I know many of us want to help everyone be better people. But the harsh reality is some people just can't or it takes way longer than others to improve themselves.

The only thing you can fully control is your ability to tell and show them how to be better. As long as you've done that you've made your point.

It is on them after to listen and follow if they want to. If not it sucks, but that's just life. Too many people keep giving those confident with their ignorance, stubbornness, and/or stupidity too much doubt

While they may have been purposely misled to believe something, at a certain point they have to put in the work to see if it's really true or not and be willing to change their mind if need be. We can't endlessly baby them because our education system and government aren't functioning exactly as they should.

I felt the movie somewhat showed the truth. I agree that religious doings are based on mentality. If mentality and power to understand the reality is not correct then such things happen judging women for what they wear. Talking about immigration I believe it's somewhat west created it, first they invaded other small countries I mean USA then created COUP and distalizibed the country. When the invaded countries leaders become corrupt, people have to migrate to other countries for education and whatsoever purpose. I don't wanna speak about Africans What the World did to them is horrible. So now when these western countries are facing the same problem what they did back to other countries. Like the British destroyed, robbed and partitioned India. Like I can go on about many countries which are destroyed. So talking about invading and destroying things doesn't suit the west because they also did the same thing to other countries.

For folks who read a lot and otherwise engage with ideas, where do you go to talk about things that spark your curiosity? Obviously, there are forums and social media, but I guess I'm looking for a place for deeper, more meaningful discussion. Have had several careers across like a dozen countries, so social and intellectual isolation is a problem.

People are way too quick to blame the West—especially the US—for being "too woke." But if that influence disappeared tomorrow, Islamic extremism and other forms of religious authoritarianism would face far less international pushback. Many governments would have much less pressure to answer for persecuting women, quer people, religious minorities, apostates, and non-believers. Just look at Afghanistan. The West is far from perfect, but I'd rather live in a world where governments are criticized for violating human rights than one where persecution is accepted as culture or religion.

People often criticize the West—particularly the US—for promoting "woke" values abroad. However I wonder whether that criticism overlooks the role Western governments and institutions have played in applying international pressure on issues such as women's rights, LGBTQ+ rights, religious freedom, and the treatment of minorities.

If that influence were to decline significantly, would countries with strong religious authoritarian or Islamist extremist movements face less external pressure over human rights abuses? Could we see more governments adopting or maintaining policies similar to those seen in places like Afghanistan, where women, religious minorities, apostates, and LGBTQ+ people face severe restrictions?

To what extent do you think Western influence has shaped global human rights norms, and what do you think would happen if that influence weakened?

I’m 24F, working in tech.

I always feel the need of having connected to a person who is genuinely smart, intellectually challenging, empathetic, challenges belief, brings different perspectives. I feel like I can’t settle for someone who doesn’t push me to think deeper. It’s not about being arrogant; it’s just that I crave that specific kind of mental connection to feel truly close to someone.

Does anyone else struggle with this?

Would love to hear your thoughts in comments.

[EDIT] ----

hi everybody, there are so many comments to respond to. thanks for sharing your perspectives. therefore, after reading all of them and broadening my views, i am posting this comment so as to express clearly what i meant from my post -

i work in data science domain - ml, dl, gen ai...and also preparing for this exam(in India) that is for hiring administrators for the govt. While preparing for this exam, i started studying humanities, and found everything so interesting. It had made more tolerant of diversity, beliefs, people ; as i was able to appreciate the origin of events, and able to appreciate them for who they are.

I don't know if that was the right time for me to put the post, as this exam prep itself only requires so much time as the syllabus is huge. but i posted because i was feeling like if i could discuss with somebody what i'm learning, to share diverse opinions and to be challenged, and to become even more smarter.

I have people around me who are smart, and i have moments of deep thinking, new learnings, but what i lack is somebody with whom i can talk to on any topic without having a fear that i should be smart, intelligent enough everytime to carry the conversation, to discuss business plans with (may be we can try one), and to be motivated each day (because i am feeling very tough to be motivated by myself every day) to pursue fitness, sports, working on tech concepts and the exam preparation, and to explore world with a completely different lens, i like running, trekking.

and i agree with people saying, you are not the smartest person, what i would like to have is somebody who is self aware, curious about learning new things, supporting each other to grow. i am aware that compatibility is what matters, but it also starts from some point, right? that point for me is - having fundamental and basic smartness and empathy, to be able to comprehend different opinions, challenge thoughts with evidences, data, insights, different angles, provide with newer lens of looking at things, while at the same time i should also strive for the same. everything else that is needed in a friendship/relationship comes after all of these for me, having met the basics.

I came across a YouTube video that I'm not going to name directly, but which was basically arguing, seriously, with data and an academic tone, that child marriage was necessary to sustain birth rates and that Western modernity and feminism had ruined everything. Presentable people, professional production, thousands of views, and almost nobody in the comments pushing back. What the hell is happening to parts of the right? And what the hell is wrong with YouTube for allowing this to exist on their platform?

