How the GOP Can Counter the Dems' Victory-Via-Psychedelics Strategy
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iSteve commenter Doug offers a novel political strategy suggestion:
If conservatives were playing politics to win, they’d push through the deregulation of anabolic steroids. If trenbolone was sold over-the-counter, you’d see a massive rightward shift in opinion among men 30 and older.
The left is certainly gearing up to do so with psychedelics, which are well-documented as producing permanent increases in personality openness. MDMA and psilocybin will probably get FDA approval within the year. Instead the stupid party of Paul Ryan and NRO seems to care more about the sanctity of Major League Baseball than winning elections.
What’s the political effect of more marijuana smoking?
If, as someone said, the soy-boys have started lifting weights so they can join Antifa and punch Nazis, mightn’t they develop themselves to the point that they’d rather punch other soy-boys than supposed Nazis?
I wonder if you could create a substance that makes women more likely to give birth to boys.
One Joe Rogan is enough.
Colorado, my state, has trended Democratic for a couple decades, but the leftward trajectory has only accelerated since pot was legalized
More lefty liberals and more lefty libertarians. Hopefully they will be too lazy, hazy, crazy, stoned to vote. We will get more people with an “I’m all right Jack”* outlook on life.
*The English expression indicating smug and complacent selfishness.[5]
The GOP does seriously need to come up with a healthcare plan that doesn’t involve just repealing Obamacare with replacing it with nothing. Polls have shown it’s voters’ number one concern, and it’ll hurt them in red states if they ignore the problem.
“If trenbolone was sold over-the-counter,”
Is that a good idea?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anabolic_steroid#Adverse_effects
Interesting idea! As an aside, there does seem to be a perceptible drop in driving skills and an uptick in «near misses», particularly in freeway merging. It never occurred to me until another friend mentioned he’d noticed the same and thought it may be due to pot. You’d think the state would be all over it, but in leftie coastal cities like SF and SM the city worries more about trying to wring license fees from scooters.
What’s the political effect of more marijuana smoking? Among the more liberal 20 something stoners something like this:
“Dude, was there like, an election today?”
“Nah man, it’s cool”
“Cool, I didn’t want to miss nothin’”
(Bubbling sound of a bong hit)
“Could you pass the Doritos dude?”
I suspect my memories of the dudes who toked up back in college in the late 1980’s/early 90’s would pretty much mirror real life for stoners today, except back then they didn’t have Facebook, Instagram, or phones to snap pictures and text their exploits.
I think the political effect of more marijuana smoking would be slightly rightward. The owners of Domino’s Pizza and Papa John’s are both pretty right wing.
MDMA and psilocybin will probably get FDA approval within the year.
No. Too many auto accidents and freakouts.
When marijuana was legalized in Colorado, Denver quarterback Peyton Manning bought a bunch of franchise pizza joints.
More gun control.
Most states that have legalized marijuana — California, Massachusetts, Washington, Colorado, Vermont — have enacted gun control laws almost simultaneously. Oregon is likely next as a gun control initiative will be on the ballot. (Maine and Alaska are the exceptions).
Renoving test cyp from the CSA would be enough. As it is, testosterone is controlled, but estrogen is not. Funny that.
Amateurs shouldn’t be messing with tren tho. You’re shaving years off your life as it is if you don’t end up with a fatal dysrhythmia.
“What’s the political effect of more marijuana smoking?”
On one hand, you’d see an increase in the number of business owners, and they skew republican. On the other hand, business owners look to the bottom line, which might lead to an increase in illegal labor and even H1B visas to obtain skilled pot growing and production experts from Mexico.
As far as recreational users are concerned, twice as many liberals as conservatives have tried pot, so maybe elections might be swayed by Dems who are too stoned to vote, staring slack jawed at cat videos, hoping that government cheese will be replaced by government Cheetos.
I took psychedelics back in the day. I think they helped open me up so that I could later clearly see through the Leftist Maya produced by our mainstream culture. Perhaps I’m an anomaly.
Since my teen years, I’ve lifted weights. Sometimes more intensely, sometimes less. But I have to say, as I’ve drifted more right, I’ve started lifting more. A positive feedback loop?
Effect of more pot smoking? More Zombies… A demand for driver-less cars…
I’ve never known a voting Republican who smoked pot.
Of the pot smokers I’ve known, all were left-wing Democrats or in a twilight zone. Or both.
Alright, Mrs Lovejoy, calm down. The children will be fine.
Nobody – and I mean nobody – is driving around on mushrooms, LSD or ecstasy.
I’ve gobbled up loads of MDMA and am still a bigoted right wing monster of the first order. Let’s see these studies.
For general use by adults? I find that very difficult to believe, although I hope it happens with respect to ‘shrooms. Not sure about MDMA. The latter is closely related to meth as I recall, so I wouldn’t expect it to be legalized anytime soon.
mmack, No one does stoners better than Cheech and Chong.
But would it be enough to counteract the countervailing trend of increased deaths from heart attack and liver failure?
I dunno, didn’t work for me. Getting better at empathizing with leftists just made it clearer how dangerous they are.
I think that’s correlation (Democrat social agenda checklist), not causation.
If conservatives were playing politics to win, they’d push through the deregulation of anabolic steroids. If trenbolone was sold over-the-counter, you’d see a massive rightward shift in opinion among men 30 and older.
Until they turn into Bruce Jenners
I think that was a coincidence. He had just signed with the Broncos after his long run with the Colts and Papa John’s was a big NFL sponsor. He probably would have bought Papa John’s franchises in any new city he went to after leaving Indianapolis.
Grape soda too, it tastes like Dom Perignon when you are high.
To answer your question: obsession with MJ politics.
I gotta say though, there are millions of people who took steroids and they seem fine.
I didn’t observe any change to my personality or politics when taking psilocybin mushrooms. If anything I moved right over time on social issues and left on economic issues and away from youthful libertarianism.
There is a sort of libertarian bent to shroomers but that may simply be the result of libertarians being the ones who want to destigmatize their hobby.
I hope the decision the FDA makes on these drugs is based on science and not political considerations. The evidence that psilocybin improves the depression that often accompanies terminal illness seems very strong to me. And it was harmless fun for young people like myself who found it more fun than alcohol and lacking in side effects.
Something else I noticed is that the people who seem to enjoy them the most are those in the Celtic-influenced Atlantic seaboard of Europe: Wales, Scotland, rural Western England, Ireland, Western France, and Northern Spain. In all of these areas they are de facto legal, and any attempt to change this strikes me as anti-rural and anti-Celtic.
Donovan is Scottish with a Catholic mother and decided to retire to Ireland.
What’s the political effect of more marijuana smoking?
Complacency.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2352695/Smoking-cannabis-really-DOES-make-people-lazy-affects-area-brain-responsible-motivation.html
One of the guys I used to smoke pot with in college is now a US Senator. Won’t tell you what state.
As for the party, look at my nomme du internet and guess.
I think it’s kind of a chicken v. egg thing. Does marijuana legalization move society leftward or does a leftward moving electorate legalize marijuana? I tend to think it’s the latter. In any event I live in Illinois where we have medical marijuana but not decriminalized/legal marijuana. Can’t say I’m looking forward to the day. I’ve never been to Colorado but Coloradans commenting on blogs report more theft and lowlifes loitering their streets since Colorado A-OKed it.
