I didn't say it was controlled. I said it has the potential to be controlled. I'm pretty sure saw a study somewhere that showed rats will self-administer it, which is the sort of thing the DEA cares about. If there's one thing they love over there, it's modeling human beings as animals without self-control.
There are tons of non-scheduled drugs that the DEA hasn't gotten around to scheduling because they haven't become popular enough yet. Tramadol will surely become scheduled if they ever get around to it. (Update: Hey look! They *did* get around to it!) Welbutrin is probably fairly low on the list, but only because drug users still have a lot of easier options at their disposal. If the DEA ever gets their way and manages to crack down in all the ways they desire to crack down, they will *eventually* turn their attention to drugs like Wellbutrin after drug users turn to it in desperation. But no, it's not their primary or secondary concern at the moment.
What freaks in prison do is of no consequence - they also try to shoot up with peanut butter if someone tells them it gives a sugar high and huff aerosols. It's simply not open to widespread abuse.
Ok fine, let me put it another way: after I was seriously injured some time ago, I accidentally confirmed firsthand that bupropion HCl significantly potentiates the euphoria of opioids. (Nothing illegal, fwiw.) It was... well, mindblowing, whereas the same opioid at the same dose with the same tolerance level without Wellbutrin was just blandly (if warmly) sedating. Bupropion also made alcohol significantly more enjoyable. You can choose to believe all that or not.
Given its mechanism of action, there's no reason not to assume that it wouldn't blend well with euphoria-producing drugs.
Also, I'm still not totally clear on why you brought it up. It's good SSRI alternative for people who want to keep their sex drives but, as with SSRIs, it's not very effective vs. major depression.
One of the things you're overlooking is the part where it can take weeks of taking the meds every day with no effect, and then one day, suddenly, WOW! It kicks in.
There is no wow for the majority of people who take SSRIs. I'm "overlooking" nothing. I'm not arguing for giving SSRIs episodically. It's about other ("abusable") drugs episodically vs. SSRIs (and SNRIs, atypical antipsychotics, etc.) daily. For anxiety conditions and some other mood conditions, too.
and we know that somehow, after several weeks, this will have an effect on depression.
Except we know they don't satisfactorily treat or cure depression for the majority of people taking them, and they perform particularly badly in the more severe or prolonged cases of depression.
Depression is trivially caused
By psychiatrist-apologists spouting bullshit. At least in my case.
"If you don't take it regularly you may not be physically able to take it when you need it." isn't a good argument?
That presupposes the drug's efficacy, when the data shows pretty damn convincingly that first and second line antidepressants have horrible efficacy vs. a major depressive episode like that.
This isn't about taking the same drug episodically vs. daily. This is about drugs that work immediately and powerfully (but are euphoric and "addictive" and thus subject to an insane regime of control and scrutiny in this country) vs. drugs that barely do much at all for most people and have to be taken constantly to even achieve that modest effect.
I agree with your sentiment but, in the future, please don't claim SSRI's are addictive. You'll immediately get shot down for misusing terminology like that.
Nope, sorry.The redefinition of addictive to exclude SSRIs is part and parcel of my indictment of the mental health industry.
The difference is an addiction diagnosis has that moral component you're talking about-- it includes socially maladaptive behavior (drug seeking, skipping out on responsibilities, taking more than originally intended). This is rarely the case for an SSRI, but common for other prescription drugs.
Because SSRIs suck. And also because they're not controlled. These are hardly objective qualities you're rattling off here, nor is this pet definition universally (or even commonly, I'd say) subscribed to. It sounds like self-justifying bullshit cooked up by the mental health industry, which is the very institution I'm indicting here.
Are you willing to concede that addiction does not exist *at all* without the user displaying such disruptive qualities, even in the presence of heavy use and physical dependence? (With any drug, heroin and meth included.)
Next question: do you think the mental health industry makes any such concession? What does the court-ordered psychiatrist say in his report to the probation officer, I wonder?
The acid test for addictive substances: would someone be tempted to steal a pill?
So here is your implicit logic of that acid test: SSRIs, SNRIs, atypical antipsychotics and other modern antidepressants are so horribly ineffective at treating depression that no one would be tempted to steal one if they were controlled and their doctor stopped prescribing them.
Uh, thanks for proving my point.
If I had a debilitating mental disease that was being successfully being treated with a drug that was suddenly outlawed, of course I'd be tempted to steal it. (That's not to say I necessarily would.) If that sounds incredible to you, replace depression/anxiety with some other debilitating disease. Stealing medicine that isn't available legally, in order to treat a debilitating condition, is an essential part of moral philosophy 101. You'd be highly abnormal to not be tempted to steal it... if the medication in question were actually very effective.
Little issue of metabolism of drugs requiring consistent dosing schedules to get consistent drug levels.
This is almost exactly what Barbara just said. Weird. Uh, well, this is just restating the issue, and not responding at all to my point.
Even with a transient anxiety problem a psych will generally recommend that someone develop a daily SSRI dependency rather than treat it episodically with the drugs we have that *do* work episodically. Because those drugs are the big, bad scheduled ones. (Well, schedule 4.)
It's not like you can take the medication and build up to the desired level in one day.
Apply that sentence and its implicit logic to literally any other medical condition we prescribe drugs for and I think you might detect a bit of absurdity there.
BTW, antidepressants such as Wellbutrin are not controlled substances, not even schedule 5 (lowest classification).
Did you mention that because I didn't exhaustively cover all of the non-SSRI/SNRI drugs? Most of my criticisms apply to other classes of drug as well, with sometimes the caveat of "semi-effective, but with horrible side effects (...that discourage "abuse", and thus result in it remaining unscheduled.)"
Wellbutrin is, incidentally, vulnerable to being banned if it ever becomes popular enough due to its dopaminergic properties. It's "abused" by stacking it with other substances. I've even heard stories of insufflation. The main reason why it hasn't seen more "abuse" already is due to its tendency to cause seizures before a particularly euphoric threshold can be reached, but there are doubtless ways around that. Drug users can be crafty like that.
