MIND STALK by D. R. Sullivan There seems to be something a tad schizophrenic about the modern progressive movement, or at least parochial. I recently read an essay from Z magazine entitled "The Economics of Greed", putting forth many of the alleged evils of our economy. What caught my notice this time was the remark on how companies were discovering that they could get perfectly fine programmers in India and elsewhere for salaries less than $10,000. This was presumably to be seen as a bad thing, the high tech equivalent of blue collar wage competition from Mexico or Taiwan, and is something I should be concerned about myself; but I found myself wondering what, from the modern-liberal/progressive point of view, the problem was exactly, and what the solution should be. Our laborers are worse off for the competition, but the foreigners are much better off for having a job. Should we raise trade barriers again, to protect the right of our programmers to have $30,000 salaries while Third World programmers starve? Yet that would seem to be the jingoist economics advocated by Buchanan populism, among others; I had thought modern liberals would affirm that all human lives had equal value; that all had an equal right to good jobs; that if society made the rich poorer to help the truly poor, this is generally a good thing. And the fact of the matter is that the amount of money we consider to be the poverty level is a tidy sum in much of the world. Opening our markets exposes that fact, and makes us all wealthy global citizens. The only way to escape that is to keep the barriers, withdraw from the world, keep the world from the benefits of trading with our advanced economy. I don't get it. It's interesting to note that at the international level, the lowering of tariffs, the freeing of trade, is always referred to as liberalization. I don't think there is an 'conservative' equivalent. Mercantilism, perhaps. * * * How to Stop Domestic Abuse Imagine a man. A big, strong man. An unsophisticated but emotional man. Who, for whatever reason, isn't happy. Imagine you're his wife -- small, weak, and due to an unfortunate moral education possessed of a tendency to feel helpless and vulnerable. Would you rather he come home after drinking three shots of whiskey or after smoking three joints of marijuana? I'm had an intimate relative who was an alcoholic, and while they might not have been any more productive if they had turned to marijuana, I'm pretty sure my whole family would have been better off emotionally. And physically, if they had been a violent alcoholic, a fate I avoided. I really don't get the fits our politicians throw over marijuana. Dangerous? To society? There's the example above, and I haven't worried or even heard about stoned drivers much. Stoned rioters after a sports event? Dangerous? To the smoker? Well, I disagree with extreme efforts to protect people from their own mistakes, but even granting that there was a legitimate interest here, I'm not sure I see the argument. Smoking joints might be worse in particulates and tar than cigarette smoke, but there's no carcinogenic nicotine involved, and tobacco is still legal, and as I understand it even a heavy marijuana smoker will probably smoke fewer joints in a week than a tobacco chain smoker would in a day. The claim of brain damage seems to have been challenged by research purporting to show that marijuana tolerance is an effect of the specific cannabinoid receptor system, not brain cell toxification. And even if not, alcohol kills off brain cells, and it is legal. And marijuana doesn't seem to be physiologically addictive the way many other drugs are. Many of which are still prescribable anyway, such as morphine. Oh, and there's the claim of marijuana being a gateway to other hard drugs. Meaning what? Most marijuana users go on to use hard drugs? Government usage statistics belie that; the number of the former is rather larger than the number of the latter. Hard drug users used marijuana before other illegal drugs? Perhaps, but what did they really start with? Alcohol and tobacco, perhaps? Would eliminating marijuana really stop the transition? The only mechanism I can seriously imagine supports legalization: people start with alcohol and tobacco, move on to marijuana, discover that that illegal drug is no worse than the legal drugs, and then go on. In this case I'd say move marijuana into the legal category, truly separating usable drugs from those which can only be abused. Although admittedly that is not the only consistent possibility. The FDA already seems to be taking on tobacco. Perhaps in another decade it could be illegal, and then we'd only have alcohol left. Which catalyzes all that domestic abuse. And causes all those drunk drivers. Really, we should get rid of that too... But I assume I don't have any adherents at this point, because we've tried that already, back in the good old days when controlling people's bodies took a Constitutional amendment, not a bureaucratic decision. Thirteen years later, we went to all the trouble -- 2/3 of Congress, 3/4 of the states, and in pretty good time too -- of passing another amendment for the sole purpose of saying "whoops. That was a mistake." We weren't the only ones, either. Norway adopted prohibition in 1919 in a popular vote with a ration of 5:3. Seven years later it was repealed by a similar margin. After thirteen years Finland repealed in 1932 with a popular majority of 70%. Apparently those countries didn't like violent smuggling anymore than we did. Drugs have been around for longer than the war on them. Drugs haven't killed our inner cities; gangs fighting over the right to sell them have. As they might have done in the 1930's, except we ended Prohibition too soon. One of my pet ideas is that we've put up with the War on (some but not all) Drugs for so long precisely because all illegal drugs put together aren't that big a problem. Not that many people use them, so the crime rates and corrupting effects on law enforcement aren't as great as when alcohol was illegal. Or maybe we're just dumber now. * * * Mind stalk. Damien and the Mindstalk. Minds' talk. Mindstalker. There are few pleasures in my life as sweet and pure as sinking my teeth into a new deep idea, in bringing to bay a theorem, in the give and take of an intense conversation. (And few as much work to get, especially without enough sleep.) There can be joy in wisdom, passion in cerebration, and danger in reading too much Nietzsche. Merry Yuletide, of whatever faith ye be. ("There is no fruitcake but The One Fruitcake, and It is never eaten, but passed around.") Pasadena, 1996