Future anti-marijuana activist

About a week ago, on MSNBC, I saw this anti-pot guy I’d never encountered before. His name was David Evans of the Drug Free America Foundation and I knew—before he opened his mouth, before the host ever revealed who he was or to which side of the argument he subscribed—that I hated his giant, ugly assface.”

The debate kicked off with the not-at-all-assface-having Jeffrey Miron, head of Harvard undergraduate studies and author of the report “The Budgetary Implications of Drug Prohibition,” which found that if pot prohibition is repealed, the state of California will earn (via taxation) $16 billion annually and save (via non-enforcement) $12 billion—a net turnaround of $28 billion.

After which, Evans—who looks as though Buck Henry, Larry Craig and a bucketful of faces that resemble ass had their DNA fused together in a horrible plasma transporter accident—countered that legalizing marijuana will increase usage by 30 percent and that the financial burden to the state will actually rise.

First of all, 30 percent is clearly a bullshit statistic. That number is so spurious, it’s offensive to actual piles of bullshit. Notice that he doesn’t cite a source. Not that it matters. I wouldn’t care if he got that number from The Bureau of the Smartest People in the Universe Who Have Never Ever Been Wrong about Anything Ever, there is just no way marijuana use will rise by 30 percent if made legal. Seriously, who isn’t getting stoned these days who wants to get stoned?

“We have 99,000 emergency admissions per year [from people under 25] because of marijuana,” says Evans. “So your health care costs are going to go up, your productivity costs are going to go up, you’re going to have to allow legal advertising, promotion, expansion of market share,” and, honestly, you have to marvel at this litany. It’s so obviously padded with gibberish. That’s what these assfaces do. To prevent peaceful, taxpaying, nice-faced adults from rolling a little freedom into their joints, they stack the anti-legalization list with impressive-sounding bullshit. They know the mooing masses will never scrutinize what’s on it. And, for the most part, they’re right. Certainly, the pro-prohibitionist choir to which Evans preaches won’t analyze the contents of that list—but us stoners, well, we do a lot of analyzing.

Healthcare costs will rise: Evans cites 99,000 pot-related emergency-room visits per year. So, how is that a financial burden to society? The majority of those people paid for their visit. We’re pot smokers, not back-alley crackheads. We have jobs, money and / or insurance. Besides, 99,000 is not a problem number. The amount of emergency-room visits per year is well above 100 million. Compared with how many people go for alcohol-related incidents, hard-drug overdoses, automobile accidents or obesity-related trauma, 99,000 doesn’t even rank. Hell, I bet more people go to have flashlights removed from their anuses than 99k. On a side note, can we all agree, nobody actually ODs on pot? They only think they do. The overwhelming majority of those visits are marijuana newbies who rush to the hospital because they think elves are running in and out of their nostrils and just haven’t figured out that if they wait a half-hour, the elves will disappear and they can go back to over-analyzing King Crimson lyrics and quietly gazing at the wonder and the glory of stucco.

Productivity costs will rise: This is just a backasswards way to say “productivity will decline”—the point being, I suppose, that pot smokers are unproductive, to which I respond with a list of my own: Bill Maher; Woody Harrelson; Ted Turner; Thomas Jefferson; Art Garfunkel; Michael Phelps; Miles Davis;  George Clooney; Richard Branson; Bill Bradley (productive in the NBA and the U.S. Senate); The Beatles; Pancho Villa; Steven King; the editor of CityBeat, his editorial staff and sales personnel (drug freaks all); Bob Marley; Michael Bloomberg; Arnold Schwarzenegger; 65 percent of NBA players (documented); and almost every painter, poet or musician who ever existed (undocumented). I could go on, but I smoke so much pot, typing makes me tired.

Legal advertising: Um, never quite heard it put that way before. But, OK, yeah, when something is legal, then it’s legal to advertise. What’s your point? By this assface-ian logic, all products should be illegal because we must allow them to “legally advertise.” And how, exactly, is advertising anything a financial burden on the public? Advertising stimulates the economy.

Promotion: More blatant list-padding. (Promotion and advertising are the same.)

Expansion of market share: Ooh, ooh, now there’s some fancy, smart-guy jargon for you. Evans knows that anyone who doesn’t grasp the meaning of “expansion of market share” will just think, Now, that sounds all economics-experty and stuff, so it must be true.

