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This is a first-person account from a psychiatry resident (me) enrolling in a clinical trial of psilocybin. Somewhere between a trip report, an overview of the pharmacology of psilocybin, and a review of the clinical evidence suggesting pronounced benefits for depression.
Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
Recently published an essay on the anxieties and fears of the years between 1900-1914, and how they bear surprising similarities to today. Explores the breakdown of meaning, psychological ailments, information overload, accelerating technological change, the crisis of masculinity, and great power politics.
The years between 1900-1914 have appropriately been called by historian Philipp Blom as the “vertigo years.” To find your footing in this dizzying period so often meant jumping into the unknown or, as many did, sleepwalking through it and hoping things would sort themselves out. Technological innovation remade cities into bustling metropolises, and the rapid transformation caused many to question what they once took for granted. As possibilities opened up, some artists and writers even found the newfound freedom exhilarating. While few truly expected the breakout of World War I in 1914, the uneasy atmosphere made the unthinkable possible. As writer Robert Musil wrote after the war, “we were simply lacking the concepts with which to absorb that which we experienced.” The vertigo years passed like a visceral dream.
...
You can’t help but read Blom’s The Vertigo Years (2008) with today in mind. Like then, our present is defined by its relentless pace. The states and people involved are clearly different, but that vertigo feeling has now expanded to include all of us, since for the first time roughly half of the world is part of the middle class and the vast majority is plugged in online. We are all arguably going through our own vertigo years, with similar anxious uncertainties about the future.
This is an overview of my struggles with chronic pain. It's a bit of a personal post, but also in the end dips slightly into how I overcame my issues via coming back to Christ. I hope it's useful/interesting for folks.
Pasting the whole thing below here, although there are images in the Substack that I reference so I recommend checking it out if you're curious:
You’ve probably seen it before. Your friend is a broken wreck, they can’t work, their life is steadily plummeting towards the abyss. They get diagnosed with fibromyalgia, CPTSD, hypermobility/EDS, or early onset arthritis. You give up hope they’ll ever be normal.
Then all of the sudden, out of seemingly nowhere, they start drinking celery juice every day and all their problems disappear! (This one actually happened to my mom, bless her heart.)
Or they go gluten-free. Or find Jesus. Or see a $500/hr chiropractor who’s written a book about ghosts. Whatever it is, it "fixes" them.
You roll your eyes. But also… you kind of want it to be true. Because maybe you’ll finally get to stop listening to them complain. Maybe, just maybe, the cloud of misery around them that has slowly pushed away you and everyone else in their life is finally parting, and you’ll get to see them be happy for the first time in years.
Modern chronic pain causes an incredible amount of misery. The typical cited prevalence of chronic pain is somewhere around 50 million people in the U.S. daily experiencing at least some pain.
Now when you think of someone with chronic pain, you probably picture an old mill worker with a bad back, or hips, or knees. Perhaps all three.
But chronic pain doesn’t just hit the old, the worn down, the obviously crippled. There are also people like me, not so long ago. A 23-year-old man sobbing silently as his tongue goes numb, his jaw locks, and he tries to decide whether or not to call 911 for the third time that month.
That kind of moment where you stare death in the face is characteristic of what the medical field calls “high-impact” chronic pain. The dry description of “daily activities are significantly limited” doesn’t quite capture how it feels from the inside.
When you look at these stats and medical phrases, it’s easy to distance yourself emotionally. But if you’ll allow me, dear reader, I want to give you a bit of an inside look into what it’s like to go through crushing, daily, seemingly inescapable pain.
How all of your worst fears seemingly become realized.
You stare down decades of living as a cripple.
When your own body betrays you constantly, forcing you to go from a bright energetic youth to a shuffling old man over the course of a couple of years.
How you think you’ve finally found a cure, only to have the hope cruelly ripped out of your weak grasp over, and over. And over.
Hopefully, this inside look can help you understand and sympathize with those unfortunates who, like me, have dealt with the hell we so clinically call “chronic pain.”
23 Years Young, Staring Death in the Face
Sitting on the bed at my mom’s house, at 3 o’clock in the afternoon, the soft afternoon sunlight streamed through the window. At the age of 23, I thought I was about to die.
My tongue burned all down the left side, then promptly went numb. It felt like a snake had lodged itself in my throat all of the sudden, and started to swell. The muscles along my jaw bunched, locked and then started to spasm. I fought for breath.