Let's be honest about something: for years I heard people on the right, many of them legitimately concerned about the ideologization of culture, saying it was the left that wanted to normalize unspeakable things, that it was the left attacking children. And in some cases they may have been right. But what I just watched didn't come from any progressive. It came from people who present themselves as pronatalist, traditionalist, defenders of Western civilization, and they were arguing with statistics and historical comparisons that the West's demographic problem can be solved by reconsidering the protections for children that we take for granted. That is not conservatism. That is not traditionalism. That is exactly what they claim to be fighting against, dressed up in different vocabulary.

What I find most revealing is not the video itself but that almost nobody in the comments was questioning it. Thousands of views, the tone of an intellectual conversation between friends, and the audience processing it as if it were just another episode of heterodox cultural analysis. That doesn't happen in a vacuum. It happens when the ethical framework that made this kind of argument unthinkable has eroded enough that it no longer functions as an automatic filter.

And part of that erosion has a name: the Epstein case. No conspiracy theory is needed to recognize the cultural effect it produced. What that case demonstrated is that elite figures, intellectuals, politicians, businesspeople, participated in the systematic abuse of minors for decades with total impunity. And instead of being horrified by how sick and almost demonic our elites are, some people drew a different conclusion: that the protection of children is a hypocritical taboo that nobody actually follows, and that it can therefore be questioned. As if Charles Manson or the nobles who released lions on villages for entertainment were some kind of serious ethical benchmark. The fact that elites are corrupt doesn't turn their corruption into a moral argument. It just makes the elites corrupt, nothing more.

And the pronatalist argument itself makes no sense if you actually look at the real data. Until recently Japan socially tolerated things we now consider unacceptable, and I have seen blogs reporting that you can still find sixty-year-old men with schoolgirls in public parks. Japan's birth rate is through the floor. If child marriage or social tolerance of attraction to minors solved the demographic problem, Japan would be the most fertile country in the world. It isn't. African countries with child marriage have more children because they are agricultural societies where children are labor, not because marrying off girls produces birth rates. The argument is not only morally repugnant, it is empirically false.

Now, I know that as soon as I post this some atheist or progressive will rush to the comments to tell me that Christianity is equally degenerate, that some cardinal, that institutional cover-ups, blah blah. And they are right about one thing: the institutional corruption of the churches is real and documented. But confusing that corruption with genuine Christian ethics, the ethics of the text, the ethics of ordinary believers, is a categorical error that serves everyone's interests except the truth. The Christian text on this subject has no ambiguity whatsoever: whoever harms one of these little ones, it would be better for him to have a millstone tied around his neck and be thrown into the sea. There is no cultural exception, no demographic relativism, no "but historically in other societies."

The protection of childhood as a moral principle is not universal common sense or natural instinct. It is the product of a specific ethic, the ethic of dignity for the weak, the idea that every person has intrinsic value independent of their social utility. That idea did not exist in the Greco-Roman pagan world where infant exposure was completely legal. It did not exist in premodern cultures where children were property, not moral subjects. It arrived with a specific ethical revolution and that revolution has a name. When that ethic erodes, when churches empty and cultural relativism replaces the principles we considered universal, what returns is not something new. It is something very old.

And to be completely honest, because I am not going to pretend otherwise: the left does not have clean hands in this either. Foucault and various left-wing philosophers signed petitions to decriminalize pedophilia. There are documented videos of naked adults in front of children at pride parades. Multiple Democrats appear on the Epstein list. The problem does not have a single political color. What is specific to parts of the right is using civilizational and pronatalist rhetoric, which in other contexts can be entirely legitimate, as intellectual cover to arrive at the same places as always. And that deserves to be called out without pretending the problem belongs exclusively to one side.

What we are seeing with videos like this being accepted, monetized and practically applauded is that the world is paganizing itself. Not dramatically or visibly, but in the worst possible way: gradually, academically, with good production values and a reasonable tone. Civilizations do not collapse only through external invasions or mass immigration. They collapse when people stop believing in and defending what makes them what they are. The real decline of the West does not arrive with barbarians at the gate. It arrives when the people who claim to defend civilization begin using civilization's own intellectual tools to dismantle what makes it civilization. And that, unlike many things I write about, does not strike me as interesting or analyzable from a distance. It strikes me as simply horrible.

I believe globalist organizations (UN, WEF, etc) are trying to destroy western values, and more broadly the west itself. They are clearly lobbying sovereign nation states to import a destabilizing amount of immigrants from the third world, and it seems like the intent is to destabilize the west and replace the native population with demographics perhaps that are easier to control and are accustomed to lower qualities of life and less freedom.

They also prioritize importing religions like Islam and other ideologies that threaten western life and ideals. The UN fully funds and supports nations and groups that hate the west and actively talk badly about America.

It seems that the demographic planning is being coordinated globally, primarily through the UN, through various justifications (we need to increase our labor force) and through appealing to our sense of compassion to refugees into our countries.

Has anybody else thought the same? What other explanation could there be for western cultures simultaneously importing unsustainable numbers of immigrants into their countries, despite the policies most often being highly unpopular amongst voters?

I know this will be labeled as an unhinged conspiracy theory, but many IDW figures have brought this up including Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, the Weinstein brothers, and Konstantin Kisin.

I've pasted the transcript below— do you all agree or do you disagree?

"What defines fascism [is] that media, corporations [and] government should all be working together as a unit to push forward... whatever the agenda happens to be. And the WEF is a place where exactly that happens."

