For bullet two, one of the best things you can do is show up to vote, and be loud if / when your rights are denied. Contact local news, tell the ACLU about your case, put it on Facebook + all social media, tell your friends at work, church, wherever about it. The legitimacy of election interference claims are much harder to deny if it doesn’t all come from the top.

Of course, effective addiction recovery is very near to my heart, and I care about getting it right. I’d be curious to see which studies you’re pulling from that define AA in opposition to “Real Treatment”. Most treatments for alcohol addiction are rather hit-or-miss, and all the literature I’m familiar with generally find that combination therapies are more effective than any one therapy alone. Peer recovery groups are “a” therapy, AA is one of them, and they help some people, not all.

AA groups are as religious as their members; some of them are chill about it, many of them are insufferable about it, particularly in the southern US, and I suspect this is a big reason why people wash out of the program. Some of those washouts find their ways to more accepting groups or programs, some do not. I think the widespread attitude of “the program works if you work it” is a pretty grisly and self-satisfied example of survivorship bias, in AA and a lot of similar programs, propagated by people who found something that works for them and insisting that it’s the one true program that should work for everyone. This happens in religious and non-religious groups and it gives people the idea that if they can’t find help in that one group, that they must be broken beyond repair. I struggled with that for a long time before I found my people.

That’s a bit of a diversion, I don’t want to get into the gritty details of the many things I think are wrong with addiction recovery culture. Suffice to say that peer support groups can help, we haven’t really worked out all the problems with doing it well, and addiction is a hard problem. I think it’s worth taking the imperfect tools we have and trying to improve them, rather than throwing them out entirely because they are imperfect.

No, I elaborated in another comment but I don’t think 12 step or similar recovery programs are cults themselves. However, there are cults and scam operations that use recovery groups as recruiting grounds, sometimes hosting their own meetings masquerading as recovery programs in order to ensnare new members, as is described in the article.

I think the reputation is partially earned. I’ve been in a few AA and AA-like groups over the years, and while I wouldn’t say that AA itself is a cult, there are cults that use AA and similar recovery groups as recruiting grounds, and it’s very possible that your dad got caught up in one of those. The sudden taking up of a new and very specific charitable cause is a big red flag.

Hard agree with your last point. I was fortunate enough to (eventually…) find a network of peers that helped me and I am doing much better now than I was, but it is a bitter truth that there are people who will find you when you’re at your lowest and most vulnerable, and exploit you. I’m sorry your dad wasn’t able to get the help he needed ❤️

None of that is anti science. There’s no “distrust in studies”, unless you’re referring to the distrust in the “some studies” you cryptically referenced in your post. Not that you bothered even to cherry pick, but cherry-picked studies can show results that the preponderance of evidence does not support. Nor do I claim that quantity beats quality. Scientific communities are as capable of systemic bias just like any other. However, the preponderance of evidence does cut against your unsourced assertion that peer groups don’t aid in recovery. Lastly ancedotes: they aren’t anti-science, nor are they useless. They are statistically unsuitable for the purposes of drawing conclusions about large populations or general trends, and therefore shouldn’t be used as the basis for broad scientific claims, which is why I did no such thing. They are stories that humans share with one another in casual conversation, and I thought it was one worth sharing here.

And not that you deserve this, making your wild claims with no evidence, but as Exhibit A for the scientificness of my paragraph I’d like to enter into the record the first result when searching for AA meta analyses on pubmed. Relevant sections are presented below.

Main results: We included 27 studies containing 10,565 participants (21 RCTs/quasi-RCTs, 5 non-randomized, and 1 purely economic study). The average age of participants within studies ranged from 34.2 to 51.0 years. AA/TSF was compared with psychological clinical interventions, such as MET and CBT, and other 12-step program variants. … AA/TSF (manualized) compared to treatments with a different theoretical orientation (e.g. CBT) (randomized/quasi-randomized evidence) RCTs comparing manualized AA/TSF to other clinical interventions (e.g. CBT), showed AA/TSF improves rates of continuous abstinence at 12 months (risk ratio (RR) 1.21, 95% confidence interval (CI)

Bet. If you can explain which paragraph is anti-science and why, I’ll move it to the top of my comment.

Brendan Carr is a fascist tool, but the anger I hold for him pales in comparison to the incandescent rage I feel for cultists who prey on people struggling with addiction. Exploiting people who are there because they have nowhere else to turn, usually while their life is actively falling apart or recently fallen apart. Turning the vulnerable into tools in their goddamn pyramid schemes or objects of their power fantasies. Making me feel sympathy for Brendan fucking Carr.

God they are the worst.

