My wife works for one of our county libraries in Colorado. The higher ups are trying to appease conservatives pushing for book bans by cancelling the yearly “Banned Books” displays that they normally put up. They seem to think that by not “antagonizing” them, the conservatives will quietly go away and leave the libraries alone.
I’m of the opinion that they’re just giving into the conservatives’ demands by making banned books less visible - and getting nothing in return. Conservatives have made this a national strategy (as detailed in the article), so our local library isn’t just going to make it all go away by ceding to their demands.
But some drugs might help you change your brain chemistry to be as narcissistic or just so singular focused that you can’t think about being depressed because you are focused on repetitive task work.
It’s seldom covered in any decent capacity by most work or private health insurance unless you target it directly and lose out on other options.
Most offices are corner cutting so hard that the following week, you might have a new therapist/counselor that has no frame of reference beyond the former’s patient folder on you.
A lot of therapy is just a gotcha for Christian and religious bullshit.
Therapy and mental health is often seen as a sign of weakness for men, who often times never open up or seek help to begin with due to the stigma.
This isn’t a huge conundrum. It’s pretty easy to understand.
That and therapy is treating the symptoms but not the underlying cause. Therapy can help you heal, but when every week brings a new trauma you’re just treading water.
That and therapy is treating the symptoms but not the underlying cause.
As a therapist, I have to object and say that’s not good therapy. Even when the underlying cause is something external to yourself that you do not have control over, a competent therapist should be working with you on how you can minimize contact, manage contact better, or completely escape said external stressor. A complete fix may not be possible, but there’s usually room for improvement.
Regardless, it’s incorrect to say therapy treats symptoms, but not underlying cases. Underlying causes are focused on all the time.
Can you help me escape politicians who are taking away the ability for women to have safe abortions, attempt to overthrow the government, and their voters who brag about it by flying fascist flags on their cars? What about massive inflation without a similar rise in income that is needed just to survive?
Thanks in advance.
Yes this is snarky, but the stressors that most people are talking about in this thread are completely out of their control AND things they can't just avoid.
Yeah, with the state of things right now, I’m not sure anxiety is so much a bug but a feature. The vast majority of the population is being exploited or ignored while a small group of people plunder the world’s resources and talents and continue to do so despite it obviously threatening the balance that life on this planet currently depends on. And different factions of those assholes use some of the population to try to take or protect what they have from others and have enough weaponry to devastate the entire population.
Even if it can be consciously ignored, the subconscious will figure it out and try to warn us and I think that denial is one of the big causes of mental health issues.
Can you help me escape politicians who are taking away the ability for women to have safe abortions, attempt to overthrow the government, and their voters who brag about it by flying fascist flags on their cars? What about massive inflation without a similar rise in income that is needed just to survive?
Nope, that's going to take a lot of work to do anything about. What (imo) your therapist should be helping you do is develop strategies that let you deal with your anxieties. If therapy was only for dealing with things after the fact I don't think I would be doing it because I agree with you, we can't escape all the awful shit in the world but what we can do is make it not so debilitating that you can't do anything.
The original point was that therapy doesn't address the underlying problem. It led to the post above:
If therapy was only for dealing with things after the fact I don't think I would be doing it because I agree with you, we can't escape all the awful shit in the world but what we can do is make it not so debilitating that you can't do anything.
Which doesn't address the underlying issues or solve anything when it comes to actual problems that directly impact people. It is also worded as if the therapy helps by avoiding the awful shit so someone can do something. Which probably means not letting stress about one thing keep you from doing something else you can control, but in the context of the comment it was replying to could be read as doing something about the examples.
Therapy is great for addressing personal issues such as anxiety and trauma that are keeping someone from successfully acting on things they do have control over. But when it comes to things people can't control it is just a coping mechanism that doesn't solve the underlying problems that someone is reasonably responding to with frustration and helplessness. Yet it keeps being suggested as a solution.
Something that has always helped me with things like this (I’m trans in the uk, and have various other things around decentralised networks and such, also the economy and like 5000 other things, personal situations, etc.) is doing concrete steps towards my socio-techno-politico-economic goals and personal stuff.
Things like organising with other people (not just for protests/riots, but also things like underground services, discreet information leaflets, and just general community), trying to develop new tech, etc. ^.^
Decent therapy can help at least with dealing with some of the effects of this stuff, and manage interpersonal causes of mental health issues, in theory, if you can access it - though there are many issues imo with certain types of therapy that promote accepting shitty sociopolitical situations and personal situations, though this seems to be more of a philosophy thing than really therapy related specifically.
Techniques for managing the effects of poor sociopolitical situations - and working with someone to come up with more strategies to deal with these effects as well as avoid more common self-destructive thought patterns - might help you act more towards fighting the root causes even if it can’t solve them itself ^.^
For people in these situations, if you want someone else to help come up with personal coping strategies and to practise identifying more destructive thought patterns and manage emotional states, my opinion is that this is where a good therapist may be helpful if you can access one and want one.
For solving the more underlying issues? They probably can’t help directly, but they may help you gain more ability/mental bandwidth to deal with them either personally or via organising and political strategy. However this is all very conditional on therapist quality and some therapists may be actively harmful.
