That wasn’t the question. Bad time to insult another’s reading ability.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSfa56tjBQo

Jesus was way cool
Everybody liked Jesus
Everybody wanted to hang out with him
Anything he wanted to do, he did
He turned water into wine
And if he wanted to
He could have turned wheat into marijuana
Or sugar into cocaine
Or vitamin pills into amphetamines

He walked on the water
And swam on the land
He would tell these stories
And people would listen
He was really cool

If you were blind or lame
You just went to Jesus
And he would put his hands on you
And you would be healed
That’s so cool

He could’ve played guitar better than Hendrix
He could’ve told the future
He could’ve baked the most delicious cake in the world
He could’ve scored more goals than Wayne Gretzky
He could’ve danced better than Baryshnikov
Jesus could have been funnier than any comedian you can think of
Jesus was way cool
You might also like
He told people to eat his body and drink his blood
That’s so cool
Jesus was so cool
But then some people got jealous of how cool he was
So they killed him
But then he rose from the dead
He rose from the dead, danced around
Then went up to heaven
I mean, that’s so cool
Jesus was way cool

No wonder there are so many Christians

I’m not convinced that a Swiss bulletin from 1999 which tents its argument on examples from the Vietnam War and the American Civil War really gets to the heart of the current issue and set of circumstances.

This was course material to a post grad university course on the subject of addiction and recovery taught THIS MONTH. It discusses the entire history of opiods.

I think we should both be able to agree that it is more informed than you are.

Ok. There are hundreds of overdoses EVERY DAY in shelters in my town. Have fun with that.

You can’t just lock people in a room until they are out of physical withdrawal and call them cured. They are still addicts. The causes of the addiction still exist. They will continue to seek drugs to help cope with life. This makes things worse.

But it takes resources away from people who want to get better. In my town, there are two to FIVE YEAR waiting lists for resources. But go ahead, institutionalize every person who a shelter worker has to shoot with Naloxone. You can fuck them and people trying to get better at the same time. Hurting all the right people, perhaps.

You are arguing from a place of ignorance, and that’s exactly what these politicians are counting on. You’re arguing from the needs of people who don’t want to see overdoses in the street, not from the needs of people with addiction. That’s the point of this entire program; addressing the relatively unimportant desires of non-addicts who vote.

TIL I’m dead

How is he still fooling people. I keep talking to folks who think he’s doing a great job.

It was a strange take in the 1980s when the disease model was the best we had. Today it is well accepted that most drugs alone don’t typically produce addiction. Just not by conservative voters, who still act like addiction is a moral failing, because people choose to do drugs “the first time,” and then become “chemically addicted”.

Please see, for example:

The concept of physical dependence implies a deterministic outlook which limits seriously any therapeutic hope. It predicts that once a user has taken a dangerous drug he or she will be hooked, with little chance to gain control. It also implies a social policy advocating total prohibition, since the drug itself is seen as the cause of addiction. The person is seen as passive and helpless in front of the pernicious substance. Alexander and Hadway [20] have called such a view the exposure orientation on addiction. They contrast it with an adaptive view of addiction which suggests that drug use is an attempt to reduce the distress that existed before it was first taken. Opiate users thus are at risk of addiction only under special circumstances, that is, when they are confronting difficult situations and trying to cope by turning to drugs. The problem lies in the persons’s psychological deficiencies and not in the drug itself. Thus, drug prohibition would be of no effect since the individual would still have to confront his or her stress and deal with it. In this view, the user has the choice of finding alternatives, searching for help and ultimately abandoning his or her dangerous habit.

A number of facts show that there is no universal and exclusive connection between such drugs as opiates and physical addiction. Any person using drugs does not necessarily become an addict. The effects of psychoactive substances are extremely variable from person to person and are relative to a number of factors among which are prior history of drug use, genetic susceptibility, cognitive factors, such as expectancy and attributions, environmental stresses, personality and opportunities for exposure [22]. People who have come to use drugs by accident, such as hospital residents who were given regular doses of morphine for pain relief, have not demonstrated an irresistible craving for such substances after release. It is estimated that about one quarter of the American soldiers in Viet Nam took heroin. Most of them, once back home, were able to quit without major difficulties. Similar observations hold for the period of the American Civil War. The case of controlled users, of which physicians are the best known group, shows that regular intakes of opiates over decades do not lead to tolerance or to withdrawal symptoms during abstinence. Heroin can be used on a regular but infrequent basis without dependence or catastrophic consequence [23]. It has also been found that former heroin addicts can completely stop using it or shift to casual use. Epidemiological studies have established that many heroin users are adolescents who grow out of their addiction and become abstinent later in life. People can experience withdrawal symptoms from much milder substances than opiates, such as sedatives, tranquillizers, laxatives, nicotine and caffeine. This evidence shows that no deterministic physiological mechanism can explain physical addiction exclusively.

