You Are Not the Reason There is Plastic in the Ocean

 

    You've no doubt heard before that a large part of the ocean is covered with massive, floating mountains of plastic trash. Implied or expressly stated is the idea that you, Western Consumer, are the cause of this, and that if only you had quit your nasty, shameful habit of using plastic straws, bottles, and grocery bags, none of this ever would have happened, so it's up to you to save the world by immediately swearing off plastic and supporting the passage of laws that would impose criminal penalties on other people for continuing to use the plastics that you've been told to hate.

Sound familiar? It's bullshit.

There are, in fact, huge, floating piles of plastic garbage. But that's where the truth of it stops. According to Qatica, an organization dedicated to cleaning up the oceans and recycling the plastic gathered from them, approximately 1.5 billion pounds of trash (it doesn't say all of it is plastic, just trash) is dumped in the ocean each year, and nearly half of that trash is commercial fishing nets.

There's more, but let's just get a quick perspective check. I want you to do a quick, mental inventory of all the single-use plastic you've used in the past week. Every milk jug, every bag of frozen vegetables, every cracker wrapper, every fast food beverage cup, every coffee can lid, every plastic film or price tag or blister pack, every Band-aid or plastic-handled cotton swab--tally it all up. And don't forget the plastics that might seem like they're not plastic. Maybe your kid's gummy fruit treats came in a "foil" bag. That's plastic. The milk he's served at school? That little cardboard milk carton is coated in plastic to make it waterproof. The fresh vegetables that you very conscientiously placed in your cloth shopping bag at the grocery store? They were shipped to the grocery in a box that was either made entirely of plastic or, more likely, cardboard coated with plastic.

Okay, so you've got a mental image of all that throw-away plastic you used this past week? Good. Now...how much ocean-caught seafood did you eat in that same period of time? Did you eat any seafood last week? Maybe a can of tuna in a salad or casserole one time? Or maybe there was a fish sandwich from McDonald's? If you eat fish every day, especially if you don't live on the coasts and didn't catch it yourself, that's very unusual for an American. Most Americans' animal protein comes from chicken, beef, pork, cow milk (including cheese), and turkey. Fish and shrimp come in far behind those. Lamb is practically exotic these days, and many of you may have never even had goat, rabbit, or duck, let alone venison, bison, snake, gator tail, etc. It's a fair bet that none of you have ever eaten whale, horse, or monkey. We Americans eat chickens, mostly, followed by cows, pigs, and turkeys. Fish is a once-in-a-while thing for most of us who aren't on the coasts.

Now try to resolve these two facts. You used the amount of plastic that you tallied up, and you almost never eat fish, yet half of the trash--more than half of the plastic--in the world's oceans is fishing nets. How does that make sense?

It's not about you. You didn't put that garbage there, just like you didn't put those fishing nets there. I mean, yeah, when you went to Red Lobster for Mother's Day, you contributed a little bit. But think about how much disposable plastic you've used since then, versus how much fish you've used since then. Who's eating all this fish?

This shouldn't be shocking, but surprisingly, it seems to never cross the minds of many activists who want to ban plastic straws or grocery bags in the U.S.--the amount of plastic in the ocean is not an indicator of how much plastic we're using. It's an indicator of how much plastic is being used by people who dump their trash in the ocean. Who is that? You?

Did you think that every grocery bag and straw you don't recycle somehow blows out of the bin like a tumbleweed and turns into the little canoe from Paddle to the Sea? 

No, if you aren't a disgusting litterbug, and you don't recycle your plastics, then chances are, like most people, you put them in your garbage, which is picked up once a week and hauled off to the local landfill, where it is entombed in an insanely watertight, airtight, light-proof, underground vault to be discovered a thousand years from now, probably in the same condition, by future archaeologists or miners. We don't ship it to the coast with instructions to dump it into the water.

So who's putting all this junk in the water?

