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Notes -
Scott has posted a short article: You Don’t Want a Purely Biological, Apolitical Taxonomy of Mental Disorders.
Takeaway:
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.
Funny enough, the desire to avoid my statements being taken out of context later generally leads me to do things like add parentheticals (where appropriate), or include a brief aside, as I am doing with this particular segment at this very moment to illustrate the point, and thus force someone trying to smear me to either accurately quote the statement with context intact or to deceptively edit it and thus undermine their own credibility. This does cause a lot of my sentences to become unwieldy, sadly enough.
Scott was maybe going for ghoulish overkill with that one but yeah, when your risk of being quoted in national publications is a bit higher maybe that sort of caution is warranted.
The problem is they don't need to quote him. They can just say that Scott Alexander falsely claimed that homosexuality and pedophilia are the same type of mental illness. Or they can quote someone else's shocked reaction to his wrong think. They do that all the time, it's almost impossible to find the actual quote sometimes when they accuse someone of saying something racist. Some people will care and dig into it and realize it's bullshit, but 99% won't so the effect is the same.
Is there anyone left who will all three of being shocked by equating homosexuality and pedophilia from the perspective that it’s beyond the pale, know who Scott Alexander is, and not dig into the claim?
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