Disclaimer: I did not violate the confidentiality of any current or past clients in this post. Future clients? One can only hope.
I was struck by two things when I first started working on Skid Row (well, three if you count the smell) in Los Angeles. The first was how infrequently I was panhandled. It's like somebody called a truce. There are exceptions, sure, but usually it will either be so casually offhand that you are convinced somebody really did just need a quarter for the bus, or it will be so aggressive that you can tell the person is targeting you to make a point of some sort. A point such as: I don't appreciate you parking on my street, white boy. But the point is: panhandling is shockingly rare. As if somebody called a cease fire.
The second thing that I noticed, not that I could avoid noticing, was that people were always trying to sell me drugs. It's probably happened to me over 50 times in the past 3 months, although it seems like it is starting to decline somewhat recently. I didn't understand the slang at first, but you usually know someone is offering you drugs without knowing: because they are strangers talking to you in clipped and hushed tones, and because in Skid Row they are in my experience always relatively well-dressed and fit young black males. And sometimes if you look at their down-turned hand you will see a tiny nugget of crack resting between their knuckles like a Parmesan booger. They always, and I mean always say some variation or combination of the following three phrases:
"Cavi cavi! Buddha Buddha!"
"You good, my man? You straight?"
or
"Nickels. Dimes. Big nickels."
Cavi means crack (possibly from "caviar") and Buddha is weed but in this context always means low-grade Mexican skunk. These are the only drugs that are ever explicitly on offer. Sometimes I'm tempted to ask about the a la carte menu out of sheer curiosity, but I don't because I don't know if that could be potentially construed as illegal activity. Whatever your position on the morality/health/sanity of drug use, buying drugs in Skid Row would be like getting albacore sashimi from a guy pushing one of those ice cream hand-trucks around a Target parking lot. Caveat emptor times 5 million. You can smell the skunk burning at all hours at certain corners, especially by parks and in front of some of the largest residential hotels. The smell of crack is IMO very hard to detect with so many other smells in the area, especially because it is most often smoked inside public toilets.
I was a bit surprised when I spoke to other staff at my agency to learn that most of them had almost never been offered drugs of any kind on the streets. In some cases, they wear their employee IDs around their necks, essentially a clove of garlic. Most women (and most of my co-workers are women) get a constant stream of pick up lines ranging from extremely charming (impromptu a capella performances), to ineffective but hilarious ("I would love to take you home for the night. No? How about an hour? Fifteen minutes?"), to aggressive, super-explicit, or obviously psychotic (btw, if you work in this field, the psychotic ones don't bother you). Most of my male co-workers are black and they also seem to be offered drugs less often than me, and say they are more often propositioned by hookers. This has only happened to me once, and the woman's line was "Hey, are you divorced? No? Well you can have me anyways." So basically the vibe I'm putting out is divorced addict. Maybe it's the beard?
There is one other reaction I get consistently on the street and it is cubed when I wear sunglasses. Some people think I'm an undercover. They will point at me and say "that's the one" or "watch that one" or even "5-0!", obviously trying to let me know they are aware of my presence instead of just communicating that info to eachother which could be done through very simple code. I've been told repeatedly that the whole Skid Row area, but especially Gladys Park and San Julian Park, are loaded with undercover cops. If this is the case I can't imagine how easy it must be to make distribution arrests unless the vast majority of small-scale dealing is totally ignored 99% of the time. This is obviously a system rife for corruption, discrimination, or abuse. But I'm sure it's preferable to both cops (who can roll informants when they need to make a statistic without having to process an endless torrent of nickel dealers) and the dealers themselves, who stand a good chance of staying in the black if they have the right combination of tact, timing, and scale.
A cursory study of LA history will teach you that the drug war did not create Skid Row, even though in the past few decades the drug war has come to largely define it. Rather, Skid Row is what happened when Christian charity tried to catch up with the serrated edge of railroad capitalism. Prostitution, alcoholism, residential hotels, and a large disabled population were an inevitable outcome of large numbers of poor migrant males attracted to the frontier for dangerous and usually seasonal work. But the difference in Los Angeles was that there was no place else to go. Skid Row was the end of the line, and many missionary churches saw a relatively captive population whose souls could easily be won with a little good news and a lot of free stuff. And the shit-stained powdered-gravy train has rolled on into the present, low-grade socialism for capitalism's damaged goods, unbelievably prime for that hyper-capitalist enterprise known as the drug war.
Skid Row is a soft target. People with limited mainstream economic viability and galaxies of pain crammed together along sidewalks fed with a steady trickle of free resources. A drug that offers motivation, self confidence, the illusion of affordability, and enough energy and desperate clarity to push it's user to earn enough for the next hit. And over time the accumulation of more and more soldiers who have been so institutionalized and stigmatized by the rest of society due to their past convictions that it starts to look rational to view drugs sales, even low-volume street corner drug sales, not as a job but a profession.
You're probably wondering where the carrots come in? Well, Skid Row is a place where everything imaginable has value, all the way down to recyclable trash which you will almost never see littering the otherwise garbage-strewn streets. But there is one item that is so ubiquitous that it will be seen strewn randomly around the streets: in fact I'll bet that if you want this item you would probably only have to scan the sidewalk for three blocks to be almost guaranteed to find it. . .unattractively labelled cans of carrots! Imagine this existing in the slums of India or Nigeria! For that matter, imagine a can of carrots sitting unclaimed for days on the streets of 1930s Los Angeles. No way! It would be cracked open and cooked over a tiny fire! But look around Skid Row and you will see what looks superficially like Third World poverty. And that's because the resources, no matter how many we throw at the problem, will always get hoovered up by dealers. And what is the incentive for an ambitious and/or pension minded civil servant of any stripe to change the problem? About the same as the incentive for a dealers to obey the laws that have made them into permanent sub-citizens. How much incentive is that? About one can of carrots worth.
Wednesday, May 30, 2012
Sci-Fi As Youth Propoganda
No matter how important you think public education is for equality of outcomes, civil society, or great teen coming of age films, there's no way around the fact that it's blatant indoctrination. Just because it isn't always very effective indoctrination doesn't change the fact that you have as near as possible to a monopoly over the messaging crammed into the most impressionable fatty tissue on Earth. The best way to justify public school propaganda is that it counters all the corporate, redneck, pornographic, Christian, morally relativist, Sharia, gangsta, and tanorexic propaganda pouring out of every other cultural orifice. Sure, most often public school propaganda is the intellectual equivalent of the Full House theme song. But marshmallow fluff beats Michigan Militia in my book any day of the week.
