Month: April 2013

Vanessa Grigoriadis explores the wild frontier of synthetic drugs and the “underground scene of hobbyists and tinkerers, hippie-meets-hipster drug geeks, who like to call themselves psychonauts” experimenting with them:

They’re most interested in the ability to custom-match a substance with a desire—even if, in some cases, the new drugs are substandard to known ones (making your heart race; shoving you through a fractal landscape with elves coming out of the gloaming; making you feel weird, and not good weird, but bad weird). “You can pinpoint what you want now: ‘I’d like something of four hours’ duration with mescaline effects, or twelve hours’ duration with alternating mushroom and LSD rushes,’ ” says a 37-year-old software engineer … .

The government is trying to crack down of course:

Morris calls the current situation an “infinite game of cat and mouse,” where the government schedules a drug, then chemists race to find a new legal compound.

“Three weeks ago, we had our first detection of new derivatives, PB-22 and 5F-PB-22,” says Kevin Shanks, a forensic toxicologist in the Midwest. “Quinoline derivatives are uncontrolled by the federal government, and I see them becoming prevalent very quickly.” Adds Lapoint, the toxicologist: “Until we can break the model of releasing a new chemical that retains the same affinity for the receptor of an illegal drug but is structurally dissimilar enough that you can avoid getting popped, this is the new normal. Brick-and-mortar quasi-legal head shops are hard enough to stop, but the Internet vendors are fully whack-a-mole … The new drug dealer is the mailman.”

Will the cat finally catch the mouse? Some psychonauts fear that the government, in desperation, might take a pharmacode dynamic password approach, looking at the receptor activated by the drug and scheduling backward from there, claiming that any organic molecule that binds to the CB1 receptor and makes you stoned is a schedule 1 drug. But then they’d have to schedule other drugs with CB1 affinity, including Tylenol.

Everything is chemistry, as Walter White has taught us. The rest is our often arbitrary moral judgments about varieties of human pleasure and experience.

Carl Bogus examines it:

At the most fundamental level, Burke was a communitarian. It is institutions — governmental, professional, religious, educational, and otherwise — that compose the fabric of society. … For the Burkeans of the 1950s, emphasis on community was at the heart of a properly conceived conservatism. [Russell] Kirk wrote: “True conservatism … rises at the antipodes from individualism. Individualism is social atomism; conservatism is community of spirit.” Robert Nisbet titled his book The Quest for Community.

Though it may surprise people who have been taught that Edmund Burke is the father of modern conservatism, the Burkeans were, in fact, defeated by a rival group with a nearly diametrically opposed view. The leader of that group was William F. Buckley Jr., founder of National Review. When, in 1952, Buckley first articulated his philosophy in God and Man at Yale, he called it “individualism,” though the nearly absolute laissez-faire philosophy he advocated became better known as libertarianism.

He wonders if modern conservatives might find their way forward by looking back:

Maybe Buckley’s was the necessary path in the 1950s. Conservatism then needed to differentiate itself starkly from the prevailing liberalism. Burkeanism would have made that difficult because, as Kirk often observed, Burke was both a conservative and a liberal. But if conservatives today are looking for wisdom — and maybe even a less truculent partisanship — they might consider the path not taken.

The Buckley wing is perhaps best illustrated by Margaret Thatcher’s famous pronouncement that “there is no such thing as society.” I think that phrase has been a little distorted from its context, as David Frum has noted. Here’s the full context:

I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand “I have a problem, it is the Government’s job to cope with it!” or “I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!” “I am homeless, the Government must house me!” and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first… There is no such thing as society. There is living tapestry of men and women and people and the beauty of that tapestry and the quality of our lives will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves and each of us prepared to turn round and help by our own efforts those who are unfortunate.

You can see it’s an attempt to restore a better balance between the individual and the society as a whole – because in her time, the collective had become culturally enervating. It was a provisional correction to an emergent social problem (i.e. a Tory argument) rather than some kind of sternal philosophical pronouncement (the Randian approach).

I favor a balance between Burke’s Whig instincts (that was his party, after all) and his Tory understanding of the centrality of culture and history. Society does not begin with the individual; it begins with the household and extends outward to civil society, Burke’s “little platoons” of associations and communities, and then to a strong government fair and limited enough to allow the individual, if he or she chooses, to forge his or her own path. Individualism is itself a product of a particular social achievement in democratic liberalism. It is the end of the great Anglo-American experiment in ordered liberty. It is not the beginning – and a failure to understand that can undermine liberty entirely.

Hence the notion that extreme social and economic inequality – although defensible on abstract libertarian grounds – is actually a threat to individual liberty. Because it threatens the legitimacy of the system that made individual liberty possible.

No man is an island, Senator Paul. Including you.

I think some libertarians’ blindness to the social underpinnings of individual freedom does them a disservice. Perhaps America’s newness allowed the forgetfulness. But England’s conservative tradition cannot forget. Which is why, in the grand sweep of Tory history, Thatcher was the exception – a particularly strong strain of Whiggery in the Conservative elixir.

The NYT recently ran an op-ed by author Scott Turow bemoaning both the recent decision to allow resale of foreign editions as well as the overall effect of e-books on the publishing industry. Mike Masnick is unimpressed:

[T]he idea of a literary culture at risk is laughable. More books are being published today than ever before. More people are reading books today than ever before. More people are writing books than ever before. Books that would never have been published in the past are regularly published today. There is an astounding wealth of cultural diversity in the literary world.

Sure, some of it means a lot more competition for the small group of authors (only about 8,000 or so) that Turow represents… oh wait, I think we’ve perhaps touched on the reason that Turow is all upset by this. But, of course, more competition for that small group of authors does not mean the culture of books and literature is at risk at all. Quite the opposite.

Alison Baverstock, meanwhile, argues that “self-publishing brings happiness”:

Publishers have long assumed that only if nearing professional standards could a self-published product bring any satisfaction. My research has revealed the opposite. It seems self-publishers approach the process confidently, are well-informed, and aware of how much the process will cost and how long it is likely to take. They emerge both keen to do it again and likely to recommend it to others. Finalising a project you have long planned feels good, and the process builds in the possibility of future discoverability – whether that is in an attic (whenever the family decides they are mature enough to want to know), or by ISBN from within the British Library. Self-publishing as a legacy – should we really be so surprised at its growing popularity?