The definition of market share is: “the percentage of the total sales of a product or service that are attributable to a given company.” To clarify, here’s a hypothetical.

Let’s say Evans owns and operates a company called Giant Steamy Cattle Cakes LLC. Now let’s say GSCC  sells 100 piles of bullshit each month and his competitors collectively sell 300. Evans’ market share of bullshit is 25 percent. By definition, if Evans’ market share expands, his competitors’ share diminishes. Applying that concept to the marijuana market—if prohibition is repealed, the market share of legal versus illegal weed will jump from (conservative guesstimation) 1 percent to 95 percent, which—as any back-alley crackhead could tell you—will increase tax revenue for the state of California and reduce the money gushing into the gullets of violent drug cartels and other illegal operations, something only an assface could oppose.

Originally published in San Diego CityBeat
04.01.2010

Though the language of the law is gender-nonspecific, it targets the atrocious problem the Frogs are having with those old-world, misogynistic, Neanderthalian males who tear women down by, you know, calling them fat, accusing them of infidelity, deriding their terrible taste in chick-flicks and similar types of bastardatry.

For the most part, there have been two reactions: from those who think the law is bogus on the basis of the “Sticks and Stones” theory and those who refute “Sticks and Stones” because they believe that verbal abuse can be harmful.

For example, Leslie Garfield of the blog Feminist Law Professors wrote an essay called “Sticks and Stones May Break Your Bones but Words Can Really Hurt You: The Case for Criminalizing Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress.” Barbara Walters, on her show, The Viewgina, said words, as well as stones and sticks, can “definitely hurt you.” Indeed, on the TV, radio and all across the clogosphere are tons of people who refute the classic children’s rhyme. And while I have a kettle-full of contempt for odious men who take pleasure in hurting their lovers with odious remarks, I take exception to the discrediting of “Sticks and Stones” because it is inarguably the most empowering and inspiring children’s rhyme ever composed.

“Sticks and stones can break my bones but words will never hurt me.”

Are you kidding?! That little ditty blows doors on the other children’s rhymes. It runs circles around, “Ring around the Rosie,” flattens the “Eency Weensy Spider” and knocks the block off “Hickory Dickory’s” clock. And while “Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Moe” is a useful tool to determine who in your group must kiss Sally “Fartface” Marshal on her moldy lips, it isn’t much good for anything else.

Admittedly, a reasonable argument could be made in favor of the axiom “I’m Rubber, You’re Glue” based on its defensive and offensive properties (the insults rebound off you and stick to your attacker? Genius!). However, there are concerns. What if your organs become rubber also? What if you’re allergic to isoprene? What if your adversary counters with the “I’m Heat, You’re Rubber, and Heat Always Melts Rubber” rubber-disintegration comeback?

With “Sticks and Stones,” you don’t have to worry about any of that. It disarms offensive words before they leave the mouths of your nemeses. That’s what makes it so awesome. It’s a statement of resolve, the key words being “will never,” as in, “Words will never hurt me,” which is an economical way to say, “From this point forward, I refuse to let others preside over my feelings,” and that, my friends, is the incontrovertible power and simplicity that is “Sticks and Stones.”

Still unconvinced that words can’t hurt you? Here’s proof:

Imagine two scenarios. In the first, you get into a row with your husband and he calls you a fat cow who balled all his friends and has awful taste in movies, leaving you on the couch crying your eyes out. In the second scenario, the two of you argue, but he leaves the house before hurling the insults. Instead, he marches over to the nearest watering hole, dumps his nostril fumes into a pint and tells the bartender that the obese floozy to whom he’s married is at home on the couch with a box of bonbons on her lap watching Le Journal Intime des Bridget Jones for the fifth time.

In both scenarios, some terrible, terrible words were spoken about you. However, in the second scenario, your feelings weren’t hurt because, obviously, you never heard the disparaging remarks. Your brain never had the opportunity to tell you to feel hurt. The insults were released, of course. They were uttered, and they were heard, but they harmlessly flitted away like sparks from a beachfront campfire, which is proof that words don’t hurt, only our reaction to them does.

Tragically, too many people react poorly. Instead of minding their responses to hateful words, they go after the words themselves. They embark on one of these “Let’s ban this word, and let’s ban that word” crusades—as if they could ever stop anyone from finding new language with which to hurt people, as if bad-word-banning wasn’t utterly futile.

