Multifarious Threads

Youth Rights and Wrongs

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As a teenager and young adult, I used to be active in online youth rights advocacy. I wanted to see young people be treated like human beings, not their parents’ property. I was involved with the National Youth Rights Association from the ages of 17 to 21, but I left in frustration after growing tired of unchecked racism, misogyny, classism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, and xenophobia amongst some of the membership. I felt as though I was constantly on the defensive, as though I had to prove I was equally deserving of civil rights. One of the only people who actually managed to get banned from the NYRA forums for an extended period of time was an outright Nazi who adulated Hitler and ranted about the “Zionist-owned government.” If you managed not to be a Nazi, the erstwhile executive director would let you stay around in the interest of protecting the Open Marketplace of Ideas. In particular, misogyny, xenophobia, ableism, and transphobia went almost entirely unchecked. News flash: people defending behaviour-modification programmes, spewing vitriol about queer people, or claiming that women are inferior aren’t acting in good faith. They want to be monopolists in the market of ideas. In retrospect, the proliferation of unchecked bigotry on the NYRA forums feels rather like Twitter and Facebook nowadays. Free-speech absolutism can result in Nazis, alt-righters, and MRAs pushing everyone else away. It’s a textbook demonstration of Karl Popper’s tolerance paradox.

The youth rights movement didn’t just have a problem with proto-alt-righters and MRAs. There were plenty of people who hung out in youth rights spaces who made excuses for child molestation, calling it “youth liberation.” There are a few radical youth rights activists who repeatedly advocate for the “right” for adults to have sex with children and underage teenagers. It doesn’t take a lot of research to find out there’s a clear reason why society frowns upon so-called intergenerational sex, and it’s not because opponents of child molestation are a bunch of uptight prudes. When I was involved with NYRA, I remember seeing a fair number of adults in their 20s making sexual advances to younger teenagers. People routinely defended teachers who slept with their students. These people weren’t part of NYRA’s leadership and the forum moderators—including me—tried their best to shut down discussion of adult-child sex, but it was still a recurring problem.

Why do people make these arguments?

I suspect that many of these radical youth rights advocates were labelled precocious, gifted, or prodigies as children. Their atypical development unconsciously influences their attitudes toward children in general, even if typically developing children have radically different experiences. If you learned how to read at 3 years old, you may very well think that it’s reasonable to encourage 4-year-olds to sue their abusers; after all, since they knew how to do it, so should other children. If you followed politics intently at 10 years old, you may think that all 10-year-olds can understand political discourse geared toward typical adult audiences. If you had the same reading comprehension as an adult at 8 years old, you might think, “Hey, if I can understand this stuff, so can every other child.” This kind of reasoning leads them to think that allowing 7-year-olds to file lawsuits against adults who have molested them is a viable option for protecting them from harm. This is the same kind of justification that child abusers make to themselves: “She’s so mature for her age.” “He’s intelligent enough to get it.” Even if these advocates may not intend to sound like child molesters trying to rationalise their harmful acts, they end up using the same self-centred arguments. It’s the old “mental age” concept lurking underneath: if precocious children can consent to sexual acts, does that mean that adults with intellectual disabilities with more life experience cannot because of their lower “mental age”?

Of course, some of these molestation defenders could just be wannabe child abusers themselves. In any case, if you think Roy Moore, Michael Jackson, Kevin Spacey, and Jimmy Savile did nothing wrong, there’s probably something deeply flawed with your argument. On top of that, there are also organisations that actively lobby to discredit the narratives of child abuse survivors by labelling efforts to protect children from predators as “moral panics” or “hysteria.” One can oppose Perverted-Justice-style vigilantism and still advocate for children’s safety.

Child sexual abuse is an unambiguous moral ill. Couching the right of adults to molest children and adolescents with impunity in the cloak of youth rights is not youth liberation. Civil rights encompass both positive and negative freedoms—freedoms to and freedoms from—and children and adolescents have the right to avoid exploitation by self-serving adults.

The Socioeconomic Dimensions of Software Privacy on Android and Windows

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Big Tech’s indiscriminate data-harvesting practices are an ethical outrage in and of themselves, but systemic social inequality determines who is most affected by these practices. Microsoft’s and Google’s operating systems are installed on low-priced devices, but users pay with their data instead. (I focus on Microsoft and Google, rather than other companies like Facebook or Amazon, because you can avoid using Facebook or Amazon, but you can’t use a phone, tablet or computer without an operating system.)

