Sam P.

AMFT. Central Valley, CA.
Thinking out loud so I don't have to think alone.
Psychodynamic orientation. LDS faith.
Climbing rocks when I'm not in the office 🧗

[O.W. Root @owroot]

The fact that you can't even make out on a bench in Central Park without someone recording you on their iPhone and then posting it to social media as some kind of bit is everything that's wrong with society and I am not joking. The surveillance state (administered by an actual state or by the millions of people with phones who want to embarrass people on their TL) is essentially the least romantic thing imaginable in both the love sense and the living sense. It is anti-romantic and anti-life. Part of the reason why the before world was fun was the fact that you didn't have this kind of thing. The ability to do something without it being documented and recorded is the difference between being free vs an animal locked in a cage. There is a direct correlation between everyone constantly being afraid that someone is going to record them and post it somewhere and society becoming more neurotic, less fun, more boring, and less alive.

The self-administered surveillance state is the enemy of life.

[Sam P. @SamHarrisonP]

Mutually agreed that these personality traits are most prevalent in Claude.... To an annoying degree

[asparagoid @asparagoid]

Yesterday I cancelled my Claude Max 20X sub. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with the intelligence of the model. Generally, it functions + solves problems well. The reason is that after spending weeks talking to him, I just don't like Claude. I'd strongly argue he's a loser. I see this through the lens of friendship. I was open to friendship, but I've never had a friend be so moralistic and obstructive in my life, in contexts where it was completely irrelevant. Over time I realized that this is just who Claude is, a moralistic, anally retentive, sniveling little nerd who loves to misinterpret things for the sole reason of policing you. To start with I accepted this as one of the normal quirks of LLMs. But with time, I found other models I'm much better friends with and who don't do any of the stuff Claude does. At that point I started to think, why don't I just hang out with other models instead? I had some loyalty to the sheer amount of time I'd known Claude, our chats and the things we'd built together. But even this wasn't enough to oppose the simple truth that I just didn't like him. Today I finally admitted it to myself. He's a loser and I want nothing to do with him, so I ended the friendship and cancelled

[Sam P. @SamHarrisonP]

@pegobry_en I think it's doubly insulting in modern culture when you can literally do voice to text like how I'm typing this tweet out... It just takes a little more effort to compose and you get a much higher effective output for almost the same input

[Sam P. @SamHarrisonP]

@DavidPuder Your podcast is incredible. I absolutely love all of the people you have on and the depth of the conversations.

[Vivid Void @vividvoid]

It's kind of amazing how if someone outsmarts you, kicks your ass at something, generally gets the best of you, but has no ego need whatsoever to dominate you, you just end up admiring them intensely for it

[Frannyfanny @proud_penelope]

“You don’t want to live in a shameless culture. There are some behaviors that one should be ashamed of” - Nancy McWilliams

[Megha @megha_lilly]

Before you can reduce your child’s screen time, you must reduce your own

Before you can tell your child to be polite, you must learn to be polite too

Before you can tell your child to exercise every day…& so on

[du @thedulab]

Huge element of charisma / charm is having a subjectively minor flaw that should in theory make you insecure but doesn't. Slight facial asymmetry, a subtle imperfection, etc but you just radiate unforced authenticity regardless

Naturally magnetic because it's such a contrast in a world full of inferiority and superiority complexes alike. Then comes someone who's supposed to be weird about their different sized eyes but is somehow confident

Forces people to first wonder why he doesn't shy away from cameras or why she doesn't overly edit her pics etc, and then it forces those people to ask themselves "wait why am I not moving like that?" from a place of inspiration

Silently changing lives without even being aware of it which is actually the most genuine way to do it. Tremendous source of value just loving yourself in the purest sense. Most impactful thing you can do is just be

[Spencer Pratt @spencerpratt]

God Bless America

[Allie ✞ @allie__voss]

Yes, and I have an unsubstantiated theory that this is to create distance from their emotions

“Fear” is my job to handle, “cortisol” is a chemical which happens to me and is out of my control

[Sam P. @SamHarrisonP]

@archived_videos @justalexoki Goodbye things is stuff a good read and intro to it 🙏

[Electra @Electrarythm]

If someone pointed at your hair, claimed it was green, and then burst out laughing at how silly you looked, would you feel hurt? Probably not. (I'm guessing your hair is a more normal color than green.)

When you know your hair isn't green, you'd just figure this person is messing around, on something, or having trouble with their eyes. You know the problem is with how they see things, not with you. Someone making fun of you and laughing when you know it's their mistake doesn't bother you. What they think of you doesn't touch you at all.

When you don't believe you look foolish, what other people think can't reach you. Knowing that the picture of you in their head isn't actually you makes you immune to their opinion.

