Hacker News: sammalloy

New comment by sammalloy in "More hospitals create police forces"

sammalloy — Tue, 16 May 2023 01:37:12 +0000

> I think a lot of people were increasingly on edge before the pandemic, and the isolation really didn't help them with their mental health.

This is my take as well. I personally viewed it as a challenge and a stress test for my own mental health, and tried my best to make life easier for myself and others. I suppose I was lucky, as my life didn’t change and I didn’t stop working. As an introvert, it felt like a holiday of sorts, with less car noise and more clean air days to enjoy. I’m not going to lie, I felt like the guy in the Twilight Zone episode "Time Enough at Last", and made great inroads with my reading list. I think the people who faired worse were extroverts who weren’t all that comfortable with being alone, isolated, or limited by where they could go and do, and were faced with existential issues that they had never really confronted before.

New comment by sammalloy in "Vice, Decayed Digital Colossus, Files for Bankruptcy"

sammalloy — Mon, 15 May 2023 10:22:26 +0000

Didn’t they break the krokodil story in the mid-2010s? That coverage was some of the best footage I’ve ever seen. I think they also did that crazy shoot about the drug that turns people in clubs and bars into zombies in South America and allows the perps to control their victims like puppets. The drug in question also wipes the memory of the victims so they can’t report the crime. That was one of the scariest videos ever made. It really had an impact on me and I think I lost my faith in humanity for about a year after I saw it.

New comment by sammalloy in "Who Were ‘The Celts’ and How Did They (Some of Them) Fight?"

sammalloy — Sun, 14 May 2023 02:57:35 +0000

That was true of indigenous people all over the world who were forced to learn English to trade. It doesn’t change the fact that English went global because of colonization, not because of trade. The trading happened because of colonization. This is the subject of numerous studies. William Cronon’s "Changes in the Land" documents exactly this scenario with the indigenous population of New England and painstakingly recounts how colonization led to trade, decade by decade, century by century. Your argument makes zero sense and is one of the strangest claims I’ve ever seen. The Māori of New Zealand primarily learned to read and write English not from trade, but from Christian settlements. (Te Ara – The Encyclopedia of New Zealand) Christian missionaries were the leading edge and primary agents of European colonialism. Attributing the wide adoption of the English language to trade is historical revisionism on a grand scale.

> English as we know it today came to be exported to other parts of the world through British colonisation…The efforts of English-speaking Christian missionaries have resulted in English becoming a second language for many other groups.

New comment by sammalloy in "Who Were ‘The Celts’ and How Did They (Some of Them) Fight?"

sammalloy — Sun, 14 May 2023 00:53:16 +0000

National Library of New Zealand:

"During the period of colonization…Maori were banned from speaking their native language in public places including schools, and forced to speak the foreign language of English…Maori were deprived…of their language, but also of the dimensions of culture and history inherent in language customers and worldview."

This only changed in the 1970s.

New comment by sammalloy in "Who Were ‘The Celts’ and How Did They (Some of Them) Fight?"

sammalloy — Sat, 13 May 2023 22:01:04 +0000

Why do you think an irreversible binomial employed as a thought-terminating cliché in the form of an argumentum ergo decedo is an appropriate response?

New comment by sammalloy in "Who Were ‘The Celts’ and How Did They (Some of Them) Fight?"

sammalloy — Sat, 13 May 2023 21:31:03 +0000

English is widely spoken because it was the colonial language enforced at the highest levels of society. This is still true today and is currently a primary plank in the political platform of US conservatives.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-only_movement

There are libraries of books written solely on this subject. Your bizarre hypothesis ignores this and instead points to slavery and trade. More to the point, there are new articles on how English was enforced on subjugated people published on an almost weekly basis. Last week, the article I read on this topic was about how indigenous orphans were prohibited from using their native language and forced to use only English. But let’s talk about glowing myths about trade and slavery instead which have literally nothing to do with it.

New comment by sammalloy in "Who Were ‘The Celts’ and How Did They (Some of Them) Fight?"

sammalloy — Sat, 13 May 2023 20:59:12 +0000

What a strange hill to die on. English is the colonial language, and its global success was singularly due to imperialist hegemony. This is taught at the university system level and is in every textbook on the subject. I love a good myth about capitalism just as much as the next exploited worker, but attributing the success of English to trade is equivalent to teaching children myths about Thanksgiving and Washington chopping down a cherry tree.

New comment by sammalloy in "Who Were ‘The Celts’ and How Did They (Some of Them) Fight?"

sammalloy — Sat, 13 May 2023 20:14:18 +0000

> who have come to use English for one reason or another

Pretty sure that singular reason was colonialism.

