On Wednesday, November 1, 2017 at 9:51:33 PM UTC+1, Brent wrote: > > > > On 11/1/2017 8:31 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: > > Even if cannabis did not have any medical use, the papers showing its > > danger have all been shown to be gross frauds, all the times. > > It's dangers have been exaggerated, but there are dangers as with > alcohol, tobacco, and other things. My wife's first husband was > (psychologically) addicted to smoking marijuana and lost all ambition.
Even if we may never be able to understand particular cases, we *can* look at the phenomenon of conspiracy discourses and make observations. Of course there are real conspiracies and evidence. Yet there IS a place where cannabis discourse that bedevils ambition with some 60s style reference to ancient buddhism, or platonism, or virtue of laziness etc. exhibits a blind spot: It takes A LOT of work and/or luck to maintain a loss of ambition in our day and age. And often that loss of ambition becomes a whole full time job in itself, while the discourse frames itself as being more liberal, open, flexible than all the cops and squares. The immediate price is some variant of a permanent paranoid victimization in that discourse: where all the cops and square ambitious people are conspiring to stop liberals from getting what they want. And the conspiracy assuming exactly the kind of large proportions and properties that the discourse frames itself smart enough to discern, feeds back into the zero ambition loop, validating itself with precisely the same rhetorical moves it makes to distinguish itself as "the true conspiracy description that explains everything". And social media + internet posting/advertising push in a similar direction: the discourse in these contexts assumes itself to be social, good, decent, polite, relaxed, and clearly above the vulgar idiocies of labelling and policing people, and yet it tries to pull off this rhetorical trick in an environment where linguistic labels, linguistic categorization of people and their interests for advertising, simplifying pictures, animations, and video are the only means of relating to others. Is this social? Or do people confuse a means of convenient communication with the depth of relationships? These kinds of discourses, internal and external, first rob themselves and then proceed to play some blame game, with the usual hierarchical trimmings and crude competitions for reputation: which is quite a trek for the folks that say they have modest to no ambitions. Even if the legalize campaigns or social justice warriors have their wishes come through, I don't see enough of the kind of education, content, art, advertising, and discourse that'd educate and enable people enough, to modulate their own subjectivity with increased degrees of freedom because the cynicism/conspiracy in peoples' heads becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, fanning the flames of the same fears that were to be definitely (in a personal hard ideological sense) avoided. Only to burn themselves. Conspiracy discourse self-tarnishes and locks itself out of the very sense of community it pretends to champion. Folks should modulate subjectivity to get softer, more communicative, more accessible, more able to change along developing the sensitivity and strength towards openness. Modulating subjectivity is an art so it pays to be vigilant AND caring; whether we consume some form of media, medication etc. is almost beside the point. PGC -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