Explain then, please, the little problem that most of the scheduled "mood altering agents' require higher and higher doses to get the same effect.
Only when that "same effect" is a rush. They give Ritalin and Adderall (very similar to meth, btw) to millions of kids at a constant dose, without escalation.
While it's not an easy habit to kick, it's precisely this medicalization as "a disease" is a major problem. And even if it were a disease, the cure we're currently peddling is surely worse.
Give all those poor opioid addicts buprenorphine tablets. Not just for detox, but for life. (Buprenorphine displaces and blocks heroin and other opioids from functioning, so they can't stack it.) Let them take it for the rest of their lives, just as they're currently encouraging people (including those very addicts, most of whom suffer from depression or anxiety) to take SSRIs, SNRIs and atypical antipsychotics for the rest of their lives. I suspect the outcomes will be much more positive than what we're seeing now.
We currently aren't doing all that well in this regard (as in many) but it is much more complex than your thesis.
I didn't oversimplify anything; I explicitly acknowledged the danger and harm done.
You're the one trying to oversimplify it all into "addiction is a disease." Addiction is a psychological quirk of humanity, not something akin to influenza or diabetes.
Drug addition has a HELL of a lot more in common with all those laughable behavioral addictions (food, sex, TV, internet) than it does with actual organic diseases. This isn't just me saying this; study after study has shown the real negative consequences and physiological changes caused by behavioral addictions, but both society at large and (most) psychs refuse to treat them or indeed think of them in the same way.
You seem to equivocate "advising against" with "denying choice" rather
You seem to be under the mistaken impression that I give a shit about this polarizing game you're playing. Analogy: "communist" encompasses people who advocate for the murder of anti-communists in order to further the cause of communism... and also those communists who actively oppose such murder. Are you understanding yet that words have actual, specific meanings?
People who had liberal ideas about human sexuality did not advocate forcible chemical castration of homosexuals. People who had conservative ideas about human sexuality did. Not all of them, of course not all of them. Do I have to draw you a Venn diagram?
Massive numbers of people dead, as a -direct consequence- of the behavior.
Conveniently omitting the Catholic church's opposition to condoms in Africa, I see. Also, I think I may have read something, somewhere about pre-HIV Christians still not really liking sexual freedom all that much. Also, I haven't seen many evangelicals promoting lesbian sex as safer than heterosexual sex (which it is.)
I couldn't resist taking that bait, but I've little interest in continuing this further. You want to turn this into partisan identity politics and insist we all use your newspeak babble, go take it up with the people who write dictionaries and encyclopedias and have extensively documented what words like "conservative" refer to.
I've already said that social conservativism can in principle do good and liberal social ideas (particularly regarding immigration, I would argue) can do bad, but you still want to turn this into some echo chamber pissing match.
I'm sorry to be the one to break this to you, but words do have meanings. If you want a label that unambiguously defines everything you like about right-wing elements in society whist excluding all the bits you don't like, keep looking.
Still waiting for a citation of someone actually saying anything enjoyable is bad.
That wasn't a quote. It was an observation that any (intellectually honest) amateur observer of human behavior can verify. Gambling, alcohol, other drugs, sex (especially sex), dancing, TV or video games, spicy foods... anything and everything stimulating and popular have been targeted at one time or another by social conservatives. Not consistently or to the same degree, of course.
I can spin up some demagoguery playing with my personal definition of "liberal thought" applying to cherry-picked history as well, it'd be just exactly as useless.
Again, this isn't identity politics. I'm not building an echo chamber here. Of course many strands of "liberalism" (particularly progressivist strans) have advocated for bad things. There's a tendency towards cultural masochism, for one thing.
Preferably along with some arbitrary chaining of history you consider "conservative"
This is the textbook definition of social conservativism: defense of the status quo and of tradition, with less emphasis on individual freedom of choice. (As opposed to economic conservativism, where freedom of choice is at least theoretically championed.) Go start a war on wikipedia's Social Conservativism page if you want to continue to quibble about this point. You aren't arguing with me; you're arguing with the English language.
The idea that homosexual behavior is highly dangerous and needs eradication, involuntary if need be, is a socially conservative idea. In other words, it is rooted in traditional collectivist status-quo preserving morality without any reasonable reason to consider it a wise policy.
If "conservative" means something else to you, whatever. I'm not ascribing to conservativism an eternal and immutable set of ideals; I'm talking about it as a social force. Once upon a time, the socially conservative position was to support monarchies and oppose abolitionism. Social/moral conservativism is widely accepted to refer to a defense of tradition and the status quo. Sometimes it gets this right (because some things we have are indeed worth defending)... other times, not so much.
One other thing interesting to note about modern psychiatric medicines: they generally insist that you take it daily, instead of taking it only when one's symptoms are especially severe. This aversion to symptom management and emphasis on sustained chemical dependency as the best approach to managing even psychiatric illnesses that have infrequent, transient symptoms is... interesting to behold.
The main exception here is probably for panic attacks among those suffering from anxiety disorders, and these medicines are of course (since they are actually rather effective) scheduled substances doled out in relatively small amounts, particularly to patients of the lower and middle classes.
The single biggest influence on the state of psychiatry today is moral conservativism and other assorted panderings to popular culture and the law. Their desire to stay profitable and respectable in mainstream society long ago destroyed any real credibility they had as a serious hard science.
Pretty much every highly effective anti-depressant ever made (including but certainly not limited to opioids and dopaminergics) is a scheduled substance and almost never prescribed for depression, because apparently every single human being alive is just a helpless addict just waiting for the chance to swallow twenty pills at a time chasing a high. SSRIs have abysmal efficacies, but that didn't stop them from pushing the placebo revolutionary drug Prozac to being one of the most prescribed drugs in the country.
A lot of people are still under this weird impression that antidepressants work by re-establishing some natural balance of neurotransmitters present in "normal" people, when there's every indication that this is not the case. (FDA is partially at fault here allowed pharma companies to put out some ads that strongly implied this was how SSRIs worked.)
