[FRIAM] The Insurrection Index

[Steve Smith]

> Hm. My conception of HR seems completely orthogonal to yours. It 
> *enables* liberty and autonomy. But the way you're describing it, 
> "do-gooder", "interfere", "spirals", "homeostasis", etc., it sounds 
> like an attempt to *manipulate* the users.
Precisely, that was my point, it often manifests that way.  I'm not 
denying your conception, only noting that my introduction to it was 
complementary to your ideation.
> It's nothing like that. By taking my street drug to someone who knows 
> how to test it, I'm ensuring that my *intention* is satisfied. "I 
> don't want to take a bunch of strychnine. I want to take a bunch of 
> LSD." HR is assisting the drug user in their use of drugs, not 
> attempting to stop the drug user from using drugs. It's similar with 
> other drugs like heroin. "I don't want to overdose. I want to get 
> high." HR helps ensure your dosage is appropriate to your *intent*.
I can get behind that.  One of the people I mentioned as being low-grade 
addicts was actually a very high-grade addict in the sense that she was 
always and forever seeking novel "altered states" and had a very 
sophisticated way of managing and expanding that without acute harm to 
herself or others.   I had to leave her orbit because in fact, I did 
find her to ultimately be a harm to me, but not acutely, or at least not 
through her myriad pursuits of novel altered states.
> Yes, of course the teatotalers and prohibitionists need to be 
> persuaded to do something other than the stupidity of the drug war. 
> So, to appeal to those do-gooder types, we can explain that a *side 
> effect* of HR is that those who don't actually intend to get high, 
> they're just trapped in some bad attractor, they will be helped out of 
> that attractor. But don't confuse the side effect with the purpose.

I accept that YOUR purpose for developing an HR strategy/system might be 
to enhance the opportunities for "novel altered states", and I believe 
that Oliver Sacks work in neuropharmacology was precisely aligned with 
that ideation, but I don't think the folks/systems who coined the term 
Harm Reduction were doing anything *but* trying to help people 
survive/recover-from their worse instincts, even if *some* of them might 
be very sympathetic (and practiced at) drug use themselves.

I would think that you would find the ultimate collaboration in your 
ideas with major Drug Cartels... why *wouldn't* they want a burgeoning 
drug-trade built on top of  high-functioning drug-culture?   I can 
*imagine* that there are some good (bad) reasons for the illegal drug 
business to cultivate bad side-effects for their wares... (the current 
stuff about lacing everything with Fentanyl?) for short-term gains 
and/or keeping control of the business by keeping it black-market (maybe 
don't want to have to compete with the Sacklers, et al?).   Maybe a good 
hedge would be to work both ends of that one?  I think that is a common 
theme in cyberpunk.

For a day-after-tomorrow view of a deliberate high-functioning society 
of drug use, I offer up Walter Jon Williams' (ABQ) 1986 cyberpunk novel 
Hard Wired <https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/304761.Hardwired> where 
his protaganist wears a pharmaceutical grade drug-delivery pump not 
unlike an insulin pump which has only three drugs:  red, white, and 
blue... following the convention of downers, uppers, and hallucinagens 
with an AI interface that monitors his vitals and convolves them with 
his aspirations for the moment.  It is coincidental, but interesting (to 
me anyway) that this was set in what WJW referred too as the 
ABQ-Flagstaff Strip, a Strip City in the near future not unlike the 
Ft-Collins-Pueblo Urban Strip that was already emerging in 1986.


