The author seems not merely uninformed but a mix of unaware and unconcerned that they don’t know what they’re talking about. No discussion of hypnosis, Stockholm syndrome, and a general vibe that psychology is like not really a thing unless it coincides with cherished narratives. And then little chestnuts like, “the idea of brainwashing continues to be a powerful metaphor for the effects of systemic racism.” Say what?
The article literally refers to the case for which Stockholm Syndrome is named and offers a simple explanation; that torture and privation work to align a person's goals and motivations to minimise pain.
I'm not sure what you are finding so contentious about this article. We have accepted that people under torture will admit to anything for centuries.
The article doesn't refer to that incident, so far as I can see. It does mention Patty Hearst, who was kidnapped a year after the Stockholm bank robbery.
The term "Stockholm Syndrome" originates from a police consultant inventing a syndrome to diagnose a woman he had never met, in order to discredit her criticism of the largely incompetent police response to her and several other people being taken hostage by a bank robber.
They just did a documentary on the bank robbery, and as you watch it you get "Stockholm Syndrome," too. The West is just addicted to narratives of mind control and bewitchment, and people are easily convinced that any deviation from the designated norm is the result of evil forces taking control of people's wills through mysterious methods.
Africa has a very similar problem. Where Anglo-Europeans think that all deviant behavior is caused by mind control (by demons, Jews, Russians, alcohol, marijuana, the Chinese, Cambridge Analytics, etc.), large parts of Africa believe that all illness is the result of curses. When somebody gets sick and dies, they start looking for witches to kill.
I gave one quote that is an example of the lack of thought, here’s another,
“by spending millions of dollars on research into manipulating the human brain. But while the science never exactly panned out, residual beliefs fostered by this bizarre conflict continue to play a role”
In what sense did the science “not pan out”?
What “residual beliefs” could she mean? The text implies that it’s the idea that the human brain cannot be manipulated.
Almost every sentence has that level of inanity and incoherence. Advertising meanwhile is a billion dollar industry built on manipulating brains.
This appears to be an overview article, just touching on a lot of subjects. Not a deep dive of any particular one. If they gave all the details of every idea in the article it would be 10x longer.
I would think for the 'deep dive' with details and citations, they want you to buy the book. This is just a teaser.
"Annalee Newitz is the author of Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind, coming in June 2024."
“ and disrupt international drug cartels who are looking to smuggle fentanyl into our nation,” they said.”
Just a totally absurd statement. Drug traffickers pour across the border in droves, daily. Anybody who supported this && does not support securing the border is a corrupt weasel and an enemy of Americans.
We could also, ya know... enforce our drug laws and punish folks in possession of fentanyl. But no, lets enable warrant-less spying on American citizens instead.
Yeah, Prohibition of substances has gone so well this far. Why hasn't anyone thought of punishing drug users? That has always worked in history!
How do people like you not realize the ONLY solution is to let adults have bodily autonomy and stop trying to police what they do in the privacy of their own home.
At this point many in the US have experienced or heard about cities like Portland where removal of prohibition did not result in a utopia, but instead a city full of meth zombies. Granted Portland is probably the worst city to hold this experiment in*, but regardless at this point there are many people with first hand experience who definitely think prohibition is a lesser evil. Doesn't mean its the correct path, but I believe neither is it simple to say prohibition doesn't work. It clearly doesn't work as good as perfect treatment, but it remains to be seen if e.g. the US could actually execute on something better.
> stop trying to police what they do in the privacy of their own home
I think if most folks used in their own home Portland's experiment would have been a smashing success. Yet nobody really uses fentanyl, meth, etc, without their life and home situation falling apart. Thus the idea of hard-drug users doing so in the privacy of their own home feels a bit unrealistic.
*Mental health care / services are among the worst here, and there are insufficient treatment centers and methods of enforcement, on top of the general lack of quality execution plans the local gov't has demonstrated as of late. The complete lack of any enforcement has led to predictable droves of addicts wondering the streets.
>Yet nobody really uses fentanyl, meth, etc, without their life and home situation falling apart. Thus the idea of hard-drug users doing so in the privacy of their own home feels a bit unrealistic.
Equally, the notion of "just stop doing it because it's banned" clearly, empirically does not work. It is and will forever be easy to score drugs.
Prohibition is a money burning pit, funneling money to organizations that are built to torment the lower classes that use substances while everyone here knows that the wealthy don't ever have to follow the same rules.
Even the proponents of prohibition agree with me. Maybe look in to the real reason prohibition even exists as a """solution""". Here's a quote for you:
"We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.
Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
- Nixon's aide John Ehrlichman
>Mental health care / services are among the worst here, and there are insufficient treatment centers and methods of enforcement, on top of the general lack of quality execution plans the local gov't has demonstrated as of late. The complete lack of any enforcement has led to predictable droves of addicts wondering the streets.
Yeah, because as you note it was a half measure where a full one was needed.
Generally I agree with the notion that hard drug use is not tenable with being functional in society, we just disagree on the solution.
As you note, mental health care, rehab, treatment facilities all need to be revamped. This is not a problem solved by prohibition.
We need to tackle inequality and a large majority of the suffering that leads to serious drug use is fixed, way up stream of the users.
We have worse than gilded age inequality. 3 people own more wealth than half the US combined. Maybe if so many weren't forced to work or starve, there would be reduced demand for unhealthy coping mechanisms like we both probably agree harder drugs generally are.