Well, prior to 1972, everybody was, at least along the coasts and rivers. And it wasn't just household garbage. Industrial wastes, raw sewage, and radioactive wastes were all dumped straight into the ocean like it had a big sign on it that said, "AWAY." Then, 51 years ago, 87 countries got together and signed an agreement called the Convention on the Prevention of Marine Pollution by Dumping of Wastes and Other Matter 1972 (more commonly known simply as "the London Convention"). It prohibited the dumping of certain wastes into the ocean, and regulated the dumping of some others. Eighty-seven. The number of countries that border the ocean is 133. That means 46 countries with coasts never signed this thing. It was updated in 1996 in what is referred to as "the London Protocol." Only 53 countries joined in on that, and it didn't even go into effect until ten years later, in 2006.

Most of the countries dumping most of the waste into the ocean--including the fishing nets--are in Asia. A law passed in Ohio prohibiting plastic grocery bags will be no more effective at getting Filipinos to quit throwing their garbage into their rivers than it will be at getting the Japanese to quit eating whales. It certainly won't prevent any Asian ships from chucking their garbage overboard while they're out in the middle of nowhere.

So am I telling you not to reduce your plastic waste? No. Conservation is a good thing. Most of that stuff is made from oil, and you already know the harm that comes from that--whether direct pollution from getting it out of the ground and refining it, or the lives and limbs lost in the wars fought to secure access to it. The less of it you choose to use, the better. Reduce, reuse, recycle. But don't go drafting legislation based on the idea that whether an Ohioan uses a plastic straw or not is a fight to the death for the survival of our planet's oceans, and that it justifies expanding our criminal justice system any further.

Nimona is not appropriate for kids...but not for the reason you think

Last night, I opened Netflix and was looking for something to watch. My 13-year-old daughter said there was a movie she wanted to see. In her words, "It's an animated movie about a castle guard who gets falsely accused of a crime and a girl who helps him clear his name."

"Is it Japanese? It sounds like an anime."

"No. It's called Nimona."

I looked it up. Rated PG, drawn in a style similar to Don Bluth's. Alright, why not? It turned out to be entertaining, surprising, funny, cute, suspenseful, and sad. It was also perhaps the most pernicious, soul-rotting piece of trash I've ever seen. If A Clockwork Orange had been a Pixar film marketed to kids, it might come in second, because at least in Clockwork, you had a sane writer telling a story about a sociopath. It's was meant to be shocking, because the writer himself saw it as shocking. In Nimona, though, the sociopath is telling the story from their own perspective.

You know, sometimes it happens that you search for the answer to a question only to feel crestfallen when you finally find it. For me, that question was, "What motivates school shooters?" Mental illness wasn't invented in the 1990's, and kids had much more access to much heavier firepower in previous generations. Prior to 1934, you could order a machine gun through the mail with no background check. In fact, clear up into the 1960's, a kid could walk into a hardware store on their own and pay cash for a handgun, and nobody would raise an eyebrow. I knew, then, that whatever changed to make school shootings suddenly become a commonplace phenomenon where, previously, they were unheard of, it wasn't an issue of guns being more available or more powerful. There was something different about the young people who were pulling the triggers.

Shooting used to be considered such harmless, family fun that carnivals would hand over a loaded gun to any stranger with a nickel to spend. And no massacres resulted.

I've similarly heard people ask, often rhetorically, why there are so many more transgender children now than there ever used to be. The response is typically that the number has always been the same, but before society was as accepting as it is now, those kids had to keep their gender identities hidden. Now that they feel safe coming out, they're much more visible. This explanation doesn't withstand even the lightest of scrutiny, however. Transgender youth have an incredibly high suicide rate; the explanation for this by trans rights activists is that these kids kill themselves because they don't feel accepted. It stands to reason, then, that the suicide rate among closeted trans kids should have been much, much higher than among trans kids who feel accepted and safe enough to publicly transition. At the same time that transgender identities became common in American schools, there should have been a corresponding precipitous drop in child suicides. But there wasn't. The explanation is a smokescreen. More kids now identify as trans than ever did before. Like school shootings, it's an idea that caught on with a generation and became part of how they see and interpret the world. 

I've witnessed as many males who identify as women or non-binary express anger towards and even commit acts of violence against women, particularly those women they describe as "TERFS"--Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists. Now I understand why. Let me hasten to add that when I say, "I understand," I don't mean that I sympathize. It's merely that I'm now aware of what's going on in the minds of the perpetrators. I know why they think they're justified, even though I maintain that they are not. 

