I voted against Trump twice. This is not a defense of him. But it’s time to wake up.

If you really think Trump and Biden are similar with respect to cognitive decline, then fine. I suppose these are subjective judgements.

But you have to accept that you’re in the minority and the median voter disagrees with you. And that’s not likely to change. Rationally, there is no other way to explain why Trump is crushing Biden in the polls despite all of the obvious weaknesses that Trump has—having lost last time, numerous indictments, not the incumbent, etc.

For Biden to be losing this badly at this point would make no sense if the median voter didn’t broadly agree with my subjective perception.

You can cherry pick a video of Trump confusing some names if you’d like. To me that seems like a fantastic way to lose to Trump. Why not just concede as a fact-on-the-ground that the median voter sees something that you don’t and adjust strategies accordingly?

Pro-Israel types say "If the Arab stopped fighting, there would be peace. If Israel surrendered, they would be slaughtered."

That's true, but it doesn't nearly go far enough. If Gazans surrendered, they would not only have peace, but if they let foreigners rule over them, rewrite their laws, and build their institutions, they would achieve a level of prosperity that would've been unthinkable before.

Their irrational commitment to self-determination is at the root of the problem. The most successful countries in Africa and the Middle East are basically run by catering to the needs of foreign capital. The people are themselves better off as a result.

As the Gulf Arabs show, there's even a way to do it where you keep your culture. You just can't have a society centered around undoing the results of wars you lost.

Look at a behavior that’s just occurred, and let’s make it an atomistic thing like pulling a trigger. Here are the four neurons in your motor cortex that told your muscles to flex. You ask, Why did those four neurons just do that? To show free will, show me that those neurons would have done exactly the same thing regardless of what all the other neurons around them were doing. But that’s not enough. Show me that those four neurons would have done the exact same thing if you weren’t exhausted, or stressed, or euphoric, or blissful, or if your hormone levels had been different, or if the trauma that happened a year ago had never happened, or if you hadn’t found God 30 years ago, or if you had been raised in another culture, or if you had completely different genes.

If you could change all of those variables and those four neurons would still have done that exact same thing at that moment, you’ve just proven those four neurons have free will. But you can’t. Everything is embedded in what came before.

The West is experiencing an on-going collapse of moral legitimacy. It has been for many years. Many of our elites use support for Israel as a proxy for an unambiguous moral good: preventing another Holocaust. This is why our elites are generally leaping to near-genocidal support of Israel over Palestine.

However, support for Israel is actually not that unambiguous due to the power it exerts over Palestine, and this greatly complicates the moral equation. This would normally preclude full-throated support for any cause, but in the special case of Israel, our elites are completely captured and, in a sense, view themselves (at least project the attitude) of fighting the new Nazis and preventing another genocide.

This full-throated support in favour of an ambiguous cause naturally creates a (large) constitutency who recognise the inherent unfairness in only one side being properly represented in political discussion, especially when it appears that the people this constituency views itself as defending is facing an impending bloodbath.

I would guess that this is radicalising the Islamic world, and shows us to be, in their view, morally backwards and worthy of fighting; more worthy, in fact, of fighting one another. The main problem this presents to the current Western (American) world order is that it is predicated on consent. The West claims to desire a peaceful and stable world in which "human rights" are protected and nations may prosper as long as they respect certain rules. The implication that underpins the legitimacy of said rules is that they are fair and any party should be able to find adequate redress given any wrongs done to them.

When it is demonstrated that the rule of human rights is actually a fiction that is used to keep the rest of the world quiet, then this system comes to an end.

The erosion of this system has, of course, been happening for many years now. Various pretexts have been used many times to justify a breach of the doctrine of human rights, and this has been grudgingly accepted because the benefits of the Western world order have outweighed the damage done by these exercises of power disguised as moral crusades.

However, we have arrived at a position where, in fact, the United States has been economically attacking other states, after deliberately and systematically attempting to erode their standing in the world, based on our own perceived moral superiority. This has created a massive upset in the global economic order and forced the disparate opponents of the West into an economic coalition with one another, whilst massively weakening America's allies.

