It's Always More Complicated

Docs doing AID in a unregulated system do not have the most pellucid of reputations (The great sperm heist: ‘They were playing with people’s lives’), but this guy was a particularly noxious instance: ‘Every time I find a new sibling, it’s like I’m ruining their life’: the fertility doctor who went rogue. Ugh.

***

And on the topic of copying, though in a rather different mode: Plagiarism Today Plagiarized in a Plagiarism Atonement Essay:

Bello, an author who admitted to plagiarizing in her now-cancelled debut novel, wrote an article about the experience and, in that article, included poor paraphrasing without attribution of an article that I wrote over a decade ago.

The changing meanings of radical objects: Josiah Wedgwood’s anti-slavery medallion:

It was this tension between the medallion’s radical history, and its problematic implications 200 years on, that sparked our research into this complex object.

I rather liked this piece on the way people have visceral nostalgic feelings of goodness about things which are (whatever they may have meant in the past) now not doing good: The Fireplace Delusion. I wonder how these sorts of feelings generalise - I think of people forcing food on other people against their will, or seeing rejection of it as a rejection of them/love/whatever - that at one time they did have a positive meaning but now the problems appear.

***

This possibly (because somehow this has me thinking about Norbert Elias' theories of The Civilising Process and how we're perhaps going through a set of changes that relate to that... 'nice people wear masks'....) links on (or not): Social mindfulness matters – for all of us:

Social mindfulness is defined as everyday acts of kindness towards strangers which have little or no cost to the individual but matter greatly for the collective. Social mindfulness measures the extent to which someone is considering the impact of one’s own behaviour on others.

And on systems which do not work as intended, and how one might achieve the desirable end aimed at: What the Fitness Industry Doesn’t Understand:

[Y]ou can’t just teach millions of children that exercise is painful, humiliating, or a punishment for their failures and expect them to swan into adulthood with healthy, moderate beliefs about their bodies.

It is, of course, not entirely logical that any of these things should have to be profitable in order to exist, or that people who want to provide these services should have to make the math work out on their own in order to do so. To make exercise instruction and equipment available for everyone, no matter their level of fitness or mobility, would be a public good—improving population health, reducing health-care costs, and making millions of people’s lives better. This is the type of thing that a functional modern society should endeavor to provide to its members, regardless of individual ability to pay. As Petrzela, the historian, pointed out to me, these services have been freely given to the public in the past. Before the private-sector fitness industry exploded in the 1980s, tax-funded recreation centers, youth sports leagues, and community pools were much more plentiful[.]