"The elites of all the different power hierarchies meet and conspire... despite the fact that they have no democratic standing... and no journalistic coverage."

"It's a pay-to-play arrangement that's made Schwab and his cronies exceptionally rich, and that's really demented and twisted the world in unbelievably pathological ways."

"Net Zero... ESG... Stakeholder capitalism. That's all pouring out of the WEF."

"Every stupid idea you can possibly imagine in the last 15 years has been promoted by the Davos crowd."

Source: https://x.com/ThomasSowell/status/1977883298161373352

Logic, evidence and meeting minimal standards of politeness & rigour.

Compelling emotional appeal!

"Steel manning" your opponent, avoiding fallacies and trying to mitigate for cognitive biases.

Reddit would seem to be an ideal place for that and sometimes it is but quite often the opposite. My "solution" has been blocking thousands, anyone have a better idea?

Where and how can we have intellectual engagement regarding differences?

Read it here if you want:

https://www.therapeganginquiry.org/

​

But here's a summary. Basically it alleges at least 250,000 UK women and girls were trafficked for many years by groups or gangs consisting of mostly Pakistani men and law enforcement and political parties intentionally turned a blind eye to it or gave those caught a slap on the wrist that encouraged them to re-offend and others to do the same.

​

After doing some looking, this isn't a new thing and discussions about it even goes back up to 5 years ago.

​

If there's even a shred of truth to this, shit is about to get atrocious for immigrants in the UK and maybe the rest of Europe.

​

I don't know if people have been keeping up with the situation, but people have been becoming more radicalized against immigration to the point there's been mass protests and riots whenever a middle eastern immigrant is confirmed to have done a crime.

​

The recent case of the Nowak individual being handcuffed and dying after he was stabbed by one after being accused of bigotry already drove people up a wall and this coming out after isn't going to make things better obviously.

​

I think there's a high chance the UK will see some mass violent civilian unrest or conflict over this that could have easily been avoided if people were more nuanced about the topic of immigration.

​

I started taking SSRIs a week ago on a prescription, and I had absolutely no libido whatsoever and believe me, I’m a pretty horny guy. When I asked about it, my sister told me that when she was 14, she was also prescribed them, and for a whole year she felt like she had no emotions and her libido disappeared too this scared her so much that she stopped taking them altogether.

If you look up studies on this, “SSRI face” is real, and for people who’ve been on these medications for more than two years, the effects are irreversible and permanent. It doesn’t surprise me that so many of these “asexual” people are women between the ages of 14 and 25, to whom psychiatrists seem to prescribe SSRIs as if they were flu pills.

Avoid using them, they cause permanent damage, and you’re seeing the effects in society. I don't say "real" asexual doesn't exist, but i have deep belief that this exponential grow is not natural.

Redditor_IDWstar18: I don't get it. Everyone agrees Trump is evil. Like, everyone. And yet he won an electoral majority. Twice.

Psychologist: Sit with that for a second. You just described two different populations giving you opposite answers, and only one of them surprised you.

Redditor_IDWstar18: Because the online consensus is right and the electorate is wrong.

Psychologist: Or — and I want you to actually consider this rather than reflexively reject it — your "everyone" isn't a sample of the country. It's a sample of people who chose to spend their evening arguing about politics on a comment thread. That's not "everyone." That's a specific personality type, self-selected, mostly talking to itself, where the loudest and most extreme voice gets the most upvotes and therefore the most visibility. You're not measuring public opinion. You're measuring what wins a popularity contest in a room you already agree with.

Redditor_IDWstar18: So you're saying I'm in a bubble.

Psychologist: I'm saying you have direct, repeated, real-world evidence — an actual election, twice — that your online "consensus" doesn't match the electorate. And your instinct wasn't to wonder about the room you're standing in. It was to conclude the electorate is crazy. That's the tell.

---

Redditor_IDWstar18: Fine. Let's talk capitalism then. It's irredeemable. Legalized exploitation. Everyone I talk to agrees.

Psychologist: Everyone you talk to, where, specifically?

Redditor_IDWstar18: Reddit. Twitter. My friend group.

Psychologist: Same populations as before, talking to each other, about a system that — depending how you poll it — somewhere around two-thirds of the actual country still says they'd rather live under than the alternatives on offer. Including plenty of people who'll tell a pollster, in the same breath, that capitalism has serious problems.

Redditor_IDWstar18: That's just propaganda. People don't know what's good for them.

Psychologist: I want you to notice what you just did. Confronted with a gap between your in-group's consensus and the broader population's stated preference, your move wasn't "maybe I'm wrong" or even "maybe they're not wrong, just weighing things differently." It was "they've been fooled." That's not a small move — it's the move that closes the loop. It means no contrary evidence can ever reach you, because disagreement itself just gets reinterpreted as proof of manipulation. You've built a belief system with no exit.

Redditor_IDWstar18: Okay, but the system does produce massive inequality. That's not made up.

Psychologist: Correct. And that's a real, substantive, arguable critique — wealth concentration, generational mobility, healthcare costs. Reasonable people disagree hard about how to fix all of that, and you're allowed to think the fixes need to be drastic. That's not what I'm diagnosing. I'm diagnosing the jump from "this system has serious problems" to "everyone who doesn't want it abolished tomorrow is either a victim or a villain." That jump isn't economics anymore. That's identity talking, not analysis.

