"If you've ever been offended, by any word, in any language, it's probably because your parents were unfit to raise a child." - Doug Stanhope

Stanhope Gets It.

Addiction isn't a disease. "Addiction is learning, very simply. It's learning a habit of thinking. It's deeply entrenched learning."

This Neuroscientist Argues That Addiction Is Not a Disease and Rehab Is Bullshit | VICE | United States: "Marc Lewis traveled the long, tenebrous road of opiate addiction, but he emerged out the rabbit hole a neuroscientist, science writer, and author...  His latest literary endeavor, The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease, asserts labeling addiction a disease is not only specious, it's downright harmful...

VICE: You're critical of the rehab industry because, according to you, it pulls addicts in under the ruse of medical treatment. However, it offers little more than 12 steps and pep talks. You've called it a canard. Can you elaborate? 

...I'm criticizing the way the medical model is used both to conceptualize addiction and to underpin, support, and reinforce the philosophy of the rehab industry. Because it fails people so often, the medical model and definition of addiction should be seriously challenged, but it isn't and there's something really wrong with that. It's a self-reinforcing system that waves this banner that says you have a chronic disease that will kill you, so you better come to us. The rationale that they have a disease has a lot of weight, especially because it's backed up by a lot of high-level bodies, like NIDA (National Institute on Drug Abuse). NIDA funds about 90 percent of addiction research in the world, according to some reports. You're giving money to people who are doing research on the biological or cellular mechanisms involved in addiction, but they're not giving money to people who are challenging the disease model, so that in itself is a self-perpetuating system. In other words, medicine does not have much to offer addicts? Does that mean treatment is really a testament of will? Will has an awful lot to do with it. A lot of addiction experts feel that self-empowerment, self-motivation, self-directed activities, self-designed goals for [addicts'] own progress are critical steps on the road of overcoming addiction. The medical model says you're a patient and you have to do what the doctor tells you.

[Del. Dan Morhaim, a doctor and Maryland legislator] is quoted as saying addiction is "a medical issue that has disastrous social consequences." That's very typical. Take those words, turn them around and you have something that's much more accurate: It's a social issue that has disastrous medical consequences. Throwing people in jail and prohibition are responsible for a lot of the harm that comes with addiction. The prohibitions create this narrow passageway by which addicts have to squeeze themselves through, which drives them into crime, which breathes life into criminal organizations and cartels that get rich on the war on drugs...

...defining addicts as patients makes them passive. It makes them fatalistic and it makes them pessimistic. If you're told you have a chronic brain disease that causes you to do all this nasty shit, you don't think you'll ever get free of it. But, in fact, most addicts do recover and the statistics are very clear on that, whether they're soft drugs or harder drugs like heroin. So, it's a chronic disease? Really? The second thing is it tends to overshadow other approaches to treating addiction that relies on much more individualized psychological methods. There are various kinds of psychotherapy, counseling, support networks, and mindfulness meditation approaches that are also being shown to be very effective. If you believe you have a chronic disease and so does your care provider, they're not very likely to recommend mindfulness meditation, but it's been shown to be very effective...

While opiate and alcohol withdrawal can wreak physical havoc on addicts, you argue that addiction is purely behavioral rather than physiological, like, say, cancer is? 

That's another discrepancy. You have substance addiction on one hand, and behavioral on the other: gambling, sex addiction, porn addiction, a number of eating disorders, internet gaming. The cool thing is when you do brain scans, you get the same neural activation patterns in behavioral addictions as you do in substance addictions. That should be enough to knock out the disease model. If addiction is a disease, then people who spend 12 hours a day playing video games are suffering the same way people who are addicted to heroin do...

What all these patterns have in common is they involve deep learning—a set of assumptions of what you need to get through the day; that learning gets entrenched through repetition and you're addicted, but there's nothing disease-like about it. People recover from all addictions, which means it's all about neural plasticity. It's not that you go back to where you were, because development never goes in reverse, it's that you learn skills that help you overcome your impulses and you learn new cognitive habits. All learning involves changes in synapses, which means creation and strengthening of certain synapses, and the weakening or disappearance of synapses that aren't being used...

