please
1d ago
If the collar was an "air tag" as Hasan is claiming, his response is still pretty bad - his dog got up, he began yelling at her, she injured herself and yelped, and instead of checking on her/making sure she was okay, he continued to yell/complain about her. The response to a dog yelping in pain is not to yell at it, especially if the pain was not anticipated to occur.
From a culture war perspective, the defense of "I didn't do X bad thing, I only did Y bad thing! Take that!!!" is wild to parse as a strategy in real time - a shock collar is horrible, but so is what Hasan is claiming he actually did in the moment, and no one seems willing to comment on the behavior of the latter just because that type of abusive behavior is less bad than the shock collar.
The Supreme Court heard oral argument in Chiles v. Salazar yesterday, a culture war-y case about Colorado’s law banning talk therapists from discussing “conversion therapy” with minor clients.
The oral argument ended up hinging on a different culture war question: is strictly talk therapy – without prescriptions, shocks, clinical analysis, official diagnosing, whatever – inherently medical? I.e., is addressing “mental health” through conversation really “health” at all, or is it something far simpler?
Colorado admitted a priest or a life coach could have the very conversations that it was banning therapists from partaking in; why would the difference in title suddenly change the classification of the act itself?
Some arguments tried to say that talk therapy is medical conduct because it triggers a physiological reaction in the brain, but all speech has the capacity to do that – someone telling you they love you can release dopamine and oxytocin; someone telling you “gross, no” after you ask them on a date can create a crushing response; etc. And yet, speech in a general sense continues to receive protections that conduct does not.
Does “medicine” need to be something that physically manipulates and alters the body? Does medicine need to be something directed towards solving an illness?
I can see the argument that mental health as addressed through a clinical diagnosis and prescriptions is medicine. But I am struggling to understanding talk therapy as falling into the medical category, in part because much of talk therapy isn’t related to the prevention, treatment, or cure of mental illness – a lot of talk therapy is simply asking for help with a difficult relationship, achieving a deeper understanding of self, or venting to someone who is trained to recognize self-perception road blocks.
Taking the view that medicine is about preventing/treating illness, it would be especially odd to view conversion therapy conversations as medical – after all, society has moved past viewing same-sex attraction as a disease, supposedly. So why then would conversations about attraction be medical in nature in this context? Is it from a larger need for therapy to be considered health more broadly?
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