Maggie's Farm

How do you carve nature at its joints, when there are no joints? This is good, from Sailer: If race doesn't exist ...  He quotes:

...as any psychiatrist involved in the making of the D.S.M. will freely tell you, the disorders listed in the book are not “real diseases,” at least not like measles or hepatitis. Instead, they are useful constructs that capture the ways that people commonly suffer. The manual, they go on, was primarily written to give physicians, schooled in the language of disease, a way to recognize similarities and differences among their patients and to talk to one another about them. And it has been fairly successful at that.

and

“The D.S.M. has been taken too seriously,” another expert told me. “It’s the victim of its success.”