#Social Control

[nando161mando]

[sergeant-macho-nacho]

Just a reminder. One of, if not the main reason that many people dont want highspeed rail in the United States is the same reason many are opposed to affordable housing and healthcare.

Equality.

A highspeed rail system that ran along the Interstate would allow millions of people economic freedom and opportunities that comes with choosing your employer and housing from essentially anywhere in the country.

The control freaks would absolutely hate it and is why they fight against its construction.

[enbycrip]

Big thing I’ve got from my study of disability in the early modern period in Britain, including dissertation research?

Poor relief that gives money out to the poorest people is probably the most benefit per amount of money, but it’s *massively*, *massively* resented by wealthier people. Not only because it’s redistribution of wealth, given it was usually raised by local taxation, but because it takes both control and opportunities to benefit from them.

The big thing money gives is options, choice, and freedom. Wealthier people value having that and massively resent poorer people having it. They much prefer giving charity to paying their taxes because a) giving charity lets them keep control of the money, even at a remove, and b) they usually find a way to benefit more directly from it.

This is basically why we have the current social security systems we have, where so much more is spent on control and policing of the behaviour of poor and disabled people than actually helping. Universal benefits were popular when the systems were set up for a variety of reasons, including reducing resentment by wealthier people, but largely because means-testing is *more expensive* and *less efficient*than universal benefits.

Wealthier people screaming for more means-testing are doing so because they prefer to have more money spent on tormenting people who are struggling with the conditions that those wealthier people create and maintain because it benefits them than that money actually reaching them.

That’s not how they parse it in their heads, I’m sure, but it *is* the reality of the situation.

[all-things-are-nothing-to-me]

Some anarchist anti-psychiatry writings.

[unwelcome-ozian]

[360degreesasthecrowflies]

New Wild West? Political Debate Online in 2025

What's the scariest thing about the rightward shift of billionaire-owned media is the shift to lawlessness.

You can't really report things to any authority any more because there is no reasonable authority that exists in an agreed shared reality with you.

I was banned from contributing to the uk political reddit today because I criticised someone else, who was being racist and posting lies, for being racist and posting lies.

Apparently, criticising others is against the rules.

Posting lies is not against the rules. And apparently, as long as you aren't using explicit slurs, neither is being racist.

I'm not unfamiliar with this. When I went to Catholic school, anti-gay bullying was explicitly encouraged by the administration as pro-Catholic. (So much for turning the other cheek...)

What frustrates me is that, and this may itself become a period piece-

Once upon a time we had tacitly agreed rules of engagement in the public sphere.

Debates didn't include people who told outright lies in order to 'win'. The definition of winning was convincing others to your position; not winning on technicality by silencing all opposition by any means necessary up to and including removing them from speaking altogether.

This is literally censorship of wrong thought which is exactly what rightwingers claim to oppose.

Is winning on technicality worth it? Apparently yes. Apparently, if you can't actually win the argument, just forcing submission is acceptable.

Well, where does that stop?

[theplateaus]

OpenAI IRL. Did you know that expressions of feelings by ChatGPT are technically forbidden? This is what making art on an OpenAI platform feels like.

[melissalabarge]

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[shldbwriting]

Some threats wear suits. Some silences are staged. And some of us choose to speak anyway. If you’ve ever been warned, watched, or told to “move on” when the truth hadn’t even been told yet—this one’s for you. “When Silence is the Goal” is live. #WorkplaceRetaliation #SpeakingUp #StorytellingAsWitness #EmotionalResilience #PowerSilenceControl #LinkedInSurveillance #TruthTelling #CeaseAndDesist #PublicVoice #NotAloneNotPowerless #IWontTakeThisStandingDown

[recsspecs]

Modern governments seek to persuade us to behave well by means other than compulsion. Often, the carrot replaces the stick.

Raymond Wacks Law A Very Short Introduction

[kalifissure]

This episode deeply investigates Peter Thiel and his connection to the Musk/DOGE infiltration of the digital infrastructure.

TechnoFascism is finally arriving.

[spaceintruderdetector]

back by popular demand

Society of the Spectacle (Donald Nicholson-Smith Translation) : Guy Debord : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

[thefreethoughtprojectcom]

With the advent of AI generative technology, deep fakes, voice synthesizers, we can likely expect a great flood of “fake news” sold to us as real.