I know why the BLM protesters in 2020 felt justified in burning down buildings and attacking police. I get why there are so many unattractive Instagram models and the like whose whole lives seem to revolve around taking pictures of themselves and then getting involved in drama when they get something other than praise. I get it now...but it doesn't make me feel any better.

Our victim culture has created a generation of narcissists who see a person's worth as deriving from their victimization. Having been instructed by older generations to be inclusive and tolerant, they've misconstrued that as meaning that if they're different, that makes them special and everyone owes them acceptance and approval unconditionally. They feel that if anyone ever rejects them or judges them in any way (even deservedly), they have been wronged. They feel that when they are wronged in this way, they are justified in taking limitless revenge, all out of proportion to the perceived slight. To them, there is no greater crime than someone making them feel bad. So if someone mocks them, judges them, rejects them, or simply unintentionally uses language that causes them to be reminded of their own shortcomings, these kids feel that such a grave crime has been committed against them that all should rally to their defense, and that there is great virtue and cause for celebration in destroying the offender as completely as possible. 

There's only so much destruction one offender can absorb, and sometimes, a kid's rage is bigger than that, so they lash out at anyone who seems like they might be remotely supportive of the offender. And if even that doesn't leave them feeling satisfied, then they'll lash out randomly at the general public, or at a broad demographic (usually the same as the offender). Think of the mass shooters who targeted women, Hispanics, blacks, Jews, Christians, or everyone at a particular school or workplace. You might be thinking, "But those are all marginalized groups." Doesn't matter. The assailant got their feelings hurt by some member of that group, so now everyone in that group is the villain in their story. 

On top of all that, because being seen as marginalized now grants one great status and authority, all the kids want to be seen as marginalized. If you're a white kid, and not an ethnic or religious minority, not disabled, not abused or otherwise traumatized, then a transgender identity provides an easy way to get in on the victimization. Otherwise, you've simply got no street cred and need to distinguish yourself through old fashioned achievement and excellence. What a pain that is! So now, we've got a bunch of straight, white, young males who couldn't compete against their male peers (or felt that they couldn't) because they're not as strong, brave, handsome, skilled, extroverted, etc., who feel that if they just paint their fingernails purple and go by they/them, they're suddenly entitled to be treated as special and entitled to whatever accommodations they wish, because in victim culture, the rejects are automatically the good guys and entitled to compensation, while the people who rejected them are automatically the bad guys, regardless of the reason for the rejection.

We've planted in these young people a value system in which they derive their self-worth by seeking pity, and the way they get it is to depict others as bullies for not showing them unconditional acceptance, even when they behave in unacceptable ways. 

It plays out something like this:
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Minority: *steals something from a store*

Store manager: *sees them* Stop!

Minority: *looking offended* Excuse me?

Store manager: I saw you steal that. Put it back, or I'm calling the police.

Minority: *gasps in shock* How dare you!

Store manager: We've got you on video.

Minority: So? It's just stuff. Stealing's no big deal. It didn't even cost a lot. Quit trying to change the subject. The real crime here is that you're a racist! You're just singling me out because I'm [fill in the victim group]

Store manager: I don't care what [color/ethnicity/sex/etc.] you are. You committed a crime!

Minority: *loudly addressing everyone within earshot* Y'all see what this racist piece of shit is tryna do? He say our kind ain't allowed in here. Our money's the wrong color or some shit. I shop here every goddam day, I ain't done nuthin'! This ugly-ass cracker's a racist! You betta get up out my face before I have to start something.

Everyone in the vicinity: *whips out cell phones and starts recording video*

Middle-class, white, liberal bystander: (Ooh, here's my chance to use my privilege and score some salvation points against my time in Privilege Purgatory!) *addressing store manager* Hey! You need to sit down and shut up. It's not all about you. This person is speaking their truth. You've had 400 years to tell your side of the story. You need to be questioning your participation in a system that makes it necessary for this person to take what they need when you should be working to remove inequalities instead.

