If you are currently in the process of saving instead of withdrawing in retirement, then falling stock prices are just buying opportunities. If the grocery store puts eggs on sale, you wouldn’t fret that the eggs currently in your fridge aren’t worth as much.

When you think of it that way, it gets a lot easier to hang on after a crash, and you might start looking for ways to buy even more at bargain prices.

From the article you linked.

researchers report that the substantial antidepressant effects of psilocybin-assisted therapy, given with supportive psychotherapy, may last at least a year for some patients.

So, essentially what I said. There is a difference between an anti-anxiety or anti-depressive drug and a drug that’s useful in therapy to treat anxiety or depression.

Anti-depressive and anti-anxiety drugs function on their own, but only so long as the drug is active in your system. Psychedelics allow self reflection to enhance traditionally non-drug therapies. They can even lead to the exact opposite results when used in an improper mind set or setting.

Psilocybin is basically an antidepressant, and anti-anxiety drug.

Except that it’s totally not either of those things. In fact, it can sometimes cause panic attacks if taken ill advisedly.

Psilocybin and other psychedelics reveal to us a lot of the inner workings of our minds. That can help people to correct unhealthy thinking when they are willing to do the work. That can lead to long term reduction of anxiety and depression, but only through addressing root causes.

That’s not what ending no fault divorce is about. It’s about making it harder for women to leave an abusive marriage without an expensive legal process. It wouldn’t be an obstacle to rich assholes like Trump.

Yep. Biden and Harris come to mind, as does the rest of the Democratic establishment. If they didn’t prefer Trump to Bernie, this would be a much sweeter timeline.

Most of Trump’s cabinet ranges from morally indifferent to outright hostile to human beings. The only exception I think I see is RFK Jr. who is just batshit insane.

It’s an orwellian term for a package of anti-worker and anti-union laws. The centerpiece where the name comes from is making it illegal for a union shop to require workers to pay union dues.

The computers we have today help to do logistics to “feed, clothe and house the homeless”. They also help you to advocate to do more. How much of that would be comprehensible to someone living in 1900?

I’m not sure that homelessness is a problem quantum computing or AI are suitable for. However, AI has already contributed in helping to solve protein folding problems that are critical in modern medicine.

Solving homelessness and many other problems isn’t resource constrained as you think. It’s more about the will to solve them, and who profits from leaving them unsolved. We have known for decades that providing homes for the homeless in a large city actually saves the city money, but we’re still not doing it. Renewable energy has been cheaper than fossil fuels for almost as long. Medicare for all would cost significantly less than the US private healthcare system, and would lead to better results, but we aren’t doing that either.

Unfortunately, we’d have to stop all the infighting and work together.

Given all the divisions in our society, it’s remarkable how unified people seem over cheering this CEOs murder. I think we may have unlocked a common cause.

They have so much money, they can buy invincibility.

There is no such thing. Even the secret service drops the ball sometimes. Also, more security means more potential for betrayal. If the demand for security personal goes up, the quality will go down.

You are interpreting the word “collaborationist” so broadly as to make it entirely useless. Apparently you would think that every prisoner in a work camp is a collaborationist if they don’t immediately cut their own throats. The system we live in is way too all encompassing to somehow fight from the outside. Some level of interaction with the system is a requirement just to survive, and fighting back against the system can require even more participation in that system. You are trying to defend yourself against being called a collaborationist by muddying the waters and making the word functionally useless. When I used the word, it was in reference to the actual rhetoric you are using that is directly related to the conflict between American workers and Oligarchs. The Oligarchs have setup a system where they can kill us en masse with total impunity, but fighting back is out of bounds. You are taking a stance that is entirely unnecessary to take for any other reason but to defend the rules that keep us trapped in a broken system.

This entire argument stems from my refusal to reduce a man to his occupation.

When state catches the killer and puts them in jail, is it reducing them to nothing but being a killer? When we take certain actions in life, that is going to have consequences in how society interacts with us in the future. This creep wasn’t just a health insurance CEO, he was by many measures the worst health insurance CEO. He traded other people’s lives for cash, and that should have consequences. That’s not a failure to recognize the breadth of his humanity, it’s saying that actions have consequences.

Was Thomas Jefferson an oppressor, a rebel, or a collaborationist?

Who said that everyone can only fit in a single box? That sure wasn’t me, I will point out though that doing away with slavery (to the extent that we did anyways) involved killing a whole lot of slave owners.

I don’t believe in free will, so this argument is kind of moot for me.

I personally think that free will as a concept is inherently nonsensical, and therefore I don’t have a position on it at all. I’ll call that agreement to that point. However, I’m not convinced that the concept of morality is entirely dependent on the concept of free will. A machine with a faulty mechanism still just does what physics say it must do, but we still call it a malfunction (bad function) and expect it to be modified to work properly. Anyways, I don’t really want to delve into a nuanced discussion of moral systems.

I beg to differ, just look at the New Deal. When the Great Depression happened,…They elected a progressive candidate in FDR…

Same war, different battle. That was a strategy that worked, to an extent. However, what works once in war doesn’t always keep working. The oligarchs learned from FDR and, when we tried this again in 2020, it failed. American oligarchs have a stranglehold on the media and decades more knowledge in how to manipulate voters. Eventually we will need progressive representation, but a lot is going to have to happen to make that possible again. We might get lucky if Trump’s presidency fails in the right ways. If nothing else, Trump is great as an agent of chaos. Maybe he shuffles the deck and suddenly we have a credible electoral strategy, but I’m not counting on it.

American society did not descend into lawlessness and anarchy.