I've talked to Nora Volkow, [the director] of NIDA and a very powerful policy maker. She doesn't want to hear it. She's basically saying that addicts need to be told they have chronic brain disease because that will reduce stigmatization. But people like me come along and say, "No, it doesn't look like brain disease. Brain change, yes. But that's what a brain is supposed to do because it's learning." That's when the wall comes down."

"If addiction is not a disease, does that render the "alcohol gene" a fallacy? 

You get little things that show some genetic correlation with alcoholism, but there is no gene, or cluster of genes, that create addiction. Rather, there are personality traits that have a genetic loading, like impulsivity. So you get these cross-generational correlations that are real and do have genetic loading, but there's nothing like a particular gene or set of genes specific to addiction...

In layman's terms, what is addiction if it isn't a disease? 

Addiction is learning, very simply. It's learning a habit of thinking. It's deeply entrenched learning. So are relationships when you're in love with someone. If that person happens to be abusive, you might still be in love with them for 12 years or the rest of your life. That's through learning. So is being a sports fan or a Jihadist. Religion is another deep substantiation of deep learning. That's what I think it is. The fact that it could be gambling, or eating, or heroin, or meth, it shows there are certain addictions that involve substances that create physical dependency. Physical dependency is a whole other layer of shittiness on top of addiction. Psychological and interpersonal tools are very important. Addiction has to do with isolation and feeling alone, not having a support network and not being able to deeply connect with other people. You can superficially connect and have a nice circle of addicts, but not connecting with people in a way that's harmonious and fulfilling, those are the people that are really vulnerable to addiction. They're lonely, depressed, anxious, and traumatized. It's just like the Rat Park [Canadian study into drug addiction]. What I said doesn't just apply to humans, it applies to other animals, too. Isolation is really bad for you and it's the underlining factor of addiction."

Camus Gets It.

Doug Stanhope too.  "The only true freedom you find is when you realize and come to terms with the fact that you are completely and unapologetically fucked, and then you are free to float around the system."

"You're On The Global Frequency."

Truth.  One minute.

51 years old.  Tapping the Fountain of Youth, clearly.  Super-Bonus Points/Nerd Cred for the t-shirt.

 Cross-posted from FB, because...  "It's interesting... there's a lot of "this is a thing that consistently happens" but not a great deal of 'why does this happen?' In your forties, in Western cultures, why is there this window where the trappings and toys of society are no longer enough to distract you from the fundamental existential crisis? Is it just being halfway to death? Is it that when you hit your forties, if you've been paying attention, you realize how fundamentally untenable the socially constructed roles you've been expected to fill are... and are, essentially, a sucker's game? Is the 'happiness' that returns when you get past it actually happiness or is it resignation and rationalization given that most people lack the psychological wherewithal to effectively make changes in their lives? Is the often-mocked 'mid-life crisis' mocked mostly because the majority of people around you hate when you upset the status quo or are, in some respect, when trying to improve the trajectory of your life, shining a light on their unwillingness to do so for themselves? If someone is authentically trying to improve the course of their life, who is it for anyone else to say whether or not those choices are 'authentic' or valid? And how can you even know? Unanswerable questions, probably, in a lot of cases. Regardless, the best book on happiness I've come across, from a science-y perspective, [that I'm still trying to grind through] is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's [no, I can't pronounce it] "Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience."" -- The Real Roots of Midlife Crisis - The Atlantic: "What a growing body of research reveals about the biology of human happiness—and how to navigate the (temporary) slump in middle age" 

Hirsi Ali slams feminism's 'trivial BS' | WashingtonExaminer.com: "Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a harsh critic of Islam’s treatment of women, said Wednesday that modern American feminism is focused on “trivial bullshit” and needs to be reclaimed. Speaking at the Independent Women’s Forum Women of Valor dinner, where she received an award for courage, Hirsi Ali reminded her audience of how far feminism has strayed from its original purpose. “I want you to remember that once upon a time, feminists fought for the access — basic right — access of girls to education,” she said...

