens, therapy is an ass.

Labels: AgeMaj, BGC, Educ, Lib, Lit, Sc, UCL

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 8:58 PM

September 12, 2007

Make Terri Lynn Farrow a Playmate!

This student at Louisiana State University is pictured much more candidly on page 112 of the October Playboy, for its “Girls of the Southeastern [Athletic] Conference” pictorial. In her shot for the current issue, I see self-confident good taste. It’s a cliché to call Playboy’s nudes “tasteful,” but I choose my written words with care.

Virtually every image Playboy has ever published is less shocking and disgusting than some other representation of the naked female form that most men and women could easily imagine (or even create and have displayed in an art gallery somewhere). Playboy Enterprises’ workshops of model recruitment, photography, and photo editing work so consistently well that tastefulness is embarrassingly consistent in the product. (Even so, the allegedly ruthless corporate machine frightens away women whose hearts aren’t really set on it.) Embarrassingly, I say, because some seem to think that Playboy must earn its status as art rather than mere entertainment by shocking the bourgeoisie. But my political tribe, libertarianism, begs to differ. We’ve been building a consensus that “art” and “entertainment” are interchangeable terms. Like McDonald’s, Starbucks, and to a lesser extent, professional sports, Playboy may be a victim of its own success in bringing sensual pleasures to the masses within reliable—but perhaps aging—perimeters of good taste. Since sports seems to be the least hated of the four institutions by those who would dismiss Playboy centerfolds as kitsch, I’ll try to explain Terri Lynn Farrow as something like a Joe DiMaggio or Muhammad Ali: one who can express beautiful individuality through a medium of mass entertainment with conventions and clichés already familiar to millions through decades of exposure. Whatever the medium under discussion, not everyone can do that!

To follow my argument completely, you’ll need a paid subscription to the Playboy Cyber Club. That link is not work-safe, of course, and neither are many that follow in this post. I first noticed her in the fall 2001 College Girls newsstand special. But later on, I was thrilled to find six minutes of video of her tryout for the New Orleans “Casting Call” (QuickTime, RealVideo). This woman is charming, quirky, polite, daring, and gritty. Unless you hold to the rigid formulas of some (not all) feminists for how a self-respecting woman behaves toward men, you’ll notice this combination of traits, remember it, and love it. She satisfies almost every possible definition of all-American by claiming Swedish, German, French, Jewish, and African-American blood. The headshot in this post comes from her January 27, 2003, Cyber Girl of the Week gig. But in light of the aesthetic choices she made in presenting her body again more recently, she deserves to go all the way to Playmate of the Month at least.

I don’t dislike breast implants for the sanctimonious reasons that some others do. If you can’t agree with me on this, please have the integrity to say “I hate saline!” instead of “I hate silicone!” The former compound deserves the blame for the balloon look of visual adult entertainment in the 1990s. The American silicone market was largely destroyed by pseudoscientific lawsuits that feminists, among others, widely supported out of moral panic. Those lawsuits arguably did more to restrict women’s individual choices than that Marxist demon of good intentions, Catharine MacKinnon, ever can.

But for purely aesthetic reasons, I want a greater variety of sizes and shapes of breasts on the centerfold proper. As it happens, Farrow impresses me by still not having implants of any kind—if the photo on newsstands now is a reliable indicator. The long hair that falls over her petite breasts is an obviously dyed, platinum shade of blond. The October 2007 Playboy won’t tell you this, but her modestly trimmed pubic hair is that darker shade of blond naturally, according to the video. Farrow must have figured that guys would notice the juxtaposition: hair dyed a nature-defying color over nature’s own breasts. In the twenty-first century, Farrow has something in common with the men who ogle her Playboy picture. She can have the complex, Rabelaisian pleasure of understanding the quirky nuances of her own sexual behavior in light of evolutionary psychology. Like the heliocentric astronomy of Copernicus and Galileo and the evolutionary biology of Darwin and Wallace, this paradigm shift frightens and disturbs even as it opens up new possibilities for dialogue on perennial human issues like entertainment and the arts.

If Farrow can be anybody’s muse in any such indirect manner (with all due modesty!), she deserves a centerfold.

Labels: ArtEnt, CC, CosSur, Femi, Lib, Lit, MorPa, NSS, OnVi, OthBlo, PM, Sc, Sp, TaoGlam, Theme, UCL

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 5:39 PM

July 31, 2007

Amanda Marcotte’s road to hell paved with empathy

While researching my previous post, I browsed left-wing feminist blogger Amanda Marcotte’s recent work. It reminded me of why I get so angry at people who seem to think they own the patent on compassion while they support policies that unintentionally hurt the less fortunate.

