tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10557263.post7901243517041629795..comments2024-01-26T10:20:37.836+00:00Comments on Diary of a Goldfish: When is a debate not a debate?The Goldfishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15213378454070776331noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10557263.post-28967972665384349322012-10-11T00:52:51.969+01:002012-10-11T00:52:51.969+01:00I think you got things spot on with your original ...I think you got things spot on with your original post here. When I disagree with someone, but they're willing to have a reasonable debate about it, I try not to call them insulting names and take their point of view seriously. (Though, yes, I do recognise the right of marginalised groups to use offensive language when they want to.) But if someone won't agree on what I consider pretty fundamental points of consensus - or if it becomes obvious they're just a troll - then I'm not going to debate with them. <br /><br />On the specific subject of gay marriage, I support it myself, but accept that there are some reasonable arguments against it held by decent people. (There are even a small number of gay people who oppose gay marriage, though clearly the vast majority support it.) For that reason, I agree that Nick Clegg's 'bigot' comments were wrong - not all opponents of gay marriage are bigots, unless you define 'bigot' extremely broadly. Those comments were not helpful to his side of the debate, since it just dismisses the other side's arguments as prejudiced and gives up any hope of winning them over. Essentially, they treated the issue as a moral war rather than a debate - which is doubtless how some on both sides see it, but there's enough nuance and complexity to the issue that we don't have to agree with them.<br /><br />(I guess what this all comes down to is: some people talking about an issue are fighting a war, and others are having a debate, and it's worth recognising the difference. And choosing which issues you're prepared to debate over, and which you aren't.)Alasdairhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07493999531504071944noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10557263.post-54147102672299390972012-09-28T10:55:36.636+01:002012-09-28T10:55:36.636+01:00Hi Librarian Mobile, thanks for your comment.
I s...Hi Librarian Mobile, thanks for your comment.<br /><br />I sympathise - such a diagnosis must suck and I agree, the label is more about gatekeeping that medicine or psychology. <br /><br />This is quite harrowing stuff, but this young lady got a different diagnosis after many years of the somatization one, during which she was, among other things, criticised by doctors for <i>having disabled friends</i>! Here: <a href="http://new-kinda-freak.livejournal.com/52711.html" rel="nofollow">Enough.</a><br /><br />Honestly, if somatization is a valid diagnosis (and it may be), the second criteria after unexplained physical symptoms should be that there is evidence of severe psychological distress. In other mental illnesses which manifest in physical symptoms like pain, that only tends to happen when someone is very ill - severely depressed or anxious or during psychosis. And the symptoms are still real, whatever their cause.<br /><br />The idea that the absence of a physical explanation plus a patient who isn't a picture of calm in their suffering means not only a mental illness, but one that deserves no proper care... well that is, I agree, something to be angry about.The Goldfishhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15213378454070776331noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10557263.post-9359678159728870002012-09-28T04:37:07.437+01:002012-09-28T04:37:07.437+01:00This concept of needing to be polite, and nice, an...This concept of needing to be polite, and nice, and not angry or "bitchy" when expressing subjugation is something I've been thinking about a lot, especially around two diagnoses: "Pain Disorder" and "Somatiziation Disorder". I've been going around calling what I have a pain disorder, not knowing that there's a thing called Pain Disorder in American medicine, and it's a subset of Somaticization Disorder in which the major feature is pain. For anyone not up on Freud, somatic symptoms are a way that your body communicates with you. You are stressed, upset, scared or angry, and your body gives you symptoms. We've all seen something like it in our lives, and it's not total bullshit. When you're nervous and your heart pounds loudly, or your stomach hurts, or you faint, or you get so angry your head hurts, all of these are somatic responses. The problem is when the definition of the disorder is all about the difference between "real" symptoms, symptoms produced by physical damage, and "false" symptoms, symptoms produced by your emotions or brain. This is a shitty, sexist, stupid system. Over half the people who live in chronic pain are dealing with pain that has exceeded tissue damage, but only the difficult ones get labeled with this diagnosis. The major feature of the diagnosis is that the doctor who diagnoses you thinks you are "overly anxious about physical symptoms" or "belligerent about finding answers or a cure". If your doctor, who stand in a position of power above you thinks you're too angry, and not calm and polite enough (another "disease" feature is being uncooperative or rude to doctors or staff), then you get slapped with this diagnosis, and your medical care gets pulled out from under you, because "false" pain can't be fixed with painkillers or surgeries. "False" pain can only be fixed when you, the patient, stop being so broken in the head. I see this as an obvious mechanism of control. This is also a protective measure, that stops doctors from needing to confront the fact that they don't know everything, can't cure everything, and that people get sick and stay sick not just to spite them. Until there is, as they say in the feministing article, a "justly and ethically" carried out medical system, I continue to reserve the right to be angry about the illness in my body, and the disability in my society that means I have to use gatekeepers like doctors to kill my pain and keep me whole-ish. Until that day, no one has the right to say how angry I can be about my marginalization, and how angry and downright rude others can be about theirs.Librarian.Mobilehttp://librarian-mobile.blogspot.com/noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10557263.post-27467115755680226482012-09-23T22:06:17.493+01:002012-09-23T22:06:17.493+01:00Thanks Matthew,