And it's not as if modern antidepressants aren't addictive; like many psychotropic drugs, SSRIs and SNRIs induce physical dependency with potentially severe withdrawal symptoms if abruptly terminated.
No, the actual difference between modern antidepressants and "addictive" drugs that actually make you feel good is... the latter actually work. Consistently and compellingly. And it's for that very reason that they are deemed dangerous. Drugs that are highly effective in enabling human happiness work better at higher dosages (which is how dosage increase works among most drugs that are actually effective, if you think about)... which of course leads to massive problems among the subpopulations of people who have poor impulse control or are overly euphoria-craving.
And all of this plays directly into the hands of religious and social conservatives who have for millenia made careers out of claiming that anything that people like too much must be bad. You'd think that more people would be suspicious of a profession claiming to be a science that was, just a couple generations ago, trying to chemically castrate people against their will to cure them of their homosexuality... ah well.
How the hell was this modded up? No, Afghanistan as a nation wasn't attacked that same night. (We might have done some one-off small attacks against suspected al-Qaeda hiding places.) We gave the Taliban a few weeks to meet some ultimatums. Actual war didn't come until October.
The second Iraq War obviously, obviously would not have occurred had the 9/11 attacks not happened. Many politicians and officials (off the top of my head: Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld) are on record about trying to leverage 9/11 into an attack on Iraq almost immediately after the attack. The smoking gun memo, detailing a meeting that took place 9 months before the Iraq invasion, at minimum indicates that we were gunning for Iraq well in advance AND that we were trying to use terrorism as a major justification for doing so.
The comment about " intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy of removing Saddam through military action" and the subsequent forgeries and lies that were used as justification for war are just the icing on the cake. Even disregarding the conspiratorial aspects, enough was said in the open to make abundantly clear that 9/11 led directly to our decision to make war with Saddam.
(I'm thinking about this off and on as I'm working on something else.)
Come to think of it, I guess an intentional bond flood would basically just be an interest rate bomb sucking up capital attracted to the high yields, soooo... crank up the printing presses and spend like mad until the effects wear off? There's only a finite amount of capital that would be tied up by the bonds. It might be as simple as countering that lost capital with tons of stimulus money and then over the next few years figure out some clever ways to keep that money that fled to the high-yield bonds from boomeranging and causing inflation. Discriminate by creation date when it comes to your offer price. Create some new securities if you have to.
This is an interesting topic but I still haven't thought about this in great detail. For the purposes of this conversation, I don't need to. Recognizing the complexity of the game, and realizing that one side has ALL OF THE TOOLS whilst the other side has only one tool (flood the market or don't flood the market) is enough to convince any reasonable person that a simplistic "OMG China has all teh bonds; they own us; they win!" narrative is laughably wrong.
To be clear, I don't claim to be an expert on the precise effects of how an attempt to flood the market would work, nor all the countermeasures the Fed could or should employ (extreme measures are bound to all sorts of unintended consequences). In particular, my glib comment on "setting" the interest rate high whilst buying back shitloads of bonds is probably a bit off unless there's some extra anti-arbitrage trick they have up their sleeves, or maybe they could do some odd stuff with the yield curve. But my point is that, as a central bank in a fiat-currency economy, the Fed already has a toolbox of enormously powerful weapons.
The Chinese... can flood the market if they want. That's just about it. To flood or not to flood; that is the question. There is nothing else they can do with that huge stack of bonds they're sitting on (other than collect interest and use it as a safe investment and use it as interest rate hedges, which they're probably happy enough to do.) They can't print more dollars. The Fed can. They can't print more bonds. The Fed can. Given that it's real wealth the Chinese have tied up in those bonds, it's very, very tough to see how their leverage exceeds their own vulnerability.
There are several economists, in the U.S. that would heartily disagree with you.
You seem to be conflating different issues. The proposed mechanism by which you're alleging China could wage economic warfare isn't economics; it's finance. Economics is to finance as voodoo is to medicine. (Partially a symptom of it being such a larger macro view, even "micro"economics.)
Speculation regarding China's motives is a separate issue.
China can economically drop the U.S. with very little pain at this point.
Then put up or shut up. Explain the mechanism by which they could do *something* with the bonds they own to do significantly more damage to us than themselves. Keep in mind the Fed's ability to change interest rates, issue more bonds and buy back an arbitrary number of bonds.
Also keep in mind the regulatory red tape and safety valves we have to prevent things from happening too quickly. If the markets go apeshit, guess what happens? The people running the markets turn them off for a cool-down period, and once people realize what's going on the mainstream bond markets aren't going to be turned back on except in a careful and controlled manner, with new rules in place. I'm not making this up; you see it happen all the time after stock market crashes. You simply can't blitzkrieg an attack like this.
Some of the tactics[1] the Fed has at its disposal might even be complementary. Raising the interest rates through the roof is (broadly speaking) a trigger for deflation, but the Fed buying up tons of excess bonds on the market is inflationary (the Fed creates money when it buys bonds, as you may or may not recall as an alleged student of economics/finance.) Yes, it would be volatile as hell and screw with the exchange rate and plunge us into a recession, sure, but China would fare much worse directly, without even examining the indirect effects of their exchange rate and the effects of reduced exports to the USA.
In the age of fiat money, you can't wage war against a central bank in that manner and expect to win... at least, not when your enemy's economy is much bigger and more developed than yours.
Read Reuters.
I don't rely on mainstream journalist to explain anything remotely technical, least of all Finance 101. If that's where you're getting your ideas... well, that would certainly explain it.
1. I say "tactics", but realize these aren't unusual things. The fed buys bonds (with "fake" money) and sells bonds and in so doing changes the interest rate all the damn time. That's its job. I'm not even touching on the unusual and more extreme weapons at our disposal, like asset freezes or selective defaults. The point is, without "playing dirty" whatsoever, the Fed already has a lot of power to mitigate and retaliate.
China is just sending a clear message that, no only is the U.S. no longer economically competitive, the country is no longer militarily competitive either.
