southsamurai

Yeah, the term usually refers specifically to moving between doctors to gain access to specific classes of medication that are restricted. In doing so, the “shopper” hopes to bypass limitations on how much of the drug they can get in a given time frame.

It’s almost always drugs that have recreational use and/or high addiction potential.

It isn’t like there’s an automatic cross reference any time you go to a doctor.

Where people usually get caught is at the pharmacies, since that’s where most places have their tracking. When it isn’t there, it’s via insurance, since even if pharmacies didn’t track prescriptions against a database, the insurance companies that pay for your meds already do.

Doctor shopping, on the level you’re asking about, it tends to be about finding providers that will just write a prescription with little or no difficulty. That’s the easy part of it. Doctors tend to either refuse to do pain management at all, or will only do it short term; but the ones that will do it short term tend to still be willing because they know they aren’t going to end up with hassles as long as they aren’t providing you with a steady stream. And, they also know if you’re “drug seeking” as opposed to treatment seeking, that you’ll get noticed at the pharmacy or insurance company.

Now, if you’re actually a chronic pain patient, you can find doctors that will act as your pain management, but it’s going to be rare as hell, and they’ll keep an eyeball on you. But you’ll usually get turfed to a pain “specialist”, and have to jump through whatever hoops they prefer.

It’s the same with things other than opiates, like benzos, ambien, etc that have a recreational use aspect, or get abused heavily/are addictive. But opiates are more or less the big doctor shopping target. Benzos are a close second, but GPs are much more likely to refer you to a psychiatrist that’s set up for handling the underlying issue than with opiates.

It has gotten a shit ton harder to sustain doctor shopping though, because there’s so many possibilities to get flagged now. You don’t even want to know how often chronic pain patients run into issues if they make the mistake of seeing a different doctor because their primary is out of town, or retires. And gods forbid you switch pharmacies when there’s a shortage of a medication that’s controlled like that. You can end up being refused anything without jumping through a million hoops.

I’ve seen people in their eighties flagged for pain meds. Like, who gives a fuck if they do become chemically dependent, they’re not going to be a long term risk for anything if they’re dealing with chronic pain in the first place. Too many co-morbidities.

Tiny gets used like that? Damn, I’m behind.

Tbh, ignoring the current political climate, a teacher would be wise to minimize exposing their private lives to students at all, and even co-workers. Just as a matter of privacy and minimizing bullshit. Yeah, you should absolutely have the ability to talk about a partner or spouse equally and without fear of reprisal, but that’s a different issue from people just being assholes in general.

Since the current US political climate is rocky as hell, not exposing your private life, even when you live somewhere with progressive policies now, is just a safety issue for one’s career.

If you want, and/or are willing, to be a fighter and defend your rights, and thus everyone’s rights, that’s great. We need people willing to not give in. But, that’s never a requirement, and it’s still too soon to tell how bad shit is going to get, so I’d at least delay such examples from your lessons if you don’t want to take the risk.

It fucking sucks that this is even something to worry about in this century.

Why? I’m not sure I’m up to a proper history of the Abrahamic religions and how their deity came to be who and what it is. Like, entire books have covered it, written by people with a shit ton more ability to research and support their conclusions than I can.

I’m not even sure how to tackle the subject in a comment length synopsis. Suffice it to say that there is a long and complicated history that led to that branch of religion. It wasn’t a single deity growing out of nothing, unconnected to other gods and myths.

So, I’ll limit myself to the second part of the question.

I think that if you boil it down, Isis is probably what you’re looking for. I can’t think of any other goddesses with such a popular following across the world, across multiple eras. She was a fairly big deity in various Egyptian eras and surrounding locations, and had a major following throughout Greece and Rome over millennia.

You could argue that Inanna was equally a top goddess, though I’ve seen it argued that they’re the same goddess with different names as “she” spread across the ancient world cultures.

But I’m comfortable saying that Isis was, in some times and areas, way more important than Yahweh/Jehovah/Allah/El/Adonai, or whatever other names you want to apply to that deity, in some of the places and times “he” has been worshipped.

If you look only at the current world, I think you’d be hard pressed to find any goddess having that kind of almost monotheistic fervor though. Even Wiccans and other neopagans don’t glom onto a single goddess, and they usually equally revere gods on average.

Since none of the polytheistic religions around the world throughout history really had one god above all gods on a reliable basis, you have to look at sects and cults for equivalents to the monotheistic cults and religions. And that means Isis. She was popular enough to have what amounted to a monotheistic following, here and there.