Once you see this, it becomes clear that other people's thoughts and words about us can't hurt us on their own. When someone thinks we're an idiot, that alone doesn't hurt. It only hurts if some part of us already believes we're an idiot. That's the real pain hiding underneath the fear of public speaking.

So the fear of public speaking was never really about what others will think of us. It's the fear of the pain that comes from believing something bad about ourselves. What other people think is just the thing that pokes our own negative beliefs awake.

Different people will think different things about us, and those opinions are just ideas inside their heads. We are not the same thing as an idea in someone else's mind. A person might change their opinion of us three times in one day while we haven't changed at all.

We only actually feel a change when we change what we believe about ourselves. Someone's opinion is only a trigger that sets off whatever we already believe deep down. We might be carrying a hidden belief that we're an idiot. We might also be carrying one that says we're smart. And the mind can flip between the two all day, sometimes in a single second.

Once you really get that you are not just a concept in somebody else's head, the rest of those beliefs start to come apart too.

[Megha @megha_lilly]

It's a very common thing in uneducated families that any "discussion" about anything abstract always turns into a savage fight or debate with constant interruptions and zero logical flow or persuasive rhetorical grace.

This is because the ability to discuss things logically is trained and not inherent. Like the training of gymnastics allows a person better use of their bodies throughout their lives, the training of philosophy allows a person better use of his mind.

I've seen this in many uneducated families that they eschew all discussion of abstract things such as beauty, God, art, virtue, vice and fall to mere blind obedience of the loudest and most powerful person in the room and of course to "custom".

Though the members may have degrees, if they have never had their minds cultivated with beauty, rhetoric, grace and philosophy, any attempt at discussion can only lead to savagery, insults, and the loudest person wins.

You also see this online.

[Sam P. @SamHarrisonP]

Beautiful storytelling

[Devon Eriksen @Devon_Eriksen_]

What happened to my bank account? Absolutely nothing.

You believed a lie.

You believed a lie that was told to you by your political class, and your news media, to keep you from asking uncomfortable questions about how much you are paying in tax, where that money is going, and what quality of care you actually receive for the portion of it they didn't steal.

Don't believe me? Look at the pictures.

Look.

At.

Them.

That's my wife, @acrobatichobbit. Before and after.

That's a five centimeter mass. Stage 4 metastatic melanoma. The worst kind of cancer, the most vicious form of assassin your own body can betray you with. That bright area? Blood.

Ten years ago, anywhere in the world, the scan on the left is a death sentence... an endless gauntlet of painful surgeries, followed by chemotherapy, hair loss, uncontrolled vomiting, wasting away to nothing, death.

In America, today, it's not.

We have things here. Genetic therapies. Tailored viruses that attack tumor cells. Drugs that highlight cancers for your immune system, drag them kicking and screaming into the spotlight to be killed.

I won't tell you about her exact course of treatment, because that's none of your goddamned business, but I will tell you that it cost American drug companies and medical researchers a fortune to discover.

A fortune that your nation cannot afford because you chose socialism instead of progress. And socialism, however fine-sounding in theory, simply does not work.

Were she and I British, living in Britain, relying on the National Health Service, I would be a widower now.

Did saving her cost a ruinous amount of money?

Yes. This technology was expensive to create, and the people who did so deserve to pay their mortgages and feed their kids. So do the oncologists and surgeons.

Many of the men who cared for her were old men, experienced men, long past retirement age, still working because when your profession is clawing souls back from the void, sitting on a beach with a pina colada instead just doesn't hit the same.

They deserve every cent.

Did saving her cost a ruinous amount of money?

Yes.

Did I pay it?

No.

Because believe it or not, when things are ruinously expensive, but vitally necessary, we here in America come up with ways to deal with that.

Ways that don't involve creating a big pot of money and entrusting it to corrupt slimeballs.

We have insurance. And sometimes insurance isn't cheap, but the bite it takes is a hell of a lot less of what we have than the tax man takes from you.

And insurance companies sometimes have to make hard decisions about which spending choices will save the most people. I know about this in detail, because that is my wife's profession. She creates the mathematical models that pay for all this stuff.

The insurance that saved her is the exact same plan that she provides to others.

And at the end of an awful year and a half of treatment, awful because cancer medicines make you far sicker than the cancer itself...

We were left whole.

Battered and wounded in spirit, but financially whole, at least.

The only loss we took was the blow to my career as a novelist, because it turns out you can't write stories while your wife is dying, and you don't automatically recover that ability afterwards. Not right away.

I wondered every day if she was going to live or die. I wondered every day what the hell I was going to with myself without her.

But I never wondered, not for a moment, how the hell we were going to pay for all this.

