More comments reposted from elsewhere:
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conuly was talking about her reaction to an article about Trump. My comment is not at all about Trump, and only a little about what Conuly was saying:
Once the interviewer gets to what they're asking for, his answer is as weird and problematic as you say. But if you asked me "your spouse is still asleep, you're in the bathroom shaving and you see yourself in the mirror. What are you thinking?" the first, honest answer would probably be something like "did I get all the hairs on my chin this time?" or "should I wash my hair this morning?" Maybe something about the plans for the rest of the day or longer. Not, "Wow, I'mredbird."
"Do you consider yourself ideal company?" is a whole different question, or two questions. Ideal company for myself, sometimes; ideal company for other people, depends on which other people and when. There are lots of perfectly fine people I wouldn't be great company for, because their hobbies, interests, even obsessions don't overlap with mine. We could get along for an hour, sure, but we'd both have a more interesting afternoon with other people, sometimes even the same other people, the Venn diagrams of what people enjoy and care about being like that.
In a discussion of activism and the tendency to criticize people who are probably on our own side. This was prompted by somethingacelightning said, but is sort of tangential, so I’m not linking:
That's certainly my goal, which is why one of the things I'm calling about for the rest of the month is leaning on the attorney general and county DA to set aside convictions based on tainted drug lab results, even though nobody I know has been convicted on drug charges in this state. And it's why I was marching for trans* youth of color in February: but it seems right and proper to me that most of the organizers and speakers at that rally were trans*, non-white, or both.
With regard to your first paragraph, from my viewpoint it's not about who has a right to say something: it's about listening to the people who know more. So I absolutely have the right to call out racism; what I don't have the right to do is say "but we have equal pay for equal work" to a woman of color who points out that the "we" who are being offered those jobs are almost all white.
Also, if someone who is white, cis, het, monogamous, middle class, and able-bodied decided to put all their energy into fighting global warming, which they do see as affecting themselves and their grandchildren, I'm not going to say "but what about race?" I'm going to be glad they're working on something else useful.
Nor do I criticize my friend who is working on that problem in the small: she doesn't think she can influence Washington or save the oceans, so she has bought some land for herself and her kids and grandchildren to live on, well inland and selected based on the likely growing zones in the next fifty years, so they're less likely to starve.
This is in response to a locked post byrafiwinters wondering whether to trust the medical establishment or our own lived experience, because either choice is risky:
And if we're trusting "modern medicine" or "the medical establishment," where are we getting our information? That's not just that the opinion of the medical establishment changes over time—ideally but not always because they learn more—it's that there isn't always consensus, and the person with the television program or syndicated column may not actually be speaking for "the medical establishment."
So, doctors are human, and suffer many of the same prejudices as non-doctors in the society around them. We trying to make health decisions for ourselves are also human, and subject to cognitive fallacies. Sometimes the best answer is different because we're different people: are you in the five percent who have bad side effects to X medication? The minority who can comfortably digest cow's milk as adults, the small group who have problems even with traces of lactose as an "inactive ingredient" in pills, or neither?
OK, pre-caffeine generalizations (I started typing this just as I started on this mug of tea) aside, what I personally do is that I'm trying to be careful of any really new treatment or intervention. That's both because side effects may be discovered only after something is on the market and used by a larger group of people, and because random chance can make something look better than it is at first: a lot of treatments look better in the first study on 100 people than later when tried on 10,000, or even in the fifth consecutive hundred-person study. (Or worse, but when that happens the study, and drug, probably get filed in a drawer somewhere.)
That's partly because I can afford to do that: I'm not deciding what to do about a condition that's likely to kill me quickly if untreated. It's also the result, likely an overreaction, of the last time I said "sure, let's try that" to a medication, and was left with an annoying side effect even years after stopping the medication (though at a lower level than during the couple of months I was taking the thing).
N.B.: Modern medicine, in the form of keyhole surgery, literally saved my life. But "your gall bladder needs to come out," to a patient who asked a friend to drive her to the E.R. because of pain, is less likely to involve a lot of those prejudices and errors. The shorthand for "most likely to have gall bladder problems" is "fat, fair, female, fortyish," all of which I fit at the time, which makes me suspect that's a set of symptoms for which weight and gender would be less likely to have a woman's symptoms pooh-poohed.
Comment to a locked post by electricant:
It sounds a little as though what you're thinking/looking for here is in the same direction as one of the reasons other people want content warnings, and why I once turned off the television when they said a program might not be suitable for more sensitive viewers.
I absolutely want stories with queer characters, both ones where that parses similarly to our world and sf or fantasy where it's just a given that a lot of the characters are LGBT and/or that many people are poly. But I may not be up for reading works that are realistic about the ways it was difficult to be queer in the past, or the sometimes different ways it's difficult in some places today.
Escapism is a valid thing, and one of the things people read for. I don't remember which famous fantasy author pointed out that the people who most oppose escape are the jailers and prison guards.
This was prompted by a travel post bysteepholm:
I am reminded of a Seattle-Boston flight, on which I had the window seat and, having chatted with the woman next to me, told her to lean over me to look out the window at the view, including Mount Rainier: she had been in town for a week or so and not seen the sometimes-elusive mountain.
