Of course I'm a materialist, do you expect me to take mind altering chemicals and believe in some kind of ontological idealism?
Quite a number of people do, although they might not formalize it as such. I'm glad to see you're not among them.
All actions that occur outside of the nominally established are by default rejecting and questioning the establishment ⋯ Is not about being edgy, is about having enough confidence in my own judgement of what's good and bad for me. I agree with you that that is not something pride worthy, but it's reverse (That is, relying 100% in society's judgement of what I'm supposed and allowed to experience) does sound kind of shameful to me.
I think I might have been slightly misreading your original post; I gather now that what you were saying is that because you questioned allegedly normative boundaries of behavior you felt that it was OK to experiment with drugs, originally I was reading something more akin to you saying that you experimented with drugs solely because you disliked the idea of normative boundaries of behavior.
Also, drug trade is obviously capitalist in it's current form, but that's because the only form of trade that today exist is capitalist trade. That doesn't necessarily have to be that way, drugs have existed in many cultures occupying many different roles. Drugs can be traded as a market value, but they can also be gifted, shared, grown, cultivated, venerated, specifically prescribed, etc.
Very little non-capitalist drug business is going on. In the
soi-disant "gift economies" that are allegedly present in the Rainbow Gatherings, the "gift economy" is only for subsistence, the events themselves are, while incorporating some leftish/left-ish political talk (environmentalism, for instance, is
not inherently leftist), are, or have degenerated into, a veneer of love and light over gross hedonism on the one hand and countereconomic capitalism with varying degrees of gangsterism incorporated therein, and Burning Man, which at it's best plays host bourgeois-bohemian bacchanalia and banal art, and at worst,
a manifestation of some very deplorable ideological trends among the Silicon Valley élite ("libertarian" oligarchy, technocracy, and some really terrifying ideas like
"transhumanism" and whatever the hell is going on with Elezier Yudkowski.) Ultimately, anyway, it's all about commerce, I don't know that much about what goes on terms of drug sales on the ground at Burning Man and those are probably the type that get their kicks by post anyway, but drugs are a part of the globalized worth a really sizeable chunk of the world's economic activity (I don't want to throw around a false figure because I don't remember it, but it is astounding.)
Globalization of trade has had as much an economic impact, and an often-deleterious one, on the drug trade as it has on ordinary commerce (see, for instance: a massive bust in raw sassafras oil leads to the meteoric rise of mephedrone in the UK, the economic success of which leading to massive proliferation of retail branded non-licit [read: neither licit nor illicit] drug products for sale to the masses; "reform" of marijuana laws in California leads grow-ops in the East and Midwest to be unable to compete and to drop-ship instead, leaving only the legal-staters, who were very much originally gangsters themselves and only now becoming corporate suits, and the Mexicans, who hve long been both, as providers of marijuana on a large scale.) This global ecoonmy deals with you, your dealers, whether they be real people or groups or the very same hiding behind email addresses and PO boxes, and everyone else in the scene. You might grow or synthesize a small amount of drugs to give away, or whatever, but it won't make a dent. To be in the drug trade is to be a capitalist and to be involved in drugs whatsoever is to be a commodity-fetishist. Not that this is not the same for all goods, but merely to say that drugs are no different from anything else.
We largely agree here, but I just extend the proposition a little further here, I think: prescribed, gifted, venerated, whatever, drugs are a commodity, and perhaps even more of a commodity
fetish than your average commodity due to the cultural connotations that are given to them—which phenomenon is visible nowhere more blatantly than in the psychedelic drugs business. I got out of the game a long time before Ross Ulbricht got in, so I don't know how it is now that you just wire your money and wait by your mail box but I do know that when I was in that line of work I had to look the part, dress the part, speak the heady lingo, whatever, and do this whole dance of blessing somebody with something, and they played their counterpart-role, thanking me graciously for bringing something special into their lives, an experience, perhaps, whatever, but ultimately a commdity. Marx: "The savages of Cuba regarded gold as a fetish of the Spaniards. They celebrated a feast in its honour, sang in a circle around it, and then threw it into the sea." Something like that, I guess.
