Mocking people as having a syndrome is the right-winger’s ableist insult that I wouldn’t use, and you shouldn’t want to either.
It’s wrong to use “mentally ill” to insult and shame people who want common sense solutions for air quality pollution, the pandemic, racial inequality, and climate change, like the kind of discourse Vinay Prasad or Michael Shellenberger engage in. It’s an anti-vax1 & climate contrarian talking point tactic to portray people who are concerned about real problems as irrational or inappropriately alarmist & call them mentally ill.
Another issue here is that you should not use mental illness as an insult. Mental illness is illness. The brain is a physical organ. Syndromes are actual medical conditions that are already sometimes minimized, and the sufferers of mental illness already face considerable stigma. “Mental illness” and “syndrome” are not synonyms for “ignorance” or “foolishness” or “weakness” and should not be used to insult people you think are “stupid” because that is multiple layers of ableism.
It might feel good in the moment to get in a sick burn and insult the shit out of your misled and propagandized friends and family as “mentally ill” because you’re angry and hurt you’ve had that “insult” hurled at you by some rando libertarian pundits and sock puppets from troll farms that push fossil fuel benefitting narratives and interests. But this problematic turnabout isn’t really fairplay. A large portion of the “back to normal” cohort has been propagandized, gaslit, and often even bullied into it by employers kowtowing to commercial real estate interests. Many often don’t have the choice to ignore the elites’ forcing of normal. Lambasting them as having “collective amnesia” and then giving the propagandists a pass. Putting the burden on the trampled, absolving the people in charge, when it’s the institutions we all rely on who’ve let everyone down in the name of The Economy. This all buys into the individualism and ableism that brought us the public health threats in the first place. I object to making the focus one of blaming ordinary people for being swept up and having had their cognitive biases and real human needs used against them – instead of blaming the leadership, institutions, and people in power for misleading them.
Any satisfaction from smearing people with the label of “syndrome” will only last a moment. It’ll benefit some influencers and some social media hotshots, make the platforms some revenue, and do the dirty work of helping troll farms who are often just interested in muddying the discourse. We all clicked, got a dopamine hit, but then nothing actually happened – not for public health.
Hypernormalisation Documentary, 2016, by Adam Curtis. ”The liberals were outraged at Trump. But they expressed their outrage in cyberspace so it had no effect. Because the algorithms made sure that they only spoke to people who already agreed with them. Instead ironically their waves of angry messages and tweets benefitted the large corporations who ran the social media platforms. one online analyst put it simply — angry people click. It meant that the radical fury that came like waves across the internet no longer had the power to change the world. Instead it became a fuel that fed the systems of power making them ever more powerful.”
And in fact, keeping a propaganda term alive, even with a “sick burn” is still boosting the original concept of a supposed compulsion for normal. Urgency of normal or urgent normal syndrome – it’s still boosting the original narrative of a yearning for normal being somehow important. These precaution adversaries are all too willing to use “mental health needs” for their own purposes. For example, cajoling people that they should want the commutes they hate, or should consider “retail therapy” as a real thing and shopping alone as filling a “social need” when it doesn’t. It benefits the fossil fuel industry to claim commuting has some psychological benefits that make it worth it, the way right-wing Koch funded think tank Mercatus Center in the 1990s came up with a preposterous argument against reducing toxic smog, claiming that more people might get sunburn or skin cancer if we had cleaner air. The whole argument about pushing maskless kids into crowded classrooms with covid spreading before vaccines were even available for most, actually hinged on embracing the idea of a mental health need. So this whole exercise in problematic psychologizing is really a GIFT TO THE OPPOSITION. It just repeats the enemy’s framing, adding to a mere exposure effect where people then accept a fiction that there are competing mental health interests, when there’s no way to justify physical harm for the sake of psychological comfort.
Small Wars Journal – WHY RESPONDING IS LOSING: The Plays We Run (and the Plays We Don’t) to Defeat Disinformation – Wed, 01/19/2022 – 8:29pm – By Alan Kelly When competitors ding your reputation or dis your brand it’s a reasonable impulse to fight back, especially when the messages they’re making are mistaken or deceptive. But be careful. The plays that often inspire response are usually better at scoring points than winning games. Here’s why: DEFENSIVE PLAYS Whether it’s conservative policies, inexperience at narrative knife fights, or a bias for taking the proverbial high road, responders typically run plays that frame, divert and press. These are influence strategies that do more to defend and maintain a status quo than shift it. Accordingly, responders avoid plays that probe, freeze or provoke. These are better for beating rivals, not simply beating them back. A GIFT TO ENEMIES If this is you, beware. Rivals will welcome you to their arena. And why not? A competitor with weak plays draws attention to the game but does little to steal a victory.
