I’m as American as the notion that apple pie is American and I use metric all the time. I convert in my head though, I can’t get my brain to completely switch over.

It is super funny that Americans will deign to use millimeters for ammo, considering how much cultural cachet “caliber” has. Or had, I guess, I think it’s less cool than it used to be.

Oh, I was talking about the 25,500 full moons.

Keep an eye out for results from the Roman space telescope, with any luck we’re about to have a buttload of new data about dark matter.

And, predictably, Americans will literally use anything before they use the metric system.

I think it’s “dark” because it doesn’t interact with photons (except gravitationally, of course)

I agree in part, and disagree in part. It is divisive nonsense, and it’s also politics. I’m not sure how widespread this sentiment is, but the fact that it’s being amplified on tiktok at all is newsworthy in and of itself, I think. We need to align ourselves against this kind of wedge driving, and to do that we need to know that it’s happening. If twenty-somethings are seeing this kind of content and I’m missing it, I’d rather rebut it than ignore it on the basis of it being ridiculous. I’ll continue to do so until it stops happening, so… presumably for the rest of my life. So be it.

As hard as things have been for me, I believe they are worse for my younger friends. These kinds of stories should be named and shamed as the distraction bullshit they are. That’s how minds get changed, not by withdrawing into news cliques where we only see news we agree with.

the full text of the bill, for those curious. It’s only five pages. It seems to amount to Congress saying, “Hey states, think about charging large-load energy buyers for the costs of incremental upgrades, ok bye”.

There’s nothing in the bill to incentivize such a move, nor is there any legal barrier to states doing that now, that I know of. It’s a do-nothing bill designed to shore up independent support for faltering Republican midterm campaigns.

If you can’t get 2/3 of the senate to convict, impeachment is so much political theater. Democrats will be quite lucky to take a majority in the senate, 67 is theoretically possible but not realistic, I don’t think, and unless a lot changes quickly there won’t be many republican defections. Not that it’s useless, because impeachment proceedings are another time sink for the executive branch, but it’s foolish to put eggs into that basket because it’s a broken mechanism.

The more important function of Congress over the next two years will be the stoppage of rubber stamping of Trump-friendly legislation, subpoenaing executive officials and forcing them to choose between testifying under oath and risking contempt (and public reporting of same, for whatever that’s worth), and investigating and reporting on the crimes that Trump and his administration have committed over the past two years.

For bullet two, one of the best things you can do is show up to vote, and be loud if / when your rights are denied. Contact local news, tell the ACLU about your case, put it on Facebook + all social media, tell your friends at work, church, wherever about it. The legitimacy of election interference claims are much harder to deny if it doesn’t all come from the top.

Of course, effective addiction recovery is very near to my heart, and I care about getting it right. I’d be curious to see which studies you’re pulling from that define AA in opposition to “Real Treatment”. Most treatments for alcohol addiction are rather hit-or-miss, and all the literature I’m familiar with generally find that combination therapies are more effective than any one therapy alone. Peer recovery groups are “a” therapy, AA is one of them, and they help some people, not all.

AA groups are as religious as their members; some of them are chill about it, many of them are insufferable about it, particularly in the southern US, and I suspect this is a big reason why people wash out of the program. Some of those washouts find their ways to more accepting groups or programs, some do not. I think the widespread attitude of “the program works if you work it” is a pretty grisly and self-satisfied example of survivorship bias, in AA and a lot of similar programs, propagated by people who found something that works for them and insisting that it’s the one true program that should work for everyone. This happens in religious and non-religious groups and it gives people the idea that if they can’t find help in that one group, that they must be broken beyond repair. I struggled with that for a long time before I found my people.

That’s a bit of a diversion, I don’t want to get into the gritty details of the many things I think are wrong with addiction recovery culture. Suffice to say that peer support groups can help, we haven’t really worked out all the problems with doing it well, and addiction is a hard problem. I think it’s worth taking the imperfect tools we have and trying to improve them, rather than throwing them out entirely because they are imperfect.

No, I elaborated in another comment but I don’t think 12 step or similar recovery programs are cults themselves. However, there are cults and scam operations that use recovery groups as recruiting grounds, sometimes hosting their own meetings masquerading as recovery programs in order to ensnare new members, as is described in the article.

I think the reputation is partially earned. I’ve been in a few AA and AA-like groups over the years, and while I wouldn’t say that AA itself is a cult, there are cults that use AA and similar recovery groups as recruiting grounds, and it’s very possible that your dad got caught up in one of those. The sudden taking up of a new and very specific charitable cause is a big red flag.

