Ulysses: Nobody understands this book, but they’ll never admit it

I took a course on Joyce’s Ulysses in college. There were sections dozens of pages long that the professor never covered because he had no idea what Joyce was talking about. When some one asked a question, the professor would completely change the subject, and the student would nod sheepishly and say without enthusiasm that he now understood. Students never admitted their obvious confusion because they were scared of being the one kid in the class too dumb to grasp this allegedly genius work. The professor spent his lectures repeatedly summarizing the few straightforward passages and using Joyce’s crude innuendo as a segway to flirt with a redhead who always sat in the first row. Everybody got A’s in a prestigious course on their resumes.

I never saw the meetings at AIG where they discussed their positions insuring exotic debt packages, but I imagine they were very similar to my Ulysses class. No one in that room could predict exactly how a CDO-squared would react to adverse market conditions, because no one in that room had any fucking clue what a CDO-squared was. None of the executives were dumb enough to admit that, though. The AIG executives had all studied in the same academic setting, and learned that if superiors didn’t understand the material, they only needed to give the superiors the illusion of understanding it themselves. Eventually, it created an environment where no one understood what the company was doing, and no one could afford to admit it. And we saw how that turned out.

The War on Drugs: Why in God’s name do we put up with it?

In middle school History, kids learn about Prohibition in the 20s and what an absolute failure it was. In the future, kids will learn how miserably drug prohibition failed. Unfortunately, we’re stuck in the present, and the War on Drugs rages on.

There are three criteria that determine whether a law is beneficial. The first criterion is whether the law achieves its stated purpose. Drug laws are intended to deter people from using drugs, at which they clearly fail. Drugs are ubiquitous in our society and everyone knows is. There are social events, such as Phish concerts, raves, and any party in Hollywood, where you will not fit in if you are not on drugs. Planetariums hold laser shows where they play Pink Floyd music. Burning Man is allowed to happen. There are profitable companies whose main product is glow sticks.

In the 1980’s, drug dealers engaged in urban guerilla warfare over lucrative drug markets. Today, drug violence is down, and the DEA has the gall to take credit, as if their vigilant enforcement scared the drug lords straight. Drug violence has declined because drug prices have plummeted. Drug prices have plummeted because so much gets into the country that there is no longer a shortage in supply. In the 80s, dealers would kill the competition and reap the profit of their customers and territory. That does not work today because every user has five dealers on speed dial, and the hitmen cannot kill them fast enough, so they give up and try to make it as rappers. The War on Drugs has reached a relative peace because we lost. Those brave insurgents in law enforcement refuse to surrender, though. It’s a bit admirable, but far more tragic.

The second criterion of a law is whether it has any harmful externalities. Consider that the War on Drugs has caused America to possess the world’s highest incarceration rate. That includes war-torn African nations with prison camps. That includes China, where it’s illegal to look at Tiananmen Square’s Wikipedia entry. That includes Singapore, where they beat citizens across the back with a bamboo cane for whistling in public. And then people wonder why so many inner-city youth grow up with a criminal mentality. When a large number of your role models and peers are labeled criminals by society, you’re going to experience an inclination to become a criminal.

On top of that, prohibiting drugs shifts one of the world’s largest industries into the black market. Columbia will never be stable when its richest, most influential citizens are drug kingpins. Warlords will always control Afghanistan when they are the sole purchaser of the only profitable crop that grows there. Just as prohibiting alcohol did, the War on Drugs creates a more organized and profitable class of criminals capable of greater mayhem. It’s only a matter of time before the next Kennedy family is spawned from this mess.

The last criterion of a law’s merit is whether the law persecutes a minority within the population. In their defense, the drug laws do not do this. Surveys show that over fifty percent of Americans have used drugs, so the drug laws actually persecute the majority of American citizens. Any law that punishes the lifestyle choices of most Americans does not reflect the will of the people. Most of us do not have a problem with other people using drugs. In fact, the last three presidents we elected all admitted to using illegal drugs. Still, because this majority is too spineless to stand up for its beliefs, it allows America to waste billions and imprison millions as it continues to wage the destructive and absolutely unwinnable War on Drugs.

