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Joined 26 days ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2025

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  • As far as I can tell, there is nothing in chiropractic practice that is not quackery.

    Think about it this way: the basic practice is the idea that you have misalignments causing problems, and that you can manually manipulate the body back into alignment. But then what keeps you from getting unaligned again as soon as you stand up? (Nothing, of course! That’s why you have to keep going back!) Take, for example, the common inguinal hernia. You can manually manipulate it so that you’re forcing the intestines back through the abdominal wall. And it absolutely relieves the immediate discomfort. But you’re not actually fixing anything; you need surgery to stitch the tear up. If you have weak support structures causing a problem, then physical therapy is going to create a permanent solution. If you have a herniated disc that’s not healing and causing referred pain, then you need to surgically fix the herniation.





  • I opt for bitcoin because it has more utility value for me.

    My bank makes it an enormous pain in my ass to buy things from overseas vendors; they won’t process any payments that are going outside of the US border. The rationale is ‘fraud’, even when you’re dealing with well-known and trusted vendors. Even when I try calling my banks and telling them to pre-authorize the charges, they won’t go through. The only way I can get around that within the established financial system is by using a 3rd party payment service; those 3rd party services make their money by lopping off a percentage of that purchase. E.g., if I’m buying something for $1000 from China (and we’re going to ignore tariffs, duties, taxes, and shipping costs for the moment), then I may have to pay $1040 for it, because of the fees that are taken out. On the other hand, if I’m buying from a trusted vendor, and I use bitcoin, I can just send it to them. Bitcoin doesn’t care where it’s going, and–assuming you don’t care about speed of confirmations–transaction fees can be quite a bit lower than using any other payment system. (And, BTW, transaction fees are built into all payment processing systems; it’s just not apparent to individuals on the purchasing end. That means that if something costs .001btc, then I have to send, say, .0010001btc to the vendor, but then the)

    Speculation doesn’t play a role in it for me.

    I have no direct use for gold; I can’t plate connectors.






  • …Except that gold, like the dollar, and like bitcoin, has the value it does because people believe it does. Sure, gold’s a great semiconductor. But if that was all we used it for, the price of gold would be a tine fraction of what it is. Diamonds are great as abrasives and in certain cutting applications, but that’s all synthetic now. Natural diamonds only have high value because of artificial scarcity and advertising.


  • Semester3383@lemmy.worldtoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldGrowing a personality
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    4 days ago

    You cant deal with or compromise with them

    You kind of have to, since government relies on the consent of the governed. When enough of them will no longer consent to being governed, your government will fail. But if you really want to address that problem, you look at the reasons why people turn to fascism; it’s not something that happens in a vacuum.

    In this case, the dems are handling it badly; they’re trying to move to the right in order to give the fascists the things that they say they want. But what they say they want isn’t really the root issue, which means that dems can never go far enough right to win their vote.



  • My spouse had a therapist that tried very hard to convince them that they had MPD (before it was rolled into DID) and repressed memories; they dumped the counselor. And yeah, they have CPTSD from familial abuse.

    The perspective I’m coming at this from is that a lot of these super-fringe ideas really got off the ground with the Satanic Panic that started very small in the late 70s, and went on through the 90s; you had groups like RAMCOA (Ritual Abuse, Mind Control and Organised Abuse Special Interest Group) that pushed really wacky ideas as being absolutely true, you had people insisting that repressed memories were 100% real rather than being things that you’d simply forgotten or fabricated memories (the work of Dr. Elizabeth Loftus shows how memories can be fabricated, and strongly suggests that ‘repressed memories’ don’t exist in the way that was popularized in the 80s), that multiple personalities were ‘fractured’ personalities that sprang into being to protect the self, and so on. The people that came up with these batshit ideas are still around, pushing the same nonsense, but they keep changing the names to try and give them a veneer of reasonableness.

    And yet, if that’s the way that shit really worked, you should see that often with highly traumatized people; you should see DID and repressed memories in soldiers that have been in intense combat, in torture victims, in people that have lived through extreme, long-lasting abuse from parents and partners. Instead you see people that can’t forget the terrible things that happened, people that have a trauma response with certain sounds, smells, etc. (triggers).


  • Semester3383@lemmy.worldtoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldGrowing a personality
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    5 days ago

    All of politics is a compromise. You can’t actually accomplish anything if you have a dogmatic approach to it. That’s why Sanders, who I very nearly wholeheartedly support, is so rarely able to actually get anything done. And bless him for it!, he’s the moral compass we need! But to get things done, politicians need to make deals, sometimes with shitty people.

    I don’t like everything that Buttigieg represents. But I like him a lot more than Newsom, who throws trans people under the buss without provocation. I certainly like him more than Joe Walsh, the ‘former’ (?) Tea Party conservative that now claims to be a Democrat.