It's no secret that, after history, literature is the easiest way to deliver a political payload to children's minds. And science fiction is probably more effective at delivering that messaging because it creates a gash of possibility wide enough to allow expectations to be reshaped. Below I'll go through a selection of sci-fi lit appropriate for teenagers, some of them tried curriculum favorites and others that I believe could warp young minds effectively with little need for lesson planning. All will be scored 0-5 on two variables. Political punch is just how hard the book hits you over the head with ideological messaging. Ambiguity is the flexibility possible in interpreting that message--the enemy of public education since it's inception.
Brave New World
Outlook: Constitutional Democracy, Cultural Conservatism, Classical Liberalism
Political Punch: 4
Ambiguity: 4
At last, a book to bring Rick Santorum, Mother Jones subscribers, and the Unabomber together under one roof. Whose outside of that roof? Everyone that prefers Playstation to civic participation, Percocet to regret, or oral sex to moral turpitude. In fact, I think they are building a Brave New World planned community right now in North County San Diego and you can still get beach-side timeshares. In my opinion, the key to effective use of BNW is to get them young, in the last excruciating months before puberty unfolds into adolescence. Pubies understand the fundamental lessons of social psychology better than anyone, because they know deep in their hearts they would do anything to avoid embarrassment, they would conform to any horrible ideal. So the main character's decision to push away from a deeply regimented, overindulgent society seems breathlessly heroic. Wait another year and the same kid will be puzzling why someone would turn their backs on free drugs and no-strings locker-room sex in order to go read books with bums. Wait another couple of years and a young adult will understand the tragic conflict between a manufactured utopia and the glare of authenticity, and all propoganda value will be lost. They might as well be reading haiku.
1984
Outlook: Libertarian, Anarchist, Free Market
Political Punch: 5
Ambiguity: 2
I read this book cover to cover as a teen because it offered more drama than a Party Of Five marathon. It has torture, morning wall-vodka, mystery, banned sex, pure evil, and thought police. That and it has it's own style of nihilistic wordplay, the best thing to my ears this side of sarcasm. But the social critique in 84 is so Sesame Street Of Darkness, so Santa Claus vs. Mothra, that it implicates almost all authority structures in the process. It implicates dictionaries. It implicates testing. It implicates public education. And most fundamentally, with every tragic and paranoid strand in it's being, it implicates teachers. The remote, heartless dictators we love to hate.
Snowcrash
Outlook: Socialist
Political Punch: 3
Ambiguity: 2
This cyber-punk classic is sexier than leather pants on your own personal post-racial ninja mind-slave. But it sneaks up from behind and jabs you in the ass with a booster-shot of inoculation against the belief that anything positive can come out of a world where governments are weak, by showing you a corporate hell-scape where people live in storage spaces, Canada has been reduced to one big RV park, every KFC franchise needs it's own drone army, and infection by a Christian brain-parasite seems almost appealing. Snowcrash is a very blunt instrument, and should effectively prevent the scourge of corporate gluteal shiatsu that passes for libertarianism in this country from taking hold in impressionable young minds--by showing it's logical and inevitable conclusion.
Dune
Outlook: Democratic, Green
Political Punch: 2
Ambiguity: 4
Royal houses ruling an endless desert getting rich off of underground resources needed for long distance travel. Oppressed desert peoples with a disregard for the law banding together to do violent mischief. Basically it's an Arab Spring with giant sand worms. There's also an environmental twist with real emotional heft, a thing as strange and wonderful as weight-loss beer. But then there's also the distracting Islam references, the blatant homophobia, and of course Sting. It's enough to make you remember all the reasons that you hate democracy. But I think most teens will just see a criminally gorgeous concubine, giant space bugs that need our help, and a desert war for freedom. Or most likely of all, they will see a book longer than their wildest attention span.
Ender's Game
Outlook: Technocracy, Military Dictatorship, Meritocracy
Political Punch: 3
Ambiguity: 3
Every kid, even the most rebellious, secretly wants to be the special chosen golden shit-king of everything. There is also a deep homespun knowledge in every 9 year old that without the recess lady something bloody and tooth-shattering could go down. And there is a blind faith in the bewildering raw-stimulation quotient of technology. Give them EG as early as possible if you want an army of goose-stepping professional resume builders able to praise Steve Jobs in the same sentence that they slam Chinese IP theft. But don't wait too long, or they might understand Ender as a tragic figure and the book as critique. And then the game is up.
It's no secret that, after history, literature is the easiest way to deliver a political payload to children's minds. And science fiction is probably more effective at delivering that messaging because it creates a gash of possibility wide enough to allow expectations to be reshaped. Below I'll go through a selection of sci-fi lit appropriate for teenagers, some of them tried curriculum favorites and others that I believe could warp young minds effectively with little need for lesson planning. All will be scored 0-5 on two variables. Political punch is just how hard the book hits you over the head with ideological messaging. Ambiguity is the flexibility possible in interpreting that message--the enemy of public education since it's inception.
Brave New World
Outlook: Constitutional Democracy, Cultural Conservatism, Classical Liberalism
Political Punch: 4
Ambiguity: 4
At last, a book to bring Rick Santorum, Mother Jones subscribers, and the Unabomber together under one roof. Whose outside of that roof? Everyone that prefers Playstation to civic participation, Percocet to regret, or oral sex to moral turpitude. In fact, I think they are building a Brave New World planned community right now in North County San Diego and you can still get beach-side timeshares. In my opinion, the key to effective use of BNW is to get them young, in the last excruciating months before puberty unfolds into adolescence. Pubies understand the fundamental lessons of social psychology better than anyone, because they know deep in their hearts they would do anything to avoid embarrassment, they would conform to any horrible ideal. So the main character's decision to push away from a deeply regimented, overindulgent society seems breathlessly heroic. Wait another year and the same kid will be puzzling why someone would turn their backs on free drugs and no-strings locker-room sex in order to go read books with bums. Wait another couple of years and a young adult will understand the tragic conflict between a manufactured utopia and the glare of authenticity, and all propoganda value will be lost. They might as well be reading haiku.
