Psychedelic scientist sends brains back to childhood

I don’t live in a red state but I was raised in the most socially conservative area of Canada and I do have a number of religious and evangelical friends though I was raised atheist. Granted I do now live in the gayest neighbourhood in Canada.

The level of homophobia I witnessed and experienced in the nineties was on another order than what exists today, there is absolutely no comparison (I’m not gay but was routinely called a fag even by strangers because I was a skinny kid with long hair and had gay friends). In the nineties I would read conservative magazines that had ads in them pushing conspiracy theories about how the NAZI leadership were all gay. DOMA was a huge issue that ate up a lot of national politics in 2004, even California voted against gay marriage in a referendum. In 2012 Obama was still compelled to campaign in defense of DOMA and was openly supportive of marriage only between men and women (though interestingly the earliest activists for marriage equality came from the centre-right (Sullivan and Rauchman)).

Now the nuttiest MAGA republicans all love George Santos, who was a literally drag queening in Brazil and Peter Thiel who got a massive cheer when he keynoted the 2016 convention and said “I am proud to be gay. I am proud to be a Republican. But most of all I am proud to be an American.” Unthinkable even 4 years prior. One poll of gay men in 2020 shows 46% support for Trump. [0] On the more traditional Republican side of things (Dispatch conservatives and Reason Libertarians) it’s hard to find many living authors who are more valourized than Deirdre McClosky who has been trans for 30 years.

It’s possible that homophobia has increased a bit in the last few years amongst social conservatives, but it still isn’t close to anything like it was even a decade ago. So if it has increased, and if young people are reverting to viewing sex as a binary according to a recent Pew poll [1] the question is why. Partly it’s the weird corporate and state monomania around the topic. But more than that, as I stated above, it seems to me to be mixed with blowback to gender ideology which has been conflated with gay rights, even though it is a very different and contradictory thing with a whole separate host of questions around medical ethics and educating children that many don’t find to be consistent with the positive message that universalized gay rights - you’re fine the way you were born and you don’t need to change anything to be accepted.

[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/trump-applauds-poll-...

[1] Most favor protecting trans people from discrimination, even as growing share say gender is determined by sex at birth - https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2022/06/28/america...

> "Oxytocin and serotonin, she found, work together in a brain region called the nucleus accumbens to produce the good feelings that come from social interaction."

Well, this supports my hypothesis on why talking to people was a really good coping mechanism for ADHD. As far as I can tell, oxytocin isn't dampened(?) like dopamine presumably is.

(I say presumably because of the specific symptoms I had and also the specific ways in which stimulants help with them, but I've never had my brain dissected or anything to confirm, seeing as I'm still alive and all.)

The LGB alliance are a weird one to mention, they have basically no grassroots members at all -- they popped up out of nowhere a few years ago, the average LGBT person in the UK doesn't know they exist at all.

They perform no advocacy to speak of within the UK except for pursuing attack lines against trans people. They're based at 55 Tufton Street which just so happens to also be where a bunch of very curiously linked conservative think tanks promoting anti-climate change, anti-immigrant populist politics are centered. They're mysteriously mixed closely with American groups like the heritage foundation. Oddly they started getting cited a bunch by openly transphobic BBC journalists, ostensibly for "balance" when discussing the rights of trans people.

I cannot think of a more obvious example for astroturfing than this group. They have literally zero presence in real people's lives the way you'd expect a charity to, they instead pop up wherever anti-trans rhetoric appears online and in papers, providing a denigrating voice to whoever needs it. They provide no services and give no advice -- here's to hoping they lose their charitable status when the Good Law Project's appeal concludes later this year.

Right.

Fear of a concerted effort to remove rights to everything from free speech, to reading books, to healthcare, to voting and actively destroying the independence of institutions whose independence is required to maintain democracy is exactly the same as fabricated fear ginned up with lies about minorities such as trans, Jews, and blacks.

If you want to play at the pot-kettle game level, I'd point out that your statement is mere spouting of the standard line of the deluded herd. Not suitable for this forum. Please bring some facts next time.

TBH Id have to dig into my notes more than I care to now, but recall looking up his and his coauthors research at the time and the verbage was very similar to what you described. But that's kind of the point. Requiring a specific controlled setting with a medical team and someone to guide the individual through throughout the process is a lot of work to require for "good" outcomes.

The only time you can expect a drug will get approval without large reproduction of quantifiable outcomes is treating some aspect of a rare disease.