I’ve taken a series of red pills over the last couple of decades while enjoying cannabis, but then I’ve always been the exception.
One of the guys I used to smoke pot with in college is now a US Senator. Won’t tell you what state.
Sources tell me it’s ok as long as you don’t inhale.
https://ftw.usatoday.com/2014/09/peyton-manning-pizza-weed
The quarterback, who owns more than 20 Papa John’s Pizza franchises, explained why he believes more people have been ordering pizza recently during an interview with Peter King.
“There’s some different laws out here in Colorado,” Manning said. “Pizza business is pretty good out here, believe it or not, due to some recent law changes. So when you come to a different place, you’ve kind of got to learn everything that comes with it.”
Category: be careful what you wish for.
http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/06/06/hppd-and-the-specter-of-permanent-side-effects/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucinogen_persisting_perception_disorder
Girl Scouts sometimes sell cookies outside medical marijuana centers.
They sell a lot.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/transformation/vikram-zutshi/political-significance-of-lsd
Libs want to take LSD microdoses so they’ll be less afraid of blacks.
Or they could be mutually reinforcing, regardless of which was causal or came first.
That’s pretty much what happened to Haight-Ashbury as the 1967 Summer of Love went on: the abundance of drugged up white girls attracted a lot of black street criminals.
Wasn’t there a recent phenomenon, effectively censored in the legacy media and somewhat discussed online, of blacks hanging out around colleges, noticing when there was a party, and swooping in to escort a blasted white girl home? There was one case where the guy was effectively a serial killer and his method of operation depended on spotting whte girls with dilated pupils stumbling out of dorms.
“But I have to say, as I’ve drifted more right, I’ve started lifting more. A positive feedback loop?”
Direct research linking testosterone to ideology is lacking. However, one study shows that rich men
with large biceps are more opposed to wealth redistribution than rich men with small biceps…
https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/political-motivations-may-have-evolutionary-links-to-physical-strength.html
and another study shows with wider faces are more willing to express prejudicial beliefs than men with thinner-faces.
http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/news/releases/facial-structure-may-predict-endorsement-of-racial-prejudice.html
But there are other studies linking specific hormones to political preferences, so researchers cannot definitively say how testosterone, let alone cortisol, oxytocin, and dopamine, politically impact men.
Most likely MDMA and/or psilocybin will be approved for medical use in somewhat generalized psychiatric conditions, like PTSD or depression.
But one only needs to take a cursory look at how Adderall is distributed in the US. Large segments of the psychiatric profession are more than willing to rubber-stamp prescriptions with virtually zero inconvenience to the patient. Docs only require a 15 minute checkin every 30 days, and approve literally everybody who can memorize the answer to five yes/no questions.
Functionally, amphetamine is a legalized drug for anyone in the middle class. At first, psychiatrists will be precautious with post-approval MDMA. You’ll have to spend the full duration in the office, and engage in boring psychotherapy. Then they’ll realize they can bill nearly the same amount and spend 95% less time, by just giving the patient his pills, telling him “be careful”, and having him fill out a nominal post-experience “psychotherapy” questionnaire.
The patient will of course, play along by talking up some overblown childhood “trauma”, then immediately set off to the nearest electronic music festival, spend the entire roll partying, then reassure his psychiatrist at his next checkin that he made a “major breakthrough” and to “please refill the script”.
Interesting question. As a 17 year-old college Freshman I discovered one Ron Paul in my roomate’s copy of High Times magazine. They were endorsing him for the 1988 Presidential election.
I read a lot of RP’s statements at the time and became a big supporter. My fellow pot smoking roommates, however, all supported Dukakis.
I know that Tucker Carlson has said he too voted for RP in that election. I’ve often wondered if Tucker came about his support in the same way I did.
Ze still votes for the GOP!
Donald/Deirdre McCluskey was a burly left-wing young man and is now an elderly transwoman Austrian economics advocate.
“What’s the political effect of more marijuana smoking?”
Low turnout.
A good investment. More people with the munchies means more pizza and fast food sales.
Follow-up to this: it turns out that attempting to research black nonstudents raping white college students at the edges of an urban campus at dusk is really stupid. I am not yet seeing the specific case I was thinking of. This was somewhat famous, but well short of Trayvon levels, and the legacy media didn’t want it hyped. The guy was established to be doing it routinely and he had hair, a mane of dreadlocks, a big guy. I want to say it was Pennsylvania, about five years ago or less. The key was, he was tolerated by onlookers because the girls were coming home visibly drunk and he looked like he was helping them.
On some occasions decades ago, I partook of various things in Boulder, and the changes to my country since then have seemed like hallucinations.
I was concerned that I was experiencing some kind of weird, lingering effect, but then some guy named Steve handed me a red pill and I found out that not only were all the weird things that were happening real, they were worse then I thought.
Pot smoking sure as hell seems to go with liberal populations. So do things like LSD, mushrooms, and ayahuasca (a hallucinogenic vine from the Amazon rainforest that, um, I learned about back then).
Do those things cause liberal attitudes or do they just correlate? I think young people with few responsibilities are more likely to do those things in the first place, and people who think it is society’s job to take care of them feel less sense of responsibility. There is a correlation, but the causation goes the other way.
That’s when Stephen Hager took over as editor of High Times. He drastically revamped that magazine- largely eliminating approval of hard drugs and getting more broad-based political coverage and populist appeal. He’s a lefty, but was heterodox enough to where quite a few young people got exposure to a wider range of perspectives than they would have otherwise.
It’s not a substance but a sonogram machine. It’s very common in India and China. If the fetus isn’t a boy the girl is aborted.
“What’s the political effect of more marijuana smoking?”
Pro-Alien. As in X-Files, Reticulons, little green men, etc.
Nearly every medical dispensary and legal cannabis store in the nearly 30 states that have them sells Girl Scout Cookies inside the store. GSC is one of the top 10 selling strains of cannabis.
As for cannabis turning people into raving socialists, it hasn’t for me and I consume an incredible amount daily to deal with chronic pain since the more effective opiates are now medically unpopular and cannabis is the only drug available with zero toxicity and which I can legally grow and consume being 100% certain it’s unadulterated. I’ve always been very libertarian on speech, drugs, euthanasia, and a firm agnostic (becoming more atheist every year). I’ve also always been a race realist (have never doubted my lying eyes in that regard), capitalist, and eugenics champion. I’ve never trusted government or media. Basically I’m a GenX poster boy.
One thing to remember with cannabis is that it’s not monolithic. There are hundreds of strains of the plant and they all produce different effects. Some are highly sedative and euphoric, some energetic and uplifting, some cerebral and creative, some suppress appetite and some enhance it. Further, like most drugs, these effects aren’t the same across all users.
I won’t write a pro-cannabis screed, you’ve all seen them before. Instead, I’ll say there are some big problems with the stuff because government stifled scientific inquiry for so damn long (it’s still Schedule 1 federally!!). We don’t fully understand how and why different strains produce different results although we are getting closer. The stuff you buy even at “medical” dispensaries is still mostly unknown and untested. Dosing remains an issue due to lack of testing, knowledge of effects of different strains, and methods of ingestion. So for the user, and especially the less bright user, it can all be a bit much to figure out.
