Ed Hagen recently wrote a paper outlining his objections to the classification of major depression as a “brain disorder,” on the grounds that, in sum: the diagnosis is made to distinguish it from other conditions and not from “normal” persons, symptoms of what is called depression tend to remit within weeks or months, and occur at points […]
Category: AltLeft
Ethnocentrism, or How I Learned to Stop Caring and Abandon Eternally Unreciprocated Altruism
Like many or perhaps most people with a verbally slanted intelligence profile, I used to invest a lot of energy into heady academic philosophy, especially ethics. The distant vision of a cognitively post-human species and a suffering-free world governed by utilitarian moral codes probably stimulated my endogenous opioid system. In retrospect, it seems to have […]
The Brick Wall of Washing Machines
People probably make too much fuss about defining biological sex in terms of its organic components. The term “chromosomes” gets thrown about, maybe because it is commonly used in basic biology education and is consequently a bit more accessible than “gametes,” although gametes are in fact the heart of the matter. Several different chromosomal combinations […]
On Agency and Accountability
Is it morally permissible for a 14-year-old to be enlisted in the military under any circumstance? The impulse this question elicits is one of disgust, founded on a historically and geographically local set of assumptions about moral agency and its relationship to age. The “true” existence of agency itself is contestable if taken to mean […]
Pinksheet Yang
A couple of months ago, when an avalanche of Yang memes seemed to appear out of nowhere, Hunter Wallace pointed out (his youtube channel has been deleted so I can’t link to it) that this wasn’t organic, and that Yang was clearly getting a “boost” from somewhere. Wallace was certainly correct about that. It was […]
A Brief Look at “Incel” Hysteria
Individuals of the libertine persuasion, those who take delight in the kind of bland sex-positive advocacy for which there are now countless figureheads on the internet, have suggested to me many times that the availability of internet pornography is behind recent falls in sexual violence, beginning roughly in the early 90s. I did not think […]
A World of Trauma – Civilizational Psychosadomasochism and Emptiness
According to Google’s vast textual corpora, there was nary an instance of the term “trauma,” or its distinctly psychiatric derivative “traumatized,” in written English prior to the 1880s. The first usage of “trauma” is documented in the 1690s, at which point it referred to physical wounding only. Its “psychic wound” sense did not pick up […]
Emily Ratajkowski’s Modest Proposal
In response to Alabama’s recent, controversial, abortion legislation, model and former Blurred Lines music video star, Emily Ratajkowski, posed nude on Instagram, bemoaning how the bill would “perpetuate the industrial prison complex by preventing women of low economic opportunity the right to choose to not reproduce,” and further how: “the states trying to ban abortion […]
The Chavs Are Not Listening
Many self-identified antinatalists adhere to some form of negative utilitarianism and are convinced that their not having children will reduce the net suffering of the world. Let us set aside the thorny question of whether beliefs have non-trivial causal efficacy independent of genes – which I doubt (<< skip to table 3). Who, prima facie, […]
Diseases, Disorders and Illnesses, Oh My
This will serve as an addendum of sorts to my article, The Harmless Psychopaths. Medicine as a science is a modern phenomenon. It was not all that long ago that going to a doctor was more likely to hurt than help, a fact which persisted, some think, until as late as the 1930s. Medical researchers […]