Anti-Love Drug

One day, in the interests of worker productivity, there will be a drug to regulate neurotransmitters so that the patient does not fall in love. Already SSRIs probably prevent people from falling in love, since falling in love seems to require a temporary reduction in serotonin levels. Which is fucked since falling in love is a more effective anti-depressant than any of the pharmaceuticals we’ve developed so far.

Greed and Outsourcing

John Howard always justifies not regulating businesses by saying things like he “likes to take an optimistic view of human nature”. How magnanimous. The thing is this is bullshit if he feels the need to outsource. This means he thinks greed is a bigger motivator than desire to improve the world, to help other humans. In cases like the one where a company called Australian Centre for Languages housed an amputated Sudanese refugee on the first floor and made him crawl everywhere, greed was enough of a motivator to tender for the contract but not to actually do the work. Economic efficiency.

Happiness vs Social Awareness

A study purporting to break down happiness levels by Federal electorates found that the seat of Grayndler was the least happy in the country. Grayndler encompasses Newtown and is probably the most socially progressive place in Australia.

It’s a given that people who care more about society are less happy. People who ignore war, Third World famine, global warming, etc feel more “relaxed and comfortable” like John Howard wants them to be. If you are content to live an insular, happy-go-lucky life while most of the globe suffers, you are either psychopathic or, more commonly, in a state of unhealthy dissociation.

Studies have found that people make better witnesses to crimes when they’re in a more anxious state, and that, in group interactions, depressives are more accurate than neurotypicals in assessing other people’s feelings and motivations.

Self-Terminating Species?

Mainstream climatologists are starting to come to the conclusion that, even if we stopped all fossil fuel consumption right now, civilisation won’t be viable within a century.

It would be eminently rational to argue that we should terminate our own species before we impact on other species too much on our own way down. (Everyone would be resistant so it would have to be done by a small group of people.) To mitigate the impact on other species the best way to do it would be to release a pathogen that doesn’t affect other species.

It would be one of the most moral things we could do. Only conscious species are capable of it.

If you proceed from metaphysically materialist assumptions, it’s also irrational not to commit suicide. Despite what TV ads would have you believe, life is mostly constituted of struggle and pain, punctuated with small moments of perspective and contentment. Being a conscious entity stuck in a biological body subject to pain and death means humans can’t really have fun lives.

For me personally, the thing that stops me from pursuing these logical conclusions is a piece of irrationality. When I first had a manic episode information downloaded from somewhere into my brain telling me that there’s a grand purpose behind it all. This is my piece of blind faith that keeps me alive and makes me want to continue improving humanity.

Mental Health, Cannabis and Howardian Hypocrisy

John Howard needs to reign in the hypocrisy on proposing harsher anti-cannabis laws as a strategy for tackling the mental health crisis.

The fact is that cannabis is not the mental illness bogeyman that current fashionable thinking would have you believe. THC can have a number of positive effects. NMDA receptors can be blocked, slowing down uncontrolled neural events that can cascade out of control. THC can block neurotoxic effects of the stress hormone cortisol on the hippocampus. Vietnam veterans who smoked marijuana while at war have lower rates of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder because the cortisol was blocked. THC can temporarily put a person who has debilitating left-brain dominance into a right-brained state. Temporary relief once in a while can be enough to stave off suicide. Other drugs don’t come close. Lithium can perform the first function but that’s about it. And other drugs don’t have the immediacy of action of cannabis smoking.

There are some side effects that can be detrimental to your mental health. Reduced motivation, reduced response to pleasure and paranoia should be looked out for. In extreme mania dope can help tip you into psychosis. Everyone needs to monitor themselves and decides what fits their own individual brain architecture best.

This is partly a class issue. Dope is used like coffee in working class suburbs. Working class males have far higher levels of cortisol. Cortisol liquefies your hippocampus, contributing to, among other things, concentration and memory problems, which often gets diagnosed as ADHD. Howard is putting the screws on the working class, increasing the level of mental illness, and then wants to lay harsher sentences on people who medicate themselves. Getting a harsher sentence isn’t going to improve your mental health.

If John Howard were serious about mental health he would start putting a decent system together instead of setting up a hotline. His thinking on mental health is just as 1950s as everything else in his world:

"We didn't talk about it because somehow or other it wasn't the right thing to do and you just had to get on with life. Sometimes it's still not a bad idea for some people to be told they should get on with life."

Sometimes it’s still not a bad idea for people to be told they should go get fucked.

Rightist Defiance Posturing, Psychological Causes and Japanese Whaling

The Japanese whaling thing must be about nationalism rather than money. Demand isn’t keeping up with supply of whale meat. There is a small segment of society in Japan that’s bitter about the war and Western cultural imperialism and drives around in dark green kind of army trucks with Japanese flags painted on them, spouting anti-Western stuff out of megaphones. They’re the same people Koizumi appeases when he visits the Yasukuni Shrine that has war criminals in it. Which pisses off a lot of Chinese people. It’s a way of saying you can do what you want, defy other people’s wishes, stand up to other people, etc.