Minority: *feeling encouraged by the crowd, physically assaults Store Manager*

The phone-holders cheer and cry for more. The beating continues until Minority feels better or gets tired. Police arrive. Now their arresting the assailant is decried as a great injustice by both the assailant and the crowd of phone holders.

Middle-class, white, liberal bystander: *going for extra credit, pulls out YouTube law degree and addresses police* She doesn't have to identify herself! You can't arrest her without her consent! Do you have a warrant? Show me your warrant. You have to have one. That's in the Constitution. What's your badge number? I want to talk to your supervisor. You can't ask her questions until she has a lawyer. That's a violation of her pursuit of happiness. You didn't read her the Miranda warning. You have to let her go now.

Cop: Shut up and back off, or you're going with her.

A fight breaks out, someone gets Tased, the video goes viral and all the liberals in the country think the cops were the bad guys, while all the conservatives on the internet argue over which caliber of gun the store manager should have used to murder the thief.
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So what's all this got to do with this cartoon called Nimona? (Spoilers follow.)
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Nimona starts off by giving us the background. There once was a brave and noble woman who defended her community against monsters and founded an order of elite knights to carry on that tradition. Fast forward a thousand years. The setting is a futuristic, sci-fi city with flying cars, but the order of knights is still central to the society. The new graduating class of the knight academy or whatever is about to go through their ceremony where they're knighted by the queen in a big stadium in front of thousands of people. 

But this year is different. For the very first time this year, one of the new knights, Bal, isn't of noble birth. He's a commoner, and literally every single person in the civilization except the queen and Bal's boyfriend (yes, the protagonist is gay, and that's what most of the critics on the internet are hung up on--and why Disney dropped the film) hate the idea of allowing him to become a knight. That was the first red flag for me. Not "it was highly controversial among the townspeople." Nobody but his lover and the queen were in favor of him becoming one of these guardians. Not one. Everyone in the stadium (save for the queen and Bal's boyfriend, who was another knight being inducted) was uniformly against him.

Persecution complex much?

So Bal gets knighted, the crowd (inexplicably) cheers after a long pause, and as Bal is receiving his sword back from the queen, a laser blaster opens up out of the pommel, fires all on its own, and kills the queen, right in front of the entire stadium. Everyone, including Bal, is stunned and horrified. Bal's boyfriend draws his sword and cleaves off Bal's sword arm. Bal is arrested and thrown in jail.

And, just because I haven't mentioned it yet, the queen and all the knights but Bal are white [correction: only in most scenes with the main characters. In a scene where the knights are all lined up, we see that they're all various colors and shapes, male and female], while Bal is kind of olive-skinned and has what sounds like might be a slight Spanish accent. Also, all the other knights are ultra-masculine, jock douchebags whose armor is gold and white or silver, while Bal's, for some reason, is black and gray. Netflixy enough for you? The underdog hero is a minority in as many ways as they could think to make him one, while the whole rest of this knight order and government just scream "white supremacy." And that makes Bal the good guy and the others the bad guys--except Bal's boyfriend...but maybe not except him, since he cut Bal's arm off. Maybe he's bad, too. We're supposed to be uncertain about him. But everyone else, you're supposed to hate, even though Bal aspired to be one of them (but not enough, apparently, to follow the same uniform guidelines when it came to his armor).

Netflix these days is kind of like the old Westerns, where the bad guys all wore black hats to indicate that they were the bad guys, and the good guys wore white hats to tell you they were the good guys. Now, the colors have flipped, and it's their clothes and skin instead of cowboy hats. The dark ones are the good guys, and the white ones are the villains. 

So our swarthy protagonist is sitting in jail wondering what on Earth just happened, when, just as strangely, a girl shows up out of nowhere and breaks him out of jail. Then she starts shapeshifting into different types of animals to effect their escape as they're fleeing the castle with many white-clad knights hot on their tails. 