I discovered Marcotte when she publicly called me a loser because I write a libertarian blog about Playboy. Still, she implicitly claims to feel sorry for me in this passage from a more recent post:

Update: August Pollak alerted me to an article in Campus Progress about the [Independent Women’s Forum] conference [on campus sex and dating], an article that seems a bit more honest about the ugly sexism on display. Contrary to my theory that men act like dicks a lot of the time because they’re living under some pretty ugly pressures, the ladies at IWF seem to think that men were born dogs. But you know, having an empathetic attitude towards male feelings [serves as] evidence that one is a man-hater. You only love men if you see them as no better than leg-humping dogs.

I can’t say why exactly Allison Kasic of the IWF fascinates me so much. I think it’s because she’s smart enough to have clued into the fact that there’s [something] disillusioning and miserable about the attitudes of so many young men towards young women, but she comes to the exact wrong conclusion about how to handle the issue, arguing that instead of combating the misogyny that’s handed down to young men as a birthright, we reinforce the sexist notion that female sexuality is more of a commodity than a set of autonomous female desires. She’s got a write-up of [the] IWF sex conference that the evil sleeper cell [right-]winger Dr. Drew [Pinsky] spoke at, and it’s just a train wreck of false assumptions and pie-in-the-sky hopes about how to coerce a less contemptuous attitude towards women from the frateratti.

[Personally, I don’t see Dr. Drew as belonging to the cultural right. Instead, he’s one of our too many vaguely left-leaning public-health busybodies. But as I explained in an earlier post, one shouldn’t expect Dr. Drew to have very consistent political convictions on anything. Now I’ll let Marcotte speak for herself some more.]

By the way, to calm the nerves that a paragraph like the before invariably ruffles, I’m not saying all college age men are pigs. But it’s been my experience that there’s a lot of pressure on men when they’re younger to demonstrate a certain level of contempt for young women in order to satisfy their male peers that they’re all man. As they get older, their priorities shift and some of the compulsive misogyny falls away for a lot of guys that were only into it half-heartedly. But when you’re actually in college, sometimes the amount of pressure on men to be disdainful towards women can be stifling. In fact, my heart goes out on a level to a lot of young men who find themselves in a situation where respect for women is simply incompatible with having camaraderie with men in college. It’s this tension that I think is driving a lot of the unhappiness with men coming from the college women at this conference that Kasic talks about.

Ah, but does Marcotte really know what empathy is? In opposing school choice, she effectively favors a public-school monopoly for America’s poor and middle-income families, who have much less discretionary income for private schooling than wealthier families. Let them eat cake, indeed. Besides the direct name-calling I’ve already mentioned, I believe I have good reasons to take her stance on school as a lack of true empathy for me, thank you very much:

1.) As time goes on, every wise and honest person will eventually recognize Judith Rich Harris as the Copernicus of child development. To the degree that misogyny among American men is the problem Marcotte says it is, it must be because of the way American boys children* socialize each other—and not a direct consequence of the way American parents treat their boys.

2.) Jokes about schoolyard bullying, even as presented in entertainments like The Simpsons and A Christmas Story, may become even more ambiguously funny after a study of Harris. After all, jokes about prison rape aren’t necessarily funny, either. It’s obviously not the moral equivalent, but the difference is only a matter of degree.

3.) In light of Harris’ scholarship, my seemingly endless guilt over my failure to stand up to my father when he was alive is certainly the effect, not the cause, of having such a horrible time with the brutal machismo of the public junior high school locker room. The only way I knew to preserve my self-respect in the face of the assault on it was to feel superior by being the biggest goody two-shoes in the room. Unfortunately, the ruse corrupted me until I was too sheepish in the face of authority, and too lacking in personal ambition, to grow up gracefully and become an unbitter adult. In principle, Marcotte surely hates that locker-room culture as much as I did. But since public-school gym class is too stupid and cruel to survive the rigors of a free market in education—especially if I had my way and teenagers weren’t the new niggers—she aids in the oppression of millions of young people of both sexes.

