Open Thread for Personal Stuff: Feb 2016 Barrel of Fun Edition

@Hambeast, Social Justice Beastie

Thank you, I am hoping for the best. Just crossing my fingers. Very sorry about your dad BTW.

@EJ

You’re welcome. 🙂

Thank you, Everyone, for the encouragement. I tend to get impatiemt when I am ill or recovering and want to be better RIGHT NOW. I will be patient and give it six weeks. Thanks again for the support.

Also, if you do start taking medication, the prescribing psychiatrist should check up on you after about a month for side effects and to check if it’s working. Be advised that medication can take a while to build up, so you won’t necessarily see any improvement at first. If a given medication doesn’t work, you can try a new one relatively quickly.

I have also used melatonin; it’s only kind of effective but on the other hand it’s pretty free of drawbacks.

Hello!
This is my first time in one of the open threads. I was asked about a project that I have been thinking about off and on for years now in this thread (pages 9-10, comments dissecting a troll (it goes up to 16) and talking about this proposal), a website devoted to the details and dynamics of social conflict. No one seemed to have an objection to my bringing up the topic when I asked about it so I wrote this up for this post in order to get some opinions, information and suggestions. I guess a little background might help first.

I’m a 38-year old cellular and molecular biologist who has spent at least two decades arguing with lots of anti-science people like creationists as a hobby, because fighting with words is enjoyable to me the way that fighting professionally might be to other people. Similarly to someone who is a professional martial artist I don’t just go fighting because I want to though. I don’t like hurting people for fun. I’ve had a lot of experience thinking about how to fight, when to fight, why to fight, who to fight for, what fighting does and more. Who I am is intimately bound up in that.

I’m a white male with a family tree that includes mostly military and fundamentalist/conservative/authoritarian religious types. If there is anything that can be inherited with respect to physical and social conflict, I have it. My personality is what would be called “masculine”. I ended going down a very different path from most of my family however, not only is there the attempted science career but I am very strongly on the left side of the political spectrum. I’m a semi-active commenter at the FreethoughtBlogs network where I have been a reader and trying to help with a legitimate schism in the atheist/skeptic community. It’s our section of a general conflict that society is having with respect to social justice issues largely centering on race, sex, gender and related politics. I was simultaneously involved in a schism in the Brony community which is a long story but two schisms let me collect a lot of data through experience.

Another thing worth mentioning about myself that is relevant is that I have Tourette’s Syndrome (TS), ADHD and I likely have comorbid OCDs. I was diagnosed with ADHD as a kid, thought I got over it, and was re-diagnosed with it and got TS as a bonus about six years ago. This is relevant not only because of the issue of ablism, but six years of making brain science and my psychology my hobby has taught me a lot about people in general, things we call “mental conditions”, and how the combination of TS/ADHD/OCD actually shapes my personality. I’ve been learning about how there are context specific advantages and enhancements associated with things like TS, ADHD, OCD, autism, depression and even schizophrenia. There are a collection of papers discussing enhanced cognition in TS that I can tie to how I see social conflict in text because of a sensory hypersensitivity (like the one in autism, it is in part connected to language phenomena). In fact, while it’s not a heavily studied hypothesis, I see these conditions as perfectly normal ways that human minds can be shaped. We are in the middle of defining “normal” and in that I believe that I am an example of the human race’s “social conflict monkey” loaded with social OCDs to keep me moral and ethical. Just like you can google articles talking about autism and cognitive benefits you can do the same with TS.

I mention all of that to bring up the fact that I want to create an internet resource on the nature and dynamics of social conflict and others seem interested in such a resource. I have a problem though, I have privilege blinders and NEED the perspectives and input of others in order to do this correctly. My privilege as a cis white male american keyboard warrior scientist from a conservative military authoritarian background does give me benefits, but my best skills only exist because I have made an effort to understand how I can help others from different backgrounds. Because I have the psychology and experience of the “oppressor control group” as I learned the specifics of how this oppression functionally occurred in different marginalized groups I gained conscious awareness of how this social conflict software was shaped. For example many of you have heard of Lewis’s Law, “the comments on any article having to do with feminism justify the need for feminism”. There is a racial correlate in “the comments on any article having to do with racism justify the need for anti-racism”. Those two together yield the observations like “any article challenging group social dominance is likely to attract dominance displays from the dominant group”. I see the world in a strange way.
Some general questions (answer as many as you want, or add your own):
*What do you personally need the most when it comes to social conflicts you experience?
*If you could wave your fingers and give someone a part of your perspective and experience what would it be?
*What would you like to learn about social conflict?
*What would you see as the riskiest parts of this proposal? Do you have any potential fixes? (not necessary, but it would be nice)
*What would you like to be able to expect out of someone who wants to be an ally?
*How do allies screw up the most in your experience?
*Have I screwed up in here anywhere?
I’ll write more down as I think about them. Thanks for reading! I’ll try to chat outside of this, I often find small talk awkward.

Tentative list of topics to cover (these may need re-ordered and renamed).
1) Object and context.
2) Signal and noise.
3) Social conflict ideals and details:
-On the true nature of emotion and associated social bullshit .
-Idealized communication.
-The individual and the group.
-In-groups and out-groups, the “social emotions”.
-Motivation and reasoning.
-Psychological triggers from trauma to “dog-whistles”.

4)Behavior and psychology.
-Operant conditioning.
-Defense mechanisms.
-The psychology of meatspace, text, video and memes.

5)Social conflict tactics:
-Individual and community level phenomena.
-Analogy via the martial art “grappling”.
-Approach/Hold/Withdraw-Fight/Freeze/Flight
-Attack
-Defense
-Deception
-Obfuscation
-Humor and social conflict.
-Political language: Streamlining and simplification.

