Arnold Schwarzenegger: Muscle size directly related to his political leanings

An interesting study from Denmark has shown that upper body strength in men is a pretty good indicator of their political leanings. Stronger men are apparently more likely to be right wing, while weaker men tend to lean left. From the Daily Mail:

Men who are strong are more likely to take a right-wing stance, while weaker men support the welfare state, researchers claim.

Their study discovered a link between a man’s upper-body strength and their political views.

Scientists from Aarhus University in Denmark collected data on bicep size, socio-economic status and support for economic redistribution from hundreds in America, Argentina and Denmark.

The figures revealed that men with higher upper-body strength were less likely to support left-wing policies on the redistribution of wealth. 

Men with less upper body strength are more likely to support the welfare state – like Labour leader Ed Miliband

But men with low upper-body strength were more likely to put their own self-interest aside and support a welfare state.

The researchers found no link between upper-body strength and redistribution opinions among women.

Professor Michael Petersen said: ‘In all three countries, physically strong males consistently pursued the self-interested position on redistribution.

‘However physically weak males were more reluctant to assert their self-interest – just as if disputes over national policies were a matter of direct physical confrontation between individuals.’

It’s a good reminder that political beliefs are as much a product of human evolution as anything else, and not some abstract concept based on anything that transcends nature. It makes sense that those most able to provide for themselves in early human societies would believe that individuality trumps all, and those least able would believe in a more mutualistic approach. Both are selfish in the long run they are about long term survival – it just boils down to whether you think you can make it better alone or in a group.

Given strength doesn’t effect women’s political leanings, perhaps it’s a good idea to let them make the decisions. After all, an ability to do pull ups isn’t exactly the best predictor of good decision making.

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If you haven’t already read it, check out Kojo Koram’s excellent piece on the mythology behind collective debt. In it, Kojo argues that the concept of debt is ruthlessly used by those in power to maintain and solidify a massively stratified social structure based on ever widening wealth inequality. Once you understand how debt is used to control people, it gets harder and harder to justify the policies being foisted upon us by our political leaders. Yet advocates of austerity continue to justify it based on math that supposedly shows cuts  = growth during a recession somewhere down the line. However, actual statistics show the inverse is true. Just take a look at these shocking charts from the National Statistics Institute displaying Spain’s unemployment figures over the past 8 years. Spain has adopted strict austerity measures year after year to avert the crisis, yet the catastrophe is compounding to the point of utter disaster (h/t the Atlantic).

The first  looks at total unemployment:

And the second at how long people are remaining out of work:

The purple line showing people who have been out of work for over 2 years is scary beyond belief.

If this doesn’t KO the philosophy of austerity, it’s unclear what will.

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Bush and Rove: Tweedledumb and Tweedledick

Continuing in the longheld GOP tradition of making shit up, Karl Rove has come out swinging to defend George W. Bush’s legacy as President. In a wide ranging interview, he made the following claims on an ABC interview:

1. “He kept us safe after 9/11,”

2. “He moved to modernize our tools, provide the tools to fight terror, he called terror for what it was”

3. “He tackled the big issues of trying to reform Social Security, Medicare, immigration, education,”

4. “The Iraq War was the right thing to do and the world is a safer place for having Saddam Hussein gone,”

5. “The greats, you can’t touch: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Ronald Reagan, FDR, the greats. But yeah, I’d put him up there,”

Tearing this nonsense apart isn’t particularly difficult, because, well, everyone reading this experienced the Bush years for themselves. The man only left office five years ago, and much of the world is still recovering from the monumental fuck ups he and his gang of lunatics wrought while in office.

Let’s take Rove’s claims one by one and match the fiction with the reality.

