And when academics engage in this practice, it is interesting to see what that looks like, just look at the deluge of LinkedIn Cringe to get a taste for what this feels like.

It is interesting to compare these films with say heist films like Ocean's Eleven, where an ensemble cast with special skills required to pull off the mission is needed.

One of my biggest fears is, if I were to lose my mind, and become a homeless mad person roaming the streets. Someone who fits this description: -- I quite like Chris Ward's description --

The strong odor of mouthwash on the breath of transient alcoholics who shelter with us is often masked by the overwhelming odor of old sweat, urine-stained pants, and the bad-dairy smell that unwashed bodies and clothes give off. It can take your breath away long before you can smell theirs.

I am almost certain none of the people I have interacted with in classrooms, in the colleges and universities, where I was a student and worked would bat an eyelid, acknowledge my humanity. It is so easy to become invisible in contemporary North American society, to become disposable and irrelevant. The fall from non-essential to non-human is rather swift. To them, I wouldn't even register on their radar, in their memory, and let us suppose that I do, they'd not dare to acknowledge that they do remember me. It would be easier to not acknowledge that they once knew me and had dealings with me. And to become to a homeless mentally ill person, is the easiest kind of NPC to become. No one bothers interacting with you ever.

And when you interact with someone who works in customer service, this is the sort of interaction that you get.

So for Foucault madness is the Dialectic Other of reason?

The a priori that was before we had madness as we knew it.

My go to here is thinking about the person who made a living scooping horse shit off the side of the road when horses and horse carts were the predominant mode of transport. When the horse is at the centre of the transportation network, there's a market economy that's built around it, an infrastructure is developed around it. The horse shoe maker, the vet, the guy who grows hay, the people making the bails, the stable boys, the trainers, the list goes on. The car took away all those jobs. The steam engine did the same thing, the microchip did the same thing. This time its coming for white collar jobs of white workers. That's what's different!

This makes me think of AI as a temptation; and my thoughts are being taken over by biblical metaphors to understand how to stay true and pure. The politics that gets mobilized when thinking of AI as a temptation doesn't feel fruitful!

to whom?

to receive funding for their research from the military industrial complex.

This is Big Science! WW2 was the physicists war, organizing the American war machine and birthing the military industrial complex, all of it comes out of this primordial soup.

Bush's other accomplishments include developments in radar technology, early administration of the Manhattan Project and founding Raytheon.

This is a research opportunity. This is easily doable with a robust data management system that looks at demographic information about the client that will augment the psychologist's decision making systems with customized therapeutic intervention strategies that can be provided in person or via an app.

This would mean receiving professional development training in DEI Diversity, Equity * Inclusion initiatives, Actively participating in training and workshops that champion decolonizing the field and unlearning some of the harmful practices that have been put in practice.

Who is the one doing the missing here?

In ethnic communities, this can be cultural practices that are alien to white therapists but are the norm to the ethnic household. It is necessary to address these unknown biases, and for white therapists to get the anti-bias training..

Karen on an elevator who holds a purse a little too tightly when men of color get on board the elevator, yeah, this is a bit too real.

In a post Trump era, this is pretty much in our faces. White hate is popular now. As was seen with the recent killing of a Muslim family in London, Ontario, where a white supremacist, ran over a Brown Muslim family with his car killing 3 people. This is not isolated the US, it is pretty much well and alive in Canada as well.

White benevolence! This is the hardest thing to overcome, if you believe you are a fair person, if you are an egalitarian person, and you are unwilling to question your thoughts, beliefs, opinions and bring it under scrutiny, it becomes difficult to bring about systemic change.

In inter-racial relationships, it quite rare that white people have to deal with PoC in positions of power and authority. Having PoC in positions of power does not seem like a natural fit in North America, even in a post-Obama world. As the BLM makes explicitly clearly the rhetorical ask of just mattering invokes white people to chime in how all lives matter. The inter-racial relations in North America, are one where the white race is expected to be on top of the other races where they servile to them. In the care professions, the baggage that is attached to all of this

Such matches are not possible because of the systemic issues. Because the number of students coming into the system to be trained as counselling psychologists is few and far between. To reduce the systemic issues would include setting aside funding and scholarships for underprivileged PoC to enter into the profession.

