It's fascinating to me that a pure element would have such immediate and significant effects on the human mind. I would think that this would generally require a more complex molecular shape that can fit with various receptors in the body and trigger the release of dopamine and other neurotransmitters.
Apparently, Xenon does this by acting as an antagonist of the N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptor, a subtype of glutamate receptor, and also by enhancing the effect of ("potentiation of") gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA). Other drugs that act along the NMDA pathway are Ketamine and Memantine (an Alzheimer's drug). And other drugs that act along the GABA pathway are Benzodiazepines (e.g., Diazepam, Lorazepam-- i.e,. Valium). And apparently Nitrous Oxide (N2O) uses both mechanisms as well.
Nitrogen is narcotic at higher partial pressures. This is something they teach during SCUBA diving training: If your dive buddy starts acting loopy when you get around 100ft deep, it's time to go up.
> It is caused by the anesthetic effect of certain gases at high partial pressure... Narcosis produces a state similar to drunkenness (alcohol intoxication), or nitrous oxide inhalation.
> Except for helium and probably neon, all gases that can be breathed have a narcotic effect, although widely varying in degree. The effect is consistently greater for gases with a higher lipid solubility, and although the mechanism of this phenomenon is still not fully clear, there is good evidence that the two properties are mechanistically related.
My understanding of mechanisms from a chemistry perspective is that the anesthetics mess with the phospholipid bilayer making up the cell membrane in a way that closes off receptors. So it makes intuitive sense that dissolving giant xenon molecules in a layer could mess with it from a pure physical perspective. What's weird, to my mind, is that other noble gases don't have any effect - you'd expect a gradient.
and apparently Gou Teng, used in traditional chinese medicine and for blood pressure control ("and" because TCM wasn't developed with blood pressure cuffs at hand).
The HIF factor they mention is what your body makes when it’s going through hypoxia. It’s the same thing pranayama yoga (or more popularly Wim Hof breathing) does because you induce mild hypoxia conditions.
In college I used a lot of nitrous. I got small cartridges and a “cracker” with a balloon. It was pretty euphoric.
I stopped after recording myself taking it. I was unconscious a lot longer than I remembered being, and even though I was probably never at risk of suffocating there were long periods where I didn’t see myself breathing. That was enough.
I regret the effects it may have had on my brain. It’s impossible to know the counterfactual “what if” and maybe binge drinking was worse.
>In college I used a lot of nitrous. I got small cartridges and a “cracker” with a balloon.
That brings back memories. I remember one time falling off the bed I was sitting on, cracking my head on the concrete floor, and laying there thinking "this should really hurt, but it doesn't..........at all".
> Why don’t recreational nitrous users mix in some oxygen like medical users do?
Because they don't know better. It's not like we teach "safe consumption" in schools, and so most (particularly young) consumers of all possible kinds of drugs end up with cargo-culted consumption methods. Yes, Erowid etc. exist, but you need to know about that as well.
The correct thing to do would be to have "drug ed" similar to sex ed, but we see with the latter already how fierce political opposition to fact-based education can be, and with drugs it's going to be even worse.
I get that, but for these pop-up shops selling to partygoers out of large tanks it seems like very little extra effort and expense for a dramatically improved user experience. Market forces alone should be enough to incentivize adding oxygen.
Next you're going to expect them to use gases that are sourced for human consumption. But this is a gray market. Nitrous isn't meant to be used this way; so a gas supplier won't want to sell the healthier alternative for fear of getting caught knowingly selling it as a drug.
Because you can buy little canisters of N2O at the gas station, you can’t buy little canisters of O2 to go with them.
If recreational nitrous was legal, and could be openly sold without the false pretense of being used to charge whipped cream - then I don’t see why not. You can get weed consumables in all different ratios and configurations.
Are many recreational drug users responsible about what they put in their bodies? Yes. The long lived in particular.
Do some recreational drug users find it a point of pride about how recklessly indifferent they can be about what they put in their bodies? Also yes.
There is also definitely a (small) subset of recreational drug users which actively seek out the worst possible things they can do to their bodies. The drug world version of [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bugchasing].
I’m generally indifferent to recreational drug use, and have friends who are avidly in the first two categories. I’ve known people in the last, but found them too dangerous (and heartbreaking) to be around. Let’s not pretend they don’t exist.
There is another post that is sounding an alarm on inert gas asphyxiation which I think is quite important but it's flagged, presumably because of a sidebar admonishment about drug addiction.
Breathing inert gasses is extremely dangerous. It is not like holding your breath: because the gas you inhale is free of oxygen, it actively pulls oxygen out of your blood. Instead of thinking about breath holding, think more like the USCSB videos where someone walks into a space with a nitrogen atmosphere and immediately drop unconscious, then someone goes in to save the first person (already knowing about the danger) and they both die. ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2ItJe2Incs ).
