First off, as clinicians we pride ourselves on using treatments that are based on strong research. Most therapists try to use evidence-based treatments in their work with patients. With a 95% to 97% “failure” rate of diets (statistic holds true, even if you mask them as “lifestyle changes”) to maintain weight-loss over the long-term, there is simply no substantial evidence to support our ability as clinicians to help someone to lose weight and keep it off in the long-term.
In promising our clients weight-loss, we leave them feeling like “a failure” when they inevitably lose the weight and then proceed to gain it back. Of the 5% who do maintain the weight loss long-term, many of them either have disordered eating, eating disorders, or spend the majority of their days fixated on food and exercise. This focus is simply not an ideal way to live.
I believe in rehabilitative justice first and foremost because I was in a cult.
Yeah, I talk a lot about my liberal pacifist upbringing and my community’s condemnation of Middle East invasion shaping my relationship to the Evil Other. All of that is true and salient. But the most formative element by far was the experience of being seduced by incorrect beliefs and finding my way out the other side.
People, even very smart people, believe in those kinds of lies because it is what seems to make sense at the time, and various social conditions can make people more vulnerable to them.
If that figure is to be believed, that’s about ten per cent of the country’s population dedicated to drug dealing, extortion, and mayhem—so what do you do? Again and again, I heard the same solution being offered, sometimes blithely, sometimes through jaws clenched in rage: kill them all. Kill their girlfriends and their families. Kill their children. One man apologized as he proposed this solution—he found it unseemly to be advocating genocide—but most did not. One young woman, soft-spoken, exceedingly polite, detailed her life in a gang-ridden neighborhood on the outskirts of the capital. It was one terrifying encounter after another, each delivering the same dispiriting lesson: she was helpless in the face of the gangs and their malevolent power. She had done everything she could to avoid them, and still they found ways to control her life. Her father was forced to pay extortion money to one of the gangs—she wouldn’t say which one. By the end of our conversation, she was almost weeping with fury. “I’m a Christian,” she told me, “but those people aren’t my brothers. I would burn them all.”
In my country of birth, many people have given up on rehabilitation and want to try death squads, mass executions, and dictatorship instead. I was one of them, and so were my parents.
Sacrificing the idea of mercy and rehabilitation pushed us, and many others, to accept such authoritarian and dangerous measures for the sake of punishing bad guys. This was all driven largely by anger, empathy for the victims, and a desire for justice.
At the same time, it’s important to note that I changed. I’m as far as you can get from pro-genocide now, and I’m not a special case either. People can change.
It’s not easy if they have become fanatical and suspicious of information that contradicts their beliefs and what they have observed about reality, but it can be done, and I would say that it is the best outcome.
Thanks for this. I find that having undergone a big change in beliefs really boosts a person’s epistemic humility. You’re a great example of that.
Neither is the most important word I have ever learned.
Neither is not just a word, it’s a concept. It’s a revolutionary concept, and most people don’t even know it.
It’s the concept that someone can hand you all the options for a situation.
And you can sit there and you can look at those options.
You can write circles on the ground, one for each option. You can stand in each circle, one by one, testing your footing, feeling for whether it’s right.
And then you can take a walk, walking around outside of the circles. You can walk as far as you want, as long as you want. Feeling the ground, smelling the air, waving your fingertips around to feel tiny variations in the air currents around you, being as alert to your environment as humanly possible.
And then you come to a place. Sometimes — the best times — it’s the perfect place. It’s a place where everything feels right. Where everything in the world seems to come together at a point, with you at the focus of that point.
And you know.
You know you’re in the right spot.
And there’s no circle drawn there. You found it by yourself, using your own senses to guide you, your own ethics, your own intuition, your own sense of the world around you.
That’s Neither at its best. Neither can be powerful. Neither can be earth-shattering. Neither can change your life and the lives of those around you like nothing else can.
There’s a bully out there who has spent a surprising amount of time since the last time I’ve seen her, trying to ruin my life. And yet she is the one who taught me about Neither. She sure didn’t do it on purpose, she’d never have done anything on purpose that helped me so much. But one of the wonderful things about the world is how sometimes people try to do evil and the world turns it into something good, in spite of itself. I wrote about her in my last post — I didn’t want to clutter up this post with that story again.
My entire adult life has been built upon Neither, on both a personal and professional level.
I have spent an extremely long time learning how to put words to things that nobody is putting words to. This is harder for me than it is for the average person, because my entire communication system is based on echolalia from the lowest levels up. It’s hard to do Neither with echolalia, but I learned how, because I was determined like hell, and because I had just enough of the right abilities to do so.