I'm very torn about the issue...Thanks Matthew,<br /><br />I'm very torn about the issue of tone and civility. I really can't stand verbal aggression. This is partly because of having been abused in that way, but it's not just that I'm sensitive to it. Sometimes tone really <i>does</i> matter when you are addressing another human being. It can be, as Daniel Finke says, an question of ethics, as well as how effective an argument may be. Bullying is bullying, wherever it is.<br /><br />At the same time, I've been criticised for the way I've expressed myself, I've been told that I state opinions as if they are facts. And I have certainly seen others - especially but not exclusively women - who have put things <i>strongly</i>, (e.g. "This is unfair and it has to stop!" as opposed to "I feel that maybe this is a subject that needs looking into, please.") - being treated as if they put a brick through someone's window. It's a fairly standard trick to attribute someone's entire argument to their emotions; "You're just angry/ bitter/ jealous/ frustrated etc.."<br /><br />And sometimes, I do think it is entirely appropriate to be angry and that marginalised people are often taught that our anger is unacceptable, that we should be quiet and grateful.<br /><br /><i>But</i>, bullying is bullying, whenever, and there's absolutely no rule that says that marginalised people are allowed to do it when others are not.The Goldfishhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15213378454070776331noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10557263.post-12046370863041615062012-09-22T23:25:37.164+01:002012-09-22T23:25:37.164+01:00With particular regard to Daniel Fincke's blog...With particular regard to Daniel Fincke's blog and the Feministe entry in response, I find that some people purportedly representing marginalised groups (women and women of colour in particular) often use their status to justify wholly uncivil behaviour and means of arguing when the person they are arguing with has not been uncivil to them at all. They will then accuse their opponents of using "tone" when called out for their bullying behaviour. I came across this a couple of years ago when a blogger called Renee Martin (she maintains a blog called Womanist Musings) accused various disabled bloggers (mostly women) of being racist by running a blogging event related to Helen Keller on 19th June which is also a fairly obscure African-American celebration related to the end of slavery. Renee made a fuss about that despite not having bothered to mark the occasion the previous two years she'd had a blog, and left hostile comments on both the original blog (FWD/Forward) and on participants' blogs. She also sent out lots of emails and got angry when people did not respond immediately, despite being in a different time zone (like Korea!), and in bed. I posted an entry accusing her of fabricating a controversy out of nothing and harassing sick women without any good reason (she even left a comment saying "what you don't have the spoons to dealt with your f***ing racism?", so she knew they were ill). She basically pulled the "tone" card out on me even though the tone was only one thing that was wrong with her emails and comments. The other was, the accusation she was making was baseless.<br /><br />I'm not sure what debates Fincke was referring to in his blog (the standard of debate on some of the "sceptic" blogs and Reddits is shockingly bad, and if they regard scepticism as a more highly evolved form of thinking than religion, well, I've never come across anything like it on any religious blog, Muslim or otherwise - people are generally polite and certainly don't use sexualised insults or threaten to rape 15-year-old girls who disagree with them), but I have noticed that some people think that insulting suggestions and negative assumptions are acceptable when used against a "privileged" person, or privileged group (and the individual is considered less important than the group, so it's not necessary to consider individual factors other than their "oppression points"), that wouldn't be if used the other way round. I once argued with a feminist who accused me of taking it personally (a no-no) when I objected to Susan Brownmiller's suggestion that rape was how <em>all men</em> keep <em>all women</em> under control, and she could not understand that the use of "all men" (not "the patriarchy", "the system" or just "men") meant just that, and was insulting. I also remember the attitude of some of the Welsh-speaking students while I was at college (they have their own hall at Aberystwyth), who had a reputation for bigotry that nobody really questioned because they were "oppressed". While I can understand people who are traumatised being hostile to those who share the characteristics of whoever caused their trauma, I don't believe there is any group in modern British society whose "oppression" is such that it justifies bigotry or incivility on its own.Matthew Smithhttp://www.blogistan.co.uk/blog/noreply@blogger.com