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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 10 months

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By: Leor Sapir and Colin Wright

Published: Jun 9, 2023

A federal court on Tuesday temporarily blocked enforcement of a Florida law that prohibits the administration of sex-change procedures on children under 18. The opinion, by Judge Robert L. Hinkle, leans heavily on medical and scientific rationales to argue that it is unconstitutional to ban the use of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgery on teenagers who feel alienated from their bodies.

Twenty states maintain age restrictions on sex-change procedures, and the problem they face is explaining to judges that American medical associations aren’t following the best available evidence. This is known to European health authorities and has been reported in such prestigious publications as the British Medical Journal. But American judges need some way to evaluate conflicting scientific authorities—especially as institutions responsible for ensuring that medical professionals have access to high-quality research aren’t functioning as they should.

A case in point: Springer, an academic publishing giant, has decided to retract an article that appeared last month in the Archives of Sexual Behavior. The retraction is expected to take effect June 12.

The article’s authors are listed as Michael Bailey and Suzanna Diaz. Mr. Bailey is a well-respected scientist, with dozens of publications to his name. The other author writes under a pseudonym to protect the privacy of her daughter, who suffers from gender dysphoria.

Their new paper is based on survey responses from more than 1,600 parents who reported that their children, who were previously comfortable in their bodies, suddenly declared a transgender identity after extensive exposure to social media and peer influence. Mr. Bailey’s and Ms. Diaz’s sin was to analyze rapid onset gender dysphoria, or ROGD. Gender activists hate any suggestion that transgender identities are anything but innate and immutable. Even mentioning the possibility that trans identity is socially influenced or a phase threatens their claims that children can know early in life they have a permanent transgender identity and therefore that they should have broad access to permanent body-modifying and sterilizing procedures.

Within days of publication, a group of activists wrote a public letter condemning the article and calling for the termination of the journal’s editor. Among the letter’s signatories is Marci Bowers, a prominent genital surgeon and president of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, an advocacy organization that promotes sex changes for minors.

Nearly 2,000 researchers and academics signed a counter letter in support of the article. Springer nonetheless decided to retract the paper without disciplining its editor. Springer initially asserted that the study needed approval from an institutional review board. But it quickly abandoned that rationale, which was false.

The publisher now maintains that the retraction is due to improper participant consent. While the respondents consented to the publication of the survey’s results, Springer insists they didn’t specifically agree to publication in a scholarly or peer-reviewed journal. That’s a strange and retrospective requirement, especially considering that Springer and other major publishers have published thousands of survey papers without this type of consent.

Anyone familiar with the controversy over transgender medicine knows what is going on. Activists put pressure on Springer to retract an article with conclusions they didn’t like, and Springer caved in. We’ve become accustomed to seeing these capitulations in academia, media and the corporate world, but it is especially disturbing to see in a respected medical journal.

Rather than appreciate the long-term risk to itself and the scientific community from doing the bidding of activists, Springer has instead agreed to evaluate and retract all survey papers that lack the newly required consent. If Springer follows through on its promise, hundreds of authors who chose to publish in Springer’s journals may have their research retracted.

The publications that support what they call ��gender-affirming care” rely heavily on surveys. The U.S. Transgender Survey of 2015, for instance, has generated several influential papers. As it happens, the USTS didn’t inform participants that their answers would be published in peer-reviewed journals.

This kind of double standard runs through gender-medicine research. Papers advocating “gender transition” are readily accepted by leading scientific journals despite having grave methodological flaws and biases. Work that questions gender-transition orthodoxy stands almost no chance of being published in the best-known journals. Every now and then, an errant research paper slips past the censors, but should it prove significant enough to threaten the settled science narrative, retribution is swift and merciless. The researcher Lisa Littman learned this lesson in 2018, when she was widely attacked after publishing on the topic. Mr. Bailey and Ms. Diaz are learning it now.

The idea is to manufacture the appearance of scientific consensus where there is none. The pseudo-consensus then allows such American medical associations as the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Endocrine Society to recommend body-altering procedures for children.