When narcotic gasses are used for anesthetic purposes they're used with a gas manifold that mixes in pure oxygen to achieve a gas mix that won't kill the subject. Even this is easy to get wrong, and a wrong mix due to a flat tank or an incorrect setting can kill someone very quickly and quietly.
It's also not clear to me how psychologically safe it is, I've seen at least one clearly unhinged person on twitter going on about their xenon use... but I dunno if the drug use lead to they psych issues or the psych issues lead the the drug use. or if their issue was just related to inadvertent oxygen deprivation as a side effect of their xenon use. Studies of anesthetic use may not tell us much about recreational use since they're presumably not dosing people daily or multiple times daily for weeks at a time. -- it's not like you can easily purchase single doses, that bottle isn't going to use itself!
Cody of the Cody's Lab youtube channel has a video of what his voice sounds like after breathing each of the noble gasses. He certainly seemed to be experiencing symptoms afterward!
It's a shame xenon is an anesthetic. If it did not have that effect, one could pressure xenon until it was the same density as the body. It would still be a gas, and one could include some oxygen in it so one wouldn't suffocate (although breathing could be more laborious, perhaps require mechanical support).
Suspended in this gas, one could be subjected to much higher acceleration without injury, up the point that density differences in the body become important.
To some extent, but there would still be a large density difference between tissue and the air in the lungs. Perfluorocarbon breathing liquids could be used.
You're in a rocket on top of thousands of tons of explosives, everything runs automatically, there's terrifying noise all around and you don't control anything.
Blacking out in dissociative euphoria still sounds like a feature, not a bug to me.
I had a similar experience recently. Massive turbulence on a commercial flight low over the continental divide flying into Denver.
I personally witnessed 3 people vomiting, but I was all smiles the whole time. I am in small planes a lot, so kind of enjoy the bumps when it’s someone else’s job to fly now.
I suppose that if we ever develop some sort of hypersleep/suspended animation or whatever we want to call it then being dissociated by a noble gas before the system kicks in might be a good idea.
No, xenon is a NMDA antagonist meaning it has dissociative/anaesthetic effects like ketamine or nitrous oxide.
TFA talks about the effects coming on "within seconds" of inhalation, so it is clearly not just hypoxia which takes tens of seconds or minutes to manifest.
Asphyxiation with inert gases causes hypoxia very quickly. It's not like holding your breath. Lungs don't actively pump oxygen; gases just diffuse along their partial pressure gradients. Air has higher partial pressure of oxygen than blood does, so the oxygen diffuses from the air to the blood. If you fill the lungs with inert gas the oxygen diffuses back out again. You're effectively breathing in reverse.
Filling the lungs with vacuum has the same effect. You have about 5 to 10 seconds before you're incapacitated:
Even though xenon doesn't easily form "compounds" in the normal chemical sense, it does weakly interact with other molecules through van der Waals forces, which are strong enough to affect the functioning of various receptors in neurons.
I'm not very knowledgeable on this, but my understanding is that xenon can dissolve in the lipids in the brain and influence reactions in that state. This paper [1] seems to show that xenon can displace glycene in the NMDA receptors. The receptor is a "door" and glycene is one of the "keys" to open. By binding or interacting with the glycene site on the receptor, xenon keeps glycene from reaching the receptor, inhibiting it.
Reactions don't need to happen, the magnesium ion is a single atom that interacts with the NMDA receptor to block it at specific potentials. When the postsynaptic neuron gets enough input at a synapse, there is enough change in the charge inside the cell where it allows the Mg2+ ion to be displaced from the pore to allow cations to pass through
Our cells use single atoms, usually in the form of charged ions, on a regular basis and we would not survive without them
Clearly the symptoms aren't the same as just holding your breath, which makes me think that it is not, in fact, completely nonreactive. (But I'm a total noob to biochemistry.) Similar to Nitrous Oxide, which definitely has a powerful psychedelic effect and is not at all simply hypoxia.
React is not a good term to use here but rather interact. Saying something reacts means that we are moving around electrons and possibly forming covalent or ionic bonds. Intermolecular interactions are quite a bit different
Argon is basically a rounding error in atmospheric gases.
Xenon has been the gas anesthetic of the future for a long time now. It does have one set of good qualities: it's not halogenated (like all common gas anesthetics), but it's nonflammable (there are very good anesthetic gases, like cyclopropane, that are extremely flammable and have thus been totally phased out of use), and because it's such a heavy atom, it essentially never leaves the atmosphere - no matter how much you use, you can always recapture it from the atmosphere.
