Monday Miscellany

Oh hai. It’s a new week! I’m back at work at the Unspecified Internship at a Neat Place. But, I can tell you what I’m doing this summer–working at the SSA!

This post by Yvain/Scott Alexander is so good it gets TWO pull quotes:

I can’t even get angry with people who say polyamory is incompatible with true love. They’re just empirically wrong, like someone who remarks confidently that hippos have six legs. They’re not evil or even deluded. They just obviously haven’t seen any hippos. You don’t really want to argue with them so much as take them to a zoo, after which you are confident they will realize their mistake.

I don’t drink much, not because I’m especially virtuous but because I hate the taste of alcohol and the atmosphere of bars and parties. In the same way, I’m not promiscuous, not because I’m especially virtuous but because I’m sort of borderline asexual. I like cuddling people, kissing people, falling in love with people, petting people’s hair, writing sonnets about people, and a few things less blogaboutable, but having sex isn’t an especially interesting experience for me. I treat it kind of like watching a chick flick – something one might do to get the nice warm feeling of doing romantic things and bonding as a couple, but wait a second why the heck is she kissing him now and that scene made no sense and THIS MOVIE HAS NO PLOT HOW DID IT MAKE $100 MILLION AT THE BOX OFFICE?”

Ahaha, oh look, it’s my feelings exactly.

“Because you don’t have to wait for a revolution to be a person, and neither does anyone else.” Real Social Skills on the importance of separating your legitimacy from your ideology.

In news that certainly didn’t surprise anyone who’s recently been in public school, the ‘obesity prevention’ programs many schools offer can be the start of eating disorders, disordered eating*, and really unhealthy habits. Shockingly, when you treat being fat as objectively bad and being thin as objectively good, problems abound.

In horrifying news, we have this: Nevada has been bussing the mentally ill to other states

In recent years, as Nevada has slashed funding for mental health services, the number of mentally ill patients being bused out of southern Nevada has steadily risen, growing 66 percent from 2009 to 2012. During that same period, the hospital has dispersed those patients to an ever-increasing number of states.

By last year, Rawson-Neal bused out patients at a pace of well over one per day, shipping nearly 400 patients to a total of 176 cities and 45 states across the nation.

Lessons learned from a decade of depression.

Cranberries: still not going to cure your urinary tract infection.

If you’re in the Chicago area, I’m giving a talk about schizophrenia this weekend.

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*Where eating disorders are clinical patterns of eating, and disordered eating is subclinical behavior, like skipping a few meals to feel better about getting dessert or somesuch.

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Monday Miscellany
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