Uh, all "did they make it"jokes aside, Chinese technology is not superior to American. So, that might be their intended message, but I hope people aren't gullible enough to swallow it, at least not in that hyperbolic form.
Having a bunch of factories specializing in cranking out cheap stuff is not the same thing as having technological superiority, nor is it the same thing as being economically dominant (although it obviously does give them a worrying amount of leverage and has fueled rapid growth.)
- Russia steps in and ends the Syrian conflict just to piss USA off.
That's politics and geopolitics. If you want to argue Russia is more ruthless, reckless and aggressive you'll get little argument from me but obviously if we wanted them out of Syria our F-22s would not break a sweat doing so.
- Russia runs rings around the U.S. by performing cyberwar on national elections and demonstrates to the world that the U.S. system of democracy is a fraud.
They hacked some very soft non-governmental targets (you do realize the DNC is not part of the CIA or something?) and released some emails.
Meanwhile, our computer viruses made uranium centrifuges located in highly secured facilities in Iran blow up. (To be fair, we probably worked with Israel on that one.)
- China owns the majority of U.S. debt, hence the U.S. economy.
No, debt is not ownership. This is Finance 101 stuff here. One of the key aspects of debt is that is it not ownership.
And their bonds in truth give them very little leverage. The worst they could do is flood the market by selling at a loss. This would hurt them considerably more than it would hurt us, and the fed could somewhat counteract the effects by aggressively buying up the bonds themselves, as well as screwing with the interest rates to force China to lose even more money.
And that's the *easy* ways we could fight back against Chinese economic warfare via bonds. (I.e. not even touching crazier but plausible possibilities like a selective default.)
The reason why they buy our bonds? Because ours are the safest long term bet, and possibly because they are wagering on a mutual enrichment given their increased trade with us. (Economics 101: Trade is rarely zero sum; at least in simple examples, there is usually an objective mutual gain.)
- China can, not only easily find but also, pluck U.S. military technology from a very large ocean as a demonstration of technical superiority that should not be ignored.
The self-destruct needn't be a large explosive charge. There are thermite and thermite-like mixes that will burn fine underwater and they could be located in modest quantities only over the sensitive internal components.
This might indeed have existed and successfully activated and the Chinese simply neglected to mention it in their press release. Or maybe it was too low-tech for us to bother, or it could be a decoy.
Well, this is all a bit tangential to my original point (which you've agreed with: "things are still improving"). But just for the sake of clarification, there are some important distinctions here between the actual law vs. the law as enforced by the courts vs. typical behavior and biases of law enforcement officers vs. general cultural attitudes. I strongly doubt that a woman who called the police with visible injuries and other evidence (be it the man confessing or whatever) and an adamant desire to press charges would have been ignored by the police in most areas even 60 years ago unless they had some ulterior and corrupt reason to protect the man[1]. America is too much of a law and order society (relatively speaking) for that to happen.
That's not the same thing as the police being eager, proactive or supportive in the matter, nor does it mean the woman's friends and family would be supportive. (And I was referring to such cultural toleration in my original post.) Sometimes social progress happens officially and then mass culture has to play catchup (...and sometimes it's the other way around.) This is all tangential to my original point, but it's a distinction worth drawing if for no other reason than there are eras and modern cultures where the right doesn't exist either legally or culturally.
I seem to be a bit more keen to split these hairs than most, though.
1. And I didn't see anything in your link to refute that. "Still on the books... as recently as 1977" doesn't mean much of anything. There's all kinds of obsolete stuff still on the books that neither the cops nor the courts pay any attention to.
I said something very similar a couple months ago but the last I heard he was doubling down on the abortion stuff (when talking about appointing SCOTUS justices specifically), which surprised me, as I'd assumed it would be one of the many issues he'd walk back. I was wrong, but in retrospect it's easy to see why he'd stick with this one point.
I mean, it was obvious during the campaign that this was a cynical ploy, very possibly suggested to him by establishment Republicans, to try to lock down the Republican evangelical base. A lot of people in this country are single-issue voters on abortion alone, and there's a lot of stuff Trump has alluded to (...or done in his personal life) that alienated these people. Talking tough on abortion was and is the one straightforward way of winning them back.
Why stick with it? Well, I think I correctly judged Trump's stance on this, but I underestimated the importance of the issue to the Republicans and the Trump-Establishment alliance... those strategic discussions and agreements that have been going on behind closed doors. Trump desperately wants to be loved, after all. He doesn't want to see his own party reject him. While I do think it would be a bad thing to reverse Roe v. Wade, from Trump's point of view it's a relatively small issue and small price to pay to keep the lion's share of the social conservatives / evangelicals singing his praises and not grumbling about his sexual immorality or his more liberal-sounding policies.
I'm not the one you replied to but I believe that poster meant equal in opportunity and rights; equal as in egalitarian.
There's a sane middle ground between social conservativism and self-flagellating SJW 'neo-Marxist' crap and it's really, really simple: people don't get treated differently based on whatever they happen to have between their legs.
I'm not quite sure if this is what you're alluding to, but yes it is an unfortunate fact that some people on the left are picking up where the right left off but from a more victim-centric perspective... slut-shaming, but disguising it as genuine concern for all those poor phallocratically-oppressed women. That's a rant for another day.
But I object to any insinuation that this 'status attainment' is a recent thing. It's morphed in character somewhat, but it is in fact a very old concept that continues to be propped up by sexual authoritarians of both sexes.
But despite that we've made advances, very significant advances on this front over the span of just a few generations. That's the main thing I'm objecting to here; this ludicrous appeal to a nonexistent golden age of American public morality.
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There are tons of non-scheduled drugs that the DEA hasn't gotten around to scheduling because they haven't become popular enough yet. Tramadol will surely become scheduled if they ever get around to it. (Update: Hey look! They *did* get around to it!) Welbutrin is probably fairly low on the list, but only because drug users still have a lot of easier options at their disposal. If the DEA ever gets their way and manages to crack down in all the ways they desire to crack down, they will *eventually* turn their attention to drugs like Wellbutrin after drug users turn to it in desperation. But no, it's not their primary or secondary concern at the moment.
