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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32159 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023

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Scott has posted a short article: You Don’t Want a Purely Biological, Apolitical Taxonomy of Mental Disorders.

Takeaway:

if “political correctness” sounds too dismissive, we can rephrase it as: “they want something that doesn’t think about ethics and practicality at all, but which is simultaneously more ethically correct and pragmatically correct than other taxonomies”.

Some of Scott’s best work comes from the tension between categories-as-descriptive and categories-as-prescriptive, so I’m pleased to see him tackling this subject.

He has a couple potentially spicy sentences which have been interspersed with extra letters to ward off journalists. Legends say they aren’t able to remove text without an invitation, preventing context-removal. A handful of commenters immediately proceed to demonstrate why this will do nothing to keep some people from thinking Scott is literally Hitler, but perhaps it will keep them from publishing that? I’m not optimistic this will keep an opportunistic editor from stripping out letters with no direct relevance unless they’re legally required to put “…” in their place.

Journalists misleadingly quoting subjects is something that is difficult to defend on non-partisan grounds. I, personally, would prefer if what a person said and what journalists thinks about that statement to be clearly separated and obvious to the average reader which is which. For example, I think ACLU crossed the line when they changed RGBs statement from:

The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a woman’s life, to her well-being and dignity, it is a decision she must make for herself. When government controls that decision for her, she is being treated as less than a fully adult human responsible for her own choices.

To:

The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a [person’s] life, to [their] well-being and dignity…When the government controls that decision for [people], [they are] being treated as less than a fully adult human responsible for [their] own choices.

The original text doesn't consider the possibility of abortion being about bodily autonomy of men, while the latter does, without making it clear what the original said.

It is revision of fact, such as that defended by /r/ssc posters who compare silenly misquoting text to removing "uhh"s from speech, or my example, that brings to mind a quote from a book often cited, yet never ceaseing to be prescient, 1984:

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.

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