But now, Hirsi Ali said, feminism has taken that victory and squandered it. “What we are now doing with the victory, and I agree with you if you condemn that and I condemn whole-heartedly the trivial bullshit it is to go after a man who makes a scientific breakthrough and all that we as women — organized women — do is to fret about his shirt?” Hirsi Ali said, referring to the controversy generated by the shirt featuring cartoons of scantily-clad women worn by the scientist who helped land a robot on a comet. “We must reclaim and retake feminism from our fellow idiotic women.”"

Sad/Infuriating.  Free speech is so last century. Today’s students want the ‘right to be comfortable’ » The Spectator: "I was attacked by a swarm of Stepford students this week. On Tuesday, I was supposed to take part in a debate about abortion at Christ Church, Oxford. I was invited by the Oxford Students for Life to put the pro-choice argument against the journalist Timothy Stanley, who is pro-life. But apparently it is forbidden for men to talk about abortion. A mob of furious feministic Oxford students, all robotically uttering the same stuff about feeling offended, set up a Facebook page littered with expletives and demands for the debate to be called off. They said it was outrageous that two human beings ‘who do not have uteruses’ should get to hold forth on abortion — identity politics at its most basely biological — and claimed the debate would threaten the ‘mental safety’ of Oxford students. Three hundred promised to turn up to the debate with ‘instruments’ — heaven knows what — that would allow them to disrupt proceedings.

Incredibly, Christ Church capitulated, the college’s censors living up to the modern meaning of their name by announcing that they would refuse to host the debate on the basis that it now raised ‘security and welfare issues’. So at one of the highest seats of learning on Earth, the democratic principle of free and open debate, of allowing differing opinions to slog it out in full view of discerning citizens, has been violated, and students have been rebranded as fragile creatures, overgrown children who need to be guarded against any idea that might prick their souls or challenge their prejudices. One of the censorious students actually boasted about her role in shutting down the debate, wearing her intolerance like a badge of honour in an Independent article in which she argued that, ‘The idea that in a free society absolutely everything should be open to debate has a detrimental effect on marginalised groups.’

This isn’t the first time I’ve encountered the Stepford students. Last month, at Britain’s other famously prestigious university, Cambridge, I was circled by Stepfords after taking part in a debate on faith schools. It wasn’t my defence of parents’ rights to send their children to religious schools they wanted to harangue me for — much as they loathed that liberal position — it was my suggestion, made in this magazine and elsewhere, that ‘lad culture’ doesn’t turn men into rapists. 

Their mechanical minds seemed incapable of computing that someone would say such a thing. Their eyes glazed with moral certainty, they explained to me at length that culture warps minds and shapes behaviour and that is why it is right for students to strive to keep such wicked, misogynistic stuff as the Sun newspaper and sexist pop music off campus. ‘We have the right to feel comfortable,’ they all said, like a mantra. One — a bloke — said that the compulsory sexual consent classes recently introduced for freshers at Cambridge, to teach what is and what isn’t rape, were a great idea because they might weed out ‘pre-rapists’: men who haven’t raped anyone but might. The others nodded. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Pre-rapists! Had any of them read Philip K. Dick’s dystopian novella about a wicked world that hunts down and punishes pre-criminals, I asked? None had.

When I told them that at the fag-end of the last millennium I had spent my student days arguing against the very ideas they were now spouting — against the claim that gangsta rap turned black men into murderers or that Tarantino flicks made teens go wild and criminal — not so much as a flicker of reflection crossed their faces. ‘Back then, the people who were making those censorious, misanthropic arguments about culture determining behaviour weren’t youngsters like you,’ I said. ‘They were older, more conservative people, with blue rinses.’ A moment’s silence. Then one of the Stepfords piped up. ‘Maybe those people were right,’ he said...