1984
Outlook: Libertarian, Anarchist, Free Market
Political Punch: 5
Ambiguity: 2
I read this book cover to cover as a teen because it offered more drama than a Party Of Five marathon. It has torture, morning wall-vodka, mystery, banned sex, pure evil, and thought police. That and it has it's own style of nihilistic wordplay, the best thing to my ears this side of sarcasm. But the social critique in 84 is so Sesame Street Of Darkness, so Santa Claus vs. Mothra, that it implicates almost all authority structures in the process. It implicates dictionaries. It implicates testing. It implicates public education. And most fundamentally, with every tragic and paranoid strand in it's being, it implicates teachers. The remote, heartless dictators we love to hate.
Snowcrash
Outlook: Socialist
Political Punch: 3
Ambiguity: 2
This cyber-punk classic is sexier than leather pants on your own personal post-racial ninja mind-slave. But it sneaks up from behind and jabs you in the ass with a booster-shot of inoculation against the belief that anything positive can come out of a world where governments are weak, by showing you a corporate hell-scape where people live in storage spaces, Canada has been reduced to one big RV park, every KFC franchise needs it's own drone army, and infection by a Christian brain-parasite seems almost appealing. Snowcrash is a very blunt instrument, and should effectively prevent the scourge of corporate gluteal shiatsu that passes for libertarianism in this country from taking hold in impressionable young minds--by showing it's logical and inevitable conclusion.
Dune
Outlook: Democratic, Green
Political Punch: 2
Ambiguity: 4
Royal houses ruling an endless desert getting rich off of underground resources needed for long distance travel. Oppressed desert peoples with a disregard for the law banding together to do violent mischief. Basically it's an Arab Spring with giant sand worms. There's also an environmental twist with real emotional heft, a thing as strange and wonderful as weight-loss beer. But then there's also the distracting Islam references, the blatant homophobia, and of course Sting. It's enough to make you remember all the reasons that you hate democracy. But I think most teens will just see a criminally gorgeous concubine, giant space bugs that need our help, and a desert war for freedom. Or most likely of all, they will see a book longer than their wildest attention span.
Ender's Game
Outlook: Technocracy, Military Dictatorship, Meritocracy
Political Punch: 3
Ambiguity: 3
Every kid, even the most rebellious, secretly wants to be the special chosen golden shit-king of everything. There is also a deep homespun knowledge in every 9 year old that without the recess lady something bloody and tooth-shattering could go down. And there is a blind faith in the bewildering raw-stimulation quotient of technology. Give them EG as early as possible if you want an army of goose-stepping professional resume builders able to praise Steve Jobs in the same sentence that they slam Chinese IP theft. But don't wait too long, or they might understand Ender as a tragic figure and the book as critique. And then the game is up.
Thursday, May 24, 2012
The DICC Paradigm
(pronounced "dicks")
DICC is a way to understand our own beliefs about the world, in particular the question of who we tend to blame and why. Hopefully some people can use it to broaden the way they look at problems and avoid getting stuck in many common loops of closed-minded thinking. I think it would also be incredibly effective in planning value debates.
It stands for Difficulty Incompetence Conflict Conspiracy
The easiest way to understand DICC is in the context of some large-scale problem, the broader and more complex the better. A sufficiently complex problem should register across the board in every category and every subcategory (yes, there are subcategories, but mostly just to flesh out the main categories and help try to define their boundaries). Given the news obsession of the last few years, as an example I am going to choose the economy:
Be it Resolved: Ever Since The 2007-08 Market Crash, The World Economy Hath Sucked
let's see what each of the DICC has to say. . .
Difficulty
This is blaming without blaming. It says essentially that the problem is insoluble, that the problem is the problem. Maybe not forever, maybe not everywhere for everyone. Or hell maybe there is some slim chance of success but it's so remote that we really shouldn't be surprised at failure. It has a few flavors:
Rage Against Deus Ex Machina is the most robust form of blameless blame: blame of god, blame of nature's unalterable laws, blame of inevitable logic, etc. this view says things things like. . .
"Sooner or later the world was going to start running out of resources, and while we pick at the scraps things are just going to get worse. The inevitability of market capitalism is almost as unquestionable as the inevitability of capitalism's predictable decline. As more and more investors chase fewer opportunities, eventually nothing will be profitable. The law of diminishing returns guarantees that. And so it was written."
Bill And Ted's Bogus Journey says that decisions were made (probably, bad decisions) so far in the past that people today don't really deserve the blame, or at least it does no good blaming them because there's absolutely nothing they could do to turn back the clock.
"If only we had stuck with gold Doubloons and goat swapping instead of printing piles of paper out of mountains of debt then the world would be full of solid currencies, solvent governments, and upright individuals with great facial hair. And if Europe hadn't enslaved the world we would all be noble savages living as equals. And there would probably be airships and no AIDS."
Hot Potato Roulette is a problem that we are unlucky enough to have to deal with now. Maybe it was caused by past actions which were not actually wrong actions, maybe it's rare but inevitable occurrence or maybe it's truly totally random, a freak occurrence, something that was unlikely ever to happen. This can be a bitter pill to swallow, but it can also be comforting because it doesn't say anything really terrible about anything, even the universe.
"Economic cycles will always be with us and an eventual recession was gonna come along one of these days. This one has been especially bad because of a unique alignment of freak events: Donald Trump's 'The Apprentice' had stoked irrational exuberance in the real estate market. The availability of powerful prescription narcotics had stoked brokers and Floridians to take unusual risks. Then, at just the wrong moment, Justin Timberlake's catchy but ominous single 'What Goes Around. . .Comes Around' caused a selling frenzy that just wouldn't stop. Oh, and something about astrology."
Incompetence
In many ways this is blaming at it's purest. It's the kind of blaming that makes a person feel genuinely superior to others. At the same time, it can be bleed into difficulty because incompetence is often something that often can't be helped. One way or another, they were born this way.
People R Suck is alot like blaming god or nature because at the core what you are dealing dirty on is human nature. So either you are blaming people for something they have no control over or maybe you are excluding some small cohort who "rise above the fray". You'll see my bias emerge a little here. . .