Lastly, let me say that unless you are a cannabis user and often even if you are, you have no idea how many people are actually smoking weed. I’ve seen countless people in every profession smoking grass. Cops, lawyers, doctors, professors, politicians, all the trades, etc, cannabis cuts a huge swath across our entire population. The only discernible effect I’ve seen from legalization is removing the specter of some jack booted government thug crashing through your door while ignoring the 5,000 untested rape kits back in his evidence locker.
You’re thinking of the gentle giant of Charlottesville
Are you thinking of Jesse L. Matthew, who murdered Hannah Graham and Morgan Harrington at UVA?
In his younger days Spode actually performed a lot of field research into this subject (methodology was less than rigorous)
MDMA: probably can make people into cucks
Psilocybin: suggestibility in either direction.
Marijuana: negligible effect on political outlook
Openness: just seems like a measure at how good one is at thinking like a Jew tbh
That’s when the left decides that fetuses are life – the left has no objection to rules that make it illegal to abort babies based on gender (female)
It was the main University of Virginia campus. His name was Jesse Matthews. He was an affirmative action employee of the University. He was some kind of low level employee at the meds school hospital.
You’d be surprised how many blacks in jobs like security guard janitor hospital central supply cart pushers mail room etc are hired right out of prison. He murdered at least 10 young women only one victim was black
This is incorrect. Adderall is most often passed out like candy by general practitioner family doctors with no psychiatric consult. Prescriptions for 90 days supply are written and filled either 30 days at a time (retail) or all at once (mail order). What’s truly alarming is that it is prescribed to millions of children in this manner.
We are feeding our kids amphetamines by the handful yet still (in some states) putting people in jail for a 100% natural and non-toxic member of the plant kingdom. And this makes sense to people because important people (govt and media and clergy) told them it was correct.
I’ve seen numerous ads for testosterone supplements. I generally assume that most supplements are varying degrees of snake oil, but perhaps that could be a boon for the GOP (with less frightening health consequences than Anabolic steroids)?
That’s it, thank you.
No need for much ‘countering’ here — this is self-countering:
Yes, thanks, here is WaPo.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/jesse-matthew-to-appear-in-court-for-plea-agreement-hearing/2016/03/01/f6b7093a-dfd8-11e5-846c-10191d1fc4ec_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.93cdc8b2593b
Get the GOP to run on securing the border and get rid of importing foreign workers to replace Americans/ Then you’ll win. You want tech sector voters? End H-1B visas. As a added benefit you get to watch a bunch of man-boy freaks in Silicon Valley run around with their hair on fire once they lose their coolie labor force.
The other one is this. Allow college grads to file for bankruptcy. This is a winner. Once enacted it will not only change college admission standards and tuition rates. It will result in the mass layoff of all those six figure “administrators” and parasites added on over the last decade and do nothing for the students except live off them like ticks.
As it stands, allowing the banks and government to finance college tuition has been a abject disaster for young Americans. It turns them into debt serfs right out the gate. Often with useless degrees sold to them by lying sacks of shit HS and college counselors.
But some parents will say “muh junior is going into a STEM field”
My reply: ‘ ‘So what, chances are he’ll be replaced by a Bombay or Chinese coolie that will work for half his wages in 5-10 years ‘.
No adult can honestly recommend college today due to what it’s become and whats happening in industry.
Girl Scouts sell a lot of cookies pretty much wherever they set up shop. I buy ‘em, and I don’t even like the cookies. Nor do I like the GS organization. But when some outrageously cute 9-year-old asks me if I’d like to buy some cookies, I always seem to have just one answer for her. And it ain’t “no.”
A good investment. More people with the munchies means more pizza and fast food sales
Thanks Captain Obvious!
Got it. I’ll run as the Cheetos candidate.
Are cliches a side effect or is that how you usually write? Also: what makes a boot a jack boot? And why is a jack boot worse than a boot? And why are government thugs jack-booted (doesn’t it need a hyphen?) and not thugs in jack-boots?
Thanks in advance for your answers!
It’s chemically similar* but has very different effects, acting on the neurotransmitters serotonin (mood/pleasure) and oxytocin (empathy/bonding) more so than dopamine (energy).
*Which doesn’t mean anything: Sudafed and Vick’s Vaporub (l-methamphetamine) are much closer to meth (r-methamphetamine).
Yep.
That’s interesting.
Is it culture or genetics though? Or just random chance? Good terrain for mushrooms historically?
I’m curious because there is a real noticeable difference with ethnic groups and type of drug use (or use at all).
I have never known a black who I considered to be a real drinker. And until I got to college I was totally unaware blacks had any kind of rep for doing drugs.
Trust me, where I came from black use of drugs was neglible except for pot smoking. They were literally not even in the same league for substance ingestion.
Most of the hardcore smokers I’ve known were white as well.
But then crack had users among whites, but mostly seemed to be a black thing.
But meth must be different somehow, because that seems to be pretty white. No idea why that difference.
But in my youth the people taking umpteen different kinds of pills, doing mushrooms, acid, were predominantly white.
Is it really different up North or out West?
Au contraire, I once put a Volkswagen squareback on two wheels in a parking lot while on mushrooms; or at least it seemed so at the time…
Hmmmm, Senator P______ L______ is a deadhead but the dude graduated in 1961 … so I’m gonna say Jeff Flake?
I claim no expertise, just things I’ve picked up in a decade of gym-going and participating in online weight training discussions, but it’s my impression that people who are into steroids generally don’t know much about politics and care even less.
Sudafed does not have methamphetamine of any type in it, but its old active ingredient is a precursor.
Levo-meth is in low-volume OTC inhalers.
I have known some… but I guess you could say they were “conservative libertarians who voted Republican rather than for nanny-state Democrats,” as opposed to “Republicans.”
I think the make-’em-more-manly policy the GOP should push isn’t steroids it’s joint-custody/no child support as default in divorce. Unless there’s some serious dysfunction to suggest otherwise, each divorced parent has and provides for the kid 50% of the time.
When women can no longer blow up marriages and take the kids and a big hunk of their ex-husband’s paycheck in the deal,
– female behavior will improve
– marriages will be better, stronger, more patriarchial
– more young men will be willing to get married
– earlier family formation and more total children produced
Granted this isn’t the GOP actually delivering on immigration–an immigration moratorium would be the big kahuna that delivers incredible benefits to middle/working class Americans and would cement GOP allegiance for generations. But it would be a definite big step forward.
Wasnt this all around the same time as when Haven Monahan was cutting a swathe?
Paul Ryan’s giant new superpac is giving most its money to the 19 Republicans who have violated party discipline and signed a Dem amnesty discharge petition.
http://www.breitbart.com/2018-elections/2018/05/18/ryans-super-pac-funds-11-of-19-amnesty-discharge-signers/
Here’s the list of GOP traitors:
Wednesday, May 9, 2018
1. Carlos Curbelo Florida 26
2. Jeff Denham California 10
3. David G. Valadao California 21
4. Will Hurd Texas 23
5. Mario Diaz-Balart Florida 25
6. Mia B. Love Utah 04
7. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen Florida 27
8. Charles W. Dent Pennsylvania 15
9. Fred Upton Michigan 06
10. David G. Reichert Washington 08
11. Mike Coffman Colorado 06
12. Chris Collins New York 27
13. John J. Faso New York 19
14. Mark E. Amodei Nevada 02
15. Elise M. Stefanik New York 21
16. Leonard Lance New Jersey 07
17. Ryan A. Costello Pennsylvania 06
18. Stephen Knight California 25
Please vote for their Democrat opponent. That at leaves open the chance of later getting an anti-amnesty Republican.