1. “He kept us safe after 9/11″

First of all, he didn’t exactly do a great job of keeping the nation safe before 9/11, when it actually mattered. It is well documented that Bush ignored many credible warnings that Al-Qaeda was planning an attack on American soil and did next to nothing to investigate them. He then attacked the wrong country afterwards and let the country fall apart under his disastrous management. As a result, authoritative studies have shown that the threat of terrorism increased by 700%. Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank
Research fellows at the Center on Law and Security at the NYU School of Law, note that:

“As The administration’s own National Intelligence Estimate on “Trends in Global Terrorism: implications for the United States,” circulated within the government in April 2006 and partially declassified in October, states that “the Iraq War has become the ’cause celebre’ for jihadists…and is shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives.”

2. “He moved to modernize our tools, provide the tools to fight terror, he called terror for what it was”

If by modernized our tools, Rove means the unprecedented expansion of the security state and the use of torture, then he’s kind of right. As for calling terror what it was, Bush essentially ushered in a war against a military tactic – about as useful as declaring a ‘War on Reconnaissance Missions’.

3. “He tackled the big issues of trying to reform Social Security, Medicare, immigration, education,”

Despite Bush’s best efforts to privatize Social Security (ie. dismantle it), he had no luck, and the popular government program remains intact. On medicare, Bush introduced a baffling, ludicrously expensive bill (Medicare Part D) that was essentially a giant giveaway to the pharmaceutical industry and added trillions of dollars to the deficit. As for immigration, Bush was reasonably pro immigrant, but then that’s because he saw immigrants as a giant source of cheap labor for beloved corporations. On education, Bush’s ‘No Child Left Behind’ policy was about as successful as the post war occupation of Iraq. As Diane Ravich at The Daily Beast wrote:

NCLB [No Child Left Behind] is the worst federal education law ever passed. About half of all public schools in the nation have been stigmatized as “failing” because they couldn’t meet its utopian mandates, and the proportion is certain to grow every year. In Massachusetts, the nation’s highest performing state, 81 percent of the state’s schools are officially “failing” by the standards of NCLB. No national legislature in history has ever designed a law that resulted in the shaming of most of its public schools.

4. “The Iraq War was the right thing to do and the world is a safer place for having Saddam Hussein gone”

Consider this when thinking about the war in Iraq:

More than a million deaths and millions more wounded with varying lifelong disabilities, including thousands of tortured prisoners, with an estimated 16,000 of them still unaccounted for. Twenty-eight percent of Iraqi children suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, and 2.8 million people are still internally displaced or living as refugees outside the country.

Add to that the complete upheaval of the Iraqi economy, as well as its transportation, education and medical institutions….the countless people suffering from trauma and depression, sectarian strife, terrifying birth defects from toxic pollution, and a brain drain that has left the country illiterate.

Forget the fact that the war was illegal, unnecessary, stupendously expensive, and incomprehensibly badly executed, it also left a power vacuum for Iran to fill, making it the biggest power in the Arab world and direct threat to US/Israeli hegemony in the region. Iraq is now an open breeding ground for terrorists and is decades away from serious stability.

5. “The greats, you can’t touch: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Ronald Reagan, FDR, the greats. But yeah, I’d put him up there”

If think that allowing the biggest domestic terror attack ever to happen under your watch, invading two countries with no post war plan, trashing America’s image around the world, increasing the threat of terrorism, gutting the government to the point of no return, massively expanding the debt, creating unprecedented levels of wealth inequality and poverty and wrecking the global economy makes you a great President, then yes, Rove is right on the money.

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Celebrating Thatcher’s death: Not good for your karma

There’s a big hullabaloo going on in Britain about Margaret Thatcher’s death and the subsequent celebrations in pockets around the nation.

In Glasgow’s George Square (where protest about Thatcher’s poll tax took place in 1989), hundreds of people gathered wearing hats, opened champagne, and launched streamers to mark her death. In Brixton, London (the scene of massive rioting in 1981) over 150 gathered for an impromptu street party after it was announced on Facebook. Bristol, Liverpool, Leeds and numerous other cities saw people handing out cake and chanting songs like “If you still hate Thatcher clap your hands!”:

The celebrations extended beyond Britain’s borders –  in South Africa, where resentment of Thatcher’s support of the Apartheid government still simmers, political figures expressed happiness at her passing. The Huff Post reported:

Pallo Jordan, a once-exiled ANC leader, was more direct. He told the Guardian: “Good riddance.”