I disagree. The rise of organized crime in the US didn’t start with prohibition. It started because oligarch strategies to divide the public on ethnic lines effectively created a bunch of isolated resistance forces. It evolved into something else, but the justification these groups used was always that their group had been unfairly shut out of prosperity. If they weren’t going to be given their due, then they would take it. It’s more self serving than a targeted assassination, but it was definitely lawlessness and anarchy.

It’s also worth noting that FDR is exactly the kind of person that the current mob would be putting on the list of assassination targets.

So far, exactly one particularly bad oligarch has been assassinated. You are making some pretty wild assumptions based on a single data point. In an oblique way, this reminds me of your point on utilitarianism. We don’t know with certainty what any action we take might lead to. Maybe this CEO was going to be the next FDR, or maybe the next Hitler. Maybe Trump will have a change of heart (or grow one) and be the next FDR himself. Anything is possible but, call me a skeptic. This is not a valid way to argue anything.

This is where you lose me. You can’t know these things. You can’t know the future 50 years in advance.

No, but I can know history, and I can see what’s going on in the world around me. Wealth and power in this country are both almost entirely in the hands of psychopaths. The psychopaths have a global disinformation machine with effectively infinite funding. The harder we have pushed for change, the more effort they have put into dividing the people into subgroups and convincing them to fight each-other. It’s a strategy that works extremely well. It’s human nature that the only way to heal those divisions is to give people a common enemy, and that has to be the oligarchs. Moving society is like advancing the plot in a book. You can’t convince the masses to do something because it is the smart thing to do. They need a narrative, and assassinations make for an interesting story. I guarantee you that the oligarchs are more concerned about that aspect of this event than anything else. Suddenly all these people across all of their carefully created subgroups are unified in expressing hatred for their actual enemies.

If not for the fact that a felon is about to become President again, I would want some form of justice in the law for the assassin.

Maybe we should run him in 2028. I think it would be a landslide.

“Deny, Defend, Depose 2028!”

Making exceptions is never a good idea.

Why not? The whole reason we have judicial discretion is that every crime departs from the platonic ideal in one way or another.

The working class has been losing a class war for decades without ever properly noticing that it was happening. Working Americans have been dying in that war, and now someone struck back.

I’ll be sold on the “no exceptions” ideal when we haul in the corporate murderers alongside the people who fought back.

Jury nullification is the other acceptable option.

The US doesn’t have a parliament. Neither party talks to everyone. There are women and ethnic minorities in Congress, which is definitely not what was originally intended.

It’s just the inconvenient truth. You are all so desperate to prove that you’re opposed to the system, because deep down you know that you’re a part of it.

Shifting goalposts. You have not addressed my criticism of your goofy point here. Oppressors, collaborators, and rebels all have to exist within the systems that exist, and that has nothing to do with each group’s intentions for the future of that system.

None of us can escape this guilt.

The assignment of moral culpability is reliant on the ability of a person to make a choice. When I pick up my prescriptions, that has no impact on whether or not little Billy gets his heart operation. No choice I could make would impact that, except through my political activity or, failing that, through some sort of violence.

Deontological Ethics (you decided to debate morality with a Theology BA) is the dominant system in the West, and it does not put any moral requirement on agents to actively oppose injustice. I personally reject that system, but it is dominant in the Abrahamic religions. Collective responsibility is not incompatible with this system, but has been almost entirely rejected in Christian traditions, the only real exception being original sin.

I personally subscribe to a mix of different utilitarian systems, and utilitarianism has no concept of collective moral responsibility. It would also not require someone to refrain from living or functioning in an imperfect society. If becoming a hermit and living off your own garden won’t help, then there is no obligation to do so.

I can’t naively cheer on this stuff like you, because I understand how futile and counterproductive it is towards the end goal of reform.

I certainly don’t claim perfect knowledge, but I feel confident in saying that I’m far from naive. I think I have a better understanding of both the morality and the politics than you do. Politically speaking, the kinds of reforms required to fix our healthcare system are far greater than anything ever achieved without at least a credible threat of violence.

The amount of wealth opposing us is nearly unfathomable, and it has control of the media, what’s left of our educational system, and the means to spy on our communication. An uninformed democracy is no democracy.

On top of that, we now have a fascist executive with both the legislative and judicial branches under his thumb. If we somehow manage to oust the fascists, it will be almost impossible to keep the neoliberals from regaining power. As we are seeing in France right now, Neoliberals greatly prefer losing to a fascist over losing to a socialist/progressive.

There is no plan of action that gives us a violence free route to an equitable healthcare system for at least the next 50 years. Violence won’t be sufficient on it’s own, but it will be necessary. Public support for this shooter actually decreases the amount of actual violence that might be otherwise required.

I still have hope and determination to change things, and for that I get called a collaborationist

No, I didn’t call you a collaborationist because of your hope and determination. Hope and determination are great, but aren’t worth much without a viable plan of action. We have tried all the “right” things for decades and have only lost ground. Maybe it’s time to move on to the “next” thing.

Your demand for a civil approach is literally what collaborationists have always done. We aren’t going to win by limiting ourselves to a system designed by our adversaries to keep us from winning. I know you found comfort in the idea that history is over, but that’s just not the case. I wish it were.

That is such a lazy bullshit argument. “You have to exist in the system as it is now, so you can’t possibly oppose that system”. There is a difference between doing what you must to survive in a system, and opposing efforts to reform that system.

Maybe. If so, yesterday was a step in the right direction.

Collaborationists don’t count.

It helped my mood considerably. Stress can be deadly.

Semi-stable based on recent events.

Non violent action has never brought power to the table without a separate violent movement adding pressure. Not even Gandhi or Dr. Martin Luther King.