Washington has the oldest shall-issue concealed-carry law in the US. Vermont never had such licensing at all– license is implicit. It’s held up (pardon the expression) by gun people as the model for
So please explain this recent gun banning you’re referring to.
Marriage promotion will create more Republicans, though women change their voting much more than men when married.
Better divorce laws wouldn’t hurt, but the best way to encourage middle class family formation is to eliminate the marriage tax penalty and make the dependent minor deduction much larger. Deductions are so much better than credits, they encourage private sector male labor and UMC white fertility much more than credits, which often eventually become “refundable” credit welfare programs like EITC.
Would this be an instance of Haight crime?
Pablo Escobar was a major pothead. Perhaps it messed up his life, but no one could say he was not focused.
You would think from the name Paleo Liberal one night at least guess a more liberal senator.
Let’s just say my college was a bit far to the left.
I don’t believe Vermont has banned any guns but in the Parkland High aftermath they have banned high capacity magazines.
You misread my comment; what I was saying is pseudoephedrine and l-meth are both much closer to r-meth than MDMA.
Never did mushrooms. I never thought a trip should start out with hacking the mushrooms or peyote buttons outta yer gullet on the way up. We used to trip and drive plenty back in the day. Throw in weed and the occasional line, a microdot or blotter and we were good to go! Used to have this 66 Charger fastback. 383 Magnum, speedy. My trippin’ ride between pier 12 and Northern Virginia on weekend leave from this job I had once.
More lung disease and more mental health issues hence more call for public health services. We all know where that leads.
Drew Carey had a bit about pot and politics.
UVA had a girl murdered drunk out on the street by a janitor at the U. Others had been murdered down there by this guy, turned out, but back in 2008 it was still a big deal for a Black dood to rape or kill White chicks down there. Now, the Black athletes are the most-accused rapists on-campus, which is convenient, most crimes by Blacks against White women are shushed up. Feminism is one-down to rape by Black men. Instead, they make it about MEN, which cryptically means WHITE men. It’s an artful dodge for sure. We have a murder gig up in Bar Harbor Maine that’s not been covered until this blurb in the Boston.com local rag. https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2018/06/06/bar-harbor-mikaela-conley-murder
The chick:
Perp:
Shocker.
My folks retired to Lake Monticello, we were well aware of that one. Nowadays, they’d cover it all up. The interest of White women on-campus is completely subjugated to the violent sexual interest of Black men, especially the athletes.
Ah, those were the days…
Typical voter, when informed that CEWII is running as Cheetos candidate – “Finally, a party for people like me!”
Society moves leftward for the same reason that you’re more attracted to warm water than cold. Who is not attracted to a world with less suffering? Only those who examine the question and consequences carefully, or the few who intuit that man & woman waste in the Garden of Eden.
Divorce as it is now is a unique deterrent to marriage. Once more people are married they will be a more effective constituency and will lobby for better deals.
I love the logic of this: nobody has forty minutes (at most) to make a spring-loaded sheet metal box in their garage, least of all teenaged loners.
Ted Kennedy’s son threw parties with bong smoking when the senator was there to see it. (This won’t surprise anybody, of course.) Someone I knew was his son’s friend and was at the parties.
That’s the same senator who greeted a woman I used to work for, and her sister a Democratic fundraiser, in his boxer shorts at that same house in Washington.
That’s the same guy who gave us the 1965 Immigration Act.
Yeah, one iStevey point that comes out very clearly in reviewing this gentle giant’s career is that, even though he frequently had to leave colleges abruptly due to accusations of sexual assault, he always landed on his feet at another campus, because he was a good football player.
Could also be toxoplasmosis:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasmosis#Research
Although apparently 50% of people are infected anyway, why would the little critter affect behaviour now more than earlier?
Was it John Blutarsky?
Drugged-up liberals are less likely to form families, have children, and become hard-working high-earners. This means they’re removing themselves from the gene pool. I approve of this. We need to get rid of their defective genes somehow.
Spot on Lot. Agreed on the tax deduction issue. The GOP is absolutely embarassing on the tax issue. If you’re not going to do a huge reform, at least clear out all the (Democrat) crap and deliver a huge tax win for–and that encourages–your married-with-children base. And yes, deductions, no credits. None of this “refundable” crap–i.e. more welfare.
But while i’ve been lucky with AnotherMom–levelheaded gal (like my mom)–i.e. seen too many guys reamed in divorce. One in my neighborhood was like a crime spree–one mom dumps her hubby, then her friend thinks it’s a great idea and dumps hers, then another gets the idea and dumps hers. You can’t really see into someone else’s marriage and know all the crap there–but none of them look to be any better off. (None of them any sort of prize a sane man would want.) And the kids certainly aren’t.
We aren’t going to restore patriarchy. But we can at least have something approaching “fairness” where the woman isn’t handed a big rolling pin and encouraged to beat her husband with if he doesn’t make her haaaaaaappy.
So yeah, much bigger child deduction *and* ending divorce encouragement.
Get the thin mints next time, and put them in your freezer.
I hope I’ve been true in my commitments and that when called to judgment i’ll squeak across the bar. But if I was found wanting and sent down. I have no doubt whom i’d find in the center of the Ninth Circle:
https://www.bing.com/images/search?view=detailV2&ccid=%2flmFJlzf&id=9C383972101684E4D0C25C5CEA866FD91E4B1AAA&thid=OIP._lmFJlzfZ3V04M-bvqU0tgHaFR&mediaurl=http%3a%2f%2ftakimag.com%2fimages%2fuploads%2fpaulryansatan.jpg&exph=192&expw=270&q=beelzebub+Paul+Ryan&simid=608028317578496129&selectedIndex=0&ajaxhist=0
A eugenic child tax policy might be to knock a point off of your top tax rate (or AMT rate) for every kid you have. Unlike the current refundable tax credit, that would be meaningless to low income parents but could have big impact on high income ones.
Also, those interested in reducing inequality ought to want the wealthy to have more kids, as that splits their estates in smaller pieces.
I have the power! Aye, the quickening that empowers me! I feel everything! I know… I know everything! I am everything!
After you drown a female campaign worker and get away with it despite proof that you did not report the accident for nearly a day, because you were stone drunk, and get re-elected to the US Senate anyway, you correctly figure that nothing you do matters anyway and act accordingly.
And the final big step is changing the balance of power between the sexes partly back to where it was.
Immigration is not just too high, but is also too male, depressing earnings for male dominated jobs. Amd government is too large, and its employment is too female. Government also taxes the rest of the economy to feed bloated education and medical sectors. While these have men at the top, the middle and bottom are still solidly female.
We won’t ever go back to the era where a man will outearn a smarter and more personable woman just because he’s three times stronger, but the government can stop making the problem worse.
I am fortunate to not have any bitter divorces among my family and friends, so I can’t know for sure. But just in my own past relationships, money could have solved some problems. If I hadn’t been paying $50,000 a year in income taxes, perhaps I would have had a maid come rather than get annoyed at my girlfriend (in a not very hard grad school) for not cleaning the house while I was at work and she at home. And other times I felt some tension just not having the physical indoor space to myself as much as I liked. Little petty ways we annoyed each other that added up, but often could have been avoided if taxes were lower and we had a bigger house.
