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“It Has Come to My Attention…” How Institutional Complaints Procedures are Being Weaponized (article in Quillette)

Discussion in 'Psychosomatic news - ME/CFS and Long Covid' started by Woolie, Jun 7, 2018.

  1. Inara

    Inara Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    The only interesting thing is that people like him replicate.
     
  2. Alvin

    Alvin Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    Exactly the poor are unworthy and the rich are worthy.
    How they got this way doesn't matter because the point is to shame or elevate based on dollar signs

    But this just won't do, you can't demean someone by empowering them.
     
  3. Inara

    Inara Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    Yes, but there's a limit, and it is well-known to the powerful: If a person feels he's got nothing to loose - because he has nothing left - he is more willing to revolt. So you have to give little to the poor, but enough so that they keep silent. Until a certain threshold "propaganda" works like "people who get social aid aren't poor" and the like. But at some point it will tip over.
     
  4. Adrian

    Adrian Administrator Staff Member

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    To me its that they create layers of abstractions that are not valid or not valid to use under certain circumstances but because they've created that abstraction they forget. So they have a set of questions and call is a depression scale and then use that abstraction of the depression scale as if it really is a universal proxy for depression that can be used in all circumstances. They don't stop to look at what they are actually asking and reasoning about.

    The same happens in their statistics when they call a randomish set of questions a scale they feel enabled to add up the question scores and quote mean, SD across the population even when its meaningless because the questions are measuring different stuff or similar stuff at different scales.
     
  5. Adrian

    Adrian Administrator Staff Member

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    I don't think its always about shaming the poor sometimes I think its about the rich trying to justify why they are entitled to be rich and pretending its deserved rather than an accident of birth.
     
    Lidia, Mithriel, alktipping and 12 others like this.
  6. Woolie

    Woolie Senior Member

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    This made me laugh, Luther, because this study recently found that lifetime income is negatively associated with agreeableness (that is, nice people don't get rich).

    Conscientiousness is, however, positively associated with income.
     
  7. Woolie

    Woolie Senior Member

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    Well done, I'd say. You got us all thinking :thumbsup:
     
  8. Jonathan Edwards

    Jonathan Edwards Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    What about Meghan? She seems feisty and a bit subversive and probably has some high profile friends with ME.

    Or we could make the whole Royal Family honorary members and become the Royal S4ME.

    But seriously, Diana did a huge amount for AIDS and sick children. Maybe we should get on to Meghan before her diary gets too full.
     
  9. Trish

    Trish Moderator Staff Member

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    I suspect we would be joining a very long queue of 'causes' looking for a higher profile. Given the Royal's links with Wessely, I suspect this would be an own goal.
     
    Woolie, alktipping, Inara and 2 others like this.
  10. Luther Blissett

    Luther Blissett Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    Guess who deserved his unemployment benefits though?

    I have just a little suspicion that people complained about his work is that it is not grounded in fact, uses bizarre leaps of 'logic', goes against what other experts in the field think, contains bad statistics, and he wants it to be used to stigmatise and punish whole groups (especially women), including doing unethical experiments on them without their consent that would probably cause a lot of pain and suffering.

    I've no idea why this idea is not repulsive to Michael Sharpe. It seems to be against everything he says he is for.

    If people want to praise a man who cannot work out that Working Families Tax Credit is only available to, well, people who work, it's up to them. I'm sure that non UK readers, who have less familiarity with the UK Social Security system might have been able to make an educated guess on that one.

    (Working Families Tax Credit is the main 'wefare' benefit that targets children in poor households in the UK. Since its introduction, the number of workless households with children went down, not up. How this proves his main thesis I don't really know and don't really care.)

    Workless households with children are about 0.4 per cent of the population I think. 1 per cent of the population are millionaires (Barclays Bank Wealth Management). I think most sociologists think that one of these groups has the power and means to shape society for good or bad.
     
  11. NelliePledge

    NelliePledge Moderator Staff Member

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    I did think about Meghan but was posting in a rush. the idea of Royal S4ME is brill

    i think there would be a huge amount of mileage if any people with severe ME were able to invite Meghan round to their house for a cuppa and a chat
     
    alktipping and Invisible Woman like this.
  12. Alvin

    Alvin Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    Six of one, a half dozen of another.
    Talk is cheap, actions speak far louder then words (but only if people are listening).
     
    Luther Blissett and alktipping like this.
  13. Amw66

    Amw66 Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    He has obviously had an effect- child benefit is only paid for the first two children ( unless you count the rape clause)
     
  14. Arnie Pye

    Arnie Pye Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    Lidia, WillowJ, FreeSarah and 2 others like this.
  15. Sly Saint

    Sly Saint Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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  16. Inara

    Inara Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    Well, that shows where the "royal" focus lies...Mental health support for children - since Crawley&Co. I know what that can mean.

    This sounds like from 50+ years ago. On the other hand, it's very modern because we need our future workers that contribute to profit.
     
    Last edited: Jun 9, 2018
  17. Andy

    Andy Committee Member

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    Getting back to the original subject of the thread, I'm not surprised that institutional complaints procedures are seeing an uptick in use, if my personal experience is anything to go by.

    As some may be aware of, my wife and I are fighting against being exploited by the "management" company of our flat. For years, we have tried to get them to address water ingress issues with the flats, only to have continued avoidance and non-action from them on the problems, up to a couple of years ago, when, for reasons known only to them, they had a survey done of the condition of the flats and, shock horror, they found water ingress issues. They then embarked on an over inflated plan of works, in which they looked to address the issues caused by their neglect and attempted to add various improvements onto the building schedule - most of which a tribunal agreed were unnecessary.

    In dealing with this company, I have had to regularly email details of my latest issue to the complaints email address in order to get any substantial action taken. If I had to guess there is a policy of "ignore for as long as possible, unless an official complaint is made", and I can well imagine that this is the case for many different organisations. You only have to look at the efforts that Dave Tuller is making in trying to get various journals to take responsible action on dodgy papers that they have published as, seemingly, an example of this.
     
  18. FreeSarah

    FreeSarah Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    Oh, yes. I'm in the midst of a highly illuminating experience here, involving one of our major UK utilities. After fully 6 months of going round and round in the circle of hell of their "Customer Service" department, costing me a huge amount of time and frustration, someone on Reddit the other day, who works for a rival organisation, told me to email a complaint to the CEO personally. Within 24 hours I had a personal, very good case worker assigned, an email of apology from the CEO himself, and a total commitment to get the matter resolved double-quick. The guy on Reddit told me that Customer Service these days isn't really meant to do anything for customers. More fend them off.
     
  19. Mithriel

    Mithriel Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    Going back to an earlier point, I have never minded being asked if I have mental health problems, I don't even mind them asking whether CFS has a mental health component. What is infuriating and totally useless is when no one accepts the answer NO.

    Even the PACE trial, bad as it was answered a question. Does the BPS theory of fatigue (never mind ME) stand up to a proper trial? No it doesn't. Even cherry picking the patients, loading the set up and then fudging the results gave a very poor recovery rate and the 6 minute test and step test showed that people did not improve their fitness. (The way they set up the trial most of us thought they were going to get spectacular results. I was shocked when the results were published).
     
  20. Sean

    Sean Moderator Staff Member

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    Exactly. Even with the most favourable test conditions for the hypothesis/model, it still delivered a null result.

    It doesn't even work for chronic fatigue only, let alone CFS or ME. Or at least, the way the study was run doesn't allow us to tell if it delivered even for CF only patients.
     
    Mithriel, Inara and Trish like this.

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