Rushing in after hearing some of the noises I was making, my mother panicked and asked if we needed to go to the E.R. I told her no, by shaking my head of course. I wasn’t capable of speech at this point.
You see, I had already been to the E.R. once for something similar, just a few months ago. They made me wait for hours, spent five minutes looking at me, told me I was ‘normal’ and then pushed me out, charging me close to $1,000 for the pleasure. Would’ve been five times more if I had called an ambulance. It was not covered by my insurance via work at the time, of course.
Then I had gone to urgent care a few times. Similar story. At least those docs gave me some drugs, to try and make me feel better.
So I told my mom no, and got up and decided to walk with her. In my head, though I was convinced that the reaper stalked behind me, about to pounce, I wanted to see the sunlight one last time. We opened the door and strolled through the afternoon sunshine. Oh, the light was so beautiful. It brought tears to my eyes. At the time I still subscribed to a sort of half-hearted atheism, but if I had believed in God I likely would’ve dropped to my knees and sung out His praise.
I’ve done that a few times between then and now.
Talking shit till I get lockjaw
A$AP Rocky has some good lyrics, okay?
Rewinding a bit, my official diagnosis for the numb tongue and the locking jaw was TMJ, or temporomandibular joint dysfunction. It began a few months after my first job out of college, a stressful, boiler-room-esque sales job where we were expected to make close to 100 ‘touches’ (calls/emails) a day to potential customers. Not horrible, as far as volume of entry level sales goes, but horrible enough to break me.
The first time I felt any issue, I thought someone had hit me in the head, or something. A lightning bolt of pain shot across my face, and a good proportion of the muscles from the side of my lip up to my right eye went numb. I was on a sales call at the time! To my credit (perhaps) I finished the call, though slurring a bit, called my manager, and told him I was taking the rest of the day off.
I had dealt with some chronic pain previously, mainly in my sciatica nerve down the side of my leg. That one, I thought, was easier to explain though. I had been doing hardcore ballroom dance competitions, it came on over a period of time, and I must have overstressed the leg. This time was different - a bolt out of the blue in a completely near area of my body, that had never felt any pain like this before.
That episode started the first of my four FMLA leave periods from sales jobs, in a five year span. While I do complain about the Western medical system, I have to admit the Family Medical Leave Act is pretty amazing. It gave me a lot of flexibility when I needed it most.
So, what do you do when a random, major illness strikes you out of nowhere? Call the doctor, of course! So I did. I went to my primary care doctor. They referred me to a TMJ specialist at a big, national name hospital nearby. Of course, all of this took over a month, since every new specialist takes between 2 and 6 weeks to even get the first appointment with.
It was during this waiting period that the drama above unfolded.
Anyway, this doctor saw me a couple of times, warned that I may need surgery and may never heal, and sent me off to a dentist who specialized in TMJ. One of the handful in the country, who happened to be in this medical system that my insurance actually did cover.
Side note: It’s completely insane how many doctors will just off-handedly tell you that you may need surgery, and/or that you’ll have to live with something forever. I would be told that at least a dozen times throughout my medical journey.
I was one of the lucky ones, despite the difficulty. So far I was in only a few hundred bucks, chump change.
So I saw this dentist who specialized in TMJ. He calmed me down, told me that things would be ok. That he had dealt with cases as severe as mine plenty of times, and no I wouldn’t need surgery. He molded a night guard for me to sleep with to stop me clenching my jaw all night, sent me to a specialized TMJ physical therapist (who cost $150 per session, uncovered by insurance) and prescribed me a benzodiazepam. Klonopin, to be specific.
Now, all of these treatments together actually worked quite well! I wasn’t back to 100%, but I was able to go back to work in a few weeks, and get rid of the impending sense of doom that whispered that I was going to die, or never be able to talk or eat again. The Klonipin caused me some… other problems, but that’s a story for another post.
Sadly, the TMJ was only the beginning of my story with chronic pain.
The Carpal Tunnel of Love
Great song, by the way. Some of Fall Out Boy’s best.
After my first successful foray into getting medical treatment for my issues, I returned to work somewhat hesitantly, but things seemingly turned around for me. My focus and drive returned, even leading to me getting promoted after another few months in the job.
However, about a year after having to take leave for TMJ, I found myself forced to quit the working world once again.
