Swift-Godzisz is among the 1 in 3 adults in the United States who have suffered from religious trauma at some point in their life, according to a 2023 study published in the Socio-Historical Examination of Religion and Ministry Journal. That same study suggests up to 1 in 5 U.S. adults currently suffer from major religious trauma symptoms.

Religious trauma occurs when an individual’s religious upbringing has lasting adverse effects on their physical, mental or emotional well-being, according to the Religious Trauma Institute. Symptoms can include guilt, shame, loss of trust and loss of meaning in life. While religious trauma hasn’t officially been classified as a mental disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), there is debate among psychiatrists about whether that should change.

Experts say LGBTQ people — who represent more than 7% of the U.S. population, according to a 2023 Gallup poll — experience religious trauma at disproportionate rates and in unique ways. Very little research has been done in this field, but a 2022 study found that LGBTQ people who experience certain forms of religious trauma are at increased risk for suicidality, substance abuse, homelessness, anxiety and depression. And as political animus toward the LGBTQ community intensifies ahead of the 2024 presidential election, many queer people say their pain is resurfacing.

I actually want to aggregate several articles from the last couple of days, for good reason. Let's hope the mods understand:

Biden says he is pushing for six-week Gaza pause

China Calls on Israel to Halt Military Operations in Gaza as Soon as Possible

Macron calls for 'lasting ceasefire' in Gaza

German foreign minister heads to Israel to urge for ceasefire as IDF prepares to enter Rafah

Egypt, Slovenia call for immediate ceasefire in Gaza

UK Foreign Secretary calls for ‘immediate pause in the fighting’

Notice that even countries that have taken a favorable position towards Israel have asked for a ceasefire in the last couple of days. This is due to the imminent Israeli attack on Rafah, where most of Gazan displaced population is currently located, which to any rational observer is a giant warning that we may soon see a catastrophe.

Rafah’s 1 million refugees fear Israeli onslaught after night of bombardment

[ I would have liked to link to an article that relates both the latest diplomatic moves by so many countries and what's just about to happen, but unfortunately the only one I have is in Spanish, so I'm trying to do this is whatever way the community's rules allow. Please consider the possibility of allowing news aggregations in the same post. ]

Allow me to aggregate plenty of news in the same post for a good reason. Heads of State, of government and ministers of plenty of countries though the world have urged Israel to pause hostilities during the last few days, including many that have positioned with them during the last few months.

Biden says he is pushing for six-week Gaza pause

China Calls on Israel to Halt Military Operations in Gaza as Soon as Possible

Macron calls for 'lasting ceasefire' in Gaza

German foreign minister heads to Israel to urge for ceasefire as IDF prepares to enter Rafah

Egypt, Slovenia call for immediate ceasefire in Gaza

UK Foreign Secretary calls for ‘immediate pause in the fighting’

The reason for this is that everyone who is taken a hard look at the situation is well aware that the next move declared by Israel is going to have catastrophic dimensions: if they attack and invade Rafah, the Gazan city where the immense majority of displaced population has ended up, we'll see the death of tens of thousands of civilians in a very short time, to the point that even Israeli allies might have difficulty justifying it.

Rafah’s 1 million refugees fear Israeli onslaught after night of bombardment

Cross-post from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/13765975 at Games@itjust.works (No idea how to properly link to the community)

Palworld has brought back a Pandora's Box that Pokemon let open in Black/White: Does Team Plasma have a point? Is the player in Pokemon/Palworld an evil entity just for playing?

Some preliminary context for those unaware. Pokemon Black/White's version of an evil team was Team Plasma, which argued that Pokemon trainers were evil for capturing Pokemon and forcing them to fight alongside them. While the game gave us the character of N, who is honest and sincere in his ideas and intentions, Team Plasma is presented as an hypocritical boogeyman that wants to force all other trainers to free their Pokemon, but secretly this is only a ploy to make sure no one can oppose them when they attempt to grab power for themselves.

Palworld has its own take on the idea: out of the different hostile factions, we find early on the Free Pal Alliance, which similarly argues that capturing pals and forcing them to do your bidding is evil, and we find again that their leader really commits to the idea, but her underlings are constantly attacking pals in the wild and sometimes even putting them in cages.

Perhaps surprisingly, the Pokemon fanbase was very defensive of this idea, often repeating the arguments provided by the games that captured Pokemon like the companionship anyway, dismissing the fact that wild Pokemon violently resist being captured unless you force them into submission to accept the Pokeball. The fact that you forcibly push them into a situation where their previous freedom to choose not to associate with you gets overwritten by a newfound willingness to obey means that they're being effectively brainwashed - if we were to apply our real life standards to this situation we would say without a doubt that the situation is exploitative and we're wiping our ass with the idea of consent. Palworld is even more "in your face" about this, given that the brainwashing mechanic of Pokeballs/spheres does not only work on the mons, but on humans as well. The general reaction of the Palworld community seems to be acknowledging that it's fucked up, but nonetheless jumping straight to the fact that the Free Pal Alliance are hypocrites as a whole or even calling them a parody of PETA.

