domain:weirditaly.com
please
19hr ago
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?
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
19hr ago
That just completely cedes the media ground to opposition agitprop.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
19hr ago
(Don't) Burn This Fucker Down!
A guy's been arrested for the Palisades fire. Note: link to an article from the Guardian, which I know is goofy, but the details are better in that article than in a few others that I pulled.
Of note:
After dropping off a passenger, according to the investigators, Rinderknecht parked his car and walked up a nearby trail, taking iPhone videos at a hilltop location while listening to a rap song whose music video included objects being set alight. He had reportedly listened to the song and watched its video repeatedly in the days before the fire.
First, I'm pretty stoked that the government went to what seems like a lot of trouble to find this guy. In fact, I can't remember if there was much reporting, at the time, on this being an intentional / negligent fire. This is tempered by the fact that this arrest was obviously only possible by employing the surveillance state to its fullest extent. People get squeamish about facial recognition technology, but using cellphone location data is both less "emotionally" invasive as well as more durable as a tracking mechanism. Maybe carrying around constant location trackers in our pockets is a bad idea?
Second, culture war angle (of course) - Odd and lonely uber driver dude sets something on fire while listening to rap music. Was it truly intentional? Maybe, maybe not. Negligent, yes. What's truly frightening however is that this is literally an almost literary manifestation of alienated male nihilism. Rinderknecht didn't shoot up a school / church/ political figure. He didn't disappear into drugs / porn / 4chan. He didn't commit suicide. He just kind of got pissed off one night and started a fire that deleted a whole section of a city.
We need to give the boys something to do. I've written about this before on the Motte. One of the primary tasks of human civilization has always been to manage, curtail, and, when necessary, punish the violent impulses of young men. War and famine did a lot of the heavy lifting for a while, and "frontierism" helped out towards the end (i.e. the idea that listless young men could at least try to find fortune in physically difficult locations. Not just "The West" but think also whaling ships, mining, etc.) But the world is fully mapped now, more or less. If you pack up your shit and hit the road, YouTube is going to be the same wherever you go. You can't get it away from it all when it's all in your pocket.
The necessity is in developing better pathways for young men to enter adulthood and develop a sense of self paired with durable external meaning. Some sort of religious or, at least, high-minded civic metaphysics is a necessary part of this. Young men, on their own in a truly atomized sense, turn into their own kind of decentralized stochastic terrorism. Stochastic chaos might be the more accurate term.
But this won't be accomplished by TikTok ads (lol) encouraging the boys to man up and / or talk to a therapist on BetterHelp (thank you for sponsoring this podcast, BTW). I think it requires the sincere confrontation of a modern liberalism that prizes the autonomy of the individual above the stability of society. I can see a good argument to be made that liberalism should be about the tension between those two things. But I don't believe we're living in that world. We're in a world where individuals demand acknowledgement, recognition, and validation from all of society all of the time regardless of any conflict between an individual's value system and societies. This is "live your truth" in a nutshell. And when that nut cracks open, it burns down everything it touches - like, literally.
cjet79
19hr ago
I don't read Twitter. Patton Oswalt's comments got picked up off Twitter space, that's how I know about them.
The kid in the incident successfully sued/settled with two news agencies over how irresponsible they were in reporting on this.
BurdensomeCount
Unable to escape TheMotte's cycle of Samsara...
19hr ago
Fair enough, points for consistency.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
19hr ago
There are Spanish versions of those ads. I suspect they're both.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
19hr ago
The gravity of the incident was not about the twitter comments but the media coverage, which was both defamatory and inflamatory.
Ioper
19hr ago
Now that I think about, everyone I knew with well trained dogs has them on shock collars. But maybe that's regional or social bubble related.
I would assume so. As I said, I know literally no-one that uses them and that includes Trump voting Americans with land (California, Nevada and Colorado).
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
19hr ago
...are you on substack?
Not yet.
One could point out that one way to avoid worries of a slave revolt would be to simply not build your economy on the backs of forced labor from an imported underclass that continues to grow...
Are you under the impression that I disagree with John Brown's actions?
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
19hr ago
Somebody has to pick the crops and slaughter the chickens and thats a very reasonable principled exception.
Without really wanting to weigh in on whether this statement is true or not, it's at least possible to note that Congress in its wisdom created visa categories (H-2A, H-2B) for these sorts of jobs. Is it completely crazy to think "maybe we should actually use (or expand/modify as necessary) the existing visa program, rather than allow 'anything goes' under the table"?
