Posts by Russell Brown
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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 steven crawford,
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 steven crawford,
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.
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Hard News: Splore 2019 – Please Don't…, in reply to Emma Hart,
That’s not the problem. The problem is that there wasn’t really anything else available.
Yeah, that’s the problem. Maia Szalavitz is pretty compelling on this – pointing out that 12 Steps does alienate people and doesn’t have a better success rate than other therapies. She actually thinks it should be separate from treatment, available for people who find it of benefit.
Beth Macy’s book Dopesick also identifies the ubiquity of 12 Steps-style abstinence therapy as a problem in America’s opioid epidemic. It fails a lot of people, but it’s generally all there is – particularly in circumstances where people are sent to treatment through a court process. Same problem here. If you want to take the opportunity offered by the AOD Court, you have to embrace 12 Steps, or you're barred.
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For practical reasons, expensive residential treatment centres that house a broad spectrum of vulnerable and potentially volatile people, can’t afford to fuck around with fat heads.
That’s not really what it’s about though. It means that the only way to enter a judicial process and stay out of jail is to formally declare a spiritual belief. I think that’s a bit of a problem.
It’s hard to argue about these things with a man who has an honorarium. But It would be nice if David was will to be challenged on some of this.
I’m happy to see if he wants to respond. But I would point out that he’s someone who works every day at the sharp end of this, both independently and with Waipareira. And he’s not the only person I’ve spoken to about the dominance of the 12 Steps model in treatment.
