domain:jessesingal.substack.com
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
9hr ago
You said that getting a concealed-carry permit is trivially easy, and in support of that first statement you said that sheriffs aren't allowed to contact the references provided by an applicant for that permit. My point is that your second statement appears to be incorrect, so your first statement is weaker. (Though a different lawyer says that your second statement is correct and Columbia County is violating the law.)
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
9hr ago
I think eventually that these kinds of drugs will be shown to have extremely negative consequences for anyone who’s not extremely morbidly obese (or at least in bad enough shape that the side effects are less serious than the obesity). Of particular concern is the number of people who are using this product for aesthetic reasons rather than as medically necessary treatment. Women have used this stuff to fit in their wedding dresses as an example.
Long term, given that this substance acts like a hormone, I think that homeostasis will eventually strike leading to the body becoming less sensitive to semiglutide and therefore the person cannot feel full. And there have been some reports of things like stomach and intestinal issues, so I’m not sure about that either.
There have been lots of these pills in the past starting with fenfen in the 1990s. Most of them overhyped or have serious side effects (fenfen worked, but since it was basically an amphetamine, it caused a lot of heart problems and was withdrawn). The thing I keep coming back to is that people are so desperate for something like a skinny pill to be true that the public and doctors pounce on it without thinking about the long term effects. So that’s why I’m shorting it. I’m expecting wrongful death or serious injury lawsuits to kill it in all but the most serious cases and thus limit the profit from it.
Rov_Scam
9hr ago
I'm not sure what your point is. The original argument was that it was harder to get a CCL in purple states like PA than it was to get a driver's license. My argument was that it's significantly easier, even in liberal areas like Pittsburgh. I don't know what pointing to the discretion of a sheriff in one of the most conservative areas of the state is supposed to prove.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
9hr ago
I think the argument is worth having.
I don't want the state killing people. I don't care if people suffer or even die to make sure that power is very securely under control. Because I've seen what happens when it is not.
I'm willing to eat some murders happening because we don't execute murderers even though they deserve it. All because it should be a Big Deal when institutions take a life. I don't see how this is any different.
Ha. In all seriousness, though, you're aware that a bill was put forward at the end of last year to legalise it in the UK, right? And that it was basically bounced through the Commons as a private, unscheduled bill with no preparation and is now waiting for approval from the House of Lords, after which it will become law?
And I do remember that the first few times 'assisted dying' was floated it was about really quite specific scenarios, and that even now a lot of the 'pro' polls about it are still quite specific. For example
A poll of more than 7,000 people this month found that almost three-quarters agreed that adults “who are intolerably suffering from an incurable condition and who wish to end their lives” should be allowed medical help to do so. It was conducted by Electoral Calculus for Humanists UK, a campaign group that supports assisted dying.
And yet when it comes to the actual law:
An attempt to block access to assisted dying for people suffering mental health problems or because they feel "burdensome" was defeated by a majority of 53.
whereas if you look at actual public opinion you see support for a much narrower version, with:
More than half of Britons (57%) would support doctors assisting non-terminally ill patients in physically unbearable conditions with life-ending medication. However, support declines to 35% when considering mental or emotional suffering. (emphasis mine)
and
63% of adults think that assisted dying should not be allowed for those whose primary reason is that they feel like a burden on their families or the NHS.
https://www.salvationarmy.org.uk/news/survey-reveals-publics-fears-about-assisted-dying-bill (yes, biased, but the poll was carried out by YouGov)
I've thought a lot about this issue for the last ten years, as many have, and it's hard to escape the feeling that public consent has been laundered by keeping the spotlight firmly on rare, sympathetic cases while the intent of campaigners has always been significantly more far-reaching. Even the chosen term is very obviously a marketing gambit - 'assisted dying' where in reality they aren't dying in any sense other than the philosophical and the point is to legalise deliberately injecting them with something that will kill them. My memory is that these words were originally justified twenty years ago by limiting discussion to the near-death cases I describe, though I admit I can't back that up.
I'm not trying to lay this on you, you're honest about your opinions. But the way the whole thing has been handled leaves a nasty taste in my mouth.
celluloid_dream
9hr ago
I'd say it's also the legal restrictions where you can't have them in public - can't be transporting them in a vehicle unless they're unloaded/locked/stored - definitely can't carry them on your person outside of wilderness areas or a gun range.