“I’ve just sent a letter of congratulations,” Jordan said. “I say good riddance. She was a staunch supporter of the apartheid regime. She was part of the right wing alliance with Ronald Reagan that led to a lot of avoidable deaths.”

The joyous reactions to Thatcher’s death have been met with stern responses from her fans, and much of the political establishment.

Speaking on BBC Radio Ulster, former Prime Minister Tony Blair said that the celebrations of Baroness Thatcher’s death were not acceptable, saying, ”Even if you disagree with someone very strongly, you can still particularly at the moment of their passing, you should show some respect.”

Wrote Janet Daley in the conservative Telegraph:

Isn’t it about time we stopped devoting ridiculously disproportionate amounts of news coverage to the handful (and I do mean handful, in proportion to the national population) of youthful idiots and embittered misfits who are “celebrating” the death of the greatest peacetime British prime minister?

So what is the answer? Is it ok to celebrate someone’s death if you believe they caused you, your family or your country unnecessary pain?

I wrote about Thatcher’s tragic legacy yesterday, so don’t think it’s necessary to rehash the specifics. It is suffice to say that through her policies, Thatcher caused an immense amount of damage to large sectors of the British population (and of course abroad in places like South Africa). Britain is a fundamentally different place due to the radical measures she took to deregulate and privatize the economy, and as a result, it is almost irreversibly polarized and unequal. Miners lost their livelihoods, child poverty increased dramatically and workers rights were flushed down the toilet. Thatcher’s policies wrecked lives, and the anger is entirely understandable.

But to take to the streets, sing songs and break out champagne takes that anger to a completely new place, and it’s not somewhere I’d personally like to go.

I don’t wish to lecture anyone celebrating her death – my family wasn’t negatively affected by the Thatcher years (the opposite), so I can only try to empathize with those whose lives were ruined. I can only express my own feelings on the matter and hope that it may provoke some more nuanced debate on the topic.

There are some truly monstrous characters whose deaths are ultimately a good thing. I would personally pull the trigger on many brutal dictators throughout history – Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot, Josef Stalin, and so on. But these would not be joyous events, just a moral necessity to stop unnecessary carnage and human misery. When the US military took out Osama Bin Laden, it was I believe, ultimately a good thing. I was pleased a genocidal maniac was dead, but not over joyed. I couldn’t really get my head around the celebrations going on around the country – it seemed slightly sadistic and grotesque to be cheering for the pain caused to another human being, no matter how evil they were. If you’ve ever been around real violence or death, it isn’t pleasant, and only people with psychological problems want more of it.

I think it is justified in saying that Thatcher’s presence in British politics caused a lot more damage than good, and her departure from government was of huge benefit to the public. You can be pleased that she is no longer around to do any harm (she hasn’t actually done anything in 23 years), but to celebrate her death is to celebrate someone’s pain and suffering, and that can’t be a good thing.

Martin McGuinness Sinn Fein’s Deputy First Minister at the Northern Ireland Assembly, and long time Thatcher nemesis said it best, tweeting out: “Resist celebrating the death of Margaret Thatcher. She was not a peacemaker but it is a mistake to allow her death to poison our minds.”

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Ann Coulter: One big act (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Numerous high profile sites have given Ann Coulter’s latest offensive remarks about the President some serious press attention. Coulter referred to the President as a ‘retard’, inciting a huge backlash from the press, discerning liberals and disabled rights campaigners. The Huff Post had a discussion based on it on their TV channel, and she’s been all over CNN, ABC and most of the blogosphere.

All well and good. Coulter’s remarks were incredibly offensive and everyone attacking her is entirely justified.