---

Redditor_IDWstar18: Fine, but anyone to the right of me is basically far-right at this point. Centrist Democrats, mainstream Labour, all of it.

Psychologist: By what reference point?

Redditor_IDWstar18: By mine.

Psychologist: Right — that's the thing I want you to hear back. "Far right" isn't a fixed coordinate on a map, it's a position relative to wherever you're standing. If you've spent years drifting outward inside a room that only rewards the most extreme voice, the goalposts move with you and you don't feel the motion, because everyone around you moved too. Meanwhile the party you're calling far-right hasn't necessarily moved at all — its actual platform, its voting record, where its own median voter sits on a generic left-right policy scale — none of that requires your impression of it to be accurate. You can check it against what the party actually does, what it actually votes for, where political scientists who study this for a living place it. That's a fact about the party. "Everyone to my right is far-right" is a fact about your position, dressed up as a fact about theirs.

Redditor_IDWstar18: So nothing's ever far-right then? That feels like it lets a lot of stuff off the hook.

Psychologist: No — some things genuinely are far-right, and you shouldn't talk yourself out of calling those things what they are. I'm only saying the word stops doing any work once you apply it to everyone who isn't standing exactly where you're standing. At that point it's not a category anymore, it's a synonym for "disagrees with me," and you've made the term useless for the cases where it actually matters.

---

Redditor_IDWstar18: One more. I don't see any violence coming from the left. None. It's always the right.

Psychologist: What would you have to see to update on that?

Redditor_IDWstar18: I don't know. I just haven't seen it.

Psychologist: That's the part worth sitting with — not whether it's true, but the shape of "I haven't seen it." If your information diet is the same self-selected rooms we've been talking about all session, then "I haven't seen it" mostly means "it wasn't covered, or wasn't covered as violence, in the specific feed I read." That's not the same claim as "it didn't happen." Political violence research generally finds both sides produce it, in different forms and different proportions depending how you draw the categories — and reasonable people can argue hard about which side does more, under which definition, in which year. That's a real empirical argument. "I have literally never seen any" isn't a position in that argument. It's a description of your feed.

Redditor_IDWstar18: So you're saying I'm just not looking.

Psychologist: I'm saying "I haven't personally encountered evidence of X" is one of the weakest forms of evidence there is, precisely because it's so sensitive to where you stand. It feels like a fact about the world. It's actually a fact about your vantage point. Worth knowing the difference before you build an argument on top of it.

---

Redditor_IDWstar18: You're making it sound like I'm sick for having opinions.

Psychologist: No — I'm pointing at four specific mechanisms, and none of them require you to be wrong about any individual issue:

1. False consensus. A self-selected online crowd feels like "everyone" because you only see the people who showed up to that room. The room is not the country.
2. Negativity bias in what gets attention. Outrage and condemnation posts get more engagement than measured ones, so the loudest content in any feed is systematically the most extreme content — not the most representative.
3. Status spirals with no cost to escalating. In an anonymous in-group, the most extreme take wins the most social credit, and there's nothing pulling anyone back toward the middle. So the conversation drifts further out over time, and nobody notices it drifting because everyone's drifting together.
4. Identity fusion. Once "I am a leftist" (or anything else) becomes who you are rather than a set of policy preferences you hold, disagreement stops being a data point and starts being an attack. And you don't update in response to an attack — you defend.
5. Moving goalposts. Labels like "far-right" are relative to your own position. If your position has drifted, the label drifts with it without you feeling the motion, because the whole room moved together.
6. Vantage point blindness. "I haven't seen X" is a description of your feed, not a measurement of the world. Mistaking the two lets you hold a confident position on something you've never actually checked against a source outside your own bubble.

None of that tells you whether you're right about capitalism, or Trump, or anything else. It just tells you why you might be a lot more confident that "everyone agrees with me" than the actual world will ever bear out.

Redditor_IDWstar18: ...So what, I'm supposed to just trust the silent majority instead?

Psychologist: I'm supposed to ask you to notice the difference between "most people I argue with online agree with me" and "most people agree with me." Those are different facts. You've been treating them as the same fact for a long time. That's the whole session.

White people in general are extremely proud people and they look down on pretty much every other race based on physical features, first and foremost and then culture and wealth. Most average white people are like that. If the western countries are truly governed by their own western white men, they wouldn't let something like the giant magnitude of southasian and middle-eastern, especially, from Muslim communities to commit the semi-oeganized rape gangs happening in their hoke countries.

​

Yes, white men are still the no.1 highest criminals for rapes in the UK and Europe but it is only natural as there are a lot more white people in white country. However, the stats and sizes of grooming/rape gangs and rape crimes from poc community, especially, the Muslim communities are not only very high for the percentages of their population in the UK or other eu countries but it is with the fact that the crimes from those communities are underreported, most of the time.

​

Now, why I say when I say that Israel might be behind this? Imagine east asian men doing and committing the same grooming/rape crimes in big scale like the southasian and other middle-eastern community are doing in the UK. I don't think the UK government would allow it but somehow, they are okay with raping crimes from southasian communities like Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangali etc...