The next problematic area was my hands and wrists. When I say problematic, I don’t mean the next painful area. At this point I had already started to develop tons of pain in my low back, hips, and legs as well; despite all the physical therapy, working out, and yoga I was doing. It got to the point where they started calling me the “old man” around my office, despite the fact that I was in my early 20s.
Either way, the combined stress of a high-pressure laptop job and me gaming a ton, led to my wrists basically completely blowing out next. I pushed through the pain for a while, but ultimately had to call it. Another dramatic discussion with my bosses about taking leave, this one FAR less friendly. Luckily however, they were legally obliged to let me take more FMLA, as a year had passed since my last medical leave.
So off I went, back to stay at home for a month, stress about doctor’s appointments, and generally just convalesce. I didn’t handle this period of time off work as well as the last. My strategy to cope with the pain had increasingly become mixing my anti anxieties with alcohol and cannabis in order to basically numb myself out of whatever I was feeling at any given moment. As the reader likely knows, that strategy doesn’t pan out well in the long run.
Anyway, I had continued working with my physical therapist this entire time, despite racking up a bill of thousands of dollars with him in over a year of weekly treatments, so I got him to give me some referrals to carpal tunnel docs.
Same old shtick. Took forever to get an appointment. When I did, they told me I would likely need surgery, and sent me off to another specialist. One of them spent months trying to prescribe me mild muscle relaxant type drugs like cyclobenzaprine, gabapentin, or flexeril, which are weak beer when you’re in so much pain you can barely lift a glass of water to your mouth with both hands.
I started to get all sorts of fancy diagnoses at this point. Early onset arthritis. Fibromyalgia. Hypermobility (EDS). CPTSD. Et cetera.
My FMLA leave quickly got eaten up, so I had to go back to work. I started using a program called Talon Voice in order to control my computer almost entirely via my dulcet tones. It was actually really cool, my friends even started calling me a cyborg for a minute there. I got an eye tracker to move my mouse and everything, like a real disabled person!
People can even code with this software, it’s wild:
Via a combination of wrist braces, new drugs, quitting all video games and recreational use of my hands (listened to a lot of audio books), I slowly managed to get back to a ‘functional’ place with my job. Of course, none of this would’ve been possible without the patient and loving support of my girlfriend, to whom I owe an incredible amount for sticking with me through these difficulties. I shudder to think what would’ve happened if I didn’t have her by my side.
Either way, at this point I was several thousand dollars down the drain, and still partially crippled. Unfortunately, life wasn’t done with me yet.
The Sound of Silence
Hello darkness, my old friend…
When I first lost my voice, I like to think my girlfriend was secretly relieved. I do talk a lot, after all!
At first I thought I just had bronchitis or something, so I took a few days off of work to just let my voice recover. Surely it’s just a bug, right? Though in the back of my head, fear was rising that something even worse was coming for my already fractured health.
So I went back to work after my voice had recovered and, lo and behold, after just a couple days on the job, the voice went again. By this time I knew the drill, so I immediately researched the most well-regarded vocal therapist in the area, and scheduled an appointment.
Of course, it took multiple weeks to even see her, so I had to go on FMLA leave again. At this point I was starting to seriously eat into my savings I had carefully built up. Have I mentioned that FMLA leave is unpaid?
Regardless, given that my computer use had switched over almost entirely to voice, and I was still talking for my sales job, I suppose losing my voice was inevitable. At the time though, the defeat was crushing. First my legs hurt, then my jaw, my hands, and now my ability to even communicate with other human beings. What would God take away from me next?
I sunk into a pretty deep pit of despair at this point. I had struggled with suicidal thoughts as a teenager, but it’s a different animal contemplating suicide past 25 due to medical complications that multiple doctors have told you are essentially incurable. Admittedly, the drugs and booze probably didn’t help.
So I went to the vocal coach, added another set of tasks to my daily exercises to manage my various conditions, which at this point had ballooned to over two hours a day of stretching, doing vocal warm ups, doing specific exercises, self-massage via tennis ball, and resting in various positions to take the stress out of certain muscles.
At one point during this time, at the advice of my vocal coach, I completely stopped talking for two weeks. The idea was we could perhaps “reset” my vocal cords, and help me learn to speak in a more “natural” way. At first, this was brutal. I had always been quite chatty, and the silence was agonizing the first few days.
