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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • You have friends that have made a therapeutic ritual out of using essential oils which helps them only because the placebo effect can be very powerful for pain. Literally anything could stand in for the essential oils. Swap their oil vials out with convincing fakes and they’ll never know the difference because it’s the ritual of smelling and/or applying the oils that’s helping them, not any real physical mechanism of the compounds in the oils interacting with their biology.







  • When I come across someone IRL who loves AI I avoid the topic around them. My opinions on the topic are likely to offend them, so to avoid hurting their feelings or causing conflict I won’t mention them. Now, if it’s someone I care about I’ll find a way to gently broach the topic because I know that heavy AI use is causing them harm and I don’t want my family and friends to lose their grip on reality.




  • My only gripe with this is that the state in its current form cannot be trusted to be an impartial judge of what constitutes hate speech. We see today that many states around the world are using anti hate speech laws to suppress criticism of the state of Israel. Giving the state broad powers to crack down on speech that it deems hateful will inevitably result in the state deciding that all criticism of its actions or the actions of its allies constitutes hate speech.

    As an alternative, I prefer that hate speech be met with social consequences rather than criminal ones.


  • Alcohol has also just been more prevalent in human cultures dating back to prehistory. Some of the earliest evidence we have of permanent human settlements were breweries, theorized to have been built by people who still lived semi-nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyles. That would mean that humans first started making permanent settlements and doing large-scale agriculture only to produce alcohol, and still mainly relied on hunting and gathering for their caloric needs. Other drugs / intoxicants have been used by humans for at least as long, but none have been so central to the development of civilization and culture than alcohol.



  • Modern states suspend the rights of individuals to lifer or liberty as a punishment for breaking a rule. Rules like “don’t rape people”.

    They also do it for rules like “wrong skin color,” “wrong country of origin,” “wrong sexuality or gender identity,” “born into poverty and stole food,” “suffering from drug addiction,” or even “possessed a completely harmless drug like weed.” And the punishment is often the total depravation of rights and forced labor tantamount to slavery.

    “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and poor alike from stealing loaves of bread.”

    At least in theory, you can move to another nation or campaign for better treatment in essentially all modern states, exempting a small group of pariah states that still mostly don’t rape people as punishment.

    This wasn’t a good argument in feudal society when peasants could leave and find another Lord or live on their own, and it’s not a good argument now. Choice is pointless when all your choices share the same constraints.

    Not a single person I’ve seen has so much as suggested any mechanism whatsoever that would keep “self organizing collectives” from becoming fetit pools of bigotry and violence. We know that will happen because such groups arise in every nation already, but their impact is curbed specifically by the power of the state.

    What mechanism prevents states from becoming fetid pools of bigotry and violence, and how has it been working so far? The power of the state does not curb this behavior, it curbs its rivals while engaging in that very behavior themselves by maintaining a monopoly on violence.

    “Get rid of the government and we’ll all do the right thing” is libertarian bullshit to cover their glee at taking things away from others. If you aren’t a pro-rape libertarian, figure out how your proposed system would protect the vulnerable at least as well as modern states do.

    Anarchy is not the lack of government, it’s horizontal governance. Hierarchy is not necessary for community policing or restorative justice. I’m not an American Libertarian which is an irrational ideology, as it wants capitalism without the state, which is impossible because capitalism is enforced by the state. Without the state protecting private property there can be no capitalism.