One tricky thing here is that existing literature is really examining the potential effects of trigger warnings in and of themselves, devoid of context or non-immediate decision making. Does seeing a literal trigger warning make someone feel less anxious? Almost certainly not, why on earth would it?

In studies that find no or slight negative effect, the outcomes are immediate measures. How do you feel right now? If it assesses decision making, it’s whether you do or do not immediately consume the content.

But for trauma survivors the potential to be triggered is always in flux, always dependent on everything else going on in your life, often set off by things that seem unrelated or irrational. Trigger warnings give someone a choice in that exact moment for what to do based on what they believe they can* manage. Yes, it may promote avoidance, but avoidance can increase feelings of agency that allow for reduced avoidance behavior in the future.

As an example from the great college campus syllabus trigger warning kerfuffle: I assign chapters from Durkheim’s Suicide in some seminars, as well as complementary readings with less obvious titles. My students get a warning about this ahead of time, but they don’t get to just skip that part of the class. Some things students have done: scheduled extra therapy sessions during those weeks, read in small groups in the library instead of isolated in dorm rooms, missed a class meeting and made up for it with office hours and a short additional assignment (so they didn’t out themselves to their peers with a panic attack in class). It’s about agency and self-assessment.

A screen with a suicide hotline number isn’t going to magically make someone ok with seeing suicide represented, but it offers an action the person can take to regain agency.

*Or just want to manage. Sometimes you’re just living your life and not super in the mood for exposure therapy, and if you can get your brain somewhere else for a while that’s a very good thing.

I use this example to introduce formal and functional approaches to topics in the social sciences. Any argument you try to make within the debate ends up including a variant of “…because sandwiches [abstraction about what formally defines a sandwich]”, which itself presumes that the “right” way to carve up the world is in categories of form. You could also conceive of sandwiches functionally, where something isn’t a sandwich if we (some cultural or linguistic group) just don’t think of them that way.

From a functional view, the very fact the debate exists at all means hot dogs aren’t sandwiches, cereal isn’t soup, pop tarts aren’t ravioli, etc.

Then I make them think about it in contexts like language, Durkheim, and policy making and watch their little minds explode.

I absolutely consider Phantom Tollbooth a masterpiece. There’s nothing else like it, and it has extraordinary persistence.

Lol from the footnotes:

Next in the Public Health series on the Organic Household: Targeting bathroom congestion — innovative uses for the kitchen sink.

This article was not reviewed by the authors’ wives before publication.

Jokes aside, I’d rather make my bed. Washing sheets regularly can handle sweat and dead skin problems just fine, and mites are going to be there no matter what. I’m more concerned with keeping out larger bugs like house centipedes and stopping my cat from tracking litter on my pillowcase.

That’s a bit different though. We don’t (generally) use “n-word” in place of the slur the way someone might type f!#k or say “frick” in place of “fuck.” We use it to talk about the term. So when someone is censoring themselves with replacement it can feel pointless, since the sentiment is the same: we both know what word you want to use to express yourself, just use it. When you use a censored alternative to a slur, you’re not just swapping one thing in for another leaving your meaning unchanged. You’re communicating an intention to avoid what you know to be a symbol of hate in a context that has no hateful intent.

I think the older generation got used to the stereotype that if people were posting with emojis, they would naturally be making more immature posts (being younger).

That’s interesting because I would have suggested the opposite. I learned to associate emojis with older internet users (boomers and up). I always understood Reddit’s anti-emoji thing to be a kind of anti-boomer gatekeeping. It had a kind of “take your Minions memes and go back to Facebook, grandma” kind of vibe.

Reddit definitely does/did hate emoji though. I think it was even part of a written down “reddiquette” at some point.

If it aired today I suspect most people would also find it underwhelming. The thing with Arrested Development is that it was truly unique and ahead of its time, enough that it couldn’t make it through three seasons on network tv. There was just nothing else like it, and audiences didn’t quite know what to do with it. People who loved it made a big deal about it because it could be (and turned out to be) the direction comedy was heading if only people would give it a chance.

Please tell me “pliers” is the term for “tweezers” outside the US.

The article says a lot more than the obvious, and really has very little to do with the topic of placing children in foster care. It’s not claiming infants shouldn’t be removed from unsafe homes or trusted to foster parents as long as those homes remain unsafe. It’s saying the foster system is being manipulated to the detriment of children, birth parents, and foster parents. The main family in this article is a shining example of when placing a child in foster care works perfectly, where the parents expediently turned things around and managed to bond with their child despite the tragic circumstances. The goal of foster care is to reunite families, and even in these ideal cases it’s easy to turn the system against its own goal.

As others have said, there’s never going to be a clear cut line between the two. I think it’s more useful to take a functional perspective. Something isn’t problematic because it’s a cult; it’s a cult because it’s problematic. I like Hassan’s BITE model of authoritarian control here. We look for social systems that are purposefully organized to enforce different kinds of control over individuals within the system - Behavioral, Information, Thought, and Information control in the BITE model. We see where systems rely on mechanisms of control to the clear detriment of those within the system.

You mention in another comment the idea that many “cults” are going to be relatively more accepting of you than many “cultures.” That’s undoubtedly true. But the distinction is in what happens next. The border around a cult system is only permeable in one direction. You may be accepted with open arms, but that acceptance is a tool to get you into a place where you can’t leave because you won’t (or feel like you won’t) ever be accepted again outside the cult.