​

Don't believe me? Do research on how UK police are very hesitant to pursue actions to those paki/afghan grooming gangs. Now, why is it? Ask yourself that. I don't think a government who represents its country and its people would allow policies and conditions that would destroy and demoalize its own people. I know those asylum paki boys and men in the rape/grooming gangs are also engineers doctors and the citizens but you know it is still not the same.

​

The coincidence is In the west, especially, the US, east asian men are under-represented in Hollywood and mainstreamedia and it is mostly, Jewish men who are the executives and powerful people behind the Hollywood curtain. I truly believe if Nazi's won WWII, there would be a far better representation of asian men than this current liberal western society and maybe, even higher amounts of rape crimes committed by real asian man aka the east asian men. After all, Hitler's and the Nazi government party called Japan the honorary Aryans.

​

​

Imagine an artist who never gets tired, who is constantly in a flow state, and not only that, but who also never experiences anything like depression or brain fog. A few years ago I found out I had ADHD and had to take Ritalin for the first time, and it was incredible; it had never crossed my mind that I had an attention deficit. But when I took it, I spent practically 12 hours reading and writing and doing my university subjects without stopping.

Since then I have gotten into the world of nootropics, and instead of feeling excited, it has depressed me completely.

Absolutely everything you know as your life and perception of the world are neurochemical reactions, essentially brain biology. Do you feel tired after a period of solving high cognitive load problems? Just take L-Tyrosine. Do you get depressed constantly? It's just your hypothalamic axis. Do you feel you should be more motivated? There are whole compounds that not only limit dopaminergic degradation but also openly make your brain need less via sensitization.

There are compounds like 9-Me-Bc that can basically reprogram the pathways of your neurons and how they have functioned your entire life. Problems like certain types of schizophrenia or addiction can be solved simply by taking NAC.

All these ideas have made me rethink even esoteric concepts like the idea of the soul, vibrations, and karma, if things like serotonin and oxytocin regulation can completely change your feelings about the world. Your "aura."

I don't have enough data yet, but I am even certain that ADHD can be completely "cured" through psychiatric medication and manipulation of dopamine receptors.

But does anyone care about this? Not at all. Imagine students with their brains opened up from age 8 with stimulants and 9-Me-Bc, learning the entire school curriculum, advanced mathematics, and biology to the letter. Does the government really want smarter people? Brainiacs by the dozen?

Then there's the issue of cost. Under capitalism, everyone only cares about how much money the compound in question is going to make. The ADHD pharmaceutical industry is practically a multimillion-dollar business beyond any logic, because you have people hooked on a medication for their whole lives. A tax to be "normal" in this system.

You would be heavily surprised how things like Semax and Selank are extremely cheap to produce. But the margins always have to be the bigger.

I don't think a "limitless pill" exists.

But I truly feel that something like a complete enhancement of brain development and performance is perfectly possible, and the only problems are the ethics around it and the big question of how to make money from it.

Why don't the rich take it then?

I unironically think it's because they are too stupid to know about the subject. Yes, it sounds arrogant, but when you see that Elon Musk is perpetually on Ketamine and Meth, it makes perfect sense. The rich don't have time for this nonsense; just take cocaine and meth and you're already at the peak performance they want, or at least numbed enough to endure their day-to-day.

Which brings me to the next problem: the fucking junkies.

Out there, there are people who truly believe they "transcend the levels of reality" with LSD, mushrooms, Salvia, or even weed. I deeply despise those people because they are not only idiots but also legitimately believe they are doing something more than seeing pretty colors and being numbed for a while.

These people are the reason getting any kind of "strong" medication has become a fucking hell.

I don't think the future is AI. But I believe that, easily, with enough political will we could create medications that eventually guide human evolution through maximum optimization of brain functions, i.e., the perpetually inspired artist in the zone, or even a trader who is on a maximum neuroplasticity state and adapts to every sittuation easily, the accountant who never gets tired and never loses focus, the eradication of things like depression and existential emptiness. Once the performance problem is solved, all other problems will be solved through pure human ingenuity.

What's the problem? How do you make money with that? Do the rich really want that? How do you prevent the fucking junkies from abusing the drugs? Simply put, nobody is interested, and nobody has the will to search for the true enhancement of human performance.

I would like to add a note on the skepticism in the mainstream media and among mainstream doctors for IVM (the "horse dewormer" drug - Ivermectin)

While it is true that IVM is not a one drug immediate solution for long haulers or post-vax issues

It should be noted that the signal is there for why it should be part of every protocol

 

There are many signals for it's efficacy that early treatment doctors have observed - I have observed it's post-exposure prophylaxis efficacy in households with index cases during the Delta variant - without the prophylaxis the whole household would fall sick - with it, the cases would be restricted to the index cases

 

However there is one place where it single-handedly shows efficacy is post-COVID19 anosmia/Parosmia (ie taste/smell dysfunction - which affects 1/5 to 1/10 COVID19 cases)

This is why I have been suggesting to early treatment doctors (like the FLCCC/IMA) that anosmia is a good way to present IVM - but most of the effort to normalize IVM use has been in arguing for mortality benefit etc

