Your point about the ozone layer response is very relevant to our expectations of solving climate change. I think replacing CFCs was just low hanging fruit, which I didn’t understand as a kid. I just assumed if we kept recycling and not consuming so much it would put us on track. So naive.

For sure, I think the patriot act was a turning point in trust of government in the US. It filtered though to our government in Australia during the Howard years. Similar to the US, around the GFC we had a hopeful change of government, but that hope for progressive values (Obama for you guys, Rudd for us) turned out to be misguided. I tend to think of those “centre left” governments as representing managed societal decline as opposed to the accelerated decline of the right wing parties.

I think part of the problem is disillusion. Millenials in the west grew up in a period where it looked like tech was going to benefit society, and climate change was going to be addressed, and ethical consumerism was somewhat meaningful, and social mobility would still exist. We are having to downgrade our expectations and it hurts.

Cory Doctorow talks about how printer ink is the most expensive liquid you can buy as a consumer. More expensive than pure bred racing horse semen (gross comparison though). He suggests a response to US tariffs being that Canada disregards printer firmware copyright and undercuts the US market by offering 3rd party printer ink cartridges via illegal reverse engineering.

There’s an interesting psychological analysis about musk on a podcast called Psychology in Seattle. They speculate that he is unconconsiously recreating his childhood bullying on twitter due to a psychological phenomenum called “repetition compulsion”. As in, you recreate relationships from childhood to try to have a " corrective experience" to heal the trauma.

Win the expectation to do more work without proper compensation, in my experience.

Even people who have put the work into therapy need a loving attachment figure. It’s healthy to be open and vulnerable when you need it.

Lilly wasn’t a nut job. His dolphin experiments ultimately failed, but it takes courage to try radical scientific experiments. Consider the common attitude towards science in academia these days where so many people fudge their results because they’re afraid of being considered failures. Failure is a part of science because you can learn from it. One of the cool things about Lilly’s experiments is that he didn’t feel the need to commercialise his experiments. They were mostly based on pure scientific inquiry.

Adding to this because I feel a bit annoyed at how John C Lilly gets so badly represented sometimes. He wasn’t a nut job. He was a weird guy with a very unique personality. He had an intense passion for knowledge and scientific inquiry. He also had a massive ego. But he was a reasonably self reflective person. Read his books and watch interviews with him. He wasn’t just a hedonist who got addicted to K. He always had a very non typical experience of reality. He had hallucinations of angels as a child, partly due to a heavily religious upbringing. It’s totally understandable that he was primed for strange trips when he got into psychedelics. But he was able to function as a professional. He had multiple government funded research projects during his career, medical credentials, and owned electrical engineering patents. His characterisation as a kook is very similar to the crap that people say about Tim Leary, who had a successful academic career before being kicked out of Harvard and was actually a very rational person.

This statement from the article is a bit misleading. Lilly had this hallucination during a ketamine trip after injecting 150mg. The article makes it sound like a persistent delusion arising from daily use. Lilly abused ketamine for sure, but he didn’t lose his mind. He was a guy who seemed to have strange ideas his whole life. https://www.intuition.org/txt/lilly.htm

It was a well meaning but failed ideological experiment that was never revised because it was locked in by the voters when benefited from it. Short term gains, short term thinking.

When you boil it down, being right wing means you value property rights over human rights, and left wing is vice versa. Right wing is maintaining wealth and power, and don’t let anyone else get in the way of it.

Because he crept into their houses at night and wrecked up the place.