"It's so simple, we all just need to follow the laws of Jesus, Tupac, Einstein, Bob Marley, and Yoda. Treat each-other with some respect, smoke a little shiso leaf, and mellow out. But most people don't listen, they're all so shallow and cruel and full of cooked-meat gas, too busy destroying the planet and the youth with their antibiotics, vaccines, and disgusting ambition to own a free standing structure. Rats in a maze are never going to be anything but rats. Maybe the economy is the problem. Ever think of that, square?"
Kids These Days: In many ways this is the inverse of the Bogus Journey. Things were laid out so perfectly and people had to go screw up a good thing by making all the wrong choices and just plain old living wrong. This is a beautifully cathartic type of blame popular with almost everyone because it just feels right.
"The economy? Back in my day it ran like a brand new Oldsmobile fresh off the lot. But kids these days are a nightmare, autistic narcissists that'll never amount to a hill of beans. Today's men don't want to work, they just want to fart into their Goodwill couch, masturbate to pornographic genocide simulators, and stick cheezy bread up their asses. All these young ladies are too busy being anorexic cocktail-sluts to start a life, until their eggs are about as viable as low-fat cottage cheese. There was a time immigrants came to this country to follow a dream but now they just want to follow a big butt from the welfare office to the emergency room to the to the crack corner. But our homegrown trash are no better, a diabetic-comatose army of lazy shit stains that never created anything more worthwhile than an empty tub of chicken fingers. And don't get me started on those Filipino hipster-homo, crypto-facist, pedo-baiting, syrup-junkie internet fraudsters subverting our Masonic values to make a quick, cheap, dirty, cum-crusted dollar."
The Level of Their Own Incompetence: This is where we get to start spraying some Haterade, that milk of human resentment we reserve for those more successful than we are. It's an interesting flavor of 'rade because the underlying implication is that someone else could do better. There is a certain flavor of social critique here which can start to bleed into the C's.
"They say power corrupts, but corruption is the least of our worries with these ingrates! We put cokeheads in charge of deciding who gets to borrow a billion dollars. We elect pampered narcissists in love with their own hairline to national office. Our most essential legal cases are decided by a group of aristocrats in training who first decided to go into the world's shadiest, most two-faced profession then got cold feet and found religion only to slowly go senile in the world's easiest job while adderalled interns write their opinions. Our top scientists turn into spineless patent-whores at the first sign of buyout. And don't get me started on 'Two And A Half Men'. Hollywood is a place where talent goes to die."
Conflict
Total Wargame Theory: There is probably no better illustration of this outlook than an actual war like WWII or the Civil War, but it applies to almost any situation where the problem is caused directly by the damage intentionally caused by competitors to one another, and resulting collateral damage and wasted resources which are the inevitable result. In the case of economics, this one bleeds into conspiracy theory, bu the difference is that unlike in a conspiracy nobody's best interest is served. Because war is hell.
"We've erected a brutal economic system where zero-sum corporate warfare has come to displace cooperation and take competition to pointless extremes, making countries that are natural allies into hateful trade warriors. To make the cheapest product, corporations destroy the environment, shred communities, exploit workers. In the mean time they destroy their brands saturating the market with crap products ending in class-action lawsuits, sell out their own productive capital in hopes of a quick stock bump, and end up screwing themselves in the end when their stock options implode, their third wife leaves them for the accountant, and their soulless trust-fund art-brat kids want nothing more than to leave a laminated steamer on their Beemer."
Tamulipan Standoff: This is an intellectually attractive kind of blame because it posits that a situation would be better if any actor would step down. Often all actors know this but don't want to be the weak ones. This often seems to apply when you look at a situation from the outside with no vested interest, like those weird foreign parliaments with all those weird political parties like the artisanal goat's milk party and the beards'n'babies party. And it works great for the drug war, hence the name.
"If the rich banksters would just spend their piles of cash and pay people a living wage, then people could run faster in their hamster wheels, pay their fair share of taxes, and everything would work out. If the unemployed would bother talking to someone outside their shabby-chique latte-ghettos maybe they would realize that all the literary history in the world won't force electrons into their tiny plastic cars, they'd get a real job, and everything would work out. If consumers would just dig into their pockets and pay off their Baby Gap credit cards (and/or splurge on some awesome new man-bags, and/or get back that true religion and buy thirty shares of Groupon) then this economy would get it's white-hot mojo back and everything would be okay. But everybody's waiting for the other shoe to drop."
David vs Gomorrah: If you take a Tamulipan Standoff, make one major actor into a struggling, professional kidney-donor, angel-baby unicorn-martyr and make the other(s) into a distractingly ugly Genghis Khan sex-slaver type, then you have the kind of truth-annihilating atom-splitting necessary for true love to coexist with true blame.
"Republicans want to legalize rape. Democrats want to ban babies. Libertarians want to sell the army to Anti-Semitic natural gas barons. Greens want to grind human bones into emissions filters. Thank god there are still a few true-believing Whigs who want to get away from all the wedge-issue politics and focus on jobs, jobs, professional wage-labor, good hygiene, and jobs related to hygiene for job-creators. And bringing back the Constitutional Monarchy, of course."
Conspiracy
Self-explanatory in a way, but this doesn't only include the strictest definition of conspiracy where motivations and alliances are kept secret. But there must be a minority whose interests are aligned working against the common best interest for their own benefit.
Tentacular Spectacular: This one is hard to argue with because the self-perpetuating logic is so overwhelming. Basically, any society naturally favors people with skills, resources, knowledge and willpower. In the aggregate, these folks want to make their own lives easier, expand their power, and insulate their privilege. And this leads to a law of diminishing returns for everyone else, who are increasingly powerless, broke, and denied access to any hope to better themselves.
"We are the 99%. Or let's say 97% because there are more rich pricks than you can imagine in Manhattan alone. And up in Seattle you can't even pick them out on the street in a thunder storm. Give us some swag, please. Or we'll sleep outside your condo and chant until we run out of canned food. Or I guess you could gas or taze us, that would probably also get rid of us. If we actually wanted to fight and knew how we'd be making 250k running Black Ops in Pakistan or guarding Rhianna's dressing room. Or at the very least we would have just mugged you. But if you continue to defy the will of the people and you ever want to get laid again you're going to have to settle for another clenched-khaki type A like yourself that doesn't go downtown unless you wax, that or take your chances on backpage.com. You'll pay double for drugs too. That'll show ya. Asshole."