No, not all of them are cults. Some individual AA groups (as well as other peer support recovery groups) are feeder programs for cults, but not all. AA being christian is incidental to cultism; non-faith-based peer groups can also be cult feeders.

Secondly, “some studies” can show a lot of things that aren’t true. IIRC the majority of peer-reviewed research shows that peer support groups like AA usually have a positive impact vs. no peer support. Anecdotally, my peer support networks saved my life, more than once.

Like all peer groups, the group is as good as the peers. That’s why you gotta shop around and find one where you fit in.

I saw this on reddit ages ago and it still makes me laugh

Zhang was second-in-command under Chinese President Xi Jinping as vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC) – the supreme command body – and has long been seen as Xi’s closest military ally.

That sounds like a big deal.

I just assume anything with “Freedom”, “Liberty”, “Patriot”, etc. in the name are grifters trying to scam and/or datamine MAGA. “Libre” I think is still safe because it sounds too European.

… brief search interlude …

aaaaand LibertyMediaLLC is a wholly owned subsidiary of Liberty Media Corporation, a sprawling corporate holding company that is 49% owned by one John C. Malone, Atlanta Braves owner, Trump Inaugural Committee (round 1) donor and onetime largest individual landowner in the US.

…yup, that tracks.

UPDATE: I based the above off the parent comment, but view-verse lists its parent company as “Liberty Social Media LLC”, not “LibertyMediaLLC”. The former is much harder to pin down, the contact information on the google app is “Liberty Smith” and the dev site is a generic vibe-coding-looking website hosted on base44, so it may not be under LMC, just riding its coattails. Still, would not trust.

❤️ none taken, all is well

This is not my experience at all. My mind is a kaleidoscopic minefield and out there in the world, there are small refuges where I can find help, or at least rest, where I can gain perspective on my own mind and help make sense of it. Books, friends, quiet places in the woods and fields, cups of tea, benches near murals.

If your mind is a safe place I am happy for you. Mine is constantly trying to kill me, and the world and the people in it have helped me stop it, at great effort on both our parts. Those safe places are there because they help people like me live. Which is a pretty cool thing for the world to do, I think.

Second thought: if someone tells you something is triggering, please take them at their word, even if you privately think they’re being childish or dramatic or whatever. PTSD triggers suck and while there are common patterns, they can often be highly individualistic. If you find someone’s (or some group’s) interaction preferences over-burdensome, just don’t interact with them.

The definition of spaces as “safe” or “comfortable” is subjective, there may be some who use the terms synonymously but I don’t. There are safe spaces for drug addicts to discuss their experiences of addiction with each other; these spaces frequently deal with extremely uncomfortable topics. They are “safe” in that there are a few precepts that must be agreed upon in order to enter into the conversation, e.g. “There are no leaders; we are all peers” or “No drug addict is unworthy of help” or “Programs or methodologies that demand exclusivity are vulnerable to cultism and their promotion is not permitted here” etc. The idea is to make certain baseline topics axiomatic so the group can focus their conversations more productively than endlessly rehashing the same topic over and over again, which can exhaust and overwhelm members, to the detriment of all. That definition of safety is created by the community and agreed to by its members, and every safe space is free to define safety differently.

I’m gonna get this one:

I love the silly things we say!
They mean a slightly different way
but still connect to things I know
and make the silly language grow.

A graveyard full of dead links. How spooky.

Fascism needs enemies to operate and will create them for purpose if none are ready to hand. Fascism also craves power and will seek to expand infinitely until the universe is bent to its will. I don’t blame any individual for fleeing when the price of staying is torture and death. If my personal circumstances were different I would do the same.

But, if every trans person suddenly left the US, Trump and co. would continue to find and terrorize enemies because that’s what they have to do to keep the terror machine alive. Brown, queer, trans, autistic, communist, doesn’t really matter what the label is, or even if it truly applies to a person, they just have to label enemies and then punish them publicly to show their supporters that they are being fought for. When they run out of victims, new ones will be selected. There’s no endgame; fascism is always plutocrats looting the country behind a facade of nationalism, and they get as long as the getting’s good. Then the facade collapses, sooner or later, and those left holding the reigns of the machine are (sometimes) punished, and the plutocrats move on to find the next grift, and the people are left picking up the pieces of a shattered nation.

I don’t know how long the American terror machine has left. It feels like it’s been on the tipping point since Trump got elected in '16. It could crash down after the midterms, it could be ten more years. But I know, until it dies, it will never run out of victims. By definition, it can’t. Until it does I’ll be here, doing what I can. And when it collapses, I’ll be around to help us get through the demolition and rebuilding. Hopefully building something better than before. :(