What freaks in prison do is of no consequence - they also try to shoot up with peanut butter if someone tells them it gives a sugar high and huff aerosols. It's simply not open to widespread abuse.
Ok fine, let me put it another way: after I was seriously injured some time ago, I accidentally confirmed firsthand that bupropion HCl significantly potentiates the euphoria of opioids. (Nothing illegal, fwiw.) It was... well, mindblowing, whereas the same opioid at the same dose with the same tolerance level without Wellbutrin was just blandly (if warmly) sedating. Bupropion also made alcohol significantly more enjoyable. You can choose to believe all that or not.
Given its mechanism of action, there's no reason not to assume that it wouldn't blend well with euphoria-producing drugs.
Also, I'm still not totally clear on why you brought it up. It's good SSRI alternative for people who want to keep their sex drives but, as with SSRIs, it's not very effective vs. major depression.
One of the things you're overlooking is the part where it can take weeks of taking the meds every day with no effect, and then one day, suddenly, WOW! It kicks in.
There is no wow for the majority of people who take SSRIs. I'm "overlooking" nothing. I'm not arguing for giving SSRIs episodically. It's about other ("abusable") drugs episodically vs. SSRIs (and SNRIs, atypical antipsychotics, etc.) daily. For anxiety conditions and some other mood conditions, too.
and we know that somehow, after several weeks, this will have an effect on depression.
Except we know they don't satisfactorily treat or cure depression for the majority of people taking them, and they perform particularly badly in the more severe or prolonged cases of depression.
Depression is trivially caused
By psychiatrist-apologists spouting bullshit. At least in my case.
"If you don't take it regularly you may not be physically able to take it when you need it." isn't a good argument?
That presupposes the drug's efficacy, when the data shows pretty damn convincingly that first and second line antidepressants have horrible efficacy vs. a major depressive episode like that.
This isn't about taking the same drug episodically vs. daily. This is about drugs that work immediately and powerfully (but are euphoric and "addictive" and thus subject to an insane regime of control and scrutiny in this country) vs. drugs that barely do much at all for most people and have to be taken constantly to even achieve that modest effect.
I agree with your sentiment but, in the future, please don't claim SSRI's are addictive. You'll immediately get shot down for misusing terminology like that.
Nope, sorry.The redefinition of addictive to exclude SSRIs is part and parcel of my indictment of the mental health industry.
The difference is an addiction diagnosis has that moral component you're talking about-- it includes socially maladaptive behavior (drug seeking, skipping out on responsibilities, taking more than originally intended). This is rarely the case for an SSRI, but common for other prescription drugs.
Because SSRIs suck. And also because they're not controlled. These are hardly objective qualities you're rattling off here, nor is this pet definition universally (or even commonly, I'd say) subscribed to. It sounds like self-justifying bullshit cooked up by the mental health industry, which is the very institution I'm indicting here.
Are you willing to concede that addiction does not exist *at all* without the user displaying such disruptive qualities, even in the presence of heavy use and physical dependence? (With any drug, heroin and meth included.)
Next question: do you think the mental health industry makes any such concession? What does the court-ordered psychiatrist say in his report to the probation officer, I wonder?
The acid test for addictive substances: would someone be tempted to steal a pill?
So here is your implicit logic of that acid test: SSRIs, SNRIs, atypical antipsychotics and other modern antidepressants are so horribly ineffective at treating depression that no one would be tempted to steal one if they were controlled and their doctor stopped prescribing them.
Uh, thanks for proving my point.
If I had a debilitating mental disease that was being successfully being treated with a drug that was suddenly outlawed, of course I'd be tempted to steal it. (That's not to say I necessarily would.) If that sounds incredible to you, replace depression/anxiety with some other debilitating disease. Stealing medicine that isn't available legally, in order to treat a debilitating condition, is an essential part of moral philosophy 101. You'd be highly abnormal to not be tempted to steal it... if the medication in question were actually very effective.
That doesn't seem be a good argument for a daily pill, particularly not if the withdrawal effects are (as they often are) anxiety or depression.
And those SSRIs have *horrible* efficacy vs. moderate to severe anxiety, whereas the immediate action drugs have excellent efficacy.
Not banned, but scheduled 4-5. (i.e. banned for most poor people.)
Little issue of metabolism of drugs requiring consistent dosing schedules to get consistent drug levels.
This is almost exactly what Barbara just said. Weird. Uh, well, this is just restating the issue, and not responding at all to my point.
Even with a transient anxiety problem a psych will generally recommend that someone develop a daily SSRI dependency rather than treat it episodically with the drugs we have that *do* work episodically. Because those drugs are the big, bad scheduled ones. (Well, schedule 4.)
It's not like you can take the medication and build up to the desired level in one day.
Apply that sentence and its implicit logic to literally any other medical condition we prescribe drugs for and I think you might detect a bit of absurdity there.
BTW, antidepressants such as Wellbutrin are not controlled substances, not even schedule 5 (lowest classification).
Did you mention that because I didn't exhaustively cover all of the non-SSRI/SNRI drugs? Most of my criticisms apply to other classes of drug as well, with sometimes the caveat of "semi-effective, but with horrible side effects (...that discourage "abuse", and thus result in it remaining unscheduled.)"
Wellbutrin is, incidentally, vulnerable to being banned if it ever becomes popular enough due to its dopaminergic properties. It's "abused" by stacking it with other substances. I've even heard stories of insufflation. The main reason why it hasn't seen more "abuse" already is due to its tendency to cause seizures before a particularly euphoric threshold can be reached, but there are doubtless ways around that. Drug users can be crafty like that.
Explain then, please, the little problem that most of the scheduled "mood altering agents' require higher and higher doses to get the same effect.
Only when that "same effect" is a rush. They give Ritalin and Adderall (very similar to meth, btw) to millions of kids at a constant dose, without escalation.