Neither has played a strong role in my self-descriptions, starting with that first determination to describe what my thoughts were really like — not words, not pictures, not the options I’d been given by others, but really. I’ve tried as hard as I can to describe my experience of the world as well as I can. Because I’d spent my entire life with people telling me who I was and not allowing me the possibility to tell them who I was. And because I knew that others like me would see it and be able to relate, which is an amazing thing when it happens. And because I knew that people who knew people like me, would understand them a little better.
Neither has played an equally strong role in my ethics. I have learned when possible, never to settle for the ethical options that others give me.
If I choose an option that I have been given by others, it’s one of two things:
I walked all over the place, feeling out the lay of the land, and the best ethical choice really did turn out to be right in one of those circles someone had drawn on the ground for me.
I’m too tired to do all that walking. Which is always valid. Nobody can always do Neither. Sometimes you can just stand in the circles you’ve been given and figure out which one is best. But you still know Neither is out there.
Neither has given me the power to resist echo chambers. To stand outside of them and hand people packages full of Neitherness. Full of experiences that are outside of the experiences everyone tells you you’re allowed to have.
Neither has given me the ability to really explore what I believe is the right thing to do. Ethics is one of the biggest concerns in my life. Right and wrong. What is the right thing to do in each situation? I do believe that ethical situations are different each time. There is rarely an answer that will fit every situation. No ideology will ever show you what to do, well enough to handle the amount of different situations the world will throw at you. Neither allows you to get outside of ideologies.
When I start to feel trapped. When I start to feel hemmed in. When I start to feel like my choices are not my own, like something is steering me around against my will. Then I know that I have been trapped in an Either/Or again.
And I quiet down my mind.
And I draw the circles on the ground, so I know exactly where Either is, and exactly where Or is, and everything is in my conscious awareness rather than unconsciously steering me.
And then I walk around, looking for my Neither.
And Neither doesn’t always mean you don’t choose the options you’re given. Sometimes it means that you look around, and one of the options you’ve been given really is the best choice. But you still spent all this time exploring Neither, to get to that point. You didn’t take it for granted that these circles on the ground were the only choices.
Learning this skill is hard.
It’s also possibly one of the most important things you can ever learn.
My friend used to be involved with a political organization. I don’t know a lot about them, and it doesn’t matter really. But she said that they had a saying, “The freedom to say neither/nor.” Meaning, when offered a political choice, and given the two sides, they frequently represented another side entirely, a side that wasn’t on the menu.
Pretty much everything worthwhile I do involves Neither.
This is true in my personal life. Neither gives me tremendous freedom to make choices that I could never make for my entire childhood and the beginning of my adulthood.
This is true in what I’d almost call my professional life: Blogger, activist, ethicist, writer, artist, whatever people are calling me, I don’t have a word for it. Everything important that I do in blogging about ethical issues stems from Neither. Everything.
Neither was one of the big, big turning points in my life. One that slowly transformed my life from hell on earth, to bearable, to wonderful. One that made me feel like somebody instead of nobody. One that stopped the horrible trapped feeling that had lasted my entire childhood. One that made me able to think for myself, communicate for myself, come up with my own ideas, make my own friends, make my own decisions.
And it all starts with this:
When facing a decision, find out what options you have been given. Become conscious of them. Make sure you know very well, what options you have been handed as possibilities. This is important, because often the Either/Or we have been handed is unconscious, and guides our decisions without us even being aware of it. And then we feel trapped into a decision and we don’t know why.
Then the harder part is learning to explore outside of the lines. Learning to look for other ideas, other possibilities, to actively evaluate those possibilities, and to then decide about them.
That part you can only get by practice and experience. At first, it feels like stepping into a void. The more you do it, the more familiar you’ll get with the lay of the land.
One thing that can help at first, also, is exploring the options other people have chosen in those situations. That can seem like more Either/Or, but if it’s you actively seeking it out, then what you’re actually doing is exploring. You’re looking for as many ideas as possible about what can be done, and you’re evaluating them consciously.
Be aware that it’s not just other people that can hand you Either/Or options. You can start doing it to yourself, too. And that can be just as confining as when other people do it to you.
But Neither is where everything is. And if you work really hard, you can probably start to find it. And even starting to find it is utterly amazing and can transform your life completely. And really finding it, finding the perfect Neither for any particular situation, is a feeling like no other.
The guy who invented the theory that vaccines cause autism had his medical license revoked for it
thats ridiculous
they took it away because he came up with a seemingly plausible theory?
They took it away because other scientists have been unable to reproduce his results, his results were made up, he didn’t even get approved by an ethics committee, and now he’s risking the health and lives of a whole bunch of people
It’s crazy how this one person, in a study of only twelve children, gained so much traction in the world. He put this lie out there—and it was a lie, not just interpreting data incorrectly—and now it doesn’t even matter that he’s been proven totally false. Years of effort to reestablish the truth can’t undo the lie once it’s out there in the world. Hundreds of thousands of people believe that lie, and actual children are getting sick and dying because of it.
