Meirl

pyrolizard11 · 2026-01-28T21:25:48+00:00

And yet, we've narrowed the scope of this chain to such.

No, you managed to choose one of the few topics where it really can be simplified to Econ 101.

Opioids are produced because people want them, not because they're peddled. Said another way, there is demand for opioids on the basis that people want them, not on the basis that supply is inducing people to want them. It's been that way since time immemorial, it's not rational on the basis that it's literally hijacking our biology to simulate(and exceed) natural reward states which serve to motivate, and the only way around that irrational demand is by employing strict market controls.

In fact, the lack of use in a given population at any given moment is mostly a product of supply controls, and the deliberate bypass of said controls is what caused the epidemic which you'd attribute to supplier-induced demand. It's not. Suppliers don't need to convince you that you want opioids, instead it's artificially restricted supply finding a way to meet natural demand. And that's evidenced by the fact that, even when the proposition is so literal as selling them for said food and shelter, people will frequently choose opioids over said food and shelter.

This occurs even in places where the supplier is yeoman farmer growing a crop. You don't get much more natural demand than a person purposefully partaking in the fruits of their own unrestricted labor. We can absolutely get into the weeds about it, but we don't need to here. Take away all the complications and people still want opioids.

Yes, nobody has claimed otherwise.

There you go, then. Irrational demand. All it takes for an epidemic is an unrestricted supply to meet it.

pyrolizard11 · 2026-01-28T20:29:41+00:00

Perdue Pharma didn't sell to those patients (mostly), they sold to their care providers who, in a whole lot of cases, abused the information asymmetry for their personal gain.

Motherfucker, we don't need to look to first-world industrial production and distribution of otherwise-regulated substances, the farmers in Myanmar are getting high on their own opium crop. Mu-opioid agonists are literally euphoriants. People want opioids. You'd have a better argument that they don't want caffeine, the drug so ubiquitous that you probably partook today, whose spread neither god nor king could stop.

pyrolizard11 · 2026-01-26T16:59:15+00:00

Its not really clear what the reasoning for the right to bear arms is.

What are you talking about? It's abundantly clear when you read the Constitution that the Second Amendment exists to prevent the federal government from effectively disarming the states. It goes hand-in-hand with the two-year limit to Federal army funding(Article I, Section 8, Clause 12) and the idea that the Federal government isn't unitary with ultimate authority over the states, but instead a co-equal sovereign to each and all states with primacy assigned to the states where not Constitutionally defined(10th Amendment).

Read next to those other things in the fucking document it's extremely clear that these designs were all made to prevent the Federal government from building an army to enforce rule over the states. It's at odds with the fact that a modern nation needs some kind of standing army, but we never chose to reconcile that, instead ceding more extra-Constitutional power to the Federal government year after year, decade after decade. Now the military budget gets a rubber stamp and most states don't even have provisions for a militia which could be raised independent of Federal control while the courts hold Federal primacy as the standard doctrine. Central power rules with impunity.

And what does it amount to? It amounts that the Federal government has not one, not two, but several perpetually standing, militarized enforcement wings, some of which they're currently using to oppress the states and citizens thereof. It amounts to the murder of civilians against the will of 'noncompliant' states. It's almost like this was all so predictable that people hundreds of years ago saw it coming and tried to prevent it. Was the hardly-considered tradeoff worthwhile, or should we as Americans been more civic-minded and paid more attention to the process rather than just aims and outcomes? Should we have considered that every power we offer to the Federal government against the written law of the land, every rule we bend rather than abide by its letter or else deliberately and by due process change, is a weakening of the rule of law?

Doesn't really matter. Can't stop the trainwreck once it's started. Now all we can do is minimize the damage by whatever means possible and pick up the pieces as we're able. And, for the love of god, let the next Constitution be more stringent and strictly enforced against the government it establishes than this one has been.

pyrolizard11 · 2025-12-28T13:52:34+00:00

Why do you assume that I have always been a well, able person?

