• 2 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: January 28th, 2022

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  • I feel like the conversation is getting pretty far out of my depth, so again if I say something hurtful please let me know. If it helps, I’ve been diagnosed with a mild to moderate anxiety disorder, but I’m pretty functional and CBT has been enough for me to get through most of my rough patches. I also have a loved one who suffers from OCD (actual OCD, not the kind where you like things to be neat). I also know how unbelievably frustrating and hurtful it is to be told that you should just “think better” or somehow fix your own “bad thoughts” or “wrong feelings”, so if I somehow unintentionally communicated that in my earlier comment I apologize, it’s not what I intended.

    My conception of mental illness has usually been that the problem is happening before volition really comes into the picture. So in your example of the videogame, it’s not necessarily that there’s a bug with the controller, but maybe there’s a bug with the display. What you’re seeing in the “game” isn’t accurate in some way, so you wind up in the pit because you didn’t see it, or because it seemed like it was somewhere else on the screen, or because something was indicating that the pit was the correct direction to go. The way I’ve always pictured mental illness is that the inputs on your controller might make perfect sense to another person if they could see what’s on your display, but because the display is bugged they lead to the “wrong” outcome. To exit the metaphor a little, I might be feeling intense anxiety about something (or nothing in particular, thanks brain) and avoid it, because anxiety is our brain’s signal that something is dangerous and should be avoided. But when that thing is an assignment for school, there’s a problem with the input or the perception of that thing. Now, my brain causing me to feel amounts of anxiety that are wildly disproportionate with the thing itself is not really something I can control, but once I understand that my “display” is fucked up in a certain way, I can work around it to a certain degree and remain pretty functional.

    I tend to believe that if we were able to get inside people’s minds and understand all of the “inputs” they’re getting, from their emotions, stray thoughts, traumas, memories, etc that for the vast majority of people, we’d be able to understand why they’ve made the choices that they make and they would make sense, in light of the information their brain is giving them. That’s why the assertion that mass shooters don’t have any mental illness is surprising to me. I can’t understand why someone would make that choice if their display hasn’t gotten fucked up in some major way. Now, maybe it is, but it’s entirely environmental or social, or something along those lines. If that’s true, then I guess I could make some sense of it, although it’s hard for me to understand what experiences would lead to this kind of destructive decision.

    Anyway, at this point I’m basically rambling about a bunch of stuff that I really have no expertise or deep understanding of, so I apologize for that, and I apologize again if I’ve said anything out of line.




  • Yeah, I addressed that briefly in my first comment. This definition of “mass shooting” is much, much broader and very different from what most people are thinking of when people talk about mass shootings. Like, I’m fully aware of how serious the gun violence problem in the US is, but I’m not thinking of a domestic violence situation where multiple people got injured, or a gang related shooting at a club where some bystanders are killed when I hear the term “mass shooting”. Don’t get me wrong, those situations are tragic, and the availability of guns in the US makes them so much worse, but I understand the psychology of them pretty well, I think. It’s not a mystery to me why they are happening. But the kind of situation where a person goes to a place and just starts indiscriminately shooting people is what I don’t understand, and it’s what I tend to think of when people talk about “mass shootings”. Maybe this is just me being wrong, or maybe it’s a problem of imprecise terminology.


  • Hi Tomato - a lot of what you’re saying here has already been addressed elsewhere in the thread. The OP isn’t just addressing Lemmy, but other Fediverse services like Mastodon as well. He also notes in the article several people who been addressing ways in which Fediverse culture has been toxic to black users. These aren’t imagined problems, they exist in a lot of places off of and on Lemmy, and providing suggestions to make these sites better for black users is a good thing, not something to get defensive about. This post isn’t accusing you personally of anything, but if you feel challenged by it then it might be a good opportunity for you to interrogate those feelings.

    Also, others have addressed your comments about not seeing other’s race online, etc, but I think it’s worth taking a step back and pausing. If people of color say they experience racism online, even though you don’t notice what race other people are, do you think it’s possible that there may be systemic problems or unconscious biases that might cause those folks to experience racism even when it is unintended? Those are the kinds of problems that aren’t solved by saying “I don’t say racist things to people and I don’t see color”. They’re problems that are built into our society just by the fact that we were all born and raised in an imperfect culture.

    Nobody is accusing anyone of anything here, and nobody is trying to make anyone feel ashamed of who they are. But we can all benefit from stopping, thinking about the ways that we interact with others, and taking the time to try and be sure that we aren’t acting in ways that harm others even if that isn’t our intent or we weren’t aware of the harm in the first place.



  • I hope no one takes this to mean that I am trying to stigmatize mental illness or people with mental illnesses, but it seems to me that if there are people who want to be famous or notorious so badly that they kill large numbers of people, that doesn’t seem to be the result of a healthy or well ordered mind. Am I misunderstanding how the phrase “mental illness” is being used here? I recognize that the headline is referring specifically to disorders involving psychosis, but they even state that only 25% of mass shooters are associated with non-psychotic mental illnesses. Are emotional/behavioral disorders not being considered here? Or is the mass shooting database they are using one of those that includes any shooting with more than a certain number of people involved, even if that includes events that the typical person would not consider part of the phenomenon of the types of shootings that most people are thinking of when they talk about mass shootings?

    Seriously, I hope I am not stepping on anyone’s toes or saying something that will be taken as hurtful, because that’s genuinely not how I mean it. But I really feel like if someone is in a state that they decide the best course of action for them is to kill a bunch of people they don’t know, how could that be the result of a healthy mental and emotional state?



  • I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, but please remember:

    1. Be Nice. You might think your cranky comment isn’t a big deal, but when there are dozens of them it can get pretty overwhelming. The dogpile is real.
    2. Technology@Beehaw.org is not a “free speech zone”. I think Beehaw admins have been pretty clear on this, but our overriding concern is community building and creating a corner of the internet where people are good to one another, not creating yet another site where people can say whatever they like regardless of the harm it might cause others. I understand this might clash with what some see as a fundamental philosophy of the fediverse, but we disagree. This isn’t the place to re-litigate those disagreements.





  • I agree completely. We do work hard to keep things inclusive and nice™ on Beehaw, but Technology is our largest and most active community by a fair margin, and sometimes folks don’t respect the vibe on the instance when they comment - either because they don’t realize what instance the post is on, or because they don’t understand or maybe don’t care to understand the ethos of the instance.

    We’ve done some cleanup in the thread, but removals can take time to federate (if they federate at all, which is not guaranteed in my experience. Hopefully the discussion from here out will be more inclusive, but we’ll be keeping a closer eye on the thread in any case.


  • We’ve removed some of the comments in this thread for expressing the exact racist sentiments which would warrant this type of post and for arguing in bad faith. This is a perfectly salient conversation to be having in this community so we will be leaving this thread up, but as a reminder, please engage in good faith and be nice. If you don’t want to have conversations about anti-racism in Technology then I suggest you unsubscribe from this community and others on Beehaw.

    On a personal note: I would be absolutely thrilled to see more, better discussions of the intersections of areas like race, gender, and sexuality with technology, and fewer arguments about which Linux distro is better.