See, you got your priorities right on that, you’re not gonna clean glass with a 12 Year-Old Macallan.
But if you happen to have a 12 Year-Old Macallan, please remember me when you’re writing invites.
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I have half a bottle of 12 year Cutty Sark sitting in a kitchen cabinet. It’s left over from my parents’ wedding 30 years ago. They’re not big drinkers, and I don’t like hard liquor. I don’t get “buzzed” off of it. I’ll have 4 shots, not feel anything besides heartburn for hours, then have a fifth shot and black out for the rest of the night, so I stick with strong beers which I’m able to at least tell when I’m starting to get drunk.
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That blacking out part is inconvenient.
I’ve always had a high tolerance, so I don’t feel much until about five drinks in. I guess I’m part Vulcan because I never lose control and I never black out, even when friends are blotto and I’m way ahead in numbers.
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I used to think I had a high tolerance, and used to never get very drunk. Until I stopped taking methylphenidate, and switched to modafinil.
Turns out that I was just being propped up by perhaps the greatest stimulant drug in the world. I didn’t get hangovers because taking drugs that force you to feel pretty good will negate those hangover effects well.
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Hoo boy, I was one of the early Ritalin kids, and stimulants in doses greater than a few sodas just drive me up a damn wall.
I was prescribed Desoxyn as a kid as well, which I only recently figured out is literally methamphetamine!
So I wish I could blame it on drugs. I’d certainly like to be a cheaper date.
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I have a friend who is on an amphetamine benzodiazepine combo drug. I can’t remember the name of it currently. But it seems just lunacy. It’s actually a prescribed, FDA approved drug though, apparently with the benzo to act as an anxiolytic. I’m not convinced, and think it’s a stupid idea. If you need so much amphetamine for your ADHD that they also prescribe xanax, then you ought to look for non-stimulant type treatments and medication because the stimulant obviously isn’t working.
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It’s more complicated than that. In my lay man’s understanding, even meth prescribed in small doses can have secondary effects of letting anxieties and depression out. So good doctors know that there will likely be some comorbidity to deal with.
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In ADHD, a lot of anxieties and depression are already comorbid and are caused and/or exacerbated by scholastic underperformance, social isolation, social ineptitude and lack of confidence. Often prescribing a stimulant medication clears up the anxiety and depression adequately on its own, because it enables focus and better performance as a student, allows the kid to pay better attention to things like social cues, and enhances dopaminergic signalling directly, which anyone who enjoys stimulants will tell you is a great confidence booster.
I used to abuse my methylphenidate because being high on dopaminergic stimulants is a kind of pure, confident mania that makes you feel like every thought you think is smart, everything you do is good and right, and that everyone around you either likes you or is wrong. I don’t have much self-confidence IRL, so that shot of feeling like I’m a good person who is not a constant fuckup is really addictive to me.
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My best solution has turned out to be herbal, but sourcing around here is spotty and challenging. And I’m working on a career change.
Tomorrow’s Monday already?
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People are complicated, aren’t we??? I didn’t achieve lasting self confidence until I was 36. It was during that layoff I mentioned yesterday. I finally got over myself and concocted a healthy mixture of, “fuck those bastards; they don’t tell me who I am or what I’m worth!!” And a deep look at what really motivates me to achieve, which is statistical analysis. It was then that I totally shifted my outlook on jobs from, how am I going to fit in? To: … Well this job will give me opportunity x and this one will give me a little x and a lot of y. I like the first one better. Didn’t get that job? Oh well, I’ll find another. Something just shifted for me and now I am never worried about my personal abilities and never concentrate on what I lack. I concentrate on what I’m building and keep my attention there. Hasn’t failed me yet since I figured it out. Other people do it other ways. But I wanted to give you this to put a bug in your ear to be on the lookout for your own radical shift. It’s coming. And more. Radical shifts do keep coming, every 5 to ten years as we mature.
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Mild ADD here. A nice present that came with my PTSD was hypervigilance, and that apparently led to my mild tendency to lose focus when attempting cognitive tasks (I genuinely have issues studying if my back isn’t to a wall because I’m constantly concerned about what’s going on back there.) So what do you give a guy like me who looks up at every little sound? Amphetamines like methylphenidate. It seems counterintuitive, but the person who is hyper-aware of EVERYTHING needs a stimulant. I have no idea why it works, but it does.
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It works because you’re understimulated. Without anything for your brain to focus on, and with so little dopamine that your reward pathways don’t get triggered in normal settings you’ll look for ways to trigger that reward in other ways. This often leads to problems with impulse control in children with ADHD. They don’t get intrinsic rewards from focus, flow, frission and good work very often, but they get an immediate squirt of reward as soon as they give in to the loudest impulse butting into the front of their mind. Same with hypervigilance, your brain isn’t getting the reward-triggering normal people are constantly getting from little things, so you’re always looking, intentionally or not, consciously or not, for something to validate your suspicions and you end up spending all your time and effort context-switching, so you can’t focus on the task at hand. Your brain is always looking for something that will trigger a reward circuit, and looking much harder than anyone else, because you and I don’t produce enough dopamine to get it triggered for normal everyday things.
