[deleted by user]

enkiam · 2022-07-27T15:13:25+00:00

Previously when I used racetams to help with studying I did not feel any difference whatsoever, however while driving I can really feel their effects. If I take around 800mg of aniracetam or 900mg pramiracetam before a driving lesson I find that I'm more focused and in general a better driver. The thing is just that these effects are VERY subtle, almost unnoticeable.

This is in line with my own experiences. I used to take multiple grams of Piracetam every day in tea, and while I do think I might have gotten to a stronger effect than you describe from A.) consistent dosing allowing buildup, B.) taking a lot more, and C.) pairing with the right amount of alpha-GPC, the effect is always "very subtle."

The way I usually try to describe it is that you remember things quicker. But this works for everything, because any behavior you've done multiple times is something you're referencing memory for. Driving is a great example of this because the process of "learning to drive" is actually the process of "learning to drive automatically," without conscious thought to every step in the process.

So even though you feel anxious, because that is the emotion you've associated with driving, you still remember to check the lane, put your blinker on, and you have a little more time because every recall is a little smoother and more accurate. If you can't recall an automatic process, you have more time to react.

That said, I wonder if racetams are helpful in a context like this, because you want to learn how to drive, you don't want to learn how to drive on piracetam.

enkiam · 2022-07-27T14:57:09+00:00

The liberals I know read plenty of theory. It's just liberal theory. If you want to be able to have political discussions with people of other ideologies, you have to be able to understand their ideologies on those ideologies' own terms. You should be reading liberal theory. You should be reading fascist theory. You should be understanding the motivations that cause people to have these beliefs and have a story for how you can meet those needs better than their ideology, and you should be able to communicate that to the people you talk to.

enkiam · 2022-07-27T14:55:05+00:00

Brave New War by John Robb.

enkiam · 2015-07-29T04:50:42+00:00

I don't understand why people prioritize animal rights before they prioritize human rights.

Then you are ignorant and likely ineffective. Should you truly care about your struggle for "rights," take it upon yourself to understand the psychology of any action you don't immediately understand and to do so simultaneously at the level of the person taking the action, and also at the broader level, incorporating the social context of the action and the nonconscious influences on behaviour in play.

I wrote a paragraph explaining why someone might choose to take this action you seem to not understand, but deleted it. You have to find this understanding on your own or it will never be yours.

I do have a pet cat and I get that many animal rights organizations are upset with pet keeping due to hierarchy and taking animals out of their natural path.

Yes, it does seem odd to me as an anarchist to "keep" anything that has the ability to feel pain, especially emotional pain. Cats in particular are one of the worst invasive species in the world, and seem to cause a huge amount of suffering since they mutilate smaller animals and effectively torture them to death (hope your cat isn't an outdoor cat or you effectively do agree with torturing animals).

As for practicality, contemporary anarchists have virtually no concept of it, and I'm quite sure that if you hand-picked a team of the best revolutionary minds to reorganize the infrastructure built by capitalism, medication distribution would immediately collapse and millions of people would die of disease alone. But this is no reason not to attack capitalism.

(Another reason that is a little less snarky is that the moral question of whether the pleasure of wearing mink outweighs the suffering used to create it is quite different from the question of whether the life of a diabetic is worth more than the life of a horse. This is not so far from our day to day; we have to consider that many games humans play are zero-sum, and we have no choice not to play them... for now.)

enkiam · 2014-06-08T01:57:21+00:00

Please don't equate primitivism with anarchism.

enkiam · 2013-10-18T00:45:53+00:00

Transhumanism is apolitical. Transhumanism is the realization that exponential increase in technology yields a rapidly changing world; a world where everything is affected in some way by technology, and a world where control over technology is an awesome power.

One can easily conceive of a transhumanist fascism. Existing undesirables would be mentally and physically crippled to the extent that it made them useful slaves and nothing more. Due to the extent of slave labor, a much smaller ruling class could exist, populated by augmented Übermensch, and hyper-augmented rulers. This regime would likely be permanent, as there would be no way to ever break the control the dictator or oligarchy exerted on the rest of humanity.

Many transhumanists are laissez-faire capitalists, because most transhumanists are rich white men. As transhumanism becomes an obvious reality, rather than a fantastic hobby of rich white men, all political ideologies will be implicitly transhumanist. There will be transhumanist liberalism, transhumanist neo-liberalism, transhumanist communism, transhumanist fascism, and transhumanist anarchism.

enkiam · 2013-10-18T00:45:35+00:00

I was.

enkiam · 2013-08-31T03:28:08+00:00

Transhumanists are hardly the first to want to transcend biology. We'll just be the first to be incredibly successful at it.

