Seriously, what the fuck is this guy’s backstory that made him this way? First he’s a political outsider who manages to win a senate election on a squad adjacent platform, and now he’s raving mad standing on buildings to demonstrate his unparalleled, unconditional support of Israel and the genocide they are presiding over?

I have never seen a politician this genuinely, deeply, personally, emotionally, and publicly invested into any matter of policy at all. His brain must seriously be swiss cheese right about now between the stroke and the worms.

Kratom is a plant containing several natural opioids. These are fully structurally distinct from the classical opioids like Codeine or Morphine and their semi-synthetic derivatives like Oxycodone, Heroin, Hydromorphone, etc. But they activate the same receptors in the brain, and produce a very similar high.

It’s currently legal in most US states, but the DEA really wants to criminalize it more and more as it grows into mainstream awareness. Thankfully it looks like they’ve yielded to popular backlash against scheduling it for the time being. While Kratom is an opioid, it is honest to god the safest opioid in existence. The most abundant active substance is only a partial agonist at the mu-opioid receptor (the primary receptor responsible for mediating the euphoric effects of opioid drugs). As a result, it is extremely difficult to fatally OD on the stuff, there isn’t enough respiratory depression to halt breathing even at high doses, and it has a ceiling effect that prevents the out of control dose spiraling typical of attempts to compensate for growing tolerance with full agonist opioids. That said, Kratom does produce at least one full agonist opioid, but the concentrations are comparatively low enough to be ignored unless you’re using an extract.

This combination of accessibility, legality, and safety profile makes Kratom a very popular and effective drug to use as an aid to quit harder opioids. If you have a tolerance to harder opioids you won’t be able to effectively get high on Kratom thanks to the ceiling effect, but it will seriously take the edge off unless you were accustomed to large fentanyl doses.

It is also one of the only means of finding pain relief now that doctors almost universally transform into cops when it comes time to discuss being prescribed opioids.

(I just noticed that your comment is ambiguous, you’ve mentioned Kratom and Kava, but I’m not sure if you meant to only ask about Kava. The two are completely unrelated drugs with different effects and mechanisms of action. The only similarity between them is that they are both plant based drugs that have slipped through criminalization in the US.)

Also, I’m not aware of any cultural appropriation concerns with either of them, and they are not at risk of extinction like Peyote cactus is.

hell yeah, that’s the spirit!

I used to be so fucking careful when it came to doing drugs the safe and responsible way. I’d read for hours about pharmacology and shit while taking in as many first hand accounts online as I could before agonizing over exactly how much I should use on my first go down to the mg and cut ratio.

Well, that mindset turned out to not be sufficient for all types of drugs, and I got addicted to opiates despite the utmost care in my initial experimentation. Things slowly fell off the rails from there. I’ve done so many absurd and horrendous things to get high and avoid the hell of opioid withdrawal. I’ve gone through so many sketchy batches of disgusting, stepped on street dope out of sheer desperation.

I’ve been clean from full agonist opioids for years now, but I think my brain is broken ,and I can no longer be arsed in the slightest on breaking my habit of doing stupid doses of a drug before I even know what it’ll be like.

yeah, it’s definitely a good suggestion to toss out there in general, there really are a ton of people out there who genuinely do need to drink more water and just haven’t realized yet that mild dehydration is directly causing some of their ailments

In this case though I’m pretty certain it’s tied to the Diphenhydramine because the ache only comes on after I use it.

It seems there are two broad sects of pro-advertising assholes on the internet:

There are the people who believe watching ads is a necessary evil for art to exist at all, and their willingness to toil in the marketing mines is some sort of moral virtue they have over the ad blocking “freeloaders”.

And there are the tech perverts who actually get excited about the latest fucking spyware hidden throughout their OS, browser, and apps because they take some sort of sick enjoyment in being subjected to increasingly personalized ads as if the only problem with marketing brainwashing is that it just isn’t quite relevant enough to their interests yet.

The first group is annoying, but the second is genuinely terrifying.

I drink a ton of water, I don’t think that’s the problem.

terf island is such a fucking pathetically cucked country lmao, gotta get a special loiscense to buy whipped cream and sleepy time tea is considered a hard drug

There’s nothing concrete really, I was just being hyperbolic about it. More and more often the vasoconstriction manifests in this dull ache in my kidneys that has been scaring the shit out of me.

