UNSENT MAIL To Ma & Pa: Liberalism = A World View Founded in Love and Curiosity and supported by science, Conservatism Founded in Fear and Purposeful Ignorance

So, I haven't done an UNSENT MAIL in a while. I had an ongoing discussion with my folks a while back, about Universal Healthcare, and socialist policies in general. Needless to say, I was of a vastly different idea then they do, and I got so sick of this ongoing argument where they were treating me like they are incapable of understanding how I turned out so different from them. So I decided to try and explain to them what I had discovered about the ideology upon which I was raised, and how my own beliefs now contrasted theirs.

As polite and intellectually honest as I try to be in this email, it remained UNSENT precisely because I knew, when it was done, that my folks would have taken huge exception and found a way to be personally insulted by it, whether that would have been right or not. So here it is for the world to read, instead. This is at least a year old or more, BTW....I  have also edited out personal epithets like references to Mom and Dad, as well as any themes that were pertinent to news-item specifics from when I wrote it that seemed out of place now.

I know that there is some comfort in feeling that there is a side who is “right” and a side who is “wrong” on all things political and ideological. Everyone is guilty of aligning their thoughts on something that they haven’t personally done adequate research on, with the “Default” for most people being the same viewpoint held by others of similar ideology who may have had more time to research an issue…Meaning if you’re anti-tax, anti-abortion, and religious, and haven’t thought much about immigration, you’ll probably instinctively take on the same views on immigration as others who share your views on other things---at least until a point comes where you have done your own research and come to your own conclusions. The problem is when not enough people have done the research, and too many are just rattling around the same, empty, ignorant opinion because that’s the viewpoint of most other people in your corner.   

It turns out that for me personally, the reason I have not been able to help myself in sort of being the political black sheep of the family, (if I may call it like it is for a moment!,) is that I have always been very insistent on UNDERSTANDING all sides too a viewpoint, when I am trying to understand an issue in order to be better suited to debate my thoughts on it. I also came to realize that you don't grow as a person when your ideology determines what you can and can't learn and read and know and think about something, but rather you grow when the things you think and read and know and learn about something determines what your ideology relative to that topic is. When an opinion I end up forming is based in a sound grasp of the actual appropriate details one would need to feel justified in having an opinion, that opinion very, very frequently ended up being a different one then I had when all I knew were the right wing echo chamber soundbites I picked up to justify opinions, while very young.

This realization dawned on me once I was out of high school, (and prison,) and I started working with other people who were part of the larger world out there; It was clear that I hadn’t really been able to subject anything that I’d absorbed growing up in a (very) conservative household to the sort of scrutiny that would allow me to truly understand both sides any issue I thought I understood, and thought I held a validly created opinion on.

I was starting to be the clear loser in a lot of discussions about politi-centric topics. I was a very effective debater, even very young, but in my ability to think on my feet, and use intuition and an innate ability to out-debate most people even given very little substance to work with (at least whey they were all my age, and equally devoid of substance, as in school), but given a debate where somebody also has the benefit of having relevant, confident facts and a practiced argument and data to support it, who could calmly and effectively use those facts in a way that rendered my (planted, non-factually based Fox News-esque) overly simplified opinions seem pretty limp-wristed… 

Speaking as a former conservative, I can tell you that if you start with a blank slate, open mind, and do research on what side of an argument, you, as a citizen who is morally and ethically inclined towards fairness should come to on any of the topics that sort of define the antiquated stances people associate with tea party, focus on the family conservatism, you will almost invariably come to the opposite conclusion, assuming your heart is hate-free, that you have no corporatist agenda, and that you feel normal compassion for others when they are not as fortunate as you may be. Things that I used to be, per the default conservative mindset, and being indoctrinated to think this way, which it turns out that the exact opposite is how I actually feel about that topic (with the exception being the religions one. I don't feel the exact opposite. I feel anti-ALL organized religions, now):

Beliefs which were:

Anti-homosexuality, anti-environmentalist, anti-government, anti-abortion, anti-welfare, anti-tax, anti-department of education, anti-science, anti-gun-control (of any kind), anti-other-religions-(besides Christianity and Judaism), anti-universal-healthcare, anti-European, anti-intellectual, anti-immigration, anti-climate-change, anti-wikileaks,anti-occupy-wall-street, anti-union…..