 

This shapeshifting girl, Nimona, wants to be Bal's wisecracking sidekick. But, aside from the magical shapeshifting and her over-the-top, colorful personality (I smell a narcissist), the thing about her that's really, unusually striking is how casually--no, eagerly--homicidal she is. She thinks it's fun to murder and also thinks it's cute to play up how much she wants to murder. Her approach is basically, all smiles, "Hey, everyone hates you, too! We can be besties and be villains together, murdering everyone we see." Bal wants to solve the mystery of the queen's murder and clear his name so the knights will accept him again, but Nimona is intent on helping him get revenge and encouraging him to embrace his new role as Public Enemy Number One. She hates humanity, yet is inexplicably perky and bouncy. It's like if you fused Harley Quinn and Wednesday Adams, then kicked up the cuteness to the level of Power Puff Girls, and we're supposed to be charmed by this unapologetic blood lust.

From that point on, though Bal remains the technical protagonist in this plot, the movie really gives the spotlight to Nimona. It's all about Nimona and Nimona's personality, Nimona's feelings, Nimona's back story. It's even named after her. Indeed, except for Bal's brooding and uncertainty, she's the only character in the whole film who isn't a flat, one-dimensional NPC.

Fast forward--it turns out that another politician, the "Director" (or the knights, I think) switched the swords to kill the queen and have Bal take the fall for it. She felt that letting Bal become a knight threatened everything the order and their whole society was based on. But she also reveals that Nimona is the original monster defeated a thousand years ago by the order's founder.

Now here's a sticky part--it's true that Nimona is the monster, and yet she faults Bal for believing it. She is the monster, yet she dares Bal to say so, as though it's a trap where, if he vocalizes the truth, that makes him the bad guy. Even when he tries to relate, and asks questions about what it's like to shapeshift, she berates him for being "small-minded" for asking such things. Basically, she flips reality on its head, and he's supposed to just accept it all unquestioningly, or he's the bad guy for offending her, even while she's doing her level best looking for opportunities to get offended. And the film depicts her as clever and witty for doing so, and for making Bal look foolish.

As I was watching this, I thought, "Shapeshifting is a metaphor for transgenderism, isn't it? This narcissistic psychopath perfectly fits the psychological profile of a transgender person." And I wasn't wrong. There are little moments all through the film, some subtle and some more explicit, where someone expressed fear or shock or something other than instant, warm acceptance of Nimona's shapeshifting, and it made them the bad guy, and made Nimona justified in going on an indiscriminate, homicidal rampage.

In fact, there's one scene where Nimona is going full-Godzilla on the city, just smashing it to pieces and killing everyone in sight, when some kind of vehicle goes flying towards a little girl. Nimona slams down her tail to block the vehicle, protecting the girl from being squashed. The girl, though, is terrified. Trembling, she reaches down and picks up a sword, which she then points defensively at Nimona. And Nimona's feelings are hurt.

Let's go over that again. A terrified child is the bad guy for being afraid of a monster that's smashing her city and killing everyone she knows, and the reason that makes her the bad guy is because it hurts the monster's feelings. The monster is supposed to deserve acceptance and trust because she performed the exceptionally heroic act of...not idly standing by and allowing a child to be killed...by events that Nimona set off herself.

There's also a flashback scene where we see Nimona as a young girl. She met another girl in the forest, and they became friends. The friend was initially alarmed by the shapeshifting, but she quickly saw the fun in it, and the two had a great time romping around. But then one day, the townspeople saw the girls playing while Nimona was in the form of a bear. They feared for Nimona's friend's safety, so they took up their weapons and chased the bear away. Nimona fought fiercely, and this frightened her friend--who then, trembling, picked up a toy sword and pointed it at her defensively. This broke Nimona's heart and she ran away. Her friend who rejected her went on to become the founder of the order of knights who protected the town from monsters. 

The whole point of that scene was to preach to the audience that Nimona wasn't originally to blame. Her friend hurt her feelings and rejected her, so a thousand years of terror was perfectly justified.

Do you see? It might be a made-for-Netflix, whitey-hatin' movie about a gay knight named Bal, but it's really about this blameless, charming, loveable, transforming mass-murderer and her attempt to get back at a society for not trusting her completely and without question. Never is the idea entertained that she should have some sort of responsibility to not freak people out by turning into a bear around little children. Instead, we see her feeling vulnerable before revealing her ability. "You have to promise not to freak out," because the other person being freaked out is somehow them being the bad guy and wronging her, instead of her being the bad guy for freaking them out.