The short-sightedness of this can surely not be overstated, as the plan to judo-flip the various economies of the opposition to bring them to their knees simply hasn't worked; it has been decades for some of these regimes and they still persist, and have been laying the groundwork for a parallel world economy.

Needless to say, as the world's economic hegemon, the United States can't allow this to happen. However, it seems that it is happening and it probably cannot be stopped at this point.

I think this is really why the political class is gripped with war fervour over a tiny terrorist-run strip of land. It isn't that there is an existential threat to Israel from Gaza, it is that we are looking at the potential to set off a chain of events that shows the West to not have the moral legitimacy it claims to have, which will unravel its own political alliances and put all its enemies into a righteous coaltion against us, whilst destroying the global economic system and throw everything into chaos. The West will need to fight or the Western elites will lose everything.

At this point, I think a world war is inevitable.

The West's lack of moral legitimacy is seen in its own countries; a very large percentage of the population of almost all of them has severe doubts about the legitimacy of the governments and institutions of those countries because the fifth columns that have been allowed to proliferate within our societies have done their work of making said governments and institutions unreliable, immoral, and degraded. The point of the left has been to weaken us from within by sowing moral discord, and they have done a very good job. They have, in fact, undermined our very claims to nationhood, family, and imperium. We do not view ourselves as the legitimate rulers of anything, and the major institutions of every country spend a large amount of their time attacking the majority population groups of that country.

It is well-known that Western militaries have serious trouble recruiting, and that we are struggling economically. To say we are being poorly governed is an understatement and a half and everyone knows it. There is simply no passion to fight for a civilisation that appears to be in collapse, appears to hate itself, and appears to be vindictive to other states on the world stage. Say what you like about Trump, but he actually seemed to be able to respect the nations ranged against the US. This goes a long way.

Now, that time appears to have passed. It seems that, in their desperate bid for moral legitimacy, the dominate faction of Western elites are at once going to drive us into a war, whilst the subversive faction of elites are going to stoke the fires of civil war in our own countries while we do it.

Personally, I think we're in a position of profound weakness. It isn't that our enemies are strong, it is that we are vulnerable and we don't really know what we stand for or why we should do what we do. So we will use Israel as a proxy for the expansion of our power and this will become an intolerable nightmare for our opponents, and they will probably decide that the best opportunity they will get to escape Western dominance has arrived. It is going to be painful, bloody, and ruinous, but if ever it could be done, now seems like the time.

I do hope I am wrong.

Food for thought:

For the first time in world history there are more people on the planet over age 65 than under five.

That will have profound implications for the trajectory of human population and thus of human civilization.

A non-neurotoxic version of MDMA that you could take every day like coffee would represent, not only a watershed moment for *human wellbeing*, but also, perhaps less intuitively, it would entail a breakthrough in *human coordination*.

Selfish genes ensure that without strong compensatory mechanisms, an adequate culture, and accountability, most organizations / groups / communities waste 80%+ of resources in zero sum infighting.

An MDMA-world will not only be vastly happier, but also, unfathomably more productive and coordinated.

Life is, always and by its very nature, pointless.

A point is a valued end and since we humans are agents, it makes sense for us to want our acts, efforts, projects, and enterprises to have a point. Valued ends provide justifying reasons for our acts, efforts, projects, and enterprises. Ends lie separate from the acts and enterprises for which they provide a point (e.g., you build a hut because you value the shelter provided by the hut and you value the shelter because you value yourself and others). Since there can be no end external to one's entire life, since one's life includes all of one's ends, life as a whole cannot have a point. This doesn't mean that the acts, efforts or projects within a life can't have a point.... But life as a whole, which is a separate effort and enterprise of its own, cannot.

Since we live our lives and structure our living-a-human-life efforts both in parts and as a whole, it is fitting to be sad to recognize that bothering to live is pointless.

.

Thanks.

A new book by the Harvard Medical historian Anne Harrington, “Mind Fixers: Psychiatry’s Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness,” argues that the “tunnel vision” of modern psychiatry, with its fixation on wiring and fixed diagnoses, cannot adequately address what has yet to be understood about the human psyche.


https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/27/opinion/sunday/its-not-just-a-chemical-imbalance.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

The management of mental illness is one of the weakest pillars of Western medicine.

