Vesna Manojlovic @becha@v.st

The whole "don't call bigotry [mental health term]" thing is always very complicated and I'm not always sure where to draw the line.

It's a very common thing to say that i.e. most cishet boyfriends would benefit from going to therapy. And while oversimplified, it's not necessarily wrong. There's a lot of violent (physically or emotionally) upbringing among boys, who then become boyfriends, husbands, and fathers and pass the same behaviours on to their girlfriends, wives, and sons. Breaking those cycles can be hard, good therapy can definitely help, and they themselves would probably benefit from processing all the trauma they don't realise they carry in a professional setting.

And the callousness and selfishness and cruelty that we're all taught is bad for us. It's bad for our mental health and that of those around us. Little children bully each other in school because they've picked it up at home.

As much as the concept of healthy is useful or not, would you say that's healthy? Probably not. Would you say there's something deeply wrong with them? Probably.

But we hesitate to call that mentally ill, and for good reason. Because often, people who are mentally ill in a way that deviates from the norm, are prime targets for violence from these "normal" people. I.e. autism is known to make you more compassionate and morally upstanding (researchers call it a "deficit in flexibility" or some terrifying euphemism), and that often gets us bullied.

So we don't want to lump the cruel, selfish sadists that dominate society in with their differently mentally ill victims. We don't want to use terms that are, by mainstream society, largely used to describe outcasts and apply those terms to their oppressors. There's too much collateral damage and too little effect.

But what else do you do? It's clear that cruelty and selfishness are the baseline in this society, but what do you call that? "Normal" is wrong, too; this behaviour wasn't always there, and it's been made worse by capitalism and exploitation. Sure, the standard of mental health, as it exists in practice, is such that a certain amount of cruelty and selfishness is expected, if not encouraged, but in theory, that's not what mental health should be.

So how do you talk about it? How do you talk about a society in which the average person is expected to have deeply disturbing amounts of violence in them, without describing it in terms that call it sick?

How do you say that most people are deeply, deeply sick, without dragging sick people into it who aren't hurting anyone?

This comes up every now and then when words like narcicissm and sociopathy are thrown around, and people step up and say, hey, there are people who are actually suffering with these diagnoses, who are seeking to better themselves, who are stigmatised just for having those words attached to them, and they want no part of this.

And they're right, too.

Everyone is right.

But what do you do about it? Short of rejecting and dismantling the entire concept of mental health and illness, which is something none of us can just do, not without the whole world helping.

And (this is where this post comes from), we as moderators are expected to decide this. We are expected to say "you are right, you are wrong".

What do you want me to tell people? This is above my pay grade. I can't tell someone "this phrasing is fine, stop complaining" when it does conflate people who suffer with the system that makes them suffer. But I can't tell someone "delete this" either, when they're right about why the system is how it is and about how it hurts people, but posted it using thoughtless wording.

So I have to find a middle ground. And because of how fedi meta works, I have to find that middle ground in a way that won't make people hold the entire instance responsible for a single post that one of our 13,000 users made. Because else, tomorrow's headline will be either "Eldritch Cafe defederated by A for censoring criticism of racism/transphobia/misogyny/capitalism" or "Eldritch Cafe defederated by B for allowing ableism/saneism".

(Slightly rephrased repost on public to remove references to a specific case)

#MastoMod #Moderation #FediMod

I have some thoughts about FOSS sustainability and burnout.

If we want projects to be a part of the commons to encourage the commons to join in, they need to be able to afford to.

TLDR: We need universal basic income. Our current systems can't cover everything.

If we want to prevent maintainer burnout, we need better support structures. Which isn't going to happen with anymore Orgs set up specially.

http://onepict.com/20240409-sustain.html