Apple has made commitments to protecting users’ privacy, but Apple products have a relatively high entry cost. The cheapest MacBooks cost around $1000 new, and that’s just in the United States. New iPhones are similarly expensive, even with costs being distributed with a payment plan. Apple’s prices are even more prohibitive in other markets. MacOS, iOS and iPadOS can’t be run on non-Apple devices unless you go the Hackintosh route. In contrast, you can get a Windows PC or Chromebook for a few hundred dollars. Windows itself isn’t cheap, but the cost of the licence is built into the cheap PCs it’s installed on. That’s how Microsoft gained its market dominance in the first place: it licensed MS-DOS, and later Windows, to multiple computer manufacturers. Android phones are similarly affordable. Unfortunately, Google, and to a lesser extent Microsoft, have used their desktop and mobile operating systems to gather large amounts of data on their users. In the Global South, Android – and its rapacious data-collecting practices – rules. People who use Android devices as their sole means of accessing the internet are a captive audience for Google and device manufacturers that also install data-harvesting apps. Android Go, a lightweight version of Google’s flagship operating system, is explicitly geared towards people in lower-income countries.

To be fair, technically inclined users can install Linux on just about everything, but that requires the knowledge, experience and interest to install an alternative operating system. If you just want a computer to browse the internet, write documents, send email and use social media, the jump to Linux may be an insurmountable barrier. People can also buy used iPads, Macs and iPhones, but buying used devices is riskier than buying new ones, especially if they’re out of warranty. If you don’t have a lot of money, the consequences are higher if you make a risky financial decision. In most cases, the only clear choices are Windows or Android…and their concomitant privacy violations.

I’ve avoided Windows as a primary operating system for nine years. I flatly refuse to use Android. I exclusively use Apple devices, but if I couldn’t afford to do so, I’d install Linux on my computers and an alternative operating system on my phones. My avoidance of Android and Windows is a product of financial privilege and technical knowledge. Many other people typically have no other choice but to use Windows or Android if they can afford to own their own devices at all.

Coverage about the privacy violations that Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Amazon have focused on the ethical problems of unaccountable data-harvesting on its own, but haven’t examined this problem using a socioeconomic lens. This obscures one of the most significant problems with these companies’ use of customers’ data: people unable to opt out are going to be their primary sources of information. This is a form of technological class exploitation. Billion-dollar companies make obscene amounts of money by selling the data of people who can’t afford to opt out, or don’t know how. It’s a classic feature of unregulated capitalism, where profits always come before people. Low-income users may not buy first-party applications, high-end Windows versions or top-of-the-line phones, but they have plenty of data. Most of these captive customers will also put up with advertising if that means they can keep in touch with the people who matter most to them.

Technology should be affordable, accessible and inclusive, but users should have a reasonable expectation of privacy, too. Unaccountable exploitation by rich and powerful tech interests has caused poor and working-class people to pay for this accessibility with their data. Tech writers portray the shift from Android to iPhones, or Windows to Linux or Mac, as a painless transition without financial consequences, but that’s far from true. Jumping ship may be extremely risky or downright impossible. More coverage of unethical data-gathering practices must take into account the individual, regional and global socioeconomic factors that force people to use Android and Windows.

Goodies: More English Localisation Choices for MindNode

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This may only appeal to weird completists like me, but I’ve created an unofficial localisation of MindNode to use British spelling in the UI to match the rest of my operating system. It’s also to keep up with the times, since it’s increasingly common to offer at least two English variants. The US-only thing is kind of ’90s Microsoft.

Along with the obvious changes like colour and centre, I’ve changed ‘check’ to ‘tick’ when referring to selections. I’ve made unofficial localisations and edits to pre-existing localisations for several years, but this is the first time I’ve shared one!

I used MindNode 6.0 to create the text files. This applies specifically to the Mac version; I don’t know how to create custom translations for iPhone apps without jailbreaking. (I wish I could, though!) I can’t guarantee whether the text will match up well with previous versions.

Installation instructions

Go to the /Applications/ folder and find MindNode.app. Right- or Option-click, select ‘Show Package Contents’ from the contextual menu and double-click the Resources folder. Unzip this folder and place the included en_gb.lproj folder inside it. Authenticate your log-in credentials if the Finder asks you to.

If your Mac’s system language is set to English (United Kingdom) in System Preferences, then MindNode should display British English the next time it’s launched. If not, you can change your system language in System Preferences. Alternatively, you can download an app like App Language Switcher in the Mac App Store to change an app language individually, or change it via the command line using Terminal:

defaults write $(mdls -name kMDItemCFBundleIdentifier -raw /Applications/MindNode.app) AppleLanguages “(en_GB)”

Disclaimer

  • This is an UNOFFICIAL localisation. Install at your own risk! I don’t expect there to be any problems—it’s a standard way of adding custom languages to Mac applications—but you never know.
  • If I’ve missed any spellings or vocabulary, please let me know! While I’m pretty decent with English code-switching, I’m not perfect. I think I’ve caught the most blatant ones, though—all instances of ‘colour’ and the like should be written the British way now.
  • If you want to comment defending the wonders of American writing standards and the uselessness of British, Canadian or other variants, don’t waste your keystrokes. Offering a second choice doesn’t mean the first choice is wrong. If you don’t like it, don’t use it.