Monopoly Manhandler: Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. A relatively tiny number of people hold most of the cards. Merit can't come anywhere close to accounting for the extent to which this is true. So something more sinister must be going on that involves back rooms, weird sex parties, mind-swap technology and odorless poison that leaves no trace. That actually makes more sense than Facebook being worth 100 billion dollars.
"What if you could get a thousand of the world's richest people in the same room, maybe at a destination wedding on a floating island made of mahogany and chiffon. And in that room, everybody decided to sell their stocks on the same day and agree not to buy back into the market for a year. There was going to be another joke here, but writing it out like this. . .I'm pretty sure this is exactly what happened."
Katrina Was An Inside Job: Sometimes it's appealing to believe that something more lively is going on behind the scenes besides Carlos Slim, three Saudis, and the ghost of Sam Walton trying to figure out how to get their sticky old-man hands on your IRA. Something involving young Elvis, three ring wraiths, and the soul of Rasputin inhabiting the body of an entire family of ginger midgets. And all they want is the truth.
"The economy's great. There's tons of cheap land, everybody's buying my video lecture series, and I can't wait to get in that bunker, put Siri in charge of the shotgun turret, and just take some me-time."
DICC is a way to understand our own beliefs about the world, in particular the question of who we tend to blame and why. Hopefully some people can use it to broaden the way they look at problems and avoid getting stuck in many common loops of closed-minded thinking. I think it would also be incredibly effective in planning value debates.
It stands for Difficulty Incompetence Conflict Conspiracy
The easiest way to understand DICC is in the context of some large-scale problem, the broader and more complex the better. A sufficiently complex problem should register across the board in every category and every subcategory (yes, there are subcategories, but mostly just to flesh out the main categories and help try to define their boundaries). Given the news obsession of the last few years, as an example I am going to choose the economy:
Be it Resolved: Ever Since The 2007-08 Market Crash, The World Economy Hath Sucked
let's see what each of the DICC has to say. . .
Difficulty
This is blaming without blaming. It says essentially that the problem is insoluble, that the problem is the problem. Maybe not forever, maybe not everywhere for everyone. Or hell maybe there is some slim chance of success but it's so remote that we really shouldn't be surprised at failure. It has a few flavors:
Rage Against Deus Ex Machina is the most robust form of blameless blame: blame of god, blame of nature's unalterable laws, blame of inevitable logic, etc. this view says things things like. . .
"Sooner or later the world was going to start running out of resources, and while we pick at the scraps things are just going to get worse. The inevitability of market capitalism is almost as unquestionable as the inevitability of capitalism's predictable decline. As more and more investors chase fewer opportunities, eventually nothing will be profitable. The law of diminishing returns guarantees that. And so it was written."
Bill And Ted's Bogus Journey says that decisions were made (probably, bad decisions) so far in the past that people today don't really deserve the blame, or at least it does no good blaming them because there's absolutely nothing they could do to turn back the clock.
"If only we had stuck with gold Doubloons and goat swapping instead of printing piles of paper out of mountains of debt then the world would be full of solid currencies, solvent governments, and upright individuals with great facial hair. And if Europe hadn't enslaved the world we would all be noble savages living as equals. And there would probably be airships and no AIDS."
"Economic cycles will always be with us and an eventual recession was gonna come along one of these days. This one has been especially bad because of a unique alignment of freak events: Donald Trump's 'The Apprentice' had stoked irrational exuberance in the real estate market. The availability of powerful prescription narcotics had stoked brokers and Floridians to take unusual risks. Then, at just the wrong moment, Justin Timberlake's catchy but ominous single 'What Goes Around. . .Comes Around' caused a selling frenzy that just wouldn't stop. Oh, and something about astrology."
Incompetence
In many ways this is blaming at it's purest. It's the kind of blaming that makes a person feel genuinely superior to others. At the same time, it can be bleed into difficulty because incompetence is often something that often can't be helped. One way or another, they were born this way.
People R Suck is alot like blaming god or nature because at the core what you are dealing dirty on is human nature. So either you are blaming people for something they have no control over or maybe you are excluding some small cohort who "rise above the fray". You'll see my bias emerge a little here. . .
"It's so simple, we all just need to follow the laws of Jesus, Tupac, Einstein, Bob Marley, and Yoda. Treat each-other with some respect, smoke a little shiso leaf, and mellow out. But most people don't listen, they're all so shallow and cruel and full of cooked-meat gas, too busy destroying the planet and the youth with their antibiotics, vaccines, and disgusting ambition to own a free standing structure. Rats in a maze are never going to be anything but rats. Maybe the economy is the problem. Ever think of that, square?"
Kids These Days: In many ways this is the inverse of the Bogus Journey. Things were laid out so perfectly and people had to go screw up a good thing by making all the wrong choices and just plain old living wrong. This is a beautifully cathartic type of blame popular with almost everyone because it just feels right.
"The economy? Back in my day it ran like a brand new Oldsmobile fresh off the lot. But kids these days are a nightmare, autistic narcissists that'll never amount to a hill of beans. Today's men don't want to work, they just want to fart into their Goodwill couch, masturbate to pornographic genocide simulators, and stick cheezy bread up their asses. All these young ladies are too busy being anorexic cocktail-sluts to start a life, until their eggs are about as viable as low-fat cottage cheese. There was a time immigrants came to this country to follow a dream but now they just want to follow a big butt from the welfare office to the emergency room to the to the crack corner. But our homegrown trash are no better, a diabetic-comatose army of lazy shit stains that never created anything more worthwhile than an empty tub of chicken fingers. And don't get me started on those Filipino hipster-homo, crypto-facist, pedo-baiting, syrup-junkie internet fraudsters subverting our Masonic values to make a quick, cheap, dirty, cum-crusted dollar."
The Level of Their Own Incompetence: This is where we get to start spraying some Haterade, that milk of human resentment we reserve for those more successful than we are. It's an interesting flavor of 'rade because the underlying implication is that someone else could do better. There is a certain flavor of social critique here which can start to bleed into the C's.
