FROM this week’s news ON: society generally, and broader issues [Note: Content Warning - may be links to distressing reports on this topic. Reader discretion is advised]

Note: CONTENT WARNING - some of this content is about upsetting, disturbing or triggering events & attitudes. Seek competent help - including professional - if you need it. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised that linked articles may contains names and/or images of deceased people. READER CAUTION IS RECOMMENDED! For anyone distressed by anything in this post, or for any other reason considering seeking support, resources are available in Australia here, here, and here. In other nations, you will have to do an Internet search using terms such as “mental health support - <your nation>” (which, for instance, may lead to this, this, and this, in the USA, or this, this, and this, in France [biased towards English-language - my apologies]), or perhaps try https://www.befrienders.org/. 

Note: in my “from the news” posts, quotes are shown italicised and blue, my comments are in a different shade of blue, and “good” items are shown in green. I have loosely grouped the posts where such seemed reasonable, but that is subjective (i.e., my opinion - others are free to disagree), and challenging, as some posts belong in multiple “groups”.

Frrom this week’s news on society generally, and broader issues (note: I may continue to add links for a few days, possibly up to a week, after these are published):

• “EU countries greenlight landmark new AI laws”   https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20240202-eu-countries-greenlight-landmark-new-ai-laws   “The European Union's 27 member states on Friday approved landmark rules on regulating artificial intelligence, passing a key last hurdle after tough negotiations to the very end”   Whether this is any good - and how much - at protecting people and the right to reality or not depends on the detail   See also   “Alan Kohler: Social media is rewiring humanity’s central nervous system”   https://www.thenewdaily.com.au/opinion/2024/02/05/alan-kohler-ai-rewiring-humanity         Also see    “Solving the supermarket: why Coles just hired US defence contractor Palantir”   https://theconversation.com/solving-the-supermarket-why-coles-just-hired-us-defence-contractor-palantir-222883   “Yet the data inevitably excludes significant social, financial and environmental information. The sweat of workers struggling to pack at pace, the belt-tightening of consumers struggling to make ends meet, and the struggle of farmers to survive unexpected climate impacts will go untracked.   ...   By placing Palantir at the heart of its operations, Coles quietly smuggles in several key assumptions: that food is a commodity to be optimised, that paying for labor is a risk rather than a responsibility, and that data can capture everything of importance. At a time of increased food insecurity, Australians should strongly question whether this is the direction one of our major grocery providers should take”  
  

• “Why are so many Australians taking antidepressants?”   https://theconversation.com/why-are-so-many-australians-taking-antidepressants-221857   “Overprescribing antidepressants is a symptom of our lack of attention to the social determinants of mental health. It’s depressing to be poor (especially when your neighbours seem rich), unemployed or in an awful workplace, inadequately housed or fearful of family violence. It’s wrong to locate the problem in the individual when it belongs to society”  
  

• “No ‘easy’ weight loss: don’t overlook the social cost of anti-obesity drugs”   https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00329-9   “Ideas of diet and exercise as the ‘best’ way to lose weight could stigmatise people taking ... drugs that affect appetite. Lessons from weight-loss surgery reveal ways to help”   As the article points out, weight is a social issue - discrimination is a major problem   See also   “No more BMI, diets or ‘bad’ foods: why changing how we teach kids about weight and nutrition is long overdue”   https://theconversation.com/no-more-bmi-diets-or-bad-foods-why-changing-how-we-teach-kids-about-weight-and-nutrition-is-long-overdue-222605  

• “Why the mental cost of a STEM career can be too high for women and people of colour”   https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00324-0   This has cropped up in a few formats in different situations - for instance, last year there was a report that living with racism on a daily basis created trauma akin to that of soldiers in combat - and the harmful effects of discrimination on many minority groups (e.g., also different gender identities, neurodiverse people, and gender diverse people) has been long known (decades at least). This article includes:   “Allostatic load is a term coined by physiological psychologist Eliot Stellar and neuroendocrinologist Bruce McEwen, one of my mentors. It describes how chronic adverse physical, psychological or social situations — including racial and gender-based oppression — cause sustained activation of the body and brain’s stress response, resulting in cumulative wear and tear. Increased allostatic load is associated with depression and anxiety, which can impair motivation”   I can, from nearly half a century in the engineering profession in several minority groups, confirm that. I CAN ALSO CONFIRM THE BENEFITS OF BUILDING COMMUNITY - this is what I refer to as network and nurture when discussing the FIVE stress responses at   https://gnwmythrsglossary.blogspot.com/2023/12/the-five-stress-responses.html      See also   “What Is Allostatic Load?”   https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-allostatic-load-5680283      “What Does 'Allostatic Load' Mean for Your Health?”   https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/presence-mind/202010/what-does-allostatic-load-mean-your-health   “According to the allostatic load model, the effects of stress are cumulative”      “Allostatic Load”   https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/allostatic-load   “Allostatic load is defined as the perturbation of several physiological systems toward consistently high or low or non-adaptive states even when stressors remit, whose combined perturbations lead to wear and tear on the body”      “Allostatic Load and Its Impact on Health: A Systematic Review”   https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32799204/      “Allostatic Load”   https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Allostatic_load&oldid=1187244176      

• “The Blue Dot Effect”   https://m.youtube.com/shorts/kBz5EdBhaYk   This covers an interesting aspect of bias   

• “Australians love to talk about a ‘fair go’. Here’s what it meant before we became a nation”   https://theconversation.com/australians-love-to-talk-about-a-fair-go-heres-what-it-meant-before-we-became-a-nation-222154   “These findings highlight that the fair go originally meant different things to different people, and in different contexts. In our recent research, we show that 19th-century uses of the fair go can be organised into six distinct meanings. These reflect the fact that the words “fair” and “go” have multiple meanings associated with both “justice” and “strength”.   ...   These different interpretations are alive and well today, and can be used to critically assess public policies on contentious issues such as housing affordability and immigration.”  
  

My links for activism post may aid any activism you may decide to do on any/all of these. If you do, don’t get too fixated on specific instances of problems - important though they may well be: take a moment to also consider the broader issues these incidents and groups of incidents may suggest/reveal.

 

Assumptions / basis 

In writing this, I have assumed / started from the following: 

• this blog states quite clearly that it is about political and human rights matters, including lived experience of problems, and thus I will assume readers are reasonable people who have noted the content warning in the post header;

Possible flaws 

Where I can, I will try to highlight possible flaws / issues you should consider:

• there may be flawed logical arguments in the above: to find out more about such flaws and thinking generally, I recommend Brendan  Myers’ free online course “Clear and Present Thinking”; 
  
• I could be wrong - so keep your thinking caps on, and make up your own minds for yourself.
  

 

If they are of any use of interest, the activism information links from my former news posts are available in this post. 

 

If you appreciated this post, please consider promoting it - there are some links below.

Remember: we need to be more human being rather than human doing, and all misgendering is an act of active transphobia/transmisia that puts trans+ lives at risk & accept that all insistence on the use of “trans” as a descriptor comes with commensurate use of “cis” as a descriptor to prevent “othering”.

Copyright © Kayleen White 2016-2024     NO AI   I do not consent to any machine learning aka Artificial Intelligence (AI), generative AI, large language model, machine learning, chatbot, or other automated analysis, generative process, or replication program to reproduce, mimic, remix, summarise, or otherwise  replicate any part of this post or other posts on this blog via any means. Typo’s may be inserrted deliberately to demonstrate this is not an AI product.     Otherwise, fair and reasonable use is accepted under Creative Commons 4.0 on an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike basis   https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/