At least, this is my view. I have a pretty complex set of thoughts about therapy and mental health systems - and am familiar with the ways they can be used as weapons against individuals and larger groups as a trans and autistic person, as well as how they can be helpful - but hopefully the stuff about acting to do political things is useful to someone.
Actually doing something rather than just watching things get worse is helpful for me personally at least ^.^
If I was your therapist, while I couldn’t change the world for you, I could certainly help you change how you’re thinking about all of this political shit to reduce your stress and distress. Most of us have political misgivings, but only some of us have those misgivings create serious problems in our lives. I’m obviously sympathetic to—for example—women who can’t get abortions in their state, but therapy is about coping with reality, not changing reality in ways that correspond to wishful thinking.
I think the issue being remarked on is while yes therapy helps one better manage and attempt to do everything within an individual’s power to react to something (include minimizing contact) there are enough stressors beyond people’s individual locus of control that no matter how personally resilient one becomes misery is still a natural outcome. Therapy attempts to address underlying causes… But ultimately it still places the burden of fortitude on the person. If the situation merits more fortitude than person is capable of even at their best then the solution lies beyond that individual’s training to respond to it and must be addressed at the source. Hence the phrase “Treats symptoms, not the cause” is catch-phrasy and not by all means technically correct, but encapsulates this frustration at having to constantly be the one expected to exert constant personal effort to be okay while the source problems, which are often cultural/social in nature, are treated as immovable constants and continue being a source of inhumane conditions.
Ok but therapy doesn’t have to be a “crisis of the week” situation. A person and their therapist should be working together toward a set of goals that aim to address their needs (e.g. getting enough self-esteem, confidence, new perspectives, etc. to treat the cause (e.g. quit abusive job, leave a partner, make boundaries with crazy family, etc…). Good therapists identify when therapy is drifting outside of effective modalities and guide the sessions back to the overall goals.
Signed, a person who is in “crisis of the week” therapy but is also terrible at confrontation and is working toward bringing it up.
How does he even do it? It’s like he’s on a zealous crusade to embarrass himself. I keep thinking “he can’t look any more foolish and shitty” and he fuckin KEEPS proving me wrong. It’s almost impressive at this point. He stays setting new PR for negative PR.
Imagine if you opened a restaurant, and I went around lying to everyone that you spit in the food. As a result, your restaurant loses business. Shouldn’t you have legal recourse to prevent me from spreading such lies about your business, and to recoup the losses you incurred?
I don’t mean to suggest that Musk has a valid case under the law, only to point out that the law in question is actually quite reasonable and necessary.
Whether the restaurant remains profitable is beside the point. If you can demonstrate that even one customer chose not to visit your restaurant as a result of my lies then I could be liable for defamation.
Suppose you were a business making, say, voting machines. It's a good business -- there are a lot of elections, they have to be tabulated, and you have a way of making that tabulation easier to do. You're not going to be Google or Microsoft, but you're in a comfortable niche.
Then comes a bunch of dumbfuck conspiracy theorists who accuse you of rigging the vote against their favored candidate. You're not happy about this, but this is just a bunch of nutjobs. To some extent, what can you do? Then this major news organization takes up what those conspiracy theorists are saying, and they're doing this to enrich themselves by putting out news that these dumbfucks like to hear. This amplification is damaging to your business (because it's costly to defend yourself and you're losing business anyway), and you can prove that this major news organization is doing this on purpose, for their own profit.
You sue that major news organization. Discovery is a delight, because these people really did know that there was no evidence for any of these conspiracy theories, but they kept repeating them over and over again, damaging your business.
Does this sound familiar? That's why we have laws so that victims of libel can recover some of those damages.
Now, I'm not saying Musk is justified. Musk can go threatening to sue, etc., and I'm sure ADL lawyers would be delighted to argue before a judge to tell Musk to fuck off, since he really doesn't have grounds to stand on.
Feel free to ignore news you aren’t interested in. The sad reality is that Elon Musk is relevant and his actions have real effects on people. Bury your head in the sand if you like but don’t expect me to join you.
I’m pretty sure that’s how it goes for most wealthy people. It’s all tied up in assets, not liquid cash. Investing your money is always better for growth in the long term.
He’s in the news because he’s become a laughingstock. All news isn’t good news. I certainly don’t think he wants news that continues to convince people that he’s an utter idiot and waste of space.
tying up in assets such as property, land, etc. has real value though. you can sell a huge amount of land without the land losing value because of the sale, but you can’t sell a huge amount of stock without the value collapsing while selling it off.
any exposure is good exposure. investors don’t normally run away just because you earn yourself notoriety, they usually do the opposite - because the market is entirely made of make belief and fairy dust.
He’s so wealthy he could personally go to your neighborhood and “Mansa Musa” your place into inflation. He could just drop $10,000,000 per person to get up and leave whatever square mile surrounding your residence right now.
Assuming avg population density for a city in the US that’s only $2.8billion (~280 ppl/mile in cities). Not even a scratch to his total net worth.