Oh, mademoiselle, I’m not trying to trivialize the damage that psychological violence can do. I fathom how complicated and painful it is for women to extract themselves from the imprisonment of an emotionally abusive prickweasel. But it doesn’t change the fact that the best response to the repeated, hostile verbal abuses of a man is not to have him arrested; it is to leave. And the only response to a society teeming with demeaning jerks making demeaning comments is to remove their power to demean in the first place. These things are not easy, I know, but our responses are the only things in the universe we can control, and to understand this is to unlock our souls and allow them to soar, weightless and free, like campfire sparks on the beach. That is the immaculate message of “Sticks and Stones.” Je commande ce que me sens (“I control what I feel”). What could be more empowering than that?

Fin.

EJD
03.17.10
Originally Published in San Diego CityBeat

Responding to the recent car-bombing of a Peshawar market, Secretary of State Clinton told the Pakistan press, and the world, that the attacks were, “cowardly,” which couldn’t be farther from the truth.

Just Google the phrase cowardly act and see how many people have no idea what coward even means. For example, the first three hits are links to: an article about a hit and run murder in Toronto, an assault on an elderly man by a teenager with a baseball bat, and a man who attacked an Australian Constable with a flying head-butt to protect an elderly man from being tasered—all of which were described as “cowardly acts.”

With no disrespect to the victims intended, the perpetrators of these crimes are not cowards. Cowards do not look for trouble, they avoid trouble. And attacking people is trouble squared. Too much can go wrong. You could get hurt, maimed or killed. You could get caught and go to prison (the worst place on Earth for a coward). And a coward would never perpetrate a flying head-butt. Are you kidding? A coward avoids confrontation, especially with police, especially with their forehead, especially while flying through the air. It’s just too risky: will the head-butt connect incorrectly? Will my ankle twist when I land on the ground? What if I poop myself and there are no bathrooms nearby? As a part-time coward, I can tell you, delivering flying head-butts to on-duty policemen is a last resort.

I don’t know why people do this. It’s almost as if they have to invent reasons to hate the offender, but really, when a teenager beats an elderly man with a baseball bat, wouldn’t calling him a, “blood-thirsty, psychopathic scumbag ” pretty much cover it? Is coward really necessary, even if it were true? That’d be like complaining that Godzilla, aside from destroying your city and killing thousands, is also a bad tipper.

For some reason, people seem to confuse courage and cowardice with good and evil. But morality has nothing to do with it. The difference between courage and cowardice is the difference between action and inaction, respectively. Look at it this way. Imagine you are a coward and you are sitting at home watching TV when you are stricken with an urge to head-butt a policeman. As a coward, you would likely tell yourself, “But I might get hurt or caught. What if I catch cold? It is pretty nippy outside. I think I’ll just stay home and watch the flying head-butt channel instead.”

Another example on the Google results page of the misuse of the word coward came in the form of a message board post that asks, “Is suicide a cowardly act?”

How anyone has to ask that question just ruptures my gonads. All you have to do is imagine yourself at that last moment—shotgun barrel stuffed to the back of your mouth, finger on the trigger—to understand the ocean-load of courage it must take to commit suicide.

Some people say, “Well, suicidists are cowards for not coping with their problems.”

Bleh. Until you know what it’s like to have real problems—I mean skin-melting-off-your-bones and/or screeching-demons-in-your-brain kind of problems—you can’t say shit about coping. So, please, stick a staple gun in your ass and squeeze real hard if you’re the type of person who maligns these poor souls as cowards.

Speaking of suicide, I remember when I noticed this phenomenon. It was right after the attacks of Sept 11, 2001. I remember how (virtually) everyone seemed to be using “coward” to describe the 9-11 suicide hijackers. I remember thinking that, actually, you would have to be pretty balls-out brave to intentionally fly a plane into a building, no matter how many celestial virgins you believed were waiting for you. As for the incident in Pakistan, yes, believe it or not, it takes courage to detonate a car bomb in a Pakistan market place, or at least, a lack of cowardice.

But they were innocent people?! you might protest.

Yes it is true, innocent, but what does that have to do with it? To understand where I’m coming from all you have to do is recognize that terrorist is just another word for soldier, in this case, a soldier who uses a specific battle tactic in an agenda-specific war. Why is this relevant? Because scaredy-cats don’t fight wars.