……..and frequently also with viewpoints that are:

Pro-war-in-general (though I'd never been pro-war-on-drugs, like many neo-cons were, even when younger), pro-military spending, in favor of granting more and more rights to corporations, pro-Ayn Randian, pro-death-penalty, pro-integration-of-church-and-state, pro-Israel, pro-abstinence-only-sex-ed (this pretty much ended earlier then the rest, when I started having sex), highly nationalistic, pro-wealthy/1-percenter even when poor on my own (Lord knows why), as well as initial agreement with the almost universally conservative idea they tend to believe we are in the midst of a decades long, severe moral decaying as a species in general. 

Good riddance, now, 15 years and counting. But you need to understand, that I cannot HELP but believe what I do now, because I've become informed on these things. Information leads to progress, not regressive status-quo maintenance.

I found, in having made a transition from not knowing anything but these ways of thinking, to a person who thinks for himself, and had to thusly come to conclusions on all these and many more political topics for myself, because the one thing I seemed to continually notice as a theme when I actually delved into the research of any given topic: The stance I previously held, once balanced with the known facts was morally or logically UNTENABLE, or both. I learned that all too often, it was almost like the people around me growing up had all willfully and collectively agreed to simply maintain as ignorant a position as possible regarding the facts, science, writing, or modern viewpoints on things because even they were prone to switch their beliefs when they had learned too much on their own, by accident, to continue ignoring other people’s frustrated arguments and sticking with the side of an argument they now recognize as futile or wrong.

Therein lies the rub, though. The reason people say conservatism is close minded is because it IS. By nature it’s a static set of immutable, immovable, unalterable attempts to maintain beliefs held the past, which qualify now as regressive because enough people have moved past seeing these views as conservatives now do, by default. To maintain antiquated, often bigoted, religiously based beliefs in the information age, one must exist almost exclusively in an echo-chamber that simply does not allow new ideas inside, for fear they affect to many people in the echo chamber in a way that reduces the effectiveness of the single ideology rattling around in there.

This is how I discovered something else out, that I am finding, as I age, to be a universal truth. Contrary to the old adages that people are liberal while young, and conservative as they age, I am the opposite, and so are many people I know. Certainly the following is true: I almost NEVER find people who were once liberal just “turning” all super conservative at some point in their lives. Many, many, people are the opposite, though, like myself, who were conservative from the get-go, end up being very liberal later in life. These people, myself included, are the ones who are not so beholden to ideology-maintenance that don’t any longer have that desire to REALLY get at the core truth, or as close to what works for them as a core truth, by understanding a topic inside and out. When people are willing to become informed, educated, and well versed in factual information and/or science, it doesn’t matter what they started out as. They almost always end up as liberal. It’s the national intellectual home for curious minds who would prefer to rule the world with love, rather than fear.

DEA "Leak" RE: How its impossible to decrypt/read communiques sent via Apple's iPhone Messaging service is Bullshit

It feels good to be right sometimes. The MINUTE I saw all the hoopla about the DEA having a memo leaked, veritably INVITING people who would like to keep their messages secret from the DEA should use Apple's Messaging service, installed directly on their iPhone, I thought to myself: Wow, does this ever smell like complete bullshit. 

Unfortunately, now that its basically been shown that, while the technological explanation given for why this is true may be sound, the whole of the message being widely disseminated to the public is still complete and total bullshit. 

First off, here is the supposed accidental leak that has the whole web jizzing in their pantaloons:

However, as you can see if you go to the Intellihub Article which I prefer to title as: "Bullshit officially called on DEA's leaked memo" which can be found at this link right here: http://intellihub.com/2013/04/05/dea-accused-of-leaking-misleading-info-falsely-implying-that-it-cant-read-apple-imessages, then you will see that things are not exactly as they would first appear. Here is an excerpt of the article for your convenience: 

In reading over this, however, a number of people quickly called bullshit. While Apple boasts of “end-to-end encryption” it’s pretty clear that Apple itself holds the key — because if you boot up a brand new iOS device, you automatically get access to your old messages. 

That means that (a) Apple is storing those messages in the cloud and (b) it can decrypt them if it needs to. As Julian Sanchez discusses in trying to get to the bottom of this, the memo really only suggests that law enforcement can’t get those messages by going to the mobile operators.

 It says nothing about the ability to get those same messages by going to Apple directly. And, in fact, in many ways iMessages may be even more prone to surveillance, since SMS messages are only stored on mobile operators’ servers for a brief time, whereas iMessages appear to be stored by Apple indefinitely.

That leads Sanchez to wonder if there might be some sort of ulterior motive behind the “leaking” of this document, done in a way to falsely imply that iMessages are actually impervious to government snooping. He comes up with two plausible theories: (1) that this is part of the feds’ longstanding effort to convince lawmakers to make it mandatory that all communications systems have backdoors for wiretapping and (2) that it’s an attempt to convince criminals that iMessages are safe, so they start using them falsely believing their messages are protected.

