According Amanda Hess, it seems as though the pot legalization movement is somewhat less than respectful of women.
I think that this is part and parcel of what I might call The Barry Cooper Problem. On the subject of Age of Consent Laws, it might be called The Gannon Problem. That is to say that the people that are often most enthusiastic about pushing back the government to grant us more freedom want it not out of some ideological conviction but rather because the government is just standing between them and what they want. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this except that people that actually want to smoke copious amounts of pot or sleep with young women are not the most appealing advocates for their cause. Or rather, people that want to do these sorts of things and feel the need to make it a part of their public identity are often people that are disrespectful of a wider array of cultural and social expectations. In other words, they can be as annoying as hell and they can make people want to take the opposite position just to spite them.
As Udolpho put it:
I used to be in favor of legalizing marijuana, but the persistent stupidity of marijuana zealots has beaten that position out of me, and now I am against legalization just to spite them. Experience shows that even occasional marijuana smokers are not terribly bright, and it is my belief that stupid people need to suffer. Taking away their pharmaceutical pacifiers is a good start.
On my Barry Cooper post, Last Home Barry commented that a lot of the legalizers are mostly just anti-authority and pot is an expression of that. Take it a step further, and a whole lot of it comes down to a deal of resentment of being told what to do and frustration that society sometimes requests that they check their id at the door. Smoking pot and objectifying women are both expressions of society telling people to behave. Those that object most loudly to corrupt authority, unjust laws, and regressive customs also tend to object to earnest authority, just laws, and reasonable customs when it suits them.
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11 Responses to Stoners Are Not Evolved
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And there’s a big parallel in religion as well, with Christianity. A lot of non-Christians see only the example of the fundamentalist, the judgemental, the racist, the homophobic, the paranoid, the holier-than-thou, the close-minded, the rude, the obnoxious, the Bible-thumping, the overbearing, and the pompous Christians that are out there, and view Christianity through their examples.
When the truth is there are a lot of so-called Christians out there that are more worried about their own status and self-importance than actually living the lives Jesus set out for them. And the ones that do walk humbly with their God find it much harder to get through and live their lives according to the example of Christ when the version of Christianity most people see is the kind found all over the web and in the words of people like Pat Buchanan, Jerry Falwell and even those like James Dobson.
That’s a good point, Barry.
It reminds me of what I might call Angela Martin Christians, named after the character on The Office. Angela is basically an uptight, holier-than-thou person. She’s also a Christian. But I really tend to think that it’s actually the former that causes the latter. Basically, she uses the religion as a pretext for her attitude rather than her attitude being formed due to her religion. God only comes up when it’s useful to her.
A lot of non-Christians see only the example of the fundamentalist, the judgemental, the racist, the homophobic, the paranoid, the holier-than-thou, the close-minded, the rude, the obnoxious, the Bible-thumping, the overbearing, and the pompous Christians that are out there, and view Christianity through their examples.
Part of the problem is that the fundamentalists have largely co-opted the very word “Christian.” Except in certain comparative contexts (e.g. “the population of Indonesia is 10% Christian”), the word has almost entirely become a synonym for fundamentalist or at least evangelical. If Charlie says “I am a Christian” you just know that he’s not a Lutheran or an Episcopalian or a Catholic even though adherents of all these denominations believe in Jesus.
Hate the sinner, love the sin.
I’ve smoked weed multiple times daily for the last 10 years or so. Starting when I was 16. My IQ is 136 and I own my own business, I have since I was 22.
“Stoners Are Not Evolved”
Go fuck yourself
It’s hard to question your intelligence with such a mature and thoughtful response, Anthony.
Articulate as you were, a better response may have been “The correlation between smoking pot and being a good person and/or productive citizen can be quite inexact as I demonstrate as a regular pot-smoker and self-made businessman.”
And that response would be entirely correct. It could also successfully leave me with an impression other than the one I do: If your online persona is any indication of your personality, you may well be a sterling example of exactly the sort of mal-adjusted pot smoker I refer to in this writing, regardless your self-reported IQ and profession.
-{Message from Trumwill: I let the last message go because there was a point hidden in there somewhere. This one is just dumb}-
Hate the sinner, love the sin.
Stone, I just noticed that. Abso-effing-lutely hilarious. I feel the same way. At various I’ve really liked pot, yet other people who like it…
The short-term harmlessness of overindulgence fools people into thinking that chronic(heh) overuse is just as harmless. OTOH, I don’t know if it’s the pot, or if the sort of people who wake and bake would turn out the same way.
I lean towards self-selection in part because my experience with people that smoke pot varies so much from circumstance to circumstance. When I was 20, some of the coolest people I knew smoked pot. But then again I was 20 and so were they. And they weren’t activists (at least of the pot variety).
Once I got out of college, that started to change. Either the pot-smokers were 20 and a particular type of 20 that I grew out of, or… they were people that conscientiously chose to continue a risky (if only in the legal and career senses) habit past the age where it could be considered experimentation.
But then it changed again when I moved to Deseret, where the culture was different and so the pot self-selection was different. The pot self-selection there was similar to smoking self-selection elsewhere.
Part of the difference between 20 year old and 30 year old potheads is ten years of smoking pot, I can’t see how that wouldn’t have effects. If not directly from the drug and damage from smoke inhalation, just the way potheads spend their time. Docile and forgetful for long periods doesn’t make people interesting. I’m pretty sure I was even more boring when I smoked a lot.
Oddly enough, I support decrim/legalization, if only to draw a brighter line between things that are bad (weed, alcohol) and things that have such negative short term effects and addictive potential that choosing to quit isn’t realistic.
In Deseret pot smokers were like cigarette smokers other places? That’s odd. I would have thought pot smoking there was deviant enough that potheads would be more akin to hard drug users other places. But cigarette smoking has gotten way more loserish in the past five or ten years. At least among late teens, early twenties, not many of them smoke. No offense, if you still smoke, try snus. worked for me. And even if you then can’t quit snus, there are safer (probably not safe though) than smoking.
In Deseret pot smokers were like cigarette smokers other places? That’s odd. I would have thought pot smoking there was deviant enough that potheads would be more akin to hard drug users other places.
It is by Mormons. Non-Mormons, by virtue of the fact that they spend more time around other non-Mormons, spend more time around pot-smokers and get introduced to it. It becomes normalized very quickly. I had a coworker that was skeptical of my suggestion that there was a significant gap between the number of people that smoked pot and that smoked cigarettes and that there would be more of the latter. Just about everyone he knew that smoked cigarettes also smoked pot but the opposite was not true.
That’s not to say that smoking pot is exactly commonplace. One factor is that smoking rates down there are pretty low. Not just because there are lots of Mormons, but also because it’s broadly considered an anti-social activity. I was one of four people in a company of 125 that dared to smoke in public. I knew at least another two or three closet smokers. But that’s still a very low number.