While anosmia remains an easily verifiable metric - within a few days and a few successive cases, a doctor will build up the confidence that this drug does have activity

 

So far I have seen 100% efficacy in all the recent anosmia cases I have seen - which have been 13-14 anosmia cases (this has been from a pool of 100+ COVID-19 cases)

The most recent anosmia (rarer now) reversal was a couple of months ago - 2 weeks of fatigue and anosmia after a minor case of "flu"/covid19

I told her it should reverse within 2 days and should see some relief in the fatigue (having seen this pattern repeat predictably in all previous cases)

And after 1-2 days she was at 100% smell

And cooked for the first time in 2 weeks - ie fatigue was gone

 

And in the months old cases - also I have seen 100% efficacy - with a longer treatment protocol - in the 3-4 cases I have seen

(though I concede this is not enough data and doesn't cover years old cases)

The pattern generally is that for old cases - more than 1 cycle may be needed - so for example 5 days of IVM 0.4mg/kg - split into morning/evening dose - taken with fatty meal or meal

Then can take a 3 day break - if want to avoid any visual disturbance side effects

Then take another 5 day course

Usually I would ask them to increase their Vitamin D levels as well

 

So just from this information, I feel that IVM should be first drug of choice as part of any protocol

Because of it's efficacy against post-COVID19 anosmia (which is a hard problem)

 

In my experience IVM also has been effective in removing fatigue as well for recent post-COVID19 cases - and in some old cases - both long haulers and post-vax

So it should be part of the protocols

 

Also because of the media paranoia created around IVM as some sort of litmus test for sanity or irrationality - I am unsure if the people who "try" IVM actually have used it for more than a few days

Since it is a relatively safe drug - it can be taken for 5 days - take a 3 day break (if you want to avoid the visual disturbances side effect) - and repeated

So my question is how many long haulers are actually trying longer term IVM use as part of their wider protocol

Instead of trying it for 5 days then writing it off

 

Summary: IVM shows single-drug response for some post-COVID19 persistent side effects like anosmia/Parosmia - which have no other comparable treatments (Stellate Ganglion Block SGB comes in a distant second - smell restraining which is the standard of care is not even partly effective) - which alone makes it an essential component to consider for protocols for long haulers - IVM hesitancy may also contribute to shorter duration use (when the drug can be easily tolerated with repeated dosing with breaks)

 

For more information on post-COVID19 anosmia, you can visit:

r/covid19anosmia

r/ivermectin

 

You would think this information would be welcomed on sub-reddits like:

r/covidlonghaulers

r/anosmia

r/Parosmia

But you would be mistaken - as these - and many of the mainstream sub-reddits - as policy - will perma-ban you if you suggest Ivermectin does anything for COVID-19

Recall that during the pandemic, YouTube actually had Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine mentioned by name in the YouTube terms of service - as unbelievable an overreach as that may seem, that was the state of affairs during the pandemic

Nearing the end of Trump’s 1^(st) term in office Bill Maher was regularly repeating the notion that he strongly felt Trump would not simply leave office if he lost the election. Trump regularly brought this up in tweets and to any journos who would listen and say Maher was a crazy person BUT he never watches his show. Supposedly never watched his show yet seemed to know what Maher was saying each week on his show – Real Time.

Eventually Maher compared him to the guy who keeps turning up to the emergency room with a Zucchini stuck up his a55 but - ‘no idea how this keeps happening.’ For those who would jump on that as homophobia - it isn’t - it is merely where self-deceit provides comedy.

Snake chasing is something not widely discussed though. You see one day a man and his son are walking through the bush/woods and a snake crosses their path. The man says to his son “snakes are dangerous I better kill it!” So, he chases the snake through the brush and thick bush, but the snake keeps ahead of him. He chases the snake cross a creek bed, but he can’t quite get in a position to kill it. The snake keeps drawing away from him and crosses a wide dirt road. It then slides up a hill until it comes to a quarry with sheer cliff faces on all sides and the man blocking the escape. The man lashes out at the snake but the snake ducks out of the way and bites him on the arm. The man turns to his son who has caught up to him and says, “see son, I told you snakes were dangerous.”  (And he didn’t even have Bonnie Tyler’s Holding out for a Hero playing overhead either)

The erstwhile orange one does seem to be chasing after countries whom independent analysts couldn’t see much if any evidence of them providing any direct threat against the United States. Venezuela, Cuba and Iran for instance. Greenland. Canada.

Quite the ‘snake’ chaser.

Before Cato was an elder, he was a young man watching Hannibal romp through Italy wiping out every Roman army that stood in his path. He grew up in the threat environment where Rome’s future was in doubt. Even though Rome eventually wore down Hannibal’s army in Europe and defeated it in Africa, before imposing tough terms on Carthage, that fear and embarrassment stayed with him for the remainder of his life. Later in life he visited Carthage and saw that they had been using the post-war period to rebuild their economy, and knew they would remain a threat to his Rome as long as they continued to exist. He ended every session of the Roman Senate afterwards, regardless of whatever had been discussed, with “Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.”……"Furthermore, I am of the opinion that Carthage must be destroyed.