While many Americans have heard news about the wave of states passing legislation that curbs sex changes for the young, few realize that an equally fierce, and arguably far more important, battle is raging: the battle for the integrity of the scientific process. It is a fight for the ability to have censorship-free scientific debate as a means to advance human knowledge.

Here's the thing: even if it's wrong, you refute it by making a better scientific case, with better evidence. You show where the flaws are. You don't throw a hissy-fit and cry until it goes away.

#Leor Sapir #Colin Wright #medical corruption #academic corruption #ROGD #rapid onset gender dysphoria #social contagion #gender ideology #genderwang #queer theory #religion is a mental illness

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sparkling-pink-lemonade · 7 days

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Oh gosh, I love your long explanations/headcanons in regards to ships. Theres a certain level of intrigue and fun about them. What would a Teacher x Khan relationship look like if Khan forced himself to be the Teacher's personal bicycle in order to keep Uzi in school.

Let's see what I can do for this one.

cw: sexual exploitation obviously

It's parent-teach conference night, and Khan has made the decision to actually attend this year instead of taking his usual shift watching the door. He really upset Uzi last week, and he wasn't sure where he went wrong, aside from leaving her for dead. So he wanted to start making it up to her.

First things first, after missing school for a week, he'd attend the conference to figure out what he could do to support her in getting caught up. How was he to know that Uzi wasn't making any friends, and was failing all her classes? Has she been in detention this whole time? He thought she was just hanging out with others after school...

And to imply that his daughter was damaged in her code!?

"How is she like at home?"

She- when was the last time he actually talked with Uzi? The blank his mind drew made his chest ache.

Though, apparently it wasn't going to matter, after enough incidents, enough school missed, and most of all, letting those murder drones into the colony, Uzi's report file was finally large enough to get her expelled from school.

Khan was freaking out. It's not like there's a different school in this colony his daughter could attend. If she was expelled, she'd essentially be forced into being a high school dropout. He didn't want that future for her. He was so focused on keeping the colony safe with his doors, he didn't care about what his daughter wanted. The least he could do is make sure she had the chance to choose the life she wanted. She can't do that without finishing her education.

There had to be something he could to to change the teacher's mind.

So an olive branch was given. Khan was told to come back at the end of the day.

It got a bit complicated as Uzi returned from her self grounding with one of the murder drones, and the place was being wrecked by some monster as people began disappearing left and right. But eventually he was able to reschedule a time to meet with the teacher.

And he was told to strip.

The teacher lamented how he was hardly paid enough to make this job worth it, his ex wife divorced him years ago and he hasn't had time to date since, and while the trope was usually it would be a student offering sexual favors to keep their grade up, he isn't exactly keen on the idea of being pleasured by someone his daughter's age. A desperate parent however...

And so a deal was made. The teacher got to ride Khan every night, and the expulsion case on Uzi would never be presented. Additionally, fulfill his fantasies without complaint, and the teacher would make it his personal interest to boost Uzi's grade, and turn a side eye to any future antics.

Whenever the teacher's place was empty, Khan would force himself to visit each night. And when it was the teacher's turn to have custody over his daughter Lizzy, he'd go over to Khan's. Khan made sure Uzi was none the wiser, always pressing his head to her bedroom door first to check if she was blasting her "nightcore" music, before inviting the teacher in.

The teacher always has Khan doing thing he never even considered in a sexual context, let alone was comfortable with. But he bit his tongue and never complained. After all, Uzi looked so happy when she told him how their teacher was going to take their class on a field trip to Camp 98.7 when she requested it. He just had to tell himself that made all of this worth it.

#proship #comship #nsft #exploitation #under-negotiated kink #academic corruption #murder drones #khan doorman #md teacher #khan x teacher #uzi doorman #ask

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leviathangourmet · 3 months

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youtube

For note: this isn't just a video about Atlantis, but a valid criticism of academic biases.