New comment by sammalloy in "19th-century trippers who probed the mind"

sammalloy — Sat, 13 May 2023 05:10:19 +0000

Probably best to start with Richard Evans Schultes. The book list is at the bottom of this page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Evans_Schultes

New comment by sammalloy in "19th-century trippers who probed the mind"

sammalloy — Fri, 12 May 2023 22:15:00 +0000

There is no evidence for any neurochemical basis, as my follow up post later in the thread explains. It’s purely in the realm of psychedelic lore, anecdotal observation, and weak psychological surveys on testing participants. In other words, it is fringe science. There is simply no way to test for it nor to prove these stories are anything other than stories. The point is that these are examples of the Platonic forms and archetypes found not just in the experiences themselves, but also in the types of substances that are used. You may want to check out Shanon’s book "Antipodes of the Mind: Charting the Phenomenology of the Ayahuasca Experience" which goes to great lengths to document these archetypes. In this instance, Shanon is arguing that ayahuasca has the form of the "jungle", and the user will see snakes, jaguars, vines, etc. as part of this experience. He and others argue that this is embedded into the drug as a form of information, but there’s no way to substantiate this or any other claim using the scientific method. Narby made similar claims, and was widely ridiculed for them. Previously, and many decades before, Leary, Watts, and many others argued that the roots of religious forms and symbols could be found within the drug itself. Watts gives an exceptionally illustrative description of how Hinduism, the world’s oldest religion, seemed to be encoded in the experience.

This all came together as something called the entheogenic hypothesis. It is often used to explain the connection between the evolution of religion and the purported sacraments that may have been used in formal rites. The Eleusinian Mysteries is often referenced as an example. Campbell’s formulation of the "Hero’s journey" is very often seen as a general archetype for the user of these substances in its synthesis of comparative literature (which features these forms as archetypes) and mythology which also translates to religion itself. In Campbell’s formulation, the "boon" that is brought back from the hero, is overlayed and represented in the entheogenic hypothesis as the very informational content that the psychonaut is able to retrieve from the experiences. McKenna often interpreted this as the "logos" but in a more secular context. Lilly and others heard distinct voices giving them instructions. Shanon and others revisited the Abrahamic stories and posited that these voices giving people instructions were equivalent to what ancient people imagined as the voice of god. Still others, like Julian Jaynes, interpreted this idea in a secular way, seeing it more as a story that explains our transition from partial to full consciousness. More recently, the writers of Westworld took a lot of these ideas and applied them to AI, in an attempt to explain how consciousness could eventually emerge again as AGI.

New comment by sammalloy in "One Day You'll Find Yourself"

sammalloy — Fri, 12 May 2023 01:00:55 +0000

The problem is most people read "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom" (line 3) and neglect line 46: "You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough."

New comment by sammalloy in "19th-century trippers who probed the mind"

sammalloy — Thu, 11 May 2023 22:56:55 +0000

Interesting. Ayahuasca has been described as the archetype of the Amazon jungle, while DMT alone has the archetype of the circus.

New comment by sammalloy in "19th-century trippers who probed the mind"

sammalloy — Thu, 11 May 2023 22:20:13 +0000

That’s correct, but each substance itself also has a similar, corresponding description or form. The "essence of womanhood" is often associated with the correct dosage of Salvia, for example, with people actually hearing the voice of a woman (or goddess as it is often described). Mushrooms are often associated with the form of the teacher, while LSD seems to have a highly technological or computing form associated with it. Some people will disagree, with McKenna associating mushrooms with aliens and science fiction, but that might have more to do with his heroic dosages.

New comment by sammalloy in "19th-century trippers who probed the mind"

sammalloy — Thu, 11 May 2023 21:52:10 +0000

You don’t need to take any DMT (or any other substance for that matter) to explore and experience this subject. The interesting thing about Shanon is how he collected data about Amazonian archetypes unique to ayahuasca. Jeremy Narby and a few others followed up on this, but it is considered the very definition of fringe science and isn’t well understood. Shanon, Narby, and McKenna were convinced that there was informational content within the drug that is passed on from the ingestion of the substance to the user, akin to Neo uploading Kung Fu directly into his brain. Sadly, however, nobody has ever been able to substantiate this claim or support it with the most basic kind of evidence.

But there is something to be said about culture and language and the Platonic forms that are communicated through writing. The domain of art, psychology, philosophy, mythology, religion, comparative literature, and theatre is chock full of it, and has enough material to keep you busy for five separate lifetimes. Archetypes, metaphors, symbols, and images in these disciplines are all different aspects of these so-called Platonic forms. In the theatrical arts in particular, there is a very strange body of literature surrounding the French troubadours that you may want to start with. The lore suggests that they were using poetry, music, and themes about love to spread these kinds of archetypes.

New comment by sammalloy in "Tucker Carlson bringing show to Twitter"

sammalloy — Wed, 10 May 2023 23:26:02 +0000

Name one. The only controversial thing I said is in the choice of specific terms and descriptions, which I acknowledge below with the following sources. For example, there is a debate over the terms lone wolf, leaderless resistance, and stochastic terrorism. Otherwise, the dispute over terms aside, it is correct.