“They are cowards,” Clinton said to the Pakistan press. “They know they are on the losing side of history, but they are determined to take as many lives with them,” which is true, except, isn’t the fact that they are losing, and resorting to desperate tactics, a testament to their courage, not cowardice?

In the second best episode of The Simpsons ever, TV news anchorman, Kent Brockman, mistakenly reports that giant, killer ants are taking over the world. At the end of the report he adds, “I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords,” which is exactly what a coward does in the face of a hostile takeover, he welcomes the ants—something a terrorist would never do.

So why does any of this matter? It matters because language matters. It matters for the same reason honesty and truth matter. It matters because, the fact that we must erroneously pad the list of reasons to hate our enemies is a symptom of the all-too human truth of how eager we are to deceive ourselves; especially if that deception will justify our own atrocities, such as, say, the lies we told ourselves about Iraq before we bombed the all-fuck out of it. Trust me, it matters.

The term is ‘moral relativism,” and it has been hijacked by Bill O’Reilly and his fellow hardcore, right-wing, often-Christian TV and radio blabbermouth types who splash it around like high-school swimming-pool bullies shoving chlorinated tsunamis into the eyes of defenseless nerdlings.

Like ‘unpatriotic” and ‘against the troops,” ‘moral relativism” has become a term of bludgeoning and marginalization. It’s usually employed when discussing hot-button issues like gay marriage, abortion, drugs, prostitution and/or pornography. Whenever anyone–usually of the liberal and libertarian ilk–defends such unwholesome activities, O’Reilly and other hardcore, right-wing, often-Christian blabbermouths announce that these defenders are ‘moral relativists,” then shut off their microphones and shout them down to size.

Which is not only rude; it’s also wrong. It’s wrong because they are not using the term correctly. Moral relativism is not simply a synonym for tolerance.

Dictionary.com defines relativism as ‘a theory that moral values are not absolute but are relative to the persons or cultures holding them.”

For example, if one culture maintains bestiality is taboo while another embraces it, the moral relativist concludes that neither is wrong. So whether yours is a system of democratic capitalists, theocentric autocrats or dog-fucking savages–it’s all okie-dokie because there is no universal ethical code by which to measure them.

What I like about this worldview is that it recognizes the right of any society to set its own system of mores–that every culture knows what’s best for itself because every culture is beholden to its own unique geographical, political and historical circumstances, which also happens to be the premise of America’s (dying) emphasis on local government and states’ rights.

Also attractive about moral relativism is that, by definition, it deters colonialism. When one culture believes itself to be superior to another, it uses that belief to justify invasions, assassinations, forced religious conversions and all the other predictable, colonialistic bullcrap these so-called superior societies pull on those they consider morally inferior.

The problem, however, is that when you follow relativism down its inevitable slope of slipperosity, you plummet into a dark and ugly paradox. Because, if it’s true that anything any society does to itself is A-OK, then what about Adolph Hitler and his Holocaust? What about Josef Stalin, Benito Mussolini and Pol-motherfucking-Pot? What about every tyrannical society that ever kneeled at the altar of the iron maiden? By definition, moral relativism concedes that tyranny and genocide are not amoral. And you’re just not going to find too many people who subscribe to that worldview who don’t have Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on their MySpace friends list.

Indeed, I’m closer to a moral relativist than anyone I know. And the reason I say that is because, when asked the ‘Was Adolph Hitler evil?” question, I am the only person I know who might consider answering, ‘No, I do not believe Adolph Hitler was evil.”

Now, before you lurch off the toilet and howl in protest about the hideous remark I just made, let me say, in my defense, that I’m not a true moral relativist. A better label would be agnostic moral relativist. As with anything else, I think maybe it’s true or maybe it isn’t. But the reason I can even consider the potential non-evilness of a beast like Adolph Hitler is because I’m not quite certain that evil exists at all. I just wonder sometimes if the Holocaust and other acts of genocide aren’t like tsunamis, or earthquakes, or disease, or computer hackers, or forest fires, or man-eating sharks, even. Yes they are destructive entities in this world, but destructive entities–whether designed intelligently or Darwinianly–are part of the ecosystem of the universe. So the question is, if something is vital to the ecosystem of the universe, how could it be wrong, immoral or evil?

