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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 5, 2024

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Possible. I have only my own personal experience with addictions to go on, and my personal conclusion is that the diminishing returns of autonomic biochemical release from satiating addiction was specifically pleasurable due to the novelty of youth, and minor psychological reprogramming allowed my personal utility calculation to value steak, lagavulin and VR porn equally to nicotine and cocaine.

Of course that could be due to physiological incapability limiting me from continuing to achieve the same upper highs of nicotine and cocaine use that sparked the initial addiction cycle, but post-hoc quantification of 'personal utility' is so useless that I might as well make up whatever historical valence I had assigned to the different contributory factors.

I am personally suspicious of modern 'research' into therapy and addiction, particularly the suspiciously high incidence of journals concluding moral expatiation for asocial behaviors. He had addiction/genetic trauma/ptsd/a bad day so of course he had no choice but to be an asshole. In this space of 'addiction cannot be managed' the criticisms of Ozempic as some form of permanent pleasure-depriving limbic path zombiefication drug seems more like concern trolling to encourage continual indulgence in bad behaviors rather than handwringing about motivation death. If ozempic causes the tweaker to rot in a lazyboy watching SpongeBob and chugging doritos instead of seeking means to score meth for that sweet sweet dragon, then bring on the apathetic skinnification of antisocial losers.