There also has to be ways to ensure that the credentialing system recognizes foreign trained counselling professionals and allow them to apply for certification in the system if they come from a demographic that is under represented in the counselling profession in Canada.

PoC always edit their words because they do not want white people to make a scene. PoC do not edit their words for their sake, they do it for white people so as not offend them.

Acquiring demographic information about their clients through an in-take software system, that will layer those informational coordinates onto them might be helpful.

e.g. when a client provides their address, the postal code can tell you their average household income, and various other demographic informational nuggets. Using some sort of intake software that allows psychologists to collate and correlate demographic and psychographic information will allow for them to engage in data-driven decision making practices which will allow for much more targeted, accurate and precise interventions.

Yes, but in this case, with PoC, there's years of racism and the legacy of intergenerational trauma that is at play here. They have been taught and conditioned to suppress their negative reactions. Unlearning all those years programming takes time.

e.g. Let us look at the monocle.

Why Do Rich People Wear Monocles?

Wearing a monocle on your face, meant you had to train your facial muscles and not be able to make certain facial expressions. You always have to keep a stern facial expression and you restricted what you could express with your face. This was a disciplining tool for the rich and wealthy and created a certain kind of persona, one that did not have any public expressions of emotion.

PoC are socially conditioned not express their feelings in every other social interaction that they have had with a white person. They are expected to cower, acquiesce, and vanish into the background. They never get to be divas, or throw a tantrum to get their way - the same way that a Karen would get to.

Shaniquah and Karen are not the same. Roselitta and Karen are not the same. Aisha and Karen are not the same. Lakshmi and Karen are not the same.

These people didn't get to express themselves ever. That's a skill they didn't develop the same way white people got to. So expecting them to develop the knowledge, skills and abilities to express is something that will take time.

The insurance industry compromises how this works. Psychologists have to make sure their bottom lines and billable hours are taken care of.

The performance management systems in place to police and govern the operations of psychologists restrict the kind of service that they provide. Refer to Rizq for more details on this point.

Rizq, Rosemary. (2014). Perversion, neoliberalism and therapy: The audit culture in mental health services.Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society (2014) 19, 209–218. doi:10.1057/pcs.2014.15

This is not in congress with what was mentioned earlier regarding counsellors being flexible and willing to offer therapies that the client would want. If counselling psychologists are not client-centric, they might not be able to get the number of referrals that their insurance company expects of them. If they are on retainer from an insurance provider, they will be expected to provide services to the clients that are sent to them.

The cultural misunderstanding perpetuated by the person in power has a much more profound effect than the person with less power. The white psychotherapist harboring cultural biases is likely inflict more harm, than a PoC who has misapprehensions about white people and people in authority.

Because of the power differential here the effects of cultural misunderstandings and miscommunication are unidirectional, i.e. affecting the PoC. It is never as detrimental to the therapist as it to the PoC client.

Misunderstanding is a misnomer here, the effects of it, lack of access, inability to go to work, not getting access to their children, etc. etc. The client has a lot more to lose than the counselling therapist. The client pays the price.

How many inter-racial friends do most PoC and white people have? The token PoC friend is the norm, where PoC rarely if ever seek out white friends and vice versa. So if interracial exchanges are rare to start with and then we account for where it is these interracial exchanges happen -- they rarely if ever as peers, there is almost always a power differential between the races. It is difficult to make friends who are in a different tax bracket.

Chris Buck's art photography for Oprah's O Magazine titled Let's Talk About Race.is really a good example to understand what I have been writing about here.

