There's a new book coming out on Kindle in the US in a couple of weeks by a writer at The Economist called Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality Previews have been great. That and Material Girls, Why Reality Matters for Feminism are starting to expand mainstream understanding of this phenomenon in general, although there's much to speculate on why it's impacting so deeply both women who transition and women who don't. (Hardbacks of these titles are coming out later this year in the US but can be shipped now from the UK).
I haven't but I love this subject and was heavily influenced by Scott Lilienfeld (RIP, dude was a genius and such a positive impact on psychology)'s paper "Psychological Treatments That Cause Harm." It's absolutely true that some treatments are worse than most treatment. At the far end of the horrific bell curve is some of the stuff that went on during the Satanic sex abuse panic -- clinicians literally instilling in their young patients the belief they were molested. A bit more subtle are programs like Critical Incident Stress Debriefings, which encourage people who have just been through trauma to sit around and talk about that trauma in a way that might exacerbate symptoms for some people (most people experience some trauma symptoms in the wake of such event but find they dissipate just about completely in time, with on treatment). I bit more on this in this (unfortunately paywalled) article I did on PTSD for The Economist.
https://www.amazon.com/Boys-Sex-Hookups-Navigating-Masculinity-ebook/dp/B07RFLTCD8
Peggy Orenstein’s Boys and Sex explores this topic pretty comprehensively. If you don’t want to read the book, she did a bunch of podcasts around the time of the release.
This author has written a few books on girls and women. Her latest is on boys. I haven't read it but I've read a couple of excerpts and an interview. My impression is that it's very sympathetic to boys themselves and frustrated with the way American parents/society chokes off their emotions, which in turn hurts the boys/men and everyone who tries to get close to them.
I haven't listened yet, but I examined a few tweets regarding it, and it seems a theme of the episode is that "nuh uh, the right does cancel culture not the left losers!" (paraphrase)
Is that an accurate view?
https://www.buzzsprout.com/1112270/8656464
Can someone provide a tl;dl?
And then can someone tell if On the Media's cancel culture episode mentions the late great Bob Garfield?
This is where I think that blockchain tech may actually have some real-world application, instead of being just a buzzword. There are some content platforms out there like LBRY which are billed as censorship-resistant. See https://lbry.com/faq/censorship-resistance
Here's the next six months of content for J&K:
https://www.amazon.com/Nice-Racism-Progressive-People-Perpetuate-ebook/dp/B08HL9XNYK
For those of us in Europe, it's still hard to get the Quick Fix. Mail today from Amazon UK:
>We're still trying to obtain the item(s) which you ordered on April 05 2021 in Order# xxx-xx-xx
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>
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> Singal, Jesse "The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can't Cure Our Social Ills"
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> http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0374239800
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>We’ll email you as soon as we have a delivery date, and we’re making every effort to ship your order as soon as possible. If you would prefer, you can cancel this order:
There’s a podcast called Partners from Mailchimp that had PJ and Alex on and they actually went to therapy to work on their work relationship because they weren’t getting along. I want to go back and relisten to it.
I wonder whether things would have devolved as badly if they hadn't changed their commenting system. It just meant participating or having a discussion there functionally impossible.
Hmm…that’s a weird one.
I would start out with a simple open question, along the lines of “what does that mean to you?” Let her talk it out a little, if she’s willing.
Either she is a Rachel Dolezal in the making OR there is some marginalized aspect of her identity that she’s really clinging onto, because, in the circles she travels in, “white women are the worst.”.
There’s also a strain of social justice activism that puts forth the idea that white is a social construct rooted in power and oppression, and the solution is to “renounce whiteness” and identify as, say “Irish and German American.” or “a person of European descent.” So if you ask her to explain what she means, and she is willing to, three possible paths emerge: 1. She is delusional and thinks she’s black or Asian (not much you can do with that one, unfortunately),
She’s harboring lots of guilt about her heritage and identifying strongly with her status as a sexual minority, or a religious minority, or something else.
She’s trying connect with her good and bad ancestors in a way that swaps out “whiteness” for a deeper connection to her ethnic heritage and culture.
2 and 3 give you lots of potential avenues to talk about something more real and less charged: What’s it’s like for her as a gay woman in X city? What do you know and remember about grandpa’s Polish heritage? What accomplishments of your family or ancestors that you feel proud of, or not proud of? How does she feel about her family and her heritage?
I have not asked them recently whether their impressions have changed with time. It’s fair to say that there was some degree of Emperor’s New Clothes going on at the time. I raised some concerns privately with them, but was not shouting “THIS IS SO FUCKED UP” from the rafters, and was not confident to do so until time had passed.