It depends on your definition of psychedelic then, as I find different sources supporting either argument, but NO2 produces powerful hallucinations, euphoria, dissociation, and sometimes creativity much like typical psychedelics, but on a compressed timescale.
It's common to distinguish between "psychedelics", which primarily function via serotonin receptors, and "dissociatives", which primarily function via NMDA receptors.
The term psychedelic is describing specific subjective effects rather than a mechanism of action, what you're thinking of are the classic serotonergic psychedelics which are 5ht2a agonists but ketamine and other dissociatives can be considered dissociative psychedelics
I’ve heard that Ketamine is a psychedelic deepener more than a psychedelic on its own. Ie, a little ket addition is similar to taking a much higher dose of psychedelics (but short duration): high definition mental imagery and expanded external visual effects. With a good set & setting, that combo nearly guarantees a mystical experience.
A compound that can deepen a psychedelic experience can also be a psychedelic on its own. There are people who like to smoke DMT during the peak of an LSD experience because of this deepening but both are capable of producing mystical experience on their own, just as ketamine (especially the S isomer) is capable of
I'm fairly certain when administered medically it's a controlled mix of oxygen and xenon, like nitrous at the dentist. They're not asphyxiating you, these molecules are psychoactive.
I do the Wim Hof breathing exercise that involves up to 15 seconds of hypoxia. I get a pretty significant head change from it. Hopefully I’m not causing any permanent damage.
Yeah, how can the body tell which noble gas it's breathing? As the article mentions, the xenon is exhaled in its original form without having been metabolized or having caused any chemical changes in the body!
Different atoms have different sizes and if you look into how ion channels work you can see that there are many processes in biochemistry that are incredibly specific to size and charge
But it does cause chemical chsnges. Noble gasses can weakly interact. It does not need to form bonds to influence potential gradients, protein shapes, or other reactions.
I don’t know. It’s the only other affordable noble gas heavier than air. Neon can float away. I would expect that would make neon safer. I’ve heard you have to stand on your head to expel argon, krypton, and xenon.
In the YouTube video linked elsewhere in this thread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40805461, someone breathing in a balloon-full of xenon gas clearly struggles to expel it afterward, remarking that he can feel its heaviness, but also visibly succeeds after just a few deep breaths. I guess this could still be dangerous if you were fully unconscious and breathing shallowly (and absolutely if you were unconscious and wearing a device that kept delivering more xenon over time), but it doesn't look like it's literally necessary to turn upside down to get it out of the lungs.
Xenon is also produced as a fission product in nuclear reactors. In fact, if you're not careful it will accumulate and inhibit your nuclear reaction. In German, the term for this is xenon-poisoning.
Erowid has some other records of it. Sounds like nitrous but probably better. I wonder if humans evolved to react this way to certain gases or if its a coincidence.
I'm a hobbyist welder. When TIG welding you typically use 100% argon gas. I have a 60 cu ft cylinder hooked up to my welder right now; it costs $89 to refill at my local Airgas store.
As with anything medical, the price of the item isn't just the item itself, it's purity plus that someone has verified and stamped off on it. I don't know much about argon, but for nitrous oxide, food grade is generally between 99% and 99.9% pure. If you want medical grade, the threshold is 99.99% pure or better depending on what you're doing. Those additional nines are what drive the price up, plus the fact that someone put their skin in the game and signed off on it with their name.
In the case of Argon, it's both inert and non-toxic. The main danger is that it's heavier than air (so you can asphyxiate yourself if you try).
As such, "food" grade argon is actually less pure than industrial argon - food grade is 99.996 and industrial grade is 99.998
The practical difference is what contaminants exist - because argon is non-reactive, in food grade argon they are just trying to remove contaminants you don't want in food.
In industrial grade argon, mainly used for welding, almost any kind of impurity can cause issues, whether it would be "safe to eat" or not.
They may have been referring to the price of Argon in it’s cryogenic liquid state. A 160L liquid cylinder will expand to 4426 cu ft at STP. Source: I used to design cryogenic liquid cylinders for MVE. Here’s a manual for typical cylinder.
dissociative effects so powerful you'll never perceive the world the same again doesn't sound like a great selling point in the worlds best anaesthetic
I find a lot of these casual drug use articles to be a bit naive on safety. “It does not cause metabolites or react” well it obviously modifies several biochemical processes in order to have an effect, who knows what long term effects it has on your brains computation. Our understanding of the biochemical interactions of various systems is still exceedingly immature. It’s best to say that from a safety perspective it probably won’t kill you straight away… and it might not screw up your personality straight away.
