If you think biological addiction to heroin and chips are equivalent enough to use the same word, I can’t help you.

Can we please stop using the word addiction? No one in online discussion agrees on what it means, so it always ends with angry people screaming past each other.

Gee, maybe it’s because we’re talking about a group that’s extremely vulnerable, a group that a lot of people are determined to commit democide against. Even if you feel how you feel for completely innocent reasons, it’s reasonable for people to assume otherwise. Lots of extremists start out sounding vaguely reasonable.

That last bit is not accurate. Search those terms with “is x real?” or “x controversy.” There is absolutely a debate rn about what constitutes addiction, and those things are regularly brought up.

100%. Weed kept me alive when no legal drugs worked. The second something else worked, I dropped my consumption significantly without a problem. After 15 years of daily use.

So addiction is a word so broad as to be practically meaningless, is what you’re saying.

Maybe start by not assuming everyone has normal brain chemistry. As someone whose brain couldn’t make “happy juice” on its own for years (I have a problem processing folate, which is an ingredient in a bunch of brain chemicals), if I hadn’t smoked weed before I found out what was wrong, I wouldn’t have lived long enough to do so.

I used weed to medicate when every drug my doctors gave me failed for years. Because of smoking weed every day for years, I lived long enough to take things that actually treat my problem, and was immediately able to drop my weed consumption as much as I liked. I do it maybe 2-3 times a week now. How do you tell someone who’s addicted from someone using it to medicate something else when nothing’s available, from the outside?

I also think the word “addiction” is so broadly used as to be practically useless at this point. I could stop weed, no problem. If I try to get off lithium, withdrawal city. But you don’t hear people talking about lithium addiction. Plus, if we’re using the same word for responses to heroin, weed, and porn, we need better vocabulary.

Is this the new right-wing line? Like the “abortion industry”? Gimme a fucking break.

Fuck yeah, linguistic punk!

I’m not giving the Economist my info to read this. However, you know what’s a lot less safe than puberty blockers? Teenage suicidality. I’m not trans, but I was a very suicidal teenager, and if trans people say puberty blockers make them safer and less suicidal, I believe them, and we should do everything we can to reduce the number of teens that feel that way. Including puberty blockers. They’re reversible, safe (we’ve been giving them to kids for conventional medical reasons for a long time), and the community affected says they help. How many kids are we willing to let die while we’re waiting for more evidence?

I see. This is the level of understanding we’re dealing with.

I know all that. That’s why a said as a country, not a nation-state; to differentiate between national culture and government It was the nation-state that started in 1789. I’m not wasting any more time arguing with you. It’s clear we won’t understand each other.

When do you think America (as a country, not a nation-state) started? And what makes yours more factual than the 1619 narrative?

Their people didn’t see it. Information silos.

American English is distinct from other English, so our vocabulary has no bearing on the rest of the world, but you can also get your linguistic prescriptivism out of our dialect. Language (and the meanings of words) are co-created by speakers. Ask any reputable linguist. And in American English, for political and cultural reasons, the meanings of “conservative” and “fascist” have converged in many ways.

Tell me you don’t understand LLMs or education without telling me.

Ah yes, well-researched history about topics that make white conservatives uncomfortable. That “alternate history”? What do you think is false in the 1619 project? I’m curious.

Let’s say there’s a spectrum, left to center to right, and there are a hundred political positions evenly distributed between the center and each extreme. I’m willing to accept that schools are 10 places over to the left, because “treat all people equitably” is both a left value and a necessary part of living in a free society. But this response is to pick a position maybe seventy slots over onn the right, and pretend that’s equivalent to the “left propaganda” of “Billy has two mommies, and that’s ok.”

I want my IWW-sponsored curriculum! If we have to deal with this shit, it should at least be real.

On another thread, a guy literally tried to defend this by saying “kids constantly get left-wing indocrination.” Are right wing nuts actually unaware how unbalanced the US right and left are in terms of extremism? They can’t really believe what they’re saying, right?