Yeah, I know, it’s an extreme position, but don’t you wonder what would happen to the planet if all the bad people, the bad animals and the bad organisms disappeared and suddenly everything and everyone was good? I have a nagging suspicion that if that happened it would be very, very bad.

However, when I debate this position with my liberal or libertarian friends, all they ever hear are the words ‘Hitler” and ‘not evil,” then pounce on me like street thugs on a drunken tourist in the middle of the night. It is a position they cannot fathom, will not tolerate and loathe to their very core, which is exactly how I know there simply aren’t that many moral relativists out there.

That’s how I know the hardcore, right-wing, microphone-shutting blabbermouths are full of shit when they call a liberal or libertarian a moral relativist. Because your typical liberal or your typical libertarian does believe in right and wrong. It’s just that their right and wrong is different from the right-wing blabbermouth’s idea of right and wrong.

For instance, liberals and libertarians think it’s wrong to discriminate against people based on their sexual preferences, wrong to criminalize a sexual business transaction between consenting adults, wrong to let the government dictate a woman’s reproductive rights and ludicrous to suggest they lack morality. But isn’t it always the same thing with the right-wing blabbermouths? Their idea of patriotism is the only idea of patriotism, their idea of family is the only idea of family, their idea of morality is the only idea of morality, and if you dare to argue, they sharpen their quiver of catchphrases and aim them at your face. This in itself is reason to consider them entities of pure evil. However, when they use the catchphrases incorrectly, well, that’s evil and pathetic.

And now, a relevant joke:

A: He stayed up all night wondering if there was a Dog and if it would be wrong to fuck it.

EJD
07/11/07

[Author's note: the following is an excerpt from the original column that was not published because of space constraints and for fear of identifying myself as a raging nerd for referencing Star Trek in an article about philosophy].

The Excerpt:
Incidentally, do you know who is a fairly famous moral relativist that I admire?: Gene Roddenberry. Indeed, the show Star Trek was a moral relativist’s paradise. And did you know Star Trek was based on the expeditions of another famous moral relativist, Captain Cook, who I also admire.

“Captain James Cook was an English explorer, navigator and cartographer. He was the first to map Newfoundland. He made three voyages to the Pacific Ocean during which he achieved the first European contact with the eastern coastline of Australia, the European discovery of the Hawaiian Islands, and the first recorded circumnavigation of New Zealand.”¹

Like me, Gene Roddenberry must have been a fan of Captain Cook because he was the model for Roddenberry’s franchise character, Captain Kirk.

Consider the similarities of their names: Captain James Kirk and Captain James Cook.

Consider the similarities in their bios: Both were sailors. Captain Cook commandeered the Endeavor to new and distant lands, Captain Kirk sailed the Enterprise to new and distant planets.

Both grew up on farms in rural villages. Both kept journals. Captain Cook wrote in his that he’d sailed, “farther than any other man has been before.” Captain Kirk wrote in his star log about boldy going, “where no man has gone before.”

“Cook rowed jolly boats ashore, accompanied by his naturalist, his surgeon and musket-toting red-jacketed marines. Kirk ‘beamed down’ to planets with the Science officer, (Spock) surgeon (McCoy) and phaser-wielding, red-jerseyed expendables. Both captains set out to discover new lands, rather than conquer and convert.”²

On Star Trek, they called that ideology, The Prime Directive. The Prime Directive stated that the commissioned federation explorer was not to interfere or in any way upset the natural state of being of whatever species or civilization they encountered. Even if that new species was eating its young and fucking the Tribbles, The Prime Directive mandated they not interfere.

And The Prime Directive is a direct cribbing of Captain Cook’s policy for encountering aboriginals and natives in the lands he discovered. Cook was criticized often for this approach, as most of Europe believed itself to be civilized and that it was their duty to conquer, convert, and modernize the primitive cultures their explorers encountered.

Cook was ahead of his time though. He wrote this about the aboriginals he encountered:

“Being wholly unacquainted not only with the superfluous but the necessary conveniences so sought after in Europe, they are happy not knowing the use of them. They live in Tranquility which is not disturb’d by the Inequality of Condition.”
Cook, like Kirk, had no interest in conquering – only in observing, appreciating, perhaps interacting – but never interfering; a core value of moral relativism.

2. From Into the Blue by Tony Horowitz