"They say power corrupts, but corruption is the least of our worries with these ingrates! We put cokeheads in charge of deciding who gets to borrow a billion dollars. We elect pampered narcissists in love with their own hairline to national office. Our most essential legal cases are decided by a group of aristocrats in training who first decided to go into the world's shadiest, most two-faced profession then got cold feet and found religion only to slowly go senile in the world's easiest job while adderalled interns write their opinions. Our top scientists turn into spineless patent-whores at the first sign of buyout. And don't get me started on 'Two And A Half Men'. Hollywood is a place where talent goes to die."
Conflict
Conflict is often the most reasonable and nuanced of all the DICC, and usually the least satisfying. Underlying the conflict perspective is that there are always at least two separate actors or sets of actors to blame. But that allows for a huge amount of variation.
"We've erected a brutal economic system where zero-sum corporate warfare has come to displace cooperation and take competition to pointless extremes, making countries that are natural allies into hateful trade warriors. To make the cheapest product, corporations destroy the environment, shred communities, exploit workers. In the mean time they destroy their brands saturating the market with crap products ending in class-action lawsuits, sell out their own productive capital in hopes of a quick stock bump, and end up screwing themselves in the end when their stock options implode, their third wife leaves them for the accountant, and their soulless trust-fund art-brat kids want nothing more than to leave a laminated steamer on their Beemer."
Tamulipan Standoff: This is an intellectually attractive kind of blame because it posits that a situation would be better if any actor would step down. Often all actors know this but don't want to be the weak ones. This often seems to apply when you look at a situation from the outside with no vested interest, like those weird foreign parliaments with all those weird political parties like the artisanal goat's milk party and the beards'n'babies party. And it works great for the drug war, hence the name.
"If the rich banksters would just spend their piles of cash and pay people a living wage, then people could run faster in their hamster wheels, pay their fair share of taxes, and everything would work out. If the unemployed would bother talking to someone outside their shabby-chique latte-ghettos maybe they would realize that all the literary history in the world won't force electrons into their tiny plastic cars, they'd get a real job, and everything would work out. If consumers would just dig into their pockets and pay off their Baby Gap credit cards (and/or splurge on some awesome new man-bags, and/or get back that true religion and buy thirty shares of Groupon) then this economy would get it's white-hot mojo back and everything would be okay. But everybody's waiting for the other shoe to drop."
David vs Gomorrah: If you take a Tamulipan Standoff, make one major actor into a struggling, professional kidney-donor, angel-baby unicorn-martyr and make the other(s) into a distractingly ugly Genghis Khan sex-slaver type, then you have the kind of truth-annihilating atom-splitting necessary for true love to coexist with true blame.
"Republicans want to legalize rape. Democrats want to ban babies. Libertarians want to sell the army to Anti-Semitic natural gas barons. Greens want to grind human bones into emissions filters. Thank god there are still a few true-believing Whigs who want to get away from all the wedge-issue politics and focus on jobs, jobs, professional wage-labor, good hygiene, and jobs related to hygiene for job-creators. And bringing back the Constitutional Monarchy, of course."
Conspiracy
Self-explanatory in a way, but this doesn't only include the strictest definition of conspiracy where motivations and alliances are kept secret. But there must be a minority whose interests are aligned working against the common best interest for their own benefit.
Tentacular Spectacular: This one is hard to argue with because the self-perpetuating logic is so overwhelming. Basically, any society naturally favors people with skills, resources, knowledge and willpower. In the aggregate, these folks want to make their own lives easier, expand their power, and insulate their privilege. And this leads to a law of diminishing returns for everyone else, who are increasingly powerless, broke, and denied access to any hope to better themselves.
"We are the 99%. Or let's say 97% because there are more rich pricks than you can imagine in Manhattan alone. And up in Seattle you can't even pick them out on the street in a thunder storm. Give us some swag, please. Or we'll sleep outside your condo and chant until we run out of canned food. Or I guess you could gas or taze us, that would probably also get rid of us. If we actually wanted to fight and knew how we'd be making 250k running Black Ops in Pakistan or guarding Rhianna's dressing room. Or at the very least we would have just mugged you. But if you continue to defy the will of the people and you ever want to get laid again you're going to have to settle for another clenched-khaki type A like yourself that doesn't go downtown unless you wax, that or take your chances on backpage.com. You'll pay double for drugs too. That'll show ya. Asshole."
"What if you could get a thousand of the world's richest people in the same room, maybe at a destination wedding on a floating island made of mahogany and chiffon. And in that room, everybody decided to sell their stocks on the same day and agree not to buy back into the market for a year. There was going to be another joke here, but writing it out like this. . .I'm pretty sure this is exactly what happened."
Katrina Was An Inside Job: Sometimes it's appealing to believe that something more lively is going on behind the scenes besides Carlos Slim, three Saudis, and the ghost of Sam Walton trying to figure out how to get their sticky old-man hands on your IRA. Something involving young Elvis, three ring wraiths, and the soul of Rasputin inhabiting the body of an entire family of ginger midgets. And all they want is the truth.
"The economy's great. There's tons of cheap land, everybody's buying my video lecture series, and I can't wait to get in that bunker, put Siri in charge of the shotgun turret, and just take some me-time."
Monday, May 21, 2012
Get Your Phenibut Out of My Baclofen: The Drug War Snoozes Onwards
I've always been fascinated with the Drug War, the most intricate reverse-welfare scheme ever engineered. And frankly, marijuana has always been the dullest part of the story for me (with the obvious exception of synthetic cannabinoids), wrapped up in so much baby boomer nostalgia it almost seems square. No, I'm fascinated by the drug war's ever-evolving underbelly, the tunnels where activists don't dare to tread, populated by Mexican pharmacists, Chinese bulk-chemical distributors, vitamin-store juiceheads, paid-off psychiatrists, and Fijian corporate raiders. And, of course, their lobbyists. Gather around, and I will tell you a tale of the latest chapters in the never ending race to the bottom of human consciousness. The Great Downer Race!
All real sedatives have one thing in common: an ability to affect the receptors for a transmitter called gamma-Aminobutyric acid, or GABA. This is probably the 2nd most important neurotransmitter in the brain (after glutamate) and as a general rule tends to slow things down. If all the GABA in your brain stopped pumping, you would have a seizure pretty much instantly. I don't care how tough you are.