But after about a week of no talking, something strange started to happen. For the first time in a LONG time, I didn’t feel quite so hopeless. I couldn’t have explained it to you at the time (because I was silent, duh! ;P), yet I just started to get this sense of silliness. That even though my body was falling apart before my 30th birthday, my relationship was on the rocks because I couldn’t even talk to my girlfriend, and my managers were looking for excuses to fire me, there was a sort of… underlying okayness to the whole thing. I was able to laugh, and relax, despite my circumstances.
The Gates of Repentance
This priest has the best voice ever, seriously. Check out this chant, it’s amazing.
A little before the voice loss I had stumbled upon some people in the Talon Voice community talking about chronic pain being a spiritual/emotional issue. Up until now, I had sort of brushed this off while thinking eh, even if this is an emotional issue, how am I going to fix my emotions? I was already doing therapy as well and that barely helped.
So there I was, over $15,000 and years of my life spent on medical treatments that amounted to temporary bandaids at best, with little to no understanding of the deeper roots of my chronic pain, or how I was going to fix it. I had some inkling that maybe there was an emotional or spiritual issue, but I barely took it seriously. From a ‘logical’ perspective, things seemed quite bleak.
Something in the silence spoke to me, though. Despite my utter lack of belief in anything beyond the material, physical reality, I began to feel as if a presence was watching over me. I didn’t know it at the time, but looking back, it’s obvious to me that it was Christ reaching out, now that my heart had finally been humbled enough to hear Him.
Thomas Merton says:
In silence, God ceases to be an object and becomes an experience.
Perhaps he’s right.
While it would take a while for my heart to fully turn around, the bitterness that had consumed me slowly started to lift. Possibilities began to open up, doors opening that had seemed firmly shut. Before I began to believe in Christ, or even the supernatural, I started to believe in myself. In Life. From seemingly out of nowhere, a hope blossomed in my chest. A hope that I wouldn’t be a cripple, that I’d get to live a good life, despite my troubles, that somehow, some way, I would be able to overcome the various illnesses that had plagued me from my youth.
Glory be to God, that hope has been fulfilled. That’s a story for another time.
The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.
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This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
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Out of enlightened self-interest, I did a deep dive into the topic of male pattern baldness, and after freshening up on my rather rusty Bayes', I decided that I'd gone to enough effort to justify a proper blog post. Here you go.
Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.
Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.
If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service
This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
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In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
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Well, this is just about exactly what it says on the tin. I've finally mustered up the energy to write a full-length review of what's a plausible contender for my Favourite Novel Ever, Reverend Insanity. I'd reproduce it here too, but it's a better reading experience on Substack (let's ignore the shameless self-promotion, and the fact that I can't be arsed to re-do the markdown tags)
Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
There are two comments here on the Motte that have, for the past month or so, been sitting amidst the 71 tabs I've got opened in my browser.
The two comments are fairly different;
The first is a more personal meditation on the human desire to 'be a good person', and how that may or may not align with the equally-human desires to 'fit in', and 'pursue Truth'.
The second is a political argument over whether Democrats/progressives/libs are the real hypocrites, and whether or not they were the ones to 'defect first' in the game of American partisan politics; pretty standard stuff around here, really.
The thing they have in common is that I've been intending to respond to them.
And yet, I haven't.
Part of this is due to a dynamic that ought to be familiar to anyone with a maladaptive relationship with deadlines- if you're late turning something in, the longer you wait afterwards to get around to it, the harder it becomes to ever actually do it; it's easy to put it off for a day or two or three, and before you know it, a week's gone by, and length of the delay in your response might raise some eyebrows when you eventually do respond. Repeat this cycle a few times, and eventually a month or two has passed you by- at which point, you might as well just not bother to respond at all- assuming you're even still in the same headspace necessary to give a coherent response, and that events in the meantime haven't made your response irrelevant, the other person's really going to wondering about your penchant for necro-ing old threads.
A larger part, however, comes down to a much simpler -and much less easily overcome- barrier:
Why bother?
In my very first comment on this site, I noted that the 'two screens' effect is very real, and that the picture that the screen the self-identified 'Red Tribers' on this site are watching is showing a very different picture than the one the few self-identified 'Blue Tribers' still active on this site are watching.
This isn't particularly surprising. For decades, Americans have been slowly but steadily self-segregating along 'tribal' lines; fewer and fewer of us spend much time interacting with other Americans radically different from ourselves. We might live in the same neighborhoods, frequent the same shops and restaurants, and be theoretically 'close' to each other (or not; the same self-segregating dynamic increasingly applies to physical locations as well), but it's increasingly rare for us to ever actually interact with our Others to any real extent.