I am legendary in my social circle for liking the cold and cold water. I really dislike Southern summers.
Actually, a stoner may be a good equivalent of the neural network in a self-driving car.
“See those lights ahead? Looks like green to me … faaarrr ouuuutttt!” (Rams back of ambulance)
“More lefty liberals and more lefty libertarians”
Only among white people.
A lot of young Muslims in the UK smoke dope (and drink), they’re the fastest-growing prison demographic in the UK. Jamaicans in the UK smoke and are pretty violent (compared with the locals). Jamaica itself is pretty violent.
Not so . Google “female feticide”. The same people who are outraged at any restriction on a woman’s “reproductive rights” are also outraged when women use those rights in the unapproved way.
Psychedelics made me right-wing. Look. The essence of leftism is that if we feel bad, the problem is in the world. It is badly structured, oppressive etc. Psychedelics taught me feeling good or bad depends more on me than external circumstances. That I am responsible for my own happiness. That nothing what others do can oppress me, because feeling oppressed or not depends on my own reactions.
I would very much like to get my hands on some of this stuff if it was legal. Some of the commenters here have said that steroids permanently enhance muscle mass and strength.
Thank you for this.
Are there any White women on the list? Let’s see.
https://www.bing.com/th?id=OIP._lmFJlzfZ3V04M-bvqU0tgHaFR&pid=Api
2/18: Iliana Ros-lehtinen and Elise Stefanik.
Don’t be so sure. Don Corleone tells us women “will surely be angels in Heaven while we men burn in hell”. Even in 1970, the writer for Don Corleone knew how this feminism thing was going to go. Still, his advice to his daughter was to “go home and learn to behave so he will not beat you”.
The Blacks never stood a chance after the 1965 Immigration Bill. They had exactly one year of their own unmolested Civil Rights Bill of 1964. After 1965, Kennedy cemented the Democrat claim on those two groups.
The Greatest Generation was shit. The baby boomers followed on and doubled down with EEOC regs. But the WW2 Generation started the ball rolling. And for that, the middle finger to them. Sorry about that.
When my folks were passed on and I could move anywhere I wanted from the DC region (Fairfax, Virginia), I came to New England. I despise hot, humid weather and DC delivers BIG. My siblings broke camp and moved to Florida. Ten and 12 years older than I, they now demand I move to Florida so I can “be with my family”. Heh. I didn’t move to New England so I could do a bank shot to even hotter weather in New Port Richey, tell you THAT. They laugh at my blizzards.
I laugh at their hurricanes, lightning strikes and tornadoes. And eight months a year of worse-than-DC weather. Still, Fox Hollow Golf in January IS a splendid break.
Please, at least don’t bullshit yourself. You two kids needed a change. Even Billy Joel got sick of screwing Christie Brinkley.
With a hat tip to the Instapundit with his continual use of this joke: They said if I voted for the Hildabeast, Mexicans would keep pouring across the border, more H-1B visas would be given out, and the American wars all over the globe would go on forever. I did, and you know what, they were right.
What I mean, Rod, is we just went through this. The GOP can RUN on all sorts of good ideas, but that doesn’t mean they will RULE on any of it. They have to fit in – they are still part of The Party, after all.
Everyone under 70 has tried pot.
Dave’s not here, man.
That doesn’t mean I disagree with YOUR ideas, Rod, with the exception of one. I don’t at all believe letting graduates blow off their loans onto the taxpayers is a good idea. It just introduces one more moral hazard, as if our socialist government hasn’t created enough already. In this case, it would mean that about any loan of any sort from Gov. or big banking will be seen as a transfer payment, with no need for payback. It’d really suck to be the guy that got only a few loans, didn’t party so much, and worked 2 jobs to get through college, too.
As to the rest of your views on college education and your recommendation for the young people – I agree completely.
Bernie?
Colorado, my state, has trended Democratic for a couple decades, but the leftward trajectory has only accelerated since pot was legalized
Clearly, we need more Pre-Election sales to suppress voter turnout.
They say steroids make other things smaller Rosie, so don’t give any to your husband, or you could end up “doing the job he left behind.”
I can’t agree with that, and here’s why:
I guarantee you that if there are certain drugs or laws that increase or decrease the likelihood of someone voting for leftwing politicians that there is some top secret committee deep inside the Democratic Party, or some affiliated group like the ACLU or OSF, that knows about it and pushes said policies. Meanwhile I would guess that it is highly unlikely that the GOP has any counterpart, and if they do they don’t bother listening to it. OTOH, Cambridge Analytica’s real or supposed role in helping Trump to victory may finally help in changing that attitude.
Obviously the biggest policy change, from a Republican standpoint, would be to reduce legal immigration and get illegal immigration under control, but that doesn’t appear like it’s going to be happening anytime soon, so I guess the next best chance is policies that increase the likelihood of family formation. Some, like changes to divorce laws, could easily be implemented at the state level, where Republicans still (at least until November, perhaps) have an overwhelming advantage.
Yes you do.
Man, the modern Carrie Nations are out in force!
I seem to remember a book from 30 years ago where the writer postulated that every culture allows 2 vices and sanctions the rest. How many deaths/accidents/societal issues arise from the legal status of alcohol and nicotine? Will steroids/hallucinogens/marijuana be any worse?
But hey, I came of age in the 70s, when nobody went to a concert without Mr. Mescaline.
Steve, you’re shockingly behind the times.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/2018/03/07/peyton-manning-sells-stake-papa-johns-franchises-nfl/402481002/
There’s no bigger virtue signaler than The Forehead.
Washington and Vermont both banned private transfers, Seattle imposed a gun and ammo tax and Vermont banned hi-cap magazines. Legislatures in both states are pushing for more.
Correct; liberalism is a highly effective meme. Its also, as a general rule, game theory optimal which also reinforces it.
As a tax lawyer, I can confidently say you are dead wrong. First, credits are always more valuable than deductions. There is nothing inherently “welfarey” about credits, but since they are so valuable, they tend to only be given to people who wouldn’t have paid much tax in the first place.
Second, the “marriage penalty” occurs when both spouses work and earn similar incomes. But there’s a marriage BONUS for a family consisting of one high-earning spouse and one low- or non-earning spouse. That is the right incentive: women should either not work or work at part-time or frivolous jobs. Getting rid of the marriage penalty encourages careerist shrikes who don’t have kids. We don’t need any more of those.
As my mother, living in the next town on the Gulf Coast to New Port Richey, says to her Boston-area friends: when she lived in Boston there were 3 months of the year when you didn’t go out much. It’s the same in Florida, just different months.
I’m sorry, but I’ve never shoveled 14″ of humidity to get to my car. I agree that there’s nothing better than getting on a plane at Logan in the cold and sleet and getting off in Tampa in 75 degree sunshine!
I often think of Senator Blutarsky when I think of the guy I used to drink and smoke with. My roommate kept our fridge filled with beer all the time, which seemed to be a magnet for this particular future US Senator.
In fact, at one point, before I even met the future senator, we were assigned to the same room together. He moved out a few hours before I moved in. I first met the guy when he stopped by to get his girlfriend’s dresses out of the closet. For the rest of the semester, I was able to keep college housing from assigning me a new roommate by telling them future senator was still living there. They finally caught on. One of my friends, who was the best friend of future senator, desperately needed to escape his evil roommate, so I let that guy move in before housing could assign me some other random roommate. It was a great room. It had a private bathroom and shared access to a balcony with one other room. Thanks to a certain future US Senator running away with his girlfriend, I was able to have that great room to myself for one semester.