Remember ALL drugs are poisons.
Along with salt, water and oxygen. Yawn.
Drug addiction is a truly awful disease.
While it's not an easy habit to kick, it's precisely this medicalization as "a disease" is a major problem. And even if it were a disease, the cure we're currently peddling is surely worse.
Give all those poor opioid addicts buprenorphine tablets. Not just for detox, but for life. (Buprenorphine displaces and blocks heroin and other opioids from functioning, so they can't stack it.) Let them take it for the rest of their lives, just as they're currently encouraging people (including those very addicts, most of whom suffer from depression or anxiety) to take SSRIs, SNRIs and atypical antipsychotics for the rest of their lives. I suspect the outcomes will be much more positive than what we're seeing now.
We currently aren't doing all that well in this regard (as in many) but it is much more complex than your thesis.
I didn't oversimplify anything; I explicitly acknowledged the danger and harm done.
You're the one trying to oversimplify it all into "addiction is a disease." Addiction is a psychological quirk of humanity, not something akin to influenza or diabetes.
Drug addition has a HELL of a lot more in common with all those laughable behavioral addictions (food, sex, TV, internet) than it does with actual organic diseases. This isn't just me saying this; study after study has shown the real negative consequences and physiological changes caused by behavioral addictions, but both society at large and (most) psychs refuse to treat them or indeed think of them in the same way.
You seem to equivocate "advising against" with "denying choice" rather
You seem to be under the mistaken impression that I give a shit about this polarizing game you're playing. Analogy: "communist" encompasses people who advocate for the murder of anti-communists in order to further the cause of communism... and also those communists who actively oppose such murder. Are you understanding yet that words have actual, specific meanings?
People who had liberal ideas about human sexuality did not advocate forcible chemical castration of homosexuals. People who had conservative ideas about human sexuality did. Not all of them, of course not all of them. Do I have to draw you a Venn diagram?
Massive numbers of people dead, as a -direct consequence- of the behavior.
Conveniently omitting the Catholic church's opposition to condoms in Africa, I see. Also, I think I may have read something, somewhere about pre-HIV Christians still not really liking sexual freedom all that much. Also, I haven't seen many evangelicals promoting lesbian sex as safer than heterosexual sex (which it is.)
I couldn't resist taking that bait, but I've little interest in continuing this further. You want to turn this into partisan identity politics and insist we all use your newspeak babble, go take it up with the people who write dictionaries and encyclopedias and have extensively documented what words like "conservative" refer to.
I've already said that social conservativism can in principle do good and liberal social ideas (particularly regarding immigration, I would argue) can do bad, but you still want to turn this into some echo chamber pissing match.
I'm sorry to be the one to break this to you, but words do have meanings. If you want a label that unambiguously defines everything you like about right-wing elements in society whist excluding all the bits you don't like, keep looking.
Still waiting for a citation of someone actually saying anything enjoyable is bad.
That wasn't a quote. It was an observation that any (intellectually honest) amateur observer of human behavior can verify. Gambling, alcohol, other drugs, sex (especially sex), dancing, TV or video games, spicy foods... anything and everything stimulating and popular have been targeted at one time or another by social conservatives. Not consistently or to the same degree, of course.
I can spin up some demagoguery playing with my personal definition of "liberal thought" applying to cherry-picked history as well, it'd be just exactly as useless.
Again, this isn't identity politics. I'm not building an echo chamber here. Of course many strands of "liberalism" (particularly progressivist strans) have advocated for bad things. There's a tendency towards cultural masochism, for one thing.
Preferably along with some arbitrary chaining of history you consider "conservative"
This is the textbook definition of social conservativism: defense of the status quo and of tradition, with less emphasis on individual freedom of choice. (As opposed to economic conservativism, where freedom of choice is at least theoretically championed.) Go start a war on wikipedia's Social Conservativism page if you want to continue to quibble about this point. You aren't arguing with me; you're arguing with the English language.
The idea that homosexual behavior is highly dangerous and needs eradication, involuntary if need be, is a socially conservative idea. In other words, it is rooted in traditional collectivist status-quo preserving morality without any reasonable reason to consider it a wise policy.
If "conservative" means something else to you, whatever. I'm not ascribing to conservativism an eternal and immutable set of ideals; I'm talking about it as a social force. Once upon a time, the socially conservative position was to support monarchies and oppose abolitionism. Social/moral conservativism is widely accepted to refer to a defense of tradition and the status quo. Sometimes it gets this right (because some things we have are indeed worth defending)... other times, not so much.
One other thing interesting to note about modern psychiatric medicines: they generally insist that you take it daily, instead of taking it only when one's symptoms are especially severe. This aversion to symptom management and emphasis on sustained chemical dependency as the best approach to managing even psychiatric illnesses that have infrequent, transient symptoms is... interesting to behold.
The main exception here is probably for panic attacks among those suffering from anxiety disorders, and these medicines are of course (since they are actually rather effective) scheduled substances doled out in relatively small amounts, particularly to patients of the lower and middle classes.
The single biggest influence on the state of psychiatry today is moral conservativism and other assorted panderings to popular culture and the law. Their desire to stay profitable and respectable in mainstream society long ago destroyed any real credibility they had as a serious hard science.
Pretty much every highly effective anti-depressant ever made (including but certainly not limited to opioids and dopaminergics) is a scheduled substance and almost never prescribed for depression, because apparently every single human being alive is just a helpless addict just waiting for the chance to swallow twenty pills at a time chasing a high. SSRIs have abysmal efficacies, but that didn't stop them from pushing the placebo revolutionary drug Prozac to being one of the most prescribed drugs in the country. A lot of people are still under this weird impression that antidepressants work by re-establishing some natural balance of neurotransmitters present in "normal" people, when there's every indication that this is not the case. (FDA is partially at fault here allowed pharma companies to put out some ads that strongly implied this was how SSRIs worked.)
And it's not as if modern antidepressants aren't addictive; like many psychotropic drugs, SSRIs and SNRIs induce physical dependency with potentially severe withdrawal symptoms if abruptly terminated.
