Occasional Link Roundup

Oh finally, we’ve made it to February. Maybe one of these days I can start voluntarily going outside again!

Did you know I have a Google+ page? Now you do. If you’re one of those rare people who actually follow posts on there, now you can follow mine.

1. Stephanie and others are organizing a new conference: Secular Women Work. It’s being funded through Kickstarter. If you can, please help them out. I’m really excited about it and have already bought my ticket.

The Secular Women Work conference is a celebration of the work of female activists who create and run projects and communities in the secular movement. And there is no better way to honor their work than by using their expertise to help us all become better activists.

At Secular Women Work, you will find workshops: both hands-on exercises to develop your skills and facilitated group discussions where you can share challenges and solutions with other activists. You will find panels on specialist topics, with panelists who can help you broaden the horizons of your activism. And when you’re ready for a rest, you’ll find speakers who will entertain and inspire you with stories and lessons from their own work. In between it all, you’ll find a conference full of other activists who want to make a difference in the world.

2. An absolutely fucking brilliant post about “overdiagnosis,” as it applies to autism (and, in my opinion, to many mental illnesses):

Adopting labels to get help isn’t “overdiagnosis”; it’s an understandable and rational response to inflexible institutions and their refusal to deal in subtlety or individuality. The word “overdiagnosis” implies that there’s something more at stake than nonsensical hoop-jumping. It blames the wrong people for the wrong problem.

[…]Getting outraged about “misdiagnosis” misses the point; it blames clinicians and parents and autistics. But our current knowledge does not support the idea of drawing a bright line. It supports the idea of measuring individuals along many dimensions and providing them the individual supports they likely need based on what we know. The need for a bright line comes from politicians and bureaucrats, and those are the people who should catch flak. Why are we complaining about clinicians and parents for “drawing the line in the wrong place” when many people aren’t interested in this stupid line-drawing exercise in the first place?

3. Franklin explains why rules are not necessarily in polyamory:

If a person loves you and cherishes you, and wants to do right by you, then it’s not necessary to say “I forbid you to do thus-and-such” or “I require you to do thus-and-such.” All you really need to do is communicate what you need to feel taken care of, and your partner will choose to do things that take care of you, without being compelled to.

On the other hand, if your partner doesn’t love and cherish you, and doesn’t want to do right by you…well, no rule will save you. The rules might give you an illusion of safety, but they won’t really protect you.

4. Lis discusses talking about racism in therapy:

The course I hated most in grad school was taught by a professor who said, “If your clients talk about the outside circumstances that keep them down and make their lives horrible, about how they’re so hard done by, they can’t ever take responsibility for their own lives.” It was supposed to be a course on marriage and family therapy, which is a topic I love a lot on its own; but most of what I learned was about the use of institutional power, from a rich moderate liberal white guy who thought that talking about inequality of any kind was actively harmful to therapy.

I try to remember him even now because he was respected in his field and by his colleagues. He’d run programs in schools and military bases, taught therapists-to-be, received all the marks of approval from his profession, and thought that if a therapist let their client talk about experiencing racism or sexism, they were sabotaging the therapy. I try to remember him because I have to remember that when I meet a new client, that client has no outside indicators that I’m not exactly like him.

5. Why you don’t need to feel bad about yourself when you’ve acted immorally:

Feeling bad about oneself does not make one a better person. Sometimes we seem to think that it would be worse to do something wrong and not feel guilty, than to do something equally wrong but feel guilty about it, as if guilt makes us morally superior, as if it could purify us or redeem us in some way. It is unclear to me how guilt could have such effects. How bad one feels about oneself does not seem to be very relevant; what is important, instead, is repentance or regret: the desire to have acted differently, the intention to repair the damage done, and the determination that in the future one will not act similarly. While regret focuses on action (e.g., I did something wrong), guilt focuses on oneself (e.g., I am a bad person). Repentance is useful: it motivates one to remedy wrongs and not fall into the same mistake again. Guilt is impractical: by keeping the focus on oneself, it contributes to the reification of our negative qualities (e.g., I am selfish), and becomes an obstacle for imagining oneself differently, and for changing one’s behaviour, since we seem to adapt our behaviour to the idea that we have formed about ourselves.

6. Eve Rickert asks: Can you really negotiate your rights away?

There’s a reason domestic violence prevention websites have lists of your rights in relationships. It’s because the places you tend to see rights violations tend to be abusive relationships. It’s because rights violations tend to lead to abuse. Do abuse victims “consent” to be in their relationships? On the surface, perhaps it looks that way, but that is rooted in a victim-blaming, “why doesn’t she (he) just leave?” mentality and a serious oversimplification of the psychological dynamics of abuse. Abuse relies on tearing down your partner’s sense of self and personal agency to the point where consent is really no longer valid. And it doesn’t take physical violence to make a relationship abusive.*

I believe that if you’ve come to a place in your relationship where someone has negotiated any one of their rights away, that relationship includes coercion, and that invalidates consent. Staying doesn’t mean your partner’s not hurting you. The fact that your partner submits to you doesn’t mean you’re not being an abusive asshole.

7. Jonathan Chait has blown up the blogosphere; Anne Therault responds:

Rather than understand how trauma works, or recognize that trigger warnings are, in fact, about giving people the choice when and where to engage with potentially upsetting content, Chait prefers to patronizingly pooh-pooh the whole idea. Instead of recognizing that most people use trigger warnings as a way to facilitate the “controlled exposure” to trauma experts recommend – because, again, trigger warnings give readers the choice to make sure that they are in a safe space and a healthy mindset before engaging with potentially triggering content – he prefers to believe that anyone who asks for a content warning is a mewling infant who should just get over it already.

How nice that Chait has never found any content upsetting enough to require a trigger warning; one supposes that makes him an expert on the subject.