In the end, I actually agree with you that drug use doesn't have an a prioristic political color, because nothing does. That's why political dispute exists anyway. They don't have to belong to any part of the political spectrum…
Then we're agreed on that. You're certainly right that in some contexts drug-taking can be seen as a transgressive/subversive act, but usually is usually merely a hedonistic or needs-fulfilling one. That's what I mean by drugs being apolitical. Both right- and left-wing parmalitary groups use drugs to fund their operations (most notoriously in Colombia, but practically everywhere there
have been active paramilitaries or terrorist groups they've had resort to drug dealing for funds, even groups in Northern Ireland who engaged in much sloganeering about drug dealing and made examples of a few dealers by execution nonetheless had their hands in the honeybucket.) As individuals, both conservatives and liberals, given the chance, will probably enjoy one or a few of the recreational drugs. Likely even the Mormon would, at least on a neurochemical level, have fun, even if had to regret it later, and some members of our site are in fact followers of that religion who sometimes find their drug use allowable by a rather Talmudic–Jesuitical–
Probabilistic interpretation of the teaching of their faith (I, too as a Catholic, have done this); I do wonder what a psychedelic would do to him when contemplating his future
having his own star, perhaps near Kolob.
But anyway, Prohibition is not an inherently conservative proposition by any means, in fact, the Prohibition Party (as in alcohol prohibition) of the late 19th–early 20th century in the U.S. ran on a distinctly progressive platform and prohibitionism at the time was a Progressive ideal. It was ridiculed as such by Chesterton in his
What I Saw in America (1922); he said elsewhere that "the business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected," which very much applies in this case.
See, the thing is, your movement might acheive sops like homosexual "marriage" which, although they are gravely offensive to the traditionally minded such as myself, but you will never gain ground against the deep structural evils in society. Real issues like the Trans-Atlantic Treaty and so on are being forgotten about by liberals distracted by rainbow flags. The only hope that we have against these evils is from the resurgent nationalist Right. #BrExit is a step. Austria's potential reversal will be a huge one. As for multiculturalism, it's already a(n epic) failure, as even such a mainstream figure as Merkel can admit. The real war isn't the one that you're talking about here, and once the scales fall from the eyes of the young, they'll realize this too.
Though this, in all honesty, was pretty scary to read. To each their own, I guess. I believe in a different world.
We believe in different worlds, but live in the same one.
Solistus and I, however, I think believe in more or less the same world albeit being on opposite sides of it, or perhaps, more diagonal than opposite. I've had my Marx, my Lenin, my Bukharin and Trotsky and all the rest; traditional left wing thought has a lot to offer about the structural dysfunctions of capital which retains a lot of importance in critical terms, although much less in the application; the modern derivatives of the New Left are utterly bankrupt and their corrupt spawn, the "social justice warriors" (I'm not fond of the word, but it's become useful enough shorthand) are a flash in the pan.
The resurgent and insurgent identitarian Right in Europe (le Pen, Hofer; moving east, even parties like Jobbik and the right-ist and right-ish movements being nutured by Putin) and in America: hypocrite and buffoon though he may be, Trump has become a much-needed popular avatar of a disenfranchised and economically devastated once-mainstream White working- to lower-middle class America. He'll lose, le Pen will lose, the powers behind the powers will probably find a way to defeat Hofer, but it isn't the point. Trapped between radical leftism and the dismantlement of traditional values at home and radical Islam abroad and increasingly at home, European Americans and Europeans will remember that we have an identity and interests. If that scares you, and your political agenda is to deny us that, it should. We are coming and we are angry. It might take a year, five, a decade, but it's happening. And the success of Trump and the European nationalists shows that it won't be through coups or terrorism but at the ballot box. I only fear the violence that will come if the globalists try to suppress the results of the ballot box. Then it gets really scary.
But yeah, I better stop my rant because this is probably not the place for an in depth political discussion…
I rather enjoy it and we should continue it in it's appropriate venue. We can easily arrange one.
). I used to hate those songs it's all I heard on the radio as a kid because my mom only listens to radio stations that play the pop sort of hits or whatever was biggest ATM. I don't even think my sister liked them at all. I don't know what I'd think of them now but I'm really pretty positive it's going to stay that way. 3-4(or however many)years they were together is good enough for now. 
