Posts by Russell Brown
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Hard News: What does the wastewater…, in reply to Sacha,
Yet brace yourself for most media leading with the angle that drugs are harm.
They all pose some harm, but I think running it through our Drug Harm Index doesn't tell us anything very useful. It's more a way of justifying budgets.
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Some other data: a ranking of countries by past-year incidence of cannabis use.
New Zealand is ranked ninth, just ahead of ... Greenland?
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Hard News: Splore 2019 – Please Don't…, in reply to Craig Young,
Prohibitionist propaganda alert: With the assistance of David Farrar’s Curia Market Research firm, Family First has just released a somewhat suspect opinion poll.
It's an extremely suspect poll, one which appears to breach at least the spirit of the NZ Political Polling Code. The question order shown in the formal report loads in all those dubious questions ahead of the primary voting intention question.
The poll script also doesn't mention the law, not once, yet Family First's article does. It's stinky as all hell.
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Carole Cadwalladr's account of doing the talk and what happened afterwards – including the angry reaction of Facebook executives – is an excellent read.
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Hard News: Digital persuasion and the…, in reply to ,
And yet, it's wrapped into our lives. It's a way I can tell people when I've written something like the above, it's my connection to decades' worth of friends, it's how everyone gets everyone else to come to their damn gigs ...
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Hard News: Digital persuasion and the…, in reply to Sacha,
Yeah, it's really good. I was interested to see a tweet by her that she had to get past a longtime crippling anxiety about public speaking to do it.
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Hard News: Psychedelic Therapy: an…, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
They seem to be having success in various areas with running much lower currents through areas of the brain to stimulate it – it need not be up in the ‘convulsive’ order of charge.
Yeah, Suresh talked about that when I interviewed him – noting that the research he's doing with psychedelics might lead to insights about what's actually happening that lead to more effective brain stimulation treatments.
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Hard News: Splore 2019 – Please Don't…, in reply to ,
So its important politically, for it to be elegant and able to be owned by ordinary people. ie: don’t fuck it up by getting too clever.
Yes. The medicinal cannabis legislation is basically okay – the regulations it enables seem to be taking a good shape – but if you were to read the text of the amendment without knowing exactly what was going on, you'd be completely mystified by what it means and what it does. It's perfectly conventional to include an explanatory note in the text of a bill and it would have been a good idea in this case.
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Flying Out RSD update in image form.
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So I went and talked to him and Paula this week, and I got the impression that they really don't care too much about the legislation, they just want to play politics with it. So that was a bit gutting.
It also seems worth noting that when Paula Bennett asked the question of the PM yesterday, her supplementary asked whether Ardern thought a cross-party group of backbench MPs should be in charge of choosing the question in the referendum.
That would be the cross-party group that Bennett has refused to join. I'm not seeing any good faith here.