8. Kate critiques that research study about ‘foods containing DNA‘:

Tricking study participants is a time-honored tradition of psych methodology, but you have to trick them effectively, and I’m not convinced this is anything but a gotcha question. If you ask people to support or oppose a governmental policy and then bury one non-policy question in a bunch of actual policies they might have heard of, you are not actually doing excellent science. You are creating a popular Facebook graphic.

9. On Tumblr, The Unit of Caring has another good response to Jonathan Chait:

Basically every problem Chait identifies can be reframed in a competing-needs framework. Some people don’t want to be exposed to conversations about whether police officers can tell if a rape victim is lying, as came up in my Psych seminar last week. That conversation could cause them to relive one of the worst experiences of their lives. They want to not take part in it. On the other hand, intellectual inquiry really does demand we conduct studies on whether police can tell that sort of thing, and debate how to inform juries about the results of those studies, and debate which advice for improvement at detecting liars really works. Both these needs are valid. Both are legitimate. And both can be met.

Chait thinks he’s found people who want to shut the discussion down entirely, or at least people whose discursive tactics are causing the discussions not to happen because others don’t understand which comments will make them into targets and so they don’t talk at all. He’s calling this ‘political correctness’. What I’m seeing is a community that used to only meet one need – intellectual inquiry – now frightened that it has to choose between that need and the needs of its vulnerable members.

10. Homa Mojtabai at McSweeney’s lists ‘Reasons You Were Not Promoted That are Totally Unrelated to Gender‘:

I’m not sexist and this organization is not sexist and I have to say you’re developing a little bit of a reputation as a troublemaker. Five years ago we promoted a woman who happens to be black –- I mean, African-American… or maybe just African, I can’t remember –- and that proves that we are tolerant and committed to diversity.

11. Lindy West was amazing on This American Life:

Trolls still waste my time and tax my mental health on a daily basis, but honestly, I don’t wish them any pain. Their pain is what got us here in the first place. That’s what I learned from my troll.

If what he said is true, that he just needed to find some meaning in his life, then what a heartbreaking diagnosis for all of the people who are still at it. I can’t give purpose and fulfillment to millions of anonymous strangers, but I can remember not to lose sight of their humanity the way that they lost sight of mine.

12. It is okay and understandable not to want to hear a lot of details about someone’s sex life:

In summary, dear Letter Writer, I don’t think there is anything wrong with you for being leery when “Friend Who Was A Lot To Take At Times” becomes “Friend Who Brings Up Sex In Every Conversation” with you. That’s a volatile combination. It’s okay to create some distance – redirect him, change the subject, say “Hey did you see where I changed the subject back there?” and see how he reacts. Your comfort matters here, as does your consent. A good friend is not going to want to make you squirm about this.

13. Julian Sanchez makes the point Jonathan Chait should’ve made instead:

It doesn’t take any very fearsome campaign of intimidation for a group’s self-correcting mechanisms to break down. Imagine an argument where someone invokes a spurious or unfair accusation of (let’s say) racism or sexism as a cudgel to close down a conversation. Maybe many other members of the accuser’s ideological in-group (“allies”) themselves perceive it as unfair, but life is short and people are busy—what’s the incentive to chime in and say “hey, wait a minute”? Pretty weak even in the absence of negative feedback. And as anyone who’s watched these arguments play out is well aware, questioning whether such a claim is fair or reasonable in a particular instance is going to be read by some observers as denying that sexism or racism are problems at all.  (I recently, rather gently, questioned whether one specific document from the Snowden cache should have been published, then had to expend a whole lot more words insisting that I am not, in fact, a shill for the surveillance state.  Anyone who knows my privacy writing understands why this was slightly surreal.) You end up having to explain and justify yourself to all these folks whose good opinion you care about, and who needs the hassle?

Iterated over time, though, that means the people who do object in particular cases are increasingly from out-groups: People who really don’t care about racism or sexism or think they’re serious problems.  Now the incentives are even worse for in-group members. Because now being the one to say “hey, wait a minute” in a particular instance doesn’t just mean conflict with an ally, it means associating yourself with those assholes.  Increasingly the objections are coming from people who just don’t care about the good opinion of the in-group, many of whom are expressing those objections in actively racist or sexist terms.  So now anyone voicing reservations has to do all sorts of throat clearing (I did it instinctively at the start of this post) to avoid the ever more statistically reasonable heuristic inference that any pushback is coming from those repulsive quarters. If you’re the only ally pushing back, hey, maybe you’re not an ally at all, but secretly one of those assholes.

You end up with team “x is the problem” and team “x is not a problem,” and ever fewer people prepared to say “x is a problem, but maybe not the most useful lens through which to view this particular disagreement.” When teetotalers are the only ones willing to say “maybe you’ve had one too many,” because your friends are worried about sounding like abstemious scolds, the advice is a lot easier to dismiss. Which is fine until it’s time to drive home.

14. xkcd has a perspective on today’s events:

What have you read/written lately?

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Occasional Link Roundup
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One thought on “Occasional Link Roundup

  1. AMM
    1

    RE: #2 (Overdiagnosis)

    It’s news to me that the “overdiagnosis” problem is about deciding whether someone is “autistic enough.” The main concern I’ve had and that I’ve heard other people voice is misdiagnosis. In particular, there’s a tendency when a kid is a “problem” to slap the currently fashionable diagnosis on them. People are diagnosing “autism”, for instance, who don’t actually know enough about autism to tell whether it’s autism or something else. About 10 years ago or so, it was ADHD. And 10-20 years before that, it was dyslexia.

    (My other peeve is that all too often, such diagnoses are simply used to absolve the adults in a child’s life from any responsibility for dealing with the child’s issues. But that’s a different rant…)

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