4.) Alarmingly, Marcotte doesn’t seem to worry about the creep-up in legal age of majority that has taken place for the last few generations of Americans. Compulsory high school is an historical aberration (like marijuana prohibition, cough). It shouldn’t be such a sacred cow across the political spectrum. Andrew Sullivan has made the mistake of supporting it, but somehow I wouldn’t expect him to play the more-empathic-than-thou game in debate about it that Marcotte does about feminism. (For the record, I support Playboy’s good-faith effort to ensure a minimum employee age of 18.) Five days out of every week are a needless sorority initiation for millions of girls during the difficult early years of puberty. Meanwhile, the heart of the teacher’s pet bleeds for 18-year-olds who get drunk and expose their breasts for Girls Gone Wild. The child is father to the man—and to the woman, too. (Sorry, ghost of Emily Dickinson, but you were right about long dashes being so much fun.)

5.) My credibility gap between Marcotte and Sullivan lies in the respective presence and absence of the Blank Slate doctrine in the mind of each. Between the two, Sullivan shows more respect for the influence of evolutionary psychology and behavioral genetics on our policy debates. Nineteenth-century racists and sexists thought those sciences were on their side; twentieth-century racists and other dangerous idealists (Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Woodrow Wilson) are exposed as fools by them. (And yes, the sexual revolution which Playboy heralded has sometimes had Blank Slate conceits of its own, although I still don’t think that that revolution has always been wrong.)

Marcotte’s compassion for me as a man is at best the compassion of the elephant for the merchandise in a china shop. Her intellectual clumsiness makes the analogy fair. I already know that I can’t trust her to see my fascination with Playboy as something other than a kind of brainwashing. I don’t need her “empathetic” missionary work to save my tribe from devil worship. If that’s her agenda, can anyone blame me for resenting it?

By the way, the Playmate mentioned in the blog post that Marcotte favorably links to in her anti-GGW rant is Miss March 1987, Marina Baker (her Playboy Cyber Club [workers of the world, beware of breasts] headshot):

Baker is 39 now, and probably still smokin’ hot. Marcotte is pretty cute, in case that’s at all germane. But since she seems so militant about its possible effect on her credibility (“God knows someone like me could never just, oh, put up some erotic pictures of myself without losing all credibility forever amen”), I won’t post her photo here.

More dirt on Marcotte

*Update, 2:57 p.m.: I’m truly embarrassed by the sexism of my original draft.

Update, December 4, 2007, 8:38 p.m.: For a few months, the Baker JPEG was missing. Now it’s back.

Labels: AgeMaj, BlaSla, Educ, Femi, Lib, Lit, OthBlo, PM, Sc, UCL

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 1:23 PM

July 18, 2007

Garcelle Beauvais pictorial: what can brown do to a guy?

The Haitian-born actress and August 2007 Playboy cover girl is a truly deserving candidate for a celebrity pictorial. Her youthful 40-year-old body holds a rare and devastating abundance of both womanly curves and Amazon muscle tone. In an alternate timeline, she could have been a widely celebrated exotic dancer. As it is in our version of history, she now confesses to an underage stint serving guests of the New York Playboy Club as Bunny Garcelle in the mid-1980s. Luckily for all, photographer Stephen Wayda knows how to chronicle by suggestion what might have been.

In most of the photos, Wayda complements the brown tones of the model’s skin, eyes, and hair with plenty of brown in her surroundings (on a ship, by the way, but that’s not so important). As is often said in aesthetic debates about color versus black and white in motion pictures, a scarcity of colors tends to accentuate line, shape, and form. The pinup genre has generally done well by using full color. But devices like this can help photography rival sculpture [not work-safe] as a loving expression of shape. (As the last link shows, we men never change. We’ll always love triplets.)

It’s not the only such trick this pictorial uses, either. By first visual impressions, a completely naked woman might just be a nudist on family vacation. But a mostly naked woman adorned in something very showy and elaborate is obviously out to drive the fellas a little crazy—and is therefore more likely to do so. In one pic, she stands with her back to the camera at a full-length (except for pelvic-level) mirror. Not only do the curves running symmetrically from her shoulders to her thighs identify Beauvais as the avatar of the muse of the Stradivari family. Not only does she tenderly rebuke our greedy eyeballs with an “oh, you dog” look through the mirror. She ensures total victory by wearing a tiny, elaborate, neo-Egyptian set of chains around her chest and midsection. In some photos, she has lost the chains and replaced them with rhinestones glued all over her body from the neck down. This is advanced weaponry, folks.

Erotica, though made just as historically necessary by the human nervous system as music, may always have more difficulty traveling across subcultures of sexual morality in a diverse society like the United States. A very sexual musical form like rock and roll can easily outpace erotica at its almost mildest. Still, in its own way, cheesecake photography may turn out to be as formally complex and precise as tonal harmony in Western classical and popular music. And if it’s such a joy to let Johann Sebastian Bach mess with our heads, why not let Hugh Hefner do it, too?