If your go-to image of a student is someone who’s free-spirited and open-minded, who loves having a pop at orthodoxies, then you urgently need to update your mind’s picture bank. Students are now pretty much the opposite of that. It’s hard to think of any other section of society that has undergone as epic a transformation as students have. From freewheelin’ to ban-happy, from askers of awkward questions to suppressors of offensive speech, in the space of a generation. My showdown with the debate-banning Stepfords at Oxford and the pre-crime promoters at Cambridge echoed other recent run-ins I’ve had with the intolerant students of the 21st century. I’ve been jeered at by students at the University of Cork for criticising gay marriage; cornered and branded a ‘denier’ by students at University College London for suggesting industrial development in Africa should take precedence over combating climate change; lambasted by students at Cambridge (again) for saying it’s bad to boycott Israeli goods. In each case, it wasn’t the fact the students disagreed with me that I found alarming — disagreement is great! — it was that they were so plainly shocked that I could have uttered such things, that I had failed to conform to what they assume to be right, that I had sought to contaminate their campuses and their fragile grey matter with offensive ideas."

"Men are four times more likely than women to commit suicide, even though women attempt it more. So men are better at it!  That's something else you gals will want to be workin' on.  Well, if you want to be truly equal, you're gonna have to start taking your own lives in greater numbers." - George Carlin

#TheStruggleIsReal 

  

  

Warren Ellis' Global Frequency Is Getting A TV Pilot—Once Again: "Deadline is reporting that Global Frequency has landed a pilot production commitment at Fox, with Farscape and Defiance creator Rockne S. O'Bannon writing and co-executive producing with Ellis, Jonathan Littman, and Jerry Bruckheimer. According to Deadline, "The show will chronicle the workings of The Global Frequency, a privately funded crime-fighting operation that uses worldwide crowd-sourcing to solve crimes the police cannot." The question is, will it explore what the strange doings of the world's governments, or will it be more of a typical crimefighting show?"

Finishing A Book | MORNING, COMPUTER: "On a tip from Joe Hill, I’m reading a book called DAILY RITUALS, about the working methods of creative people, and it appears so far that I am probably somewhat less functional than Kafka, while being less than half as good as him.  You start looking at their drinking and drugging patterns and falsely think, “mmm, that sounds good.  That sounds productive.” An old girlfriend once bought me a book about four brilliant writers who were alcoholics and their awful doomed lives.  “Thank you!”  I said.  “A manual!” “That is not,” she said gravely, “why I gave it to you.”"

This week in innocence: Ricky Jackson to be released tomorrow after 39 years in prison - The Washington Post: "Ricky Jackson, now 59 years old, has spent the last 39 years of his life in prison for a 1975 murder that he and two of his friends didn’t commit."

  

Albuquerque police lieutenant advertises “Killology” classes - The Washington Post: "As I pointed out in September, this is part of a growing movement within policing that emphasizing using more force more quickly, and encourages cops to see themselves more as soldiers and warriors, not as keepers of the peace. Jones not only wants cops taking a more aggressive approach to lethal force, but he also believes the public has no right to know about it."

thehappysorceress: herochan: Batman 2 18 x 29... - APE IN A CAPE:

For all the quality TV there is these days - and there is, quite a bit - MasterChef Junior may be the show I enjoy watching the most.  'MasterChef Junior': The Secret Ingredients Are Moppets And Empathy : Monkey See : NPR: "It's not necessarily intuitive that Gordon Ramsay, who once told a Hell's Kitchen contestant that a poorly cooked piece of fish resembled "Gandhi's flip-flop," would be good with children. It's surprising, then, that MasterChef Junior, a kid-centered spin-off of his Fox show MasterChef, is one of the most warmly reviewed reality-competition shows ... maybe ever...