#video #the lore lodge #archeology #academia #academic corruption #academic bias #Graham Hancock #anthropology #Youtube

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missygoesmeow · 2 years

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i like to suffer :))) tis The Hesitant Prime Mover

original artwork: The Hesitant Fiancée by Auguste Toulemouche

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16-jarrah · 1 year

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i get why people would opt to say walter was a terrible person since the beginning, but i think that's like, the most boring takeaway you can get about his character. he was already insecure and prideful from the start, and it's what would hurt him and keep hurting him. but like, being insecure and prideful are regular traits any regular person can have. the actions that he makes because of these traits, which in turn keep fueling his ego more and more, are what makes him an interesting character. and he was already pretty capable of hurting other people, but he wasn't doing it out of malice, but more because of careless selfishness at first. what makes walter terrifying is that the more he does it, the more he becomes aware of what he's doing, and the more he keeps going and keeps being more and more meticulous and deliberate about what he does that hurts people and even to the point when it was specifically to hurt people.

i think the traits were there in walter from the beginning—the pilot did a pretty good job of establishing how powerless he's felt all his life and just how susceptible he is to letting this newfound perceived power get to his head so easily. he even says this explicitly in 5x06 "Buyout" when he tells jesse "i'm not in the money business, i'm in the empire business". but saying he was this monster from the start kind of implies he didn't undergo through a character arc throughout the show when it's quite literally what he did. he got worse. so much worse. through mostly the fault of his own fragility.

#idk if i put it into words right but i'm just musing #was walter a good person when brba started? up in the air. but his family genuinely adored him. despite feeling like a loser teacher #some of his coworkers actually really liked and respected him. he was just as much of a regular person as anyone else was tbh #you know it's interesting that he and gale basically have the same motivations. why jump to meth of all things. why go from 0 to 100 when #it sounds COMPLETELY ridiculous. but they were both very passionate about chemistry who felt like their potentials were wasted and felt #like they were finally putting their skills to good use again. getting to flex their muscles and shit. whenever they cook better purer meth #than most other people. i think it's a really genius idea to have this premise for the show lol #cz as much as walter is motivated by him feeling like he desperately has to take control of his own life he also is a scientist at heart #who desperately needs to apply his knowledge and skills somewhere where it would feel gratifying #seriously dude you could've tried to get a paper published or two or something. djhdidhd #but the academe has its own Politics and whatnot. so one could only speculate why walt didn't get to pursue that any more #(aside from the whole grey matter industries thing)#anyway uhhh i hope i get the post across lol not to sound cheesy cliche but brba is a corruption slash character deterioration arc #quite literally the whole point is that he Didn't Start Off Like This And He Gets Worse #again. he already had some of his bad tendencies and traits but it's like. we all do that's not necessarily inherently make or break #it's what he DOES and KEEPS DOING. CONSCIOUSLY that turns him into the horrifying man he is by the end of it all #so i just think if your biggest takeaway is Walter Was Always A Monster then you're just missing the whole damn point #op #brbaposting

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milumis · 8 months

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< books with playlists 3

#just finished Corrupt today so wish me luck with Hideaway!#aesthetic #dark academic aesthetic #bookblr #booklr #read books #book aesthetic #book blog #books & libraries #books #romance books #bookaddict #photography #dark acamedia #dark aesthetic #dark romance

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skidrowflorist · 5 months

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@scrivellc / plotted starter

"I miss you," she heard her own voice come softer, calmer than she'd thought it would. The lie didn't even hurt. But her band-aid wrapped finger twisted nervously in the phone cord as she looked out the shop window to the quickly emptying streets, betraying a certain fear.

Audrey was resolved — had been convinced — that tonight was the night to act, but she was suppressing a bone-deep terror at the thought of what had to be done. She hoped she'd have the stomach for it. She focused on the freshest bruise peeking out from beneath her sleeve, forcing herself to remember how his hand felt as it worked those purple marks into her skin. A lot of folks deserve to die.

"Everything's been so busy since the shop's taken off, and like I said, I been feelin' under the weather, but... I'm closin' alone tonight..." she trailed off meaningfully. "Come keep me company, doctor?"