One thing that may have impacted our different responses is that my friends were progressive Christians, and I’ve never been religious. There are some clear parallels to Christian theology that showed up in this training. and my theory has always been that it hijacked their religion receptors. “You are born tainted and evil, and you must seek forgiveness that you will never deserve or be worthy of, etc.” I felt some pride—in a “Great Minds Think Alike” kind of way—when one of my intellectual crushes, John McWhorter, landed on the same idea a few years later and [wrote a whole book about it]https://www.amazon.com/Woke-Racism-Religion-Betrayed-America/dp/0593423062/ref=nodl_?dplnkId=e8a5e6d2-e081-4b96-b843-714b0cb3f785
I’m so sorry. I have a family member with borderline personality disorder and this sounds like the situation with her. There is a book called “stop walking on eggshells” (Amazon linkthat helped me understand what was happening and see how it became a family disease.
You should read Samantha Geimer's autobiography. u/coachmaxsteele's portrayal of events and characterization of the victim's views is correct as far as I can recall. (Read it around five years ago, so I could be misremembering though.)
I have a nice-ish pair of binoculars but they're not really fancy. These ones, though the link says unavailable now. They work really well and they're also very compact and easy to use. I did some research at the time and these came up as good and I've been satisfied, but I'm not really an optics nerd so can't remember other options lol. My spouse has a really nice camera and he's the photographer, we bird together, I'll often spot them with my nocs and then he'll get to photographing, it works well. We want a scope soon, it's pretty addicting haha.
I highly, HIGHLY recommend you get into birding! It is seriously super easy, cheap, fun, and so rewarding. It's an awesome experience having one's eyes opened to the amazing variety of birds that are around us all the time! And of course it's just a fun way to enjoy nature in general. Birding has saved my sanity so many times over the years. You will get addicted, do it.
I am always team arm yourself. The police will not save you; they might show up after the fact depending on how bad the altercation was.
This is not to say that I actually do arm myself, because I live in the SF Bay Area and it's a huge pain to own a gun here. Instead I have definitely curtailed the areas I frequent, and when. My situational ~~paranoia~~ awareness has been dialed way up over the past couple of years.
Any pepper spray recommendations?
I have one of these aluminum stabby things on my keys, which is probably just LARP but does make me feel a bit better. And they can break a car window, which could conceivably come in handy in a wreck or whatever.
Mackay's "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" is a classic but it's not particular to America.
Moral panics are pretty common the world over.
Good job, Jesse. You work hard. I love how an academic institution was complaining about the length of the article of all things.
This should be required reading for high school students since no one from medical students to university administrators to consumers of media seems to grasp the concepts within, which are vital to information literacy.
I think you are right that IP Addresses alone aren't enough. But, they can be used to connect dots that leak info.
Examples I have seen:
A person searched for their own full name on someone's personal site. That person logged the IP address. Then, that person sent an image to the person's pseudonymous twitter account. When that person clicked the image link (the only person who would do so, for this private link), that revealed that the IP address matched. From there, the person used full name + rough geolocation to find the person's FB profile.
Using IP addresses to tell that sock puppet accounts were all controlled by one person
Use a VPN to protect yourself. The riskiest thing is clicking a link to a non-huge domain .. something that isn't google, reddit, etc. These big sites probably won't doxx you. But, if you visit justicenow dot com or some other strange domain, there's a chance you are being phished for your personal IP. One way a psycho could do this is sending you a link on reddit and getting you to click on it while on WiFi. Again, using a popular VPN like NordVPN or ExpressVPN can be a big help. Removes the rough geolocation, and your IP just becomes their node's IP address, meaning your traffic is washed in with a bunch of others'.
Even more interesting fuel for the fire: the chair of the Government Department at CMC is one of the most prominent conservatives left in academia (and has literally written the book on conservatives in academia). Would be very curious to know what his take is on this situation given that it sounds like he was intimately involved in it.
It gets worse. In 2020, Rushdie was among many writers who contributed to a volume in honor of ACLU's 100th anniversary. Probably a fund-raising effort. https://www.amazon.com/Fight-Century-Writers-Reflect-Landmark/dp/1501190415
Meanwhile, Amnesty France tweeted about the attack but nothing from Amnesty USA or the main Amnesty Int'l account.
I mean, if you want to know how the word is used, you should know who the people are who use it. This really isn't a very complicated concept.
Look at this book:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07THXS3JL/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
The word is indicative of a type of culture warrior.
If you disagree, please find me the most serious, thoughtful piece of journalism or writting that uses the word "triggered" the way you understand it.
I bet you will find nothing becasue the only folks using it that way are right wing hacks - your Shapiros and Trumps and such.
the heart of the buddha's teaching
inadvertently, the "big book" of AA doesn't explicitly take on the lie of the self, but via the 12 steps i stumbled ass backwards into eastern psychology. i realized i couldn't keep telling myself "well i know i was an asshole to so-and-so, but deep down i'm a good person" because there is no "deep down". i am my actions. what i think, feel, and believe doesn't matter. from this seed of an idea i was able to start grokking the idea of the illusion of the self.
this book!
https://www.amazon.com/Factfulness-Reasons-World-Things-Better/dp/1250123828/
it looks a bit self helpy, but it has good facts and figures showing how the world on a whole has improved over the last 100 year or so. It made me feel much better about stuff, and also feel a bit more proactive about helping where I can help, rather than wallow in self defined hopelessness.