- "It’s best to say that from a safety perspective it probably won’t kill you straight away"
It *will* kill you straight away–it's an asphyxiant gas, any mistake involving oxygen supply will kill you in a few minutes, or leave you incapacitated and brain-damaged for the rest of your life. It's somewhat more hazardous than most, because it's (substantially) heaver than air, and accumulates in lungs.
(And you can be certain there will be mistakes, because a large subgroup of the users will be binge-drinking escapism addicts experimenting alone, drunk, self-administering this anesthetic out of a party balloon. The substack's rose-tinted focus on "luxury clinics" whitewashes the nature of hard drug use).
Your comment reminded me of college when they taught us: you don't ride in an elevator with a nitrogen tank because it can displace the oxygen in seconds.
We broke major safety rules doing the opposite. Carrying various steel tanks up stairs that were way too heavy for two, under-gymed, college students, one step at a time, resting the tank on every step while half of it cantilevered over the edge, as we hand-stabilized it...
I wanted to avoid thinking about that failure mode where you accidentally cleave some part of the gas regulator by damaging it, and that turns the tank into a cold-gas rocket motor. We were shown pictures of the aftermath of those lab accidents—I think there was one were a tank embedded itself into a ceiling?
edit: Now I remember the follow-up—after a professor witnessed us, they showed us the correct method. It was simply to send the tank up in the elevator unattended—one undergrad pushing the "up" button and stepping out, the other waiting for it on the destination floor. Stupidly simple.
The Finals is nuts and sports one of the most advanced game engines out there right now. Fine-grained, server side destruction physics that's synced perfectly to everyone's client so everybody sees the building crumble in exactly the same way.
> they showed us the correct method. It was simply to send the tank up in the elevator unattended—one undergrad pushing the "up" button and stepping out, the other waiting for it on the destination floor. Stupidly simple.
That works great until somebody in an intermediate floor enters the elevator oblivious to the risk and suffocates.
It is a small confined space that you have little control over your ability to escape or open up.
A stairwell you can run up, or out a door. An elevator can get stuck - or just take awhile - and there is nothing you can do about it.
Also an issue with liquid nitrogen, but that usually takes a little longer to sublimate.
Dry ice is one of the few grocery store substances (in many areas) with a similar issue, but at least co2 causes a suffocation reflex we can feel. So less dangerous.
That's exactly what I was going to bring up with this. As a doctor I just chuckled when it got to here
> Xenon is considered “the perfect anesthetic” for 5 reasons:
> It’s extremely fast-acting — xenon gas kicks into full effect within seconds
> It wears off quickly — once the gas is removed, normal consciousness comes back within a minute or two
> It doesn’t interact with other drugs
> It leaves no lasting side effects or toxicity
> The anesthetic state xenon induces is extraordinarily powerful
The vast majority of drug incompatibilities are not a result of the physical interactions between the molecules. It's the undesirable effects that they exert in tandem on physiology. A vasodilator and a negative inotrope don't have to chemically react with each other to give a patient a very bad time.
I will acknowledge that xenon does appear to have interesting effects, but nobody should be base their health and safety on what the author has written. Their analysis on its safety is far far far too superficial to be worth anything.
The Xenon episode of Hamilton's Pharmacopeia is one of the very best episodes of that series, I don't know the best way to find it on streaming currently, it was available I believe on Netflix (or maybe it was Hulu?): https://www.vicetv.com/en_us/video/xenon-the-perfect-anesthe...
The full episode takes very disturbing twists and turns, worth a watch.
Unfortunately it's not, this is some supplementary video. The full thing is 44 minutes long and covers a lot of different angles. The ongoing story about the Czech Xenon clinic in it that he covers over a longer time period is especially crazy.
From season 3, they're all great, but besides the Xenon one I also remember "Ultra LSD" and "Synthetic Toad Venom Machine" being especially great episodes.
I've done Xenon a fair number of times, it is definitely the Rolls Royce of inhalants. I'd recommend it to anyone as long as you can divert a little and aren't paying for it yourself. If you don't have unlimited amounts of money, it simply is not worth it.
If you're looking for a great NMDA inhalant experience I'd recommend another classic 19th century anesthetic, diethyl ether. It is extremely simple to produce -- heat everclear and sulfuric acid together and distill. Adjust the PH afterwards. Anyone can make diethyl ether. The actual meat of the ether experience is actually on par with Xenon. I'd say the only element that makes it worse is the aftertaste.
It's still a tradition among Lemkos in the Carpathians (Slava Ukraini!) to drink ether. Drinking is a little trickier, as the boiling point of ether is lower than your body temperature. You should chew and swallow some crushed ice beforehand, and also serve a bit in a shotglass with some crushed ice and lemon shaved ice to offset the taste. I've also found pina colada mix to be a great accompaniment. If you're just starting out with ether I recommend just inhaling the vapor.
