Tucker Carlson is a racist windbag that needs to be checked. His vicious sarcasm regarding any and everything black or of color is well known. I am beyond tired of this prick. His ridiculous defense of the hypocritical asshole in Louisiana caught in the D.C. madam scandal was it for me. I loathe everything this bastard represents: a privileged white elite disdainful of anything non-white or liberal.

Empathy?! That sure isn't an emotion fit for politics. I mean, have you ever described a president as empathetic? I think not. :P

Carlson is really saying, "Well, he is Black, he must smoke the herb, you know, weed, ganja, sticky-icky-icky, grass--they all do: Snoop Dog, Marley, John Coltrane, and even Clinton has been described as the blackest president we have ever had--he smoked pot is his day... Obama is prolly smokin' with Bobby and Whitney as we speak, they all know each other, I assume."

Wow.

There is this book by the guy that wrote Fast Food Nation called Reefer Madness. (I can't remember the author's name--schloser?) but he writes that marijuana was outlawed after rich wht people saw Mexicans smoking and were afriad it would make their children "act Mexican." I wonder if racism is connected to the history of most drug legality. Opium-the Chinese. Alcohol-Europeans. hmmm. I should look more into this.

***

p.s. everytime I read something new about the health benefits of mary jane, i sigh--it makes me paranoid, I hate being high. damn it, life is so unfair.

If people become empathetic, they won't want to go to war.

Department of Peace. Heh. I should read 1984 again.

luisa, i have that book! both of them. and this entry i did talks about the Mexican Opium aspect of history, anslinger, etc.

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Pat, exactly.

yeah, luisa, i did get that too. i mean they are always saying that about obama. its gross.

well said, skeptical brotha.

Ah, Luisa, as a former pot smoker, I can tell you the secret I found for preventing paranoia. Smoke it all day every day! :-P Seriously though, your brain gets used to it and you stop getting The Fear and start getting The Mellow. That's my public service announcement for this fine July evening. And in case any uptight but also good hearted folks read this - I'm not advocating that everybody should move to stonerville, I just like to contribute to the spread of accurate information on drugs when I can.

This is a really interesting post, Nez. I am both freaked out by and grotesquely in awe of what comes out of people's mouths these days, and their seeming blindness about it. Saw a clip the other day where Bush said something about how the people who were responsible for September 11th are the same people over in Iraq killing innocent people right now, and I was like, hm, some people might interpret that differently than what you think you're saying, GW.

Anyway, never cared for the dismissive "you're all a bunch of pot smoking pussies" rhetoric, often with an undertone of that's-girly-talk when any man expresses empathy clearly and openly (and hell, when any woman does either), and the goes-without-saying-ness of how it's weak and lame and impractical to be like a woman. I am still wary of all the mainstream candidates, but I am grateful that Obama even says things like that, that he is a voice in some sort of powerful position and he is rejecting the pressure to embrace hate mongering.

Joan, that last paragraph point was too true of yet another aspect of this whole matrix.

I would definately encourage all those who haven't read up about Anslinger (the Nazi of recreational drugs) and the history of Cannabis in the U.S. to do so. The banning of these drugs was to target everyone from Mexican Revolutionaries to emerging 1920s-40s Blues singers in New Orleans and Harlem. Anslinger hated the rhythms and easiness of Blues and Jazz, I believe he called it "Marijuana induced voodoo satanic music."

Poor little Tucker, son of Richard, champion of the most malignant administration in America's history. If anyone needed a spleef desperately, it's Tucker.

Pat, on your reference above to 1984, I recently heard David Simon (creator of HBO's show "The Wire" - a must see if you haven't already) say that he's beginning to think that Orwell underwrote it.

And, when I hear comments like this one from Tucker, I can't help but think about Riane Eisler's book "The Chalice and the Blade." In it, she contrasts pre-historic Middle Eastern cultures based on partnership (chalice) to our current culture based on heirarchy (blade). I remember the feeling that all was lost in 2004 when the Democratic Convention that nominated John Kerry was turned into a "Yes, Sir, reporting for duty" love fest to war. It was the beginning of the end of my belief in electoral politics as the vehicle for change.

And yes, Obama was a bright spot in all of that.

I dunno... I think sometimes living in the US the ideal is to be a coldhearted jerkface. Anyway, don't listen to little Tucker, he doesn't know his cabeza from his cola. =P

Well Carlson loves his hyper-individualism, the better to divide and conquer. So no empathy for him, thats a weak and soft emotion he could do without, like blood to his brain.

Adam Curtis' -The Trap
nicely revealed the reasons for the enmity to empathy, market theory is predicated on us being selfish emotionless individuals. To enable the dog eat dog, rat race. But even when the first game theory and experiments were done, in an experiment called 'Fuck you buddy' which they expected to show that people would always be selfish and screw over the other to succeed- it failed, the female secretaries in the experiments all cooperated and helped each other out. So what did they do? They threw away the data. It should be noted the experiments were corporate funded, corporations who would benefit from a free market structured society. Thus only the results and theories that would chime with their goals were pursued. All enabled by anti-communist paranoia and cold war MAD theory that was paramount in govt. thinking.
Although I doubt Tucker knows that, he's not defending theories he knows are false, he's just a git. Without empathy, well the Nazis showed a good example of where that goes. And after the war a lot of nazis were brought to...hmmm, I'm beginning to see a pattern here. Even without a Camberwell Carrot

Rick B, somehow I had survived until now with no knowledge of the Camberwell Carrot, but due to your erudite exposure to the splendor of splifferies, I am now among the select. The Carrot, it seems, is a close cousin to the Banana Boat, a similar creation of the cannibanoidal type made with a section of banana leaf and adaptable in size {by tearing the banana frond} to the actual amount of herbiage one might have on hand. Careful, however!-- The Boat may sail to some very Empathetic Isles!

Thanks RickB, its a great film. Disturbing to say the least.

RC- The Banana Boat sounds a fine item indeed, and I would guess very ecologically friendly too, no big paper factories needed making skins, just an aromatic leaf. A voyage of green empathy...
Yep Rafael, must see tv, this paranoid present was planned (not least by John Nash while suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, doh!).

I don't remember exactly what the context was, but I remember seeing individual indifference to one's classmates being taught as practical morality in a western school. No wonder people are screwed up.