There is a great deal of politics and special interests wrapped up in the approval of drugs, and the lack thereof. Many remedies are rebuffed and suppressed, and diagnostic procedures are constantly warped and twisted by socio-political agendas.

I was diagnosed with ADHD in kindergarten. I was so distracted they couldn't get me to complete the diagnostic test. That was when I started learning to take pills. I took Ritalin, and Strattera, and eventually Adderall, which I took for years through high school and into college. The approval of amphetamine use in children was a huge boon for drug companies, but it doomed children like me to a life of unforeseen problems. Now that we've be had by this great experiment, it has surfaced that childhood stimulant use likely hypersensitizes us to dopaminergics for the rest of our lives. The rather common-sensical idea that "you shouldn't give kids speed" was completely oblated in the minds of my parents by the dictum of educated psychiatry.

Now I have Raynaud's — another side effect of the help doctors gave me — and will probably be dependent on some sort of motivationally modulatory drugs for the rest of my life.

So no, I don't judge people who want to pursue solutions outside of the system. I think that this can be far worse than trusting your life to psychiatrists, and that some people waste themselves on stupid delusions of medicament as they destroy their brains and bodies with drugs, but the comparison with organized medicine is far less distinct that you would think.

I certainly don't shy from telling people to make use of the diagnostic power of blood assays and professional help, but psychiatry plays a pretentious game admonishing those who seek to help themselves without a doctor's permission. It's far from right for everyone, but it isn't evil, and wishing for the pharmacological domination of those who wish for autonomy isn't going to do any good.

Why Do People Kill Themselves?

A good summary:

https://www.suicideinfo.ca/resource/suicidetheories/

“I tend to believe that, at rock bottom, the pains that drive suicide relate primarily not to the precipitous absence of equanimity or happiness in adulthood, but to having been a victim of a vandalized childhood, in which the preadolescent child has been psychologically mugged or sacked, and has had psychological needs, important to that child, trampled on and frustrated by malicious, preocuppied, or obtuse adults.

—Edwin S. Schneidman

I have no idea if this is true in most cases, but it does capture so much of the sense of grievance and thwart that I frequently encounter when I talk to suicidal people.

”It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.”

I don't much like this Cioran quote. I think it really is amplified apathy; it seems to reify that and approve of it, and I see it differently.

By the time you consider suicide it's already too late

Nope, it's always better to have less of something bad. This looks like black and white thinking to me.

Plus there is no "you" at all. The idea of a self is an illusion

I don't get this at all. I used to, then I stopped getting it. I understand that we're always changing, and we're a composite of subconscious processes, genetically-determined characteristics, memories, etc. But "I" exists in some form, even if it's just as a symbol which we all understand. That has physical presence in our neurons. People deploy this notion when it suits them, to wave away some issue. If "everything is an illusion" whatever that would mean, then it wouldn't conveniently only apply to suffering.

The stigma of failure and despair has to be removed from suicide and from those individuals who choose it. The bottom line is, their choice should be respected since it’s their life. I think everyone probably has a breaking point, even the people who swear they would never take their own life under any circumstances.

David Benatar’s foundational claim about suffering is probably the most easily disputed. As Geoffrey Miller, a professor of psychology at the University of New Mexico, has observed, “all the research on human well-being shows almost everyone across cultures is well above neutral on happiness. Benatar is just empirically wrong that life is dominated by suffering”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/anti-natalism-argument-david-benatar-wrong/

This is the best summary of the evidence and arguments against biopsychiatry I’ve ever seen.

Opposition to the illness model predates the writings of Drs. Szasz and Laing, and was promoted by various individuals and professions, including psychiatry itself. The history of how this opposition was muted within psychiatry and of how the vast majority of psychiatrists came to align themselves with the Pharma--APA orthodoxy has not yet been fully written, but WILL probably emerge in the coming years, as increasing numbers of retiring psychiatrists speak out against the hoax and the recruitment methods used to promote it.

[....]