This is a really troubling aspect of how human minds work, and it’s something conservative politicians take advantage of on a regular basis. If you just say that “well over 90% of what Planned Parenthood does“ is provide abortions, it doesn’t matter how often people recite the objective truth that abortions are a tiny fraction of Planned Parenthood services. You can say the truth 1000 times for every one time the lie is repeated, and thousands of people will still trust the lie.
I’d never heard this before, and it’s actually really helpful information to have, so thanks. Here is a scientific article by the American Academy of Pediatrics explaining the flaws in Wakefield’s research and briefly summarizing four studies that refuted the fraudulent claims. Here is an article by the editor-in-chief of the British Medical Journal calling him a fraud in no uncertain terms. Here is the first part of a nine-part investigative journalistic series, published in the BMJ, uncovering his fraud. And the General Medical Council conclusions that stripped Wakefield of his clinical credentials can be found here.
I’m honestly so mad right now reading about this guy. People are dying of measles right now because vaccinations fell off so sharply, and those deaths can be laid at the door of this man.
This man is a mass murderer
VACCINATE YOUR KIDS. THERE IS NO EXCUSE FOR NOT VACCINATING HEALTHY CHILDREN.
NONE.
Your regular reminder that the entire anti-vaxx movement is founded and predicated on hatred and devaluation for autistic people and autistic lives. Never forget this, and remember to talk about it when you’re talking about anti-vaxxers.
funny that parents would rather their kid die than “possibly get autism” from vaccines 🤔
I have talked about this before, but I’m going to point it out again. Not only did he falsify data, but he conducted unethical medical research on children.
Andrew Wakefield was found guilty of professional misconduct by the UK General Medical Council. I’ve worked in research for a pediatric hospital, and two of the GMC findings constitute major violations of professional ethics for research on children here in the US (I’m pretty sure the UK is similar since these findings formed the basis for revoking his medical license and retracting his Lancet paper.
He performed invasive medical procedures with potential serious side-effects on autistic children contrary to the children’s clinical interests. I.E. the colonoscopies, biopsies and lumbar punctures he performed on these children were of no benefit to them and were done strictly for research purposes. All procedures done for research purposes only should be approved by an ethics board known as an institutional review board, which ensures that parents are given enough information about the research and negative side effects of the procedure (adverse events) so that they can give informed consent. Wakefield did not do this. He sidestepped the ethical review process. We have no idea if any children were harmed by this, because there was no tracking of adverse events, because there was no review board involved.
He performed invasive medical procedures on “normal” non-autistic children with no clinical benefit to them, no ethical oversight and no informed consent. In fact, these were children he was not even seeing as their doctor, he simply asked parents at his child’s birthday party if they would allow a blood draw on their children for £5. Now, a blood draw is WAY less invasive, painful and has less potential to cause injury. But it’s still an invasive medical procedure done for zero reason and without informed consent of their parents.
Basically, Andrew Wakefield is an unethical asshole, on par with the people who ran the Tuskegee study.
Working in research I’mma point out a thing in this that people outside might not understand.
Informed consent means not only that the person says yes, but they also know what they are saying yes to. So a person walks up to you at a kid’s party and asks if they can, for five bucks, take a blood sample. They don’t explain why. Just “oh, I’m doing a study” is not an explanation.
Here, in the work done in my organization, we need to confirm the people know what they are consenting to, and what future uses of information/material they are consenting to. “We’re going to use this in THIS research to look at THIS issue”.
Often I see conversations wherein people misunderstand informed consent as “they said yes”, not understanding that they need to understand what they are saying yes to.
I’ve been seeing more and more posts lately which are just screenshots of other people’s posts.
Not to stay off the OP while adding some critical commentary or anything (which can be more understandable), or where the OP deleted (in any case I’ve taken the few minutes to track down so far), or to comment on a chat format post (done that myself, with links to the OP included)–but literally just reposting somebody else’s stuff as screenshots instead of reblogging.
And in some cases, that will get way more notes than the OP. Sometimes with some scattered “why didn’t you just reblog, wtf?!” showing up in the notes, but not always even that.
It just seems kind of sleazy, and I don’t want to give the people who are doing that any kind of encouragement by interacting with those posts at all.
Consent is like….the absolute minimum. Sex can be unhealthy, damaging, and traumatic without being criminal, and you have an ethical, if not legal, responsibility to do everything possible to avoid hurting your partner.
I want to add some examples to this, because I think it’s important to emphasize that this mostly isn’t rocket science, nor is it some vague “just remember to doubt yourself in everything you do!” It’s stuff like this:
Don’t cheat.
Don’t expose people to STIs without their knowledge.
Don’t take advantage of someone who’s going through a crisis by offering them “sexual healing.”
Don’t have sex with a student, employee, or someone who otherwise might not be free to say no to you.