Although there's probably an interesting tangent on using AI and robotics in slaughterhouses.
MotteInTheEye
19hr ago
It's wild how many commenters seem to react to the idea of any negative feedback whatsoever to a working animal as if it was unthinkable. Dogs were bred to be conditioned to do the jobs that humans assigned them. Laying down on a comfortable bed for hours on end is very much a job that a dog can do, and that a dog can find satisfaction in when it knows it is doing its job well. A tiny stimulus from an e-collar as an occasional reminder is an incredibly normal dog training behavior, despite the efforts of radical positive-feedback-only advocates to dramatically shift the Overton window over the past two decades.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
19hr ago
I disagree, it's simply looking at the tradeoffs of enforcement within certain contexts. If the harm of enforcement within a certain context would be greater than the benefits, that doesn't invalidate enforcement everywhere.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
19hr ago
What is a young man supposed to do when he's hobbled from the start by educational programs that favor women, college admissions that favor women, jobs programs and diversity mandates that favor women, and a general social environment that favors women?
"Man up" and overcome all the challenges that face him through masculine vigor and endurance, all with an uncomplaining stoic demeanor, or die trying? Recognize that he is the "disposable sex" who has to earn his personhood through deeds and through suffering?
hydroacetylene
19hr ago
But those ads are in English. Might I suggest that they’re campaign ads for Trump and not actually targeted at illegals?
if this alleged mistreatment of the dog is what gets him cancelled, it's pretty revealing what certain people's priorities actually are
I don't think it's so much a question of priorities. The people that Hassan mistreats, he would argue (and his audience would agree) are evil people that deserve it. And for that matter, he could be right; I don't know enough about it to say for those people, but I do believe some people are evil and do deserve bad treatment.
Dogs though, I'm not convinced at all are capable of evil. They either act according to their natural instincts, or they act how they've been trained. Thus I find mistreating a dog is a worse act of villainy against an innocent than mistreating a person that you believe is evil.
professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
19hr ago
Vote for me my niggas!
Head of State isn't a great movie, but it is a decently funny artifact of a different time in US politics and culture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_of_State_(2003_film)
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
19hr ago
Yes - there is supermajority support essentially everywhere for curtailing abuse of the humanitarian and family-based routes to immigrate to first-world countries, based on the accurate belief that the people who get in that way are, on average, bad neighbours. We should do so.
And yet, it doesn't happen. Curious!
hydroacetylene
19hr ago
Uh, what do you want done instead of immigrants on farms?
faceh
20hr ago
Yeah, my experience is that once you're able to fully articulate your problem and request to them, with specificity and supporting documentation, they get like 80+% of the way there on the first shot, and then you correct them in the places where it wasn't able to quite get your intent.
Which, yeah, that's the same issue you'd have if you hired a human to help too.
2rafa
20hr ago
A lot of the failure comes from the fact that European countries could not really fathom a guest worker program with NO route to permanent residency. There was a need for guest workers, but we should just have used the Kafala system. No family members. No route to citizenship. Mandatory return home for a 6 month period every 5 years.
hydroacetylene
20hr ago
recruitment has completely collapsed.
Recruitment collapse is in large part due to the decline in working class human capital. Cops have high standards(reasonably so) and human capital has gotten worse.
NullHypothesis
20hr ago
There is a culture war angle here about how some people like animals way more than humans.
Considering all the things Hasan has previously done and said (things that break the Twitch TOS like doxing other people and arguably inciting violence with inflammatory rhetoric), if this alleged mistreatment of the dog is what gets him cancelled, it's pretty revealing what certain people's priorities actually are.
This story was brought up on some discord servers I'm in with people that lean mostly left/center and the consensus is that's "subhuman" behavior from Hasan. So it's not something that's just circulating around his haters.
That being said, I highly doubt this is what gets Hasan cancelled, or that this will be a major blow to his reputation. Anyone who isn't a fan of Hasan probably already greatly dislike him, and many people on the left aren't huge fans of Hasan. The worst this can do is get some of his existing fans to stop watching his content.
please
20hr 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.
I think there is a significant difference due to which population gets impacted; prohibition impacts citizens, ICE doesn't. Certain rights are determined by whether you are a citizen of the country or not. I don't think it's inconsistent to want less freedom for foreigners than for fellow citizens.
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