Over her shoulder, the plant cackled a laugh that set its leaves rustling, and Audrey reached out with a hand and gently but firmly pushed its pod back and shush it.

#yeah orin <3 come to the little shop <3 there are no horrors in it i prommy <3 #audrey corruption arc! audrey corruption arc! we love audrey corruption arc!#i emerge from the depths of academic hell to post this starter and then retreat to lurking lol #scrivellc #v; move heaven and hell

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the-everqueen · 8 months

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i know my friends are losing it over ianthe in "the unwanted guest" but may i just say as a palamedes bitch forever and always, YUM.

#locked tomb blogging #the unwanted guest #devotion as consumption #devotion as corruption and/or change #i'm such an academic #this and sophie's fic are making me realize how much of a nerd ianthe is #pero like pal is Old Skool nerd and i'm weak for it

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soufre-de-paris · 3 months

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gomes asserts that by the time of the prohibitions of língua geral (first attempted in 1727, then finalized in 1757) língua geral had undergone such enormous change (via substratum interference, moore) from the language the jesuits wrote their catechisms in that it had already (in less than two hundred years) become dialectical into:

"língua geral verdadeira" (the jesuit's "real língua geral", more akin to the original tupinambá)

"língua geral corrupta" (the quotidian "corrupt língua geral")

this is incredible. the chaotic violence is palpable: all these various peoples of various linguistic backgrounds (some from the same language family, many not) shoved together in aldeias and "towns", most of them not fluent in língua geral yet being forced by proximity and the requirements of life into using língua geral and teaching it to their children who then grow up with these already-altered-still-being-altered forms, until in less than two hundred years the language has become demonstrably, identifiably divided from itself

this is substratum interference, btw (as opposed to borrowing)

#língua geral #historical linguistics #been a while since i could use that tag #adventures in post-academic academia #the “corrupt” is the one that survived btw #and went on to continue to change #and is still #today #spoken in amazônia

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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 2 months

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By; Andrew Doyle

Published: Feb 28, 2024

Many years ago I gave a talk at the London Metropolitan Archives in which I outlined my reasons for rejecting the then fashionable theory of social constructionism in relation to human sexuality. In the coffee break that followed, I was approached by a lesbian activist, who claimed to have chosen her orientation as a means to oppose the patriarchy. She demanded to know why I would not accept that sexuality had no biological basis, even though I had spent the best part of an hour answering this very question. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘but I’ve already explained why I don’t agree with you’. ‘But why won’t you agree?’ she shouted in response. ‘Why?’

Primary school teachers are familiar with such frustrated pleas. The anger of children is so often connected with incomprehension, a sense of injustice, or both. When it persists into adulthood it represents a failure of socialisation. We frequently hear talk of our degraded political discourse – and there is some truth to that – but really we are dealing with mass infantilism. Its impact is evident wherever one cares to look: online, in the media, even in Parliament. Argumentation is so often reduced to a matter of tribal loyalty; whether one is right or wrong becomes secondary to the satisfaction of one’s ego through the submission of an opponent. This is not, as some imagine, simply a consequence of the ubiquity of social media, but rather a general failure over a number of years to instil critical thinking at every level of our educational institutions.

To be a freethinker has little to do with mastery of rhetoric and everything to do with introspection. It is all very well engaging in a debate in order to refine our persuasive skills, but it is a futile exercise unless we can entertain the possibility that we might be wrong. In Richard Dawkins’s book, The God Delusion (2006), he relates an anecdote about his time as an undergraduate at Oxford. A visiting academic from America gave a talk on the Golgi apparatus, a microscopic organelle found in plant and animal cells, and in doing so provided incontrovertible evidence of its existence. An elderly member of the Zoology Department, who had asserted for many years that the Golgi apparatus was a myth, was present at the lecture. Dawkins relates how, as the speaker drew to a close, ‘The old man strode to the front of the hall, shook the American by the hand and said – with passion – “My dear fellow, I wish to thank you. I have been wrong these fifteen years.” We clapped our hands red’.