Cheech and Chong are way too Latino and obviously cartoonish and my contact with pot smokers has been with whites. A lot of pot smokers aren’t so funny. I’ve met some strange women that it turned out were habitual users and you could tell. The effects of THC on their personalities was odd, negative, a little creepy. These types aren’t as of yet represented by a popular fictional character or well recognized and understood by the broader society, but they will be. Pot has darker effects, rarely “Reefer Madness” insanity, but, more common than most people think today.
Jenner looks like some sort of alien or a pink Creature from the Black Lagoon in that photo. Acceptance of transgenderism is a sign of total civilizational degeneracy.
That is an interesting assertion. Could you elaborate a bit? To my mind one of the failures of liberalism in the US is the gutting of incentives for good behavior. That aspect does not seem very game theory optimal to me.
So the effects are positive, if that’s the case.
I love iSteve drug threads, it dials boomer cluelessness comedy up to 11
Its very game optimal to hire illegal immigrants, for example. Your overhead is lower, thus your profit is higher . Any costs are externalized to society but not on yourself: assuming, for example, they add to crime, its quite likely that your profit will far exceed the costs needed to build walls and hire a guard.
Even in an extreme case of “by doing this, you ruin the country”, you likely will profit enough to just leave the country and thus avoid having to deal with the consequences.
Bucket of cold water poured over the head, running down the face, running down on Aaron’s beard.
I don’t mean Lot necessarily, I mean the whole of human existence: Don’t BS yourself.
Well I’ve never been accused of that before! As alluded to in the second part of my post, I’m one of the most drug-friendly commenters here.
But anyway, steroids are probably after opiates and cocaine the deadliest class of drugs. Get the dosages even a bit wrong and you can easily fry your heart and/or liver and/or immune system.* Moreover, the damage is invisible and permanent, until one day you suddenly drop dead.
So electorally speaking, the advantage of their making men more right-wing has to be weighed against the disadvantage of their making men drop dead at 32.
*Which is why we had the mini-phenomenon last year of jacked 20-year-olds dying of the flu.
There’s some theory that women under stress produce more testosterone and have more boys. So testosterone is the answer again.
Now I get it. Strongly agree with that aspect (just uncertain about equating that particular with “liberalism” as a whole). The whole privatizing profits while socializing costs thing is infuriating. That also shows up in environmental impacts, welfare supplementing employee costs, etc.
I was doing a ton of acid when I became an HBD convert about four years ago. So, n = 2.
Negative externality problem is a hard problem to solve, and yes, same with pollution which is a classic example. I apply this same analysis to a lot of other proposals and principles; its quite interesting.
I should probably write/blog about it someday.
I think the chain of causation is more that stoner culture emulates Cheech and Chong than the reverse.
New Jersey is proof that widespread steroid use won’t shift the electorate right.
I would read that. Have you noticed any interesting patterns?
‘Multi-culturalism’ should be called ‘Multi-colonialism’. The West is being massed and colonized by multiples of Third World folks.
I voted for Hillary and yes, all of those things happened. Truth.
And this was the takeoff on the old “they said if I voted for Goldwater”, and the LBJ did all the things he claimed Goldwater was going to do.
I almost voted for Trump [ended up not voting] and I smoke cannabis a few times a year. Does that count?
A good friend of mine has been a diehard Republican drone his entire adult life. As in: uncritically parroting the GOP talking points du jour. He is a big Trump fan. He’s also been a major pothead since high school. The funny thing is when Massachusetts had a proposal to legalize cannabis a couple years ago, he voted no because he didn’t want his young son to grow up thinking it’s ok to smoke weed. You can’t make this stuff up…
It is a relatively solved problem- you just need to internalize the externalities. That is impossible in a democracy, but relatively easy in a monarchy and other systems with a small, explicit and lasting political elite. You can even do it with relatively large and open oligarchies (although they tend to work less effectively)- China managed to go about 2000 years on that model and while it kept on falling down, it managed to do so without getting the Chinese people exterminated.
No one should be driving on those substances. But people definitely do.
Of course, “some people will drive under the influence of x” is an utterly retarded reason not to legalize x. Many hundreds of thousands of people have died in the US in drunk driving incidents yet alcohol prohibition has never been seriously reconsidered since it was first ended.
Well, offhand the most interesting direct observation that I’ve had is that people act irrationally in terms of their own long-term happiness due to what I believe is a flaw in human psychology. As part of what I believe was an instinct for survival, we prioritize autonomy as it would mean that we have psychic safety from the judgment of others as well as material autonomy which has been mostly achieved in modern society.
However, I believe that low levels of mental illness and happiness over a long term is most achieved through interdependence which as part of a social contract and compromises some part of full autonomy.
Therefore, as part of what might be a rational desire for autonomy maximization in an individual, it has the negative externality of damaging/destroying expectations of any social contract, ultimately creating atomization and isolation. Unlike the game theory maximization above where someone can externalize costs with no consequence, this is one where the individual actually suffers the consequences of the hostile environment she has created, but is still incapable of not worsening the situation because of the usual desire to further increase autonomy in order to create more psychic safety.
Peyote buttons yes but if you are hacking up ‘shrooms you are doing it wrong. If they are dead dry then moisten them first.
Civilization and legal drugs don’t mix. Look at Yemen, or Mexico, were Congress legalized every drug know to man, as long as it was for “personal use”. Competition for marked share have raged ever since.
Blame Mr. Pareto and his damned principle.
OT: Anthony Bourdain just killed himself. Since a lot of baby boomers are getting to be pretty old nowadays, it’s going to be a blow to a lot of their egos to have to face their own decline and eventual death. I suspect we’re going to see a big increase in suicides in the coming 2 decades and a wave of suicide chic. A certain percentage of boomers would rather go fast in one big, showy way, instead of a slow decline into obscurity.
Re Donovan: “I’m just mad about fourteen.” Donovan seemingly saw no need to hide his predilection for very young girls. In “Super Lungs”, he sings about a girl who is “… only fourteen, but she knows how to draw.” It’s not clear to what “Super Lungs” and “… her breathing’s real good” refer, unless they are would-be-sly allusions to “blowing”, as in “blow job”.
Yes, and this positive interdependence is especially helpful when it has a biological basis.
Racial awareness may have cut my depression levels in half.
Racial awareness is the drug we should be promoting if we want to beat the Dems
Very true Dave. But more important than estate splitting is skills.
You want a society in which a *lot* of people have the “wherewithal” to work competently at high skill/high income jobs, and relatively fewer who can only do relatively unskilled labor. That grinds away at “winner take all”–because lots of other people could just as easily do the work, and generally compresses the income scale. And on top of this, such a society is more republican in character and just better functioning across the board.
Poor nations are unequal nations. Eugenic fertility is the key to reducing income inequality.
THANK YOU!
As 30+ year tax CPA I haven’t given up trying to explain tax law to Lot. And will never attempt it again. Good luck in your endeavor.
I find that plausible. Worrisome that autonomy maximization seems to be valued more highly in America than elsewhere (is that actually true, or am I being provincial?).