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Plenty of usually-better-meaning friends make excuses for Maher whenever he decides to embrace similar “truth always lies the middle” mindless centrism. So I suppose?
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I was sub-vocalising an online acquaintance’s name in preparation for some witty bbs correspondence when Big Ricky Dawkins materialised with a bang in a puff of purple smoke and slapped me upside the face and screamed
###Its pronounced Yah-froyg! No Jah-froyg y’doss cunt!
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Hmm? What?
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Uhm, If am not mistaken, Followers of Islam are doing some oppressing. I mean, his mom won’t be driving any cars during the trip to Mecca they have planned.
I think there trick for rational people here is not getting sucked into the fight between religions when clearly they all have some terribly bad ideas to account for. Maher and Dawkins seem to be regularly angered by progressive defending Muslims from conservatives, which seems like another partisan war they would be smart to avoid.
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I didn’t realize they were oppressing Dawkins and Maher… I’m okay with focusing on what SOME followers of Islam are in fact doing, see for example the Saudis, ISIS, Al-Qaeda, etc. I am not okay with sweeping, blanket accusations against roughly a billion people, who have a wide variety of practices and are not actually doing any oppressing themselves. Don’t forget that the biggest victims of Jihadist violence is actually other Muslims, not white rich atheist males. Also, there are situations where Muslims are being oppressed by other groups and they are being bombed back into the stone age by the west.
Additionally, my point was that the deep power imbalance between the IDF and Hamas goes one way. yes, Hamas has shit policies and they do oppress people in Gaza. But they are not oppressing the IDF and to think so is actually, well, delusional. I think we can all hold these two ideas in our heads, that Hamas are not good actors in this situation and that they are indeed being brutalized by the occupation.
Hence, my posting of the Malcolm quote.
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I concede your main point as a fair one. in that situation.
Similarly, My main objection to the Maher/Harris/Affleck fight from months back was that they talked about the evils of Islamic theocracy without really comparing it to the needless killing and oppression perpetrated by or with the support of secular democracies. But I don’t think we should fall into the trap that whoever is less guilty at the moment should be thought to be the innocent victim.
My point above was that I respect their main points and what I think they are really guilty of is stumbling into a partisan argument and assuming the discussion is about their issue.
“I didn’t realize they were oppressing Dawkins and Maher…”
This one doesn’t really hold water as the oppressed can’t really be the only valid advocates for ending oppression.
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Speedball pills? Off the doctor? Hoo boy.
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That’s true, but they aren’t really advocating for the oppressed, they are advocating for suppressing others - they are arguing that the wars we waged are indeed against the Umma, are about Islam as a religion, not about geopolitics that evolved out of particular contexts - in this case, the cold war and what our and Soviet policies created in the region. Our support for the Saudis and for more religious oriented groups helped to create the current climate which allowed groups like ISIS to grow. And I’m sure you agree with that point. If they spoke out against our political connections to the Saudis, Kuwaiti, Bahraini, or Egyptian governments, that are clearly oppressing their own people, I’d be fine with that. But I don’t believe that is what they are doing - they are making much broader statements about the religion as a whole.
I think we should be on the side of people who are being oppressed always, but I don’t think that’s what Dawkins and Maher, as well as their group (Hirsan Ali, Niall Ferguson, and Anne Coulter) are doing. They are very much blaming Islam for our current predicament, as if there was not centuries of interactions and historical events, much of which Western Powers were responsible for, which laid the ground work. In their world view, there is no power differences between the west and the rest of the world - and that’s just untrue, anyway you slice it. They tend to make blanket statements about the faith which really just ignores that there are a wide variety of practices, many of which are completely compatible with modern democratic practices and citizenship, in a secular society, as we understand it. It also ignores that many Muslims are indeed oppressed under all kinds of governments - from those derived on Sharia law, buddhist, and even western governments. I suspect, if asked, they’d agree with the old racist notion that Arabs aren’t “ready” for democracy and would be better off under a authoritarian government to “keep them under control”.
So, that’s my problem really, that Maher and Dawkins are socially powerful figures, who have a large audience who respect and like them. Imagine if they said that about black people or Jews - would we at all justify it?
Again, look at the Malcolm quote and see what he’s saying there. How the media describes life in Muslim countries informs how most of us understand life in these countries and as such, many people are deeply misinformed about what’s going on there. As such, they all too often don’t see the people across the muslim world as fellow human beings, but monsters who hate us. Making broad generalizations about 1 billion people the way that Dawkins and Maher do doesn’t help. It only further stigmatizing the people who are being oppressed.
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