Don’t ignore signs that consent is being given reluctantly.
Don’t rules-lawyer or look for loopholes in consent.
If you know someone is new to an activity that you’re experienced in, don’t throw them in the deep end for their first time.
Don’t do any of the above to yourself, either.
This isn’t meant to be a complete list or anything, just a sense that this isn’t an abstract topic. There are concrete examples of how consensual sex can still be unethical.
The notion that political enemies are human, too, sharing our common human hopes and fears, triumphs and vulnerabilities, is often deployed in a way to downplay political division and enmity. In reality, though, the fact that our enemies are human, too, is what makes them morally accountable. If they were inhuman monsters who thrived on death and suffering, then we would expect nothing of them but sadism. The fact that they share our common humanity, that they have experienced love and pain and disappointment and satisfaction just like us, is what makes it so intolerable that they would, for instance, vote to take away people’s access to health care just because they said they would, with no plausible narrative for why such a thing is beneficial as public policy or even as an act of political expediency.
The fact that John McCain would get up off his deathbed to participate in this cruel farce does not make him a hero, it makes him a bad person. He had a perfectly valid excuse to skip the vote. Indeed, he had a perfectly valid excuse to resign his senate seat altogether and wash his hands of this mess. Those would both be understandable human actions. What he chose to do instead was completely gratuitous and cruel, which is comprehensible only as an attempt to bask in the media’s adoration one last time. That motivation is human, and that’s what makes it morally blameworthy. If he were a mystical creature who fed on the praise of journalists, then we could write it off as a survival instinct. Since he is a human being with human moral agency, we are entitled to our equally human moral judgment. And in my judgment, which is my right as a human being, John McCain is an evil man and anyone who is trying to use his unfortunate medical condition to distract from that fact is a fool at best and a fellow villain at worst.
Yes, our enemies are human. That’s what makes them enemies. That’s why their actions are unacceptable — because they are just like us. If we can make the morally right choice, so can they. And they have not.
Adam Kotsko, “On the old saw, “Remember your enemies are human too”,” An und für sich (x)
“I respect [insect/spider/thing] outdoors but IN MY HOME IT DESERVES DEATH” is one of the most common responses I see in regard to treating tiny creatures with respect and it’s just really sad people fall back on that so eagerly to excuse what’s still completely senseless destruction.
A bedbug or a tick or something else that wants your blood, sure, that makes sense, but a spider wandering into your house is still minding its own business hunting flies and crickets. It doesn’t know this big cave “belongs” to an animal that arbitrarily hates it for being there, and no, spiders do not just climb into your bed and bite you in your sleep.
The vast majority of flies, moths, beetles and anything else that small that ends up in your house actively *does not want* to be in such a place because it’s doomed to starve or dehydrate. Others are just trying to come in from the cold, and even if it’s your food they’re after, they don’t know that it’s “your” food. They especially don’t know that it upsets you for something 1/1000th your size to take a bite of that food; most other big animals don’t care, so they have no reason to be cautious of it.
People talk like it’s some kind of delinquency to be punished or something. It feels kinda more like reaching for a justification to enjoy a tiny moment of socially acceptable sadism.
Do what you really have to do to protect yourself from a deadly allergy or something but don’t be an asshole to something just because it made a wrong turn it can’t even comprehend.
Look at this face:
People honestly need to have more compassion for little ones who are visiting.
Education is a huge key to fixing this though! I’ve found that the more information about insects and arachnids you share with others, the more they start to understand that these are living creatures that deserve respect.
What about cockroaches? I’m mixed about them because they are quite cute.
A heavy population of roaches in a house can trigger asthma, and in theory, harbor some dangerous bacteria as their waste builds up. It’s usually only German cockroaches that get “severe” though (the tiny ones) while many other roaches have smaller, less intrusive populations. Larger species like American and Oriental roaches prefer moist conditions, so their presence is more often a symptom of rot or they, too, are just coming in from outside.
The risk of disease from roaches is pretty much highly exaggerated, as they can only pick up disease from their immediate environment. In a relatively clean house, the roaches will be fairly sanitary as well!
The really sad thing about “pest” cockroaches is that they evolved to be beneficial to us. They originally come from caves, where their scavenging habits would have made conditions comparatively cleaner and safer for other, larger animals living there. It’s only in the artificially sterile environment of a modern human house that they become a “contamination” themselves, and seldom even encounter the many predators that would have controlled them in a natural cave.
Most species of cockroach, though, just aren’t cave or house dwellers either way. A lot of people mistakenly think they’ve got a roach problem when they’re just seeing “forest” roaches who, once again, got lost like so many other creatures in the wrong place, and would rather be back outside!
Anyway here’s what I think is the most beautiful roach, Polyzosteria mitchelli:
Also note that roaches experience something a lot like friendship
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 