“The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. And I knew we'd get into that rotten stuff pretty soon. Probably at the next gas station.”
Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
This quote doesn't really describe ether at all. I'm not even particularly inclined to stand up while I'm doing ether, much less engage in depravity. I recommend for a more accurate account that you read what Oliver Wendell Holmes said about it.
Bandera was fighting against the Nazis by the end of the war. At any given time, he was doing what was prudent for his country and getting resources to fight the Cheka, because the Soviets were disappearing Ukrainians in the middle of the night and sending them to gulags.
Appreciating Ukrainian cultural traditions is not political. "Slava Ukraini" should not be a political or offensive phrase, unless you are a genocidal maniac supporting Putin's mass murder.
> a liberal attitude like yours.
Lemkos then and now generally had a pretty high opinion of Bandera (they were forcibly resettled by the Soviets). Doing ether is not a particular indicator of a liberal attitude -- it is a traditional practice in Lemko society, and it was so during the time Bandera was alive. Ether is fun and enjoyable, and I like it better than alcohol. I don't think it changes your political designation. It is maybe a Calvinist/Puritan attitude to see the consumption of ether or alcohol as associated with political liberalism, are you perchance of American Protestant stock? This attitude is extremely alien to me.
> "Slava Ukraini" should not be a political or offensive phrase, unless you are a genocidal maniac supporting Putin's mass murder.
Ask the poles what do they think of it. Are they all "genocidal maniacs supporting Putin's mass murder"?
Bandera and his OUN carried out massacres and ethnic cleansing of a hundred thousand Poles, plus we don't know how many Jews. It was the slogan of the OUN so yes it is a highly offensive phrase especially if you are Pole or Jew.
I couldn't care less if modern Ukraine adopted it as a national slogan. If Germany decided to adopt "Sieg Heil" as a national slogan, that would still make think of Hitler every time I hear it even though Germany is now a democracy.
> Lemkos then and now generally had a pretty high opinion of Bandera
Some Germans still have a pretty high opinion of Hitler, some Italians of Mussolini. That doesn't make up for their crimes.
> > a liberal attitude like yours.
You happily partake in Xenon, ether and what not, I generally call this behavior that of a junkie, liberal was my way of being polite.
The phrase "Slava Ukraini" predates the OUN by actual decades. There are plenty of people in Ukraine, particularly East Ukraine, that have personal objections to the mythos of Bandera as a national hero that still use the phrase, as it was coined in the Ukrainian War of Independence. Comparing it to "Sieg Heil" is utterly disingenuous. Regardless, your summary of Bandera and the OUN is delusionally ethnocentric and clearly biased against Ukraine.
> I generally call this behavior that of a junkie
and most people that voted in favor of prohibition would say that everyone that drinks alcohol must be a public drunkard, I guess. Usage of ether is a tradition on par with drinking in at least one part of the world. It is a little more dangerous, given ether's excessive flammability and low flash point, but inhaling some ether does not make anyone a junkie. America doesn't have a tradition of ether at all, and it is the only country where there are shambling masses of xylazine/fentanyl zombies defecating in the streets. Maybe you could all use a little more traditional ether consumption.
> The phrase "Slava Ukraini" predates the OUN by actual decades
> Comparing it to "Sieg Heil" is utterly disingenuous.
LOL I'll introduce you to the fact that Sieg Heil originated in Germany around the 1900, way before the nazis got the power. The roman salute was used by the Roman empire, the earliest known use of the swastika dates the 4th centure BCE. Yet none of this symbols/gestures are accepted today, because the nazis spoiled them for everyone.
> Regardless, your summary of Bandera and the OUN is selfish and ethnocentric.
Nice hand-wavy way to dismiss hundreds of thousands of murders.
Sieg Heil originated in Germany around the 1900, etc
A broken analogy. The difference lies in the fact that these symbols were utterly obscure to German public before the Nazis introduced them in the early 1920s; though they had previous incarnations, in essence the Nazis reinvented them. In fact, they were so successful at it that most people are surprised to learn that these symbols had prior origins.
The situation with "Slava Ukraini" is entirely different. It first appeared in a poem of Shevchenko in 1840, and gained widespread traction during the War of Independence. It was then co-opted by the OUN, but the point is, by that time it had its own "legs" as a slogan rooted in Ukrainian national consciousness, completely independent of Bandera and his program.
And used today, it has no fascist connotations, and does not indicate support for Bandera or the OUN. That's just a simple fact. You obviously want the slogan to mean something different in the current context -- but we're talking about a country of 44 million people here, and if you have any interaction at all with this society, it's perfectly obvious and clear what they mean by it. I take their word over yours.
