Scientific Truth VS Religious Truth - Dr Jordan Peterson on

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Mikah
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06 Nov 2018, 3:00 pm

I'm not sure how else to explain it.

-You can't drug test employees arbitrarily and regularly because it's wrong, morally and in some places legally, to assume someone is guilty of the law-breaking necessary to obtain said drugs. Innocent until proven guilty etc.
-Once drugs are legal that "barrier" disappears and is likely to be enforced by insurance companies the first time a lawyer makes the case that an employees performace may have been affected by his smoking weed the weekend before (or perhaps his long term usage of the drug).
-Drug testing will rather quickly become standard procedure for all but the most basic jobs. What employer doesn't have some form of insurance these days?
-You could fight it by making a law against it, but this is unlikely to be popular. A few headlines similar to "Drug tests banned: Teachers may get high with impunity" would quickly kill the idea. Quite rightly the populace will be concerned that teachers may decide to bite their kids' noses off while blazed.
-A secondary effect of this scenario is "high functioning drug users" like yourself will be barred from any serious employment or be forced to give up your pastime.

techstepgenr8tion wrote:
People getting high on the job isn't allowed now, people getting stoned on the job wouldn't be allowed and would have similar consequence. Absolutely nothing new.


It's more complicated than all that. I think you could make a legal case where not regularly drug testing employees in certain professions, in this Brave New World of legal and easy to obtain drugs, is negligent of employers.


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techstepgenr8tion
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06 Nov 2018, 3:21 pm

Mikah wrote:
I'm not sure how else to explain it.
-Once drugs are legal that "barrier" disappears and is likely to be enforced by insurance companies the first time a lawyer makes the case that an employees performace may have been affected by his smoking weed the weekend before (or perhaps his long term usage of the drug).

That's a metaphysical enough concern that we'd have to actually get there and cross that bridge, for a while before we make that unlawful on civil rights grounds, before we actually worry about it as a threat. It sounds legally incoherent and in the US we have a firm set of procedures against this sort of infraction - ie. you either have something illegal and treat it as such or you can be sued for discrimination if you treat appropriate use of a legal substance in a discriminatory manner.

Mikah wrote:
-Drug testing will rather quickly become standard procedure for all but the most basic jobs. What employer doesn't have some form of insurance these days?

As stated above. This is fancy and projection.

Mikah wrote:
-You could fight it by making a law against it, but this is unlikely to be popular. A few headlines similar to "Drug tests banned: Teachers may get high with impunity" would quickly kill the idea. Quite rightly the populace will be concerned that teachers may decide to bite their kids' noses off while blazed.
-A secondary effect of this scenario is "high functioning drug users" like yourself will be barred from any serious employment or be forced to give up your pastime.

Ah, now you're thinking teachers coming to work on bath salts! There's also a fighting chance of these people buying a new age or occult book, riding the rainbow to Satan, getting possessed by the spirits of nephilim and becoming foot-soldiers of the Beast, The Antichrist, and the Whore of Babalon! Woe to their eternal souls!!

Mikah wrote:
techstepgenr8tion wrote:
People getting high on the job isn't allowed now, people getting stoned on the job wouldn't be allowed and would have similar consequence. Absolutely nothing new.


It's more complicated than all that. I think you could make a legal case where not regularly drug testing employees in certain professions, in this Brave New World of legal and easy to obtain drugs, is negligent of employers.

This is again more ideologue solopsism.

I don't know if you read the news or browse Google occasionally but several states in the US have had legal recreational cannabis for several years and at least in Colorado this has been the case since late 2012. If a zombie apocalypse should be kicking off in these states it's late! What that? Ah yeah, they're probably all too stoned for that...

I'm not at all saying that someone couldn't present me an argument for restriction of these substances that makes sense or would go along lines that I'd consider restricted legalization (ie. limited context such as retreat clinics) to be appropriate but you're not providing that at all. I'm getting the Apocalypse of Mikah instead and it seems to be an apocalypse written overwhelmingly on lack of any practical experience.