Yes

IDF is doing that thing from video games where enemies inexplicably cluster around randomly placed bright red barrels full of nondescript explosives

wtf election years suck. stop reminding me that four years have passed since four years ago, ban all indications of linear time, this is really fucked up

Damn, that’s such a fuck you blatant move at preventing another Bernie. Once again, the Dems only get their claws out and seriously play politics when it’s to stop all movement leftward.

“If you can pee pee, then poo poo”

Smh Anglo culture encourages pee pee poo poo

I just wouldn’t trust anybody like that. He needs to open that button before I’ll consider voting for him

I can sometimes feel a bit sorry when a young, politically clueless person sees us talking about the evil that whiteness is and starts thinking “damn, my skin is kinda whitish, why they hate me :(”, but also, that’s not being the target of racism. One of the few cases where the typically right wing retort to grow a thicker skin is the actual solution, that and stop associating your light skin tone with the inherently racist conception of “the white race”. But I find that once someone goes beyond that to being insulted by the word cracker, it’s no longer such an innocent reaction.

I’m sorry, I don’t think I was attempting to “build a politics” of any sort. I was just shooting the shit about which lib politician would be directing self described American leftists toward electoralism next, like u/zed_proclaimer said

I think Bernie scared the establishment dems too much.

This is why I think Bernie actually had a far better chance of winning the 2016 primary than he did the totally doomed 2020 primary. (That said, I think it’s very unlikely he’d have went on to become president after either primary.)

Nationally speaking, he was a no one before his 2016 campaign. He arrived so late to the primary process that until then, Hillary Clinton was the presumed victor in a similar way incumbent presidents are presumed the de facto victors in their own primaries. He did receive an unexpected amount of fanfare at his announcement, but for a while afterwards, the party essentially expected him to be a far more subdued 2020 Mike Gravel type figure who’s goal is to make it into the debates, raise some domestic policy issues to help move public opinion, and drop out sometime around the first few primary contests. Probably because that was most likely Bernie’s actual goal at the time.

But actually those specific issues were what every remotely left learning person struggling in this country was waiting to hear in a candidate, and his campaign exploded in popularity shortly before the voting. Hillary Clinton was the DNC’s only option to contest him. They were caught off guard, and had no 2020 style shenanigans prepared to force another candidate ahead of him as a buffer. Ratfucking the Iowa caucus was their only option. If Bernie won Iowa, nothing would have stopped the momentum going forward.

That was the last Iowa caucus to have obfuscated actual vote counts. We have no idea what they were. All that we have is the Iowa Democratic party’s official “state delegate equivalent” numbers. According to that, Bernie lost by a narrow margin. Months later at the convention, the DNC Bernie delegates won a vote that forced Iowa to release true vote counts in caucuses going forward.

And what happened four years later in the 2020 Iowa Democratic caucuses? Bernie won the most votes as per the previously hidden raw vote counts. But surprise, he lost the actual caucus, once again narrowly receiving less “state delegate equivalents” than his opponent, Mayo Pete this time. This fucking bullshit was immediately obvious to everyone. Within minutes of the caucus closing, everyone knew what a corrupt shit show it was when the results were severely delayed. Imagine the wild shit the Democratic party must’ve been doing for decades back when the caucus process was essentially a black box, theirs free to manipulate.

Normal primary elections are much harder to rig than that. It can be done, but I don’t think the Democratic party had the time remaining to put in the necessary legwork. If that Iowa ratfuck failed, it was over for Hillary Clinton. I don’t think they would have made use of the super delegates still having the option to choose their candidate and thereby ignore the outcome of the contests. It was just too brazen a move, they’d have been right to fear it would cause the party to implode. The Democratic establishment would have found it preferable to sabotage Bernie’s national campaign as inconspicuously as possible.

They will never let it get that close again.

Ah yes, love to go swimming in the public pool built in the middle of a fucking walmart parking lot

I feel so upset that I totally missed Jan 6th while it was happening. Chapo.chat was having a massive struggle session at the time, so I decided to log off for a while. Bad decision considering I avoid all other news sources for my own sanity. I returned days later, totally clueless about what was perhaps the funniest event in American history, worst case of retroactive FOMO in my life

It was a big moment of radicalization for me when I first became aware that the US was actually the worst side in the revolutionary war, a very great feat of evil considering their enemy was the fucking British Empire.