A better way of dealing with drug abuse is in our sight. In 2001, Portugal decriminalized all drugs. If you tie up and shoot heroin in the middle of the street there, all you get is a traffic ticket. Not only have they saved themselves money on enforcement and sent fewer citizens to prison, but they actually cause drug use to decline. By taking away penalties for drug users, they have been able to encourage more users to admit that they have a problem and voluntarily enter rehab. Use has not skyrocketed, because unlike the conservative pundits who insist that drug laws are the only buffer that prevent a nation overrun by addicts, the vast majority of people have some common sense. If crack was made legal tomorrow, most Americans would not go out and try crack. They know that crack is very harmful, and abstain from using it because they care about their bodies, not because the government tells them not to.

There is no rational evidence that the War on Drugs is succeeding or that it benefits our nation. People are afraid to stand up and say this because opponents will label them a drug addict or a sympathizer with drug addicts. This is insane. People who never drink can tell that Prohibition was a terrible policy that harmed our society. It is time to employ some common sense and end the travesty that is the War on Drugs.

At Least They Didn’t Give the Peace Prize to Bono

Would You Hate a Guy Who Cured Cancer? You probably would

Let’s say hypothetically that this guy works for years in his basement laboratory and eventually develops the cure for cancer. Let’s also say he is only motivated by money. He determines that the best way to maximize his proceeds is auction off the cure, selling it to the 5,000 highest bidders, and then destroying it afterwards. People would call this guy the antichrist. Some one who easily could have saved millions of lives but let all these people die because he wanted money for himself would be more hated than Hitler.

The ironic thing is that if this guy had sat on his couch all day drinking 40s and robbing stores to pay for his heroin addiction he would be a sympathetic figure. Instead, because he studied and worked his ass off, saving five-thousand lives in the process, people feel that they are entitled to the fruits of his labor and condemn him when he doesn’t relinquish them.

By any objective standard, the researcher in question would be one of the greatest men who ever lived. If a fireman saves five lives in his entire career, he is lauded as an incredible hero; this guy would have saved five-thousand. No NGO ever saved five-thousand lives, and the twenty most prolific social workers combined could not come close to his total. Critics of our inventor will say it’s not what you do in life that counts, but what your motivation is, or some other moral relativist horseshit. These same people will try to condone the murdering fascist dictator Stalin, saying that he was only trying to create a utopian communist society and got lost along the way. This argument allows people to feel better about their lack of competence. They tell themselves that even though they would never have the capability or drive to save thousands of lives like our inventor, they would help more people if they could, as if this somehow counts. These same people claim that they would cure world hunger if they had one wish, and then live their lives resenting of other people’s popularity and material possessions.

The other argument people will use to criticize our inventor is that his actions promote inequality. People who further this argument will try to use to perverted logic to show that it’s somehow better to go to a remote Inuit village and give each of the fifty members one cherry than to single out one member and give him a year’s supply of caribou meat. Equality is an impossible notion. Everyone can and should have equal rights or equal protection under the law, but people stretch this concept to cover things like achievement, possessions, and even happiness. They will try to argue that curing the 5,000 richest cancer patients will somehow make life worse for the millions who were not cured. If anything, it would probably give them far more hope to know that a cure for their disease was possible and inspire a more energized research process. Equality pimps, however, will make some argument that those who do not get the cure will have their self esteem hurt or something dumb like that.

Guess what: the more humans evolve, the more material inequality will exist. When we’re all crawling on four limbs, we all travel in the same manner. When some one invents a Corvette or a hoverboard, not everyone will get one. The only people who could possibly argue that this is a bad thing are those whose worldview is dominated by bitter jealousy. To recap, our hypothetical researcher develops a cure that will give the five-thousand people who can afford it the gift of heath and may provoke jealousy in those who cannot. Whether you consider his existence good for the human race depends on whether you place greater value on human health or human bitterness.