My whole point is best demonstrated by one throwaway line in the wire, "you think i sleep under a fucking bridge sober?"
Poverty is the real issue here. Not drugs. It never was drugs.
On topic: Warrantless searches are 'needed' to "stem the distribution of fentanyl" the same reason drug use has always been targeted. Here's a quote from one of the progenitors of the idiotic prohibition mindset (in the US at least)
>"We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.
Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” - Nixon's aide John Ehrlichman
Spoiler alert: They don't give a fuck about drugs or those dying from drugs.
They use the specter of "drugs" just like child abuse and terrorism - as eternal battles that need to be fought. How? By ameliorating the conditions that lead to drug abuse and child abuse and terrorism, like poverty and war?
Of course not, they use them to erode our rights under the guise of protection.
You are not the only victim as a drug user (unless you are a loner), people around you are impacted, you are not your best self when you are intoxicated.
Distribution certainly impacts more than one person and heavy handed punishment is the best way to deter it.
Possession is voting for distribution and while not as destructive as the scalability of high profit margin black market businesses.
Should individuals have the freedom to vote for something that harms other individuals and society as a whole?
You are really pushing the definition of "victim" by claiming that being in the same space as someone who "isn't their best self" is something that deserves government intervention...
I think they are actually (intentionally) pushing the definition of "isn't their best self", where "not best self" may means things like "yells racial slurs", "stabs stranger" (etc), "shoots random people", etc.
Yeah all those life sentences for meth, heroin and cocaine distribution have really done a number on our drug problem!!!! /s
Our country's drug use continues to go up despite having the most draconian punishments for drug dealing of western nations. Perhaps the problem has zero to do with punishment and is moreso a reflection of our very unhealthy society, physically and mentally.. just a though.
Don't worry the reddit and HN experts (morons) calling for public executions for drug dealers will get their way eventually and we will finally have our drug free Utopia!!!!
I think about this a lot. It seems obvious to me that drug abuse (and a lot of crime in general) is only a proximate problem (right term?), in that it’s just a symptom of something else, and so a punitive solution isn’t going to do a whole hell of a lot even if it worked well (which I also believe it is obvious that it does not).
When I look at the large portion of society - shit, humanity - that believes punishment is the fix, I have to think that they are either stupid or dishonest. Or that I am not right. Are these folks just smarter than me, and realize that the N-th order solutions - like ensuring humans have their basic needs met - are too expensive or otherwise impossible and we should pretend that incarceration (which isnt just cheap in the US - it’s a money maker) is the way forward?
There is a chain of violence that goes back from most street drugs. There is no victimless usage of drugs - you are directly damaging a lot of the US and almost all of Latin America at this point.
While you did qualify “street drugs” in sentence #1, you didn’t in #2, and so I have to disagree that the stinky plants in my garden are damaging to anyone :)
“It also implies that explanations of belief in conspiracy theories need to accommodate the observation that beliefs in such theories vary much more between people than within people.”
To me it implies that what they are operational using as “conspiracy theory” is nothing more than individual differences in personality. Those who want to study/address/remove “conspiracy theories” really just have a problem with individual differences and want to control others.
Arguably that’s the meta force behind social media. The platforms are designed to make people think in collectivist terms, which coincidentally (or not) makes things easier for more tyrannical forms of government. Indeed Facebook and old twitter are arguably quasi-federal entities.
I’d say a lot of that is genetic and or cultural. At the very least there are many of us who do not possess that instinct. We have much lower karma scores but we don’t care.
Just because you don't care about something doesn't mean it doesn't affect you.
For example with many websites, high karma posts/users show up at the top of the feed. This means those addicts messages are the ones you're getting subjected too every day.
Often that amounts to changing the people or circumstances in one’s life. That’s the point of therapy. A good therapist wouldn’t help a sexually abused child stay in a bad situation and just learn to suppress emotion. Well maybe a cbt therapist would. But a good therapist would try to help catalyze a change in the situation causing the trauma.
Monks are doing it on easy mode. They have nothing to anger them, zero triggers. It’s the whole point of hermeticism. Remove all sources of stress. Desire nothing. Of course they aren’t angry, they have nothing; nothing to feel angry about.
The world is nothing but edge cases. Expressing anger requires cooperation. If someone doesn’t want to listen, and you express anger at them anyway, is it not abuse?
I appreciate you pointing this out. If we force someone to listen to our anger, we can see it as abuse. If we force someone to suppress their anger, we can see it as normal. It's almost as if we might normalize suppression and demonize expression.
And it's not just anger. If I want to express verbal affection towards someone and they don't want to hear it, we often call it abuse. But if they want me to suppress verbal affection towards them and I don't want to, we celebrate it as them having boundaries.
And I think sometimes being forced to not say something can hurt as much as being forced to hear something, yet we don't seem to see how it harms people.
That depends on whether they're a legitimate object of your anger. If someone injures you and then ignores your complaints, no it's not abuse to be angry with them.
I mean I think it depends on how the anger surfaces to determine whether its abuse. Yelling and screaming and throwing things, absolutely. But the reason we're scared of anger is because we don't know how to communicate and express it in a healthy way.
But you can also process anger solo with the right tools, or with a good therapist that doesn't shame anger. It doesn't always have to involve another person.
I think the answer about why it’s so specific is if you just say you threw someone out of a window people might assume it was only one story high and not lethal. Defenestration tells you that it was a high window, and often implies the ejection of the owner or a legitimate occupant. Similar to shock vs electrocution.
