I couldn't sign in via movable type (thought I could sign in to Movable Type), I was able to sign in using my old LiveJournal account.
]]>O-P offices are slave-pens, just like their "Victoriam" clek-offic predecessors. Perfect for control-freaks effing useless for actually getting useful work done.
]]>The thing about LSD-25 and the western discovery of Psilocybe mushrooms was (and this is per Michael Pollan's Changing My Mind, which has a history of psychedelics) is that it represented a sea change. With something like alcohol or heroin, you can blame the drug. With something like LSD, it's not just the drug, it's about set and setting. In the 1950s, they went through quite a lot of models for how to describe what LSD does. Does it induce psychosis? No. Does it cause some other form of insanity? No. Does it always make people better? No. Worse? No. Control their minds? No. Etc. It turns out that the set and setting of the trip--the instructions you get before, the support you get during, and the counseling you get after--are critical to what one of these drugs does to you. Used as in the 1950s (or now) with a reasonably good control, and psychedelics seem to be better at treating addiction, depression, and anxiety than anything else we have at the moment. Used as a party drug, while you're breaking up with your girlfriend, or during a riot, and they will mess you up.
That "context" problem is what differentiates LSD and company from alcohol. With alcohol, Prohibition was about trying to deal with the very real problems of alcohol addiction by banning alcohol, and good luck with that. With LSD, the problem was (and is) about context: there's good evidence that they can be used treat some truly problematic diseases, and there's a push to figure out how to legalize them for these treatments. The problem is that many people who work with them (most notoriously, Timothy Leary), start wondering if society's ills in general can be cured by turning everybody on (they still regret not giving Nixon 1000 mikes, for example). The latter is dangerous, especially in a society where the government wants us afraid and the corporations want us addicted to their products so that we'll be predictable customers. Giving everybody a pill and a ceremony that turns them into non-compliant free thinkers looks a lot like anarchy, and it's not clear that this is a good thing, even to someone like me.
]]>I remember reading that back when the Temperance Movement was getting going, something like 1/4 of many towns' men were considered drunks — which meant they were passed-out or unable to stand by noon. (I read this well before the Internet, so will defer to someone with decent search skills and an actual citation.)
]]>If you had written about the hippie movement in the 1920s, wouldn't those people have accused you of writing a highly implausible near-future?
You might want to take a look at this one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensreform
Somewhat more detailed accounts make for a not-drug-induced flashback...
]]>As for hashish, some Frenchmen might want to have a word with you, notably Baudelaire.
Also, while most analgesic and euphoric effects of opiates are mediated by the mu receptor, they also bind to the kaapa receptor od Salvia divinorum fame. Not as much, still, makes you wonder about some of the opiate dreams, especially in long-term users if tolerance wouldn't build up to kappa agonism as fast as with mu agonism.
]]>This isn't restricted to LSD and friends though. It's pretty obvious that a major if unspoken reason why They don't like people smoking cannabis is that it makes it so clear how much of the stuff They want you to believe in is bullshit.
And Their backup plan is to be half-arsed about enforcement against people growing it under lights, but not so half-arsed that the growers don't get motivated to optimise for maximum sledgehammer effect from minimum quantity of production. Better for Them that people end up smoking mainly heavy indicas that are more like alcohol in that they just stop you thinking altogether, than smoking spacey sativas that free your mind to think in undesirable (to Them) channels.
]]>Mainstream psychiatry frames autism as a spectrum of disorders. Really? Do we have to act like somebody else to be judged normal?
Laurent Mottron, a psychiatry professor at the University of Montreal, argues against a “deficit-based” approach to children with autism. The premise is that “treatment” should change them, make them conform, suppress their repetitive behaviours and moderate their “obsessive” interests.
This approach, Mottron says, has done nothing to improve employment outcomes for people with autism.
In my own case, attempts by teachers and work managers to make me behave “normally” often just triggered my autism. My reactions at school led to expulsions. At work I would quit.
So I agree with Mottron and others autism researchers that want to move beyond studying autism as a deficit and to emphasise the abilities and strengths of people with it.
]]>Long Ago, In the Far Away, when I was a kid reading about Timothy Leary and LSD, the concept itself was enough for me to enter an "altered state" of consciousness.
It's like what Heteromeles @1257 said, it's not just the drug, it's about set and setting.
Do something as simple as sit quiet, especially if you are surrounded by noise. Then look at where the ceiling meets the wall across the room. Now see yourself sitting cross legged, upside down, butt on the ceiling, back against the wall, looking at yourself sitting in the chair.
Now have both versions of yourself wave at the other.
It's all about hearing the silence especially in the midst of the noise of life. Everybody makes the mistake of trying to find a quiet place to hear the "sound of one hand clapping" and they miss it. It is harder to hear one silence against another silence.
Hear the "sound of water flowing in a stream". It's not the sound of the water snapping in the rocks, it's the silence of the water in between the other sounds.
Hear the "sound of wind flowing through the tree". It's not the sound of the leaves rustling, or the brief whistle of fast wind, it is the silence of the air among those sounds.
In the noisiest place, I will first hear the "sound of one hand clapping", then I will see myself sitting high in a Live Oak hearing the "sound of one hand clapping" while I hear the "sound of wind flowing through the tree" while I listen to the "sound of water flowing in a stream" below the branch of the tree I am sitting in, all the while the noise of life is flowing around me. It's about those separate silences happening at once.
Then there is when I am sitting cross legged in the white desert looking at a century plant. It is Twilight, the sun just setting, as I listen to the wind move through the century plant, with puffs blowing bits of sand, and a black beetle scuttles past, then later a snake swings past following the tracks of the beetle.
Each time you come back to the Real, it's sharper, and different than when you left.
]]>:) thanks
]]>As I said in response to "The Economic Case for Worldwide Vegetarianism"... the article makes explicit the assumption that we can simply buy another planet and move there once we wreck this one. Without that the cost of business as usual is not meaningful.
The same problem applies to almost all of the economic analysis of the impact of climate change. Which is a limitation of economics, they can try to wedge "cost of a human life" into their systems but invariably end up using "monetary value of measurable outputs over expected remaining lifetime" or some similar nonsense, rather than "cost of substitution" because the latter is too scary. And that's just for one human life.
The "cost of replacement" for the only planet we can live on is far too scary to even think about. It becomes a Brin-style thought experiment in "how many Apollo programmes would it take to move a useful number of people to another planet, assuming we can find one" and the answer is a hollow laugh.
Herr Doctor Professor Waring actually takes a different approach and asks why are we not even attempting to value most of the unpaid work. Then extends that to all the other inputs and output of the economy. Hence considering water and air as well as slavery.
]]>Err, at least for India the Bronze Age Collaps would overlap with the final stages of the Indus Valley Culture, though the Harappan culture had problems way before that.
For China, we have little historical data on this time. The Shang dynasty went down about 200 years later.
It might depend somewhat on commercial relations; there were likely some between Mesopotamia and India. For Chine, I'm not aware of some, though I might be mistaken.
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