Depression is more than low mood – it’s a change of consciousness (Cecily Whiteley and Jonathan Birch, Psyche, Nov 08 2021)
“People who’ve never been through depression might assume it’s just an extreme form of feeling low.
Don’t we all find that our daily activities can sometimes lose their sparkle? Yet, accounts of people with depression point in a different direction.
As another person said to the psychologist Dorothy Rowe, recorded in her book The Experience of Depression (1978):
‘I awoke into a different world. It was as though all had changed while I slept: that I awoke not into normal consciousness but into a nightmare.’ (…)
Neuroscientists and philosophers of consciousness have recently coined a new term – the global state of consciousness – to describe the structural properties of experience that varies between ordinary wakefulness, dreaming, the psychedelic state and the minimally conscious state.
These states are called ‘global’ because the whole of conscious experience is altered, not just a particular element.
The fine detail of what we experience in everyday waking life changes all the time (sounds, colours, odours all come and go), but the structure stays largely fixed:
I feel myself to be present in the world, at the centre of an integrated, coherent point of view; time carries on flowing at the same rate; space has the same geometric structure.
The global state is this overarching structure and ordinarily stays constant as particular experiences pass us by.
When we dream, take psychedelics or suffer a brain injury, this structure can be altered, and we enter a different global state.
Could depression belong in this family too?
What people with depression describe as their ‘world’ or their ‘nightmare’ might be a distinctive global state, in which some of the structural pillars of ordinary experience (such as the sense of self, space and time) are distorted.
Not a ‘dream’ or a ‘trip’, but a state that belongs in the same group. (…)
But why might psychedelic therapy work as a treatment for depression?
One common suggestion is that psychedelics provide individuals with an uninhibited space or window for insight and emotional release.
Yet the idea that depression is an altered state of consciousness suggests a different explanation: it could be that psychedelics work by forcing a transition between global states of consciousness.
First, they propel a depressed patient into a new state of consciousness, the psychedelic state.
At the end of the episode, the patient must transition out of it – but into what?
Perhaps, after a psychedelic trip, the patient can emerge into a state of ordinary consciousness, rather than the ‘nightmare’ of the depressed state.
The idea is that psychedelics might work to reset or reboot a patient’s global state of consciousness.
On this hypothesis, being depressed is like being stuck in a dream from which you cannot wake. Psychedelics are the jolt that finally wakes you up.”
(via marxistprincess)
Vladimir Lenin: Speech At Unveiling Of Memorial To Marx And Engels, Nov. 7, 1918
We are unveiling a memorial to Marx and Engels, the leaders of the world workers’ revolution.
Humanity has for ages suffered and languished under the oppression of a tiny handful of exploiters who maltreated millions of laborers. But whereas the exploiters of an earlier period, the landowners, robbed and maltreated the peasant serfs, who were disunited, scattered and ignorant, the exploiters of the new period, the capitalists, came face to face with the vanguard of the downtrodden people, the urban, factory, industrial workers. They were united by the factory, they were enlightened by urban life, they were steeled by the common strike struggle and by revolutionary action.
It is to the great historic merit of Marx and Engels that they proved by scientific analysis the inevitability of capitalism’s collapse and its transition to communism, under which there will be no more exploitation of man by man.
It is to the great historic merit of Marx and Engels that they indicated to the workers of the world their role, their task, their mission, namely, to be the first to rise in the revolutionary struggle against capital and to rally around themselves in this struggle all working and exploited people.
We are living at a wonderful time, when this prophecy of the great socialists is beginning to be realized. We all see the dawn of the world socialist revolution of the proletariat breaking in several countries. The unspeakable horrors of the imperialist butchery of nations are everywhere evoking a heroic upsurge of the oppressed and multiplying their strength in the struggle for emancipation.
Let this memorial to Marx and Engels again and again remind the millions of workers and peasants that we are not alone in our struggle. Side by side with us the workers of more advanced countries are rising. Hard battles still lie ahead of them and us. In common struggle capitalist oppression will be broken, and socialism finally won!
(via marxistprincess)
(via marxistprincess)
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Big Retail Chains Are Manufacturing a Shoplifting ‘Crisis’ -
As The Appeal wrote in June, data does not back up claims of a nationwide shoplifting “surge.” According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) data, the number of reported shoplifting offenses dropped 18 percent between 2019 and 2020, the last year for which full data is available. That decline may be an aberration due to the COVID-19 pandemic — though supporters of the “crime wave” narrative say retailers have stopped reporting theft to police because prosecutors aren’t punishing it harshly enough. But there is perhaps a simpler explanation than an unreported shadow-wave of stealing: While the average value of shoplifted items has ticked up over the last decade (likely due to a confluence of factors), the actual number of shoplifting incidents in America is falling. The FBI reported in September that overall larceny rates across the U.S. have plummeted to lows not seen since the 1960s.
