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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 30, 2023

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This is a suicide posts about an entrepreneur who failed and is going thru certain twitter communities.

https://twitter.com/smb_attorney/status/1720486539325587858?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ

https://twitter.com/moseskagan/status/1720231141826015303?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ

https://twitter.com/moseskagan/status/1720232058109469137?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ

A few thoughts.

  1. Yes business owners do kill themselves when their business fails. Capitalism does have brutal aspects.

  2. I laugh when the one guy posts go talk to a therapists here’s the suicide prevention helpline. When your business is failing your issues are not lefty mental health. Your dealing with a real issue of not being able to provide for your family and seeing all your dreams disappear. It’s one of the most emasculating things that can happen to someone especially someone who is use to being able to handle stuff

  3. He shouldn’t have killed himself. I’d assume he could have found some consulting or being an employee for a bit gig.

  4. Society has very little tolerance for failed men. After the fact everyone will say he showed some signs and should have helped out. When you are failing you have the stench of failure and people honestly try to run away from you.

  5. I know someone whose dad killed themselves so when there business failed. I always thought the lefts argument that rioting and looting isn’t damaging was false. Being able to provide for your family is life and it’s something men take very personality.

  6. Females somehow survive with nothing. Not sure how but realistically society is far kinder to widowed mothers.

Points 2 and 3 basically contradict each other. That is, there's the object level struggles of material providing, which therapy would not have helped with, and the irrational misperception that these issues were irreparably unsolvable to the point that suicide was the only way out. In-so-far as therapy and suicide prevention could have helped him figure this out, they would have been useful (in-so-far as some therapy and suicide prevention are lefty mental health stuff made of empty-sounding words that don't improve rational consideration of object level issues, they would not have been useful)

I would be curious to see the efficacy of therapy on reducing suicide rates among men in particular. I imagine it's tricky to disentangle selection effects: people who go to therapy are more likely to be suicidal than the general population, but suicidal individuals who go to therapy are probably less suicidal than suicidal people who don't go to therapy.

Therapy-as-it-actually-exists does seem to be less efficacious for men than women. Enough to make it have no effect? Not sure.

Therapy-as-it-actually-exists does seem to be less efficacious for men than women

Is that true, or do women just actually like therapy?

Full disclosure- I think therapy works for trauma and phobia related issues, and is useful for management strategies on depression/anxiety issues, and maybe has some applicability to rarer issues(eg the vanishing penis syndrome Scott wrote about) or for managing mental health care when there’s 20 different providers, but is basically hokum outside of that. And functionally all hokum works on the basis of empathizing with the mark and then telling them what they want to hear. Women like empathy where men as often find it annoying. So women like therapy in a way men don’t, but it has the same effectiveness for both. And obviously that leads to women pointing to it as useful even when time and drugs/life changes did the heavy lifting, while men point to it as stupid and useless in the same circumstances.

I wonder what the overlap is between liking therapy and believing in other hokum (eg astrology, acupuncture).

I dunno. For people who don’t actually have a problem it seems like a one to one trade off with psychics, so I’d expect it’s actually negative.