Combined with the general shifts in how people interact with and perceive what are 'their' communities (triply so in the online age!), the balkanization of 'common' hobbies & interests, the fracturing of the media landscape, and the overall decline in common cultural touchstones and trusted authorities, the end is result is that nowadays its easier than ever for all of us to live in our own Bespoke Realities™. It isn't just that political polarization & disagreements are tenser & higher-profile then they've been in decades (though they are!); now, we no longer even need to have similar conceptions of what it is we're even arguing over in the first place!
I can rage over how Republicans are trying to destroy the government and intentionally harm millions of the worst-off Americans with their new tariff, tax, & budget idiocies- and you can scoff and dispute my entire framing, say how I'm being absurdly hyperbolic and hysterical.
You can denounce the large-scale concerted push by progressives to trans the nations youth; to turn them into Marxist-indoctrinated eunuchs conscripted as soldiers in the frontlines of the culture wars. I can roll my eyes and say there is no such phenomenon, and it's all a conservative bogeyman.
Etc, etc.
So in light of this situation, where we not only argue endlessly about the most basic facts of any given political disagreement, without either side ever having to concede to either the opposition's arguments, or even their basic worldview and underlying framing of the situation...
Why bother?
Why bother continuing to argue (and especially why bother continuing to argue online- an exercise in futility if I ever heard one!) when doing so is unlikely to change the other person's mind?
Why bother continuing to argue when the people I'm disagreeing with seem to have beliefs & experiences so wildly opposite of my own that I have to wonder if we're even living in the same country?
Why bother continuing to argue when people I disagree with just seem like they fundamentally can't be reasoned with at all?
And especially why bother continuing to argue when doing so is only likely to be """rewarded""" with mass-downvotes and distributed dogpiles by commentators on a forum you don't even really like, and only stick around on out of some sort of... IDK, perverse masochism, I guess?
Seems kinda pointless to me, tbh.
Despite my faint hopes, the dysfunction in this country appears to be acclerating.
We seem to be waiting on the precipice, holding our breath to see if the next few days heralds the opening salvos of the beginning of true, active civil conflict.
So I ask again- why bother? Is the time for talking over?
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The website is a user-friendly proxy for youtube - if it has trouble loading the video, there's a link to the youtube page (or just edit the url).
You may have read things like Why Amazon Can't Make A Kindle In the USA, but what about a hand tool with no electronics, just a few materials, large tolerances, and a simple assembly process? The same problem of manufacturing engineering being exported for greater integration with manufacturing labor applies to that, too - according to this, American "tool and die" capabilities for small-scale manufacturing are gutted. (I suspect the this video overstates the problem, because the biggest obstacle came when the non-manufacturing engineer with a small budget wanted to contract out a specific need - molds for plastic injection molding, which the molder would have sourced from the PRC - and two other engineers lent their expertise for two different ways of manufacturing plastic injection molds, and he found a mold-maker, after he needed to change the material of a part, but it's still a big deal that there aren't more American vendors advertising these capabilities.) And the video didn't even touch the materials supply chain...
(The completed grill scrubber was priced at $75 and the initial batch sold out within hours, in case you were wondering.)
If you haven't read things like that Forbes series, you might not fully appreciate that it's very easy to have a false perception of what the manufacturing capabilities of other countries are, due to selection bias in exports; there's often a wide variety in the quality of goods produced in a given country and only a narrow range of quality that's economical for you to import. One famous example is the brand images of German cars in America, which only imports expensive German cars. Less famously, there's been a secular trend of American imports of Japanese musical instruments going from the bottom to the top of the Japanese (followed by other Asian countries') production ranges and many American musicians assume each decade's imports were a representative sample. But, since manufacturing labels reflect final assembly, increasingly complicated supply chains are mostly invisible to the consumer. It'd be interesting to know what this partnership would have done differently, if they had expanded their searches to Mexican and Canadian suppliers as an acceptable alternative to American suppliers (as a larger-scale business intent on "friend/near-shoring" would), but the value of purism vs general applicability is a "six of one, half a dozen of the other" type thing.
As someone who's pro-industrial policy and also anti-CCP, I think think the supply chain problem is one of those issues with a lot of misplaced attention, wherein globalization gets projected onto various political narratives, to the detriment of analyzing capability.
(Hopefully that's enough of a conversation-starter, without crossing into CW!)
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