This contradictory data hasn’t stopped big retail chains and their law enforcement allies from pushing the theft-surge narrative. Stories about shoplifting are generally sourced from major retailers themselves. And while media outlets tend to treat these corporations as neutral arbiters of information, retailers have a vested interest in the policy debate that stems from these stories. Many of these companies have long lobbied to keep people locked up for as long as possible. Safeway, one of the multiple companies that has complained this year about a shoplifting surge, also backed a California ballot initiative in 2020 that would have locked up people who shoplift for longer periods of time.
Cops also benefit from this narrative of supposed lawlessness. How could we defund police or lessen the U.S.’s harsh penalties for retail theft when there’s a crime wave afoot?
One such targeted media campaign came to Arizona in May, when Home Depot fed shoplifting footage to the Phoenix CBS affiliate in order to push state lawmakers to pass House Bill 2383. That legislation would have created a statewide “organized retail theft task force” with its own full-time prosecutor and multiple investigators, but the bill died in the Senate after making it through the House.
Efforts in other states have been more successful. In September, Illinois created an Organized Crime Task Force that partners directly with major corporations. And in California, a recently enacted law is set to bolster the California Highway Patrol’s existing retail crime task force, after receiving unanimous support in the legislature. That bill comes as shoplifting rates across California are at their lowest levels since the state officially began tracking the statistic in 1975.
Perhaps most notably, San Francisco Mayor London Breed this year expanded an “organized retail crime initiative” and beefed up the number of city cops assigned to retail theft issues — seemingly in response to claims that a shoplifting wave was sweeping her city. The issue came to a head in October when Walgreens stated that rampant shoplifting had forced the multibillion-dollar international corporation to close five stores in the city. Predictably, the specter of widespread crime in left-leaning San Francisco set right-wing media ablaze: Here again, they said, was a Democrat-dominated city with a “woke” prosecutor falling into supposed lawlessness and decay.
But Walgreens’ own statements have since been called into question. Last month, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that some of the Walgreens stores slated for closure had reported fewer thefts than city averages. The data did not support Walgreens’ explanation that the closures were due to “organized, rampant retail theft,” the Chronicle wrote, later concluding that they were more likely due to other factors. (As others have also noted, the press was not similarly enraged when Walgreens agreed to pay $4.5 million in November 2020 to settle claims it had been stealing employees’ wages for years.)
Any such context was entirely absent from the hearing on Capitol Hill last week. Instead, Dugan’s testimony served as the crowning achievement of a years-long push by major retailers and local police to manufacture a narrative that crime is increasing when it isn’t.
In his testimony, Dugan painted a dire picture of the threat CVS Health faces from $200 million in losses due to shoplifting each year. What Dugan didn’t mention is that his company still sold $91 billion in goods and posted a $7 billion profit in 2020 — an increase from the year before. While everyday Americans are hurting after two years of a crushing pandemic, CVS seems to be doing just fine.
(via marxistprincess)
Barack Obama has a nerve preaching about the climate crisis -
“We have not done nearly enough to address this crisis. We are going to have to do more. Whether that happens or not to a large degree is going to depend on you.”
Who precisely is “we” in this scenario? The young people who were children when Obama took office did not clear the way for a 750% explosion in crude oil exports, as he did just a few days after the Paris agreement was brokered in 2015. Nor did they boast proudly about it years later, as ever-more research mounted about the dangers of continuing to invest in fossil fuels. Speaking at a Houston, Texas gala in 2018, the former president proudly took credit for booming US fossil fuel production. “Suddenly America is the largest oil producer. That was me people,” he boasted jokingly to an industry-friendly crowd. “Say thank you.”
Young people also didn’t use the US Export-Import Bank to direct $34bn to 70 fossil fuel projects around the world. Neither did they deploy the National Security Administration to surveil other countries’ delegations at the climate talks in Copenhagen in 2009. And they have not joined other wealthy nations at the UN Framework Conventions on Climate Change (UNFCCC) talks to keep conversations about the enormous climate debt they owe the rest of the world off the table.
To hear Obama tell it, if enough people come together to raise awareness about the climate crisis and consume smartly, they will change enough hearts and minds to keep warming below 1.5C. That would be a lot easier if Obama, in his time as leader of the free world, hadn’t made the task so much harder for all those inspiring, passionate young people.
(via marxistprincess)
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Godzilla vs. Gigan