butterfinger

Thank you for claryfying! Would you mind to elaborate on that? I'm not a huge fan of Darkthrone and while I know that many of their songs are anti-judaism I don't remember any racist lyrics.

"Popular" is pretty hard to define in a genre like black metal. Looking at "The greatest black metal bands" [0] I found 6 bands where at least one of the members has ties to right-wing ideology with 3 of the bands being outright neo-nazi music.

[0] http://www.ranker.com/list/best-black-metal-bands-and-artist...

Anti-religious music seems to invite anti-semitic people, so I'd guess there are more racist bands in black metal than in other genres. But the majority of black metal bands are not racist. There's a small fraction of bands where we know that some members subscribe to right-wing ideology and some of those bands have racist lyrics, but overall it's negligible.

Which Burzum album do you consider to have overtly antisemitic messages? Varg only started being a Neo-Nazi in prison and after releasing most of his influential music. So this says nothing about Darkthrone.

That sounds pretty harsh. Did your wife talk to her doctor about the withdrawal symptoms?

When I quit, I've taken it for about two years. I was able to prevent the brain zaps by making a concious effort to not move my head or eyes too fast. The other symptoms persisted for some weeks-months.

To me, it felt like the moment after some limb went numb and you start to feel it again, just for the whole body. And I had some visual effects like everything being brighter for a moment. It's not painful per se but very disorienting and irritating and it happens several times per hour.

I probably would not have avoided the drugs based on the description, because it doesn't sound as bad as it feels, but I would never quit a SSRI without tapering off again.

Venlafaxine seems to be one of the worst SNRIs/SSRIs wrt discontinuation syndrome. Except for the nausea, I had the same experiences when quitting cold turkey. The most problematic symptom for me were the "electric shocks" when moving my eyes or head to fast.

For me, getting off venlafaxine was way harder than quitting tilidine, tramadol or the z-drugs.

Could be that one: http://www.davidbrin.com/transparentsociety1.html

Yeah, you're right. We're probably on the same page about both of these methods being coercive.

My initial point was just that there's probably a big number of cases of mental illness in traditional societies that we can't diagnose because our ways of coping with these are so different that they manifest in completely different ways.

But is it any more coercive than putting those kids into psychiatric care and putting them on drugs that just make them not feel anything anymore?

I'm schizotypal myself and I can say those methods of coping with this have not helped me at all. By now, I understand most of my paranormal thoughts are just windows into the unconcious mind. I think that having a centuries old tradition of identifying and using these thoughts would have helped me better than talking to psychiatrists that don't have the slightest clue about what goes on in my mind.

Another point that this article does not discuss is that in many of the "less coercive" societies, schizophrenia or related diseases are not seen as a disease or problematic at all.

McKenna writes: "A shaman is someone who swims in the same ocean as the schizophrenic, but the shaman has thousands and thousands of years of sanctioned technique and tradition to draw upon. In a traditional society, if you exhibited “schizophrenic” tendencies, you are immediately drawn out of the pack and put under the care and tutelage of master shamans. You are told: “You are special. Your abilities are very central to the health of our society. You will cure. You will prophesy. You will guide our society in its most fundamental decisions.”" [0]

[0]: http://www.scribd.com/doc/12470230/Eros-and-the-Eschaton-rou...

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_construction_of_schizop...

This applies only to philosophy because it is about always using the first link in the article.

> We're all just people who want to spend our days doing and making things in a way that feels valuable

"doing and making things in a way that feels valuable" requires a belief that the things your company do are valuable.

> One key thing people need to learn is: Slides exist to supplement what is being said.

Agreed. In my opinion, the slides should supplement the presentation and sum it up in as few words as possible. Having concise slides that sum up a presentation makes it so much easier to go over the presentation and learn the subject more thoroughly (edit: assuming you have access to the slides).