Re: Advice isn't enough

Now, if you'd known in advance that there was a threat to people in a specific building on a specific date, wouldn't you want to protect people from it?

Bad analogy.

If you warn, but cannot physically prevent people from going to the building, and they still go to the building, then you cannot responsibly be held accountable.

That will always be the problem. We cannot physically prevent someone from doing unsafe internet practices, nicklinking themselves to their real life identity, doing illegal stuff, or trusting the wrong people. Therefore, some will at some point.

If this is going to turn into an excessive anti-psychiatry place then I may as well leave, and you guys can go play with Hubbard or something.

Anti-psychiatry is not prevalent here. As a matter of fact, I can only think of Hierophant, Agathos and myself who have explicitly positioned themselves as anti-psychiatry. Many other posters have, otoh, recognised it as at least partly valid. So no, I don't think you have too much danger on that.

You do need to be intelligent to be a psychiatrist.

You do need to be intelligent to pull 9/11. Or to kill JonBenet and get away with it.

Many kind people become psychiatrists.

Irrelevant.
Many kind people become aromatherapists. That doesn't say anything about aromatherapy's scientific character or not.
Many kind people become tax collectors, as Jesus argued. That doesn't say anything about taxing's oppressive qualities.

I know you're sore about pedophilia being a disorder, but that should not lead a reasonable person to dismiss the entire field of study on those grounds.

No, I dismiss it because it's not science period.

They could burn everything they've wrote on paedophilia right now and recant from it - it would not make it science anymore.

When I read psychiatry, I feel like I am reading the texts of witch hunters, the literal witch hunters of centuries ago - they have the same pseudo-intellectual aura and arrogance; the same disregard for truth, facts, fact-gathering and rules of evidence; the same desire to pathologise everything that does not adjust to their minutest expectations; the same obsession to find metanarratives to blame that can be used ad infinitum; the same leaning to destroy any individual wills that come on front of them in order to prove themselves right; and the same selfrighteousness that they are doing this to Save the World...

...except that reading the Malleus Malleficarum is, at least, fun to do.

Yes, a lot of antis/haters/vigilantes support psychiatry. So what?

Irrelevant.
A lot of them also support death penalty. So do I. And I explicitly chose this example because I know I am minority on GC on this. But what I support or not does not depend on who else supports it or not.

Please try to be more considerate of less despicable motivations people may have.

That's good for sharing a coffee or a beer, I guess. But the effects are the effects and if the effects are deliberate then the motivations become a sidenote. Whether the Bolsheviks were prioritising their wish to liberate the Russian people, their realist concern for political stability, or their despise of Tsarism is irrelevant: they killed the Romanovs anyway.

In the same way, it's damn well totally irrelevant what Violent Fleas is thinking when posting about killing us. The point is she posted that, not whether she had good faith in posting it.

People should demonstrate informedness before being allowed to do something that is potentially dangerous to themself and others. This is already the case for medicine and driving the car, and it should be the case for having sex and posting on a board that can get you hurt by terrorists, be they pro or anti ones.

That's probably why Saddam's Iraq gave explicit internet licenses to individuals.

North Korea today still doesn't allow its private individuals to access the internet at all. That certainly protects them from identity theft, online fraud, phishing, spam, and pj.