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Spartacus's avatar

I participate in the conversation about so-called trans "women". Is it empathy to celebrate men as the most feminine of women from the BBC to Time? Is it empathy to put old men into competition with young girls 12 years old and tell them to accept boys and old men in their locker rooms? Is it empathy to tell women that "female" includes men in dresses, some who take estrogen to grow breasts, men who want to badger and force lesbians into sex? Is it empathy to embrace a "transhuman" ideology that categorizes all humans as skin suits? Is it empathy to erase women by forcing the fetishists on society as if this tiny minority is the norm?

What my investigation and experience says from years in San Francisco's bonkersville stew is that these "thought leaders" are simply drug addled. It is driven by men (and a few women) using MDMA, mushrooms (a little) and LSD.

This allows similarly disturbed individuals to find each other online and create an echo chamber in which they take flight into imprinted word salad hallucination-land.

Imprinting on psychedelics is combined with porn addiction in an online relationship between porn servers and the mostly male 😳 progressively degenerating men who seek ever more and more. And pay.

This may be enabled by empathizing women, but only on the back end, I don't see it in the formation very much. Yes, there are women who raise empathy to the point of suicidal idiocy. We see this in the phenomenon of serial killers being befriended by mostly young women who write them. I don't see it as the core though. The core is the psychedelics phenomenon of exaggeration of personality traits, men with fetishes, and the absolute certainty of imprinted ideas that are nearly impossible to shake. This creates a leadership who then lead like pied pipers.

To give a sense for it, in the class I gave, I used the example of John Lilly, MD. John wrote "Center of the Cyclone" and invented the isolation floatation tank. When he was a professor in LA, he came down from an LSD and ketamine trip series knowing the reason for the cold war. This was the 1960's when it was at its height. So, he called the president. It was a simpler time, and he got through to the White House Chief of Staff, who told him that no, he couldn't put him through, he had to tell him what it was about so he could brief the president. So, John cut loose. The Cold War was due to aliens fighting over the earth. There were the good, friendly aliens and the bad ones. To my knowledge, this never affected US Cold War policy, but it was the Strangelovian period when the CIA had to circulate a memo to staff telling them not to put LSD in the Christmas Party punch, because civilians would be there, and were off limits. This was also the time when the CIA was trying to make Bourne-identity assassins using LSD to imprint ideas, and found that the moral compass could not be changed even if the ideology was.

John never shook his idea of the invisible aliens. It is quite reminiscent of angels and demons that are Jungian archetypes and religious symbols. It was there on John Lilly's posthumous web site last I checked, as ECCO, the "Earth Coincidence Control Office". This shows the power of imprinted ideas. They become ground truth, like knowing who your mother is. It isn't just that the person can't fight them, they have zero willingness ever to do so.

Silly men like Michael Pollan "How to change your mind" (on Netflix) think everyone who takes psychedelics will have their experience and outcome. It's perennial in the psychedelics field. It's helped by the self-authenticating chemistry of psychedelics. And it's utter codswallop.

The Baader-Meinhof gang bonded and extremified themselves with LSD. So did the Manson "family". Not everyone is on the same page as kindly STEM academics. John Lilly was STEM. Michael Pollan is not. Both made similar mistakes that cannot be undone very easily. I worry about another Dr. Strangelove era burning through the country, this time exacerbated by the dingbat-matching that the internet provides.

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Judy Parrish's avatar

Snow said something else in that lecture, a quote that is very famous:

"A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's? I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question – such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? – not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had."

I think that's even more true today, although the humanities, broadly defined, have become less and less interesting as they've become less and less anchored in the real world, so perhaps scientists aren't following the latest developments. Still, how do we even out knowledge among the "educated class"? Of course, it is easier for scientists to "dabble" in the humanities (playing music and chess, engaging in creative writing or even acting) than it is for those in the humanities to "dabble" in theoretical physics, but there is plenty of popular literature, even about complex topics such as quantum mechanics, that is apparently ignored.

And yet....we need the humanities. We scientists can provide the sense of place that humans occupy, but cannot explain humans, or even very well explain how humans fit into that place. Perhaps the humanities need to take these wild deadend roads of exploration in order to come back around to a fuller understanding of humans, as indeed it seems Anne Frütel is encouraging.

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