I wonder how many people who eat that up uncritically also spout off about how people shouldn't be allowed to open-carry guns in public because it might make someone feel nervous. "Your right to exercise your Constitutionally-protected right to self-defense doesn't take priority over my right to not feel creeped out!" But if anyone feels creeped out by Nimona turning into other animals, they're the bad guy for feeling creeped out, and Nimona is blameless. Pick a principle and stand by it.

I said above that I wasn't wrong about the whole thing being a self-absorbed whine about the sense of unjust persecution that a transgender person feels after going to great lengths to freak people out. I did some reading on the background of the movie. Disney rejected it because Bal and his boyfriend kissed at the end and had a couple hand-squeezes and affectionate looks at each other through the film, and they felt that was too overt to make them money at the box office. But then I also found who wrote it. Nimona was written by Nate Diana "Indy" Stevenson, whose birth name was Noelle Diana Stevenson. Nate/Indy/Noelle is female but identifies as non-binary and "transmasculine," according to Wikipedia. Nimona was originally a series of graphic novels that was later turned into a movie. She is married to Molly Knox Ostertag, who draws LGBT comics targeted at teenagers and middle-schoolers. 

They'll dedicate their careers to chasing down your kids and flying their freak flag in their faces with queer comic books published by Scholastic and made into rate PG cartoons, but don't you dare get weirded out about it, or they might just have to smash your city for a thousand years.

After the movie was over, before reading anything about its background or author, I told my daughter, "I'm going to tell you what this movie is trying very hard to tell you the opposite of. Nobody owes you unconditional acceptance. If you act like a jerk, and people reject you because of that, that doesn't make them the bad guy. If the only thing that stops you from going on a homicidal rampage is getting your own way and being told what you want to hear, then you're not actually a good person just because you don't go on a homicidal rampage. Sometimes, people will reject you for very good reasons. And even if it's not a good reason, you're not going to be everyone's cup of tea. And that's okay. Not everybody has to adore you like I do, but that doesn't make them bad people, and it doesn't justify being mean to them."

Questioning Truth

 

I’m thinking this morning about truth and deception, and how they relate to competing narratives about reality.

Think about something that you’re so certain of, that you think that anything who even entertains a contrary idea is a fool. I don’t mean something you acknowledge is controversial, but that you have strong opinions about anyway. I mean the sort of thing you think is obvious to everyone, and that the only sort of people who don’t are fringe kooks who are probably conspiracy theorists or cult members. I’m talking about statements like:

-        Earth is roughly spherical--not flat and not hollow with another civilization living inside.

-        The moon exists and astronauts have been there

-        People need to eat food to stay alive

-        Drilling a hole in your head is generally a bad idea

-        Humans are not reptiles from another planet

-        Molesting children is bad

You with me? I’m guessing that for most people reading this, no matter how diverse your social sphere is, you probably don’t expect any sane, non-evil person that you know—even ones you dislike—to disagree with any of these statements.

I’m not going to play the philosopher’s game of delving into how we know these things (at least for now). I just want you to get a grasp on what sort of beliefs I’m talking about—things that you know. You’re aware of them, you know they’re correct, and you don’t for a moment question that they’re correct, because you’ve never seen any evidence to the contrary that actually holds up.

Okay, you know what it is to know something that’s unquestionably true to the point that you have to question the sanity of anyone who disagrees. So what do you think is going on in the minds of people who do disagree?

Well, I’ll tell you one thing—they don’t doubt themselves any more than you doubt yourself. They’re convinced that they’re right and you’re wrong. The see themselves as part of an elite who’s privy to a great secret. They think you’re a mindless sheep who’s eyes just haven’t been opened by “the red pill” yet. They think that your arguments defending your point of view are just a defense mechanism protecting your fallacious belief system.

They’re also probably schizophrenic, schizotypal, or bipolar. This is why you can’t argue someone out of a delusion. To them, the experience was real, and that simply throws all contrary evidence into question.