Unique -- how? Isolated to interactions between people of colour and a white person, where a white person is a position of power and privilege than the person of colour? How is this interaction similar to other interactions between a PoC and a white person. What are the social locations of these people. PoC are usually in jobs cooking. cleaning, washing, taking care of white people. They do stuff for white people and get paid meagre wages for doing stuff for them. They pick the fruits, they do their nails, they massage them, they sweep the floors. Every interaction a person of colour has with a white person, they are made to feel less than the white person. Their social worth and status is always less than that of the white person. And the white person is always giving orders to the PoC. So, if PoC have only had this kind of interaction with white people? What is it that therapist can do to make PoC feel comfortable and ready to open about the constant racial prejudices and microaggressions that they deal with. What makes this interaction special or any different from the other ones? If they are different, isn't it the therapist's responsibility to prove to the client that is indeed the case.

special considerations in comparison to white clients? What makes them special? And why is it that white clients do not need them? What are the white clients needs that the therapist has already accounted for and considered in the scope of their practice?

e.g. Therapists did not have to have a wheelchair ramp available for their clients. If a therapist has their office on the 2nd story of a brown stone, by virtue of where the therapist's office is located, it is inaccessible to disabled wheelchair bound clients, If the therapist's office is not located in a place inaccessible by public transit it is likely that those clients who use public transit are unlikely to be on their roster. The design affordances that are take into consideration by therapists, quite often exclude certain demographics while including only certain others. Rather than framing the conversation around special considerations, if universal design principles are adopted -- i.e. all buildings have to be wheelchair accessible, medical service providers must make sure that they are located in and around transit hubs etc. The universal design principles approach is much better than making one-off changes for a special case.

this is interesting! From a data-analytics and client feedback perspective. If the initial therapist-client interactions are positive and a relationship has been established and a client satisfaction survey is conducted. The data from that client satisfaction survey can help drive the therapist improve their therapeutic practice. Data-driven decision making practices can help terminate the relationship before the client's ratings are adversely impacted. The therapist can pre-emptively drop a client based on the client satisfaction ratings and the predictive analytics that it will render.

with substance abuse, there are other competencies that the client has to develop. How they got hooked on the substance as a way to escape the drudgery of everyday and as a way to get out of their own head for a while. It will take a fair bit of therapy and a detox lifestyle without the triggers and enablers that fueled those habits.

This is as opposed to trying to coerce the client to participate in the therapy, here we are seeing researchers advocating for creating a climate of client buy-in! If the client buys into the notion of therapy and accepts the therapist for who they are and they have established some connection/bond, it is possible to get the client to try out things that they would otherwise not have been open to.

This could be elaborated upon in further detail. Follow up with the Huppert et. 2006 article.

Again, this could be interrogated further, what is that makes a good match between client and therapist. Do they have to be of the same race, sex, gender, class? How does age and generational differences play a part in the alliance formation stage?

What can a therapist do to promote a positive climate where the client feels safe to form a bond/alliance?

Once again good for whom? Good for the client? Good for the client's health insurance provider/employer/etc.?

For whom? For the judicial system? For the employer? For the insurance company? For the client themselves? Who defines what is a positive therapeutic outcome?

This can be understood in terms of KPIs - key performance indicators, upon commencing the therapy, the client and the therapist have to agree upon what the milestones are, what the metrics, what are the metrics that they will use to compute behavioral change and how these changes can be monitored. Helping the client understand the therapeutic instruments and what the measure and how they will be documenting progress is important. It helps a client understand the amount of time and commitment (both psychological and financial) it will take to get the endpoint, symptom relief and a better quality of life.

The nugget of insight to understand here is what does correlating the therapeutic alliance with a relationship do for us? What does the equivocation achieve? What is it about a relationship that can be mapped onto the therapeutic alliance and vice versa. What is it about relational dynamics that translates well in the therapeutic context.

the capacity to build a rapport and empathize with a client while withholding judgement is extremely important. Offering the client the space/time to communicate on their own terms and making them feel comfortable enough to share their thoughts and feelings requires an innate ability to be mindful and an attentive empathic listener.

In order to be adaptable and able to continuously change based on the market needs, includes being a life-long learning and participating in professional development activities, like conferences, seminars, and taking graduate level courses in new and emerging fields and topics areas that will allow the therapist to offer those therapeutic interventions.

