Let's Jam this Bog with Roasts

[Damage Jackal]

meh i don't need hard hands and i can relax my stress watching super nintendo speed runs on youtube

[Gorosaurus]

Damage, you need to listen to your father and put those youtubes down!


Christo, why don't you both take the leash with you and walk the dog. It's a beautiful day!

[Slime]

lol!

[Bravoie]

Damn, tony clay got slapped silly

[Dungeon Snake]

he's lucky he only got slapped around, some folks would have shot him thru the door and asked questions later

[Slime]

o man never heard koto - visitors till just now. that's my fav sound

[Dave Miles]

I can't stand when people are caught red handed and STILL lie to your face. I lose my shit when people do that to me.

I confronted a friend of mine who tried to scam me with some MLM pyramid scheme a few days ago. This guy was my AA sponsor. I lost my temper a bit and said some silly stuff but i coudnt believe the audacity of this cunt

[Izak MD]

wow that's a heated exchange

shit

yo dave, i made a thread about MLM schemes, you might get a kick out of reading it.

my conclusion, from talking with people trying to push their shit on me, is that they're basically messes, and they have a lot of issues with their own lives. and they've fallen for a big lie themselves.

so maybe you can have some empathy for this loser

anyhow here's the thread: http://3dmm.com/showthread.php?t=50331

[Dave Miles]

yeah i honestly felt a bit bad after, its clear he's not very bright. I didn't need to try and humiliate him, however taking advantage of people that he sponsors in AA is a huge betrayal of the principles of the program. ive seen a lot of people in AA pushing MLM on others recently. AA is a bit of a joke, but it helped me out once upon a time.

ill check out that thread. thanks

[Dungeon Snake]

nah that honestly is disgusting dave and you were right to call him out on it. sometimes when i get heated i regret it alot later, i have a hard time feeling "righteous" about my anger after the fact. but i think in that case you were very correct.

and really tbh it doesnt surprise me at all that an AA sponsor would also be a pyramid scheme shill. the 2 concepts have quite a lot in common

[Slime]

wow thats terrible that people do that through AA. i have too high an expectation of most people i think

[Izak MD]

Originally Posted by Dungeon Snake

and really tbh it doesnt surprise me at all that an AA sponsor would also be a pyramid scheme shill. the 2 concepts have quite a lot in common

hahaha i was like "will he make a post without bashing AA in some way?? will he make it through???"


but seriously yeah the guy was being unethical, i should have stated that more strongly

i don't like that comparison though, because MLM is more like drug addiction than anything designed to help with drug addiction (regardless of how effective you might think it is, and we of course can include the more atheist-friendly groups)

i tend to think that MLM people really can't help it, because their finances depend so much on getting people hooked. like drug addiction, they start paying in and paying in and paying in, and they probably get a dopamine rush when they got some initial results, but then they realize that they can't maintain their finances without getting desperate and doing some stupid ass shit. so they start bothering everyone left and right, constnatly getting people to join their shitty pyramid scheme. and it's not that different from drug addicts constantly hitting people up for money or asking stupid favors for this and that

i could see AA or any addiction recovery group being prey to all sorts of flotsam and jetsam that emanates from the crushed dreams of mainstream society, because addicts are vulnerable, not so much because of the deficiency of the group itself

[Dungeon Snake]

well when you get the flotsam & jetsam of society together with the cultish groupthink mentality of AA you have a perfect venue for predators peddling self-help bunko to the mentally susceptible

that's really all AA has ever been. self-help guru flim-flam combined with the special brand of intolerant evangelism that was popular during the 1930s

[Izak MD]

fair enough, but it has helped about 3 IRL friends of mine get clean

and apparently dave miles

so i tend to be sympathetic with what works. and whenever i've seen people say "but what about their rate of success, it's very low," i tend not to be too persuaded, because rate of success is always going to be low for addicts. they're weak people when it comes to self-control, a priori

[Yamles]

Originally Posted by Dave Miles

yeah i honestly felt a bit bad after, its clear he's not very bright. I didn't need to try and humiliate him, however taking advantage of people that he sponsors in AA is a huge betrayal of the principles of the program. ive seen a lot of people in AA pushing MLM on others recently. AA is a bit of a joke, but it helped me out once upon a time.

ill check out that thread. thanks

Don't feel bad, I was reading that and cheering you on. Apart from the growing a dick where your vagina used to be part. MLM schemes are the fucking worst. Why does everyone I know who has had a kid insist on getting involved with them?

[Dungeon Snake]

fair enough, but it has helped about 3 IRL friends of mine get clean

and apparently dave miles

so i tend to be sympathetic with what works. and whenever i've seen people say "but what about their rate of success, it's very low," i tend not to be too persuaded, because rate of success is always going to be low for addicts. they're weak people when it comes to self-control, a priori

i'm not so sure that is "a priori". some societies have a low rate of addiction, despite having presumably the same rate of weakness vs strength in individuals. in other societies, there's really not much stigma against what we here would classify as "alcoholism", and those with alcohol habits are welcomed as strong members. i think largely the problem is in identifying habitual alcohol consumption as a problem to be fixed, independent of any other factors. often, people with happy lives will stop depending on alcohol. sometimes, economic pressures are a factor. other times, people with alcohol habits are able to maintain perfectly happy and successful lives. the problem comes when somebody tells you that you "need" to change, and that if you don't change, you are a failure. that's when you set people up to fail.

