A gay man's view on Hillary's Nancy Reagan/AIDS comments

[Warren DeMontague]

93. Maybe, or maybe we as a species have outgrown certain concepts

which were better suited to our brains when we thought the sun was a magic ball in the sky.

Or, to put it another way; you wouldn't buy a brand new computer and load it up with Windows 95. It would be ridiculous to try and run 20 year old software on a modern machine and expect good results. But people walk around trying to comprehend the reality of 2016 using semantic maps that were put together 1400, 2000 years ago, or longer. And the results are frequently obvious.

Hell, even our legal and governmental structures are proving woefully inadequate to address modern realities; the FBI is currently attempting to rely on laws from the 70s all the way back to the late 1800s, to address their fight with apple over encryption. We often see people- even some self-identified "progressives"- in a perpetual state of temper tantrum because HBO shows full frontal nudity, that sort of thing.

I am of the opinion that particularly as technology advances at an exponential rate, what is needed more than ever are open source, open-ended, belief systems or meta belief systems, to address the, for lack of a better word, non-euclidian levels of complexity that comprise the data streams we are encountering in the 21st century. Catmas, as the Discordians call them, as opposed to Dogmas.

(It is interesting, as a digression from this digression, that Bill Wilson- again, for all his many flaws- did manage to create in the structure of alcoholics anonymous a very durable, perfect in many ways, model for a decentralized, anarchist bottom-up anti-organization, which contributes mightily IMHO to the durability of the idea and the program. While one can take issue with the steps, the traditions are pretty objectively impressive from that perspective)

But I disagree, I think actual education and information is somewhat incompatible with these sorts of oversimplified bumpersticker aphorisms. Like "abstinence only" versus teaching about STDs and contraception, the approaches are not easily munged together.

I do believe that young minds should develop organically, and that would include avoiding mind-alterants (many of which our young people are inundated with by big pharma, like ritalin) until the brain has sort of figured out where it sits as a baseline and the personality has gelled to a certain extent. "Just say no" as one piece of advice isn't inherently bad in this regard, but again, I do think that an intellectual approach to the issue of "drugs" and education thereof would include as I said upthread, acknowledgement that all drugs and all users and all relationships between the two are not the same.

Hell, we can acknowledge that a glass of wine is occasionally healthy for some people, while also realizing that alcoholism is a deadly nightmare for others. Similarly, it is inane to pretend that something like cannabis isn't only "not bad" but can be downright beneficial for some people, in terms of creativity and other enrichment.