However, I’m not entirely sure why anyone cares what Ann Coulter has to say about, well, anything.

It’s pretty well known that Coulter is a complete fraud who goes out of her way to offend everyone in order to get press attention. She’s well aware that her blond hair, skinny figure and big mouth get her media gigs, and she has made a nice living riling up liberals for the best part of two decades. The bolder her statements, the more attention she gets, and as her star power fades she has to keep upping the ante.

Coulter is basically irrelevant as a media figure, as shown by her increasingly offensive rhetoric. She has made the news cycle this week, but will be consigned to appearances on Glenn Beck’s radio show for months after this until she finds another way to irritate liberals. The problem is, the formula will only work for so long. The more offensive she is, the more attention she gets in the short term but the more inconsequential she becomes in the long term.

I’m not going to respond to Coulter’s statement about the President for two reasons. Firstly because whatever she says is self evidently stupid, and secondly, she’s a no one.

The sooner the media starts treating her that way the sooner she’ll fade away. She’s doing a pretty good job herself, but it wouldn’t hurt to speed up the process.

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As much as Glenn Greenwald irritates me, his scathing break down of the US Presidential elections is right on the money:

The reason I write so little about the presidential election is that it’s the ultimate expression of the CNN-ization of American politics: a tawdry, uber-contrived reality show that has less to do with political reality than the average rant one hears at any randomly chosen corner bar or family dinner. That does not mean the outcome is irrelevant, only that the process is suffocatingly dumb and deceitful, generating the desire to turn away and hope that it’s over as quickly as possible….

Strong and rational though it may be, the temptation to ignore entirely the election year spectacle should be resisted. Despite its shallow and manipulative qualities – or, more accurately, because of them – this process has some serious repercussions for American political life.

The election process is where American politicians go to be venerated and glorified, all based on trivial personality attributes that have zero relationship to what they do with their power, but which, by design, convinces Americans that they’re blessed to be led by people with such noble and sterling character, no matter how much those political figures shaft them.

Part of me feels ashamed to write endlessly about the horse race that pits the leaders of two corrupt political parties against each other in what mostly resembles a fashion show, and I agree with Greenwald about it’s increasing irrelevance to reality. What Obama and Romney say on the campaign trail does not correlate to action when in office – the relentless sound bytes are repeated only to attract particular demographics, not as a precursor to actual policy.

However, the seriousness of the outcome is enough to keep me going – every election cycle is another opportunity for disaster, with the Democratic Party being the only bloc of power left to prevent the disintegration of government and the potential for more disastrous war in the Middle East. I would love to write about the intricacies of policy difference between the two parties, the nuances in their proposed foreign policy, and the ins and outs of their economic agenda. But the sad truth is that while one side is still engaged with reality, the other exists in cuckoo land where simple things like adding up are ignored, and evidence dismissed as conspiracy. I occasionally sift through Republican policy proposals, but they are so ridiculous they are never worth taking seriously.

The main stream media has no interest in objective reporting or facts, and yes it is slowly but surely aiding the destruction of the democratic process. These are all huge problems that deserve our attention. But right now, keeping the Right out of power should be priority number one, and for that reason, I’m going to keep writing about the elections, no matter how maddening it is.

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Don't celebrate too soon, the fights not over by a long way.

By Chez Pazienza: Hungover from all that celebrating in the wake of yesterday’s Supreme Court decision on the Affordable Care Act? Well, with the cold light of a new day, hopefully, comes the realization that this little victory doesn’t in any way mean that the overall battle is over when it comes to trying to provide Americans with health care that won’t either leave them to die or just kill them with bills.

It took all of about five minutes for the right to completely lose its collective shit over the high court’s ruling and what’s important to keep in mind going forward is that — in keeping with tradition — Republicans absolutely will not let it stand and will never let it go. Get ready for weeks, months and years of attempts to repeal the ACA outright or clever back-door legislative tricks aimed at whittling away at it piece by piece; the over-the-top, drama queenie rhetoric from the usual Republican mouthpieces all but confirms this.