So much of this influencer’s content is attractive on a knee jerk initial level, yet upon closer inspection is highly problematic. It’s hard to understand why this one content producer comes out with just so many things that are so very counterproductive to the actual public health and disability justice interests of her fans. Always a little l’agent provocateur. And I guess still just doing whatever will get the most clicks and subscribes, because perhaps that’s what people in the business have to do to keep up her level of revenue, as she’s doubled ko-fi subscribers over a few months. I don’t begrudge people trying to make a living in this gig economy and our media hellscape, but many do it more responsibly and without the problematic emotional hooks and without pseudoscience. But that may not be lucrative enough for people with a taste for finding out what it’s like to own a whole bitcoin.
References:
1 – Science Based Medicine – Dr. Vinay Prasad echoes a common antivax trope that portrays concern about a deadly disease as irrational fear. Before the pandemic, antivaxxers likened concern about childhood diseases to mental illness. In the age of COVID-19, Dr. Vinay Prasad accuses medicine of “legitimizing” irrational anxiety and says we should treat COVID like the flu—with one telling omission. In a recent paid Substack, he doubles down and accuses physicians and scientists of anxiety disorders that “interfere with people’s lives”. David Gorski on September 19, 2022 These are often doctors who never, ever would have said anything even vaguely antivaccine before the pandemic but now routinely parrot “old school” antivaccine talking points, whether they realize them to be antivax or not. An example of just such a talking point is to portray people who actually take precautions against being infected by COVID-19 of being “irrational” or having “irrational” fear or anxiety. The fear and anxiety are acknowledged, but then immediately portrayed as less than rational or even as not rational at all. Worse than that, these “COVID-19 contrarians” portray taking precautions to avoid COVID-19 as being more than just irrational, but outright pathological, with people who still wear N95 masks, for instance, being accused of “irrational anxiety” or “fear” just because they don’t want to be infected by a virus that has killed over a million people (and counting) in just the US alone and is still widely circulating in the population. This narrative is of a piece with longstanding antivaccine messaging that portrays vaccination programs driven primarily by irrational fear in order for the medical profession, big pharma, and government to exercise “control” over you. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve read variations on this theme over the last two decades
2 – DENY, DECEIVE, DELAY Exposing New Trends in Climate Mis- and Disinformation at COP27 (Vol 2) Climate Action Against Disinformation, January 2023 Michael Shellenberger – A longstanding critic of the environmental movement, in and around COP27, Shellenberger focussed on a relatively new line of attack: the supposed link between climate activism and mental illness. He continued to produce high-traction posts attacking renewable energy – a long-standing pillar of his outputs – but content discussing so-called ‘narcissism’ and ‘anxiety disorders’ was more prominent. He also launched attacks against ‘woke’ activists by connecting movements like Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ+ rights to psychological disorder. In the process, he has begun to explicitly reference the Great Reset conspiracy and alleged plans for energy and food shortages.
3 – Alarm is appropriate, the volcano is erupting – by CHLOE HUMBERT, JUL 6, 2022 The the story of Pompeii is riveting. One may be led to think initially that the people frozen in place by the volcano were merely caught unaware. But only about 2,000 people out of around 20,000 actually stayed behind in Pompeii to get pyroclasted into a grim posterity. The vast majority were alarmists who fled the city — in abject fear of the volcano… and escaped in time and therefore lived out the rest of their lives. What led that minority to stay behind? Normalcy bias? Propaganda? I wonder if perhaps elites convinced some essential workers that they needed to stay behind and keep the economy going. Perhaps some felt they had no other good option and just hoped for the best. We will never know the exact stories. But we’re seeing ours play out. Somehow those people were convinced staying behind was okay. What we don’t ask in retrospect, notice, is why did people flee? We know why and we understand they were right to do so. We also don’t ridicule them for having been scared into leaving Pompeii
4 – Forbes – Please, Stop Using Mental Illness As An Insult. By Davide Banis, Jul 29, 2019 The reasons we shouldn’t use mental illness as an insult are the same you wouldn’t use any other kind of illness as an insult. It’s deeply offensive and it makes no sense. Why would you use a legitimate medical condition to insult someone? Moreover, in the case of mental illness-related insults, it perpetuates a cruel stigma, hurting millions of people who suffer from mental illnesses. The stigma is also a barrier to help-seeking for people in need. It also shuts down possible discussions on mental health, something, one way or the other, we can all benefit from. And, on top of all of this, it’s just an incredibly lazy way to engage with your opponents, because it doesn’t really say anything about why you disagree with them. You’re just polarizing the discussion and nobody, besides the people who already agree with you, will understand your reasons better.
