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Cake day: April 3rd, 2024

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  • For sure, I think the patriot act was a turning point in trust of government in the US. It filtered though to our government in Australia during the Howard years. Similar to the US, around the GFC we had a hopeful change of government, but that hope for progressive values (Obama for you guys, Rudd for us) turned out to be misguided. I tend to think of those “centre left” governments as representing managed societal decline as opposed to the accelerated decline of the right wing parties.










  • Difficult topic to discuss in a sensitive and respectful manner.

    “He’s among a group of psychiatrists who argue the gender-affirming treatment model discounts underlying psychiatric issues in youths who present with gender dysphoria.”

    Reasonable statement that deserves some discussion.

    “There is NO reliable evidence that trans identification can be differentiated from psychosis,” he wrote on X last year.

    And immediately this individual’s credibility is tainted by a hyperbolic and disrespectful statement. I wish the ABC wouldn’t do that.

    There are a small number of people who detransition due to misdiagnosis, which should lead to a discussion about lack of access to high quality psychologists when you’re trying to figure out what you need to do to feel OK.






  • Adding to this because I feel a bit annoyed at how John C Lilly gets so badly represented sometimes. He wasn’t a nut job. He was a weird guy with a very unique personality. He had an intense passion for knowledge and scientific inquiry. He also had a massive ego. But he was a reasonably self reflective person. Read his books and watch interviews with him. He wasn’t just a hedonist who got addicted to K. He always had a very non typical experience of reality. He had hallucinations of angels as a child, partly due to a heavily religious upbringing. It’s totally understandable that he was primed for strange trips when he got into psychedelics. But he was able to function as a professional. He had multiple government funded research projects during his career, medical credentials, and owned electrical engineering patents. His characterisation as a kook is very similar to the crap that people say about Tim Leary, who had a successful academic career before being kicked out of Harvard and was actually a very rational person.