Therapists are expected to be adaptable, flexible and knowledgeable in a wide array of therapeutic options, and offer the client a suite of options to select from. This shows a customer-service focus emerging here. And how the culture of client feedback is necessary for attracting and maintaining new clients is pervasive in the field, i.e. the prevailing market logics are being introduced into the professional practice .

Here the author is describing what it is like to communicate with the patient what kind of therapy they are going to offer them and getting their consent on if they are okay with receiving that particular kind of therapy.

It is important to understand how this is very different from the historical practice of psychotherapy. The psychotherapist would in all cases be non-communicative, they would hoard all the therapeutic information and not tell their clients the rationale why they are doing what it is that they are doing.

Getting enthusiastic consent from the client, to conduct and engage in therapy is necessary and ideal. It shows that you respect your client and their right to choose what it is that they want out of their health care professional. It keeps the professionals accountable to their client and requires of the counselling professional to maintain open lines of communication.

i.e. fostering a client-centric therapeutic practice

buy-in is important. You can take a horse to water, you can't make it drink. There's got to be a desire for self-improvement that comes from within.

This is an interesting observation, i.e. the silver bullet cure is never better than the generic. It is the routine, the act of going to therapy, with all its ritualistic paraphernalia, that makes a bigger difference, than a specific kind of therapeutic intervention or hotshot therapy.

Psychologists must be agile in their therapeutic approach and use the appropriate treatment schema that works best for their clients. i.e. They have to be mindful of the clients needs and retool their practice to meet those needs rather than be stiff/conservative about what are the options that will likely make available to their clients.

i.e. data-driven decision making

The article lays out very early on what the intentions are what they aspire to learn from the paper that will help counselling people of colour.

Yes, this maybe unfortunate but what are the reasons that lead to their dropping out is the important question here. What makes the ethnic client feel frustrated with the process?

How is the frustration with a white male working class client? How does race add to the reasoning? How does race and class impact the decision? How does race, class and gender come into play?

Interesting race, class, ethnicity and disabilities have been left out.

Oh! Tell me more about this particular group of students

This is creating a certain kind of confessional subject, it is a sort of disciplining scheme!

This is small fry stuff! The colored folks are going to corrupt the lily white kids. The increase campus incidents of sexual violence can be chalked up to this. Yes! Bring on the dubious correlations.

Does it need to be an instrument that measures it? If so let us talk about how this instrument is going to be weaponized and marketed? How can we use this data collected about loneliness to inflict harm on people? OR sell them stuff? Both options allow for the research investment to produce an ROI that is of benefit to the state or the corporate-state.

Is it because it's not just rich white Christian men who are attending university now? And this is just dressed up psychographic research to keep tabs on the coloured folks?

The pressures that immigrant parents put on their children is just deplorable But this all tells us how prevailing the myth of meritocratic success really is.

Is this because over the last 20 years or so the number of BIPOC students on campus have increased and these structures were not built to support the needs of students coming from those backgrounds. So they feel really out of place and alienated? Is it because they are not financially well-off and therefore have less time to interact with their peers on campus in co-curricular activities that would help them feel like they belong? The number of non-hegemonic participants on campus increasing doesn't automatically make them the hegemons. They are still a minority, because their interests are not reflected in the institutional norms and values.

Out of these only the elderly are not engaged in the labour force. So the others can be addressed in terms of labour output and productivity metrics. If lonely labourers are not productive labourers perhaps their living arrangements can include some socialization in order to induce changes to labour productivity. In this case, studying loneliness is good for management to come up with better loneliness mitigation strategies which is good for the corporate bottom line.

This is interesting! In order for an issue to be addressed, it has be quantified, enumerated, and gauged to be be able to parse it. i.e. As soon as something is enumerated it is by extension informationalized and datafied, Whereupon it can interact with other datasets and be used by decision makers based on how much it costs. The price-point determines the severity of the issue. i.e in other words, quantifying the problem is asking, how much is this going to cost me? And if its a problem I can choose to ignore, if it doesn't cost all that much.

People locked up in carceral institutions whose interactions do not include any that they would consider nourishing interactions.

Too bad he didn't consider a pandemic an externality that would turn most of us into bread-baking tradwives, camgirls, and incels.