Psychiatry is not something good that needs minor adjustments. Rather, it is something fundamentally flawed and rotten. Based on spurious premises, and devoid of even a semblance of critical self-scrutiny, it is utterly and totally irremediable. It has locked itself into the falsehood that every-problem-is-an-illness-and-for-every-illness-there’s-a-drug from which it cannot extricate itself. It is nothing more than legalized drug-pushing, endlessly attempting to mask its guilt by proclaiming its innocence, vilifying its critics, and calling for more “treatment.” It has built into itself the seeds of its own destruction, and will eventually fade away as its credibility dwindles, and more and more potential recruits recognize the sordid reality and seek careers in genuine, ethically-driven medicine.

Read here:

https://www.madinamerica.com/2019/04/in-defense-of-anti-psychiatry/

Ketamine May Relieve Depression By Repairing Damaged Brain Circuits

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/04/11/712295937/ketamine-may-relieve-depression-by-repairing-damaged-brain-circuits


“have found hints”

“In mice”

“appears to”

“scientists have known relatively little about how ketamine and similar drugs affect brain circuits”

“there are still many remaining questions”

“appears to”

“region of the brain we think is important”

“seemed to be repairing”

“finding suggested”

“could be relieving”

“research suggests”

“somehow coaxes”

“One possibility”

“study suggests”

“What we can imagine”

“if that’s true”

*************************

In other words, these researchers don’t know jack sh*t about what this new drug does.

:roll:

As far as I'm concerned, this profession does not receive enough scorn. They abuse the public trust by mass-prescribing drugs they often don't understand while professing their empathy, sacrifice and beneficence. Despite their incomes already being in the top 1%, they feel it is necessary and appropriate for their members to take money from the pharmaceutical industry, ignoring research on monetary gifts and behaviour changes, and sacrificing patient safety for additional money that they transparently do not need. On top of this they will constantly lie to support each other at medical malpractice trials, acting as if they are a persecuted minority, rather than probably the most privileged group of people on the planet. And of course they use bogus pharmaceutical industry research to support their harmful behaviour. The hypocrisy is outrageous and disgusting.

But let’s put aside the subject of psychotropic medications and consider for a moment what has become the dominant and most popular treatment of mental disorders over the past 30 years or so — Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)

CBT is based on the idea that our emotions and moods are influenced by our patterns of thinking. The aim of therapy was to "correct" these processes, "to think and act more realistically". It would allow the patient to avoid the misconstruction of reality that had led to their problems. Rather than focus on the patient's history -- say their childhood and early experiences -- like most other psychotherapies, CBT is mostly directed to the here and now.

Ok, I am not convinced by this or by the current behavior-based descriptions of depression, diagnosed according to a check-list of factors that drugs can shift (appetite, mood, and sleep patterns) or by the cures. People are both much more complicated and far more interesting! Depression is not just a set of pre-ordained symptoms, but as multiple and varied as those who are told they suffer from it... Its source can lie deeply buried in an individual's history and far from present awareness, though the trigger may well be a separation or crisis. At its core is the experience of loss: engaging in the difficult process of mourning is what allows us to come through. CBT can certainly be helpful for some people. But it is crucial to distinguish the question of whether a therapy works and HOW it works. For any therapy to get started, unconscious belief systems need to be mobilised. Human belief is a very powerful thing and no external authority can tell us what to believe in. Just to be clear: I don't think CBT is completely without value. It can definitely help some people to become aware of and to correct one's irrational biases in thinking or with anger issues. But I think it's impossible for CBT theory to take into account the complexity and contradiction and detail in human life. It also has no place for the realities of sexuality or violence that lie at the heart of human life.

With CBT the psyche has become like a muscle that needs to be developed and trained. There is no place for complexity and contradiction here: the modern subject is represented as one-dimensional, searching for fulfilment. The possibility that human life is aimed at both success and failure and never simply at wealth, power or happiness no longer makes sense. Suddenly the world of human relations described by novelists, poets and playwrights for the past few centuries can just be written off. Self-sabotage, masochism and despair are now faults to be corrected, rather than forming the very core of the self. In today's outcome-obsessed society, people must become countable, quantifiable, transparent. And this leads to a grotesque new misunderstanding of psychotherapy. Therapy is now conceived as a set of techniques that can be applied to a human being. This makes sense if we see it as a business transaction with a buyer, a seller and a product. But it totally ignores the most basic fact: that therapy is not like a plaster that can be applied to a wound, but is a property of a human relationship. Therapy is about the encounter of two people, and the real work is done not by the therapist but by the patient. As the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott observed, the therapist provides a space in which the patient can construct and create something. The therapist encourages and facilitates, but whether a therapy takes place or not depends entirely on the patient.

