Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
Yeah, sure, some people really do have something. He addresses that about two minutes in…
Boy, he’s got some BP going on there. And not without reason. A little bit further on, he gets right to the heart of it. If you want to be given credit for trying harder than you really are, the bullshit mental disorders are where you go. They’re available for anybody who’s closed their minds to the possibility of suckage. Can’t admit they suck as parents, or that the kid sucks, or that the kid isn’t trying, or is just plain lazy. People who swear up and down that they have these, or that their kids have these, simply won’t consider possibilities like those. Which has always struck me as weird and bizarre: Everything is wonderful, or at least, adequate? What an amazing world. What color is the sky inside that snow globe?
In the real world, lots of things suck. Not necessarily parents or kids. Sometimes, teachers:
And the way we find out about these things is through sucky grades. They can’t all be A-plus. If they were then it would be pointless to evaluate it.
And that, right there, is the problem. The phony cases of ADD and Aspergers merely represent a stage in a long pattern of decline, during which time we’re ridding ourselves of standards. Where we are now, we feel obliged to continue to put out report cards and to read them, but several among us have lost the will to look at substandard grades and say “Something needs to change here.” That requires confrontation. A lot of people would like to avoid that.
Simply put, in the times in which we live, we have softened up to the point where anyone who says “Something needs to change here” is a meanie-cow and a bad person. Like a grain of salt in the eyeball, the thing to do is to wash it out as fast as possible and go back to feeling comfortable.
With a bullshit mental disorder, you can do all the pretending you want. Your kid is a genius, you’re a wonderful parent, the kid is trying super-duper hard, but something’s wrong with his brain and that’s why he’s failing. No need to improve or change anything. Just listen to the experts, believe them uncritically, and accept all your best-wishes and notes of sympathy from your Facebook friends, after you put up a post saying your son has an ASD. Bask in the glow, fix nothing, the perfect formula.
Next stage after that is to keep putting out grades, but if any teacher puts out a B-plus or lower for any reason whatsoever, you complain and get his ass fired.
Next stage after that is to stop reading the grades, then they stop putting them out. Even then, they won’t stop with the exploding statistics of questionable mental disorders, because now there’s money attached to it.
I’ve been arguing with people about this for nearly two decades now, and it always amazes me how they refuse to acknowledge the recent instability of this thing they call “science.” They act like it’s been a perfectly consistent exercise since the time of Socrates. That just completely baffles me. I would prefer to believe, charitably, that they’re ignorant and don’t know of all the fits & false starts & hairpin turns the orthodoxy has been taking. But if that’s the case, their ignorance looms large and they need to cork it, rather than coming up with innovative new ways to monopolize the soapbox and marginalize everyone who questions them about it.
Theirs is a process of achieving complete “certainty” about the matter, if only at a cosmetic level, by achieving a complete consensus. And they do that, by ejecting from the discussion anyone who doesn’t go along. That is the formula consistently found in lots of historical failure, phony certainty churned up by way of phony consensus. There should be arguing about this, and disagreement about this, and contention. And challenges, questions and rebuttals. It should be going on all the time, and everywhere. Hundreds of thousands of kids have these disorders now, and a generation ago very few of them did. We don’t have any business being in complete agreement about anything, except maybe that “science” is in danger of being held hostage by pharmaceutical profiteering. Apart from that, everything should be on the table and opened up for discussion.
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Another side of this issue is that the phoney cases mean that people that do have real issues are actually further marginalized because a significant percentage of the population does not believe they really have a problem or need help.
- Fai.Mao | 09/21/2014 @ 17:31Well, SOME folks might be made to feel uncomfortable with a full blown diagnosis of
- CaptDMO | 09/21/2014 @ 18:16“Just doesn’t test well…”, fortunately, Psychiatry’s “Doesn’t test well…” younger sibling, psychology, has
developed a new term to excuse poor performance, without risking surrender of “social reparations” in public/peer esteem.
Just add a hyphenated “borderline” in front of a “newly discovered” distant cousin of a recently renamed “affliction” found in APA DSM-(is it 5 now?).
Of course, once the duration of evaluation, and special privilege “grading” period, is over. All references are to be scrubbed, or reclassified as “personal”.
It’s DSM-V now. The way it categorizes the ASDs is radically different from DSM-IV, which wasn’t entirely respected from all quarters itself. The entire methodology has changed. That’s from a little over a year ago.
They should be studying the mental health of the people who go out and look for these labels.
- mkfreeberg | 09/22/2014 @ 00:38