Take, for example, the words of douchey Breitbart non-journalist Ben Shapiro, who tweeted that the Supreme Court’s decision not to strike down a measure that attempts to guarantee affordable health care for millions of people represents, literally, “the end of America as we know it.” Or maybe Representative Todd Akin of Missouri, who calls the ACA a “crushing blow to freedom.” Or former Michigan GOP spokesman Matt Davis, who fired off an e-mail wondering aloud if “armed rebellion” was now justified in the wake of the ruling. Or libertarian Christ child Rand Paul, who didn’t even bother disagreeing with the decision but instead went right to dismissing it as unconstitutional, regardless of what the highest court in the land had to say.

It was Paul’s reaction that was both especially irksome and not the least bit surprising, mostly because it so perfectly summed up the entire right-wing mindset and illustrates where their blind outrage comes from and how it will continue to manifest itself. It’s all there: the complete ignorance as to how our government works; the arrogant belief that any reality that challenges conservative demands, be it a decision by the voters or the Supreme Court, can be casually dismissed as illegitimate; the unwavering obstinacy and vow to fight on no matter how many times they’re told that they can’t have it their way. This is the kind of thinking and behavior we’ve come to expect from the modern Republican party: From their willingness to hold the entire country hostage in what should have been an entirely routine and apolitical debate over the debt ceiling, to the insane conspiracy theories they concoct or enable to demonize Barack Obama as an impostor whose presidency isn’t legally valid, to their insistence in fighting and refighting battles they lost decades ago, today’s Republicans simply refuse to take no for an answer.

What’s more, their go-to tactic for getting their demands met involves behaving like your average six-year-old: they stick their fingers in their ears, then stomp and scream in the hope that we’ll all relent just to get a little peace and quiet, that we’ll ultimately value our sanity more than our political ideals.

This is what we have to look forward to in the health care battle — and yes, it’s still a battle. We may have won a skirmish, but for conservatives the larger war remains and will always be waged. This fight isn’t over for them. It will never be. Not until they’re satisfied on this issue and every other one and until they’re given back complete control of our government. This is simply the way the Republicans are these days. Give them what they want and no one gets hurt. A complete refusal to accept any way other than their own — anyone other than themselves — as legitimate. Screw the will of the people, the good of the country, or the rule of law — none of that can even be present when the GOP isn’t in charge or isn’t getting what it wants.

The only hope for progress is to be as ruthless, relentless and cunning as they are. Because they’re not going to give up on this or anything else they petulantly demand.

This fight is just starting for them. As they say, an elephant never forgets.

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Greenwald a master of shooting himself in the foot

By Chez Pazienza: So over the past week this site has turned into the “Let’s Take a Few Shots at Glenn Greenwald” show, with two of its highest-profile columnists — Banter founder Ben Cohen and blogging machine Bob Cesca — penning pieces that take issue with Greenwald’s smugness and intransigence in the face of political reality. One of the essays that started it all actually quoted something I’d written months ago, but I’ve been loathe to step into the fray myself around here simply because these days I honestly regard Glenn Greenwald as a nonentity, having come to the conclusion quite a while back that the less I think about Greenwald’s insufferable sanctimony and ongoing propensity for childish tantrum-throwing, the better. I genuinely don’t read what he writes at all anymore; I see the headlines over at Salon, know in short order exactly what he’s going to say before he even says it, chuckle and shake my head for a second, then move on to something more informative, balanced and worth taking seriously.

