Letter from Charles Darwin to Asa Gray (22nd May 1860)

With respect to the theological view of the question; this is always painful to me.— I am bewildered.— I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see, as plainly as others do, & as I shd wish to do, evidence of design & beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidæ with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.

Source

Lasagne - I got layers.

If you’re browsing Lemmy, on your phone, in work then really you should be curating your feed a bit better.

Well, I agree that everybody is different in certain ways but one of the main lessons of being in group was the revelation that broadly speaking we all want the same things and a lot of the mis-aimed strategies we’d adopted was stopping us from getting that stuff. A lot of people came through that community throughout the course of a year and while some of the stories were absolutely horrific, the problems were much the same, person to person.

Yes, the therapy was less effective for some than others and drugs absolutely should be available as a first-aid but I think that people should be moved on to other therapy as soon as they can use it.

I’m particularly hopeful about the results we are now seeing from psychedelic research into treatment resistant depression as I think that there are people for whom talk therapy won’t work but if you look at recent research into SSRIs it seems that some are barely improving on the placebo effect.

So yes I’m in favour of multiple approaches but it seems that SSRIs are outcompeting other treatments because the decisions are being made on the basis of cost and that means that those other treatments simply will not exist in the future.

Worked for me.

The last decade has seen a particularly significant increase in depression in the United States, with prevalence rates increasing by 33% between 2013 and 2016, with the largest increase among youth and young adults

Back in the day we used to try to address depression with various talk therapies and group therapies. This wasn’t perfect and was also relatively expensive but at least it offered a sense of connection and tried to tie people back into society.

Now it’s all about pills, which are a huge money-spinner and are cheaper than talk therapy. When things make money you tend to see an increase in them.

I’m beginning to think that Homo sapiens sapiens are not the good guys.

could get a bit rough in the backseat.

It’s how I market my sperm…

Probably not, but they’d definitely patent the method.

Dell are shit. It was a good day when the last Dell in the family was switched out for Macs.*

*I don’t like Macs either but I could plausibly refuse to support them on the basis that I didn’t know how they worked and the hardware is all locked down.

I read the translation of Stefan Aust’s book on the Baader-Meinhof and he covers the Rudy Dutschke shooting and also the bit where a Springer editorial praised Savak for beating up students protesting the Shah’s visit to Germany. Called them something like ‘Jubilant Iranians’ if I recall correctly.

You talking about Cromwell or William and Mary?

I’m from the UK. We still have a monarch and an aristocracy, as well as a capitalist class. Even worse: they interbreed.

Like we do any better without Springer in the Anglosphere. If it’s not Murdoch metastasising everywhere it’s one of the Bannon/Koch Foundation appendages.

Yes, I suppose what I ought to have said is that for people with an already elevated risk of developing schizophrenia cannabis could be the trigger. Thank you for this well written summary though.

Yeah, I know, wrong meeting.

No, but here he is trotting out the line about Schizophrenia, which is a real risk, but is dwarfed in its societal impact by the downsides of alcohol. I don’t expect he’s said anything at all publicly about the impacts of that though, which would suggest that he’s the talking head that the German press always contact for a negative comment about cannabis every time it hits the news. Especially as this is reported by Die Welt which is an Axel Springer publication.

Here’s my improved version:

An analysis of policy, formed by corporate interests and pushed upon the public in the 1980s, shows how it deprived the current crop of young adults of social housing, under-invested in public healthcare, enabled predatory lending practices, distorted the tax system so that a disproportionate amount fell upon the lowest three deciles of tax payers and hobbled unions while outsourcing manufacturing to the developing world causing earnings to plummet.

Probably not as selectively stupid as Thomas Fischbach.