Since bootlegs of Beauvais’ exclusive Cyber Club shots are all over the internet already, I would feel like a nerd if I didn’t post one of them. I give you the one that Playboy Enterprises’ lawyers will least mind me stealing, of course:

Labels: AgeMaj, CC, Celeb, Mus, Sc

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 5:36 PM

March 13, 2007

An Australian blogger after my own heart

Hugh Hefner will reportedly marry Holly Madison, one of the “girls next door” on the reality television show of that name, before the end of the year. Researching the story at Technorati, I stumbled on another blogger who relies on evolutionary psychology to understand the Playboy phenomenon. In her blog for The Sydney Morning Herald, Sam and the City, Samantha Brett suggests that Hefner may be motivated by a male biological clock:

Now before you snort on your cornflakes at the thought of a men’s version of the internal timebomb (which forces single gals way into their 30s and 40s to become a little more desperate than their younger counterparts), let’s take a moment to look at the male side of the commitment coin...

Scientifically speaking, research has proven that men do in fact suffer from a ticking clock. According to Dr. Harry Fisch, director of the Male Reproductive Center at Columbia University in New York City and author of The Male Biological Clock, after men turn thirty, their testosterone levels decline at a rate of around 1 per cent per year. Fisch also reckons that men older than 35 are twice as likely to be infertile as men 25 and younger!

While other experts surmise that a more accurate age is around 40-50 years old, either way, confirmed bachelors with birthdays around the corner should start scouting around.

Yet despite the warnings, many men still prefer to continue on with a lifestyle of barhopping, bedhopping and boozing over leaving it all behind for a life of potty training and nappy changing. (Who wouldn’t?)

So what makes men change?

I still wasn’t sure. Yet I was almost knocked off my seat when my phone snorted the arrival of a text message the other day from a girlfriend telling me that her 30-something ex-commitment-phobic-boyfriend had finally gotten engaged. [ellipsis in the original]

The Playboy Blog has recently implied some other questions for EP. The magazine’s staffers in Santa Monica, just down the hall from studios where Playmates and celebrities pose naked, spend most of their free time gathered around a high-tech ant farm. Is the sort of man who reads Playboy usually a dork posing as a smooth operator? Or will female beauty always tend to scare men a little, like a bigger-than-expected bong hit? Maybe it’s a question for economics instead: did the same Hayekian spontaneous order that created Playboy also build a firewall around the hotties? Enquiring minds like mine want to know.

Labels: BlaSla, Celeb, He, OthBlo, Ptv, Sc

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 3:12 PM

March 9, 2007

Watch great satire for free while you still can

The eleventh-season premiere of South Park pertains to a dirty word I’ve used occasionally on this blog (with adequate sensitivity to context, I sincerely hope). (Hat tips.) I’ll remind everyone that the satire isn’t as broad as you might think. But I’m more optimistic than Trey Parker and Matt Stone that whites and blacks can understand each other’s emotions. Regardless of skin color, all humans have pretty much the same circuitry in their brains. Individual genetic variation and unique life experiences create different emotional reactions to things, but only within certain parameters. In the cartoon, Token arguably—but not necessarily—lays a guilt trip on Stan.

Labels: BlaSla, Cintv, MorPa, OnVi, Ra, Sc

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 1:11 PM

March 5, 2007

Dr. Drew Pinsky is on the wrong side of the drug issue

Get ready for two paragraphs of almost no cause-and-effect reasoning despite three uses of the word consequences:

Q: I think a friend is using, and maybe even selling, marijuana. He has no father and a poor family life, and I want to help him stop. What’s the best way for me to approach this?

A: This may sound cruel, but getting caught may be the best thing that could happen to your friend. He needs to suffer the consequences of his behavior. When he recognizes what he’s doing to himself, and possibly others, hopefully he’ll realize that smoking marijuana isn’t worth damaging friendships or his future. The most important thing you can do is tell him how his behavior affects you, how you see it changing him and what your concerns are. Ultimately, you have to be willing to end this relationship if he continues to use marijuana. It is only through these cumulative consequences and losses that he’ll make the connection between marijuana and the negative impact it’s having on his life. I encourage you to be loving and supportive, and perhaps even help him find a drug treatment program or support group, such as Marijuana Anonymous. You could also alert an adult who has a significant influence on his life. But be prepared to pull away from him if he continues to use or sell drugs. He needs to feel the consequences of his behavior—anything short of that and you are continuing to enable his disease. [link in the original]

According to Pinsky, nobody knows better than MA the negative consequences of the filthy stuff. Um, I’m a little hazy on those consequences, so I’ve consulted the MA website:

Q: What is the effect of marijuana on pregnancy?

