So I was watching Levity(the 2003 movie) for a theology discussion, and the entire time I couldn’t help but think
‘wow, even unsong is less heavy handed with religious imagery’
TIL: JRR Tolkien’s great granddaughter, Ruth Tolkien, is the only blind person in the UK to be a competitive fencer. She is currently ranked the #186th best fencer in the country.
There’s a court case called Tarasoff where a psychiatrist’s patient killed someone, and they found the psychiatrist liable for failing to warn the victim. The case established a “duty to warn” - psychiatrists need to warn anyone threatened by any of their patients that there’s a guy out there trying to kill them. This makes sense and has basically been universally accepted.
The other day I went to a lecture on so-called “Tarasoff expansions”. The guy giving the lecture basically admitted they made no sense. The principle seems to be that if anyone ever does anything bad, people can sue their psychiatrist and and win.
So for example, suppose you treat a psychotic person in the hospital, and after they’re better, you let them out. There are no signs of any problems and they are exactly like all your other successfully-recovered psychotic patients. Then a few months or years later they stop taking their medicine, snap, and attack someone. Can the victim sue you? You bet they can. Can they win? If the judge and jury really want someone to blame, absolutely. The specific charge will be that you failed in your “duty to warn”. To warn who, exactly? Uh, the general public. About what? Uh, that somebody might become a threat a few years down the line.
None of these cases specify what it means to warn the general public. Also, you can’t actually tell the general public about any specific patients of yours, or you could be sued for violating confidentiality. Also also, you have only the faintest idea which of your patients might become violent in the long-term future.
(also, it doesn’t have to be violence. One person got successfully sued under a Tarasoff expansion case because their patient drove under the influence and killed someone in a car crash)
One of my colleagues suggested some kind of non-specific warning. We came up with the idea of hiring one of those skywriter planes to write the message “PSYCHOTIC PEOPLE MIGHT BE TRYING TO KILL YOU” in the air above major cities. Sounds like this can’t possibly go wrong.
I wish I could just start appointments by asking “So, do you prefer mildly condescending platitudes, or medications with a bunch of side effects?”, and then people could just tell me, and I wouldn’t have to guess, and they couldn’t get angry if I gave them the one they wanted.
Public service announcement: if you have a kid with some kind of horrifying predatory criminal, and now your kid is a horrifying predatory criminal, and you have no idea how this happened because the father left before he was even born and your new husband is a great guy and you’ve both always done your best to raise your kid well and give him a good home, your kid’s psychiatrist will listen empathetically to your story, and then empathetically give you a copy of The Nurture Assumption.
…maybe not actually. But it will definitely be on his mind. And maybe it would get people to stop having so many kids with horrifying predatory criminals. Seriously, I’m doing inpatient child psychiatry now and I get multiple cases like this every day.
It’s horrible to call anything about a terrorist attack “funny”, but it’s definitely something that the ringleader of last week’s terrorist attack in London was featured in a documentary about jihadists living in Britain. Kind of makes it harder to pull the “nobody could have predicted this” card.
But I sympathize with the British police in this one. Every so often some mentally ill person commits a violent crime, and the news focuses on how their psychiatrist had written in their notes that they were potentially violent, likely to commit crimes, et cetera. And people ask “everyone knew this could happen; why didn’t anybody do anything?”
And the answer is: being the sort of person who seems likely to commit a crime isn’t illegal.
I assume that if someone reports a potential terrorist to the British police, they tap their phones and keep a watch on them and so on. But (especially if the potential terrorist is a citizen) I’m not sure what else they can do without sacrificing the principle of “innocent until proven guilty”. Freedom of speech isn’t just about being able to say politically incorrect things at colleges, it also means you can’t lock up a Muslim for saying “Those ISIS people seem to have some bright ideas” on national TV.
I wonder if someone in intelligence services has put together a list of people they would like to be able to lock up forever if we ever became a police state. And I wonder if anyone has ever looked back on the list a couple years later to see how many of those people actually ever caused any problems. My guess is that even a really good intelligence officer would have a lot of trouble coming up with a list like that where fewer than 99% of the entries were false positives. And that means that even knowing that some recent suspect was on a list like that doesn’t mean anything necessarily went wrong.
On third thought, everyone else is right and I am wrong. The Dragon Army group house is a very bad idea, enough so that it’s okay to be forceful in encouraging Duncan to modify it or other people not to join it. This is true even if the required modifications are so hard that they end up sinking the project.
I’m not sure what my point was except that it’s wrong to make fun of people who are trying to do interesting things with their hearts in the right place, and that if despite all the light social pressure we can muster people still want to join it they should be legally allowed to do so. I still think these are true, though more weakly.
K and I learned how to shoot guns today. It was interesting. And by interesting, I mean “loud”.
There was some helpful safety training beforehand. But it missed the most important part, which is that the gun will eject the spent bullet casing in a random direction. Somehow I managed to live in a “gun culture” and watch a bunch of action movies without realizing this was a thing. When you’re firing a gun for the first time and really nervous, and a bullet-shaped thing shoots out of the back of the gun and hits spectators in the face, this is NOT a minor point that you can forget to warn people about, even if it turns out to be nothing and everybody laughs that you were so worried about it.