He never lived to see the results of the 3rd Punic War he helped inspire …… but I’m sure he would have been satisfied with the result ….. Carthage was wiped off the face of the earth, the survivors enslaved, and rumor has it the land was salted to prevent any future recovery. No Carthaginians were left to declare victory.

About 1800 years later the early American colonists had a problem. The woods around their cabins were filled with organized bands of humans that wanted to kill them and their families. Barbaric and violent people that needed to go away if they were ever going to be able safely walk around with their families. Those people were also standing in the way of their future goals. Cotton Mather. Puritan minister in Massachusetts in the late 1600s had been suggesting to his flock that those people needed to be exterminated. He celebrated the Mystic Massacre of 1637…… where English colonists and their Narragansett allies burned a Pequot village and killed somewhere between 400-700 people, mostly women, children, and elderly …… as the work of God. The woods outside his cabin door were getting safer every day.

There was no public outcry with institutional weight behind it. A few outliers existed ….. men like Roger Williams, who had built real relationships with the people being slaughtered and saw them as something other than an abstraction. But they were isolated voices with no press and no audience that felt safe in their homes. The overwhelming general public, including those whose trade and security depended on the land being cleared, was on board with pushing these hostile people away from their growing communities.

But things slowly changed over the next 150 years. Those on the expanding western frontier still wholeheartedly supported the use of indiscriminate violence against these savages in their immediate vicinity …… but back east, in those communities where the threat has been vanquished long ago something was brewing …… a conscience.

Pamphlets, sermons, and editorials started showing up in eastern papers questioning whether the men being sent west to handle the Indian problem were behaving like Christians or like savages themselves. Reformers organized, petitioned Congress, demanded investigations into reservation conditions and broken treaties. The moral language was sincere. It was also, conveniently costless. These were people whose own safety was now unrelated to the threats the pioneers on the fringe of western expansion were still facing. Being judgmental of their own side’s distant behaviors was becoming both fashionable and a defensible political position. But sympathy was arriving too late for the savages that had been resisting our continued encroachments into their land. The enthusiastic use of methods of destroying their food supply, biological warfare in the form of old world diseases, and restrictions on their movements at the point of a gun had finally and completely removed them from their warrior code. They fully capitulated and remained in their assigned reservations, for their own safety, long enough to have their offspring somewhat forcefully assimilated into their enemy’s culture. You never heard them declare victory …… even a pyrrhic one.

Roughly around the time our Indian problem was being put to bed we were also putting our rough riding boots against some necks in the Caribbean and Latin America. We could read all about our glorious victories in the patriotic press, but the details were mostly quotes from the victors, with no bloody images attached, reaching the public that might have found our brutal methods as the basis of a political opposition position. No one that survived our adventures in imperialism was ready to declare victory the day after we withdrew.

The US civil war had been the first time that our founder’s definition of “all men” had been broadened to include men living in the US but previously outside the founder’s originally intended scope. Fifty years later there was a nascent anti-imperialist faction growing in the northeast looking to extend these noble ideas and guaranteed rights to whatever foe our military was facing, over increasing long distances.

The Philippine-American War was the perfect opportunity for opposition political groups to weaponize these ideas against a sitting President. US soldiers’ letters home had been trickling in bragiing about their kill ratios. So when after guerrillas dressed in civilian clothing ambushed and killed 48 US soldiers, General Jacob H. Smith’s order to “Kill everyone over ten” landed with a thud inside the beltway. The media that had been patriotic pro-war up to this point …… actually goading politicians into wars ….. Suddenly found well received advantage in painting a mental picture of American cruelty against a peace loving Christian society that just wanted the same opportunity to rule themselves we had. Nobody hated the Filipino guerrillas enough to politically justify a total war against them.

This became a partisan issue in the next election cycle, but nationalism still prevailed outside the northeast, despite the celebrity firepower and funding Mark Twain and Andrew Carnegie brought to the anti-Imperialist faction …… But the seeds were planted for a return to the isolationist instinct Washington had championed in his farewell address.

We were back on the path towards an enlightened liberal society until WW1 came knocking, then on December 7th 1941 …… the Japanese shattered the illusion of safety these noble ideas needed to keep our barbaric instincts at bay.

The day after Pearl Harbor …… the anger and fear immediately started rewiring our brains back to the human norm. Americans on the west coast looked out over the Pacific ocean and knew there was danger coming for them, they scanned the water just like the colonialists and pioneers scanned the upcoming tree line. Internment of our Japanese was a no brainer …. just high security reservations for a race of people as easily dehumanized as the old savages had been. Not just for our safety but for theirs as well. Lines started forming at recruitment centers, factory floors were repurposed to start kicking out mass quantities of instruments of death, and cautious career military brass were quickly replaced with young, aggressive, pissed off harder men.

Dissent, what little there was, was criminalized and prosecuted as sedition. The press reverted to patriot and self-censored for the good of the nation. The isolationist organizations closed their doors and kept their mouths shut.

Shortly there would be images of burning piles of dead Japanese soldiers on some distant Pacific island, and the public viewed it, not as an atrocity, but a W on their scorecard. Submarine commanders would surface after their attacks and sailors stood on the deck with machine guns picking off the survivors in the water. The firebombing and nuking Japanese cities received widespread popular approval …… and within days after the world’s first glimpse of nuclear American exceptionalism the centuries old Japanese Bushido warrior code, that had emphasized fighting to the death before surrender …… unconditionally capitulated. No one in Japan was deluded enough to claim victory just because some of them managed to survive the war.