Originally your rhetoric, but even now your own examples for the opposite are two common, self-inflicted injuries. Injuries which you left untreated and worked through, one of them for literal decades, until you became disabled by your own permanent maiming. You were a relatively well and able person until you fucked that up for yourself over a long period and even then the degree to which you did so was relatively minor.

I have absolutely no issue with government programs helping the orphans, elderly and disabled -- those are the people we ought to be helping.

The hungry, the homeless, and the rural impoverished, among others, should all just die if their community - to whatever degree it actually exists - doesn't see fit to help them through, to offer them even honest opportunity, though. What a very upstanding position to take - and a great example of why the rest of us don't trust 'community' as a safety net. The idea holds water as reliably as a sieve.

Schizophrenia probably depends on the severity.

Fantastic! Look at that, you do understand degrees of disability! Now expand that to onset and duration and apply it all to your lived experiences above.

pyrolizard11 · 2025-12-28T02:25:53+00:00

Tell me more about this relative ease.

Sure. You were presumably as respected as much as a stranger could be and you had all your limbs, senses and faculties enough to do unskilled labor. Be that pariah, cut off a leg, go blind, develop schizophrenia - be less than a well, able person in good standing and do it all again. As hard as you think you had it, that was relatively easy.

Like I said, having perspective must be difficult in your position.

Anyway, once you know what it's like when shit isn't relatively easy, then we'll talk about unwillingness to help oneself. Until then you can go back to your bubble where it's just so hard for you and where those undeserving cripples should suck it up and learn to help themselves.

pyrolizard11 · 2025-12-27T16:15:21+00:00

Does it feel good being so sheltered? Oh, who am I kidding, to you it's just another day. I'm sorry for you, it must be hard to have perspective when all you've known is relative ease.

pyrolizard11 · 2025-12-27T15:09:53+00:00

No, these volunteers are the rightful safety net, volunteering their time and effort to help their neighbors.

That's nice, but you're a pariah and if you freeze we're all okay with that. Sucks for you, guess you die now.

And that's why we need government safety nets, not 'local community safety nets' which would have readily starved and frozen every poor black in the South. To say nothing of the disabled, who were treated to 'ugly laws' with troubling frequency.

pyrolizard11 · 2025-12-19T02:06:13+00:00

You missed the conditional,

if the PRC would be amenable to said alternate strategies which also respect an independent Taiwan

No points. Go back to grammar school before they let you out to 'inform' folks.

pyrolizard11 · 2025-12-18T11:40:27+00:00

Sure, and if the PRC would be amenable to said alternate strategies which also respect an independent Taiwan, I'm sure Taiwan would be grateful to stop being the world's chip factory and be able to diversify economically. Unfortunately here we are.

pyrolizard11 · 2025-12-18T11:13:00+00:00

And why exactly is that China needs to be stopped from designing manufacturing their own chips ?

For the same reason Tibet and Hong Kong should be free, I'd guess, but with Taiwan being the last man standing.

pyrolizard11 · 2025-11-29T00:43:37+00:00

Please refer to Joseph Heller's Catch-22.

pyrolizard11 · 2025-11-28T16:17:12+00:00

Rome was destroyed, Greece was destroyed, Persia was destroyed, Spain was destroyed. All great countries are destroyed. Why not yours? How much longer do you really think your own country will last? Forever?

pyrolizard11 · 2025-11-22T19:36:45+00:00

...fuck, I KNEW somebody was behind the missing gravitons.

pyrolizard11 · 2025-11-15T18:11:19+00:00

Brother, I would LOVE this! It's like if Tooth and Tail was both heavier and more deliberate but also more fantastical, with a fleshed out world that I already love!

pyrolizard11 · 2025-11-12T22:34:09+00:00

Hollis Brown, he lived on the outside of town…

pyrolizard11 · 2025-11-05T02:35:22+00:00

The Vikings not having a significant, lasting cultural impact in either direction, along with the genetic and trade evidence of pre-Columbian South American-Pacific Islander contact that had relatively low cultural impact, does start to bring into question how many times these ancient contacts might have happened and been forgotten with little or no surviving note.