I wouldn’t argue or fuss if anyone had another candidate, or disagreed with my take though. I sure as hell stopped maintaining my body of knowledge about religions almost twenty years ago, so I can’t pull things out of memory on the subject the way I can with stuff I keep myself refreshed on. And with something that covers as much territory as religion, you gotta keep things fresh or they get buried under mountains of memory.

Yup, like generaldingus said, it’s largely an economic barrier. There aren’t many states that could pull it off properly.

It’s definitely possible though, but you’d have to break through so many barriers to get any current legislative body to make it happen, that it won’t.

Jfc, are you for real?

Because everything you just wrote indicates you would be the worst possible leader in any situation.

If this isn’t rage bait, it’s still just narcissistic rambling with no actual allusion question to be answered

Honestly, at this point, the only reason to go with either ecosystem is that Android, for now, allows you to escape Google, to some degree depending on how much work you’re willing to put in. IOS/apple doesn’t allow that

But, Google is trying hard to get to the same place.

But, ignoring that, apple got there first. That’s what it amounts to. The first real smart phone was by Apple, and that gave them a leg up

Could be.

There are plenty of people that do masturbate in their sleep, and it’s more common during puberty.

However, most wet dreams are generated without manual stimulation. Typically, it’s a combination of the stimulation of the genitals against clothing, or bedding with the brain’s ability to process those signals into something else and match it up with whatever dreams are ongoing.

In some cases, it doesn’t even need any physical stimulation at all. The brain can do all the work, so just the bare minimum stimulation from the aroused genitals just being there is all it takes to generate orgasm.

The pumping of blood, minor muscle tension and movements are all it takes when the brain is doing its thing.

Matter of fact, it’s possible to have a hands free orgasm while awake for the same reason, though it takes practice.

You would contact long of the private security firms. Probably something like Northbridge.

Basically, those companies hire ex military and ex LEO, get them reoriented for security qork and farm them out.

A good deal? Depends too much on the threat profile, how big a team you need, how many areas they’ll need to cover, how much you travel, etc. But expect to be paying out the nose.

Back when I did super low end security, as in being an obvious bodyguard to deter idiots, my rate was per event, as in you’d pay me to stand there at a party and make sure you weren’t fucked with, then I left at the end of an agreed on span of time. A grand would be the norm for me back then.

Someone doing something under contract for someone like a singer, and doing essentially the same thing, you might bring in 50-60k a year, depending on where you are. Higher than that for high profile clients, or with a lot of travel involved. That pricing is pretty old though, so don’t try and go negotiating a contract with that info.

Someone that’s doing real security work? One person might have a base salary in the 100k range, depending. Someone with some serious credentials like having a background in government security, special forces and the like can go higher.

Generally, if your security detail is taking a bullet, they fucked up. They will, at least in theory. Individuals may or may not actually do so, but they hire people partially based on their willingness to take decisive action like taking a hit.

The few times I was in contact with people like that, they tended to be batshit fucking crazy enough to take a bullet for some rich asshole.

A CEO like that dickweed? Probably has a half dozen people in rotation at most, no ability to control everything, and may or may not be able to afford the hard core people that are out there in that field. That’s going to run a fucking big expense per year. Not something they’d be paying out of pocket, even with the kind of salaries they get. If they want the kind of team that can handle even the unrealistic threats, you’re looking at a million dollar contract, easy. That’s going to be handled through their company, unless the company has an internal security department.

The goal of a security team at that scale is to predict possible attacks, plan for them, and prevent them.

The attack Mr Mangione is accused of, the CEO didn’t have serious security, or the shooter couldn’t have gotten that close. The client would have had meat all around him, watching for anyone moving into their defined perimeter. They’d have seen someone moving the way the shooter was, and at least have fouled the shot.

The CEOs out there now have whined and moaned into better security. Folks that have kept an eye on such things aren’t seeing major activity from any of the big names in private security though. Frankly, they don’t need top end protection.

Willing to have a casual explanation of it? An in depth one isn’t on topic for this community. And yes, this is the condensed version, I could write a small pamphlet on this.

If so, read on. If not, throw me a DM and I’ll try and give a more detailed version of my take after having changed my mind on the subject as a whole.

Neopronouns are not truly necessary. There’s other ways to achieve the same goal

However, respecting them is, and it’s important to recognize that the concept behind them is an important one.