Otherwise everything went okay. I think if I ever have to write a story involving guns, I can use words like “magazine” without sounding ridiculous to people who know what they’re talking about. I think the friend who brought me was expecting that this was going to be some sort of revelatory experience where I realized that Guns Are Your Friends and so gun control was a vile lie, but I feel like if guns were *really* my friends then the person who held one at a slightly different angle than everyone else would not have had a big security guy run up to him and freak out and yell at him until he changed the angle back.
Also, Ada Palmer (author of Too Like The Lightning) was at the shooting range and I got to get a picture with her!
K: Wait, I thought Charlemagne was the Pope.
Me: Huh, no, Charlemagne was the Holy Roman Emperor. The Pope was the Pope.
K: Yeah, but I heard they were in cahoots, which I figured doesn’t really happen in this world unless you’re the same person.
This is a travel blog and I have OCD, so I wanted to start it at the start of the travel, but I am sufficiently confused about how many layers of travel I am undergoing that I just went for my birth. But I also don’t like to skip huge pieces of time, especially whole layers of traveling. So to give you an idea and get to recent times quickly, a non-exhaustive selection of things that happened in the intervening time.
After being born half way through a world trip, I took half of a world trip with my parents, to Tasmania. I am told some minor royalty tried to buy me in Europe, but failed.
(A very hazy mural of me with my brother on the front of a Chinese restaurant in Tasmania from Google Maps. I’m not totally sure why, though the building was an ice cream shop belonging to my family at the time it was muraled.)
My mother bought a restaurant in a ghost town. I lived in a movie prop ‘house’, there were bats in my bunk bed, I missed so much school that I thought for years that ‘roll call’ was a thing from fiction or in America (I now think it actually happened every morning in my classroom). I abruptly ceased coping with life for several years after being read a horrifying book at school. I was so scared of e.g. the deadly snakes that I would use something like Bayes Theorem to work out e.g. how likely I was to die if there was blood on my leg. A snake killed my dog, and my other dog chased a babysitter with a live snake in its mouth, so the inside view on snake safety genuinely looked bad.
(My childhood home apparently featured in this movie. I have not got around to watching it. I am not sure if it is the one in the picture.)
We moved to town and I looked after my three younger brothers in a house that was about as tidy as you would expect if it were inhabited by three boys in a state of constant war brought up and accompanied by their older sister who also had little actual upbringing to speak of, and a rapidly developing appreciation for ‘tragedy of the commons’. I decided I should give all of my money to the very poor overseas forever, minus anything really necessary to live. I insisted on cycling or walking everywhere, and was very confused about why everyone else in the world continued driving, given that they seemed to fairly universally agree that it was bad.
A memorial to my grandfather on the waterfront in Devonport, for providing the world with a lot of opiates. Picture from here.
At school I accidentally joined a wannabe-wiccan-cult, intentionally joined anti-forestry activism, was surprisingly good at academic contests once I went to school enough to know that e.g. decimal points are a common convention, and not a code that you are meant to logically deduce the meaning of from context as part of the problem. I can’t remember whether or not I used to dress in a Viking helmet and flowery blue cape on days that were not assigned for that. I moved to a tent in my family’s (fenced) front garden, and then left home.
(Tasmania is pretty, and relatively safe from global catastrophic risks, but it is not my favorite place to live. Photo by JJ Harrison.)
(A six foot man on one of the biggest trees to be felled in the Styx Valley. I used to know a lot of arguments and statistics about why this shouldn’t happen.)
I went to university at ANU in Canberra. I figured I would henceforth know an entirely new set of people, so I changed my name to Katja and cut off my hair and decided to make a go of being gregarious. I hadn’t really tried talking to people at school before, so it was not super smooth, but to my delight I relatively quickly mastered causing other people to hang out in my room.
(At university I definitely wore a viking helmet when it wasn’t required—here with my friend Victoria—but that sort of thing is basically required at university. I also wore nothing but shoes and rode my bike up and down the center of campus, which was probably not required at all, especially since I was sober and alone. It felt required though, because on the one hand it seemed like the kind of thing you just can’t do, yet on the other hand I couldn’t see any good causal reason that it would be that bad, so I thought I should really do it and find out what happens if you do things that you just can’t do. What happens is that you do them, like usual things.)
I went to America on holiday, then on a really long holiday, then as a student in Pittsburgh, then as a temporary worker. While studying in Pittsburgh, I went to Berkeley on holiday and then on more holidays and more holidays and took leave from my PhD program and haven’t been back or talked to my advisor about whether I will in a while, so it seems safe to say that I moved to Berkeley at some point. Then while living in Berkeley I visited S near Detroit for a week, and then a longer week, and then stopped buying return tickets, and got around to going home less and less often.. until now I think I just went on a holiday to Berkeley. And I am probably about to move there. Moving to Berkeley was amazing the first time, so I hope if I move there twice without moving away my life will be really very good.
(According to Wikipedia, the city of Westland where I am was so named in order to avoid a nearby city annexing this shopping mall, which is called Westland for some reason. Photo by PeRshGo.)
Perhaps it belonged to the honest man. He wasn’t making a grand philosophical statement, he was just trying to return the lamp he borrowed all those years ago.
I understand now that you’ve rediscovered the 13th amendment everything looks like a nail, but murder isn’t a status crime like vagrancy, some pretext to reincarnate slavery as convict leasing. We were always going to punish murder (traditionally, by hanging).
And against the complaint that even fixed-term sentences don’t come with an exit plan these days, “ease out your last few years doing off-campus catering around the most powerful people in the state” doesn’t strike me as rank barbarity tbh