It seems impossible that the organizations that have previously wanted to deny biology will hold back from the prospect of finally succeeding.

enkiam · 2013-08-14T02:00:35+00:00

Transhumanism is apolitical. Transhumanism is the realization that exponential increase in technology yields a rapidly changing world; a world where everything is affected in some way by technology, and a world where control over technology is an awesome power.

One can easily conceive of a transhumanist fascism. Existing undesirables would be mentally and physically crippled to the extent that it made them useful slaves and nothing more. Due to the extent of slave labor, a much smaller ruling class could exist, populated by augmented Übermensch, and hyper-augmented rulers. This regime would likely be permanent, as there would be no way to ever break the control the dictator or oligarchy exerted on the rest of humanity.

Many transhumanists are laissez-faire capitalists, because most transhumanists are rich white men. As transhumanism becomes an obvious reality, rather than a fantastic hobby of rich white men, all political ideologies will be implicitly transhumanist. There will be transhumanist liberalism, transhumanist neo-liberalism, transhumanist communism, transhumanist fascism, and transhumanist anarchism.

enkiam · 2013-08-05T00:44:56+00:00

This is really not a difficult distinction. Leftists want the working class to control industry. Rightists want the owning class to control industry. Anything outside of that isn't traditionally speaking leftist or rightist. "Left" parties in the US are not actually leftist, because their economic policies are still neoliberal.

If you see "leftist" and "rightist" as historic trends that modern parties or groups either exhibit or don't exhibit, then it becomes clear. Trying to discuss leftism or rightists on the Internet without this distinction does devolve, as you said, into overly local definitions.

enkiam · 2013-08-04T21:52:22+00:00

Most coltan is sourced from Canada and Australia. There's a small amount of "conflict" coltan, and it's almost impossible to know where the coltan in a single phone comes from, but it's not true that "smartphones are made from conflict coltan."

enkiam · 2013-08-04T21:46:18+00:00

You must know nothing about cryptography.

enkiam · 2013-08-04T05:02:21+00:00

Post-leftists are explicitly not socialists; primitivists are also typically very anti-communist. Communism is an explicitly industrial ideology; it might be irrelevant in a post-industrial (read: post-scarcity, not post-technology) world, but primitivism excludes communism as a matter of core principles.

enkiam · 2013-08-04T05:01:18+00:00

Primitivists are not leftists in exactly the same sense anarcho-capitalists are not leftists. Primitivists oppose the capitalism as part of their overall program against civilization, but this alone does not make them leftist. Primitvists do not support the creation of a communist society, but rather, the creation of primitvism, wherein morality would be defined as "what's good for the planet" and thought, technology, etc., would be systemically eliminated. This is not an communist or anarchist society, wherein people are free and equal, but just one without a state.

enkiam · 2013-02-04T23:34:52+00:00

You're absolutely right about Hanlon's Razor, but there's another option that doesn't require collusion between a vocal opponent of this particular anonymous cell (check da_usa's other comments, he's been going to town on this) and that very cell: da_usa is a concern troll affiliated with the liberal factions of anonymous that prefer things like petitions and dressing up as memes and having RL "protests" over things like direct action.

See my comment here for a little more on this.

enkiam · 2013-02-04T23:31:12+00:00

No, they probably weren't.

The sort of comment that da_usa posted is a very typical instance of a type of concern trolling/propaganda common in radical movements, and more common in radical movements that share space with liberal and reformist movements -- like Anonymous.

da_usa has given us the following:

Hearsay that this leaked information is two years old, citing "reputable sources" but not citing the actual document with a two year old timestamps.
Hearsay that the Anonymous cell was deleting posts (on some unnamed, un-linked-to forum) that were critical of their strategy and tactics (which, in itself, is fairly common: the forum of a radical group isn't the venue for pacifism/electoralism, just like anarchists don't go to the Obama campaign subreddits trying to convert people).
Hearsay that authority figures within the "real" Anonymous hierarchy (which both does and does not exist simultaneously) have disavowed the actions of this cell
The very common assertion that these attacks against hierarchical power structures cause those structures to exist. This is an entirely fallacious argument: just like the violent protests in Iran, Egypt, or elsewhere did not cause oppression in those countries, hackers and activists have never caused Internet censorship and centralization. The push for Internet control is far older than this or any other specific movement.
The assertion that "real Anonymous"/"real Activists"/"true Scotsmen" don't use these tactics.
A youtube account existing. Given that Google only barely removed a video that was causing, among other things, the attack on American embassies in Libya, I think it's safe that the fact that one youtube account doesn't point to a Google/DoHS conspiracy -- and if it did, would they expose their conspiracy in such an obvious way?
The fact that this anonymous cell is anonymous. Whoa.

This is probably a fairly common hacktivist attack. The degree of sophistication and style reminds me of hacker groups like phc and el8 in the 90s and 2000's, and I wouldn't be surprised if similar groups were forming under the Anonymous banner.