Then as quickly as the fear subsided, and safety returned to the US and Europe …… the pretensions of civilized ideas and gentlemanly warfare popped their heads out of the diplomatic sands, and we all signed feel good treaties that pinky-sweared to each other that we would never again commit the atrocities we had just witnessed and performed.

These newly codified rules of warfare were even written so that we were to abide by them in the future, even when the future enemies did not. This gave rise to some clever enemy strategies. Now that they knew what our compassion based rules for ourselves were ….. they could weaponize them against us. Firing at western soldiers then running into and blending with a group of unarmed citizens, or surrounding your military installations with civilians and cameras, for the first time in human history, actually worked. But only because unsavory images in western media had become tools in the west’s constant internal partisan struggle, half of the western electorates at any a time could become advocates for the enemy, because the enemy's interests inadvertently aligned with one domestic faction's partisan ones. What the Geneva Conventions fail to address, is that these rules of self-restraint have a shelf life ….. they expire the minute a signatory once again experiences fear in their homes, or a serious threat to the continuity of their governments.

In the artificial construct of post war peace and complacency, western diplomats have assumed the self appointed role of refereeing lesser conflicts on distant shores, trying to force our cultural values onto cultures that never asked for them. Borders that have been shifting like sand dunes since the dawn of civilization are now, in their minds, permanently etched in stone for perpetuity now. And they seem to have developed an affinity for never allowing conflicts to be played out to a definitive conclusion. As soon as one side gains a decisive advantage they start clamoring for restraint and looking for some economic lever to pull to force compliance that leads to simmering animosities on the ground, and an unnatural stalemate that allows the weaker side to reconstitute its forces. The last example I recall of allowing forced capitulation to work its hostilities ending magic was Sri Lanka. The Tamil Tigers had developed a romantic following in western society for their innovative tactics of resistance during their 26 year insurgency efforts, that including the introduction of modern suicide bombing tactics. The Sri Lankan government forces had finally pushed the Tamil leadership into a small radius of control and the had holed up in a hospital. Western diplomats howled for the Sri Lankans to show some restraint … but the Sri Lankan government, with China backing their play at the UN and India quietly looking the other way, ignored every plea, every ceasefire demand ….. and wiped out the Tamil Tiger command down to the last man. No Tamil has ever had the audacity to claim victory just because they survived.

For those few of you still reading this ….. I will now get to my point….. if you haven’t already guessed it.

I had only recently become cognizant of global affairs in 1979 when some crazy Muslims in Iran took Americans hostage. If I had been old enough to vote in 76 I would have voted along family instilled preferences for Democrat Jimmy Carter, but the nation was growing tired of his refusal to do anything kinetic, and over the course of 444 days the combination of rage and embarrassment was permanently reshaping my perspectives. My first trip to the ballot box was to eagerly empower the tough talking man who was going to deliver our collective vengeance against the flag burning “Death to America” crowd who had been toying with Carter’s lack of manliness.

….. and nothing happened. I watched eight administrations come and go as televised acts of Islamic terrorism went from shocking to mundanely brutal. Over the decades the rage subsided, and now 70% of the current American population didn’t experience what it was like to be attacked and humiliated by a ragtag enemy who knew he was insulated from America’s wrath because his reign of regional terror was born in the era of American restraint and politically induced inaction.

Then all the sudden a lame duck hero emerges that seemed to be immune to the political constraints that had kept superior American firepower holstered for decades. He actually ordered B2s to drop bunker busters on Iranian soil that had been avoided since Carter’s failed rescue operation.

I had it on good authority from Generals Kelly and Milley, the mainstream press, Hollywood actors, most musical artists, and no shortage of my good leftist friends right here on Reddit, that Trump was the embodiment of Hitler. This should be good. Hitler wouldn’t have had any qualms with punching the Iranians’ lights out if he had all the resources he needed in theater, no peer level resistance …… and all it came down to was giving the final order to send the death to America crowd back to the dark ages. We had eliminated the Ayatollah in his bunker without remorse, something I had been told all my life was not doable due to the expected global Shiite rage blowback, he had decapitated IRGC leadership forcing them to stay hidden underground in the nation they lorded over …… one more sortie would have eliminated their electrical grid they needed for lights, water supply, refrigeration, and fuel delivery …… that would certainly cull the herd in the upcoming summer heat ...... and its hard to make too many more missiles and drones without electricity or the ability to import or produce replacement parts to rebuild the grid …… my day of vengeance had arrived.

But then Hitler blinked. Trump is no Hitler ….. turns out he’s a humanitarian after all.

I’ve always questioned Trump’s geo-political chops. I’ve never thought he really understood how human nature works outside the artificial construct of western enlightenment. Sherman knew ….. LeMay knew …. Neither went to Wharton.

My window is closing. Iran will be allowed to rebuild and continue to threaten the region, and possibly some day my offspring in their homes. The survivors are declaring victory …….. let me just end with …… Ceterum censeo Persiam esse delendam.