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> because it means you are implicitly deciding your current existence is not enough

> that is what bothers me with religion as well: it is a rejection of ourselves and reality traded for comfort. I get people need it due to bad life circumstances, but like any addiction it is just a pain killer for a festering wound.

Is it only drugs and religion though? And not just illegal drugs, but the legal ones as well?

Couldn't one argue that people seek out religion for emotional needs, and that emotional needs force people to reject themselves in favor of the community? Or is this a misguided take?

> I'm curious as to what differentiates cannabis from other psychedelics such that you think there is a healthy path to it and not to anything else.

Experience. Also you're more likely to come across it due to legality. When you cross the threshold of legality you're more likely to find yourself in bad company

> I personally think turning to psychedelics as form of subjective exploration is perfectly healthy, despite the risks.

Maybe it is, but if I had kids I wouldn't allow them to take that risk

Imo there is no healthy situation that leads someone to any drugs past pot. At that point you enter a rabbithole

> Just curious, were they already fairly normal? I'm wondering if the benefits are only in a narrow group, setting, condition, etc.

This is the problem: is anyone? Does anyone have a perfect upbringing? How could they be sure?

Tbh I really don't know whether they were normal, one of them had an abusive dad and afterwards decided to cut family ties, drop out of college, and do more drugs

The problem here, and why I don't recommend hallucinogens to anyone, is that people read the warnings about hallucinogens and think their upbringing was "healthy enough" to handle them. How could they actually know that for a fact?

Could you elaborate on the girlfriend, best friend, and other friend? How did their experiences play out? What about it changed them?

Of the people I've known who did hallucinogens, I knew them all before and after.

NONE of them were better off afterward

You can read all the "life changing experiences" that people have online, but when you take these you roll a dice. Keep this in mind. There's a lot of people who shill them super hard, and they might've had a positive experience, but consider the risk vs the reward and tread lightly

edit: And even the people who had "life changing experiences", they weren't better off. They never came out of it "enlightened" or any better than where they were before (based off of their behavior and the lifestyle choices they made)

People who (implicitly) say "you better do X or care about Y or else bad things will happen!!111!"

it's like: what's going to happen? Am I going to spontaneously combust if I just ignore you?

FWIW Gonzalez v Google might not have as much of an impact as what the comments here indicate.

> The case — Gonzalez v. Google — seeks to hold Google legally liable for a deadly 2015 Paris terrorist attack, alleging the tech giant recommended ISIS videos to users and boosted the terrorist group's recruitment.

If the focus is on the recommendation of content and not on the hosting of content (I know they're both related, but bear with me), then the effect of the ruling might have a narrower scope. If a company like Google is recommending terrorist content in such a way that affects many people, that's a problem with the recommendation engine. If the problem is broader and about hosting the content (as opposed to just recommending), the effect might be more extreme

Notwithstanding this ruling could have a catastrophic effect and turn social media sites into lawsuit piñatas, it could be the single most significant fuck up of this court to date

As a recent grad, this doesn't at all seem surprising

I had a class where literally half of the people in it cheated on the autograded assignments and got caught. Then after getting caught a bunch of them cheated again by just refactoring what they already wrote

There were two to three other classes where a group of 10-20 people banded together and started insisting out of nowhere that the class was "too difficult". We had one lecture where the professor was reviewing the exam material and this group literally wasted the entire lecture bitching about the class and yelling at the professor over zoom

I've found that you only hear about it being a "hard" class if a bunch of people get together and start insisting that it's hard. Which then puts pressure on the professor and uni to water down the class, which then makes it worse off for everyone else and dilutes the program

Sorry for the rant but this stuff still pisses me off to this day

edit: I feel like video lectures (and class group chats without uni oversight) enable this behavior. This and the sheer complacency on the part of universities for prioritizing "student well being" over actually teaching something

In hindsight pompous would've been a better word

Why does the author write in such laughably pretentious language?

> It is the emotional register that accounts for the Pavlovian alacrity with which we attend to our devices and the digital flows for which they are a portal

Why not just say "it's the feeling of being addicted to social media"?

Another example:

> I skim the surface of each emotional experience, but rarely can I plumb its depths or sound out its meaning.

This isn't a satire but I wish it was. If the author has something to say, maybe they should actually make an effort to say it instead of larping as a philosopher

The TPP was more complicated than this and there was bipartisan opposition to it. The opposition to it wasn't merely Trump's isolationism but genuine concerns about the economic affects it would have on domestic citizens

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