Every population has a segment that is psychologically fixated on ensuring that their country and society flaunts their independence of the authority of other countries/societies. Some of the pro-publishing arguments about publishing the Mohammed cartoons have emanated from this psychological need. The rioting in response to the cartoons is the same thing. But Western cultural hegemony is such that you would have to be a particularly insecure Westerner to feel a need for the West to prove its independence.

Oil For Wheat and Orchestrated Ignorance

Howard and his people have a simple technique for getting illegal things done without leaving evidence that they were involved. They make bureaucrats implicitly aware of what they want done. Bureaucrats have to ensure that they don’t pass information up to ministers that would force them to make unacceptable changes to their policy.

In the oil for wheat scandal the people involved were surprisingly eager to take each other’s word for fact for hardened political operatives. DFAT fell over itself to ignore evidence that AWB was breaking sanctions. Even wheat farmers on remote Canadian plains knew. US Senator Norm Coleman terminated inquiries into AWB bribes on the mere word of the Australian ambassador. I don’t think so. Then he makes a big public show of how angry he was about being misled, only to crawl back into his hole after meeting the (new) Australian ambassador a few days ago. Give the man an Oscar.

Also, there is no apparent reason why Commissioner Terence Cole has so far declined to ask for the inquiry to be broadened to look at the government’s actions.

Westminster ministerial responsibility is a dead convention. Mark Latham ranted about this in his diaries: we need to stop honouring conventions, because the moment they become inconvenient the conservatives throw them out. Like in 1975. We need some kind of permanent judicial panel that can investigate ministers. They would be able to make findings on the basis of what the minister ought to have reasonably been aware of. No more orchestrated ignorance.

Update: Norm Coleman had his staff hack his biography in Wikipedia.

Family as Totalitarian Structure

When rightists talk about “the family” I get a tension reflex. They talk about it as if it were a Platonic form in the sky. Which is what they think: they think that god has set a archetype of a monogamous hetero man, woman and kids as the template all humans should fit into.

My only experience of “family” was as a kid with a single father. My childhood was the most painful part of my life. Something that exacerbated the pain was the lack of autonomy. I couldn’t stand having decisions made for me by someone else, especially someone I felt smarter and morally superior to, and someone who often didn’t have my best interests at heart. To me, “family” means a social grouping in which one person has totalitarian power over a bunch of other people. And it evokes the vibe of male control of females. People that talk about protecting the family are fans of totalitarianism in both the private and public spheres.

People use language that betrays the fact that they regard their kids as objects they own. If you see a parent hitting a kid, you have the obligation to object, and no protestations about “interfering with my kid” are valid.

ADD vs ADHD vs AID

Why change “Attention Deficit Disorder” to “Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder”? Two-thirds of ADD people aren’t hyperactive. To go a step further, we should remove the misnomer “deficit” and replace it with “inconsistency”: “Attention Inconsistency Disorder”.

Distraction Through Superficial Morality

There needs to be a word for superficial morality, and a word for the deployment of superficial morality to distract people from issues of true moral gravity. John Howard is a master of it. Especially of trying to make interlocutors who question the morality of his actions look like the question itself is more offensive than the action. “I find it quite offensive that you would suggest that I could be capable of…” That makes me insanely angry.

Voting Systems, Triple J Hottest 100

The Triple J Hottest 100 this year was a borefest. Camp glam rock, scrappy/atonal boys on electric guitars and plaintive/ethereal girls on acoustic guitars. I blame the voting system. Limited Approval Voting favours lowest common denominator results. Compromise results can make for stable democracy but boring lists. You can’t give your votes different values. You might be passionate about 5 songs and then the next 5 songs you vote for you might like but not love. Songs that evoke passion polarise - a lot of people won’t vote for this class of song and there is no ranking of votes to compensate for this. So a lot of kind of OK songs got up. Triple J playlists are always more diverse and interesting than the Hottest 100.

Buy a car

Just about the worst possible investment you could make right now is to buy a car (unless you buy a cheap shitbox coz you’re forced to). It looks like we’re going to hit Peak Oil within the next few years. Petrol will be unaffordable. (If the free market were more than just a myth then current prices would already be a lot higher). Cars will be worthless.

Mohammed Cartoons, Intolerance and Tim Blair the Moron

As society becomes more civilised, we create higher standards of behaviour for ourselves. At the risk of sounding chauvinistic, Western society has attained high standards in some areas of human behaviour and thought. Unfortunately some members of Western society promulgate arguments along the line that, when other societies fail to live up to our standards, we are absolved of the responsibility to live up to our own standards.