I’m sure that the more individualistic cultures have it more so, but I think its an universal human hack. This ties into the Tower of Babel theory that I’ve been playing around with, incidentally, on harmful ideas and how one eventually could destroy civilization:
Apparently there is a certain style of boot known as a “jack boot”:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackboot
Worn by Nazis, military members in banana republics, and government paramilitary thugs the world over. It’s an apt image.
That was the Moldbug solution and it has an appealing argument: that the monarch(or any other stable power elite) has a self-vested interest in improving the condition of their ruled area because they have full ownership of it; akin to it being more worthwhile to fix up an owned house rather than a rented one.
Even when true, though, it still doesn’t solve the problem for the citizenry, though; your average Joe in such a scenario is likely optimizing himself by defecting from such a society to a more open one, where he can increase personal gain why damaging the commons.
When I was in Finland, I knew rich businessmen(one of them was the richest in his province, actually) who very much enjoyed the pleasant commons of Finland, but they still would rather open factories in Estonia, because it was cheaper there. In doing so, they effectively benefit from the commons and the taxes of their fellow citizens, while not contributing equally and not hiring their countrymen: maximizing their benefits and highly rational.
To internalize the negatives that they inflict, would require an external power/regulatory agency, but by definition, the wealthy elite here are the powerful agents.
That should read “HAVE given up…”. Dang commenting via smartphone.
Men eating a high carb diet gets boys. High protein gets girls. Primal caveman stuff – high carb means the tribe needs more hunters. High protein means the tribe needs more berry pickers.
I seem to recall reading (in The Electric Koolaid Acid Test?) that Timothy O’Leary’s early acid tests often produced a significant fraction of testees who never recovered their sanity.
Knowing some folk in the Therapy Industrial Complex, I occassionally hear about these permanently-hallucenogen-disabled, but as they are not in the public eye, and the pharma-friendly media has no interest in covering them, so most people aren’t aware of them.
Like any pharmaceutical, some people can bathe in the stuff and then shrug it off, while others get one hit and enter a permanent tailspin. Of course there is no way to know who will be which beforehand.
Wasn’t he famously drug-positive?
I think his “suicide” has more to do with running afoul of Weinstein/Weinstein’s buddies and running his mouth about him than trying to go out with a bang.
In 1970s UK such people were known as “acid casualties” – tripping had indeed altered their minds, but not in a good way – they were generally perfectly nice, but not very functional.
My saying that was just part of the joke, of course, as if I ever woke up with some memory of voting for that beast, I’d go back to sleep until that memory was gone, or start taking drugs to ease the pain. I can tell you are a good and intelligent guy, P.L., but that is something I just cannot fathom. (If you couldn’t stand Trump, why not abstain or vote for a 3rd/4th party?)
Anyway, thanks for the info. (again!). I didn’t think that joke was orignated by Glenn Reynolds, aka, the “Instapundit”, but wasn’t sure. He sure likes that one. It’s very clever – do. you know who wrote that first? You seem to know and have known lots of people.
Our current culture’s insouciance about LSD will get tens of thousands of people brain-damaged for life. LSD even in small doses is very, very bad for a small percentage of people.
Freeman Dyson proposed in “Disturbing the Universe” 40 years ago that a global language would be very dangerous because self-destructive ideas might spread universally.
I suggested along those lines a couple of years ago that Japan’s difficulties in learning English might prove a backstop of global importance.
Who is Rand Paul?
“credits are always more valuable than deductions.”
Well duh, a $500 child credit is better than a $500 deduction.
But the more relevant question for me and I assume others here is “we have $50 billion we can afford to give as either credits or deductions, which will be more eugenic?”
“There is nothing inherently ‘welfarey’ about [a tax] credit”
Inherently? No. But the problem with non-refundable credits is they often become refundable later.
“But there’s a marriage BONUS…”
Yes, there is. And removing the marriage penalty for two income couples would make the marriage bonus even larger for one-income couples.
Mark Richardson at Oz Conservative has written some really interesting posts about treating autonomy as the greatest good and the consequences. It seems rooted deeply in Anglo culture.
That was nothing but a mish-mash of ruling class memes intended to keep the proles in line. It may very well work in China but that place is a shit hole.
Actually, I remember reading that fathers who smoke marijuana are a decent amount more likely to have sons.
The US dominated mental system isn’t just run by the liberal left, the liberal right also has a big influence. Cognitive therapy, a major cornerstone of the modern mental health establishment, is influenced by right-wing liberal ideas that neuroticism is driven by irrational thinking, rather than individual variation in temperament/personality/life experience. Similarly, the over-focus on anti-depressants is partly due to the excessive influence of big business.
Indeed, many left-leaning individuals in the mental health field say they are just there to act as a token clean up crew for the socio-economic distress created by neoliberalism.
The main problem with the mental health field isn’t a lack of “right-wing” thinking, but not enough HBD thinking.
Neither you nor anyone else can point to me ever getting a point of tax law wrong. In the exchange above, it is absurd to take my OP as implying a deduction of $X is better for someone than a credit of $X.
There’s an obvious unstated premise in that OP “for a given amount of money to use in a tax cut” that deductions are more eugenic than credits. A $500 child credit is a much smaller incentive for a $200,000 income father to have another kid than a $40,000 income one, while a $2000 deduction (or whatever deduction that has the same revenue loss as a $500 credit) could be worth three times the amount to the presumably higher IQ father.
It is possible you don’t share my desire for tax policy to be heavily focused on increasing fertility of the middle and upper middle classes, but if you do, I think if you search my comment history here you will see much to agree with.
I am in particular concerned that tax cuts for the 1% that the GOP passed under Bush and Trump are wasted because the 1% are mostly too old to have children, are too rich to efficiently target with eugenic tax cuts, and also simply too small a group to have any substantial impact on fertility trends. Additionally, status signal conspicuous consumption by the 1% can make the next 49% feel relatively poor and less able to have additional children.
For these reasons I favor extremely large child deductions and much higher luxery good, corporate, estate, and capital gains taxes to pay for them.
Sorry, I meant too little “right-wing” thinking.
To really know that you’d need to find people who have taken LSD but not other drugs. I don’t know if anyone has even tried, but I know researchers have had trouble finding people who have taken MDMA but not other psychoactive drugs for purposes of brain scan and memory comparisons.
It is well established that it isn’t persisting and isn’t neurotoxic (like MDMA and meth is for example), so “brain damaged” is not a good choice of words. The only way it could have long-lasting effects would be something like a PTSD effect from a bad trip. One measurement of the danger of a drug is the ratio of an effective dose and a toxic fatal dose. For LSD this ratio appears to be more than 50,000.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therapeutic_index
To the extent there really are people who have been permanently and negatively effected by LSD, these are likely cases of eggshell skulls who’d eventually have these problems anyway. A “bad trip” really just isn’t that traumatic.
The anecdotal self reporting that psychedelics caused people harm should also be weighed against those who report long lasting mental benefits from their use.
Our culture is a lot more insouciant about alcohol and tobacco use, which cause far more problems, even adjusting for their relative use.
Thanks! This looks like a representative sample to me: http://ozconservative.blogspot.com/2010/08/chapter-2-autonomy-theory.html
If anyone has other specific recommendations please link.
Out of the maybe 120 times I’ve had mushrooms I have never vomited and perhaps had mild stomach upset about 10% of the time. The only time I felt even close to vomiting was when I took them before riding a crowded, hot, swaying boat from the Italian shore to Venice. And it was a ton of fun as soon as I hit land!