I brought this to my the attention of a friend who had been claiming precisely what all the news outlets are reporting, which is that this information that is referenced in the initial DEA link is still very likely factual and thusly, he was calling bullshit on my call of bullshit. To wit, what I said to him is as follows: 

It is very possible that the technological aspects being reported are accurate. But knowing how readily most operators hand over that information without a subpoena, I am prone to believe Apple would not take a heroic stance and refuse to do so without a subpoena, and furthermore, being that apple doesappear to indefinitely store a decryptable form of yer messages, the DEA can take their sweet time GETTING a subpoena and still gain access to your messages, even when your mobile operator has long gotten rid of them. That would normally not be possible, due to the fact that the US has no data retention requirements on the books like European operators do, and thusly, only maintain a temporary copy of your message for a very short time.

Lastly, any impression falsely provided, courtesy of the press, regarding that mode of communication being so solid it stymies any chance at the DEA ever trying to read them, is patently, by definition, bullshit. The technology may be accurate, but the fact is that they do not need to decrypt your intercepted communication. They have a 3rd Party--In this case Apple, (who has never really taken a stand against privacy of your incrimination that I am aware of). and who holds the entire message and the key to its encryption on their servers for an indefinite period of time. This, to me, is kind of like claiming they cannot, without exception, read your mail correspondence if you use the USPS, and you also write your message in Pig Latin. But in doing so, their goal is to mislead you, because what they fail to tell you is that they dont need to do that anyway, because they already have one of your pig latin translating relatives secretly planted as a mole in your own household who secretly keeps photocopies of all of your correspondence, and will provide them a plain english translation, upon request-- either with or possibly without so little as a court order to do so. Who knows?

What seems clear to me, is this: If it sounds to good to be true, it probably is. This nearly always holds up, as a universal law of human nature. Use your instincts people. Don't trust the DEA's direct correspondence with the public, and don't trust the DEA's pretend inner monologue,supposedly leaked for the public to see.

My definitive argument on behalf of gay marriage. Feel free to borrow heavily from it when you debate with bigots.

This is directed squarely at those of you who try to squirm out from underneath accepting responsibility and taking blame for your bigoted, hatefilled viewpoints, by absolving yourself of responsibility with claims that its not your fault that you can't support it, because its "God" who decided that it was immoral. It also is aimed squarely at those of you bigoted fools who try to claim "Next thing you know, people are gonna wanna be marrying their grandparents, their dogs, and having marriages that involve 3 or more people!"

Do you not see the absurd, childishness that has pervaded your thinking in order to prop up your religion's bigoted viewpoint, when you try to make a non-farcical argument in favor of forcing the rest of us to abide by it? With inane and totally crackpot logic about marrying grandmothers, and asking totally irrelevant false-flag questions that have nothing to do with the issue, such as querying: "Where in the constitution does it say that we have to redefine marriage to mean....., etc etc,"...You only make yourself look wholly idiotic and petty.

You people ought to be ashamed of yourselves. If anybody on our side of the political debate tried to make an argument with such a sad and pathetic foundation, you'd rightfully laugh us right out of the nearest exit door. But when it comes to trying to use logic to support illogical arguments, your ability to be typically hypocritical seems to know no boundaries whatsoever. 

Precisely, what, is actually being "Redefined" here, when you claim that marriage will need to be redefined when it is allowed to encompass anything outside of two opposite sex people...?

Did they need to redefine Golf so that it was a "Game played by people of all colors and genders" in order to start letting black people, and then women, join Augusta National? 

Did they need to redefine what a bathroom was to encompass a restroom "shared by both blacks and whites" once they got rid of the "Separate But Equal" facilities around until the Civil Rights Act?

Did they need to redefine VOTING as a "right to cast a ballot upon which a choice for elected official is made, and which can be dutifully performed by a member of any gender?" when the womens suffrage movement succeeded?

Did they need to redefine marriage the last time before blacks could marry whites, as an institution in which two consenting adults of *any color* may, as an act of love and commitment, conjoin their lives .... Yada yada yada..."? 

(Bonus question: Did all your predecessors decide that rabid, obnoxious arguments about religion and other similarly absurd points had to be made to try to stop it back then, and do you still have the signs they picketed with in your attic, ready to dust off again, as needed?)

The answer to all these questions, as you well know, is no, they did not.---- (Except maybe the bonus question. I can't answer regarding WHAT might be in your attic. Nor do I Want to know.) 