>
>
> On 1/7/22 09:10, Steve Smith wrote:
>>
>> On 1/7/22 7:01 AM, glen wrote:
>>> ...<Harm Reduction>... And perhaps it's a manifestation of whatever 
>>> core physiology it is that binds the [ma|pa]ternal-individual 
>>> perspectives into a triangle. HR seems to cut a comfortable, 
>>> practical slice through the mess, much like what I imagine a 
>>> steely-yet-kind affect would look like. 
>> I do have an affinity for the  Harm Reduction conception to a degree, 
>> and see how it can break the "downward spiral" that I think is 
>> implied here (I feel bad; I take risks/drugs to feel better; I get 
>> caught/judged; I feel bad;....etc).   Someone once told me "you are 
>> always either spiraling up or spiraling down in this world, it is the 
>> choices you make at any given instant which you are doing". Even 
>> homeostasis ideation leaves room for a mix of up/down spiraling 
>> within some limits.   I don't have a lot of experience with drug (or 
>> other harsh) recovery up close, but I have known a lot of mild 
>> addicts... people whose drug/alcohol/sex/spending/exercise addictions 
>> *seem* to interfere with their quality of life and have tried (only 
>> mildly) to bump them onto new trajectories.   I would say all of them 
>> were in some kind of dynamic homeostasis that had worked for them for 
>> years if not decades, and who was I to interfere with their patterns 
>> which were by some measure, actually working.
>>> I haven't. But I'd *like* to buy some street drugs and take it to, 
>>> say, a rave and have the HR team test it just to get a feel for that 
>>> process from the user's perspective. I think I can project how it 
>>> might feel to be on the HR team. But I really don't have any idea 
>>> how the users feel about it. One of my neighbors back in Oregon, I'm 
>>> speculating, would have thought the HR team was part of the "deep 
>>> state" ... or spies for the DEA. But I've known many drug users who 
>>> are more rational than she was.
>>
>> The major proponents of HR that I know of tend to be do-gooders who 
>> believe they are "saving people".   That is not to say that they 
>> don't have some successes, and that the spirit is a good one, but to 
>> the extent I have had people (try to) interfere in my life, it is 
>> generally unwelcome (until I am ready, whatever that means).   I 
>> think the fact (not the aspiration) of HR can mean that many 
>> individuals who might have spiraled right out the bottom have the 
>> opportunity to reverse their spirals and spin back upwards... ideally 
>> through a different mechanism (finding something besides the 
>> addiction that is hurting them to climb back up with?).  I think HR 
>> is more important to  the non-subject of the HR in that it removes us 
>> (somewhat) from the judgement that whomever is being *harmed* 
>> *deserves* to suffer, and I think for the most part, that makes us 
>> better citizens... to relieve our own judgements at least in one or 
>> two contexts.
>>
>> I had heard the phrase "there, but by the grace of God, go I" many 
>> times, and dismissed it as religious gobbledeygook until a very 
>> non-religious friend said that about a homeless person on the street 
>> in a time and circumstance when I was able to recognize the "grace" 
>> in what he was saying.
>>
>> - Steve
>>
>>>
>>> On 1/6/22 09:41, Steve Smith wrote:
>>>> Your use of Gaze worked for me, but I also understand Marcus' 
>>>> reaction to it.  I'm sure others would as well...  Gaze as you 
>>>> intended it and the rest of us received it is naturally a 
>>>> multi-spectral phenomenon... some of us have notches in our Gaze, 
>>>> as you suggested Q-shaman and Rittenhouse in their own Reflective 
>>>> Gaze perhaps.  I had not heard the reference to the 
>>>> nanny/daddy/libertarian triangle before but it fits how I do think 
>>>> about the tensions, up to and including my own internal 
>>>> apprehensions and intentions which sometimes have my mind/soul 
>>>> running a little bit like a Wankel engine... each combustion 
>>>> chamber taking it's turn (positive or negative pressure) on each of 
>>>> the three extrema you describe.   It seems like there is a 
>>>> meta-pattern in there, a first derivative of those quantities that 
>>>> can get a resonance set up, driving us forward (or backward).   In 
>>>> reflection on my ambitious youth, I think I was driven by that 
>>>> triad... 1) Wanting the freedom to explore/experience with abandon; 
>>>> 2) Wishing someone would clear my path, pick up my broken toys and 
>>>> cut the crusts from my avocado toast; 3) Wishing someone would 
>>>> bitch-slap the people who were getting in my way or not cooperating 
>>>> and maybe give me a hearty slap on the back anytime I did something 
>>>> bold.
>>>>
>>>> I also like your invocation of the Steely Affect Judge in these 
>>>> cases. I have my own distrust/judgement of the "<Adversarial> 
>>>> Criminal Justice System", mostly from having worked as a PI for a 
>>>> few years (in my ambitious youth) but the few members of those 
>>>> professions (judges, lawyers, LEOs) that I developed a lot of 
>>>> respect for were those that seemed to have a truly humanist center 
>>>> AND the Steely Affect you suggest. Unfortunately those were as 
>>>> Unicorn as the apocryphal Benevolent Dictator and the 
>>>> GoodGuyWithGun...   I left the biz because (partly) I didn't see a 
>>>> righteous niche for me (or anyone?) in that game.
>>>>
>>>> <aside> As an antidote to those judgements/kneejerks of mine, I 
>>>> *was* very pleased to see how hard the judge, prosecutor, and 
>>>> ultimately Governor of Colorado worked with the recent Manslaughter 
>>>> Case where the sentences for the trucker were required by law to be 
>>>> consecutive, leading to a 100+ year sentence for something that I 
>>>> think ended up being reduced to order 10 years.  I wanted to see 
>>>> more of that kind of unity (vs adversarality) in cases like Floyd, 
>>>> Rittenhouse, Aubery, etc...
>>>>
>>>> I have only begun to follow politics closely in the past 6 years or 
>>>> so but was not surprised to find how few *statesmen* we had among 
>>>> our elected officials.  Among those who seem to have truly 
>>>> dedicated their life to trying to make this nation (or any given 
>>>> state or locale) a better place for all who live in the 
>>>> jurisdiction, many have a very different idea from me of what 
>>>> "better place" would look like, but at least they seem to engagable 
>>>> on the topic.
>>>
>
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