5 – BBC Trending (podcast) – Brazil’s real life trolls – Sun 23 Apr 2023 “Trolls are necessary and I’m going to explain why. We have a troll farm. A lot of them. What we don’t use are bots. Bots are different things. you can buy it in India and they give you 10,000 likes in a second. That doesn’t work because it’s not legitimate. What we do, for example with trolls, is to generate some kind of relevance within the social network’s algorithms. They have become very rigid about what they show and what they don’t. And that has to do with the relevance of the publication. So what trolls do is give relevance to a certain publication. Good publicity, so that it can be shown more than other publications.”
6 – CMD – How The Koch Network Hijacked The War On Covid By Walker Bragman and Alex Kotch | December 22nd, 2021 Lockdown measures drove down cases in the U.S. and likely saved millions of lives globally. But the decline of in-person shopping and work, combined with factory shutdowns in places like China, disrupted the economy. A 2020 report from the corporate consulting firm McKinsey & Co. found the hardest-hit industries would take years to recover. One sector in particular that took a big hit was the fossil fuel industry. Oil demand fell sharply in 2020, placing the global economy on uncertain footing. Before long, business-aligned groups — particularly those connected to fossil fuels — began targeting the public health measures threatening their bottom lines. Chief among them were groups tied to billionaire Charles Koch, owner of Koch Industries, the largest privately held fossil fuel company in the world. The war on public health measures began on March 20, 2020, when Americans For Prosperity (AFP), the right-wing nonprofit founded by Charles and David Koch, issued a press release calling on states to remain open.
7 – Teams Human – The Economy demands full participation, herd debt paid on an altar of lies – “Public health” is operating, but with the wrong information and the wrong solutions to solve the wrong problems, because those calling the shots have the wrong goals. By CHLOE HUMBERT, DEC 23, 2022 People are being convinced to blame all disease mitigation. They are being propagandized into blaming, and resenting, the people who have in fact been isolating or otherwise taking precautions to avoid sickness. It’s the only explanation that fits. They’re blaming the people who are masking. They have connected dots – but all wrong. They’ve been given different dots to connect, and they’ve connected them. They are NOT blaming their own covid precautions (that they didn’t do) for ruining their children’s immune systems. They are blaming OTHER people’s covid precautions for ruining herd immunity for their children. And it seems that’s why they want everyone else to unmask and get infected – as if that’d be a good thing when it’s obviously not doing good for the people, especially not the ones winding up in hospital or six feet under.
8 – Medical News Today: What is gaslighting? According to the CPTSD Foundation, medical gaslighting is when a medical professional dismisses a person’s health concerns as being the product of their imagination. They may tell the person their symptoms are “in their head” or label them a hypochondriac. According to an article in Politics, Group, and Identities, racial gaslighting is when people apply gaslighting techniques to an entire racial or ethnic group in order to discredit them. For example, a person or institution may say that an activist campaigning for change is irrational or “crazy.” Political gaslighting occurs when a political group or figure lies or manipulates information to control people, according to an article in the Buffalo Law Review. For example, the person or political party may downplay things their administration has done, discredit their opponents, imply that critics are mentally unstable, or use controversy to deflect attention away from their mistakes. Institutional gaslighting occurs within a company, organization, or institution, such as a hospital. For example, they may portray whistleblowers who report problems as irrational or incompetent, or deceive employees about their rights.
9 – CNBC: Google employees frustrated after office Covid outbreaks, some call to modify vaccine policy by Jennifer Elias PUBLISHED FRI, AUG 26 2022 The employees, who spoke with CNBC on the condition of anonymity, said since they have been asked to return to offices, infections notifications pop up in their email inboxes regularly. Employees are reacting with frustration and memes. The company began requiring most employees to return to physical offices at least three days a week in April. Since then, staffers have pushed back on the mandate after they worked efficiently for so long at home while the company enjoyed some of its fastest revenue growth in 15 years.