Please Note: This post does not constitute an endorsement of any of the sedatives described here. I'm not a medical practitioner, and you should consult your doctor, shaman, and mother-in-law before ingesting anything but kale or almond milk.
Alcohol acts on GABA but it also works on your brain in at least a half dozen other ways, which might explain why it is the most popular drug of all time. Most of the familiar actors on just GABA...benzos like xanax or klonopin or roofies, "zzzz" drugs like ambien, and barbituates (the stuff Don Draper takes), and chloral hydrate (one of the many things Anna Nicole Smith OD'd on) are all legal but not only require a doctor's prescription but are controlled by the DEA. A couple of them (GHB, Qualudes) are totally illegal (which isn't even true of meth, coke, or PCP).
With a few historical exceptions (the disco "lude" craze, date-rape hysterias) downers have always kind of flown under the radar compared to the big scourges of dope narcotics, crystal-whatever, Krishna-consciousness pills, and of course good old genetically-engineered super-skunk. Perhaps because the effects are so workingman pedestrian. They relieve stress, help you sleep, and maybe make you feel a little fuzzy in a non-threatening sort of way. Just don't take too much, or you might die. And don't stop taking them too fast. Or you might die. Kind of like our old friend alcohol.
Time was, in the not so distant past, there was one potent downer that had no DEA controls that was quite popular. Fairly appropriately, it's called Soma. Without DEA controls, Soma could be ordered online without a prescription in unlimited quantities from overseas pharmacies as legally as toothpaste. Folks have known about the abuse potential of Soma for a very long time, leading over a dozen states to control it independently, but the Federal government finally joined the club in January of this year. The reason it took so long? Lobbying by certain states, certain employers, and especially certain insurance providers who had a vested interest in controlling the price of workers compensation clams! See, Soma is considered a muscle relaxant (a meaningless kitchen-sink designation) along with many other drugs that are more expensive, don't work as well, or both. And controlled status is going to mean that lots of people with bad backs or other muscle spasms are going to be more expensive to treat. Who stands to benefit? King Pharmaceuticals--makers of Skelaxin, a drug that costs 8 times as much per dose and. . .get this. . .nobody has ANY IDEA how the drug works.
Relaxed?
Good, it's about to get weirder. In the mid-80s the US passed a law called the Analog Act in order to curb designer drugs. The idea behind it was that any chemical with a similar structure to an illegal or very strictly controlled chemical was automatically illegal. It was mostly designed to combat psychedelics but came in handy "battling" some uber-potent synthetic opiates also. The problem is, because benzos are scheduled at a lower level than the Analog Act covers, benzo analogs remain totally legal and can be sold as bulk chemicals. So if I want a valium, I need to see a doctor who may or may not send me to a psychiatrist who may or may not first have me checked out by a therapist (who all need to be paid and all have the right to shrug, not write the prescription, and get paid anyways) before I go to a registered pharmacy for the privilege of buying it. But if I want a huge bag of phenazepam (a potent Soviet-bloc benzo), I just go here. Of course, I will have to check a box saying that it won't be used for human consumption, but it's still legalish. And the best part? No age limit. Because it's for my chemistry set, and it's important that children learn chemistry to compete in the world economy. They can also get practice using their digital scale, because a dose of phenazepam is just 2 milligrams! I'll be honest, I don't know if there are any lobbyists involved here, just a loophole so weird it would keep Nixon up at night if he weren't permanently hitting the big snooze button in the sky.
But what if you want something less quasi-legal and more. . .say. . .something you can buy on Amazon.
Phenibut is considered a nutritional supplement (no, I really don't have any idea why) available at many healthfood stores. Not the kinds with hippies and six types of tea tree oil, but the type with two walls full of protein powders and products named to evoke the image of well-veined testicles. It was designed to replace another vitamin-aisle drug that actually did have a strong claim to belong there: GHB. See, GHB is a hormone naturally produced by your body (let's call it "god's date rape drug") that causes sedation but a whole lot of other crazy effects--one of which is increasing production of human growth hormone leading to muscle formation. Now, GHB is a bit of atypical sedative because it acts on the GABA-B receptor as well as the GABA-A receptor that our friends booze and benzos target. This accounts for it's unique capacity to cause amnesia when combined with high-dose alcohol. Now, as far as I know, Phenibut does not increase growth hormone but it does tag GABA-B. It has some weird features. First, it takes about 2 hours to kick in but it lasts a really long time. Second, on it's own it can work pretty well on anxiety but it is really not strong enough to deliver euphoria on it's own: that's why most recreational users tend to drink with it. It is probably the most effective OTC sleep aid available ever, and can be quite habit forming when used for this purpose. And lastly, if taken for long enough at Stallone doses it causes a withdrawal syndrome similar to GHB, which is not known to be fatal but can apparently involve seizures, "brain zaps", and make you want to die.
Kava on the other hand rightfully belongs on the shelves of healthfood stores, next to the bran fiber and the placenta extract. But the real scam is that, despite the fact that a culture was based around the use of kava as an intoxicant for hundreds of years, the kava capsules at Whole Foods might as well contain eraser shavings. To get the real thing you have to go online and buy the powder, which tastes like clean dirt (yes, you heard me) and will numb your mouth like nothing you have ever experienced. It's a hell of a strange way to circumvent the pharmaceutical monopoly, but sometimes people do things just because they can. Or, because they hate doctors, or hate lying to doctors, or hate being labelled for life with preexisting conditions. There's always that. I can't tell the story of the weird capitalist cowboys that brought real kava to Americans better than others already have (it kind of reminds me of the Five Hour Energy story), but I have to give them mad kudos for dodging the prohibitionist machinery thus far.
I was going to go deeper into nutritional-supplement lobbying politics, Mormon conspiracies, and weave that all into a larger narrative about the pharmaceutical industry via the modern snake oil Neurontin, but. . .well, maybe the Mormon faith should be off limits, right? Next post will be about Neurontin, "euphoric events", and assessment of drug abuse liability. But I'm afraid that it's Benadryl o'clock. . .