> Prohibition, for example, was considered a real women's rights issue, and many proto-feminist and suffrage groups were organized around it as a core tenet. It was also popular with religious conservatives and the Ku Klux Klan. Who gets the points for that one?
This is tangential to your point, but I can't resist mentioning it since Prohibition is one of my peculiar fascinations. Mark Lawrence Schrad wrote a great recent book called Smashing the Liquor Machine, from a committed progressive who emphasizes that Prohibition can only really be understood as an emphatically progressive movement.
I would say less that it was popular with religious conservatives, more that the progressivism of the day was very much a Christian movement. William Jennings Bryan, cited repeatedly by Schrad, is perhaps the ur-example of this: he was a pacifist and one of the most prominent anti-imperialists of the day, fought repeatedly against big business and for measures like progressive income taxes and more direct representation, and is broadly considered one of the leading figures of the era's progressive forces. He pushed for an eight-hour workday, a minimum wage, the right to strike, and women's suffrage.
He was also a passionate advocate for Prohibition and against evolution. He saw these as fully in line with his progressivism: Prohibition, against predatory businesses looking to exploit and abuse the poor; evolution (alongside his Biblical justification) because it encouraged social Darwinism and inhibiting social and economic mobility.
The split between high-demand, moralist religions and progressive social causes is, in many ways, a more recent one. Much of the progressivism of the day, including Prohibition, was a natural fit for moralist Christians.
When I first heard "CRT", I googled it an immediately found resources about using CRT to change education in elementary and secondary schools. Now, the results are flood with articles, but I mean...
This is an entire book on CRT in education published back in 2013.
https://www.amazon.com/Handbook-Critical-Race-Theory-Education/dp/0415899966
To pretend this isn't a topic in schools is just denial of reality.
Israel is founded on antisemitic terrorism.
Mostly against Arabs, but even against dissident Jews, in the early days.
https://www.amazon.com/State-Terror-Terrorism-Created-Modern/dp/1566560683
I'll just note that 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus uses "Indians" for the express reason that this was, in the author's experience, the most common and widespread self-reference.
It’s this one from Amazon, it has a ton of different rings you can choose from.
It sounds like you're not familiar with this idea of wokeness being a religion, in which case you might be interested in checking out this book:
For me it would be Stephen Jimenez, the journalist who wrote the book about Matthew Shepard that Jesse and Katie have spoken at length about before: https://www.amazon.com/Book-Matt-Hidden-Matthew-Shepard/dp/1586422146
Kindergarten teacher here (public school) had a Amazon book list where parents could buy books the teacher wanted for the class. When I looked at it 5 of the 7 books were LGBT books. Maybe those were just the ones the parents didn't feel like buying, I don't know. The teacher was a good teacher, though, and I don't remember them actually pushing any gender identity stuff outside of reading the class a book about a transexual crayon. Though the school in general has been pushing a lot of woke ideology and political indoctrination.
Please for the love of god will someone else read Jesse Walker's book: The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory
You are attempting to present only one side of the literature, not the entire picture, and certainly not an objective view. This is further evidenced by your ad hominem attack. In fact, I presented no links in this thread. You did - a link to a blog. I can do that too. So what? I care about evidence. I care about critical thinking and objectivity. Why am I obligated to answer your questions? I'm not.
We don't have a name yet, but we have a working prototype.
The concept isn't some kind of secret or something like that, but I'd rather not talk about what it is at this stage in the user research process because that would make it difficult for us to get honest and unbiased feedback.
I'm totally happy to explain what the project is to anyone who doesn't want to be part of our user research, or who has answered some preliminary questions.
If this sounds weird to you, I recommend reading "The Mom Test" by Rob Fitzpatrick, which is a great book on how to have customer conversations.
Hi -- I just wanted to share, I appreciate your comments and I see you that you are suspicious of radical feminism. I don't blame you. People (including radfems) can act nuts online or be a bit obtuse about explaining what it is exactly we believe.
I wanted to let you know that many, many radical feminists do not hate men and I (maybe weirdly) think that some of the goals of feminism kind of overlap with some of the men's rights talking points (equality in relationships, child-rearing, equality in divorce proceedings, etc).
I wanted to tell you about this book -- The End of Patriarchy: Radical Feminism for Men by Robert Jensen. I know some men who loved it and I think Jensen does a good job of explaining how feminism, while focusing on the liberation of women, will also be beneficial for men and the world as a whole. I will literally buy this book for you, if you want it!
Additionally, if you want me to read a book you recommend on men's rights, I will happily do so.