No, the actual difference between modern antidepressants and "addictive" drugs that actually make you feel good is... the latter actually work. Consistently and compellingly. And it's for that very reason that they are deemed dangerous. Drugs that are highly effective in enabling human happiness work better at higher dosages (which is how dosage increase works among most drugs that are actually effective, if you think about)... which of course leads to massive problems among the subpopulations of people who have poor impulse control or are overly euphoria-craving.
And all of this plays directly into the hands of religious and social conservatives who have for millenia made careers out of claiming that anything that people like too much must be bad. You'd think that more people would be suspicious of a profession claiming to be a science that was, just a couple generations ago, trying to chemically castrate people against their will to cure them of their homosexuality... ah well.
How the hell was this modded up? No, Afghanistan as a nation wasn't attacked that same night. (We might have done some one-off small attacks against suspected al-Qaeda hiding places.) We gave the Taliban a few weeks to meet some ultimatums. Actual war didn't come until October.
The second Iraq War obviously, obviously would not have occurred had the 9/11 attacks not happened. Many politicians and officials (off the top of my head: Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld) are on record about trying to leverage 9/11 into an attack on Iraq almost immediately after the attack. The smoking gun memo, detailing a meeting that took place 9 months before the Iraq invasion, at minimum indicates that we were gunning for Iraq well in advance AND that we were trying to use terrorism as a major justification for doing so.
The comment about " intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy of removing Saddam through military action" and the subsequent forgeries and lies that were used as justification for war are just the icing on the cake. Even disregarding the conspiratorial aspects, enough was said in the open to make abundantly clear that 9/11 led directly to our decision to make war with Saddam.
(I'm thinking about this off and on as I'm working on something else.)
Come to think of it, I guess an intentional bond flood would basically just be an interest rate bomb sucking up capital attracted to the high yields, soooo... crank up the printing presses and spend like mad until the effects wear off? There's only a finite amount of capital that would be tied up by the bonds. It might be as simple as countering that lost capital with tons of stimulus money and then over the next few years figure out some clever ways to keep that money that fled to the high-yield bonds from boomeranging and causing inflation. Discriminate by creation date when it comes to your offer price. Create some new securities if you have to.
This is an interesting topic but I still haven't thought about this in great detail. For the purposes of this conversation, I don't need to. Recognizing the complexity of the game, and realizing that one side has ALL OF THE TOOLS whilst the other side has only one tool (flood the market or don't flood the market) is enough to convince any reasonable person that a simplistic "OMG China has all teh bonds; they own us; they win!" narrative is laughably wrong.
To be clear, I don't claim to be an expert on the precise effects of how an attempt to flood the market would work, nor all the countermeasures the Fed could or should employ (extreme measures are bound to all sorts of unintended consequences). In particular, my glib comment on "setting" the interest rate high whilst buying back shitloads of bonds is probably a bit off unless there's some extra anti-arbitrage trick they have up their sleeves, or maybe they could do some odd stuff with the yield curve. But my point is that, as a central bank in a fiat-currency economy, the Fed already has a toolbox of enormously powerful weapons.
The Chinese... can flood the market if they want. That's just about it. To flood or not to flood; that is the question. There is nothing else they can do with that huge stack of bonds they're sitting on (other than collect interest and use it as a safe investment and use it as interest rate hedges, which they're probably happy enough to do.) They can't print more dollars. The Fed can. They can't print more bonds. The Fed can. Given that it's real wealth the Chinese have tied up in those bonds, it's very, very tough to see how their leverage exceeds their own vulnerability.
There are several economists, in the U.S. that would heartily disagree with you.
You seem to be conflating different issues. The proposed mechanism by which you're alleging China could wage economic warfare isn't economics; it's finance. Economics is to finance as voodoo is to medicine. (Partially a symptom of it being such a larger macro view, even "micro"economics.)
Speculation regarding China's motives is a separate issue.
China can economically drop the U.S. with very little pain at this point.
Then put up or shut up. Explain the mechanism by which they could do *something* with the bonds they own to do significantly more damage to us than themselves. Keep in mind the Fed's ability to change interest rates, issue more bonds and buy back an arbitrary number of bonds.
Also keep in mind the regulatory red tape and safety valves we have to prevent things from happening too quickly. If the markets go apeshit, guess what happens? The people running the markets turn them off for a cool-down period, and once people realize what's going on the mainstream bond markets aren't going to be turned back on except in a careful and controlled manner, with new rules in place. I'm not making this up; you see it happen all the time after stock market crashes. You simply can't blitzkrieg an attack like this.
Some of the tactics[1] the Fed has at its disposal might even be complementary. Raising the interest rates through the roof is (broadly speaking) a trigger for deflation, but the Fed buying up tons of excess bonds on the market is inflationary (the Fed creates money when it buys bonds, as you may or may not recall as an alleged student of economics/finance.) Yes, it would be volatile as hell and screw with the exchange rate and plunge us into a recession, sure, but China would fare much worse directly, without even examining the indirect effects of their exchange rate and the effects of reduced exports to the USA.
In the age of fiat money, you can't wage war against a central bank in that manner and expect to win... at least, not when your enemy's economy is much bigger and more developed than yours.
Read Reuters.
I don't rely on mainstream journalist to explain anything remotely technical, least of all Finance 101. If that's where you're getting your ideas... well, that would certainly explain it.
1. I say "tactics", but realize these aren't unusual things. The fed buys bonds (with "fake" money) and sells bonds and in so doing changes the interest rate all the damn time. That's its job. I'm not even touching on the unusual and more extreme weapons at our disposal, like asset freezes or selective defaults. The point is, without "playing dirty" whatsoever, the Fed already has a lot of power to mitigate and retaliate.
China is just sending a clear message that, no only is the U.S. no longer economically competitive, the country is no longer militarily competitive either.
Uh, all "did they make it"jokes aside, Chinese technology is not superior to American. So, that might be their intended message, but I hope people aren't gullible enough to swallow it, at least not in that hyperbolic form.