The kind of neopronoun drag used aren’t the only kind of neopronoun. I can’t recall the name for that type, but it is an individualized version that has a different kind of merit.

The core of neopronouns is redefining gender and language. It’s reframing how we think about and deal with agender, gender fluid, non binary, and other labels that represent people for whom the traditional masc/fem/neutral pronouns don’t really fit. Now, yes, the singular neutral they/them does partially achieve that. But it isn’t necessarily perfect because it’s the same as just saying “other”.

Standard neopronouns like xe/xem/xyr attempt to rectify that, in part, by providing a general use new (neo means new) words that are inherently without gender, and are also internally consistent (hence why xyr replaces the plural they/them rather than leaving that in place).

What dragon rider’s pronouns do (and here I’ll switch to just calling the person drag because arthritis) is a furtherance of that basic idea. The concept of individual, single word pronouns takes the concept of reframing gender in language to its logical extreme.

Now, here we have to address the elephant in the room. Otherkin. Otherkin are the folks you think about when you see a lot of individual pronouns. They also want their pronouns to be different from the norm, though they don’t all want individual ones. They do tend to want pronouns that reflect their belief that they are different by being kin to their other. That’s a simplification, but that’s a tangent on a tangent already

Drag, afaik, isn’t otherkin.

The connection to drag is that the individualized pronouns look similar, and it’s where most people draw the line. Now, I have my opinion about that side of things, but for this purpose let’s set the assumption that their belief is valid.

That’s where we get back to drag. Drag, in choosing their user name, set up a fight from the beginning. I don’t know if it was intentional or not, but choosing dragon (rider), and dragon fucker as user names, it was inevitable.

But drag is not actually their user name, nor what you would call a name at all. It isn’t directly linked to them wanting to fuck dragons, which aren’t real. It’s a knock on effect.

Pretend, instead, that their user name is southsamurai, and they wanted the individual pronoun “sam”. Still some confusion, obviously, but it isn’t a fight from the beginning.

So, if my pronouns are sam/sam, I’m requesting an individual pronoun. I’m saying, up front, that by requesting that, that I have a sense of myself that doesn’t work with standard gendered pronouns, nor with the commonly used neopronouns. I’m saying, please interact with me as an individual, not as a generic person.

That’s why it matters. Now, I’m not saying anyone has to agree to use them. I’ve had many a discussion about that, and not just with drag. It’s a big ask. It’s asking everyone you meet to upend their brain and restructure their language pathways entirely, so that they can fluidly switch between known individual pronouns, and generic ones, without making errors.

But, even if you aren’t willing or able to do that, I have come to agree that the point of individualized pronouns is important, and that standard neopronouns need to be adapted to, because language does matter. Our thinking is shaped by those language pathways. Language is how we exchange ideas, and (except for people that don’t think in words at all) it’s how we process our thoughts.

There are languages with no gendered pronouns, and some with long lists of them because there’s more than two recognized genders, or because the pronoun used is grammar based regarding when and where it’s used.

So, in English, our entire mind is influenced by having only three standard options: masculine, feminine, and neutral. It’s inflexible because of that. And, you can see evidence of that via the rejection of the singular they/them, despite it having been a part of the language for much longer than trans issues have been in the public awareness.

Again, you might disagree about that. That’s fine, I’m not trying to convince you, just trying to explain why I changed my mind from “that’s silly” regarding all neopronouns, to having the opinion that they matter.

I now think that they matter because it’s an effective way to shake up the way we think about gender and language. I think that’s important because we all suffer limitations based on the limited English pronoun structures. In order to improve that, a shakeup is needed.

Drag is the reason I changed my opinion, and that’s despite still having objections to individual pronouns as being more trouble than they’re worth at this point in time. That’s also despite my impression and opinion on the otherkin side of things being a hindrance to everyone else.

I gotta add in some support to this.

I specifically said that using individual pronouns was more trouble than it’s worth to me, and was not banned.

I even questioned the role of neopronouns, what impact they have, and expressed my opinions that disagree with some aspects of it (which changed, btw), and was not banned.

And, I specifically rarely used their (drag’s) neopronouns during any interactions on the instance and was never banned.

Considering I’m a known asshole, and I’m confident that some of my comments got reported because people said they would/did, I never got banned from the instance, and afaik not from any communities, though I’d have to check the mod log to be certain of that part.