10 – Wall Street Journal – Interest-Only Loans Helped Commercial Property Boom. Now They’re Coming Due. Landlords face a $1.5 trillion bill for commercial mortgages over the next three years. By Konrad Putzier, June 6, 2023 Many of the commercial landlords on the hook for the loans are vulnerable to default in part because of the way their loans are structured. Unlike most home loans, which get paid down each year, many commercial mortgages are known as interest-only loans. Borrowers make only interest payments during the life of the loan, with the entire principal due at the end. Interest-only loans as a share of new commercial mortgage-backed securities issuance increased to 88% in 2021, up from 51% in 2013, according to Trepp. Typically, owners pay off this debt by getting a new loan or selling the building. Now, steeper borrowing costs and lenders’ growing reluctance to refinance these loans are raising the likelihood that many of them won’t be paid back. Many banks, fearful of losses and under pressure from regulators and shareholders to shore up their balance sheets, have mostly stopped issuing new loans for office buildings, brokers say. Office and some mall owners are facing falling demand for their buildings because of remote work and e-commerce.
11 – Teams Human – Forcing Normal in the Roaring 2020s. Elite panic kayfabe is timeless but not permanent. By CHLOE HUMBERT, DEC 13, 2022 It might seem like there was a moral vacuum then, and now, among elites especially, but in reality there were the Sanitarians, and today we still exist, we just don’t use that antiquated term. Nowadays we are called public health advocates and disabled justice activists. And now, as seemed to be the case then, we’re not given nearly as much limelight as the forced normal party crowd and their elite backers. Major media and all our cognitive biases, such as normalcy bias, appear to be exploited to keep a great many of us going about maskless in workplaces and social gatherings, which happens to be lucrative for certain sectors of society, and so they believe profitable. Just like in the 1920s. There is big money in influence peddling against attempts at mitigation.
12 – The New Yorker Magazine: The Real Paranoia-Inducing Purpose of Russian Hacks. By Adrian Chen, July 27, 2016 The real effect, the Russian activists told me, was not to brainwash readers but to overwhelm social media with a flood of fake content, seeding doubt and paranoia, and destroying the possibility of using the Internet as a democratic space. One activist recalled that a favorite tactic of the opposition was to make anti-Putin hashtags trend on Twitter. Then Kremlin trolls discovered how to make pro-Putin hashtags trend, and the symbolic nature of the action was killed. “The point is to spoil it, to create the atmosphere of hate, to make it so stinky that normal people won’t want to touch it,” the opposition activist Leonid Volkov told me.
13 – Hypernormalisation Documentary, 2016, by Adam Curtis.”The liberals were outraged at Trump. But they expressed their outrage in cyberspace so it had no effect. Because the algorithms made sure that they only spoke to people who already agreed with them. Instead ironically their waves of angry messages and tweets benefitted the large corporations who ran the social media platforms. one online analyst put it simply — angry people click. It meant that the radical fury that came like waves across the internet no longer had the power to change the world. Instead it became a fuel that fed the systems of power making them ever more powerful.”
14 – Fortune – You need to detach and ‘psychologically recover’ from work, professors say. Commuting is a ‘liminal space’ where that can happen. BY Matthew Piszczek, Kristie McAlpine and The Conversation, February 2, 2023 For most American workers who commute, the trip to and from the office takes nearly one full hour a day—26 minutes each way on average, with 7.7% of workers spending two hours or more on the road. Many people think of commuting as a chore and a waste of time. However, during the remote work surge resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, several journalists curiously noted that people were—could it be?—missing their commutes.
15 – Jane Mayer, Dark Money. The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, January 2016 In 1997 for instance the EPA moved to reduce surface ozone, a form of air pollution caused in part by emissions from oil refineries. Susan Dudley, an economist who became a top official at the Mercatus Center, came up with a novel criticism of the proposed rule. The EPA, she argued, had not taken into account that by blocking the sun, smog cut down on cases of skin cancer. She claimed that if pollution would controlled, it would cause up to 11,000 additional cases of skin cancer each year. In 1999 the District of Columbia circuit court embraced Dudley’s pro smog argument, evaluating the EPA rule, the court found that the EPA had “explicitly disregarded the possible health benefits of ozone.” In another part of the opinion the court also ruled 2 to 1 that the EPA had overstepped its authority. Afterward the Constitutional Accountability Center, a watchdog group, revealed that the judges in the majority had previously attended one of the all expenses paid legal seminars for judges that were heavily funded by the Kochs’ foundations. This one had taken place on a Montana ranch run by a group that the Kochs helped subsidized called the Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment. The judges claimed that their decision was unaffected by the junket. Their embrace of the Mercatus Center’s novel argument however soon proved embarrassing. The Supreme Court overruled their position unanimously, noting that the Clean Air Act’s standards are absolute, and not subject to cost benefit analysis. Although their side lost in the end, the case illustrated that the Kochs’ ideological pipeline was humming.
