Extremely against any kind of murder over difference of opinion, but this obsession with making it look like an evil coordinated group was behind this killing is legitimately one of the larger threats to US I've witnessed in my life.
Making this event into an excuse to crack down on any kind of group opens a door that nobody, left or right, should ever want open. JD and co. are playing a deadly game here.
The FBI is not creating a narrative, never mind shifting it. They are trying to explain what currently best fits the evidence. Much of what they said was clearly premature. IIRC they even caught the wrong guy initially and then had to apologize.
By "the people involved" I mean those who would propose to make lists of leftist organizations and do whatever unspecified thing NYT is vaguely alluding to.
They intend to play a deadly game. And they've been ginning up the specter of a vast and dangerous left-wing conspiracy for a long time. Look at what QAnon's beliefs actually were, and their intersection with Evangelical Christian beliefs about the inherently satanic nature of secular and leftist ideology. Trump was accusing the media of being run by leftists coordinating with the DNC to steal the election from him in 2016. "The Nazis were really leftists","BLM was a leftist terrorist organization burning down entire cities","leftists tried to kill Trump once," etc. They've been laying the foundations for a road that only leads to one place. Hell, they were talking about a "cold civil war" back in the Obama days.
Just look at the reactions from the right and the government after the shooting[0]. Immediate calls for war and violence. The narrative was constructed and deployed everywhere, even on Hacker News - that this is the evil of "the left" [and trans people] on display. I'm not claiming it was a coordinated psyop on the part of the Trump administration or anything - I do believe the right sincerely considers the left to be vermin only wort crushing under their boot - but as many people have pointed out in other contexts, you don't always need a conspiracy, sometimes you just need a confluence of interests.
I only just learned about the "Horst Wessel effect" in relation to this[1] and it's chilling how much history is seeming to repeat itself here. The only question to me is how far Trump administration is able to take this? Simply harassing leftist organizations isn't that unusual - the US has been doing that since the end of World War 2. Right wing militias are going to keep killing "leftists," again, that's just America. I hope this administration just isn't organized enough to take us back to the 1940s instead of just the 1960s or 1950s.
Note that when I say "leftist" I implicitly include LGBTQ people, black people, immigrants, feminists, Jews and a lot of other groups that for some reason are "left coded" to the right. When the Overton Window shifts so far that the Democratic Party are considered Marxist by half the country, "the left" encompasses a hell of a lot of people.
There's nothing free-flow about TikTok, though. Like Twitter/X, Instagram, etc it's actually a carefully curated experience that can be tuned opaquely by whoever runs it to control the flow of information. The US took umbrage to this being in the direct hands of a foreign adversary.
This is a great case of actually putting in the steps to prove something many people implicitly or observationally assume is true. You only have a few seconds (at best) to grab someone's attention, so it stands to reason that a short email will be more focused and likely to grab their attention.
I'd be curious to see how this works in an internal corporate setting. I tend to notice that 1+ page email blasts about some technical or process change at my employer (who I do not speak for) tends to get ignored. If you ask people if they know about the process change, they generally have no idea what I'm talking about. A quick email that says "Hey we've migrated the schmission engine from forkilate to quantilate, please stop using forkilate by August 7th" tends to get a lot of attention!
It is being used off label all over the place for heart conditions. That’s why i take it. The on label use is actually pretty annoying for the first few months.
No. You get hard easier and it takes longer to go down, but without (mental) stimulation, there is no erection. (for the vast majority of people taking sane dosages)
Not OP, but their statement read as if that effect wears off after the body develops tolerance to the medication. So, yes they did for a while (it was annoying) but no they don't now (for a few months)
There is NO tolerance development, on the contrary, increasing vascular health by long term PDE5 treatment and increasing psychological confidence over time make the treatment more effective with time.
You're taking about slightly different things - you about ED, the other person about "boner all day". They are not the same thing.
Slightly off topic, but this is why I don't really trust these "no tolerance" claims. That claim is usually very specific, while people's understanding of "tolerance" is often quite a bit wider.
I take 3 medications which each make "no tolerance" claims based on scientific studies. But my subjective experience is that all of them do build tolerance in some way - the subjective effect does wear off with time and taking a break does reduce the tolerance. One possible cause is mistaking the intended effect (ED) with side-effects (boner all day).
