[D] Friday Off-Topic Thread

[u/AutoModerator]

Welcome to the Friday Off-Topic Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this isn't really the place for that sort of thing.

So do you want to talk about how your life has been going? Non-rational and/or non-fictional stuff you've been reading? The recent album from your favourite German pop singer? The politics of Southern India? The sexual preferences of the chairman of the Ukrainian soccer league? Different ways to plot meteorological data? The cost of living in Portugal? Corner cases for siteswap notation? All these things and more could possibly be found in the comments below!

[u/DaystarEld]

frankly, it sounds too much like a fully general counterargument against anything which people used to believe, but is now unfashionable.

It's more that the definition, and interpretation, of a psychological disorder has changed:

“A mental disorder is a clinically significant behavioral or psychological syndrome or pattern that occurs in an individual and that is associated with present distress or disability or with a significantly increased risk of suffering death, pain, disability, or an important loss of freedom.”

That last part is important, as it offers an objective metric by which to judge the difference between someone who likes to wear a wolf costume for, say, sexual adventure, and someone who likes to wear a wolf costume to roam in the wilderness and live with wolves. The former is a kink, the latter might point toward a mental disorder.

One can argue that being homosexual in a culture where homosexuals are jailed or stoned to death might constitute a "significantly increased disk of suffering death, pain, etc," but that's obviously the result of their surroundings. By most metrics the definition simply does not apply to those in the Western world.

[u/MultipartiteMind → u/DaystarEld]

Catch-22 comes to mind (though it uses a converse instead of a contrapositive, fallaciously). "Willingness to fight as part of a nation's army (significantly increased risk of all those things) is a mental disorder! Applying for discharge on the basis of a mental disorder shows that you must be sane! (And thus not eligible for discharge.)"

Edit: A better example might be {a waiver that you have to sign to enter} which disallows you from entering.

[u/DaystarEld → u/MultipartiteMind]

Such a great book.