The funny thing about this show, though, is that they're kids, and they're all pretty nice people who have a legitimate skill (that would be cooking). That gives the audience a chance to enjoy some of the really fun things about competition shows (growth, personality, triumphs) without the bad things about competition shows (backbiting, unpleasantness, resentment). It allows the audience to be on the side of not just some participants but all of the participants, which is secretly what a sizable chunk of the supposedly bloodthirsty crowd really wants to do anyway...  This season, I am carefully tracking the fortunes of Abby, a bespectacled eight-year-old, and Oona, a wry nine-year-old. If they made The Abby And Oona Show, where they just talked about whatever was on their minds at the moment, including but not limited to food, love, and world events, I would tune in. In fact, we need to start the Abby And Oona podcast. This is Oona, introducing a dish she's cooked, and right at the very, very, very end? That's Abby applauding with more good-natured sportspersonship than the jocks at the end of Lucas."

 The Return of Awesome Fitz.

  

 Kyle MacLachlan is killing it on S.H.I.E.L.D.

Strong Parenting Move.

"There is no self-analysis; there is no concern for changing our interventionist national attitude; there is no sense of reevaluation."

Only once, Hulk. 

Always Repost.

Fictional Infractions and Furry Judges - Reason.com: "The North Carolina Supreme Court argues that "an officer may make a mistake, including a mistake of law, yet still act reasonably under the circumstances," and "so long as the officer's mistake of law is objectively reasonable…the Fourth Amendment would seem not to be violated." But as George Washington University law professor Orin Kerr points out in a recent discussion of Heien, courts do not cut people without badges that kind of slack. The usual rule is that ignorance of the law is no excuse. Shouldn't police officers empowered to use force against their fellow citizens be held to at least as high a standard?"

  

Jihadist or Jingoist, what a choice! | OrthoCuban: " …if you look at almost all of the Congress and the media, there is no sense whatsoever that any of this is happening because we invaded an innocent country. Yes, it was a country innocent of the charges of having WMDs. The Iraq of back then was guilty of other things, but not of harboring WMDs to be used against the USA, not of supporting Al Qaida, not of exporting terrorism to other parts of the Western World. There is no sense that we could have, in any way, been one of the causes that triggered this horrific counter-reaction by the jihadists. No, there is only talk of how we should have stayed longer in Iraq, how we should have been militarily tougher, how we should have taken over Syria (and maybe even Saudi Arabia), how we should be wiling to put boots on the ground. There is no self-analysis; there is no concern for changing our interventionist national attitude; there is no sense of reevaluation. If anything, as parts of Islam have become jihadist, so have many of our countrymen (and Orthodox clergy) become jingoists. Violence seems to be the only answer increasingly given by both sides. Jihadist or Jingoist, what a choice this world has!"

"What we think..."

"I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return." - Frank Church

  

Drug warriors invoke their ‘service’ to demand more drug war: 

"A bunch of former federal prosecutors, drug war lieutenants, and Justice Department officials have written a letter to the leadership of the U.S. Senate in opposition to the Smarter Sentencing Act. The law would cut most mandatory minimums in half, and apply the sentencing reforms already passed in 2010 retroactively...

Julie Stewart of the advocacy group Families Against Mandatory Minimums noted the letter’s particularly telling first line: “As former government officials who served in the war on drugs . . . “ The signatories return to that theme later in the letter: “Many of us once served on the front lines of justice.” Ah, the “front lines.” Apparently, Bill Bennett (one of the signatories) wasn’t just feeding quarters into Vegas video poker machines as he demanded that other people go to prison for their vices . . . he was also ducking sniper fire at the time. The notion that when it comes to having opinions about how or when we go to war, people who didn’t serve in the military should defer to those who did is already a tired fallacy. It’s all the more ridiculous when it’s invoked by a group whose “battlefield” was an air-conditioned office or a wood-panelled courtroom."