The Poles have long gotten over all this history too, of course. They know what happened in those years, but they know that what's happening in the current day is infinitely more important. They know there's a fascist aggressor to the East which threatens their survival as a people, and it isn't Ukraine.
Your attempts to conflate the slogan with a meaning it simply doesn't have are disingenuous. You're clearly not interested in what's historically accurate, or what describes the feelings and intents of people who use slogans like "Slava Ukraini" today.
You're only interested in this stuff as scare imagery -- as a way to push people's buttons.
> And used today, it has no fascist connotations, and does not indicate support for Bandera or the OUN. That's just a simple fact. You obviously want the slogan to mean something different in the current context -- but we're talking about a country of 44 million people here, and if you have any interaction at all with this society, it's perfectly obvious and clear what they mean by it. I take their word over yours.
That's BS. Do some research, check how many marches like this one[0] (clearly mimicking nazis and glorifying Bandera) there are in Ukraine. Check the countless pictures and videos showing elements of the AFU wearing nazi symbology. Check what is the role of fascist militias like Azov and neo-nazi parties like Svoboda in the 2014's Maidan.
What evidence do you have to support that symbology taken straight from Bandera period has no relationship with him?
> The Poles have long gotten over all this history too, of course. They know what happened in those years, but they know that what's happening in the current day is infinitely more important. They know there's a fascist aggressor to the East which threatens their survival as a people, and it isn't Ukraine.
That's bullshit as well, and you know it. To this day Poland comdemns Ukraine's commeration of Bandera & co.[1] That's a constant source of friction between the two countries, which are only united at the moment because of Russia.
The real problem with Ukraine as a nation is that the only national cultural identity they could find is rooted in collaborationism with the nazis, ethnical extermination and hatred for the URSS. Not a great base to start from.
> You're only interested in this stuff as scare imagery -- as a way to push people's buttons.
All I'm interested in is to see an end to the constant glorification of nazism.
Check in on any American Nazi rally from the 1930s to the present day (the photos are all over the place); you'll see the Stars and Stripes displayed very prominently right along Swastika flags. Does that mean the former is, therefore, a fascist symbol?
Check what is the role of fascist militias like Azov in the 2014's Maidan.
Azov did not exist at the time of Maidan.
This is the kind of nonsense world you create for yourself by obsessively reading polemics, and pulling "research" from echo-chamber news sources. Rather than bothering to find out what Ukrainians are actually like, as a people.
The real problem with Ukraine as a nation is ...
The irony here is that you claim to be concerned about the dangers of Nazism. But then almost in the same breath, you dive head-first into weird tribalist diatribes like this.
Yes Azov was founded right after, which tells you already there is some correlation with the Maidan. But do you think Azov was founded by a bunch of newborns, or maybe by the same militarly trained people who participated in the Maidan?
> The irony here is that you claim to be concerned about the dangers of Nazism. But then almost in the same breath, you dive head-first into weird tribalist diatribes like this.
So since you have nothing to deny the fact that Ukraine's identity is deeply rooted in nazism and violence, you resort to defining what I say as "weird tribalist diatribes", which is nonsense.
The point is that with all of your concern about these momentous events, and all your "research" -- you're clearly hallucinating about the key players involved.
At any given time, he was doing what was prudent for his country
By which you must mean his issuing the Act of Restoration of the Ukrainian State, which famously states:
3. The newly formed Ukrainian state will work closely with the National-Socialist Greater Germany, under the leadership of its leader Adolf Hitler which is forming a new order in Europe and the world and is helping the Ukrainian People to free itself from Moscovite occupation.
Yes, absolutely, the Soviet Union and its Secret Police were an active threat to Ukrainians every day. Adolf Hitler was not.
Though Bandera did work with the Nazis, he later worked against them. They weren't ideologically into Nazism.
Even Karaite Jews in Ukraine joined SS regiments at some points. They didn't love Hitler, everyone knew Hitler was a stinker. They were just more immediately concerned with the immediate threat of forced starvation or torture in a gulag.
Yes. It was prudent to do anything to save Ukraine. Absolutely. If you love your country you'd deal with the devil himself to save it from what Russia was doing.
10 million people died in Genrikh Yagoda's torture chambers. Another 5 million starved to death in the holodomor.
Hitler was bad, sure, but only a third as bad as the Bolsheviks. And about half of those 15 million deaths happened in Ukraine, and Bandera's fiduciary duty was to fellow Ukrainians, not to some foreign nation. If you had to pick a side (and Bandera did) it was best to go with Hitler.
10 million people died in Genrikh Yagoda's torture chambers.
