Last weekend, I found myself in London with an Australian friend (“I’m outside the big church thing!” “You mean Parliament?” “Yeah!”). On Saturday morning, though, I was on my own and so headed off to the Wellcome Collection’s High Society exhibit.
Given my pretty stringent anti-prohibition stance, any exhibit that deals with “Mind altering drugs in history and culture” is bound to pique my interest. Even more so when there’s a decent chunk of the exhibit dealing with prohibition, in a corner they called “A sin, a crime, a vice or a disease?” (For the interested, the answers are: No, yes but it shouldn’t be, yes but that’s no bad thing, and ask a doctor, I don’t fucking know).
And, having been round, I gotta say, I was pretty impressed. What I was happy about was that there was a complete absence of “preachiness”- be it anti-drug or pro drug. It was, the sin/crime/vice/disease corner aside, much more about drugs in history and culture. So, you find on one side of the exhibition hall, art and historical trinkets dedicated to the opium war, and the trade of drugs- especially the opium wars. Nowadays we go to war to stop the trade of drugs. Back then, we went to war to ensure it.
(Left to right: webs made by spiders on Speed, caffeine and cannabis)
Meanwhile, on the other, you find some awesome videos and artworks centered around self-experimentation and the modern drug trade. This cabinet pictured below featured around 50 impliments for taking various drugs, historically and modern.
If you look carefully, you can make out two glasses of wine, and a Starbucks cup. Well, why not? We’re a nation of caffeine heads, really, and we love it. The most obvious one there is the Hookah pipe: Hint, it’s the big motherfucker on the top shelf. Whereas many people in the West may see the pipe and recoil in horror, in many parts of the world, there’s not much difference between a hookah bar and a Starbucks.
But most probably my favourite exhibit was these pair of paintings from an unknown artist in the 19th century. The top is of a Rich pair of opium smokers. The bottom, a poor pair.
In all honesty, when you look at these two pictures, and compare them to the effects of the drug war today, it’s hard to say much has really changed. The drug war, by far, disproportionately harms the poor, and minority groups, and costs us God Holy knows how much, not just in economic terms, but human ones as well. Despite all this, the war on drugs keeps going on, with near unanimous support from the ruling classes. Now, it was a bit much to expect the entire exhibit to take a decidedly and explicit anti-prohibitionist stance, but I do think the Wellcome collection has done a good job in bringing to light some of the more severe consequences of the drug war. If you do find yourself in the area whilst the exhibition is still on (hurry up, it ends next month), make sure you see the wall length chart demonstrating price against purity of drugs at stages of production and sale, along with how much the people working at that stage can expect to earn.
I promise you, one thing you won’t get out of your mind is just how similar it is to the regular corporate structure- the people doing the backbreaking work, in the fields harvesting poppies or what have you, get barely pennies- and yet the drug lord “CEOs” are filling their homes with piles of cash and guns made of gold. I guess the cabinet of drug paraphernalia was more right than was intended- Starbucks really is like the opium trade.
No drugs and culture exhibit would be complete, of course, without a reference to 4:20. So here it is:
Music, art, high spiders, Sigmund Freud, Starbucks, a murderous politically motivated “War”, and students smoking pot. Yep, they had all the bases covered. Well done, Wellcome Trust!
KC is one of my favourite libertarian writers today; and that was true even before I realized he was right about lots of things, and I was still clutching to my quite orthodox, stringent An-Cap interpretation of libertarianism. Now that I find myself digging myself into a little Libertarian-Left rut (and it’s quite cosy here, thanks), I think maybe I should take this as a springboard to start on a little project I’ve been meaning to work on for a while.
It was basically going to be a collection of articles, blog posts, etc, distributed in a sort of ebook form, detailing the Libertarian-Left position on various issues, with an emphasis on distinguishing itself from the more staunchly capitalist, or socialist branches of the movement. A sort of introduction to the Libertarian-Left. Hopefully, it’d get distributed amongst more than the types who read C4SS, and thus do more than just preach to the converted. Hopefully.