PTSD and the remnants of Cartesianism in psychological practice

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The view of trauma adopted in the DSM-V is a reflection of the Cartesian dualism that still permeates mainstream psychology. The diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, requires that a direct, physical threat to someone’s life occur; emotional abuse doesn’t seem to count, despite research studies indicating that emotional distress can exert the same effects as physical abuse. If emotional abuse results in the same biochemical responses as physical abuse or life-threatening accidents, then it should be included as a criterion for PTSD or other psychiatric disabilities that arise from stress or trauma. Limiting the aetiology to direct physical threats prevents survivors of emotional abuse or other forms of sustained maltreatment from receiving the help they need.

Drawing a bright line between the two seems entirely predicated on the idea that the mind and body are two separate entities. This kind of crude dualism reflected in the DSM is not in keeping with current neuroscientific findings. Rather, the states of the mind and the rest of the body work in concert with one another. For example, anxiety and depression lead to the increased production of stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline, which can ultimately overload the body and lead to a variety of adverse health consequences like stroke and heart disease (McEwen, 2005). The idea of a mind wholly separate from the rest of the body is an epiphenomenon of our cognition, not a tangible reality; while we may feel a separation between our thoughts and the rest of our body, the brain is still inextricable from the rest of our flesh, blood and bones. Our selfhood is immanent within the corporeal; it neither transcends it nor is reducible to it.

Admittedly, this frustration is deeply personal; I myself have PTSD symptoms from surviving years of emotional abuse and neglect, but if diagnosticians adhered strictly to the DSM, I couldn’t even be diagnosed with it. There is no official name for what I’ve gone through, even though the effects of this maltreatment still linger. Some psychologists and psychiatrists have suggested adding complex PTSD, or C-PSTD, to the DSM, but it hasn’t been added as of 2013. Leaving the scars of emotional trauma unnamed creates the potential for gaslighting, denial, and manipulation. While I’m not an unalloyed supporter of the medical model to name and identify trauma, I do think that we need ways to discuss what we’ve gone through as survivors in a systematic way. I hope the DSM-6 actually catches up with the literature and recognises the effects of long-term emotional trauma.

References

McEwen, B (2005). Stressed or stressed out: What is the difference? Journal of Psychiatry and Neuroscience 2006, 30(5).

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-V) (2013).

Hyphens: Get them right, professional writers.

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One of my pet peeves is the rampant omission of hyphens in professional writing. Note that I’m talking about professional writing: paid blog posts, newspapers, books, academic journal articles, marketing materials, policy briefs. I really couldn’t care less what you do in your social-media statuses or texts. If you’re writing for pay, though, it makes sense to be more careful about what you’re doing.

Professionally edited text in books, newspapers and magazines will almost always hyphenate phrases like five-year-old boy, small-government conservatives and well-known author. Using these hyphens makes your meaning clear. Leaving them out can confuse your readers because it’s not obvious how you’re grouping the adjectives.

Phrasal-adjective hyphenation is not dependent on the variant of English you use; British, American, Canadian and Australian style guides all recommend hyphenating phrasal adjectives. Look carefully at the hyphenation patterns in The Economist, The Washington Post or The Atlantic. (The Guardian is an outlier and only hyphenates phrasal adjectives in ambiguous cases or short phrases like three-hour wait.)

Examples include

  • well-known author
  • old-fashioned ideas
  • civil-rights advocates
  • eighty-year-old books (remember to use hyphens after both the number and the time word)
  • orange-faced, loud-mouthed politician

…Speaking of orange-faced, loud-mouthed politicians, this xenophobia- and conspiracy-theory-laden Trump tweet from 28 December 2018 shows an example of what not to do; he wrote “profit making operation” instead of the correct “profit-making operation.” (He also confused loose for lose, but that’s beyond the scope of this post…)

  • Note that hyphenation rules don’t apply to proper names if the name of an organisation or company omits the phrasal-adjective hyphen. The disability-rights organisation Self Advocates Being Empowered (SABE) come to mind. Since it’s a proper name, you shouldn’t add a hyphen; personal and organisational preferences supersede the usual rules.
  • You should also avoid hyphenating phrases that end in -ly, since it’s clear that they’re modifying the word that comes immediately after it. It’s a clearly defined phrase, not a clearly-defined phrase. If it were well-defined, however, it would take a hyphen.
  • This rule applies only to multi-word adjectives that come directly before a noun in most cases. You’d say a fifty-year-old woman, but the woman was fifty years old.

Am I perfect at this? Certainly not, mostly because I keep wondering whether I’m being too fussy by adhering strictly to this rule. I often wonder if I sound like a stuffed-shirt pedant when I follow rules too strictly; because of these worries, I’ll sometimes take liberties on social media to seem more approachable. If I’m writing professionally or editing someone else’s writing, however, my inner stickler comes out in force.

References (not exhaustive)

  • Bryan Garner (2016), Garner’s Modern English Usage, 4th Edition.
  • The Economist Style Guide, 11th Edition.
  • The Guardian Style Guide
  • Grammar and Style in British English
  • While Matthew Butterick’s Practical Typography was primarily intended to help make writers make good typographic choices, it does also cover punctuation from an American perspective. (The hyphenation rules he lists out are NOT US-specific, though.)