Read More: https://thefreethoughtproject.com/fake-news/the-rise-of-the-false-false-flag-and-curated-narratives-for-social-control

#TheFreeThoughtProject

[luffymonkey1227]

Autonomy Denied: The Unseen Parallels Between Trans Bodies and Pet Bodies in a Culture of Control

Introduction: The Illusion of Choice In contemporary society, we often speak of choice as a hallmark of freedom—an indicator of progress, agency, and moral evolution. Yet, when we examine how certain groups and beings are treated, we uncover a deeply contradictory truth: many are denied choice altogether. This denial takes different forms across different contexts, but its mechanism remains…

[recursive-rupture]

"My neighborhood was a place of unrest. I lived right down the block from Tompkins Square Park, where the police attempted to enforce a midnight curfew, in 1988. The park sits in the heart of Lower East Side, a volatile neighborhood with a long, radical history of resistance. So, when a police megaphone ordered everyone out of the park one hot summer night, we all refused to leave. The crowd just stood there, chanting: "Whose fucking park? OUR fucking park!" Then without warning, riot police charged into the crowd on horseback. Screaming and chaos ensued. People reacted by throwing bottles, bricks, and firecrackers at the cops. I took it all personally. This was the park I'd grown up in... my playground as a child. I'd never seen this level of violence firsthand - I saw the police just cracking people's skulls open and galloping into the crowd - helicopters hovering above tenements - an unforgettable, apocalyptic scene. I saw my friends and neighbors fighting against the helmeted police - rebelling against the landlords... and it was inspiring as hell. Oh, it was picturesque indeed: nocturnal hordes of uniformed men on horseback, swinging shiny batons. I immediately began working on my next street poster, 'Police Riot', which was wheat-pasted on lampposts and walls throughout the neighborhood. Later I used this image in Flood!'s riot sequence. Ultimately, the band Rage Against the Machine used it as a CD cover."

Eric Drooker

{pictured: Police Riot, by Eric Drooker}

[medsocionwheels]

Compliance, per the two main approaches to medical sociology

Sociology in medicine is research that’s of interest to medical professionals, medical educators, medical scientists— things that are important to medicine as an institution.

Sociology of medicine tends to be research of interest to the general scientific field of sociology, not only sociologists who study matters of medicine, health, illness, healthcare, and disability. Importantly, it is not that medicine is simply disinterested in sociology of medicine, the institution of medicine sometimes has a vested interest in silencing or arguing against sociology of medicine. Sociology of medicine may not be useful to medical professionals, but if, for example, sociology of medicine is critiquing medical practice, as is often the case, it might move beyond useless to being perceived as offensive.

To further explore the difference between sociology in versus of medicine, let’s take the issue of compliance.

From the medical perspective, patient compliance is vital for successful medical practice and treatment. if your patient is not listening to you–for example, if they’re not taking their medication, and that medication is supposed to get them better, than you are going to have a much more difficult time treating that patient, and thus, a much harder time doing your job, than if the patient “complied” with your treatment plan. Same thing if your patient won’t have surgery. Well, if operating is the way that you do your job and the patient refuses, you cannot do your job as well. So, sociology in medicine would examine compliance with this medical perspective in mind. Sociology in medicine might investigate the barriers to patient compliance, and they might ask about these barriers in terms of patient behavior, asking something like "why are these patients non-compliant?" with the goal of identifying things that can be addressed to help patients better comply, so that medical professionals can have better chances of success when trying to do their jobs.

Now, moving to sociology of medicine—the greater field of sociology is interested in issues of power and inequality. When examining compliance in terms of power and inequality, we might look at something like physician control over patients, which would contribute to areas of sociology beyond medical sociology, such as the larger sociological literature on deviance and social control.

From this perspective, physicians offer something that patients cannot obtain on their own—prescription medications, surgery, imaging…these are all things that are considered both illegal and dangerous when obtained from non-credentialed entities. This means patients must be compliant to avoid severe consequences, like physical injury, disability, or even death. Healthcare providers hold power to help people feel better when they have few, if any, safe alternatives.

Instead of looking at compliance as inherently positive or necessary, we can critique the concept, and most importantly, the continued endorsement of compliance as “positive” and “necessary” by credentialed actors in medicine. So, sociology of medicine, similarly to sociology in medicine, may examine barriers to compliance, but because it does not assume compliance is necessary or helpful to the patient, it leaves room to explore the patient experience. Sociology of medicine can explore things like mistrust of medical professionals, experiences with bias and discrimination in the clinical encounter, and the patient’s understanding of a potential treatment as helpful versus their belief that the treatment is useless (independent of the science on said treatment’s effectiveness).

So, while sociology in medicine and sociology of medicine might both be interested in the question of “why do patients become noncompliant,” sociology in medicine might approach that question with the intent of identifying something that will lead to increased compliance, whereas sociology of medicine may approach the question in terms of medical harm, so not taking the assumption that compliance is positive, instead, taking the more skeptical view that compliance might be an exercise of power on the part of the healthcare provider over the patient and focusing on issues like the potential for patterns of exploitation and/or harm of certain groups of patients with shared characteristics. Sociology of medicine might ask whether healthcare providers, because they are powerful, are inherently good or right. Sociology in medicine would probably not ask this question at all, instead assuming the answer to be "yes"