So. Any ideas, anyone? Is this worth it? Worth putting the effort in, or will it just be wasted time?
Any minister who puts civil liberties ahead of security should be in student politics, not government.
Says Lord Tom of Harris. I really wouldn’t mind if he only gave up his civil liberties; but his job is to take them away from everyone.
Now, Twitter, on the whole, seems to be calling bullshit on that. And so will I. So, bullshit on that.
The problem is, the question is slanted from the start. It assumes that there is security to be delivered by politics and ministers. This is far from the truth, and it doesn’t take long to realize that. Yes, in theory, there’s a debate between security and freedom- with security meaning surveillance and regulation, and freedom meaning the lack thereof. In reality, though, it’s usually government policies that lead to there being less of both- not less of one or the other.
Do we really believe that the terrorism Harris fears so much comes from purely unilateral hatred for us? Seriously? You mean the wars the government have raged in the Middle East for years were entirely unlike kicking a hornet’s nest?
And it’s not just that government creates outside threats to our lives and liberty, it directly damages them itself.
To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be place under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.
Yep, I’ll take any opportunity to use that quote. It’s so damn good.
Amazingly, despite the Human Rights Act, Tom’s party (not that I care which team is in power; government is government is government) managed to leave office with a totally ruined civil liberties record. And civil liberties were always supposed to be a “left wing” thing; unless they’re in power, of course, in which case they’re just a nuisance. Just as the tories, traditionally thought of the party of small government, now in power, have no reason to cut off their own tentacles.
So, government is always taking our freedom directly- on the grounds these freedoms must be taken away to protect us from terrorists- whilst giving terrorists every justification possible to attack up. Once again, government totally fails to make real its intended goals. It’s a bit like the Cheese pizza example of joined up government I blogged about yesterday, but a million times more tragic.
Whilst we’re at it, this is where Tom’s logic also fails: It’s assuming that, the institution that, in theory anyway, is supposed to exist to protect citizens and their freedoms is more important than the freedom it’s supposed to protect. That government intrusion into freedoms should be placed as a higher priority than freedom itself, as he implies. This is like saying the burglar alarm is more important than the contents of the house, and so it should be going off constantly, just in case. Perhaps Tom Harris should read up on the American Classical Liberal tradition. No doubt a million tweeps have already sent him this infamous Franklin quote:
Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
So, instead, I’d like to draw his attention to this passage from the Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Tommy, your entire role is to protect our freedoms. You, as are all your friends, are utterly failing to do this. Some will insist it’s just a question of getting “the right people” in your seats; myself, I say the only way we’re going to protect our freedoms is by abolishing your job altogether.
The US department of agriculture has a project called Dairy Management. Looks to be your regular, useless Quango.
Their new idea is to help Dominos pizza sales, which it has done by:
develop[ing] a new line of pizzas with 40 percent more cheese, and proceeded to devise and pay for a $12 million marketing campaign.
Consumers devoured the cheesier pizza, and sales soared by double digits. “This partnership is clearly working,” Brandon Solano, the Domino’s vice president for brand innovation, said in a statement to The New York Times.
Uh hu. Use more cheese. Got it. Meanwhile…
Dairy Management, which has made cheese its cause, is not a private business consultant. It is a marketing creation of the United States Department of Agriculture — the same agency at the center of a federal anti-obesity drive that discourages over-consumption of some of the very foods Dairy Management is vigorously promoting.
Urged on by government warnings about saturated fat, Americans have been moving toward low-fat milk for decades, leaving a surplus of whole milk and milk fat. Yet the government, through Dairy Management, is engaged in an effort to find ways to get dairy back into Americans’ diets, primarily through cheese.
Sweet Jesus. When you’ve got the same government department working towards opposite ends, that’s a sign you have too much government.