A single person with that much wealth and power doesn’t require any attention to retain it. He’ll keep coming out on top because it’s nearly impossible not to when you reach a large enough number.
he doesn’t actually have his wealth. it’s estimated stock value; which would cascade to nothing the minute he tries to extract it. all he can do is borrow with stock as leverage; which would net him a lot of money sure; but there is no way they would approve billions in a loan unless he is very very specific on the investment goal.
Okay we’re done here. You’re contributing nothing to the conversation and I wasted enough time arguing with fools on reddit, I’m not going to do it here.
Imagine thinking this is still (or ever was) just about twitter, or that if you simply starve the richest fascist on the planet of attention he will just go away.. 🤦♀️
It occurs to me that I’ve never heard of an absolutist that wasn’t a hypocrite in some way. They can excuse white supremacy and Nazis, but they draw the line at either being personally attacked or held accountable.
For context, this all started Thursday when the ADL xeeted that is had a “frank and productive” conversation with X’s CEO. She replied with some warm and fuzzy PR bullshit about working together to improve the platform blah blah blah. But the right wing nutjobs weren’t happy with the implication that X was in anyway cooperating with the ADL and there was immediate backlash. “Ban the ADL” became a trending hashtag, because, according to the racist majority on X, the ADL is the actual hate group and they pressure advertisers who in turn pressure platforms to “ban free speech.” Musk, always quick to undermine the sad sack holding the title “CEO” jumped on that bandwagon and been xeeting about it all weekend, threatening to ban them, generally talking trash, and now threatening to sue.
I almost feel bad for the new “CEO”. It really seems like she’s doing her best to give the impression that Twitter is still a sane company with reasonable business practices, only for Elon to completely disregard her messaging and do the exact opposite.
I would feel bad if it wasn’t obvious that Musk would do this. It is impossible for him to control himself. He can’t help to put his dumbass opinion in the mix, no matter how much it hurts him personally and professionally. It’s the reason he was forced to buy Twitter in the first place.
Drop me in her seat for 7 figures with a nice kick-out clause (no stock, please) and I’ll pretend Xitter is a wholesome, thoughtful, productive corporate citizen, too.
It’s a shitty position to be in so I almost feel bad as well, except literally everyone knew this was going to happen when she joined. But I doubt she thought, “What’s the worst that could happen? I have a bland conversation with the ADL, and Musk spends the weekend retweeting self deacribed antisemites and threatening to ban/sue the ADL?”
She is scheduled to be at the Code Conference hosted by the Verge/Vox at the end of September. I’m really interested in how she answers when asked about being undermined, especially now that the undermining has taken the form of her boss just being an outright antisemite.
they pressure advertisers who in turn pressure platforms to “ban free speech.”
This argument of theirs is so strange. Don’t advertisers too have free speech? Is the right wing arguing that advertisers shouldn’t be allowed to choose to stop advertising with Twitter? What “pressure” can ADL put on them? Does the ADL have legal authority to force advertisers to exit Twitter? No. Is the ADL holding private information about the CEOs of advertisers and extorting the advertisers to leave? Not likely.
Is the ADL communicating a position that the majority of the advertiser’s customers find the racist, fascist, and misogynistic content now omnipresent on Twitter distasteful, and therefore harmful to the advertisers’ brands and with negative impacts to future sales? Likely yes, but those statements are themselves free speech on the part of the ADL.
What the right wing seems to be arguing is that the definition of free speech should be the right to say whatever racist, fascist, and misogynistic comments they like without anyone making choices of their own to dissociate with the right wing. That’s not free speech that’s…fascism!
Perhaps ironically it is the ADLs free speech that allows them to show advertisers what is posted on elons website. Further irony can be found in the fact that a screenshot of elsons website showing bigoted posts is an example of fact and not of feelings. Moreover: crying about your lost ad revenue is feelings and blaming the ADL for it is not facts.
It’s never ok to hurt somebody’s business just because you disagree with them giving free speech to everybody. The ADL should pay Elon for the damage they did to his business
No, that’s not free speech. Free speech is supposed to be for protecting businesses, not for hurting them. If you hurt somebody’s business, you gotta pay for that. Freedom isn’t free.
I remember around 2020, a lot of freethinkers began spouting something about how Twitter is “a platform not a publisher” and therefore users are entitled to treat the website like a public meeting place and protected by first amendment rights, etc.
It was basically a Soverign Citizen argument about how Section 230 means websites don’t have the authority to moderate content at all, and it died down after Trump stopped preaching it after he launched Truth
I remember around 2020, a lot of freethinkers began spouting something about how Twitter is “a platform not a publisher” and therefore users are entitled to treat the website like a public meeting place and protected by first amendment rights, etc.
I think you’re taking that quote of mine with an unintended meaning. I didn’t mean to suggest advertisers have right to post what they want, rather they have the choice to NOT post if they don’t want to. The right-wing argument appears to suggest that advertisers should be powerless to choose or not choose to advertise. Suggesting they are wheat to be harvested. A resource owned by the company they are purchasing advertising from; its a bizarre notion.
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