i'm happy that it helped your friends. personally, in a long life of alcoholism & knowing alcoholics & attending AA meetings, i have never really seen anybody helped by AA. i saw some who were clean for a period of time thanks to AA, but they always relapsed. I saw others who got clean off of other programs, most of whom also relapsed. i saw MANY who never got a thing out of AA, and whose habits became more destructive afterwards. i'm really not sure what the solution is, but i'm pretty damn sure it's not AA. your example sort of reminds me of jesterfoot in that Pyramid scheme thread you posted. yeah, sure, maybe 0.3% percent of AA members "succeed" in their insane program. those are probably the ones who are sucking more people in, and ensuring that (for some ungodly reason) AA remains the only government-approved treatment for alcoholism. that doesn't make it a good program

[Izak MD]

yeah i agree generally about AA monopolizing the US government. so we definitely see eye to eye there

but beyond that, i don't see much downside to it. joining a stupid MLM scheme gets you broke, and so does drug addiction. AA doesn't really do that. you might relapse harder than ever before, but i think that's true for any attempt to kick an addiction

[Old Rivers]

lol "the people who don't like me are the ones who can't handle the truth"

that guy sounds like a colossal shithead.

[Dungeon Snake]

Originally Posted by Izak MD

yeah i agree generally about AA monopolizing the US government. so we definitely see eye to eye there

but beyond that, i don't see much downside to it. joining a stupid MLM scheme gets you broke, and so does drug addiction. AA doesn't really do that. you might relapse harder than ever before, but i think that's true for any attempt to kick an addiction

well see i think your two ideas are intertwined here.

AA would be perfectly fine if it were just purely an optional program that people could join if they wanted. I would have no problem with it, if that were the case.

but right now, people are forced to attend AA against their will as part of a lot of court orders. which is fucked up.
if 99% of prisoners committed crimes as soon as they were released, you would say "man we need prison reform".
we also used to offer the option for young people to enlist in the army rather than suffer jail time for minor crimes - if 99% of army recruits were killed in battle, you would say "man our army sucks!"
but for some reason, when 99% of addicts relapse, we say "well, it was their fault in the first place."

we're forcibly feeding people into a pyramid scheme that simply doesn't work for the overwhelming majority. it's worse than just that, though, because when that's seen as the only option by the justice system, it also sometimes becomes the only option for the rest of society. so you basically have a significant portion of americans defaulting to these bizarre early-20th/late-19th century puritanical values that really never had any scientific basis in the first place, and it ends up informing alot in our entire national discourse about drugs and addiction. you see this a lot in rural, underemployed communities, which (i believe) is also part of why meth & pain pills & alcohol are such a problem there

AA might not bankrupt us directly. but accepting such a ludicrous scheme as our modus operandi for addiction treatment certainly damages us over time

[Slime]

damn hadn't thought of the negatives of AA and all

[Izak MD]

yeah i understand this criticism. i've always been in favor of a few options with different recovery philosophies.

not sure i agree with the causal claim about puritan mentality causing drug addiction. but i also tend not to be persuaded by any causal claims about drug addictions. it's a complicated subject.

[Phil Williamson]

haha I think Dave was a total dick?? what makes you think the guy isn't a genuine believer in whatever the BS thing is, and that's why he got into selling it? I dunno why you'd assume someone trying to get you into a MLM scheme is actively trying to scam you. after all, they voluntarily got "scammed" the same way themselves

[Dungeon Snake]

because they're trolling an AA group for converts. i'm sure he is a complete convert. but that doesn't make it less wrong. he's preying on the psychologically vulnerable for business opportunities. it's a conflict of interests

[Dungeon Snake]

Originally Posted by Izak MD

yeah i understand this criticism. i've always been in favor of a few options with different recovery philosophies.

not sure i agree with the causal claim about puritan mentality causing drug addiction. but i also tend not to be persuaded by any causal claims about drug addictions. it's a complicated subject.

well im sure youre also familiar with the next point i want to bring up, which is that the best predictor for addiction is poverty. not to get too My First Socialist 101, but the war against addiction in this country is essentially a war against people who are bad at capitalism. if people weren't forced to live such grindingly superfluous lives, AA probably wouldn't be necessary at all. but AA has a number of precepts that are extremely antithetical to any way of living besides capitalism (or i guess stalinism & maoism? i don't know that much about communism. it certainly isn't compatible with fascism)

the moment i realized AA was a toxic program was when I saw on a banner in one of their meetings that one of the warning signs is "Self-Sufficiency". Now, any idiot can tell you self-sufficiency is a good thing. our whole way of life is built on it. but the supposed "pathology" of the addict (ie, anyone who believes they are self-sufficient) is that this is supposedly impossible
Essentially, AA wants you to believe that you have no self-determination. Everything is dependent on a "higher power". this is their way of playing a bait-and-switch with psychologically weak people. However, this view is inherently destructive. somebody with no self-reliance is vulnerable to any whim of politician, clergyman, business mogul, or tyrant.
this is precisely where a capitalist or communist wants you to be. weak, ineffectual, and totally lacking in free will. a dutiful slave who will proselytize others to slavery. they make a point of saying this "higher power" can be anything - god, country, AA itself, the Reptoids, whatever. it doesn't matter, as long as you submit to the concept that you are a defective subject who can only achieve adequacy through subservience

[Slime]

yea even if the guy fell for the BS Dave is completely right to have acted that way. these people need a wake up call to how terrible what they are doing is if theyre pushing it onto people in their AA group