The patient's own reality has to be taken very seriously by the therapist. To explore it, to define it, to elaborate it and to see where it will go. No outcome can be predicted in advance. With CBT the divided self has vanished, along with the recognition that grief, despair and frustration strike at the heart of our image of self-possession and fulfilment.

I have yet to hear from any psychiatrists as to what it is exactly that the profession of psychiatry has to offer, AND what it is, that is unique to psychiatry alone (as opposed to the various therapeutic technologies of psychologists, social workers, family therapists, community workers, etc. etc.), other than psychotropic medications and the pathological labels of the DSM. The profession of psychiatry is indeed suffering from a very deep identity crisis, belittled by other medical specialties for its lack of evidence-based rigor, and with the collapse of the biological mythology, no longer able to justify its dominance among the various mental helping professions. Psychiatry’s last identity crisis, back in the 1970’s, which was largely due to the challenge posed by other less expensive professionals to psychiatry’s dominance within the psychotherapy market, led to the biological reinvention of the psychiatric identity.

So my question for Anaxagoras is this:

What is a psychiatrist without his medications and diagnoses?

What is it exactly that he/she has to offer people in need and our society? What are psychiatrists offering us that we need so badly?

Thanks.

At the 161st annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in 2008 the APA president Carolyn Rabinowitz told the audience in her opening-day address:

”We have come a long way in understanding psychiatric disorders, and our knowledge continues to expand. Our work saves and improves so many lives.”

But here is a conundrum. Given this great advance in care, we should expect that the number of disabled mentally ill in the United States, on a per capita basis, would have declined over the past 50 years. We should also expect that the number of disabled mentally ill, on a per capita basis, would have declined since the arrival in 1988 of Prozac and other second-generation psychiatric drugs. We should see a two-step drop in disability rates. Instead, as the psychopharmacology revolution has unfolded, the number of disabled mentally has skyrocketed. Moreover, this increase in the number of disabled mentally ill has accelerated further since the introduction these second-generation psychiatric drugs.

The disability numbers, in turn, lead to a much larger question. Why are so many Americans today, while they may not be disabled by mental illness, nevertheless plagued by chronic mental problems — by recurrent depression and crippling anxiety? If we have treatments that effectively address these disorders, why has mental illness become an ever-greater health problem in the United States?

Possibly one of the dumbest things the scientific community did was to allow businesses like Pharma to use science as a marketing tool, hide their data and then sell billions of dollars of drugs whose efficacy was exaggerated and risks were downplayed. Great job shooting yourself in the foot. The fact that most keep their mouth shut about this is a travesty.

https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020138

I can understand if research is not replicable due to honest mistakes — science is hard — but to allow it to be exploited for profit at the expense of sick people trying to get better is a deep betrayal.

Here is another article which explains exactly why a large portion of the "scientific" literature is BS.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jep.12147

I believe psychiatry as it now functions is a menace and should disappear.... There is a need for medical doctors with special additional training regarding mental and behavioral problems, psychoactive drugs, medical diseases presenting with psychological and behavioral symptoms, et cetera to work with other professionals and non-professionals but should never be anything but equal members of a team.

It's a grim thought, that doctors are so keen to find a biological basis for depression, but fail to recognize and treat a hormone deficiency (thyroid) known to cloud the thoughts and cause low mood and unshakable fatigue.

Also, it is unfortunate that "depression" has become as vague a term as "fever", and that far from advancing in our knowledge of our mental states, we are reversing into ignorance. The contemporary refusal to acknowledge unconscious conflicts and a tendency to speak vaguely of "stress" and "genetics" leave us with a reduced vocabulary. What we are suffering from (among other things) is a lack of words and better ideas. Empiricism can only take us so far; it is the hidden — our unreachable secrets, which generate puzzling symptoms — that is doing the damage.