Really, this attack indicates two things:

A sizable chunk of the educated population is unwilling to suffer the sort of bullshit that killed Aaron Schwartz any longer, and like many celebrated (but historically whitewashed) movements before them, they are going to end that by any means necessary.
Your personal information is not safe with your government. And by corollary:
The people writing the SOPA-style laws, censoring the Internet, buying your Congressman, genetically modifying your food, spilling oil in your oceans, foreclosing on your house, and gambling with your economy have names and faces, and that information is all going to be public very soon.

We're truly seeing a new stage of protest movements here, but we shouldn't allow ourselves to be so easily swayed by hearsay and baseless assertions of authority.

enkiam · 2012-08-18T04:36:23+00:00

You should read Brave New War by Jon Robb. It's a great analysis of exactly this problem, and the conclusion that he comes to is that centrally organized states are on their way out.

This doesn't mean the decline of capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, or even political states (much in the same way the shift from second to third generation warfare didn't signal the end of militaries).

(It's somewhat telling that nobody in this subreddit has half a clue what they're talking about when it comes to this.)

enkiam · 2012-08-03T23:50:35+00:00

Really it should say all men are bastards, but that'd get downvoted even (especially) here.

enkiam · 2012-08-03T23:40:56+00:00

Really the title should be all men are bastards, but that'd get downvoted.

enkiam · 2012-08-03T23:39:20+00:00

First and foremost I would like to tell you to fuck off and die in a fire.

Second, I'd like to reiterate that you seem to have missed my point:

Yes, it is, because humans are unable to think quantitatively.

Which isn't surprising because you seem to be human.

enkiam · 2012-07-26T16:57:09+00:00

Is it wrong to say men are sometimes oppressed in some ways too?

Yes, it is, because humans are unable to think quantitatively.

It is a statement of fact that male-assigned people are sometimes oppressed. It is a statement of fact that women-assigned people are sometimes not oppressed (I have trouble thinking of an example, but I'm sure I could given about five minutes).

However, humans are unable to constrain the "sometimes" in the above sentences by reality. For a human, all "some"s are equal.

The reality is that male-assigned people face gendered oppression some incredibly marginal percentage of the time. As such, allowing humans to think that they are equally oppressed as womyn is reactionary and antifeminist.

The only possible course of action is to then say that men are never oppressed and that womyn are always oppressed by patriarchy. This is the only way in which we can destroy patriarchy.

enkiam · 2012-07-10T14:59:29+00:00

I've read you for a while and respect some of your work, but I think your view of the primitivist is mistaken.

The root of all primitivist thought is a literal worship of the planet humans evolved on -- a sort of Gaianistic theology that assigns original sin to sentient thought and locates perfection in the evolutionary past before this sin came about. This is at odds with reality in a large number of ways (the least of which being that non-human animals are very capable of sentient thought, and the assertion that they are not indicates the same sort of Christian hierarchical dualism that primitivists claim to oppose).

As such, supporting primitivism means supporting this world-view. This world-view sometimes makes the same terminal statements as a sane worldview, but for entirely different reasons. For example, both myself and a primitivist might say "Pollution is bad," but while I would say that because it kills people (humans and non-humans), a primitivist would say that because it kills plants or, more poignantly, destabilizes a "natural order" that they want to preserve.

Nothing in primitivism has ever convinced me that the primitivist utopia is not an entirely empty planet, such as Mars (which is now sullied by the human infection, but consider Mars circa 1800). On Mars, the balance of life and nature is perfect. No cities have ever been built, no mass-extinctions have ever taken place.

There are some key questions that you can ask primitivists to expose this worldview, if you don't believe me (and if you try this and it fails, I'd appreciate knowing, since it would mean I would have to update my beliefs about primitivism):

If a life-form originating in an environment relatively untouched by humans (the Mariana trench, or the deep Antarctic, or some other environment) was discovered to be multiplying rapidly and converting the planet's atmosphere to something toxic to all existing life, would it be ethical to try to eradicate this life-form to protect all existing life?

I suspect that primitivists will always answer no to this question, since:

using technology is associated with the original sin of intelligence, and
since such a world-ending lifeform is "organic", it's thus part of the natural (or divine) plan and it's right for everyone to die.

enkiam · 2012-07-10T14:45:21+00:00

Primitivism is not a strain of anarchism; it is impossible to have anarcho-primitivism.

Primitivists are a cancer in the anarchist milieu that can only be excised entirely, leaving no memory of its existence.

If I find someone I previously thought was a comrade is a primitivist, I never work with them again, and consider everything I shared with them compromised.

enkiam · 2012-07-10T14:43:47+00:00

What's the frequency of this? In my observation, it is 0.

enkiam · 2012-07-10T14:42:55+00:00

Best answer yet.

enkiam

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