I am glad to be back in the landscape I grew up in, but sometimes I miss the mountains: Rainier standing above the horizon, a more northerly part of the Cascades to my east, and the Olympics in the west on clear days.
conuly was talking about her reaction to an article about Trump. My comment is not at all about Trump, and only a little about what Conuly was saying:Once the interviewer gets to what they're asking for, his answer is as weird and problematic as you say. But if you asked me "your spouse is still asleep, you're in the bathroom shaving and you see yourself in the mirror. What are you thinking?" the first, honest answer would probably be something like "did I get all the hairs on my chin this time?" or "should I wash my hair this morning?" Maybe something about the plans for the rest of the day or longer. Not, "Wow, I'm
redbird." "Do you consider yourself ideal company?" is a whole different question, or two questions. Ideal company for myself, sometimes; ideal company for other people, depends on which other people and when. There are lots of perfectly fine people I wouldn't be great company for, because their hobbies, interests, even obsessions don't overlap with mine. We could get along for an hour, sure, but we'd both have a more interesting afternoon with other people, sometimes even the same other people, the Venn diagrams of what people enjoy and care about being like that.
In a discussion of activism and the tendency to criticize people who are probably on our own side. This was prompted by something
acelightning said, but is sort of tangential, so I’m not linking:That's certainly my goal, which is why one of the things I'm calling about for the rest of the month is leaning on the attorney general and county DA to set aside convictions based on tainted drug lab results, even though nobody I know has been convicted on drug charges in this state. And it's why I was marching for trans* youth of color in February: but it seems right and proper to me that most of the organizers and speakers at that rally were trans*, non-white, or both.
With regard to your first paragraph, from my viewpoint it's not about who has a right to say something: it's about listening to the people who know more. So I absolutely have the right to call out racism; what I don't have the right to do is say "but we have equal pay for equal work" to a woman of color who points out that the "we" who are being offered those jobs are almost all white.
Also, if someone who is white, cis, het, monogamous, middle class, and able-bodied decided to put all their energy into fighting global warming, which they do see as affecting themselves and their grandchildren, I'm not going to say "but what about race?" I'm going to be glad they're working on something else useful.
Nor do I criticize my friend who is working on that problem in the small: she doesn't think she can influence Washington or save the oceans, so she has bought some land for herself and her kids and grandchildren to live on, well inland and selected based on the likely growing zones in the next fifty years, so they're less likely to starve.
This is in response to a locked post by
rafiwinters wondering whether to trust the medical establishment or our own lived experience, because either choice is risky: And if we're trusting "modern medicine" or "the medical establishment," where are we getting our information? That's not just that the opinion of the medical establishment changes over time—ideally but not always because they learn more—it's that there isn't always consensus, and the person with the television program or syndicated column may not actually be speaking for "the medical establishment."
So, doctors are human, and suffer many of the same prejudices as non-doctors in the society around them. We trying to make health decisions for ourselves are also human, and subject to cognitive fallacies. Sometimes the best answer is different because we're different people: are you in the five percent who have bad side effects to X medication? The minority who can comfortably digest cow's milk as adults, the small group who have problems even with traces of lactose as an "inactive ingredient" in pills, or neither?
OK, pre-caffeine generalizations (I started typing this just as I started on this mug of tea) aside, what I personally do is that I'm trying to be careful of any really new treatment or intervention. That's both because side effects may be discovered only after something is on the market and used by a larger group of people, and because random chance can make something look better than it is at first: a lot of treatments look better in the first study on 100 people than later when tried on 10,000, or even in the fifth consecutive hundred-person study. (Or worse, but when that happens the study, and drug, probably get filed in a drawer somewhere.)
That's partly because I can afford to do that: I'm not deciding what to do about a condition that's likely to kill me quickly if untreated. It's also the result, likely an overreaction, of the last time I said "sure, let's try that" to a medication, and was left with an annoying side effect even years after stopping the medication (though at a lower level than during the couple of months I was taking the thing).
N.B.: Modern medicine, in the form of keyhole surgery, literally saved my life. But "your gall bladder needs to come out," to a patient who asked a friend to drive her to the E.R. because of pain, is less likely to involve a lot of those prejudices and errors. The shorthand for "most likely to have gall bladder problems" is "fat, fair, female, fortyish," all of which I fit at the time, which makes me suspect that's a set of symptoms for which weight and gender would be less likely to have a woman's symptoms pooh-poohed.
Comment to a locked post by electricant:
It sounds a little as though what you're thinking/looking for here is in the same direction as one of the reasons other people want content warnings, and why I once turned off the television when they said a program might not be suitable for more sensitive viewers.
I absolutely want stories with queer characters, both ones where that parses similarly to our world and sf or fantasy where it's just a given that a lot of the characters are LGBT and/or that many people are poly. But I may not be up for reading works that are realistic about the ways it was difficult to be queer in the past, or the sometimes different ways it's difficult in some places today.
Escapism is a valid thing, and one of the things people read for. I don't remember which famous fantasy author pointed out that the people who most oppose escape are the jailers and prison guards.
This was prompted by a travel post by
steepholm:I am reminded of a Seattle-Boston flight, on which I had the window seat and, having chatted with the woman next to me, told her to lean over me to look out the window at the view, including Mount Rainier: she had been in town for a week or so and not seen the sometimes-elusive mountain.
I am glad to be back in the landscape I grew up in, but sometimes I miss the mountains: Rainier standing above the horizon, a more northerly part of the Cascades to my east, and the Olympics in the west on clear days.
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