I get that. I just felt the need to defend lilly a bit because I’ve been reading his books since I was a teenager. It’s like when you read something inaccurate about a topic you know. Just wanting to correct the record somewhat.

Lilly wasn’t a nut job. His dolphin experiments ultimately failed, but it takes courage to try radical scientific experiments. Consider the common attitude towards science in academia these days where so many people fudge their results because they’re afraid of being considered failures. Failure is a part of science because you can learn from it. One of the cool things about Lilly’s experiments is that he didn’t feel the need to commercialise his experiments. They were mostly based on pure scientific inquiry.

Adding to this because I feel a bit annoyed at how John C Lilly gets so badly represented sometimes. He wasn’t a nut job. He was a weird guy with a very unique personality. He had an intense passion for knowledge and scientific inquiry. He also had a massive ego. But he was a reasonably self reflective person. Read his books and watch interviews with him. He wasn’t just a hedonist who got addicted to K. He always had a very non typical experience of reality. He had hallucinations of angels as a child, partly due to a heavily religious upbringing. It’s totally understandable that he was primed for strange trips when he got into psychedelics. But he was able to function as a professional. He had multiple government funded research projects during his career, medical credentials, and owned electrical engineering patents. His characterisation as a kook is very similar to the crap that people say about Tim Leary, who had a successful academic career before being kicked out of Harvard and was actually a very rational person.

This statement from the article is a bit misleading. Lilly had this hallucination during a ketamine trip after injecting 150mg. The article makes it sound like a persistent delusion arising from daily use. Lilly abused ketamine for sure, but he didn’t lose his mind. He was a guy who seemed to have strange ideas his whole life. https://www.intuition.org/txt/lilly.htm

I tell you what Jack, he’s full of piss and vinegar.

Another sad aspect to this is that often the parents think they are doing the right thing. They’re wrong of course. Some people have mental issues that lead them to “magical thinking”. I know some people who are anti Vax, and are very health conscious in all other respects. They’re just ignorant. One of the founders of permaculture in Australia wrote about being against the covid vaccine during the lockdowns here. I used to live in one of the villages he designed, and the people and their beliefs were mostly lovely. But they have a distrust of science that makes them vulnerable to dangerous ideas.

The only way expansion works I’m Australia is if we build new cities like what they have in Europe and US. Commuting 3 hours to work is not feasible for anyone.

I grew up in the country side working on farms. Post covid I can’t even afford a house there because boomers priced me out. My expectations have been meager my whole life. It took me six months to land a shitty 60s falling down 2 bedroom place during our housing crises. In Australia many people get evicted after 12 months and lose their savings to moving costs. You Americans need to stop telling people from other countries what to do.

Ah yes. The American libertarian position. If you find an affordable rental in Australia during a housing crisis let me know.

Whatever mate. You don’t know a fucking thing about the job market and housing market in Australia. Get fucked seppo.

You are commenting from an American perspective. There are no houses in Australian capital cities for less than 100k. And there are no job opportunities for many professions outside the capital cities.

Its not the workers who are to blame. Its the folks who aspires to live on “passive income” who used housing as a vehicle to steal wealth from the younger generations. I finished high school during the GFC and everything about the housing market has been fucked since then.

Mate, I have an electrical engineering degree and work for a big chip design company. Wages have stagnated to the point where I can never afford afford to buy a house, and rent eats nearly half my wages. I live a modest life and the only time I travelled was when I was working full time in Europe. Never been on a holiday. There’s literally nothing I could have done to fix that except find a squat to live, or put up with share houses into my thirties. No family I can live with. Its out of many peoples control. The house I rent is valued at 1.2 million in Melbourne. It was 370k 15 years ago.

The average worker has no choice but to funnel their money up the wealth chain through rent and mortgages. That’s the bulk of it.

BTW, this is what an Aussie bush doof looks like. Music courtesy of Russian psychedelic boffins Kindzadza and Psykovsky. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCrIPWFXEbU

Thank you for your address Mr or Mrs Ambassador.

Went to an Aussie bush doof as a teenager and had some Americans come smoke bongs with me at my camp site. They were dressed up as ninja turtles. After a while I realised one of them had his plums hanging out his shorts and they were painted green. Americans love taking things too far.

The problem is that mainstream media has less integrity now than it did 30 years ago. The national broadcaster in Australia for example has been infiltrated by right wing people (BTW I don’t want to get rid of ABC, just wish it was better). To cut through the propaganda, people need to acquire the skills to find their own media sources. Unfortunately that also means getting technical ability with computers now. Best thing I can think of is helping less adept people to navigate the space. Otherwise we end up with a much weaker democracy. Listening to C-SPAN callers in 2022-2024 scared the hell out of me and made me think Trump was gonna get voted back in. People stuck in legacy media space are getting brainwashed. I wish it was easier to curate RSS feeds for non-technical friends and family.

Freedom until it’s taken from you by those who are wealthier and more powerful.

When you boil it down, being right wing means you value property rights over human rights, and left wing is vice versa. Right wing is maintaining wealth and power, and don’t let anyone else get in the way of it.