16 – Respectful Insolence – Coronaphobia: How COVID-19 minimizers shame the responsible – Dr. Lucy McBride, a concierge medicine doctor who has become famous as a pandemic minimizer and one of the drivers of “Urgency of Normal”, Tweeted an article that she had written over a year ago about “coronaphobia”. Whether she understands it or not, this is a very old antivax trope: To pathologize fear of infectious disease as mental illness. By Orac – May 23, 2022 More importantly, her labeling her patients afraid of the virus as having “coronaphobia” or, in the WaPo article “fear of normal” (or FONO), has also not aged very well. It was also particularly vile in its time because by the beginning of March 2021, most of her patients had not been vaccinated, but, as Gonsalves noted: Tweet posted by Gregg Gonsalves May 15, 2022 “And yes, this was from last year. Makes it even worse. Because it was BEFORE almost all of her patients had been vaccinated and AFTER she was. Let this sink in.”
17 – The New Republic – Why Is This Group of Doctors So Intent on Unmasking Kids? The physicians and scientists of the Urgency of Normal are cherry-picking data in their push to end pandemic precautions, but are getting favorable mainstream media attention and support from wealthy, white communities that never felt the full brunt of Covid-19. By Melody Schreiber / February 22, 2022 Some of them, organized in a movement they call “the Urgency of Normal,” are finding an eager audience in those who have largely been spared the worst of the pandemic. The group says the precautions, more than the pandemic itself, are causing mental strain and potential harms to children. If the precautions are lifted, kids can return to normal. Public health experts, meanwhile, point to what they say is a huge flaw in this reasoning: Removing precautions before meeting various vaccination, treatment, and caseload benchmarks could let the virus spread unchecked, develop more dangerous variants, and put “normal” out of reach for much, much longer. There is, to be clear, little scientific disagreement about what helps quell the pandemic. Vaccinations, masks, ventilation, tests, staying home while sick—these layers of protection, when employed, are highly effective at keeping the virus from spreading, which is especially urgent with 109,000 daily cases, 2,000 daily deaths, and many hospitals still at capacity. The science is strong. But this movement to drop pandemic precautions is about something else entirely—a potent mix of pandemic fatigue, politics, individualistic thinking, and, if both polling and pandemic statistics are to be believed, a persistent divide based on class and race.
18 – Small Wars Journal – WHY RESPONDING IS LOSING: The Plays We Run (and the Plays We Don’t) to Defeat Disinformation – Wed, 01/19/2022 – 8:29pm – By Alan Kelly When competitors ding your reputation or dis your brand it’s a reasonable impulse to fight back, especially when the messages they’re making are mistaken or deceptive. But be careful. The plays that often inspire response are usually better at scoring points than winning games. Here’s why: DEFENSIVE PLAYS Whether it’s conservative policies, inexperience at narrative knife fights, or a bias for taking the proverbial high road, responders typically run plays that frame, divert and press. These are influence strategies that do more to defend and maintain a status quo than shift it. Accordingly, responders avoid plays that probe, freeze or provoke. These are better for beating rivals, not simply beating them back. A GIFT TO ENEMIES If this is you, beware. Rivals will welcome you to their arena. And why not? A competitor with weak plays draws attention to the game but does little to steal a victory.
19 – Mere Exposure Effect, leads to Exposure. After repeated exposure to something it becomes familiar, and even if it’s false or bad, it can come to be viewed as true or acceptable – even favorable, simply because it feels familiar. By CHLOE HUMBERT, OCT 21, 2022 Frequency of a message is also important in maintaining everything from preferences to beliefs and includes, unfortunately, factual knowledge. The reiterative effect, when used by bad actors to promote disinformation for whatever reason, can often overcome rational considerations if it becomes overwhelming. Even repeating facts to oneself seems helpful. Studying results in passing tests. Advertisers know this. Politicians know this. Governments know this. Corporations know this. Churches know this. And you know it. So what are you going to repeat?
20 – Jessica Burn Notice. By Chloe Humbert on Medium, Jan 22 2023 She has hundreds of paid subscribers to her Substack, and 125,000 followers on Medium. Also 150 Ko-fi supporters. Even the most conservative estimates say she’s making some money at this gig, and her business predates the pandemic.