The intention of the politicians expounding this isn’t even to improve outcomes, it’s to improve election performance, and they don’t care who has to be thrown under the bus to accomplish it. They don’t care whether or not it improves outcomes as long as it engages their voters. And right now, their voters want to see the right people get hurt.

Or, don’t participate in atrocity against animals.

This doesn’t help the people already stuck.

Neither will arresting them! We know that forced treatment does not have good outcomes for addiction! This is not science based policy, this is sheer populism, and it is going to further harm vulnerable people.

The cause of addiction is not drugs. Programs like guaranteed minimum income would have far more impact on the actual causes of addiction. But let’s just imprison people until they stop being sick, that’ll work.

It is genuinely pretty obscene. You can’t “offset” this kind of behaviour.

Now, now. What would Marx say about that?

The steam deck wasn’t even a sketch on paper when Valve started pushing Linux. It’s been their route forward into all forms of hardware. I’m sure it’s not long before we get a stand alone VR headset that runs Linux, which seems to me to be the real goal. The Deck was just a step along the way.

Bethesda Microsoft, EA, Ubisoft and Epic

Line forms behind me!

Much like the nuclear forces, it only works within a certain range. Not enough principle and the economy collapses before you can snowball. Too much and the economy collapses because you snowball.

I’m not busy…

Bibliography

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This book explores the emotional complexity of animals, offering evidence of empathy, fairness, and moral agency in various species, including primates and mammals.

Brosnan, Sarah F., and Frans B. M. de Waal. “Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay.” Nature 425, no. 6955 (2003): 297-299.
This study documents experiments with capuchin monkeys demonstrating a sense of fairness. It is one of the key pieces of evidence showing non-human animals responding to inequity in ways similar to humans.

Cheney, Dorothy L., and Robert M. Seyfarth. Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.
This book provides insight into the social intelligence of primates, with a focus on how baboons use their social knowledge in decision-making, emphasizing complex moral and social cognition.

De Waal, Frans B. M. Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2016.
Frans de Waal examines the various ways animals demonstrate intelligence, including problem-solving, communication, and social behaviors, and critiques human biases in measuring animal cognition.

Foote, Amanda D., et al. “Mirror Self-Recognition in the Bottlenose Dolphin: A Case of Cognitive Convergence.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 98, no. 10 (2001): 5937-5942.
This article presents research on mirror self-recognition in dolphins, a test typically used to determine self-awareness in animals.

Griffin, Donald R. Animal Minds: Beyond Cognition to Consciousness. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.
This book explores the conscious experiences of animals, focusing on problem-solving, communication, and self-awareness across different species, including birds, primates, and marine mammals.

Inoue, Satoshi, and Tetsuro Matsuzawa. “Working Memory of Numerals in Chimpanzees.” Current Biology 17, no. 23 (2007): R1004-R1005.
This research highlights the short-term memory skills of chimpanzees, demonstrating that they can outperform humans in specific memory tasks.

Metcalfe, Janet, and H. Michael Brower. “Animal Metacognition.” In The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Cognition, edited by Thomas R. Zentall and Edward A. Wasserman, 537-556. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
This chapter discusses evidence of metacognition in non-human animals, focusing on rats and primates and the implications for animal intelligence.

Povinelli, Daniel J., and Timothy J. Eddy. “What Young Chimpanzees Know About Seeing.” Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 61, no. 3 (1996): 1-191.
This research investigates the cognitive abilities of chimpanzees, including their understanding of others’ perspectives and intentions, challenging human assumptions about self-awareness and theory of mind.

Smith, J. David, et al. “The Comparative Psychology of Uncertainty Monitoring and Metacognition.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 26, no. 3 (2003): 317-339.
This article presents studies on metacognition in animals, focusing on how rats, dolphins, and primates monitor their own mental processes and make decisions based on uncertainty.

von Bayern, Auguste M. P., et al. “Tool-Using and Problem-Solving in Non-Human Animals.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 368, no. 1630 (2013): 20120410.
This paper explores tool use and problem-solving abilities across a range of species, highlighting the cognitive flexibility and intelligence of animals such as birds, apes, and octopuses.

Whiten, Andrew, et al. “Culture in Chimpanzees.” Nature 399, no. 6737 (1999): 682-685.
This study provides evidence of cultural behaviors in chimpanzees, suggesting that culture—once considered a uniquely human trait—is present in other species.