There is no evidence Donavan likes underage girls. He’s been married for 40+ years to the same woman and never been accused of anything.
I know a woman whose two favorite things in the world are Donald Trump and smoking weed. She is Iranian and has fake boobs…the biggest I have seen. So you just never know.
Quite an excellent page. I will add that I believe this is to some extent, a natural result of resource oversupply. Interesting fractal designs with bacteria colonies, for example, only occur when resources begin to run short enough that coordination/cooperation patterns become worthwhile.
Otherwise, order and structure are quite unnecessary in a free-for-all to grab resources.
I keep telling people, not a Republican.
I went to an extremely liberal college. Republicans were rare there.
A positive externality of legalizing cannabis would be increasing your access to it.
I’ve been following this tax discussion (along with all the rest of the comments). I understand your point here, Lot, on the total value of the tax break vs. the simple idea of (deductions/credits) = marginal tax rate in worth (is that correct, tax guys, as that just the way I see it?). As to this part, though:
OK, this argument is not with you guys, really, but more with the IRS, but WTF is the principle behind this non-refundable vs refundable business? I ran into it in doing my taxes, and luckily I was on the right side of it that year, but this does nothing but making financial decisions with income tax in mind even more convoluted.
If I get this right, you’ll get the credit if you are even with the IRS at tax time, but not if the IRS owes you money due to your overpayment. Why should a refund vs. payment due have anything to do with the tax break in question? That’s just a matter of how withholding was handled. Before the FED drove interest rates to negligibility, you were giving the government interest money if you had too much withheld just to lazily use the IRS as a forced savings plan. Now, it doesn’t matter a whole lot, except having too much withheld irks me, as a) it IS a savings plan for un-disciplined people, b) gives money to the government before it’s due, and I DON’T LIKE THE GOVERNMENT, and c) you lose leverage if you have a discrepancy (more like disagreement) with the IRS (they’ll take last year’s arguable discrepancy out of this year’s refund).
Sorry, got off topic there, but how you want to withold money to cover taxes should have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with whether you “deserve” a credit due to the use of the income tax regulations to implement social policy.
Please feel free to explain this to me, tax guys (that was not sarcasm).
It may be mating game optimal (esp. for males) to signal support for alleviating the suffering of immigrants, minorities, women, etc., through channeling social resources toward this goal, even though the eventual consequence is likely enhanced suffering for many individuals initially targeted for pain relief, along with collateral damage to a host of others who were never considered in the first calculus. It is the lack of accountability that drives the drill deep to the heart.
I told you…
It was north or south carolina iirc. They got dreadlocked killer by watching cctv. Big ape got victim right outside bar.
I didn’t mean to suggest Donovan is a pervert. If he sowed some wild oats as a young man with irresistible 14-year-old girls, what rock star didn’t in those days? Most didn’t write songs specifying the girls’ ages.
Hardly possible as the nearest pot shop is 3 blocks away from my place of abode and is open every day. BTW, prices for pretty decent weed are down to as little as $6 a gram. This situation still bypasses the issue of the lack of validity to the puerile insights of your egregious pop-sociology generalities.
I chewed about a quarter of a button of peyote back in the mid 70s, later maybe. Plus blotters. When in Europe, hashish, in the States, weed, heh.. But the mushrooms just struck me as disgusting, not that I’m judging YOU, understand. Everyone picks their poison. I don’t judge junkies, really, the OD people. They picked their poison, they rolled the dice for the buzz and it didn’t work out for them. It’s just what people do. Pulp Fiction can take full credit for the onset of heroin in the mainstream (read: Whites).
I have 3.
Clearly, you need more.
As is so often the case, I am in agreement, but I think you understate things somewhat with “divorce encouragement”. There is in fact an outright Divorce Bounty: not only for the lower-earning spouse to clean out and permanently impair the higher-earning spouse, but also for lawyers to facilitate this looting and for state bureaucrats and their monopolist pseudo-unions who feed off the wreckage. I personally know several lawyers whose practices have morphed from mixed, rustic, general practitioner-type practices to exclusively or nearly exclusively divorce boutiques. Plundering middle class salary earners is just so much more profitable than drafting contracts, incorporating small businesses or closing the occasional house sale. Of course, they leave a wake of demolished families, foreclosed homes, semi-orphaned kids and bitter resentment behind them, but they justify it by saying that the legislature must have wanted this or they wouldn’t have written the laws the way they did. They also “make” a lot of money at it. That money of course is not really “made”, just taken from people who actually do, or did, productive things.
Lot,
You may be a loopy ‘shroomer, but I like the cut of your tax jib.
Call it whatever you want, but then check Ivy‘s Scott Alexander link:
http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/06/06/hppd-and-the-specter-of-permanent-side-effects/
Perhaps, but is it wise to flood society with something that may crush one psyche in ten, notwithstanding that we retroactively label those crushees as “eggshells” who had it coming? The welfare rolls are big enough already.
Russian Roulette has similar odds. We consider it unwise to play.
That’s an interesting link, but it doesn’t suggest anything like a 1 in 10 effect, and it also says for most people who do experience aftereffects they are mild and sometimes self resolve.
I again think the whole “persisting” is likely BS. Is the brain of someone who accidentally took 10,000 doses of LSD, or others who dosed 30-100 times a year, really so different than those who claim persisting effects from one dose?
I don’t advocate for legalization of LSD by the way, but Spainish style decriminalization of mushrooms seems OK to me. Maybe we could have doctors dispense controlled and heavily taxed doses of shrooms after people complete a psych evaluation.
The “1 in 10″ was a three decade old recollection of reading something I referenced two comments ago. If I had a couple of days to spare, I’d try to track it down.
Well, since HPPD seems to be a real thing–or as real as anything in the shifty world of psychology–maybe the effective/toxic dose measurement, which implies that it shouldn’t exist, isn’t the right yardstick of hazard.
As it happens, I know someone who probably qualifies for this diagnosis. The effects are neither “mild” nor have they “self-resolved”. You could say, well that person would have been crazy anyway, and that may even be true, but a boatload of hallucinogens probably didn’t help.
Do such evaluations accurately predict who resists and who succumbs?
As you’re an interesting commenter, I’m sympathetic to your attempts to de-control substances. But post-welfare state, EVERYTHING is potentially the government’s legitimate business, so all libertarian arguments are at best temporary holding actions and more usually just fantasy football for political nerds.
When I say it isn’t real, I mean it is all like a placebo effect and suggestion. So the guy with persisting LSD effects would be the one with some other hysterical reaction if he never took it.
A lot of rock stars tapped 14/15/etc technically underage-for-jurisdiction stuff back in the day. They were throwing themselves at them and lied about their ages. It was in retrospect poor judgment but it sure as hell was not child molestation.
The sanctity of Major League baseball was defiles more than two decades. Like virginity, it cannot be retrieved. There’s nothing to save. Zignore it.
Dropped quite a bit of acid, psilocybin, synthetic mescaline, and peyote back in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I was a Leftist then, but I was a Leftist before I became a head. The dope didn’t prevent me from becoming a right-wing old geezer.
That narrows it down to two.
Never happen because women won’t let it happen. But if by some miracle it did happen, the result would probably be fewer marriages, unhappier women, and more happier men