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Mikah
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06 Nov 2018, 3:27 pm

techstepgenr8tion wrote:
I'm getting the Apocalypse of Mikah instead and it seems to be an apocalypse written overwhelmingly on lack of any practical experience.


Well let's hope I'm wrong then. I reserve the right to laugh if I turn out to be correct though.

Edit: And the right to be angry if I have to have weekly drug tests.


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techstepgenr8tion
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06 Nov 2018, 3:52 pm

Admittedly you live in the UK, I'm in the US. The UK has, currently, much more draconian laws than the US does on these sorts of things. There may be a grain of truth that the psychology of umbrella scheduling everything that's not alcohol, caffeine, or nicotine might make this a much harder bridge for the UK to cross. At least in the US I see this continuing to go the way it is which is conservatives increasingly joining liberals on being pro-legalization and a list of senators coming out against both Jeff Session's memorandum earlier in the year and encouraging some firmer language to assure the safety of retailers who sell legal substances. If the UK when into it deeper than the US did it may take longer to culturally come around - I won't dispute that possibility. The US isn't operating on a civil liberties double standard and is unlikely to start doing such.


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Mikah
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06 Nov 2018, 4:05 pm

techstepgenr8tion wrote:
Admittedly you live in the UK, I'm in the US. The UK has, currently, much more draconian laws than the US does on these sorts of things.


Even more interestingly than that, we have gone far further than any other developed country in de facto decriminalisation. The way the police and courts refuse to enforce those laws, we are effectively more liberal when it comes to drugs than Holland - and it's really not great. Drug usage, associated crime et al has gotten steadily worse since the 1970s when it became unofficial policy to stop caring. The pro-drug lobby has the balls to say our ever increasing problems with drugs are because of the "war on drugs" that stopped, if it ever existed, decades ago.


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techstepgenr8tion
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06 Nov 2018, 4:12 pm

Sounds like a massive policy failure. I'm sure there's a lot to be learned from it and it sounds like a large part of that is the 'its all the same'ness of the legislation as well as a populace whose really gotten used to strange contradictions in an unhealthy way.


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06 Nov 2018, 4:19 pm

techstepgenr8tion wrote:
Sounds like a massive policy failure. I'm sure there's a lot to be learned from it


I agree, but I don't think we agree in the same way. If you're really interested in detail, I can pm you a book suggestion. I was on the fence before I read it.


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techstepgenr8tion
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06 Nov 2018, 5:03 pm

We might not, I'm saying that letting there be an almost public black market is a bad way to go. Incentive structures done wrong have a very disfiguring influence on things and it's been interesting here in the US - the cartels south of the border like illegality because black markets are more lucrative in most cases and the kingpins are the sort of war-hawks that lead from way behind the lines.


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06 Nov 2018, 6:43 pm

Naturally I'd say the mistake was allowing a market to grow at all. Here is usually where the conversation diverges into the supposed impossibility of containing or eliminating any sort of drugs market.


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Pepe
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06 Nov 2018, 7:24 pm

Hey!...
You two...
Get a room!... :mrgreen:



techstepgenr8tion
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07 Nov 2018, 7:11 am

The list of human priorities, outside of staying alive, is pretty fungible and takes a lot of shape from what avenues with which it can open doors as well as even how much of a crap sandwich life might be feeding you and how much you may need to dig your fingernails in to prevent your own suicide or moral derangement in other cases. What is true is that those inclined to experimentation, as similar to those who are likely to take up mystic or occult practices, are usually people who society broke its contracts with and they're forced to find other means to cope with life.

I think the part that you aren't likely to register, no matter how much we talk, is the degree of upside that there is on psychedelics. I could honestly say that I'd be wedged much deeper under my autism, doing much worse with respect to being able to get over the ASD related issues, would be closer to half my age in maturity (no matter with how much discipline I beat myself with to be otherwise), and I wouldn't have figured out half the things I had - let alone I probably would have been just about murdered by NT's by now (any difference = baby rapist) - if I hadn't taken the path I have.