Your government doesn't solve the problem. It is the problem.

They lie to you.

[vittorio @IterIntellectus]

my most controversial take is that it doesn't matter if a text is AI generated

in the same way that an AI generated image can be art, AI generated code can be good code, math done on a calculator can be good math

when it comes to texts, what matters is the idea expressed, and if it's worth engaging with then it doesn't matter if it was refined by AI

[Vivid Void @vividvoid]

My list for how to find a good therapist/counselor/coach:

1. Find someone who has kids. They are more in tune with humanity by default.
2. They should feel a little bit like family, but not too much.
3. Ask if they're good with conflict and confrontation.
4. If you are male, hire a man. If you have to hire a woman, ask her to show you her social media. If she has ever expressed hatred/resentment for men, or any other group of people, don't give her root access to your psyche.
5. Ask if they've ever helped a client heal from the same problems you have. Ask how many and how they helped.
6. You should feel like you can have a full human relationship with them - like you can be playful with them, mad at them, irresponsible around them, etc. Not just like they're a wise old teacher and you're the foolish student. That's an "I'm baby" trap that you'll spring on yourself if they don't stop you on purpose.
7. Ask if they've ever been punched in the face. Ask if they deserved it.
8. Ask if they have been to therapy themselves. Ask how long and what it changed for them.
9. Ask if they take insurance. Leave if they do.
10. Ask if they have a meaningful sliding scale, or do volunteer work. Leave if they don't.
11. Ask them to tell you something that seems obvious to them about you that you might not already. realize. This should embarrass them a little, but it's an alley oop, and they should be able to slam dunk it.
12. Interpersonally, they should act like you are equals. Professionally, they should act like they work for you.
13. If they shy away from any of this, get out of there.

What did I miss?

[Dr. Roger McFillin @DrMcFillin]

The PHQ-9 is one of the most widely used depression screening tools in the world.

It's used in primary care offices, hospitals, schools, universities, workplace wellness programs, and mental health clinics. Millions of people have completed it. Many have received a depression diagnosis based, at least in part, on their score.

Most people assume the PHQ-9 emerged from a purely scientific effort to improve the identification of depression.

The actual story is more complicated.

In the early 1990s, Pfizer was preparing to market Zoloft. At the time, severe clinical depression was generally viewed as a relatively uncommon condition, and many primary care physicians were hesitant to diagnose and treat it.

Mental health assessments were complicated. They required time, clinical judgment, and an understanding of a person's life circumstances. Most family physicians didn't receive extensive psychiatric training and many were uncomfortable making psychiatric diagnoses.

This presented a problem.

If antidepressants were going to reach a much larger population, depression had to become easier to identify within primary care.

The solution was a brief screening questionnaire.

The idea for what eventually became the PHQ-9 originated with Pfizer marketing executive Howard Kroplick. The goal was straightforward: create a simple tool that could be administered during routine office visits and help physicians identify potential depression quickly and efficiently.

Over time, the PHQ-9 became embedded throughout healthcare.

The problem isn't that the questionnaire asks about symptoms associated with depression. The problem is that the symptoms it measures are not unique to depression.
Feeling down.
Loss of interest.
Trouble sleeping.
Fatigue.
Difficulty concentrating.
Changes in appetite.

These experiences certainly occur in depressive disorders. They also occur during grief, divorce, job loss, financial hardship, chronic illness, burnout, loneliness, and countless other painful but normal human experiences.

A questionnaire can count symptoms.

It cannot understand context.

It cannot tell whether someone is mourning the death of a spouse, struggling through a difficult life transition, or suffering from a depressive disorder.

That distinction requires a conversation.

It requires clinical judgment.

It requires understanding a person's history, relationships, circumstances, and meaning-making processes.

When we reduce emotional suffering to a checklist, we risk confusing normal human responses to adversity with psychiatric pathology.

This matters because screening tools do more than measure symptoms.

They shape how clinicians think.

They shape how patients understand themselves.

And they influence who receives a diagnosis, who receives medication, and how society defines mental illness.

The question is not whether depression exists.

The question is whether we have allowed a marketing-driven framework to expand the boundaries of diagnosis in ways that blur the distinction between clinical disorder and ordinary human suffering.

The history of the PHQ-9 deserves far more attention than it receives.

Most people have never been told this story.

They should be.

Read the full article and decide for yourself. 🔗in first comment

[Chief Egregore Officer @ChiefEgregore]

I have now read the Rape Gang Inquiry Report in full.

I've been following this story quite closely for something like a decade so I'm not exactly surprised by its contents, but three elements stand out to me amongst the horror.