6) Social hierarchies and social justice.
-Historically dominant and subordinate groups.
-Groups within groups, white/male/masculine as a “control group”.
-Overt and covert phenomena.
-How to be a valuable and effective ally.
-Majority and minority.
-Privilege.
-Power.
-Elevating the marginalized and voiceless.

7) Trolls and troll dynamics.
-Defining a “troll”.
-The different “flavors” of troll.
-Fast dismissal.
-Sustained engagement for training.
-Community level strategies.

(Response to EJ’s comments in a couple of hours)

Brony,

I’m really excited about you project. I would suggest that you consider moving to the the adjacent “non-personal” open thread. The non-personal threads are lower traffic, this week’s especially so, so you could have the feedback on your project grouped together with fewer interruptions.

WordPress mangled the link somehow, I think.

@Orion
Did I misinterpret the the personal/non-personal somehow? This one seemed personal on a lot of measures so I thought it would go best here.

@Orion
OK. If it would be less chaotic and still acceptable I could move it there. I had the impression that the non-personal thread was a bit less intense topic-wise and was not sure if this one would be too much. I get a little mentally chaotic in-the short term in new social spaces so I’m a little hyper-vigilant about stuff like that.

I have a job which often requires me to work alone, in the middle of nowhere (I install and service communications equipment, which is often in the middle of nowhere).

Occasionally, you get people who like to come out to the sites, or ex-employees who didn’t handle termination well. I had a guy at a site today who proceeded to talk forever, and kept assuring me that ‘he wasn’t someone i needed to be concerned about’, which wasn’t as reassuring as he thought it was.

YESSSS I caught Alakazam!

(Sorry about that, all.)

@dhag

Lucky, you beat me. XD I’m taking a break from that fucker to reset the event Mew in ORAS… After waiting 20 years you’d think I’d be happy with anything, but nope, perfect or bust. At least I’m only after 4 IVs, should be easier than the 6 I’ll need when Meloetta rolls around.

… Is there any way for us to share our FCs without posting them here where MRAs can see them?

Hugs to everyone who could use one.

@rugbyyogi
I’ve been following Geneen Roth’s type of intuitive eating for many years. I don’t know if or how her approach differs from that in Intuitive Eating by Tribole and Resch. Roth isn’t a nutritionist. She invented this program to help her deal with her own disordered eating, probably back in the 1970s.

Her program allows you to eat absolutely anything that you want as long as you aren’t allergic to it or have some other condition that wouldn’t allow you to. You have to be mindful of what you really want–something salty or sweet or rich, and so on. And you keep checking in with your body to see if you’re full. Also, you remind yourself that you will be able to eat again once you get hungry again.

I love her program! I’ve found it very helpful and not hard to follow. I usually don’t allow myself to eat junk because I find that it triggers binges. And I can’t have much salt. Also, she doesn’t pay any attention to calories or weight, and I stay mindful of both. But other than that, I follow her program 99 percent of the time. I don’t find it difficult at all.

When I lived in Berkeley years ago, I saw her in the natural foods store. Twice! Once, I was directly behind her in line. I didn’t have the nerve to say a word.

All best wishes for a happy approach to food.

Thanks for the support and advice, all.

@guy, before we work with any given child we read their support plan which includes extensive detail of their health conditions, dietary needs, medication, likes and dislikes, ‘challenging behaviours’ as they are still known in our department and basically best practice for working with them.

I was also kind of venting in a hurry so I didn’t mention that I had done his personal care 1-1 earlier in the day with absolutely no incident – he pulled me to the door of the bathroom, hopped up on the bed and lay there making his usual chirpy noises the whole time. Being new to it, it took me longer than it would take a more experienced staff but he was really patient with me.

Compare that to when the more experienced staff held his wrists above his head and frogmarched him to a bathroom, picked him up and put him on the bed and attempted to change him while holding his wrists and keeping up a running…well, basically diatribe. And he cried and thrashed and was completely miserable.

And the other staff while wrestling him into the seat for lunch, said “you are nothing compared to some people I work with” referring to his attempts to claw at her. Imagine serious venom in the tone.

Later that day I was chatting to that same staff member about one of our other kids, who likes to do this repetitive hand-clapping thing with everyone she meets but has recently been banned from doing it. I voiced my opinion that the clapping serves a need that will still need to be met somehow, and she shot me down with:

“It isn’t a need, she’s just pushing you. There are hundreds of things she can do while she’s here instead of clapping, but she just wants to try it with everyone because she is lazy. Challenging behaviour is just a way of trying to be in control and she just needs to be told to make the effort to do something else. If you let her do it you’ll just see a lot more behaviours from her because she got her way.” Oh, and she said this while the girl’s mother was within earshot.

Liiiiike…the clapping isn’t a hobby and when she used to be allowed to do it, she did a wider range of activities and could tolerate more things. Like keeping her shoes on because it is blindingly obvious that shoes and socks are a sensory problem for her so she takes them off, but if she can do the clapping with someone it allows her to tolerate the shoes which enables her to go on walks. I actually know the girl’s mother because I was on a Floortime course with her months ago and on the course we talked extensively about the clapping thing – the reason it is being removed is that her mum is getting RSI. But we talked about redirecting the need and finding other ways she can get that comfort and connection, and none of that seems to have been implemented. It’s just “no clapping.”

I volunteer with disabled teens and adults elsewhere in the organisation, and the things I have been taught since my volunteer induction just don’t seem to be present in the sort of hard core of supervisors in this department. I had a volunteer meeting on Saturday and some of the things we talked about stood out so starkly against what I hear just across the hall where I do my paid work. I talked to my volunteer bosses about my concerns and got some sound advice, but it’s a tough one.