The stated policy of the current President on "marijuana" (cannabis) legalization can be found here. If you want an Official Government line that uses every lawyerly (actually, outright dishonest) weasel-worded tactic available to justify the unjustifiable, it can be found there. (The Catch-22 type of argumentation is the best part! :-) At this point in history, a point-by-point refutation of this garbage would be kind of pointless seeing as nobody outside the beltway with a lick of common sense buys into this horseshit - certainly not as sufficient grounds to deny consenting adults their nature/God-given rights to toke up seeing as it's they as individuals (and certainly not the fuckers in D.C.) who are in the best position to decide for themselves whether cannabis use is for them. See? Common sense. (The point-by-point refutations have already been done hundreds if not thousands of times already, so I won't waste my precious time reiterating them all when it's the reader's responsibility to be aware of the myriad refutations available by now.) The President's point-by-point excuse for justifying a continued War on Weed flies right in the face of common sense by obfuscating the real issue, which is freedom, goddammit.
Now, what makes this even more infuriating is the current President's pathetic attempt to Please Everyone as usual. (Worked out really nicely for his "look forward, not backward" approach to accountability for this government's acts of torture, hasn't it? [Read: no accountability.]) This is his standard tactic of Leading from Behind because he doesn't have the nuts to take a clear stand at this time so that his positions and policies can be pummeled into the ground. He has (apparently) adopted a "wait and see" approach to the new Washington and Colorado state laws aiming to end the insanity. Well, that's only a Jerkoff move; is he going to enforce the "marijuana" policy stated on his website, or not? Are we in some kind of postmodernist legal limbo, or what? What the fuck is going on here, and what the fuck does the President/Jerkoff intend to do? If he's got the nuts, why doesn't he stick to his federal enforcement powers in adherence to his oath of office, rather than send mixed signals like this?
This is a political maneuver in which the Jerkoff is trying to have it both A and not-A at the same time and in the same respect. Legally, he's still within his ostensible constitutional authority to enforce the ridiculously insane federal drug laws. (The term "ostensible" triggered in my mind an association with Orson Welles's adaptation of Franz Kafka's The Trial, where the court painter Titarelli (sp?) explains to Joseph K. in classic Trial fashion how an acquittal from the unknown charges leveled against him would make him only "ostensibly free," as he could come home only to be arrested and processed all over again.) Politically, his game-playing - the result of which is that we don't really know at this time what policy he intends to enforce - has succeeded so far in distracting the public from his officially-stated policy. Looks like a state of A-and-not-A jerkoff limbo to this here philosopher if there ever was such a thing; how about for you, reader?
What this President hasn't done, is to do the courageous thing, i.e., what a President Jefferson would have done, and that's to speak out clearly against the madness that is the drug war, and propose serious revisions if not downright legalization (for cannabis, at the very least). That's what common sense and backbone would dictate. Instead, we have a "leader" more in the mold of a Mr. Thompson, the Head of State in Atlas Shrugged: a pathological pragmatist engulfed in a "Heraclitean Flux" of Non-Principle. The President pulled this same shit with his transparently dishonest "evolving views on same-sex marriage" shtick, when he could have nutted up like a real leader and stood up all along for what he knew to be right and just. (Miss Rand's comment on the character of Mr. Thompson as described here is precious.) Meanwhile, intellectually-deficient but influential pundits such as our fellow blogger Andrew Sullivan are reduced to groveling before the President, entreating him to "please not use your ostensibly-duly-established constitutional powers to interfere with States' Rights, and follow reason instead," or some such A-and-not-A excuse for an argument that hardly even merit the status of a fallback. Do recall that this very same Andrew Sullivan said not more than two weeks ago that, quote, "the public has every right to legislate morals," unquote. (That's why, apparently, he thinks cannabis policy is a matter for States' Rights rather than individual, Ninth-Amendment-style rights.) Do keep in mind that the federal government's executive branch has the power to enforce laws enacted by Congress, to crack down on any and all pot whether it's legal under a given state's laws or not. Is the federal government going to be treating citizens of the different states differently just because majorities in some states enacted legalization initiatives? We just don't know right now.
Sullivan's weary and ineffectual last appeal for the President not to enforce the federal drug laws amounts to nothing more than, quote, "...if they [i.e., the current Administration] decide that opposing a near majority of Americans in continuing to prosecute the drug war on marijuana, even when the core of their own supporters want an end to Prohibition, and even when that Prohibition makes no sense ... then we will give them hell." Say what? You mean, the American people aren't giving them hell already? What makes anyone think that continuing the status quo at the federal level will change anything? Then again, maybe it would be some sort of last straw for the People. How do we know at this point?
You begin to see the problem when objectivity and identity are replaced in the public discourse by ambiguity, obfuscation, limbo, flux and short, non-integrative attention spans. Where are the Professional Philosophers in all this? Why is the task of pleading before the President in the mainstream media left to some intellectually-muddled blogger who gives away the case in the very act of presenting it?
Had enough yet? I haven't. (This is Philosophical Boot Camp and I'm the senior drill instructor; we haven't had enough until I say we've had enough.) In his groveling appeal to the President, Sullivan writes that "the federal War on Marijuana is racist in its enforcement." Certainly it is de facto and substantively if not procedurally racist in its enforcement, one of the eminently sensible reasons to end this War. One might think that this President would be responsive to this, or that he should be given his race. (Meanwhile, Sullivan quotes another author, Pete Guither, who makes the sensible matter-of-fact observation that the President appears to have floated a "blatant political trial balloon using the New York Times." See? Leadership.) Anyway, that the Drug War is de facto racist is one of the several matters of fact that Sullivan gets right, and proud we are of all of him for that, but in missing the real point and target, he essentially gives away the case to the goddamned statists. To wit:
Let's have this debate openly and honestly. Let the government prove that marijuana is as dangerous as heroin and should be treated as such. The very process will reveal the anachronism of the provision itself and the racial and cultural panic that created it. The very discussion will point to an inevitable, scientific conclusion that the current federal policy is based on nothing.