My position here is: should these games even address the ethical dilemma? Once you put the ethics into the game's narrative, the designers are basically forced into going to "Yes, but" territory, since acknowledging the ethical issue leads you to the conclusion that the game only allows you to play as a morally dubious character at best, but given that that would be unwise from a marketing pov (at least for Game Freak), the narrative ultimately has to twist the argument into some sort of fallacy (The Pokemon actually want to be captured/The Free Pal Alliance is full of hypocrites anyway), which in my opinion is actually the heinous design decision, since you're pushing the player into twisting the moral dilemma in a way, thus training moral hypocrisy, rather than the much healthier position "Yes, capturing Pokemon/Pals is evil, but it's a game so no actual sentient creature is being harmed".

Both Pokemon Black/White and Palworld hint at the idea of human-Pokemon/Pal association out of free will through the character of N and the Free Pal Alliance, who do not capture their creatures, but rather they choose to cooperate with them out of real free will, but this option is mechanically impossible for the player (save, arguably, for rare exceptions where Pokemon freely join you through through scripted events). This ends up cementing the ludonarrative dissonance where the player has to justify themselves into thinking that what they're doing is morally acceptable, despite being presented with actually ethical in-lore alternatives that they just do not have access to. It is understandable that, from a game design perspective, the Pokemon/Palworld developers do not want to spend significant effort into reworking the mechanics of Pokeballs/spheres, which are already effectively fun for their gameplay loops, but that leads them into the position where Team Plasma and the Free Pal Alliance have to become caricatures of their actual ideas, which on the other hand is a waste for their respective lores.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed my rambling. My Chikipis have already laid all the eggs I need for baking cakes, so I'm off to butchering them for meat, bye.

Palworld has brought back a Pandora's Box that Pokemon let open in Black/White: Does Team Plasma have a point? Is the player in Pokemon/Palworld an evil entity just for playing?

Some preliminary context for those unaware. Pokemon Black/White's version of an evil team was Team Plasma, which argued that Pokemon trainers were evil for capturing Pokemon and forcing them to fight alongside them. While the game gave us the character of N, who is honest and sincere in his ideas and intentions, Team Plasma is presented as an hypocritical boogeyman that wants to force all other trainers to free their Pokemon, but secretly this is only a ploy to make sure no one can oppose them when they attempt to grab power for themselves.

Palworld has its own take on the idea: out of the different hostile factions, we find early on the Free Pal Alliance, which similarly argues that capturing pals and forcing them to do your bidding is evil, and we find again that their leader really commits to the idea, but her underlings are constantly attacking pals in the wild and sometimes even putting them in cages.

Perhaps surprisingly, the Pokemon fanbase was very defensive of this idea, often repeating the arguments provided by the games that captured Pokemon like the companionship anyway, dismissing the fact that wild Pokemon violently resist being captured unless you force them into submission to accept the Pokeball. The fact that you forcibly push them into a situation where their previous freedom to choose not to associate with you gets overwritten by a newfound willingness to obey means that they're being effectively brainwashed - if we were to apply our real life standards to this situation we would say without a doubt that the situation is exploitative and we're wiping our ass with the idea of consent. Palworld is even more "in your face" about this, given that the brainwashing mechanic of Pokeballs/spheres does not only work on the mons, but on humans as well. The general reaction of the Palworld community seems to be acknowledging that it's fucked up, but nonetheless jumping straight to the fact that the Free Pal Alliance are hypocrites as a whole or even calling them a parody of PETA.

My position here is: should these games even address the ethical dilemma? Once you put the ethics into the game's narrative, the designers are basically forced into going to "Yes, but" territory, since acknowledging the ethical issue leads you to the conclusion that the game only allows you to play as a morally dubious character at best, but given that that would be unwise from a marketing pov (at least for Game Freak), the narrative ultimately has to twist the argument into some sort of fallacy (The Pokemon actually want to be captured/The Free Pal Alliance is full of hypocrites anyway), which in my opinion is actually the heinous design decision, since you're pushing the player into twisting the moral dilemma in a way, thus training moral hypocrisy, rather than the much healthier position "Yes, capturing Pokemon/Pals is evil, but it's a game so no actual sentient creature is being harmed".