The first time I took sildenafil I had a bad headache and nausea, the next couple of times I didn't suffer from nausea and the headache wasn't as severe. I don't suffer from any side effects now other than my nose getting a bit stuffy every now and then, so in that sense I developed a tolerance to the medication's side effects. The boner effects still work just as reliably as day one, no tolerance development for me there.
you are lucky, in addition to the migraines and stuffy nose, sildenafil altered my vision making everything looked blue tinted. I tried a couple other drugs in that class but the migraines never went away.
Long term PDE 5 treatment lowers estrogen and increases testosterone. As a consequence of that, and its cardiovasvular effects, it makes it easier for the body to turn fat into energy by fat-browning, to grow muscles and to lose fat.
I don't know how people imagine viagra working - it's not like you take a pill, you continue browsing the internet, reading news, and suddenly, a boner lifts your desk.
Was news to me to read in a sibling that it also requires mental stimulation. I thought it was purely a physical inducement by the drug, as many drugs for other purposes induce a physical response without requiring mental effort.
>it's not like you take a pill, you continue browsing the internet, reading news, and suddenly, a boner lifts your desk.
Aside from the lifting the desk part, that's exactly how I imagine it working - and how it should work. You mean it also requires special sexual arousal? Well, even that it shouldn't be that difficult.
That’s not how it works at all. As someone with recent onset of ED taking viagra regularly, it’s been fantastic but it just makes me function like I should.
It takes about an hour to take effect (usually less for me) and lasts a little over 4 hours with some lingering effects for several hours later, with diminishing effects towards the 4 and above hours.
If I’m sexually stimulated during that time physically and or mentally, everything works like it should (erection). If during that time even when I would normally see peak effects around the 50 min to 90 min mark I’m driving or doing taxes or whatever non-sexually stimulating activity one might do, no erection at all.
> Viagra should make you "pop" regardless of what activity you're doing.
No it doesn't. It simply makes the effect of sexual stimulation more effective. If you body is not trying to engorge the penis it has little to no effect on that part of you.
Tadalafil works well for getting more out of your workouts too (I take that). Gives you an overall feeling of well-being too (better than any cup of joe), I no-bullshit begin my day with it.
I know a former executive of the company that was developing this drug for cardiovascular problems. He told me that they sold it because it had this "side-effect" that they couldn't get rid of. ;-)
Marketing is the key to business success.
(Talking to you, tech people)
Marketing as I was taught in a fortune 500 is the end to end process of delivering a product/service to the target customer.
Good product is the table stakes. (entry requirement)
Everything else is in the marketing plan.
We don't know how many medications actually function. We put them inside of increasingly complex animals and study the results to see what they do (and hope they don't die). Botox was intended to treat muscle spasms. Powerful anti-depressants are regularly prescribed for pain from nerve damage in people with no mental health issues. And MDMA isn't prescribed for anything because the powers that be prematurely decided to ban it based on completely fabricated claims, which I assume is part of a massive hundred-year conspiracy to make sure people... keep dying from alcohol? Not totally sure about that last one, but it's hard to deny the facts.
I work on health equity things in healthcare occasionally. I think this is so dumb. MDMA rejected by panel recently for evaluating rescheduling for use in PTSD.
“ Panelists pointed to flawed studies that could have skewed the results, missing follow-up data on patient outcomes and a lack of diversity among participants. The vast majority of patients were white, with only five Black patients receiving MDMA, raising questions about the generalizability of the results.
“The fact that this study has so many white participants is problematic because I don’t want something to roll out that only helps this one group,” said Elizabeth Joniak-Grant, the group’s patient representative. “
this is the case with almost all drugs. for example almost every antidepressants was the result of a weight loss or something like that.
drug research is worse than training an LLM. you feed it to random people and then compare effects with initial conditions and of something looks good you try with more control.
I think it's a meaningful comparison still. As a human I can comb through tons of prior art to learn my trade, and that's how we learn most of what we know.
Yes, an AI requires more, but it's still the same basic idea. I'm still not comfortable with using AI to replace artistic functions in particular for a variety of reasons, but the person you're replying to is definitely within the realm of reason.
Making this event into an excuse to crack down on any kind of group opens a door that nobody, left or right, should ever want open. JD and co. are playing a deadly game here.