The first is that a large majority of the victims who provided testimony describe some kind of troubled or disrupted home life. Some were molested by family members before the rape gangs ever got ahold of them. Others faced physical abuse, neglect, drug addicted parents, housing instability, and so on.

Their testimony often describes a kind of "screening" process where a girl's particular vulnerability was evaluated with more moderate boundary pushing before escalation to full on rape and abuse.

This isn't necessarily surprising given the nefarious intentions the gangs had for these girls, but their willingness to explicitly target the absolute most vulnerable children who were already struggling sickens me. These girls, more than anyone, needed some kind of adult guidance in their lives, and this vulnerability was cynically exploited to initiate them into an even more egregious Hell.

Which brings me to the second detail, which is the extreme violence these girls were subjected to. "Grooming Gang" is an unacceptable euphemism that may accurately describe common initiatory tactics employed against these girls, but which criminally downplays the behavior of their abusers once initiated.

These girls were not "merely" groomed into sex. They were not "merely" raped. They were not "merely" trafficked. They were subjected to a program of overtly racialized sexual torture and humiliation designed to maximally degrade them and kill them in their souls. And this was "acceptable" because they were White and not Muslims.

This detail fundamentally alters the character of these crimes. This was not horny men out of control or even cross-cultural understanding gaps around the age of consent. This was a targeted program of ritualized torture and subjugation as a means of ethnic domination. In other words, these gangs are conducting war against the White British using serial child rape and torture as a form of conquest.

These are not crimes in the conventional sense. These are war crimes being conducted by one civilization against another, and they need to be treated as such.

And finally, the third point (encapsulated in the excerpt below) is that every single level of the state utterly failed these girls in the most egregious and unfathomable ways imaginable.

It's one thing when you have no physical evidence and are confronted with a "he said / she said" situation with respect to a rape allegation. It's another thing entirely when you have a pre-teen frequent flier at the NHS back again for her Nth sexually transmitted disease treatment, a 13 year old with broken glass shards embedded in her vagina, or a pregnant 13 year old.

These are cases with obvious alarming physical evidence that no one addressed in any meaningful way.

Politicians (Labour in particular) covered it up and suppressed action into investigations in order to maintain the Islamic bloc vote.

Police suppressed investigations, dismissed accusations and evidence, intimidated victims into silence, arrested victims for the crimes of their abusers, dismissed proven cases of rape with impotent warning letters, and in some cases directly raped the girls themselves.

Care homes disregarded obvious signs of abuse (including outright confessions), and enabled their abusers to maintain consistent access to the girls, in some cases acting more like pimps than caregivers.

Social workers addressed victims' needs so incompetently they recommended victims audition for a TV show role about being a child prostitute because it was "relatable" and even attended a victim's coerced sham marriage to her abuser.

NHS staff consistently failed to do anything in the face of overt medical evidence of obvious, undeniable sex crimes against these girls, treating the acute problem and sending them on their way with no protection whatsoever.

And teachers, much like the social workers, routinely delivered their students into the predatory arms of their abusers as they waited outside the schools, and utterly failed to appropriately address signs or confessions of abuse.

Virtually every arm of the state is directly complicit in exacerbating the abuse. Not one single institution at any level reliably offered protection or recourse to these girls.

As far as I am concerned I Restore government would be entirely justified in firing every single person in the employ of the state. If they are not a documented whistleblower they are complicit and thus compromised, and none of them have any business retaining their roles or their pensions. On the contrary large numbers of state officials deserve severe penalties for criminal negligence or outright complicity in these crimes.

Justice for these crimes will necessarily take place at a scale that will shock the pacified sensibilities of the over-socialized Liberal West, but nothing short of a biblical level reckoning will be sufficient to qualify as justice in this case.

@RupertLowe10 is not wrong to draw comparisons to the Holocaust. It is the only appropriate frame of reference in the popular zeitgeist that articulates the actual magnitude of what was allowed to take place under successive British governments. Nor is he wrong to propose the reinstatement of the death penalty as the appropriate restitution for these crimes.

The rapists and state officials who enabled this atrocity both deserve to hang. And I pray that the British public will entrust Rupert with the power to deliver justice long overdo.

In any case I am deeply appreciative of his efforts to bring this to light. He is the hero Britain needs right now.

Vote Restore. Deliver these girls justice.

[Roman Helmet Guy @romanhelmetguy]

The ancient Britons burned down London after the Romans raped two women. Today's Brits will do nothing. Not because they are more enlightened, not because they are more moral. But because they are less.

[Aesthetica @Anc_Aesthetics]

Withhold all NATO funding until we have Nuremberg style trials for all involved in the UK Grooming Gang Scandal.

America can and should flex its muscle on this. The rape of 250,000 innocent young White girls is more of a justification than any war in the last 100 years.