I watched a documentary last night about fungi. Paul Stamets was in it, of course, along with Michael Pollan and a bunch of others. They spent some time showing pretty pictures and paying lip service to the role of mycelia in the ecosystem (overstating it a tad, in my opinion), and then they moved into talk of psychedelics. (If you’re not aware, Michael Pollan, of “Omnivore’s Dilemma” fame, also got really into using hallucinogens and wrote a book about that a few years ago, so that was his interest in this project—not teaching us how to sautee mushrooms).

Stamets didn’t actually use the word “symbiote,” but there was a theme running through what he and other speakers—all of whom claimed to have gone through profound transformations after having an experience of spiritual awakening on some kind of hallucinogenic (usually psilocybin)—that humans aren’t really a complete, stand-alone species in themselves. They seemed to think that the only way humans could really thrive and be complete was if they became one with the mushrooms, taking them into their bodies and letting it rewire their brains to the optimal state that we can’t achieve without the help of the fungi.

And hearing it, I thought of that fungus that infect ants and makes them climb to a high place before the mushroom erupts from the ant’s head and spreads its spores. Or how Toxoplasma gondi controls the behavior of its host—say, making infected mice fearless of cats so the parasite can spread from mouse to cat.

How do we know that’s not what’s going on here? Maybe these “entheogens” are simply reprogramming the people who take them to believe it’s a good thing and to persuade others to take them. If humans are destroying fungi’s habitat, maybe this is the fungi’s strategy for making us stop—it gives us a religious experience that makes us feel as one with it, and then sets us off to preach to the other people to infect themselves as well.

That’s a very strange thing to believe, but so is the idea that humans are incomplete without entangling ourselves with species of fungi. Which one’s right?

Stamets obviously believes he’s found the truth. But maybe that’s just spiritual madness induced by the mushrooms.

I’ve always eschewed drugs that weren’t medically necessary to treat a disease. I’ve always held that, uninfected and operating normally, the human body is in its ideal state and doesn’t need any outside help to improve. Obviously we need nutrients and hydration, but I’m saying that drugs throw your system out of whack, and then your body goes through a withdrawal trying to correct the imbalance. You can avoid that whole unnecessary see-saw effect by just not throwing off your homeostasis in the first place. Don’t put anything in you that doesn’t belong there.

Stamets’ argument is that these plants and mushrooms do belong there, and that by isolating ourselves from them, we’re harming ourselves.

At least one of us is very, very wrong, with potentially harmful consequences.

So how do we determine which of us that is?

One thing you don’t want to do in deciding who’s right about something is to put your faith with the person who seems more confident. A scientist can express all sorts of doubt and ignorance about how the Big Bang happened, because he honestly doesn’t know. That doesn’t make the Creationist who bangs on about Genesis correct. It doesn’t matter how certain you are of the facts if your facts are all wrong.

My bias is to think that people who ingest substances, experience a mystical ecstasy, and then think that they’ve got all the answers and that the rest of us are blind are not the correct ones. I think they’re suffering a delusion caused by direct chemical alteration of their brain chemistry. I think this even if they haven’t taken any substances. It’s sad, because when people experience this kind of “eye-opening, awareness-expanding” event, they feel so convinced that they’re the ones who are right and everyone else is just deficient.

It's down to a question of whether the red pill or the blue pill is the one that shows you the truth. In The Matrix, they knew, and it was simply an informed choice between disturbing awareness or contented blindness. But in real life, we don’t really know which one is which, and both the red-pill-takers and the blue-pill-takers say that they are right and the other is wrong.

Questioning the Superiority of Non-Violence as a Political Strategy

A friend of mine shared a meme of a John Lennon quote on Facebook, and I wanted to dispute it, but I’ve tried to stop sharing memes for the purpose of disagreeing with them, because I expect that a lot of people scrolling through look at the meme and ignore my remarks, meaning I’ve just helped to spread an idea I disagree with. Also, when people click “Like,” in those situations, I never know whether they’re expressing approval of the meme itself, or my criticism of it.

So instead of sharing the meme, I’ll just embed the quote here.