These are some wildly inflated numbers you're posting here. Total estimates for the number of persons killed in pre-war political repressions in the USSR top out at 1 million or so. I'm not sure what Ukraine's exact number is, but (in asserting that it was "about half" of 10M) you're easily inflating the true number by a factor of at least 10x here. Likely closer to 20x.
You cited, as an encyclopedic fact, 10M as having perished specifically "Yagoda's torture chambers" per your words, which can only refer to NKVD (or otherwise "political") persecutions -- not the various deportations en masse or the Holodomor. The WP page you cited confirms upper bound for the former set of excess fatalaties (i.e. the one that you were explicitly referencing) at 770k -- which we shall charitably round up to 1M for the sake of "civility" here -- for the entire USSR during the pre-war era.
Far short of the 10M figure you are introducing for whatever imaginitive and creative purposes.
Again: 10M in this category -- the number who perished "Yagoda's torture chambers" throughout the USSR before the start of the war; and "about half" being in Ukraine; or around 5M, is the number you put forth -- apparently for the nifty rhetorical effect you thought it might bring.
Whereas the historical consensus for this category is <400k.
> Far short of the 10M figure you are introducing for whatever imaginitive and creative purposes.
I didn't introduce the 10M figure, I linked an example article where it was used (the Ynetnews one) -- it is a common number I have seen of those who died in Soviet prisons. Maybe not specifically those who were captured by the NKVD -- but I think a lot of people were dropping dead who were also not political prisoners.
> 10M in this category -- the number who perished "Yagoda's torture chambers" throughout the USSR before the start of the war; and "about half" being in Ukraine;
No -- I said about half of these excess deaths were in Ukraine, most of that half being made up of the 5 million people killed in the Holodomor.
I'm sorry I don't have perfectly legible accounting of the millions of people Stalin killed in Ukraine, but with the lower bound being in the millions I don't think saying 7.5 million people killed in Ukraine is unreasonable. The Holodomor killed 5 million and then there's assuredly another 2.5 million made up in further excess deaths there somewhere. I don't know if it is perfectly accurate and I don't care. These were the people who Bandera had a fiduciary duty to protect, as a leader of Ukrainians. I don't support the evil things that happened in Volhyn and Galicia, but those things had a historical context where there was a credible threat of millions more lives of his countrymen on the line. Tough choices had to be made and he made them.
> I didn't introduce the 10M figure, I linked an example article where it was used (the Ynetnews one) -- it is a common number I have seen of those who died in Soviet prisons.
That's not how it works champ, we need sources. An article from a random "journalist" (Sever Plocker?? who is that? he has no history on the web, very suspicious) does not count as a source. Anyone can go to the web and write random numbers in a post, that doesn't make it true. Don't believe everything you read blindly, always look for a source first.
Okay. Let's pretend the Soviets killed nobody in Ukraine other than the Holodomor. That's 5 million people. The credible threat of millions more being butchered by the Soviets was real. At this point, we are disputing small fractions of the total deaths. I don't care if it was only 5 million, though it was millions more.
There is no Ukrainian/Soviet distinction. Ukrainians were Soviet at the time. Ukraine was historically part of the Russian empire and only split very briefly after the revolution. You are trying to promote the idea of a split between Russia and Ukraine that didn't certainly exist at the time.
Putting that aside, nobody "killed" 5 million people. Killed certainly isn't the correct term, as the Holodomor was about deaths by starving and not by shooting. We're talking about mismanagement, not murders. Otherwise we'd have to consider every death caused by government mismanagement as murder.
When a homeless dies for the cold do you consider him to have been killed by his country?
When someone dies because they couldn't afford insuline, is it a murder by the government?
When a worker dies in a factory accident, was he killed by an unequal economic system?
Between 17500 and 46500 homeless died in the USA in 2018 alone[0], was that mass murder by the government? No? Then the Holodomor wasn't a genocide.
By the way, get your numbers straight again, it's 3.9 millions[1], not 5.
I think this is an unnecessarily polarized admonition. Alcohol is arguably more than possibly-lethal, but many people exercise a reasonable risk calculus that allows them to enjoy it, and even enjoy it to a low level to moderate excess (on occasion), and that doesn't necessarily indicate pathological drug abuse.
An unusual medically-safe (in medical contexts) anesthetic generating curiosity about recreational effects and safe use is not unreasonable, and having that curiosity certainly doesn't imply that someone is "not ok!"
I'm not saying that Xenon isn't exotic; it likely takes someone with a strong background in less-dangerous inhalant usage (and deep pockets) to use it safely. But there are plenty of exotic substances that people use safely and sanely throughout the world, and telling people off for having interest drawn from a (reasonably balanced, I would say) source ain't the business.
