Me: Sorry, but I’m never going to visit your family in Tasmania. The whole place sounds horrifying.

K: No it doesn’t! Why would you say that?

Me: Well, between your stories about venomous snakes killing your dog, and bats flying into your bed while you were sleeping, and the shrieks of Tasmanian Devils keeping you awake all night as a kid -

K: No, that part is better now. The Tasmanian Devils were all killed by a weird contagious form of facial cancer.

Me: YOU’RE NOT HELPING YOUR CASE.

Friend: Sometimes cuddling can be scary.

Me: What do you mean?

Friend: I stop wanting to move and I stop thinking so much about things, and then I get this heavy feeling all over. I worry that I might be dying or something.

Me: Wait…do you just mean that you feel relaxed?

Friend: I guess that could be it.

Me: Well, at least for you it’s a self-limiting problem.

Me: Should I drive or do you want to drive?

Friend: I don’t think I’m a very good driver

Me: What do you mean?

Friend: Like, sometimes I’ll just go blank and forget which one is the brake and which one is the accelerator and have to derive it from first principles.

Me: You mean, like, cogito ergo sum?

Friend: Maybe second principles.

Me: How do you derive the location of the brake from second principles?

Friend: I don’t know, at that point I crashed.

Me: Okay, I’m driving.

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.

Me: And the ruler during this period was Antigonus Monopthalmus.  Can you translate ‘Monopthalmus’?

@worldlypositions: Hmmmm. One…head?

Me: You think he was called Antigonus The One-Headed?

@worldlypositions​: Sure!

Me: That’s not a very imposing epithet.

@worldlypositions​: Sure it is! If you called yourself ‘Antigonus The Two-Headed’, it would be scary, but not too scary, because there’s only one two-headed guy. But if you call yourself Antigonus The One-Headed, it suggests everyone else in your country must have more than one head, which is even scarier.

Elissa: That church over there, the one that’s kind of falling apart? It’s always bothered me.

Me: Why?

Elissa: It’s called “The Church By Jesus Christ”. And Jesus was a carpenter, so I think linking him to that kind of shoddy work is kind of insulting.

Me: What kind of a name is “The Church By Jesus Christ”? Is it supposed to be, like, next to him or something?

Elissa: I think it’s supposed to be started by him, or inspired by him.

Me: Seems a little implausible. I mean, Catholicism, maybe. Greek Orthodoxy, maybe. But a random Protestant church in Ohio?

Elissa: I mean, technically if Jesus is God, then everything is “by Jesus.”

Me: “The Holocaust By Jesus Christ”?

Elissa: I mean, technically, yes.

Me: I don’t think the people who made that church would endorse that Jesus caused the Holocaust.

Elissa: It’s not that he caused it. Just that he deliberately gave humans free will, knowing that it would happen. And that church is the same way.

Me: “The Church That Jesus Christ Failed To Prevent.“

K: I was trying that FaceApp thing earlier today with photos of everyone we know. It looks pretty good. Except for some reason when I try to do the “hot” filter on you, it replaces you with a totally different-looking person.

Me: Ha ha, very funny.

K: No, I’m serious. (she shows me, and this turns out to be 100% true)

K: “I remember when I was young I asked my mom if I was adopted, because I was nothing like the rest of my family. See, they were all pink squishy fleshy beings, and I was a consciousness of pure light and reason. She said ‘Your father used to say that kind of thing too.’“

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.