Jessica Where There’s Smoke, and Mirrors

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-vax & 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 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.