The downstream cultural effect of these laws is that most Canadians don't see or think about firearms. They only come up in conversation related to sporting uses (hunting, range shooting). They're just not much of a cultural thing.
Browser
9hr ago
Yep that's the one I was thinking of, thank you. Afaik Scott linked it in one of his articles?
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
9hr ago
A bit ago I finally pulled a box off my shelf of shame and played Hands in the Sea, a game about the first punic war. I kickstarted it forever ago, then kickstarted the second edition upgrade kit, then I moved, then I lost touch with the friends I usually played those sorts of games with. I marked this game as received on Kickstarter in October of 2016, and it finally hit my table July of 2025. Jeeze.
I originally took an interest in the game because a respected wargame youtuber, I think Judd Vance, was going around saying it was one of the best games he'd ever played during playtesting with the designer. It takes the deck building system from A Few Acres of Snow, widely but perhaps unfairly panned for having an unfixable OP strategy, and fixes that as well as improving on it in nearly every way. I never played A Few Acres of Snow on account of it's poor reputation, so I can't attest to that personally. However, I did greatly enjoy it.
If you've played a deck building game, the central mechanic might not be alien to you. You have a starting deck of cards, you draw five, and you get to take two actions. Where it gets wargamey is that the actions are all printed on a player aid, there are about a dozen of them, you can pick any action you want, and the cards mostly provide resources to accomplish them. Broadly there are two types of cards also, territories which you either start with or conquer, and then also personnel like legions, commanders, traders, etc. I won't bore you with a detailed rules breakdown, but generally you'll be conquering territory, trying to fuck up each others lines of supply through naval fuckery, and racing towards a set of military and economic victory conditions.
I played the game with my brother who is back in state. It went well, and I couldn't help notice how differently we try to learn a game. He wanted to try each different action and learn how it worked. I just learned a subset of them that I thought would make a good strategy, and clobbered him. He kept trying, and failing, to ask AI rule questions, I looked them up on BoardGameGeek. That said, it probably would have been a close game if the random events didn't hand me several absolute coups.
Yes there are random events. You roll a dice to see which player they effect, and some are weighted more towards Carthage or more towards Rome. Unfortunately this provided no assistance, and my brother playing Carthage just got absolutely hammered. The first few random events cost me some money and cards. Then for the rest of the game my brother ate shit. He lost his entire fleet to a storm, losing his singular advantage over me that he was really beginning to punish me with. Then he lost a heavily fortified town that was holding the line in Sicily to a rebellion. A town I quickly scooped up before he could react.
He tried to pull his game out of the tailspin it was in. But curiously enough, the game's length is determined by how many times Carthage goes through their deck. So the more he tried to optimize his deck to combat my strategy, the quicker he was running out of time to execute, as the game can only go 12 turns. Also, I was scoring way more points than him during the scoring phase of each turn, which was pushing me faster and faster to an absolute victory. In a way, it was a mercy killing the way that accelerated his loss.
So, all in all, I really enjoyed the experience. But I did win a crushing victory, so of course I would.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
9hr ago
Look dude, you're the one who said that whatever's disclosed while sobbing in that 'Spoons stays in the Spoons.
At any rate, I wasn't around when the PR push you're talking about for euthanize took off (which jurisdiction are we talking about?) It's not legal in the UK, and I am part, albeit only at a very junior level, of the bodies putting forth policy proposals and considering whether to make it legal. I can tell you that we use simultaneously more careful, and more broad, language. It is definitely not being sold as something for those who are in maximal agony and only at the very last minute.
Browser
9hr ago
Yeah but Antifa are essentially given soft handling veering on explicit carte blanche by the powers that be.
Browser
9hr ago
Also active guerrilla warfare success tends to rely on pre-existing networks of ethnicity, religion, family or whatever else. Plus significant foreign support. You can red/blue tribe all you want but these are ideological causes and not literal tribes.
Americans are not for the most part built like that. Red Dawn arguments are generally a spurious circlejerk.
Right, but I think your post contained something of an elision. If I'm reading you correctly, you're saying that people with terminal illnesses but also people who were dealt a bad hand by life should be afforded the dignity of a quick, painless suicide.