What they had to do in each of these cases was STOP acting in a legally discriminatory way and expand rights that had previously actually only been rights for the privileged majority, that were restricted to only those who were seen/decided as *privileged*, because those who were privileged had enough clout, and support, and they chose to legally enforce their own religious bigotry on the rest of us.

Your problem, and the problem of the entire religious establishment...Even those of you who pretend that its not a religious push that is causing you to make your bigoted case, (but everybody knows that its the ONLY reason for you to have to concerned) is as follows: Marriage has ALWAYS been an institution that, in its purest and most appropriate form, involved the conjoining of two consenting adults, ostensibly because of love, under a legal contract that conferred certain rights to a sharing of their existence together. 

Just because, thanks to religion, for 5000 years a marriage could only happen between two heterosexual members of the opposite sex does not mean that this actually DEFINES religion. Rather, Marriage itself is a neutral concept, and RELIGION CHOSE RECENTLY TO DEFINE IT AS TWO OPPOSITE SEX MEMBERS WHEN IT GREW APPARENT THAT "Those damned gays have acquired enough respectability and joined the mainstream world with enough clout that, heavens to Betsy, one of them might very well choose to try and GET MARRIED if we don't do something about this! However, in getting with the times, its soon to be FORCED (which I find very sad and very pathetic) to recognize that marriage has for a very long time now, been not just a religious concept but a legal one...And its quite a neutral concept under contemporary law; As such, the existing institution need not be redefined whatsoever. We simply need to ensure that its *scope* improved  in such a way that no longer can it/will it be used as a means of legally enforcing religiously encouraged/condoned bigotry. 

Just like all the above examples did not involve redefining anything, they will neither have to redefine marriage. They will simply have forcibly make the church acknowledge that, though they don't like it, and though they may be filled with people who push an agenda of restricting human rights for certain groups who they identify as made up of "lesser" people, and try to absolve any blame for doing so by putting it on God's shoulders and saying "look, its not like I have any issue with gays. But the big man over there said its immoral, and so I have no choice! Sorry!" Shame on you all for trying to blame an entity who, even if he existed, certainly wouldn't have created homosexuals without the choice to "undo" their homosexuality if it were something that would condemn them. Just like you have the right to be stupid, ignorant, bigots, I will support and even fight for your right to be and think like an ignorant, uneducated, dark ages hatemonger, because I recognize that whatever inane, pathetic credos you choose to live by are none of my business, I expect you to recognize in return, that you won't be attempting to force your inane pathetic credo down our throats through legal channels. IT IS THIS FALLACY IN YOUR PUSH TO FORCE RELIGIOUS CONCEPTS DOWN OUR THROATS THAT IS THE ONLY REAL PROBLEM HERE. YOU FAIL TO GRASP THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN YOUR PERSONAL BELIEFS (AS WRONG AS THEY MAY BE), AND EVERYBODY'S LEGAL STANDING AND HUMAN RIGHTS UNDER THE CONSTITUTION.

I will close with this important thought: 
Just because your church doesn't WANT marriage to include same sex couples, does not mean that marriage, by definition, doesn't already do so. The problem is simply that our laws haven't acknowledged that marriage has ALWAYS encompassed this definition, and the hateful fundamentalists are fighting to keep it this way.

P.S.-- addressing my initial paragraph, regarding people who use the argument that "Next people will want to marry relatives, pets, and 3 of more people...etc...:

To any one of those, I say fine. If that's what you wanna do, feel free to bring the absolute misery upon yourself that would inherently encompass doing any of those things.... Though since a dog can't technically consent, nor comprehend what is happening, I feel like, maybe the beastiality aspect you like to argue your viewpoint with should just remain the type of Church Marriage that is holy in your eyes, and God's but cannot be legally recognized. As for anything involving consenting adults, if you want to marry half a dozen people and legally confer to them all the rights of a spouse, who am I to stop you? You'd be making your bed, and I don't mind forcing you to lie in it.  

My Best/Futile Attempt @ DESCRIBING in DETAIL & 2 DISTINCT TYPES of MYSTICAL PSYCHEDELIC EXPERIENCES: A Lesson Based On My Own Personal Accounts

I actually pulled these directly out of an email I was writing to a group of people involved with MAPS, as myself, when I realized I couldn't casually expect anybody to read this after involuntarily receiving the email as part of a forum list. As such, I am providing here below, basically, my own unedited and unabridged attempt to convey what two genre of distinctly different experiences that went beyond the normal realm of sensory perception, and yet were not in any way related to a hallucination or a delusion--which I'm also very familiar with. To anybody that wound up here on freak accident, this will sound utterly insane-- to anybody that is familiar with psychedelics but has not had anything like these happen, you will be skeptical, as anyone must until they happen to stumble upon the same thing.....And too the few who totally GET what I'm taking about, particularly in reference to the second one I describe below, youll be relieved that you aren't the only person you'll ever meet who has specifically had the same sort of thing occur to them...... ;) Its only a little long, but its free of pauses for breath, so you may want to add your own, just to digest it a bit.... Take a few seconds every couple sentences, please.  Here goes... (I'd love to read a comment from anybody that really, totally GETS what I'm attempting to describe. Its always nice to hear from others who are relieved at somebody else conveying the same thing they do when they try to tell people about this happening to them....)