So do nothing, Mr president, with respect to these states and their legitimate decisions. Set the DEA's priorities so that this trivial, medically useful, pleasure is not in any way a priority for law enforcement. Let the states figure this out, as they are on marriage equality.
Lead from behind. An entire generation is ahead of you.Yes, the mainstream national discourse has fallen just this low, given oh-so-much intellectual bankruptcy as its background context. (Isn't this what Miss Rand would say about the present situation were she around now? Something tells me that were she around now and commanding national attention as she did in her prime, things would be getting shaken up a lot more. So I can only do my best to emulate her style of cultural and political commentary in my own unique way.) We have Andrew Sullivan, the nation's leading political blogger, asking the President to "lead from behind" and "do nothing" even though the White House's official statement of drug policy indicates that it doesn't accept that "doing nothing" is the right thing to be doing. (To reiterate: we're getting mixed signals on this from the White House and its political trial balloons.) In addition, Sullivan didn't waste an opportunity to leave the matter of marriage equality up to the states rather than up to sound interpretation of the Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments.
With "friends of freedom" like this, who needs enemies? If this is the best critical voice out there in Mainstream Public Opinion today, this President needn't worry about truly serious challenges to his doings. (Actually, the best critical voices in that context would be Greenwald and Chomsky, but as long as the Public remains largely ignorant of what these two are saying, the President still needn't worry. My point is, even if/though the public isn't largely ignorant of Sullivan, the President needn't have much to worry about in the way of intellectually serious and credible opposition. After all, the public has "every right" to legislate morals 'n' all that, and decent and intelligent Catholics and others can find only "puerile cruelty" in the works of Ayn Rand. The President himself, in typically un-Jefferson-like, philosophically-vacant fashion, doesn't understand jackshit about Rand, either, so the circle of ignorance [EDIT: or, how about . . . epistemic closure? Booyah, score one for the UP!] is complete.) And as long as the public remains largely ignorant of philosophy - thanks in part to the failure of the Professional Philosophers to serve as the guardians and integrators of human knowledge - we will continue to get lousy, non-identity, Orwellian "leadership" like this.
This feels like shooting fish in a barrel, a task for which Perfectivism seems particularly well-suited, I'll point out. (Praise due to Ayn Rand for establishing precedent in this area with her Objectivism.) So you're welcome, or something.
Merry Fucking Christmas.
P.S. I've come to the realization that, his having put several decades of deeply-Rand-influenced thought into the subject, Leonard Peikoff is (in a just world) our current leading authority on the philosophy of history, his The DIM Hypothesis (2012) being the culmination of his investigations. (Note that I say philosophy of history, not history of philosophy. In the latter department, Peikoff suffers from many of the very same problems Rand had. His latest statements about Kant in The DIM Hypothesis bear no resemblance to recent Kant scholarship, such as Korsgaard's. You might as well have jerkoff academic "philosophy" bloggers commenting on Ayn Rand in complete obliviousness to, say, Peikoff's interpretive work, and get precisely the same embarrassing effect. You have to have the analytical skills - as Aristotle did - to separate out the wheat from the chaff in Peikoff and Rand's expositions, or you're going to fail miserably at getting their essential core message, something about focus vs. evasion and the role of the mind in human existence [EDIT: and the vital importance of mental integration], I believe.) Few people alive are as keenly aware as Peikoff is, of the central role of integration (or lack thereof, or misapplication thereof) in the course of human life and history. His latest work requires serious attention from philosophers of history, if any (besides Peikoff and those on his wavelength) are even around today. I mean, if I were asked where serious philosophy of history is being done these days, the only name that pops into mind is Peikoff's - and there's no good reason to think anyone has put in nearly the kind and level of analysis that he has put in over some 60 years of thought and study, half of them under the tutelage of a fucking grandmaster of integration. The Professional Philosophers ignore Peikoff's work in this area (as well as his two books on Objectivism now in publication) at their own peril. Arguably, they've done so for so long as it is that a Point of No Return has been passed, probably in the last decade or so. They can ignore the well-researched Rand scholarship for only so long before their intellectual credibility begins swirling around toward the bottom of the shitter. Tara Smith's 2006 book was the final litmus test of what these so-called philosophers are really made of, and of whether they could make themselves useful to the public discourse for a change; many of them failed that test miserably. So fuck 'em. Let their departmental funding get cut and market principles encroach further into their insulated bubble of security, and let them whine incessantly about capitalism in their blogs. The whiners had their final opportunity in 2006 to close the massive gap between themselves and the Real World (where Ayn Rand matters - a lot), and they blew it big-time; the more ignoble bastards among them have resorted instead to vicious, savage, smears pertaining to Rand's youthful (and irrelevant, and not-admiring) comments about a serial killer, and other such intellectually-reckless or negligent tactics for which their pathological groupie-colleague-enablers hold them not at all accountable. To see these fucks get their comeuppance - it's not a matter of if, but when - will be a particular pleasure of mine to behold. So the current situation is that we have this national discourse where Rand looms as a major presence and influence on people's ideas, and instead of participating in that national dialogue on a level field of play the Professional Philosophers gratuitously dropped the ball and retreated ever-further into their Ivory Towers. ("Cowards! Weaklings! Bums!") So, again, until they get their act together: Fuck 'em. In the meantime, I'll be reading DIM, and integrating, of course.
P.P.S. Sign of a/the verbal river of gold to come? Merry Fucking Christmas. :-)