All real sedatives have one thing in common: an ability to affect the receptors for a transmitter called gamma-Aminobutyric acid, or GABA. This is probably the 2nd most important neurotransmitter in the brain (after glutamate) and as a general rule tends to slow things down. If all the GABA in your brain stopped pumping, you would have a seizure pretty much instantly. I don't care how tough you are.
Please Note: This post does not constitute an endorsement of any of the sedatives described here. I'm not a medical practitioner, and you should consult your doctor, shaman, and mother-in-law before ingesting anything but kale or almond milk.
Alcohol acts on GABA but it also works on your brain in at least a half dozen other ways, which might explain why it is the most popular drug of all time. Most of the familiar actors on just GABA...benzos like xanax or klonopin or roofies, "zzzz" drugs like ambien, and barbituates (the stuff Don Draper takes), and chloral hydrate (one of the many things Anna Nicole Smith OD'd on) are all legal but not only require a doctor's prescription but are controlled by the DEA. A couple of them (GHB, Qualudes) are totally illegal (which isn't even true of meth, coke, or PCP).
With a few historical exceptions (the disco "lude" craze, date-rape hysterias) downers have always kind of flown under the radar compared to the big scourges of dope narcotics, crystal-whatever, Krishna-consciousness pills, and of course good old genetically-engineered super-skunk. Perhaps because the effects are so workingman pedestrian. They relieve stress, help you sleep, and maybe make you feel a little fuzzy in a non-threatening sort of way. Just don't take too much, or you might die. And don't stop taking them too fast. Or you might die. Kind of like our old friend alcohol.
Time was, in the not so distant past, there was one potent downer that had no DEA controls that was quite popular. Fairly appropriately, it's called Soma. Without DEA controls, Soma could be ordered online without a prescription in unlimited quantities from overseas pharmacies as legally as toothpaste. Folks have known about the abuse potential of Soma for a very long time, leading over a dozen states to control it independently, but the Federal government finally joined the club in January of this year. The reason it took so long? Lobbying by certain states, certain employers, and especially certain insurance providers who had a vested interest in controlling the price of workers compensation clams! See, Soma is considered a muscle relaxant (a meaningless kitchen-sink designation) along with many other drugs that are more expensive, don't work as well, or both. And controlled status is going to mean that lots of people with bad backs or other muscle spasms are going to be more expensive to treat. Who stands to benefit? King Pharmaceuticals--makers of Skelaxin, a drug that costs 8 times as much per dose and. . .get this. . .nobody has ANY IDEA how the drug works.
Relaxed?
Good, it's about to get weirder. In the mid-80s the US passed a law called the Analog Act in order to curb designer drugs. The idea behind it was that any chemical with a similar structure to an illegal or very strictly controlled chemical was automatically illegal. It was mostly designed to combat psychedelics but came in handy "battling" some uber-potent synthetic opiates also. The problem is, because benzos are scheduled at a lower level than the Analog Act covers, benzo analogs remain totally legal and can be sold as bulk chemicals. So if I want a valium, I need to see a doctor who may or may not send me to a psychiatrist who may or may not first have me checked out by a therapist (who all need to be paid and all have the right to shrug, not write the prescription, and get paid anyways) before I go to a registered pharmacy for the privilege of buying it. But if I want a huge bag of phenazepam (a potent Soviet-bloc benzo), I just go here. Of course, I will have to check a box saying that it won't be used for human consumption, but it's still legalish. And the best part? No age limit. Because it's for my chemistry set, and it's important that children learn chemistry to compete in the world economy. They can also get practice using their digital scale, because a dose of phenazepam is just 2 milligrams! I'll be honest, I don't know if there are any lobbyists involved here, just a loophole so weird it would keep Nixon up at night if he weren't permanently hitting the big snooze button in the sky.
But what if you want something less quasi-legal and more. . .say. . .something you can buy on Amazon.
Phenibut is considered a nutritional supplement (no, I really don't have any idea why) available at many healthfood stores. Not the kinds with hippies and six types of tea tree oil, but the type with two walls full of protein powders and products named to evoke the image of well-veined testicles. It was designed to replace another vitamin-aisle drug that actually did have a strong claim to belong there: GHB. See, GHB is a hormone naturally produced by your body (let's call it "god's date rape drug") that causes sedation but a whole lot of other crazy effects--one of which is increasing production of human growth hormone leading to muscle formation. Now, GHB is a bit of atypical sedative because it acts on the GABA-B receptor as well as the GABA-A receptor that our friends booze and benzos target. This accounts for it's unique capacity to cause amnesia when combined with high-dose alcohol. Now, as far as I know, Phenibut does not increase growth hormone but it does tag GABA-B. It has some weird features. First, it takes about 2 hours to kick in but it lasts a really long time. Second, on it's own it can work pretty well on anxiety but it is really not strong enough to deliver euphoria on it's own: that's why most recreational users tend to drink with it. It is probably the most effective OTC sleep aid available ever, and can be quite habit forming when used for this purpose. And lastly, if taken for long enough at Stallone doses it causes a withdrawal syndrome similar to GHB, which is not known to be fatal but can apparently involve seizures, "brain zaps", and make you want to die.
Kava on the other hand rightfully belongs on the shelves of healthfood stores, next to the bran fiber and the placenta extract. But the real scam is that, despite the fact that a culture was based around the use of kava as an intoxicant for hundreds of years, the kava capsules at Whole Foods might as well contain eraser shavings. To get the real thing you have to go online and buy the powder, which tastes like clean dirt (yes, you heard me) and will numb your mouth like nothing you have ever experienced. It's a hell of a strange way to circumvent the pharmaceutical monopoly, but sometimes people do things just because they can. Or, because they hate doctors, or hate lying to doctors, or hate being labelled for life with preexisting conditions. There's always that. I can't tell the story of the weird capitalist cowboys that brought real kava to Americans better than others already have (it kind of reminds me of the Five Hour Energy story), but I have to give them mad kudos for dodging the prohibitionist machinery thus far.
I was going to go deeper into nutritional-supplement lobbying politics, Mormon conspiracies, and weave that all into a larger narrative about the pharmaceutical industry via the modern snake oil Neurontin, but. . .well, maybe the Mormon faith should be off limits, right? Next post will be about Neurontin, "euphoric events", and assessment of drug abuse liability. But I'm afraid that it's Benadryl o'clock. . .
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