With that in mind, though, I do think there’s one thing worth addressing when it comes to the discussion of Greenwald. It’s something I’ve noticed all week, something I’m frankly tired of seeing: I’d like to know why anyone feels as if he or she needs to go through the requisite genuflection procedure before spelling out just how worthless Greenwald is as a voice for smart progressive politics. I obviously don’t mean to insult either Ben or Bob, because I believe their overall appreciation for Greenwald’s work to be sincere, but it does seem as if any criticism of Greenwald from the left has to be tempered with the disclaimer that he’s an intelligent guy who often does good work that’s deserving of consideration and praise. In other words, to crib an old bit from comic Dom Irrera, it seems like anytime someone on the left decides to take on Greenwald, that person has to begin with the obligatory, needlessly deferential and often laughably full-of-shit, “With all due respect…”

Well, as it turns out I don’t do that. And that’s because I’m more than happy to admit that I have no respect at all for Greenwald. Not anymore.

I actually have spelled out in the past, in semi-articulate fashion I hope, just a few of the reasons that I think his relentless fusillade of self-righteous indignation aimed at the Obama administration amounts to little more than white noise and disqualifies his opinion from serious, continued attention by anyone interested in the promotion of a progressive agenda in this country. Greenwald’s ongoing love affair with four or five subjects, at the exclusion of almost anything and everything else, has become, if you’ll pardon the pun, a dull “drone” at the periphery of intelligent political debate. No one’s arguing that the White House under Barack Obama has and hasn’t done quite a few things worthy of criticism and even outright denunciation, but to hector this presidency without compromise or the consideration of any dissenting argument, to equate it wholesale with the administration of George W. Bush or the potential administration of Republican President X, and to condescendingly ridicule anyone who dares to defend Obama as some sort of “cultist” or intellectually dishonest automaton — that makes you nothing more than a fringe element whose opinions will never make a bit of difference in the overall political discourse because you offer zero room for the possibility that you’re wrong. It’s one thing to stick by your ideals — it’s quite another to arrogantly believe that you’re Horatius at the Bridge and to blithely dismiss those not willing to stand on that bridge with you.

The main issue for me comes down to this bit of hypocritical dissonance: Greenwald once wrote a lengthy piece questioning President Obama’s progressive bona fides, in essence claiming that he had none, that he wasn’t really a liberal thinker and therefore no one on the left should approach his presidency with the assumption that he has their best interests at heart. First of all, this is a nonsensical thing to say by any objective measure, given that while Obama has indeed made decisions that reflect centrist and even conservative politics on occasion, he’s taken progressive positions across a wide range of subjects and has pushed through or attempted to push through liberal legislation as a matter of policy more so than just about any other president in a half-century.

But more than that, I’d argue that it’s Glenn Greenwald who doesn’t truly care about progressive politics — certainly not more than he cares about, well, Glenn Greenwald and the absolute satisfaction he demands on his pet issues. He speaks out, always in an almost inhumanly detached and Aspergerian fashion, not as someone who wants to see real-world liberal politics succeed and flourish in the United States but as someone who wants his personal utopian ideals catered to in the manner he feels he deserves. He figuratively and somewhat literally — if you take into account the fact that he lives as an expatriate a good portion of the time — offers the “view from nowhere” in his diatribes. Not only are his opinions divorced from modern political reality in this country, he’s throwing rocks at a house he chooses not to live in and therefore there are no negative consequences to his actions. He can look from on-high and pass judgment, piously casting himself as ethical journalism’s Last Man Standing, because in the end he won’t have to live with the disaster that would be the alternative to the Obama administration coming to power in November.

Politics is about compromise and, as much as you or I would like it to be otherwise, that’s always going to be the case. While this president has done plenty of things I vehemently disagree with, I understand that if you’re looking to see progressive political policy pushed by the White House he is the absolute best you’re going to do in a country that’s made up of as many conservatives as there are liberals. Demanding accountability is always a necessity — but constant vilification accomplishes nothing other than doing the job of Republican strategists for them. And that matters if the debate isn’t merely an academic one for you — a lot of pseudo-intellectual masturbation — and if you’ve actually got something to lose. If you live in a world where political reality is a consideration for you. But again, Greenwald isn’t on anyone’s side but his own and his only consideration is what he personally believes is right — and if something infinitely worse and more unjust comes from relentlessly voicing that intractable belief system and patronizing anyone who offers a contradictory argument, so be it.