Right wing violence is the largest form of extremism in the US today.

https://www.adl.org/resources/report/dark-and-constant-rage-... https://web.archive.org/web/20210131220343/https://www.nytim...

It is also largely based on the original values of the KKK

https://www.gale.com/intl/essays/cynthia-miller-idriss-white... https://www.americanprogress.org/article/white-supremacy-ret... https://carnegieendowment.org/2022/03/31/rise-in-political-v...

But operates on the level of lone wolves at the individual levels of violence (such as mass shootings) instead of the group.

https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/... https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/white-supremacists-are... https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/the-new-st...

Today, the group level focuses on disseminating violent rhetoric from the top down, often from political actors using the cover of free speech through media outlets.

https://theconversation.com/impeachment-trial-research-spann... https://apnews.com/article/1410b516f5b66c18d62342a0d7a9b60f https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/07/january-6-trump... https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/trumps-a...

It’s also still a major problem with law enforcement, as the ghost skins phenomenon of infiltration shows in FBI reporting on the subject.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_skin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Supremacist_Infiltration...

It is emanating directly from the leaders of the GOP.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/show/how-trumps-2024-presid... https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/donald-trump-cpac... https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/07/january-6-trump... https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/10/trump-death-wish-com... https://timesofsandiego.com/opinion/2021/01/19/in-the-end-it... https://time.com/5930592/everyone-thinks-im-a-terrorist-capi... https://www.al.com/news/2023/05/tuberville-on-white-national...

New comment by sammalloy in "Heather Armstrong has died"

sammalloy — Wed, 10 May 2023 22:52:10 +0000

I’m sad to say that I had never heard of her, but it sounds like she was influential and made her mark and had a way with words. One thing that struck me is how she was suffering from depression for years and committed suicide, leaving her partner and children behind. I’ve only met one other person who was facing this kind of scenario and it has left me endlessly questioning how they could do this and if there is a known etiology that could lead to such decisions like this, such as the much talked about and popularized parasitic fungus that hijacks insect brains and causes them to kill themselves.

New comment by sammalloy in "Tucker Carlson bringing show to Twitter"

sammalloy — Wed, 10 May 2023 00:38:26 +0000

I spent some time trying to parse your comment, but I’m afraid I just couldn’t do it. Right wing violence is the largest form of extremism in the US today. It is also largely based on the original values of the KKK, but operates on the level of lone wolves at the individual levels of violence (such as mass shootings) instead of the group. Today, the group level focuses on disseminating violent rhetoric from the top down, often from political actors using the cover of free speech through media outlets. It’s also still a major problem with law enforcement, as the ghost skins phenomenon of infiltration shows in FBI reporting on the subject. It’s not a joke, it’s one of the most pressing issues in 2023 America, and is emanating directly from the leaders of the GOP.

New comment by sammalloy in "Tucker Carlson bringing show to Twitter"

sammalloy — Tue, 09 May 2023 22:30:49 +0000

When you research the history of the KKK, you will see that they were purveyors of the original blocks and bans; whenever a non-Christian or non-white spoke out about equal treatment under the law or decided to move into their town and live like any other person, they would begin a state-sanctioned campaign of intimidation and harassment against their opponents, sometimes resulting in their intentional injury or deaths and destruction of their private property. I say state-sanctioned because the KKK were part of the establishment, from the police department all the way to the governor’s office. You say we should allow the message of extremists to be heard, but their message is loud and clear: we will destroy the lives and property of anyone who disagrees with us. And this is why I maintain that free speech absolutism is a total charade, a con job to provide cover for political violence and limitations on the free speech of their opponents. The people cannot figure this out if they running for their lives from terrorists who are trying to kill them. And yes, the KKK were the original homegrown terrorist movement, and they were protected and given safe harbor by the government, just as Musk is protecting the same type of people today on Twitter.

New comment by sammalloy in "Tucker Carlson bringing show to Twitter"

sammalloy — Tue, 09 May 2023 22:03:52 +0000

I don’t agree, and it appears to me that those who embrace the facade of free speech absolutism always turn out to provide forums for blocks, bans, and threats of political violence against their opponents. Look at the demise of any so-called free speech forum on the right for any numbers of examples. The right has been at this for more than a century while the left has staked their entire ideology on protecting free speech. Musk and Carlson have repeatedly shown that they value "free speech for me (protected class), but not for thee." The entire history of human rights is based on this dispute. One side wants free speech for the rich and powerful, while the other side wants it for everyone without threats of political and physical violence. Conservatism is incompatible with democracy, so by its very nature demands that free speech only applies to those with wealth and means.

New comment by sammalloy in "I downloaded all 1.6M posts on Bluesky"

sammalloy — Sun, 07 May 2023 00:06:32 +0000

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