Regardless of whether or not anyone agrees with the policies regarding neopronouns, the admins have a pretty damn good track record of enforcing them evenly. Yeah, that’s partly because they didn’t ban me, but if my pissy, contrarian ass didn’t get banned, it certainly points to them paying attention to nuance in their decisions.

Also, as a tangent to all of that, I know trans people irl that depend on blahaj lemmy as their place of support and community. If making a place where people can have that did mean being heavy handed, even if it meant I got banned, I’m okay with that. We need a place like that. Now more than ever.

I’ll say it again; long past overdue. Probably the best thing Biden has done

Dallas is doing that? Surprising

Yeah, if that’s the person making the choice, that’s a good thing

I mean, if you want pizza that’s even shittier than chain deliveries, sure, you can do that.

Let’s be real. A home oven and premade dough might be cheaper, but it ain’t good pizza.

You can get a pizza stone (or steel), or do a cast iron pizza and end up fine, that’s for sure. But if you’re using that premade dough, even Caesar’s is going to be as good. That’s not mentioning that the sauces available in jars aren’t all created equal at all, or that it’s a dice roll if the cheese is okay or not.

Even dominos and pizza hut are better than a cheap home made pie. You want a good home made pizza, you’re spending roughly the same, but now you have to learn how to hey it right. The learning curve isn’t horrible or anything, but it’s there.

Most people that want a pizza want something decent, or they’d just throw in a digiorno’s or whatever. Mind you, calling most chain pizza decent is a stretch of the term, but that’s another issue entirely since a solid pizzeria isn’t exactly a guarantee outside of cities

Well, let’s play pretend for a second.

Imagine, if you will, a country that used to have good history basics. A country well armed, and with direct experience facing fascism.

Imagine that, despite the best attempts at killing that education system, that are still people that remember the price of fascism, if not directly, through the memories out those that did experience it directly.

Imagine that not all of those people are complacent.

Imagine that out of those aware, watching, and willing to act, there are some who have had the sense to recognize the possibilities.

Imagine that those people have been quiet publicly because they know they would have sounded paranoid. Imagine that, quietly and carefully, they’ve been stocking ammo, learning useful skills and hoping that it’s all wasted time and effort.

Now, imagine that the pollen problem with forming a resistance is that you don’t know who you can trust. Even in times of apparent peace, governmental agencies tend to keep a close eye on people practicing the kind of skills needed to resist, or possibly overthrow a fascist government.

You have to be very, very careful in working with others. To the point of essentially having no way to communicate outside of carefully vetted groups of like minded individuals.

Imagine that situation, and those people seeing fascism taking over. They’d be ready, but without a plan, without coordination, concerted effort is difficult. This isn’t a hypothetical that allows for rapid escalations, especially in a world where false flag events happen. This imaginary situation would take a great deal of careful outreach to establish lines of communication between groups. You can imagine that those efforts would take vetting at each step because in the age of fascism, you will be facing an enemy that’s capable of completely faking any evidence they want, throwing a label on you that allows you to be held without access to attorneys or the rule of real law.

I suppose you can imagine that in that situation, you aren’t going to see many indications of action. You shouldn’t see any indications because if these hypothetical individuals and groups aren’t plain stupid, they know that showing indications is capture at best, death at worse, and the compromise of any hope of resistance at worst.

In that situation, maybe the only thing anyone can do is get armed, get trained, and be ready.

Imagine if someone waiting for whatever it is they need to be ready for can’t be armed, or can’t train. Then their goal should be to stock up supplies. Make arrangements to be able to host unexpected guests with a great deal of privacy. Maybe just take some first aid courses and have those supplies on hand.

Maybe those indications never come, in this hypothetical situation. Maybe those groups aren’t enough, maybe they can’t or don’t make contact. Maybe it never comes to be. I mean, that’s what is most likely, that nobody will be willing to take enough risk to do more than huddle up and hope nothing bad happens.

What wouldn’t make sense is for them to be out in the open giving indications they exist.

Maybe they don’t exist. Maybe the probability of all those factors coming together is so low as to be impossible. That’s certainly a possible reason for no indications as well. After all, we’re just a bunch of assholes running our mouths on a public forum, having a little fun with thought experiments.

It has.

The problem is that the resistance hasn’t gotten rolling yet.

What? You don’t think the takeover of the US government by fascists isn’t a revolution? It is. It’s joust that the bloodshed is going to come after they solidify power instead of bale before.