A smart and potentially powerful voice for the advancement of progressive policy and against the frightening reality of Tea Party-era conservatism is instead content to settle for dispensing town crier-style shtick on a handful of subjects — evil drones, Bradley Manning as a martyr, Assange as a saint, al-Awlaki as an innocent victim of imperial murder — and to make a really nice little career for himself doing it it. This is what makes it so easy to simply shrug off Greenwald’s pedantic ranting. Which is what anyone interested in keeping this country from going to total shit should be doing.

Oh, by the way, Greenwald supported George W. Bush’s invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq, then had the balls to turn around a couple of years later and punch way above his intellectual weight class by calling Christopher Hitchens a “war monger” for having done the same.

Tell me I need to take him seriously.

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The right to smoke weed - really as important as civil rights?

By Chez Pazienza: You know, at some point I want this little debate over “Marijuana the Amazing Wonder Drug®” to be over, I really do; the thing’s been going on in one form or another for about two months now. But I guess I can’t complain that I cross-posted the original Daily Banter piece on pot culture that I banged out a couple of months ago over at the Huffington Post and now the floodgates have opened. (If nothing else I hope it helps to bring attention to the good work being done here at the Banter.)

First of all, a discussion has been going full-bore on my Facebook page over the merits of marijuana and the question of whether I really have an issue with the substance itself or just the hardcore proponents of it. On that point, I’m more than willing to say, as I thought I made pretty clear in the piece, that yes, the argument I was making was aimed much more at those who seem to professionally smoke pot and who’ve made their lives about lobbying for marijuana legalization, making it not only their, well, “highest” priority when it comes time to cast a vote but an integral part of who they are as a person.

I said right off the bat at HuffPo that, with all the problems currently facing this country and within our government, if you’re basing your vote for a candidate solely on whether that person is for the legalization of marijuana, you’re a fucking moron. And anyone with a functional cerebral cortex, high or not, would tell you that. A fanatic of almost any kind is a dangerous thing if for no other reason than the fact that he or she suffers from tunnel vision, but in this case — even with the governmental fight against marijuana being grossly unfair and unnecessary — it’s not only dangerous but flat-out stupid. Pot legalization simply isn’t all that important in a relative sense. You can argue with this all you want — you’ll be wrong.

While there are certainly those who claim that it relieves the pain of chemo, arthritis, and so on, for the vast majority of Americans who do it, smoking weed is a luxury — not a necessity. It’s done because they like the way it feels, which was my point to begin with.

On that note, the best response I’ve gotten so far has been from someone named “Radical” Russ Belville, who apparently hosts a series of multimedia shows out of Portland (because, of course) and who’s been a star in the pot legalization movement for some time, first working with NORML then kind of going out on his own, but always preaching the gospel of weed. Seems like a nice enough guy, and I certainly respect his willingness to argue for an issue he’s passionate about even if I happen to think it’s an issue that isn’t all that important in the grand scheme of things. The lengthy piece he penned as a direct rebuttal to my own, however, is comically melodramatic and occasionally so willing to conflate the legal fight for marijuana acceptance with other, infinitely more critical struggles throughout history that it borders on being offensive.

Let’s let Russ himself give you an example of what I’m talking about, via two related quotes from his blog post:

“It seems to me that marijuana legalization is the only civil rights issue in America where it is still acceptable to mock the oppressed by questioning the selfish motives of those fighting for equality.

“OK, Chez, you got me –- I like to smoke pot and I don’t want to be put in a cage over it. You’re right, my motivation is extremely personal. Kind of like how a black man marching with Dr. King in the early 1960′s probably had a very personal motivation to not be firehosed, attacked by police dogs, or lynched by rednecks. Kind of like how a gay man protesting in the 1980′s probably had a very personal motivation to not die from HIV while a president ignored an epidemic.”

