So ebay is going to ban the trading of spells, hexes, blessings, tarot readings, horoscopes, and other forms of commodified woo:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19323622
From my experience of ebay dispute resolution, it is bad enough when you have a disagreement over a real, tangible product that can be photographed, inspected, shown to be unfit for the advertised purpose, etc; so Dog help those who are unhappy with a defective love spell that they handed over good money for. I know some might be unsympathetic towards people who would buy occult services on ebay, 'a fool and his money are easily parted' and so on, but I think it will be an improvement for ebay to close the door on what is tantamount to fraud, even if it's just so that they can wash their hands of having to spend man-hours on dispute resolution for intangeble products and pushing up the cost of running the site. It is almost certainly the cost cutting factor that will be ebay's prime motive for the ban rather than a true desire to protect mugs from charlatans.
Your intrepid hero never ceases to be amazed at the diversity of snake oil preperations bought by people as a 'spirituality' or 'philosophy'. So-called spirituality has always been in bed with worldly commerce, whether it was a state sanctioned clergy being given the right to tax the population with tithes in exchange for promoting the divine legitimacy of the ruling classes, to the 'spiritual' capitalism expoused by new age gurus who are in the business of selling the individual their own personal enlightenment or 'healing'.
At the best of times the commodification of the creative efforts of humans has it's own self-perpetuating logic beyond the mere generation of exchange value. It leaves somewhat of a taint on whatever it touches, and nowhere does it stink more than to sell out the intangible stuff of human experience. This kind of exchange can only work by some degree of fraud, of convincing people that there is a lack where there is none, or otherwise profiting from another's ennui or unhappiness without offering anything of real use beyond some convoluted mysticism or re-enforcement of wishful thinking.
I buy a bag of rice because I cannot grow the stuff myself. To see people buying 'spirituality' from self-professed gurus and other assorted cranks to me is just sad.
Wednesday, August 22, 2012
Saturday, August 18, 2012
Xenophobia, puritanism and the moron logic of prohibition
I have been reading through the Alternative World Drug Report put out by Transform, an NGO dedicated to ending the 'war on drugs':
http://www.countthecosts.org/sites/default/files/AWDR.pdf
It is quite astounding to realise that there has been no real concerted effort by governments or the UN to conduct a cost-benefit analysis of their prohibitionist policies. The money spent every year in the UK on police and military enforcement against the black market in illegal substances, the incarceration of thousands of drug users and low level distributers in Britain's prisons, and the insurance costs of aqusitive crime related to illegal drugs must run into the billions, yet the stated aim of the UN conventions on narcotic drugs, of creating a 'drugs free world' though punative measures, is further away than it has ever been. During 50 years of the 'War of Drugs' (or more correctly called 'selective war on certain drug users') the demand for illicit recreational drugs has only increased, and the markets that supply that demand have both grown and diversified.
Compared to 1961 there are so many different variations of recreational drugs on the market now that it is hard to keep up, especially with 'research chemicals' which are a direct result of drug producers working around the efforts of prohibitionists to outlaw new substances and to clamp down on precursors for more established party drugs. The Big Two so called 'hard' drugs - heroin and cocaine - have not fallen in popularity since 1961 despite the sabre rattling of the drugs warriors, quite the opposite in fact - they are more readily available and cheaper now than they were in the 60s. You would think that is would not be so hard for government appointed experts to go some way to quantifying all of this, but the problem is less so of the practicalities, and more of the political will. This is a political climate where in 2009 the chief drugs advisor to the government David Nutt was sacked for publishing an evidenced based report on the 'drugs problem' rather than pandering to the opportunistic 'law and order' rhetoric of the politicians.
The 'Alternative World Drug Report' is an excellent publication. If I was to make one critisism of it it would be that Transform gives the prohibitionists too much credit. They call the prohibition of drugs 'well intentioned' but ultimately misguided. This is not really the case if you dig deeper into the history of drug prohibition, where you find that just like the suppresion of other aspects of human culture such as language, the suppresion of certain forms of drug use in the West, and the USA in particular, were historically motivated by a distrust by the majority towards immigrants and ethnic minorities who were associated with those drugs (ie; chinese immigrants and opium smoking, mexicans and marijuana), and by the mid 20th century that current of hostility extended into a xenophobia towards the majority's own youth, alienating the generations from each other.
This is the reason why there has been little attempt for an outright ban of alcohol in the West as it is the most culturally ingrained drug here. The attempt at alcohol prohibition in the USA in the 1920s became rapidly disasterous because of alcohol's prominent place in mainstream American culture. If the drugs warriors of the 1960's and 70s had learned from the history of prohibition they would have recognised the futility in attempting to curtail a natural human behavior with a big stick.
If one accepts that drug use, whether it's purpose is for ritual, excitement, relaxation or for medicine, is an intrinsic part of human culture, then the 'drug free world' of the prohibitionist stinks rather more of a fascistic and hypocritical intolerance than a well intentioned concern for human health. The very term 'drug abuse' is a product of that way of thinking - the arbitrary assignment of legitimacy based on what is politically expedient. For instance a doctor getting a patient physically addicted to benzodiazpenes is not considered 'drug abuse', but the use of LSD to explore one's psyche is. Once upon a time LSD was legally used in psychiatry until the prohibitionists turned their attention to it on account of it's popularity with the hippy movement, which was at the time reviled and feared by the mainstream. With a stroke of the law maker's pen LSD became a 'drug of abuse'. Cue myth making tabloid hysteria about kids on acid jumping off tall buildings and going blind from staring at the sun!