Having a bunch of factories specializing in cranking out cheap stuff is not the same thing as having technological superiority, nor is it the same thing as being economically dominant (although it obviously does give them a worrying amount of leverage and has fueled rapid growth.)
- Russia steps in and ends the Syrian conflict just to piss USA off.
That's politics and geopolitics. If you want to argue Russia is more ruthless, reckless and aggressive you'll get little argument from me but obviously if we wanted them out of Syria our F-22s would not break a sweat doing so.
- Russia runs rings around the U.S. by performing cyberwar on national elections and demonstrates to the world that the U.S. system of democracy is a fraud.
They hacked some very soft non-governmental targets (you do realize the DNC is not part of the CIA or something?) and released some emails.
Meanwhile, our computer viruses made uranium centrifuges located in highly secured facilities in Iran blow up. (To be fair, we probably worked with Israel on that one.)
- China owns the majority of U.S. debt, hence the U.S. economy.
No, debt is not ownership. This is Finance 101 stuff here. One of the key aspects of debt is that is it not ownership. And their bonds in truth give them very little leverage. The worst they could do is flood the market by selling at a loss. This would hurt them considerably more than it would hurt us, and the fed could somewhat counteract the effects by aggressively buying up the bonds themselves, as well as screwing with the interest rates to force China to lose even more money.
And that's the *easy* ways we could fight back against Chinese economic warfare via bonds. (I.e. not even touching crazier but plausible possibilities like a selective default.)
The reason why they buy our bonds? Because ours are the safest long term bet, and possibly because they are wagering on a mutual enrichment given their increased trade with us. (Economics 101: Trade is rarely zero sum; at least in simple examples, there is usually an objective mutual gain.)
- China can, not only easily find but also, pluck U.S. military technology from a very large ocean as a demonstration of technical superiority that should not be ignored.
It's a claimed demonstration of technical superiority. You might as well argue that someone capturing a pawn from a grandmaster (while still in the opening) is demonstrating superiority. America has a lot of matériel near China (in large part due to our alliance with Japan and tacit alliance with Taiwan), probably much more than they have off the coast of CA.
China and Russia are needling the U.S. to try to get it's people to understand that they can pull the wings off the U.S. like a fly with no effort.
Oh, so you are serious. Tell me, are you a troll, astroturfer or genuinely delusional?
The self-destruct needn't be a large explosive charge. There are thermite and thermite-like mixes that will burn fine underwater and they could be located in modest quantities only over the sensitive internal components.
This might indeed have existed and successfully activated and the Chinese simply neglected to mention it in their press release. Or maybe it was too low-tech for us to bother, or it could be a decoy.
Well, this is all a bit tangential to my original point (which you've agreed with: "things are still improving"). But just for the sake of clarification, there are some important distinctions here between the actual law vs. the law as enforced by the courts vs. typical behavior and biases of law enforcement officers vs. general cultural attitudes. I strongly doubt that a woman who called the police with visible injuries and other evidence (be it the man confessing or whatever) and an adamant desire to press charges would have been ignored by the police in most areas even 60 years ago unless they had some ulterior and corrupt reason to protect the man[1]. America is too much of a law and order society (relatively speaking) for that to happen.
That's not the same thing as the police being eager, proactive or supportive in the matter, nor does it mean the woman's friends and family would be supportive. (And I was referring to such cultural toleration in my original post.) Sometimes social progress happens officially and then mass culture has to play catchup (...and sometimes it's the other way around.) This is all tangential to my original point, but it's a distinction worth drawing if for no other reason than there are eras and modern cultures where the right doesn't exist either legally or culturally.
I seem to be a bit more keen to split these hairs than most, though.
1. And I didn't see anything in your link to refute that. "Still on the books... as recently as 1977" doesn't mean much of anything. There's all kinds of obsolete stuff still on the books that neither the cops nor the courts pay any attention to.
I said something very similar a couple months ago but the last I heard he was doubling down on the abortion stuff (when talking about appointing SCOTUS justices specifically), which surprised me, as I'd assumed it would be one of the many issues he'd walk back. I was wrong, but in retrospect it's easy to see why he'd stick with this one point.
I mean, it was obvious during the campaign that this was a cynical ploy, very possibly suggested to him by establishment Republicans, to try to lock down the Republican evangelical base. A lot of people in this country are single-issue voters on abortion alone, and there's a lot of stuff Trump has alluded to (...or done in his personal life) that alienated these people. Talking tough on abortion was and is the one straightforward way of winning them back.
Why stick with it? Well, I think I correctly judged Trump's stance on this, but I underestimated the importance of the issue to the Republicans and the Trump-Establishment alliance... those strategic discussions and agreements that have been going on behind closed doors. Trump desperately wants to be loved, after all. He doesn't want to see his own party reject him. While I do think it would be a bad thing to reverse Roe v. Wade, from Trump's point of view it's a relatively small issue and small price to pay to keep the lion's share of the social conservatives / evangelicals singing his praises and not grumbling about his sexual immorality or his more liberal-sounding policies.
I'm not the one you replied to but I believe that poster meant equal in opportunity and rights; equal as in egalitarian.
There's a sane middle ground between social conservativism and self-flagellating SJW 'neo-Marxist' crap and it's really, really simple: people don't get treated differently based on whatever they happen to have between their legs.
Rape has attained a status
I'm not quite sure if this is what you're alluding to, but yes it is an unfortunate fact that some people on the left are picking up where the right left off but from a more victim-centric perspective... slut-shaming, but disguising it as genuine concern for all those poor phallocratically-oppressed women. That's a rant for another day.
But I object to any insinuation that this 'status attainment' is a recent thing. It's morphed in character somewhat, but it is in fact a very old concept that continues to be propped up by sexual authoritarians of both sexes.
But despite that we've made advances, very significant advances on this front over the span of just a few generations. That's the main thing I'm objecting to here; this ludicrous appeal to a nonexistent golden age of American public morality.