Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Big and Little Spoons (November 10) From xkcd.

2. Disney stopped being about romance and started being about trauma (November 10) "In short, these days, Disney/Pixar teaches that you become an adult when you come to terms with your shitty parents."

3. You Aren’t In The DSM (October, via) "Like the Danaids’ jars, diagnoses leak relevance and accuracy as they move across contexts. And yet — the task goes on, because clinicians still need a shared language, insurers still need billing codes, governments still need their statistics, and researchers still need clear descriptions of who to enroll in clinical trials."

This is a really good article about the history and purpose of the DSM, and how that's incompatible with the way that average people understand it. It's useful to have standardized definitions of psychological conditions, for sort of big-picture generalizations about what these conditions are and the guidelines that should be used for treatment- but patients are now viewing their mental health situation like they "have" a certain condition, like it's a thing inside them that's causing their symptoms. That's not what it is at all. These diagnoses are just ways of labelling a cluster of symptoms, and the labels can be used as keywords to find other people who have had similar experiences and what helped them- but that's all it is. Just the variations in the range of human experience, and we find it helpful to group them into categories and label them, but the label doesn't describe an actual *thing*.

4. Axios tried to shame Christian U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico—and ended up exposing itself (November 11) "That’s why the threat of a not-weird white Christian who can comfortably speak about his faith without using it as a weapon against the marginalized poses a real challenge to Republicans. They don’t know how to fight someone like him."

5. Internet Archive’s legal fights are over, but its founder mourns what was lost (November 3, via) "In the end, the fight led to more than 500,000 books being removed from the Archive’s 'Open Library.'"

6. The Chinese College Student Who Took on Annoying Elevator Ads (November 12) !!! I too am annoyed by video screens in elevators playing ads. This is a thing here in Shanghai- is it a thing in other places? In the previous apartment that we lived in, the elevator had a tv screen that was always playing some little jingles and ads. I have, like, a moral objection to this, because you're stuck there in that small space and they want to force these ads on you. I've even been in elevators that have some kind of projector that projects the ads onto the elevator doors after they close. Not cool.

7. Does the news reflect what we die from? (October 6, via) "Heart disease and cancer accounted for 56% of deaths among these 15 causes, but together they received just 7% of the media coverage."

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. US supreme court rejects call to overturn decision legalizing same-sex marriage (November 10, via) Good news.

2. “My Community Is Under Invasion from Our Own Federal Gov’t”: Evanston Mayor Decries ICE Raids in Illinois (November 6, via) "But I feel that our residents have been attacked by a lawless entity, and we can’t just stand by and pretend this is acceptable."

3. ‘A classic authoritarian tactic’: outrage over Trump’s pardons for friends and allies (November 11) "Donald Trump’s unprecedented pardoning spree for political and business friends since returning to the White House has prompted warnings from ex-prosecutors and legal scholars of “corrupt” pay-to-play schemes, conflicts of interest and blatant partisanship."

Trump pardons Giuliani and others accused of plot to overturn 2020 election (November 10)

4. My husband laughed so hard over the fact that the Supreme Court is trying to figure out if tariffs are taxes. He says, in Chinese 'tariff' is 关税 and 'tax' is 税. It's right there in the name. It is obvious to anyone who speaks Chinese. Why do you need the Supreme Court to tell you this.