Both Pokemon Black/White and Palworld hint at the idea of human-Pokemon/Pal association out of free will through the character of N and the Free Pal Alliance, who do not capture their creatures, but rather they choose to cooperate with them out of real free will, but this option is mechanically impossible for the player (save, arguably, for rare exceptions where Pokemon freely join you through through scripted events). This ends up cementing the ludonarrative dissonance where the player has to justify themselves into thinking that what they're doing is morally acceptable, despite being presented with actually ethical in-lore alternatives that they just do not have access to. It is understandable that, from a game design perspective, the Pokemon/Palworld developers do not want to spend significant effort into reworking the mechanics of Pokeballs/spheres, which are already effectively fun for their gameplay loops, but that leads them into the position where Team Plasma and the Free Pal Alliance have to become caricatures of their actual ideas, which on the other hand is a waste for their respective lores.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed my rambling. My Chikipis have already laid all the eggs I need for baking cakes, so I'm off to butchering them for meat, bye.

Crosspost from Reddit

The article collects the reactions of representatives from multiple countries to the provisional ruling, including South Africa, Israel, the US and some other Western and Muslim countries.

I will take no questions, thank you.

Monotropism is a theory of autism that posits that the main functional characteristic of autism is a cognitive configuration that prefers to have less channels of attention. Despite the fact that there's very little discussion about it, it is incredibly consistent regarding what we know about autism, and it might help us understand ourselves a little better.

According to this theory, autistic brains are better wired to pour as many resources as possible in fewer tasks to focus of attention on, in contrast to allistic brains that would prefer to distribute resources among more different tasks at the same time.^1^

How well does this theory in more concrete aspects of life? Let's use communication as an example. People typically use plenty of tools to communicate: verbal language, tonality, hand and facial gestures, etc. If you were to define these as physical problems, this is, tasks that must be approached and worked through by a cognitive mechanism through material means, working according to algorithms of some sort, each of these tasks would have to be separated into individual problems, along with other functions such as coordinating the information gained through each of these processes to build a somewhat coherent whole that allows you to communicate back. If your brain works faster through individual tasks, but cannot handle as many tasks at the same time, it will have a tendency towards ignoring the least useful ones.^2^

If you'd prefer a more down-to-earth metaphor, imagine communication is a card game where polytropic players are receiving one card of each category (verbal language, hand gestures, facial expression, etc.) each round, while monotropic players receive as many cards each round, but they can only belong to one category. Naturally, the monotropic player is heavily incentivized to choose verbal language, because that's the main pillar of communication for contemporary human beings. If you were to give this player the form of a human child, you'd get a kid that uses language with a lot of precision and is probably using more technical words than you'd expect at their age, but doesn't look at your face and often has a very unchanging tone. You can even link this with the double empathy problem, and argue that, since communication is a cooperative two-way problem (problem understood as a task to solve), information flows better when both players are using the same channels of communication in similar intensities (this is: using more technical language isn't that useful if the other person doesn't understand it; using facial gestures isn't useful if the other person isn't looking at your face).

Let's get more practical. If the theory is correct, it would likely follow that the very first thing you have to do in order to prevent cognitive delays in autistic babies and children would be to reduce the sensory complexity of the environment. Choosing where to focus your attention is a cognitive task, which is easily understood when you compare how capable of reading you are in your living room in comparison to a disco, where your brain has to work on filtering the music, the conversations, and the lights. If someone's brain prefers to focus on as few tasks as possible, putting them at a place with plenty of noise and lights will collapse the resources of the brain, hindering their development in an optimistic scenario or even provoking trauma in one of the worst ones.

Note that these previous paragraphs of mine are built as narratives. The site https://monotropism.org/ explains the theory at a divulgative level, references the researchers behind it and some relevant papers, and proposes some practical avenues to improve the lives of autistic people by respecting these different cognitive needs and preferences from the experience of people who have worked with the theory at a scientific level - but it should also be mentioned that monotropism has, unfortunately, received very little attention in comparison to previous theories ( mind-blindness , extreme male brain ) that had very little evidence and have since been proven as bullshit, and therefore there's relatively little research on it despite its apparent solid predictive capacity.^3^

Does any of this ring a bell to you? Can you recall experiences that could be explained through monotropism?

1: Because virtually no person focuses all their attention in one single cognitive process at the same time, and no single person places infinitesimally small amounts of attention into an infinite number of tasks, so I think it'd be more appropriate to talk about monotropism-leaning and polytropism-leaning minds.

2: While the human brain is not a computer, the physical infrastructure of the human mind is the brain, and in order to fulfill specific tasks, it must be able to compute the solution to problems in a material way, even if that material way is immensely different from how contemporary computers work.

3: It might also be noted that, as far as I'm aware, the theory of monotropism would explain autism at a functional level, but not yet at a physical one. This is, while monotropism could serve as a central piece to explain fundamental practical aspects of the lives of autistic people, there would yet not be an explanation on what's the specific neurological difference between the brains of autistic and allistic people.