Before we can even start to openly consider that any one motivation for drug use by an individual as being as 'legitimate' as any other, there is this circular moron logic of the drugs war to contend with. This is the self-renforcing set of beliefs about drugs and their harms that feed the drugs war from the rhetorical point of view. It's what gets politicians jumping on the authoritarian 'law and order' bandwagon and prevents them from questioning the status quo. We see it every time there is a Leah Betts type tragedy spashed across the tabloids, and along with it all the typical right wing hacks baying for the blood of drug dealers as if they aren't to some extent complicit in these tragedies themselves by their speading of stigma, misinformation and fear for a paycheck.
The harms caused by the drugs war, by the social stigma, the black market racketeering, the perverse incentives, are attributed solely to the drug itself and used as a justfication for more of the same. It is an absurd situation we are caught in, and it is probably the single most damaging and socially corrosive set of circumstances we have created. The only real beneficiaries of the drugs war have been criminal gangs, populist politicians playing on public gullibility, the police budget, and the prison industry. It is hard to see how the drugs war can continue or why it has lasted as long as it has without enough people calling bullshit on it for it to end.
http://www.countthecosts.org/sites/default/files/AWDR.pdf
It is quite astounding to realise that there has been no real concerted effort by governments or the UN to conduct a cost-benefit analysis of their prohibitionist policies. The money spent every year in the UK on police and military enforcement against the black market in illegal substances, the incarceration of thousands of drug users and low level distributers in Britain's prisons, and the insurance costs of aqusitive crime related to illegal drugs must run into the billions, yet the stated aim of the UN conventions on narcotic drugs, of creating a 'drugs free world' though punative measures, is further away than it has ever been. During 50 years of the 'War of Drugs' (or more correctly called 'selective war on certain drug users') the demand for illicit recreational drugs has only increased, and the markets that supply that demand have both grown and diversified.
Compared to 1961 there are so many different variations of recreational drugs on the market now that it is hard to keep up, especially with 'research chemicals' which are a direct result of drug producers working around the efforts of prohibitionists to outlaw new substances and to clamp down on precursors for more established party drugs. The Big Two so called 'hard' drugs - heroin and cocaine - have not fallen in popularity since 1961 despite the sabre rattling of the drugs warriors, quite the opposite in fact - they are more readily available and cheaper now than they were in the 60s. You would think that is would not be so hard for government appointed experts to go some way to quantifying all of this, but the problem is less so of the practicalities, and more of the political will. This is a political climate where in 2009 the chief drugs advisor to the government David Nutt was sacked for publishing an evidenced based report on the 'drugs problem' rather than pandering to the opportunistic 'law and order' rhetoric of the politicians.
The 'Alternative World Drug Report' is an excellent publication. If I was to make one critisism of it it would be that Transform gives the prohibitionists too much credit. They call the prohibition of drugs 'well intentioned' but ultimately misguided. This is not really the case if you dig deeper into the history of drug prohibition, where you find that just like the suppresion of other aspects of human culture such as language, the suppresion of certain forms of drug use in the West, and the USA in particular, were historically motivated by a distrust by the majority towards immigrants and ethnic minorities who were associated with those drugs (ie; chinese immigrants and opium smoking, mexicans and marijuana), and by the mid 20th century that current of hostility extended into a xenophobia towards the majority's own youth, alienating the generations from each other.
This is the reason why there has been little attempt for an outright ban of alcohol in the West as it is the most culturally ingrained drug here. The attempt at alcohol prohibition in the USA in the 1920s became rapidly disasterous because of alcohol's prominent place in mainstream American culture. If the drugs warriors of the 1960's and 70s had learned from the history of prohibition they would have recognised the futility in attempting to curtail a natural human behavior with a big stick.
If one accepts that drug use, whether it's purpose is for ritual, excitement, relaxation or for medicine, is an intrinsic part of human culture, then the 'drug free world' of the prohibitionist stinks rather more of a fascistic and hypocritical intolerance than a well intentioned concern for human health. The very term 'drug abuse' is a product of that way of thinking - the arbitrary assignment of legitimacy based on what is politically expedient. For instance a doctor getting a patient physically addicted to benzodiazpenes is not considered 'drug abuse', but the use of LSD to explore one's psyche is. Once upon a time LSD was legally used in psychiatry until the prohibitionists turned their attention to it on account of it's popularity with the hippy movement, which was at the time reviled and feared by the mainstream. With a stroke of the law maker's pen LSD became a 'drug of abuse'. Cue myth making tabloid hysteria about kids on acid jumping off tall buildings and going blind from staring at the sun!
Before we can even start to openly consider that any one motivation for drug use by an individual as being as 'legitimate' as any other, there is this circular moron logic of the drugs war to contend with. This is the self-renforcing set of beliefs about drugs and their harms that feed the drugs war from the rhetorical point of view. It's what gets politicians jumping on the authoritarian 'law and order' bandwagon and prevents them from questioning the status quo. We see it every time there is a Leah Betts type tragedy spashed across the tabloids, and along with it all the typical right wing hacks baying for the blood of drug dealers as if they aren't to some extent complicit in these tragedies themselves by their speading of stigma, misinformation and fear for a paycheck.
The harms caused by the drugs war, by the social stigma, the black market racketeering, the perverse incentives, are attributed solely to the drug itself and used as a justfication for more of the same. It is an absurd situation we are caught in, and it is probably the single most damaging and socially corrosive set of circumstances we have created. The only real beneficiaries of the drugs war have been criminal gangs, populist politicians playing on public gullibility, the police budget, and the prison industry. It is hard to see how the drugs war can continue or why it has lasted as long as it has without enough people calling bullshit on it for it to end.
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