- "An unusual medically-safe (in medical contexts) anesthetic"
It's a heavier-than-air asphyxiant and the contexts are not medical. It takes somewhat rose-tinted glasses to assume every person abusing this anesthetic will do so safely, under professional supervision, in some expensive clinic. Or that the anesthetic spas will be competently regulated and ethical.
I'm not a xenon user, but I completely disagree with what you've said here. What is your point, that because xenon is hard to make it's an insane person's drug? You're implying a huge level of risk but TFA outright states that xenon is incredibly safe, which can't be said for ingesting carcinogens from combusted cannabis, or from drinking alcohol which can kill you in a single night pretty easily. Are you saying TFA is lying about the chemical safety of inhaling xenon?
People do die using asphyxiant gasses recreationally. Xenon's much greater density and narcotic potential may make it more dangerous than nitrous oxide.
Xenon gas is a pure element. It absolutely is going to leave your body exactly the way it entered, because your body has absolutely no ability to break down a pure non-reactive element into anything.
You seem to be responding to this as if it is saying that your brain is immune to injury from Xenon abuse, which is never a claim that the article made. It is clearly stated that oxygen deprivation through Xenon inhalation can cause death.
Now, 30 seconds of oxygen deprivation is sure to cause your brain to "starve" in the sense that oxygen levels will drop enough to affect your consciousness, but that's absolutely not enough oxygen deprivation to cause brain damage, given that the general method is to trip off of a single inhale, similarly to how Nitrous Oxide is used recreationally.
That's absolutely not true. It is already used in medical practice and mixing with oxygen, similar to how laughing gas is used, prevents hypoxia. These things are easy to google if you actually care to look
I wouldn’t use such analogies on wildly unrelated subjects.
Saying „The long term effects of Xenon on the human body and brain are still mostly undocumented when it comes to repeated recreational use.“ sounds so much better!
Especially since almost all common magnets don’t actually effect a hard drives functionality. The internet states you need a magnet with a force of 0,5kg to actually cause data loss. So we’re talking a large neodymium magnet. Which makes this analogy even worse.
It’s honestly incredibly how much your analogy upsets me!
You should compare it with oxygen tents used to simulate training at high elevation. The risk of damage is more-documented from those compared to argon and xenon.
These days we have some theory about this. See Stuart Hameroff MD, a Professor of Anesthesiology and Psychology, and Director of the Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona.
To sum it up from my limited understanding: This disturbs the quantum coherance in the microtubelies in all cells (But mostly nurons) which is needed for consciousness to "limit" itself to a identity.
I am not aware of any proof that "Consiousness is a emerging feature of our brains complexity". For all that I know throwing around such statements of truth is mere stupidity and anti scientific
Hameroff is one of those common pseudo-psy frauds. Dawkins hit the nail on the head when he said consciousness is hard to grasp and understand so everytime something in science comes along that is also hard to grasp, people latch on to it as an explanation. 70s it was chaos theory, then everyone switch to quantum entanglement, and already seeing it leak into AGI.
No no, Dawkins is just a old scientist and even though I admire him, he is just repeating the same old lines. These days there is research and qunatum effects in the structures of microtubelins was shown by other research groups also:
It is best to really do the research and not rely on people who already have made up their mind (that Dawkins guy for example seems like he really wants Materialism to be true).
You’re already polling way over what you’ve just said, though.
There is no doubt that small structures exhibit quantum effects. There is absolutely no demonstrable relationship between small things exhibiting quantum effects and consciousness.
You give your whole game away when you say
’which is needed for consciousness to "limit" itself to an identity.’
This is actually mysticism. You’re already making absolutely extreme claims for what you believe consciousness to be.
It may well be that consciousness is ‘in the microtubules’. But today we have no evidence of this. Nor do we have effective understandings of why anaesthetic drugs work (as opposed to, say, our mechanistic understanding of how opioids cause analgesia, or other pharmapsychophysiological relationships).
Keep an open mind, but don’t let your brain fall out
You are right, what I claimed is byond the current scope of science. It is a bit like saying 'A brain can "see" an apple even when the eyes are closed" (alluding to what we call "imagination"). You _know_ it can, but science can not prove it. It is based on your very own experience
Apparently, Xenon does this by acting as an antagonist of the N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptor, a subtype of glutamate receptor, and also by enhancing the effect of ("potentiation of") gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA). Other drugs that act along the NMDA pathway are Ketamine and Memantine (an Alzheimer's drug). And other drugs that act along the GABA pathway are Benzodiazepines (e.g., Diazepam, Lorazepam-- i.e,. Valium). And apparently Nitrous Oxide (N2O) uses both mechanisms as well.