I see our culture actually failing harder for lack of perspective than due to drug use. If you get to run in the center of the pack with full protection rather than penalty from the power of Conformitas (conformity deified) you can be a near perfect ape your entire life and never have to know what cost the rest of humanity has to pay for so many people being in such a fast asleep and accordingly 'thin veneer of human' sort of state. We can't solve problems because not enough people can properly self-examine credibly enough to have any hope of breaking the implicit belief that whatever they believe is good and whatever the next person believes is evil. The IDW might be something close to a non-psychedelic antidote as well, and we need more of it, but I have to go with Jordan Peterson, Bret Weinstein, and Sam Harris on the psychedelics and I have to say a lot of the same core argument I'd make - that 'narcotics' is an absolutely terrible category with respect to being a container for substances that have no place being considered in the same space, this is one that Sam also makes quite often.

I also had scenarios thrown at me throughout this conversation that might have made sense if I'd said 'You know, I condone the use of bath salts' or suggested that heroin and meth should be sold at every convenient store. Heroin and meth are in a category where there's no confusion over what they do to people. Legalization of things like marijuana and psilocybin, maybe eventually in some contexts LSD, would compete against other hard drugs. I don't want to project but you seemed to imply that once one smokes their first joint they're a slip on a banana peel away from overdosing on heroin and that any 'narcotic' use is a race to the bottom. The world is filled with academic, medical, and other high-level conversations right now that couldn't exist if that were the case.


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techstepgenr8tion
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07 Nov 2018, 7:34 am

Also on the topic of authors, whether reading their books or just seeing what they have to say, Michael Pollan wrote an interesting book 'How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence'. A lot of important and equally interrelated themes in that.


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07 Nov 2018, 4:35 pm

techstepgenr8tion wrote:
Also on the topic of authors, whether reading their books or just seeing what they have to say, Michael Pollan wrote an interesting book 'How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence'. A lot of important and equally interrelated themes in that.


Interesting but... :mrgreen:
I am sure you will agree that experimentation with psychedelics is not suited for everyone...

For example, someone like me, who had a severe dissociative disorder in my younger years, is someone who may have lost their way due to their "lessened sense of reality" to begin with...

With my being ontologically-secure these days, things may be different and there might be an argument that mind altering drugs could further broaden my weltanschauung...

But hey...
Why mess around with perfection, eh?... 8)



aghogday
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07 Nov 2018, 6:23 pm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRZnw6GPe8o

i Remember When i first Lost Shangri-La; An Afternoon Sun it Was
On A Warm January Day in 2008; As Beauty Grew Empty As A Pet of
A Cat No longer Felt Warm As Suddenly the Warmth of a January Day in 2008
Went Cold; Sure, Human Depression; It's A Thing; Dark And Numb and Painful too;
So What Would/WiLL one Do to Escape Numb; For What of Those Folks Who Have Never 'Seen'
'Allone'; A Comfort
And Beauty
Of Shangri-La
Also Felt, Sensed;
Never Vague When
Real; Yes, Utopia Within.
Hmm; iN those Days, those Nights,
Those Months; Those Years; Yes, 66 Months
As Shut-in in my Bedroom; All oF LiFE iN SHades
Of BLack And White; Colors and Flavors of Life Lost
From Within; Where to Go And Find Shangri-La Again;
Only In Dreams Vague Still to Come A Statuesque Home
Hidden Floors Above Post Modern More With Pools of Beauty
And A Hidden Trail To A Creek Where All Existed As Bliss iN A Beauty
of Life Wise Beyond Words; Yes, I Rose Out oF Those Ashes to Shangri-La
Within; And If one has Never Experienced a 'Perfection' in any one Moment of
Life; Where There Is No Forward or Reverse But Now That Is Never Better or Worse Than
Now;
Sure, IT's
Safe to Say Many
Folks Are Missing out
On This KingQueenDoM
Of Heaven Within Eternally
Now Never Ending Now Just A Feeling
And Sense of Life It Is With No Gravity; Yes,
And Connection to All That Is In Oneness Now
That Never Ends. True; Hard to Put in Empirical
Measure; But Science Will Measure This 'Autotelic'
'Transient-Hypo-Frontality' Way of Being Through
Brain Scan Ways 'These Days'; Through Neurochemicals
And Neurohormones And Brain Waves too; But Those Material
Reductionist PArts of Life Will Never Equal the Total Frequencies
And Vibrations as Synergies in Energies of Life Rising Higher in Mindful And
Body-Full Awareness; That Is Perfect In Practice oF an Ever Changing Now Always
More Never Less as Better Now; As Now is as Good as Now Gets Now. It's No Wonder
That 'Those' 'Greater
Mortals' With All Their
Modes of External Goals
Seek a Way Through External
Substances to Be Set Free; However,
to Master this State of Being; This Utopia
Within of Shangri-La IS A Top oF A Mountain;
A Top Of A Pyramid Capstone Set Free iN Wisdom
Is Beauty oF aLL Seeing Eyes And Ears Set Free Just to Be NoW;