I keep being told by various people- bloggers, musicians and unfunny comedians mostly- to buy a new song by some guy by the name of Mitch Benn which has just been released in single format, although it’s been online for a while now. The song is called Proud of the BBC.
Well, ok. There’s a catch though. Before I am proud of the BBC, I want it to do two things:
1) Be denationalised by means of being turned into an employee co-operative. Revoke its Royal Charter and public service status.
2) Remove its legal privilege, both to itself and to its private contractors, of being able to force people who do not wish to use BBC services into buying a license under threat of legal action just because they use other provider’s services.
1) isn’t likely, since the only privitization that occurs nowadays is by selling resources to politically connected corporations, which I’d rather not do. Neoliberalism for the fail. 2) isn’t likely because it’s a useful revenue stream, and keeps the BBC on the government’s good side, less it revokes its legal privilege.
So, I’ll settle for this instead:
1) Release all BBC original material- sitcoms, dramas, quiz shows, news, whatever- under a Creative Commons licence.
First an foremost, this is because the modern framework of copyright, which lasts for life plus 70 damn years- compared to 14 in the Statute of Anne- is grossly unfair. This applies to everyone, not just the BBC. It monopolizes culture and gives privilege to certain groups. It’s a fundamentally unjust system.
Secondly, this applies doubly to the BBC in its current form. Being, as it is, funded by means of coercive threats against at least some of its customers, and being permitted to do this by legislation, it’s a de facto institution of the State. Given this, it’s entirely unjustifiable that the BBC can use a legal framework to take legal action against people who, having been made to pay for BBC programming once, regardless of whether or not they want it, for accessing BBC material. You’re being forced to pay twice- once through the legal privilege of the licensing fee, twice through the legal fiction of Intellectual Property. The BBC is the most awful example of Corporatism going, and yet it’s heralded as a public institution. Horseshit. It’s a State institution. It’s no more a public institution than Parliament. Of course, people seem to take a bizarre, pseudo-patriotic pride in that rusty old castle, too.
We will introduce a new right of access to government funded data, requiring the release of all maps, statistics and so on that have been paid for by the taxpayer in open formats, under a Creative Commons or similar licence, giving the public access to research that they have already paid for…This will include the output of the BBC, which is funded by the licence paying public and should therefore belong to the licence paying public. We will amend the BBC’s charter to prevent the BBC from using DRM technology, and to require the BBC to release all their content under a Creative Commons licence.
Yeah. It’s a public institution- any claim the BBC makes to an Intellectual Property “right” over the content it produces is pretty damn ballsy. It’s a bit like forcing people to pay for healthcare through taxes, then making them pay fees when they collect medicines.
You know what I don’t like? Slimy, smug, prejudiced, hateful, privileged women with a smug sense of superiority, who are convinced they’re on some sort of holy mission to subject people already considered second class citizens into a totally destructive and indignant process that serves only bring them psychological suffering.
This is a woman who’s most famous quotes are as follows:
I’m not saying these women are dogs, but they’re not acting any more responsible than a dog in heat…
We don’t allow dogs to breed. We spay them. We neuter them. We try to keep them from having unwanted puppies, and yet these women are literally having litters of children…
We have campaigns to spay cats to prevent them from having unwanted kittens, yet we allow these women to have litters of 14 children…
Given that she runs a charity that claims to “help” drug addicts, as well as society at large by reducing drug addicted babies, do you honestly think in light of the above that she has any one’s interest at heart besides her own conscience? This is a woman who genuinely hates people she sees as “below her”; and she’s not afraid to wreck their lives to make herself feel even more superior.
Drug addicts are already victims of a totally nonsensical set of policies, and all that Project Prevention can do is make them trade, for a quite small amount of money considering what they give up, their whole future for a small bit of relief when they’re at the bottom of their game.
Project Prevention will help no one, and neither does the prohibitionist policies that has created Project Prevention. Harris, of course, won’t ever listen to reason. She can’t her you over the sound of how awesome she thinks she is.