The control mechanisms also create an all-in system. I’m not generally a fan of religion TBH, but you can decide how much you want the culture of Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, or whatever to affect your life day to day and in what ways. If you’re in a Christian cult though, like the IFB or IBLP (the one the Duggars are in), the system decides your level of involvement. Scientology is a great example of this because it looks like there is a wide range of involvement level. You see a lot of celebrities who don’t seems crazy, who talk about how wholesome it is, who say they’ve never seen any of the abuses people talk about. It’s not that these celebrities are opting for a chiller version of Scientology, it’s that Scientology opted them into a less obviously, outwardly repressive day-to-day for the benefit of the system.

All this to come back to my first point - this is a functional distinction, not a formal/semantic one. Is some social system manipulating its members in an organized and harmful way? Then let’s call it a cult so we can talk about that concept more easily. THEN the question of is this or that group a cult based on whether it functionally presents as one.

I read The Fountainhead in a high school English class and then got super into Ayn Rand and read Atlas Shrugged and some of her other stuff on my own. What actually happened was that I was a child in the Florida Public School System and so 1) didn’t understand what capitalism was, 2) couldn’t recognize terrible writing, and 3) was enjoying how proud my dad was for once.

Now I’m in my 30s and I can’t bring myself to throw away books at all, but also refuse to give them away and put them back out into the world for other dumbasses and/or impressionable children to find. They live on a bookshelf in my back room strategically positioned so that even if someone did go into that room they’d have to dig through a bunch of French textbooks and ancient American Girl books to find them.

If anyone would like some garbage propaganda advocating for a society of psychopaths written in the style of your drunk uncle’s auto-transcribed voice memos, hit me up.

The way you’re describing it sounds like a step past the standard “super taster” experience. Especially if you already know you’re prone to hypersensation in taste (or tactile), you might look into learning more about ARFID, an avoidant-restrictive type eating/feeding disorder. Many kids who don’t grow out of being picky eaters (or even get worse) aren’t as much “picky” as they are literally unable to swallow or keep down most food. There’s been more education about it (especially in adults) recently, leading to a lot of adults having a “holy shit I’m not the only person in the world like this?!” moment. There’s a decent community on Reddit if you’re curious about others’ experiences (though being Reddit there’s also some wildly uncalled for aggressive armchair diagnoses, groupthink, and misinformation, soooo grain of salt).

Mystery solved.

I’m imagining you sending off your dirty laundry to relatives for their birthdays, which is probably not what you mean. Does hamper mean something different for you?

This is a really cool take. I’ve never heard that interpretation of “taking the lord’s name” but I like it a lot. Do you know anywhere I can read more about that idea or the history of the phrase?

I definitely do. I had a problem for a few years where I would wake up in the middle of the night, see a notification on my phone for a text or email, read it, and then take whatever action needed in the morning. This would be fine if I was actually waking up or the texts/emails actually existed. I was not and they did not, but I took MANY actions in the morning.

I heard that you can tell if you’re in a dream if you try to read something twice to see if it says the same thing both times. Probably true for some people. As it turns out, not a reliable method for me. I once dreamed up a whole damn cast list for a ballet I was working on which I could repeat verbatim the next morning. I proceeded to email my friend involved in casting with my hot takes on the choices and got a very confused reply about how they hadn’t even had the meeting yet.

The only solution I have found is to have a 100% no-exception ban on actually interacting with my phone at night so I am sure that whatever boring ass email I’m reading at 3am isn’t real.

My husband and I have been together for 10 years. He currently has a girlfriend he’s been seeing about 6 months. She lives with her husband (who also has a secondary partner) and two children. I have dated a bit but am not currently interested in anything outside our marriage. We also had a relationship a while ago where a close friend of mine had a purely sexual relationship with my husband for a little while, and for the next three years, we went through periods of being a triangle, a V, all just friends, she lived with us for a bit. She moved across the country and now is in a monogamous relationship, and we are all good friends. The most drama that has ever happened is that a guy I was into slept with a girl my husband had slept with. That kinda sucked. Thankfully I had my husband to cheer me up.

I’m on one end of a V and super happy with the arrangement (the “primary” end, so the one most likely to harbor resentment). The other end of the V is too. And so is the middle lol.

Actually now that I think about it it’s actually a W. The other side of the V is in another V with her primary.

A resentful V is unhealthy and not going to end well, but there are plenty of happy functional Vs around.

I think this point about being discreet is huge. My husband and have been open/poly for a decade (ie from the start). We don’t keep it a secret by any means, but most people I know have no idea — it just doesn’t come up in conversation very often.

We had a very bizarre situation recently where one of my closest friends saw my husband holding hands with his girlfriend at the beach. She texted me frantically, saying she just wants to support me and is here if I need her and she hoped she was doing the right thing by telling me. It was pretty trippy to tell this friend who is close enough to know super specific details about very private parts of my life “oh cool thanks but it’s chill.”

Non-monogamy isn’t for everyone, but it’s for a lot more people than you might think.

He’s kinda been crushing it. Definitely a pleasant surprise. I think putting 50 million of his own dollars towards campaigning for a tax system that would dramatically raise his own taxes was a pretty impressive demonstration that his approach is a bit different from Trump’s.

Also women’s healthcare, refugee support structures, LGBT inclusivity, legal recreational weed, union support, Election Day as a state holiday…the dude doesn’t suck.