"Life is Good"; Hehe, iN mY 'BackYard' at Least..;)

"Shangri-La has become synonymous with any earthly paradise, particularly a mythical Himalayan utopia – a permanently happy land, isolated from the world. In 'the novel', the people who live at Shangri-La are almost immortal, living hundreds of years beyond the normal lifespan and only very slowly aging in appearance. The name also evokes the imagery of the exoticism of the Orient."

The United States as Set Up As Democracy Does Still Provide
For All the Avenues for "Shangri-La" to Be Real in the Human
Experience NoW iN A Pursuit of Happiness; It Is A Within noW
PArt of "Shangri-La"; And An Only Part of "Shangri-La" that is
Real iN A Naked Flesh and Blood of Being Human; No Matter Time,
Distance, or Space; "Shangri-La" Is An 'OZ' Within That Is Verily Surely Eternally Now Heaven.

And Yeah; I read "How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence" by Michael Pollan in Barnes and Nobles in an Ecstatic Slower Free
Dance iN Ascending Transcending Way With Meditative Music In Flow There as i Finished the Book in one Dance
All For Free. It's Like an Ultimate High; Dancing And Reading and Listening to Meditative Music Always Now
Then and Now Again Always Again Now Never Ending Now; SMiLes, For Those Who Haven't Gone 'THeRE'
Yet', NoW; It's Worth a Try; one Step Spiraling After Another one Word Spiraling After Another
Soul
Spiraling
as Just Another
Milky Way Within
Another Universe
As Just Another Center
All oF All That Is Now Real
As Real As Real Will Continue to Come to Be More
As Less As More Now Always More As Less More JusT NoW MoRE.
I Liked "The Book" to See How Other Folks Get 'Here' Less And More Than "AFreeDaNCENoW"..:)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shangri-La


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techstepgenr8tion
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07 Nov 2018, 9:28 pm

Pepe wrote:
Interesting but... :mrgreen:
I am sure you will agree that experimentation with psychedelics is not suited for everyone...

For example, someone like me, who had a severe dissociative disorder in my younger years, is someone who may have lost their way due to their "lessened sense of reality" to begin with...

With my being ontologically-secure these days, things may be different and there might be an argument that mind altering drugs could further broaden my weltanschauung...

But hey...
Why mess around with perfection, eh?... 8)

I'd qualify my recommendations here by saying I'm comfortable with a wide range of outcomes, but even at the most conservative I'd really like there to be some sort of organized and culturally 'made-appropriate' context for adults, especially those with spiritual and depth psychology curiosities, to have a good weekend together in a peaceful environment and engaged in positive/mindful activities while they partake in a psychedelic experience together. Slightly more liberal would be my CCW-like licensing and matched added rights / added responsibility to where such a selective legalization would at least buffer things and keep it from going to the corners of the public that it shouldn't reach.


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