Now, Russ does go on to make the argument that each person should have the right to his or her own “consciousness” and to be allowed to do whatever he or she wants to with it. Very fair point. But to call marijuana legalization a civil rights issue is a laughable conceit; to compare it to the fight for African-American rights in this country, or gay rights, or the rights of women to be the people they were born as and be granted equal acceptance is fucking ridiculous. You don’t have a right to get high; getting high is a choice you make and not all choices you make are going to be legal, nor should they be. A black person can’t change the color of his or her skin and a gay person can’t become heterosexual, regardless of what some asshole Christians think, and therefore neither should ever be persecuted for those qualities about themselves. They have a right to exist; they haven’t made a choice that would warrant discrimination.

In other words, maybe in your mind you do have a right to get high — but don’t ever think it’s an honest-to-Christ civil right, on par with the civil rights so many have risked their lives to defend throughout history. I realize that some will consider this argument nothing more than a matter of semantics, but when you put your desire to get high — admittedly without fear of arrest and prosecution — up against the right of a black guy not to be killed for the color of his skin, I tend to instantly take you a hell of a lot less seriously.

Again, I sincerely understand where Russ is coming from and he is of course completely entitled to his opinion and to advocate for it; I just happen not to think, in spite of what I’ll freely admit is a lot of unfairness and injustice associated with the U.S.’s drug war, which I mentioned openly in the original piece, that overall the fight to legalize marijuana should by any stretch of the imagination be the singular priority anyone’s hanging his or her vote on at the moment. You wanna smoke your shit openly and you think marijuana can be a blessing to humanity in myriad ways? Fantastic. You wanna make it your life’s work, an all-encompassing crusade that you insist is one of the most important issues facing our country during these tumultuous times? You really are high.

And that was always my point.

By the way, the picture of himself that Russ posted within his piece shows him wearing a Kangol with a pot leaf on it and smoking a blunt the size of a whiffle ball bat.

And with that, we roll credits.

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The Atlantic has a great piece on the very lucrative side industry of Presidential politics where candidates turn failure into a media career. The best (and worst) examples:

Pat Robertson (1988): His Christian Broadcasting Network and its flagship show, The 700 Club, had been on the air for decades when he launched his surprisingly strong, though ultimately doomed, Republican challenge. (He did finish second in Iowa.) Still, a few months on the campaign trail is always good for ratings and way less messy than blaming natural disasters on devil worship.

David Duke (1998, 1992): Duke actually ran as both a Republican and a Democrat, and while his previous job (as Grand Wizard of the Klu Klux Klan) will forever make him toxic to mainstream TV and radio, he’s made a nice living selling books about Jewish conspiracies and can still occasionally be called upon for a convenient (if racist) quote.

Pat Buchanan (1992, 2000):  After working in two Republican White Houses and starring as a featured player on the pioneering partisan yell-fests CNN’s Crossfire and The McLaughlin Group, Buchanan was a consummate Washington figure, but not very well-known of outside the Beltway. That changed with his first presidential run in 1992, which ended in failure, but led to a fiery convention speech — that introduced America to the phrase “culture war” — and earned him a reputation as one of the more outrageous and unpredictable Republican voices. After his second run in 2002, Buchanan got his own show on MSNBC and even after it was canceled he remained a semi-permanent talking head on the network… before he got fired earlier this year.

Alan Keyes (1996, 2000, 2008): A former diplomat and three-time presidential (and three-time Senate) loser, Keyes also scored his own MSNBC show in 2002, though it was quickly canceled due to poor ratings.

While Pat Robertson isn’t exactly brain of America, one would think that he’s intelligent enough to know he doesn’t have it in him to be President of the United States. And if that’s true, you really have to question the motivation of candidates like him. Do they really believe in helping the country, or are they just looking for a TV show? Hermain Cain is probably the best example thus far of a candidate with clear ulterior motives. Sadly, he may have set a dangerous precedent and opened the flood gate for even more idiotic candidates looking for book deals and shows on Fox.

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