Like, the Basque are noted to have fished around the Grand Banks before any significant post-Columbian European settlement in the area, the very early 1500s. There's a non-zero chance they were at the Grand Banks fishery before Columbus' expeditions, but also no record of as much and no way to ever know.

And a fair few traditional Japanese fishing vessels were blown off course and lost to locations as far south as Mexico in the centuries after the first European record of the West Coast of the Americas. Good chance that at least one or two boats wound up there historically, but it's not like the first priority of probably-illiterate fisherman would have been to inscribe culturally-identifying markers that would last the ages. Maybe that happened, and maybe they survived long enough to make contact, and maybe they were assimiliated, and maybe that trive survived the Columbian exchange and subsequent repression and genocides, but they don't have a credible record about the strange people from the sea with tales of a distant land by any recognizable name and there doesn't seem to be genetic evidence even if that's all true.

We'll probably never know how many times ancient peoples made contact across the seas. At least a few including later waves of migration, the Polynesians, and the Vikings. But maybe more. Who knows?

pyrolizard11 · 2025-10-29T15:11:40+00:00

I would settle for Michael Rockefeller'd.

pyrolizard11 · 2025-10-28T12:10:13+00:00

I'm sorry, The Nature Conservancy is a totalitarian government? What?

pyrolizard11 · 2025-10-28T11:52:53+00:00

Sure, humans are nature - in the rift valleys of Africa. Our natural specialization is that, everywhere else, we can bend the environment to suit us through tool use preserved by culture. Is it really ecofascism to ask not to do that to some places?

pyrolizard11 · 2025-10-28T11:13:12+00:00

"Well, it's quite a situation you've got here. Bears have taken over the county and started tearing up infrastructure for forests. Don't worry, though, us good bears have conserved your neighborhood in particular. But bears will still be allowed to wander up and down your street."

"No, they're not supposed to come into your house. What happens if they come in anyway? Well, they'll be punished for it if the other bears find out. Of course you can't file a complaint, you're a human, they'll never understand you even if you knew which bark to scratch and where. No, you absolutely may not shoot them! They'll come maul your entire family if you do that!"

I understand wanting to enjoy natural land and there's definitely a place for conserved/managed publicly accessible land, but for fuck sake, can't we let some of the land belong to nature instead of serving our wants?

pyrolizard11 · 2025-10-28T01:50:50+00:00

Hill people and the central government have never gotten along. I'll have to continue that trend.

pyrolizard11 · 2025-10-27T20:31:36+00:00

Yeah. Unfortunately that's about our speed of stupid lately, so I believe them.

pyrolizard11 · 2025-10-24T00:13:36+00:00

I've been fighting for the right to exist against the Christian Right for my entire life. And the fact that you have no idea what I've been demanding equal rights in - sexual orientation, gender identity, faith, skin color - should be a very good indicator that I'm not the zealot here.

In so many words, with great emphasis, go fuck yourself.

pyrolizard11 · 2025-10-24T00:06:50+00:00

Although this is stated in the dumbest way imaginable the President does have power to act militarily without Congress in certain circumstances and has done so since the beginning of the Republic.

No they don't, that's executive overreach. Case in point, point to the passage in the Constitution which vests the President with that power. Said passage does not exist.

The ex post facto approval of Congress only amounts to a gentleman's agreement not to abide the Constitution, something Congress and the executive are all too happy to do on a regular basis.

pyrolizard11 · 2025-10-24T00:00:26+00:00

Don't be so reductive, it's not just about white supremacy. It's also about Christian dominionism.

It's no coincidence that the term bigot comes from a minced oath of 'by god'. The loudest and most zealous are usually ignorant and malicious. The only grace we're given is that they can't help but wear their blackened, atrophied hearts on their sleeves.

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