In A Beautiful Mind, when Marcee runs through a flock of pigeons they don't move, because she's not real, she's a figment of John Nash's imagination.

Its like reading about Eleanor Rigby's years as a university student.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVz65Phjqbc

I had just read how Japan appoints 'minister of loneliness' to help people home alone. So it seems like bureaucratizing loneliness will allow for public administrators to gather qualitative and quantitative data about lonely people.

Now could it be that loneliness is a product of being trained to be self-sufficient, self-reliant, selfish to the point of being narcissistic and taking selfies? The quantified self movement has made being selfish a virtue, you can upload data about your corporeal self and tweak your behaviors to get the needed results.

Is the fission reaction that comes after the nuclear family goes kaboom? We have been atomized! And this was a long time coming.

You could say McLuhan was the Medium to Innis' Message!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDfAdHBtK_Q

This section was titled Dialectics, and yet it is unfortunate how there is very little if any dialectical thinking that is employed in the arguments presented in this section.

This is not a contemporary phenomenon, there is a long storied history to this narrative. And there have been several scholars over the years who have written about the topic.

Perhaps including the work of Simone Browne and Virginia Eubanks would have been helpful. As true as these statements are historicizing them and showing how what is happening in the here and now can be traced back to other periods in time where/when the cutting/bleeding edge technologies of that space/time were deployed for the very same purposes would have been a great reminder to the reader what is at stake here.

Lenna would like to have a word!

The use of scare quotes without a citation, is problematic. Is the charge here that the discrimination, is in fact not accidental but deliberate for the most part?

Defining haywire technology would have been helpful. What is the particularity of a haywire technology that solicits this particular intervention? What are the haywire attributes that are best addressed vis-a-vis the lens being employed here.

I get a very Lovecraft Country vibe here! That's cool! But argumentatively I am not sure what is happening here.

Perhaps, talking about how dating apps, break up apps, etc. work this point could have been made with interesting technical examples that make the case.

Perhaps illustrating this with an example would help the reader understand where this pathos is linked to historical evidence. e.g. Sarah Baartman, [Tuskegee syphilis experiment] (https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/06/tuskegee-study-medical-distrust-research/487439/)

Perhaps, the author could give the reader an example here. e.g. James Marion Sims' inventing of the speculum, and the tests that he performed on black women, presuming that they do not feel pain the same way, could have made the case here.

And what is the point of this showboating? This could be perceived as concern-trolling.

The argument here as I understanding is conflating how the tech corp. is trying to do a face lift and get the optics right. These are band-aid solutions that solve the DEI problem. That doesn't fix the issues that have to do with the issues pertaining to sorting and sifting through data. The oppressive regime exists as software, hardware and wetware. Tokenism is problematic, but that is something that cannot be braided into the concerns emanating from the critique of algorithmic oppression.

As much as I agree with the sentiment, I am struggling to see how this relates to the topic sentence of this paragraph.

Woke-washing exists? Gasp!

How so? Rather than handwaving, if there was material evidence presented with a few examples this sentence might have come across as less hyperbolic.

If this in reference to someone the likes of Google CEO Sundar Pichai or the CEO of Microsoft is Satya Nadella. These brown men represent what intergenerational privilege, looks like when applied to brahimincal patriarchy.

Defining an oppressive technology and historicizing oppressive technologies would have helped the author make the case better. e.g. The Pear of Anguish is an historical example of an oppressive technology.

This is true in a Western context, and in the North American context. But if you look at the oppressive regimes of the Global South, e.g. Saudi Arabia, India, Thailand, etc the oppressive tradecraft is practiced very differently.

I came across this paper after I saw the twitter kerfuffle that went down between Safiya Noble and the student. Noble's comment to the student was that they had to build upon earlier works rather than try to tear it down. There was a time when scholarly critique meant ripping the previous scholar shreds to establish your presence in the field. (The scene from Game of Thrones where a Khallasar takes the throne comes to mind!)

Moretti seems to privilege the written text over modes of communication. Why is that the case? What does imply?