Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Please don't post about US Politics. If you need to do this, try [email protected]
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected].
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
Why is society so afraid of people purposefully altering their mental state? (In terms of cannabis, psychedelics, anything "mind-expanding.)
And even this isn't something that I've never seen asked, but aside from like Terence McKenna, I don't really know anyone who's interested in it, or even accept the question.
Edit this thread is a case in point. Not one single explanation, just people absolutely terrified out of their minds, parroting bad propaganda and even worse rhetoric. "I don't want my surgeon tripping when he's operating on me." And I don't want my surgeon drunk, and alcohol is legal, and I've never had the issue, because surgeons don't come to work drunk.
Genuinely, I'm tired of answering these "arguments" and no-one will accept how afraid they are, even when not a single soul can explain why.
I think the mindset of a society is hard to change. We do see some progress towards the use of psychedelics for mental treatments which I think is great(at least in my area of the world). Is it enough ? Not to my taste but it's progress. I can't wait for people to have access to that kind of help!
I'm still using mushrooms from time to time to deal with personal issues, trying to find a different perspective on my own, it has helped me numerous times. I think it also helped me reduce my overall stress and prejudice.
I would suggest you also try to find different perspectives on how people got different opinions on the subject. I really don't think being aggressive towards them the way you have been helps anybody. If anything, your opinion/facts are discarded quicker because you dont appear as a respectable source of information. You appear too emotionally connected to the subject. Especially to people who may be scared or closed to those different ideas.
No offense, but; oh, please.
I find it extremely annoying that people pretend as if I've not listened to or considered the "different opinions". If it even was different opinions. It never really is. That's my point. People don't really form an opinion of the subject as an aversion to it. If I could just relay my personal experiences to you. The frustration of politely bringing the topic up pretty much always ends in people getting extremely upset. And I've worked customer service for decades. I know how to be polite.
I don't need to accept the asinine propaganda being touted as someone's opinion. Like the "I don't want my doctor being high" shit. It's almost as disrespectfully asinine as "if people do LSD, they'll peel themselves as oranges or try to fly by jumping of high rise buildings". No respectable doctor is someone who goes to work high. And if they're a doctor who's not respectable and have a drug issue, they shouldn't be a doctor, but those doctors exist currently. And according to actual science we have on the issue, reforming drug laws to be more liberal really works on addicts, so legalising drugs will actually make it less likely your doctor would be high. Doctors have access to pharmaceuticals all the time, so why on Earth would they need to wait for them to be legal? Them being legal wouldn't make it okay for them to be under the influence at work, just like it's not okay for them to be under the influence now.
See. I have considered their "opinions". More than they have. And that's my issue with it. People get somewhat upset, and then say "have you considered", when it's literally them who are refusing to even consider my side.
That is a myth as well, btw. Well, according to the flimsy research we have.
What is true however, is that some people will sometimes (or most of the time) perceive neutral attitudes as hostile ones. Unfortunately, not my issue. Where I live, we speak directly. It's in our culture.
However, for that one guy, I'm not really being neutral towards. But this comment, for instance, is completely neutral.
You know who appears too emotionally connected to a subject? People who can't even consider something else than what someone programmed into their brain through shitty propaganda, because they get extremely emotionally upset if they even try.
It's a cold hard fact that prohibition of drugs is extremely harmful towards the planet, and any sort of even indirect defense of it or defense of aversion towards discussing it is bad for the world in the long run.
Imagine if you were suddenly transported to say to the 1800's or something. Imagine how annoyed and disgusted you would be with people who'd get annoyed (or even downright violent) at you for you trying to talk about how chattel slavery is bad.
edit oh I forgot to mention, there's one person that I actually managed to completely convert during a single night. He began touting 60's propaganda. (Literally, he was like 70 or something at the time and this was in 2011 or something.) He was the president of the local Mensa. (Any my coworker, he worked part time essentially.) He actually considered my points. It took a while to get through the propaganda, but once I just posed the same simple questions enough times (and after a bottle of Jägermeister) he suddenly stopped at one point when he was raising his finger in protest, then froze, looked somewhere far and was like. "Huh. I think you got me with that one." And that's how you recognise intelligence. He actually listened, unlike 99% of the population with that extreme aversion to the whole topic.