NOTE: Both of these, would, of course, by definition, count as Plus-4's on the Shulgin rating scale of psychedelic experience, where 1-3 are essentially intensity descriptions, but plus 4 is not relevant to intensity but denotes the change in the very nature of your experience to be a profoundly, distinctly spiritual one of mystical, foundation-shaking proportions.
 

The first type of psychedelically induced, MYSTICAL experience is the "standard" one which leads to a physical synesthesia where you can taste, see, smell, hear, and feel EVERYTHING, and NOTHING and realize you're a part of all of it, and its a part of you. Not to downplay something that is usually the most important experience in the life of the individual who has it, but the majority of the mystical experiences, from my conversations with a great many psychonauts, are of this type. In other words, where you can BE that which you now know to be true. This is the most common type of harmonius mysical clarity associated with psychedelics.

But, there is another kind as well, that only occurs on the borders of your unrestrained mind, prone to runaway free association thinking, while trying to fall asleep....It occurs suddenly, and can scare the hell out of you and/or instill excitement or both. In my experience it will happen many times the same night if you stop fighting it, when its happening to avoid being woken completely and full up, but whether it happens repeatedly, or just once, it goes like this: As you are drifting off, but not quite unconscious yet, you'll suddenly begin to back out of your near-sleep very quickly, your heart begins racing, your adrenaline gushing, and the reason is the sudden awareness that you're being forced away at the entrance once again. That you are in situ the narrow corridor of your mind that cannot be found purposely, but when its found subconsiously, (and in people I've talked to who GET this feeling, only occurs during the mental state one is in at the tail end of an exhausting intense psychedelic trip...Where you are tired enough to be falling asleep while still mentally being influenced by the direction the experience wants to push you), without the impediment of your conscious self to get in the way....  You awake to find yourself exiting the sort of chaotic mental labyrinth and seemingly disallowing a force inside your own mind, that is able to create a sensation of actively and helplessly being forced into forgetting the entirety of the thinking that led to the great epiphany you had made it RIGHT to the border of. Its literally as if your very mind was built with a trigger that, once you pass a certain point, its IMPOSSIBLE to be there with your fully conscious mind--- and the closer you are to that state, the more you have no choice but to be turned away from whatever secret of the universe itself was to be had by getting in there. And so, what happens, is the moment your last glimmer of consciousness suddenly grasps what you are stumbling into, the very gravity of the experience forces that panic response of adrenaline release, heart rate increase, etc, which serve to bring you closer to complete wakefulness, which in turn cruelly RIPS you from the edge of the epiphany you were just nearing the completion of understanding, in such a way that if fully awakened by it, you cannot remember AT ALL what the fuck you had just been on the verge of becoming aware of or in tune with, and you only know that whether the response was built into you, or from an outside source, the only thing you are SURE of is that, while it may have been for your own good, nevertheless, you were just FORCED out of your own mind and right out of the back exit door of your entire enormously important train of thought, and the building is such the type that you can't seem to even remember how you got in, or what was in the building at all in the first place. You just know, that you had literally no power over the thought loop that was turning your thoughts away from the real prize at the center of everything, and which, if it is focused on purposely, instead disintegrates into nothing precisely proportioned with how quickly you are brought back to complete waking coherence. This generally leaves you with both an excitement of having possibly been on the verge of knowing something literally UNKNOWABLE, a paradoxical, ultimate truth kind of thing.... And yet you are also entirely confused and frustrated--because this experience is ONLY FOR YOU. Its nearly impossible to explain, to comprehend, to describe, or to find another person who doesn't think you're crazy when explaining it. Its one of those mystical goings-on, where, if it hasn't happened to you, basically you can't possibly even understand it, let alone believe it or picture it...

......As these are the two types which I can speak from the heart and from memory about, they are the only two, I understand and as far as that goes, may be the only two types universal to humans. Or there may be others completely, which you can tell me about. If so, and you can clearly elaborate your point, I'd appreciate hearing about it.

Sincerely,
Heedless Blotterfelon (Rhymes with Seedless Watermelon)