While I can understand the argument that people who will never be able to live a normal life (people with severe developmental disorders such that they will never be able to support themselves, paedophiles, the constitutionally unfuckable etc.) should be afforded the dignity of a quick, painless death if they want it, the point I was making about guns is that they facilitate opportunistic suicides among people who don't meet this description who find themselves in a state of intense but temporary distress. And I don't think there's any effective means of separating wheat from chaff. When guns are widely available, you allow the unemployable and unlovable to undergo a quick, painless death - but you also enable a hard-working, decent man who just lost his job to top himself when he would have thought better of it had the gun not been right there in front of him.
The implication that the only people to kill themselves are people who cannot function in ordinary society and want to exit from an agreement they never personally assented to is, in my view, not supported by the best evidence from the social sciences. Every year, lots of people kill themselves who would not have done otherwise if not for the ease of accessibility. An obvious sign of this is the fact that three professions which consistently rank among the most suicidal in every Western country are doctors, dentists and veterinarians. Is it because these professions are uniquely depressing, or attract a particularly dysfunctional class of person? Or is it because all of the people working in these fields have easy access to morphine and other painkillers?
JarJarJedi
9hr ago
"Right wing" has a weird meaning in Europe... I am eagerly expecting a fresh crop of horror stories (in addition to the plenty we have in NY) to follow.
Browser
9hr ago
Makes sense. I've done Jiu-Jitsu for a long time and whilst I've never been out-out I've spent a lot of time being choked in various guises and if somebody's got a clean bite and catches a blood choke perfectly it's blackness oncoming almost instantly. But also plenty of chokes where it's see-sawing the line the whole time and can be minutes of awkwardness
You've given me the idea for a very good medical comedy about a critical care doctor who either disagrees with the concept of euthanasia, or bumbles around never quite being told which patients are involved.
He, or she, holds the record for most lives saved or resuscitations performed. In a very British manner, the actual doctors responsible for euthanasia are very vexed by his tendency to immediately save their patients, and they're in a cat and mouse game of taking turns murdering and unmurdering any given patient.
The hospital brass are desperate to figure out a way to not award him excellence awards, because it's just plain old embarrassing at this point.
I can foresee potential to change the plot to get more demographic appeal. The life saving male doctor versus the ice queen no-nonsense German euthanasia dom. Or getting Rowan Atkinson to play the male lead.
It might be delightfully British. We can fabricate end of season drama by having them come to blows, and then have them either start to fuck over a corpse that comes alive (because their thrusting counts as CPR), or when they realize that they can game both metrics if they cooperate to keep the bodies clinically dead for long enough to fool the coroner.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
9hr ago
From 2011 (not Scott)
FtttG
10hr ago
Apple seeds contain about 0.6 milligrams of hydrogen cyanide.
I once had the same thought about eating cherries in bulk.
You might be able to buy a pack of .308 or 12 gauge buckshot and press your head on the entire thing while you heat it up somehow, maybe a frying pan.
I vaguely recall some movie where this happens, a guy heats shells on a frying pan.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
10hr ago
All interstate transit would have to be on the I-10 and I-40 through Arizona.
Or at least I-10 after the Navajo Nation blockaded I-40 from Gallup to Flagstaff.
ArmedTooHeavily
10hr ago
Absolutely seconded. Mental coherency is, fundamentally, what makes a person a person, what makes one oneself. Getting out while the getting is good and you are still you is right and honorable.
ArmedTooHeavily
10hr ago
Despite all of this about 1/5 of the patients regularly asked me to help kill them. They were in more or less constant pain despite pain management, increasingly felt that the help the got was degrading and their minds were rapidly slipping.
Is 1/5 an exaggeration or (to quote black hawk down) a no-bullshit exception?
My mind immediately goes to "this is another reason why you should never, ever let anyone disarm you." Horrifying.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
10hr ago
You can see that, but only really around government buildings of significant importance (I've almost never seen armed cops outside London). Don't seem to recall seeing them at transit stations, the police there were chill and mostly concerned with shooing away the homeless. And believe me, I've been to a lot of stations this month.
With respect to how the state treated black people, yes.
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