A: Marijuana Anonymous has no opinion on outside issues including medical advice or opinions. MA does not know what effect marijuana may have on pregnancy. Some members may have more experience in that area than others, but no more so than the general population. That is a medical question best answered by medical professionals.

Q: What physical side effects does the use of marijuana cause?

A: The pamphlet “Detoxing from Marijuana” that is on this web page [sic: it’s on this other page] does not contain medically based knowledge, but empirical knowledge based on the experiences of many MA members who took the time to fill out extensive questionnaires regarding their own early days of abstinence from their drug of choice. This pamphlet should answer most of your questions on common physical side effects.

Q: Why do I need MA to quit using marijuana?

A: Maybe you don’t. “Marijuana Anonymous is a fellowship of men and women who share our experience, strength, and hope with each other that we may solve our common problem and help others to recover from marijuana addiction.” If you haven’t crossed over the line from using to abusing to addiction, you can probably quit using it any time you’d like....

Q: How can there be marijuana addicts if marijuana is not addicting?

A: ...Based on our own experiences, we who seek recovery in MA generally consider ourselves to be marijuana addicts. Whether or not our addiction is psychological, physical, or both, matters little. When it comes to the use of marijuana, we have lost the power of choice. It is strictly up to the individual to decide whether he or she feels addicted to marijuana. MA has no opinion about marijuana itself one way or another....

Q: What is MA’s opinion on the legalization of marijuana?

A: The Tenth Tradition of Marijuana Anonymous states:

“Marijuana Anonymous has no opinion on outside issues; hence the MA name ought never be drawn into public controversy.”

This tradition protects the integrity of the organization. “Anything that can disrupt our unity, and interfere with our primary purpose of carrying the message to the marijuana addict who still suffers, should be avoided” (Life With Hope, p. 93). Therefore, MA has no opinion about the legalization of marijuana. [bold in the original]

(I assume I can get away with copying and pasting all this, because I don’t belong to MA.) Like, wow, I’m still hazy on the negative consequences. Either I have a marijuana problem, or Dr. Drew wants to shun us potheads Amish-style for no good reason. But at least, if those paragraphs alone are an indication, he doesn’t discriminate between legal consequences for 17- and 21-year-old stoners, or for stoners and junkies.

The Drug Policy Alliance doesn’t have as much integrity as MA. Its site actually answers those rude questions.

A related earlier post:
Hipsters can be square about breast implants

Labels: DruPo, MorPa, Sc

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 11:41 AM

March 3, 2007

What are you saying, Miss November 2004?

“I’m always suspicious of men who want to meet Bunnies.” The January “Playmate News” section attributes these words to Playmate Cara Zavaleta without context (p. 171). I may be leaping to conclusions, but I’m offended if she means what I think she means. I assume she’s describing a higher level of caution than women appropriately have towards strange men in general. If I met her, would my heroine addiction creep her out?

Zavaleta’s attitude has me wondering about the effects of the progressive ideal of egalitarianism on the self-esteem of the gifted. I’m arrogantly guessing that she has had to spend most of her life pretending she’s nothing special to keep her beauty from alienating others. But her high midi-chlorian millihelen count, her rare willingness to flash the entire world, and some non-genetic good luck have made her something quite special indeed.

My geeky Star Wars reference allows me to segue to my problem with David Brin’s hyperegalitarian screed against the “elitist, anti-democratic” saga. In a different context, Andrew Sullivan acknowledges inequality as a fact of life:

Of course, discussion of human natural inequality will always be sensitive. It’s a hard fact to absorb that some people will never be as intelligent as some others, or as musically gifted, or as mathematically skilled. Americans in particular hate the notion that there is some natural limit on what people can and cannot achieve.

But there is a distinction between moral and political equality for all—the bedrock of a liberal society—and unavoidable natural inequalities between human beings and, in a few narrow areas, between social groups. This cannot and should not mean that any individual should be prejudged or denied opportunity. But it does mean that some imbalances in certain professions may not be entirely a function of prejudice or bigotry.

Since Brin prefers “true science fiction” to space opera or superhero comics, I’ll say that my experience as a “gifted child” in the government school system—perhaps one of the “institutions” Brin would have us serve—reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut’s short story “Harrison Bergeron,” which begins with this paragraph:

The year was 2081,