Hard agree with your last point. I was fortunate enough to (eventually…) find a network of peers that helped me and I am doing much better now than I was, but it is a bitter truth that there are people who will find you when you’re at your lowest and most vulnerable, and exploit you. I’m sorry your dad wasn’t able to get the help he needed ❤️

None of that is anti science. There’s no “distrust in studies”, unless you’re referring to the distrust in the “some studies” you cryptically referenced in your post. Not that you bothered even to cherry pick, but cherry-picked studies can show results that the preponderance of evidence does not support. Nor do I claim that quantity beats quality. Scientific communities are as capable of systemic bias just like any other. However, the preponderance of evidence does cut against your unsourced assertion that peer groups don’t aid in recovery. Lastly ancedotes: they aren’t anti-science, nor are they useless. They are statistically unsuitable for the purposes of drawing conclusions about large populations or general trends, and therefore shouldn’t be used as the basis for broad scientific claims, which is why I did no such thing. They are stories that humans share with one another in casual conversation, and I thought it was one worth sharing here.

And not that you deserve this, making your wild claims with no evidence, but as Exhibit A for the scientificness of my paragraph I’d like to enter into the record the first result when searching for AA meta analyses on pubmed. Relevant sections are presented below.

Main results: We included 27 studies containing 10,565 participants (21 RCTs/quasi-RCTs, 5 non-randomized, and 1 purely economic study). The average age of participants within studies ranged from 34.2 to 51.0 years. AA/TSF was compared with psychological clinical interventions, such as MET and CBT, and other 12-step program variants. … AA/TSF (manualized) compared to treatments with a different theoretical orientation (e.g. CBT) (randomized/quasi-randomized evidence) RCTs comparing manualized AA/TSF to other clinical interventions (e.g. CBT), showed AA/TSF improves rates of continuous abstinence at 12 months (risk ratio (RR) 1.21, 95% confidence interval (CI)

Bet. If you can explain which paragraph is anti-science and why, I’ll move it to the top of my comment.

Brendan Carr is a fascist tool, but the anger I hold for him pales in comparison to the incandescent rage I feel for cultists who prey on people struggling with addiction. Exploiting people who are there because they have nowhere else to turn, usually while their life is actively falling apart or recently fallen apart. Turning the vulnerable into tools in their goddamn pyramid schemes or objects of their power fantasies. Making me feel sympathy for Brendan fucking Carr.

God they are the worst.

No, not all of them are cults. Some individual AA groups (as well as other peer support recovery groups) are feeder programs for cults, but not all. AA being christian is incidental to cultism; non-faith-based peer groups can also be cult feeders.

Secondly, “some studies” can show a lot of things that aren’t true. IIRC the majority of peer-reviewed research shows that peer support groups like AA usually have a positive impact vs. no peer support. Anecdotally, my peer support networks saved my life, more than once.

Like all peer groups, the group is as good as the peers. That’s why you gotta shop around and find one where you fit in.

I think exceptions and tokens play an important role in permitting the followers of fascists to deny the general principles of the people they follow, even in their own minds. For example, if Vance’s wife is brown, then Trump can’t hate all brown people, right? Then he must be rounding up those other brown people for some reason other than their being brown. The news keeps saying they’re rounding up criminals, many of whom happen to be brown, and the Left keeps screeching that Republicans hate all brown people, but his wife is brown… so the Left must be lying. The evidence to the contrary is right in front of your eyes.

And so on. Tokens are kept around by Republicans because they provide the thinnest possible veneer of plausible deniability to people who are afraid of non-whites but don’t want to think of themselves as racists. It’s a convenient off-ramp from a road that would otherwise tempt them to think difficult thoughts about themselves and the policies they approve of or at least willfully ignore.

Yep. His punishment is having his consciousness split between all his roommates, everyone whose lives he made hell, experiencing all their ire, in parallel, for eternity.

You make this deal with a demon. You immediately die and arrive in Hell. It’s not so bad, you have to walk over flaming coals to get anywhere and the demons inserting fiery brands into every orifice are pretty unpleasant, but you’ve had worse. You begin to settle into your new life.

A few years pass in this fashion, until one day the demon knocks on the door of your abyssal torture cottage. You ask him why he has come. He says it’s time for your eternal punishment to start, and he’d like to introduce you to your new roommate.

fin

Whose voting rights, exactly?

A pony? You sound like a savvy investor. You know, for a modest fee of $500 you could be a part of my Premium Insider Patriots Initiative. It’s a small group, available only to those who have proven that they are willing to go into debt for my cause. If I win, members get an additional $5000. That’s a 10x investment, and you know it’s legit, just check the math.

If you’re in, put the money into a bottle and throw it into the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, and the antifa goblins I sent to wreck the place that live there now will deliver it to me. Allegedly sent.