This line of thinking is being pushed by conservative commentators in regard to Islamic intolerance. This is especially inexcusable when the examples of Islamic intolerance are cherry-picked from extremists. Ironically the Islamic counterpart to Western conservative commentators are the very extremists they focus on as representing the Islamic world. Hopefully Islamic extremists aren’t cherry-picking conservative Western commentary as representative of all Westerners in turn. A classic example of this is at Tim Blair, who has republished the cartoons of Mohammed that have caused the riots of the past week with the excuse that there are intolerant Muslims and he is thus exonerated in his own intolerance. Actually, it’s not so much intolerance as a combination of a cry for attention and an embittered attempt to provoke hostility. The cartoons themselves are unsophisticated, nasty and reminiscent of 1940s anti-Japanese, anti-German propaganda. There is nothing witty or thought-provoking about them.

Freedom of speech should prevail. And violent reaction to mere ideas is immature and disproportionate. But media outlets should be condemned for gratuitous provocation. There is a prohibition in Islam against depicting images of Mohammed and people should have some respect. And Tim Blair in particular should be condemned for his actions in the context of mass racial tensions of the past few months in Australia. Hopefully any anti-Anglo violence he provokes comes home to roost at his door rather than innocent Australian Anglos in the wider community.

Fake Sex Moaning

It’s embarrassing when people fake sexual moaning. To fully experience sexual pleasure you have to liberate your breathing, and most of us trained ourselves to be silent when masturbating as kids, so it’s definitely something that has to be tackled. But it’s obvious when conscious effort is involved. The voice never lies. And you can hear the breathing being pushed from the upper respiratory tract rather than emanating of its own accord from the gut, which is where it comes from when you are truly abandoning yourself to sensation. People need to stop watching porn.

Sociogenic Ideostasis

“Sociogenic ideostasis” denotes the situation people find themselves in when they are unable to change their belief systems due to social or material exigencies. Social/material exigencies might take the form of belonging to a religious or political community from which you derive your sense of identity, having academic tenure, having the first half of your career based around a set of ideas, etc.

(Sorry about combining Latin and Greek but couldn’t think of an alternative to “sociogenic”.)

Knowledge Specialisation, Common Sense and Interdependence

This stage of human history is heavily infused with the themes of specialisation, atomisation and individualism.

Industry has shifted the cost of specialisation to the private sphere: our labour is highly specialised and abstracted from basic skills that keep humans alive, and our home lives, being more atomised than ever, require that each individual be a jack of all trades. If your brain architecture lends itself to hyperfocus rather than multi-tasking, you’re at a disadvantage in general life. The opposite applies for the world of labour.

Our urban social lives are fragmented into components that don’t interact. We develop multiple personas. It’s also almost impossible to get by without having access to a plurality of differently gendered characteristics.

As far as the progress of human knowledge is concerned we are at a point in history that requires extreme specialisation. One person isn’t capable of having a deep understanding of a large number of fields of thought. We need to trust each other. The problem is, whenever you wade into a new area of thought you find a bunch of mistakes the people there have already made. To deal with external specialised knowledge we have to rely on our common sense and intuition. We have to walk around with a countenance of unflustered agnosticism, having tentative belief in story models in so far as they are useful for us, but structure our mental worlds in a way that will allow us to cast them off if they prove impractical, erroneous or clash irreconcilably with the rest of our belief systems.

Relying on gut feeling is anathema to current purportedly hyper-rational, empirical scientific method (which is just a myth anyway - scientists use dreams and hunches). We need to teach schoolkids epistemology. The concepts aren’t that difficult, though academics who want to make their area of specialisation rarefied try to make them seem difficult.

Hyperfocus vs Multi-tasking

There is a continuum of thinking styles from that which is capable of hyperfocus to that which is capable of multi-tasking. Innate brain architecture is largely responsible for which pole you are closer to. They’re mutually exclusive: when you possess more of one, you lose some of the other. Hyperfocus is a correlate of ADD and Asperger’s Syndrome/autism and is more prevalent in males.

Hyperfocusers are better at academically specialised employment. Multi-taskers are better at life.

Western society is demanding both more hyperfocus and more multi-tasking than ever.

Michelle Malkin's Left and Right Brains

There's a rightist American blogger named Michelle Malkin. I noticed her photo was very asymmetrical so decided to do mirror images of her to see what personalities her left and right brain express. I won’t analyse the photos; people can judge for themselves.

Left face / right brain.

Right face / left brain.

Forgiving American Imperialism

Conservative Americans wouldn’t be aware of this, but the only thing keeping the rest of the world from wishing for America’s destruction are the muffled voices of humanist Americans that cut through occasionally. When American power eventually wanes the rest of the world will forgive America because we won’t be able to ignore the body of art, culture and letters from the large minority protesting American imperialism. Conservative Americans will owe their survival to progressive Americans.