Interesting Links for 22-04-2020

[andrewducker]

Deaths from coronavirus in the UK 40% higher than previously reported

(tags:uk pandemic death )

How awful men push women out of fandoms

(tags:fandom men OhForFucksSake abuse )

'Just not true' we're too lazy for farm work, say frustrated UK applicants

(tags:farming UK jobs )

Turns out Stockholm Syndrome is nonsense made up to discredit a woman.

(tags:OhForFucksSake women psychology abuse )

The mother of Arthur Schopenhauer writing a letter to every single dude on Reddit.

(tags:funny intelligence men )

FactCheck: are ethnic minority coronavirus patients more likely to die?

(tags:virus race )

Internal British imperialism and the fens of Eastern England

(tags:UK history )

A UK Museum Challenged Bored Curators Worldwide to Share the Creepiest Objects in Their Collections.

(tags:horror history museum uk )

The best way of keeping track of lockdown

(tags:time funny pandemic viaSwampers )

How Britain's 999 service really deals with keypresses

(tags:emergency phones UK )

Comments

Stockholm Syndrome is nonsense

[claudeb]

Yes! yes! I always thought it was an iffy concept at best, and said as much through fiction and non-fiction alike; the last time in a blog post that went like this:

Which reminds me that I spent years exploring the concept of freedom in my stories, and no matter how I looked at it, one conclusion imposed itself every time: there is no freedom without belonging. If you don't belong anywhere, that doesn't make you free, but adrift. Conversely, if you belong where you are, are you really a prisoner? It's not like you'd leave even if the door was wide open.

This, by the way, is why I find the Stockholm Syndrome a dubious notion at best. It's predicated on a gung-ho conception of freedom that only flies in Hollywood movies. And we all know what happens every time a certain world superpower tries to force this brand of "freedom" on other, older countries.

Take that, armchair psychologists!

[jack]

Huh. I am incredibly depressed but in retrospect not surprised about that origin of Stockholm syndrome. There are so many things that happened like that :(

But I am surprised that it's not a recognised phenomenon. Bonding to people with immediate authority over you is pretty widespread in human brains. People just tend to do that! And yet, it would make perfect sense if that was an excellent (deliberate or inadvertent) survival strategy in the short term, but did cause other problems later. Lots of things are like that: a lot of PTSD may be hyper-awareness of risks in situation where that's useful, but which lingers when it would be better to be able to adjust out of it.

[nancylebov]

Not exactly Stockholm Syndrome: Betrayal Trauma, a deep dive into evidence that people are more likely to forget abuse if it's imposed by someone the victim is dependent on.

The Fens

[anef]

Francis Pryor has written an excellent book about the history and archaeology of the fens, which M gave me for my birthday. We heard him talk at last year's Wimpole History Festival, at which he said he fully expected the fens to be flooded due to climate change, and hoped that it would be managed responsibly. Small hope with the current people in charge.

There were probably about 100 people in the tent, and he said that when he had been driving around he had seen small red signs attached to signposts with ER on them. He asked if anyone knew what that meant. One woman put her hand up and said "Well I know because I live in Florida, and they mean Evacuation Route".

How awful men push women out of fandoms

[jducoeur]

*Sigh*. I remember the days when I naively believed that Geeks were the Good Guys. But I've seen this sort of ghastly story crop up in pretty much every geekery I touch (and there are many of them). It's unnerving to realize the amount of slime hiding under the rocks, and how universal this sort of misogynistic crap is. (And how much it's enabled by the Geek Social Fallacies...)