“When it gets down to having to use violence, then you are playing the system’s game. The establishment will irritate you—pull your beard, flick your face—to make you fight. Because once they’ve got you violent, then they know how to handle you. The only thing they don’t know how to handle is non-violence and humor.” – John Lennon

Lennon was espousing the ideology of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. It was as though they felt that the government was an expert swordsman, and so if you wanted to challenge it to a duel, you had to be absolutely sure not to choose swords as the dueling weapon, or you’d be sure to lose. Lennon, speaking from Britain and the United States in the 1960s, was of the belief that, as long as you didn’t initiate violence, a government wasn’t allowed to use violence against you, but that once you opted into a contest of violence, it was certain that the government would win, because governments have large armies and are the sole experts in violence. Additionally, he believed that governments were incapable of “crying victim” or of using humor as a weapon.

I’d dispute all of that. Look at what’s happened since he made that statement.

The United States was at war in Vietnam, mainly fighting poorly equipped rebels and covert insurrectionists. The Vietnamese people who wanted communism used violence, and they won.

Russia has been fighting Chechen separatists for decades.

The United States was bogged down in Afghanistan for 20 years, using sophisticated weaponry against peasants who were hiding in caves and shooting rifles and RPG’s.

The US is still in Iraq.

Hell, the US is still in Germany and Japan.

So even when the gloves are off, even after these many decades of experience fighting against smaller, weaker forces, the US still hasn’t learned to make quick work of resistance fighters in asymmetrical warfare.

And that’s just when the gloves are off, and they can freely use their drones and bombs and cruise missiles and artillery and tanks and shoot people on sight. Here at home, the government has more restrictions, like that pesky Posse Comitatus rule that says they can’t use the federal military against civilians. The Waco siege could have been ended in a single airstrike or one night of shelling, but because domestic battles have to be fought by the police with one arm tied behind their back, it was a fair fight between two groups of people shooting small arms at each other. The standoffs at the Bundy Ranch and the Malheur Wildlife Preserve were shaping up to go the same way.

Civilian authorities also have to deal with the whole issue of due process. Before you can just shoot someone who isn’t trying to hurt anyone, you have to charge them with a crime (sometimes getting warrants or a grand jury indictment), then putting them on trial with counsel to represent them, then afford them appeals, etc., before you can finally say that they’re sentenced to death by firing squad…and then that can be delayed by further legal challenges to the particular method and how it’s done.

Sometimes, available forces for that kind of thing are simply overwhelmed. Look at the Capitol invasion of January 6^th, 2021. Police couldn’t hold back the protesters, and some of them didn’t even try. National Guard troops weren’t sent until afterwards. The FBI’s strategy seemed to be to just let it happen, and then hunt down the perpetrators afterwards. Suppose the protesters had had concealed handguns, kept them concealed until they got inside, and then pulled them out to murder the politicians and any guards who got in the way. The military would have responded, but by then, it would have been too late. The assailants would have achieved their goal through violence.

The 9/11 terrorists achieved their goal of striking a blow against America through violence.

Every socialist country in existence became socialist through violent revolution.

The United States, Mexico, Haiti, and many other former colonies achieved their independence through violence.

My point here isn’t to promote violence. I’m simply saying that Lennon was wrong when he said that governments are uniquely skilled at achieving their goals through violence. It’s not true. Other, non-state actors also achieve goals through violence, and often, governments that try to achieve their goals through violence fail. So his basic premise is faulty.

Another aspect has changed since Lennon said this. Countries (I’m looking at you, America and Russia) fighting insurrections and trying to manipulate the affairs of other nations may not have achieved full perfection just yet, but they have had a lot of practice trying, and they’ve gotten more skilled at it in that time. These two big ones, especially, are masters of manipulating public opinion through mass media.

Russia, for example, employs “troll farms” to flood American websites with comments supporting both sides of controversial topics, just to throw fuel on the fire of Americans fighting each other. It creates the illusion of greater division than there actually is, so those feeling attacked feel that the threat is even greater, and thus react with more vigor—effectively making the illusion a self-materializing reality.

So to think that only plucky, non-violent rebels could possibly use humor and claims of victimhood to discredit their opponents is shortsighted. Government actors can do the same. Particularly since non-violence as a political strategy became popular in Lennon’s day, we now have a “victim culture” in which conflicting factions will try to “out-victim” each other, each trying to portray the other as the more evil and dominating perpetrator of injustice. Why couldn’t an agent provocateur working for the government do the same?