This is the ideal that so few embody, particularly when it comes to the unexamined tenets of political ideology. We often see examples of media commentators or politicians being discredited in interviews or discussions, but how often do we see them concede their errors, even when they are exposed beyond doubt? There is a very good reason why the sociologist and philosopher Herbert Spencer opened his First Principles (1862) by asserting that there exists ‘a soul of truth in things erroneous’; but such concessions can only be made by those who are able to prioritise being right over being seen to be right. Too many are seemingly determined to turn difficult arguments into zero-sum games in which to give any ground whatsoever is to automatically surrender it to an opponent.

The discipline of critical thinking invites us to consider the origins of our knowledge and convictions. A man may speak with the certainty of an Old Testament prophet, but has he reached his conclusions for himself? Or is he a mere resurrectionist, plundering his bookshelves for the leather-bound corpses of other people’s ideas? Hazlitt expounded at length on how sophistry might be mistaken for critical faculties, noting that the man who sees only one half of a subject may still be able to express it fluently. ‘You might as well ask the paralytic to leap from his chair and throw away his crutch,’ he wrote, ‘as expect the learned reader to throw down his book and think for himself. He clings to it for his intellectual support; and his dread of being left to himself is like the horror of a vacuum’.

The natural human instinct for confirmation bias presents a further problem, one especially prominent among ideologues. Anything can be taken to bolster one’s position so long as it is perceived through the lens of prejudgment. We can see this most notably in the proponents of Critical Social Justice, who start from the premise that unequal outcomes – disparities in average earnings between men and women, for instance – are evidence of structural inequalities in society. They are beginning with the conclusion and working backwards, mistaking their own arguments for proof.

Worse still, such an approach often correlates with a distinctly moralistic standpoint. Many of the most abusive individuals on social media cannot recognise their behaviour for what it is because they have cast themselves in the role of the virtuous. If we are morally good, the logic goes, it must be assumed that our detractors are motivated by evil and we are therefore relieved of the obligation to treat them as human beings. What they lack in empathy they make up in their capacity for invective.

Again, we must be alert to the danger of cheapening argumentation and analysis to the mere satisfaction of ego. One of the reasons why disagreements on social media tend towards the bellicose is that the forum is public. Where there is an audience, there is always the risk that critical thinking will be subordinated to the performative desire for victory or the humiliation of a rival. In these circumstances, complexities that require a nuanced approach are refashioned into misleading binaries, and opponents are mischaracterised out of all recognition so that people effectively end up arguing with spectres of their imagination. The Socratic method, by contrast, urges us to see disputation as essentially cooperative. This is the ideal that should be embedded into our national curricula. Children need to be taught that there are few instances in which serious discussions can be simplified to a matter of right or wrong, and fewer still in which one person’s rightness should be taken as proof of another’s wrongness. In the lexicon of Critical Thinking, this is called the fallacy of ‘affirming a disjunct’; that is to say, ‘either you are right or I am right, which means that if you are wrong I must be right’. One cannot think critically in such reductionist terms.

To attempt seriously to understand an alternative worldview involves, as Bertrand Russell put it, ‘some effort of thought, and most people would die sooner than think’. In the study of psychology this is termed the ‘cognitive miser’ model, which acknowledges that most human brains will favour the easiest solution to any given problem. These mental shortcuts – known as heuristics – are hardwired into us, which is why being told what to think is more pleasurable than thinking for ourselves. I remember an English lesson in which I had initiated a discussion with my students about the representation of Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost, a topic that routinely comes up in exams. I wanted to know what they thought, and why. One student was sufficiently bold to ask: ‘Can’t you just tell us what we need to write to get the highest marks?’

This was not the fault of the student; there has been a trend in recent years, most likely influenced by the pressures of league tables, for schools to engage in ‘spoon-feeding’. Schemes of work and assessment criteria are made readily available to the pupils so that they can systematically hit the necessary targets in order to elevate their grades. The notion of education for education’s sake no longer carries any weight. I have even seen talented pupils marked down by moderators for an excess of individuality in their answers. In such circumstances, even a subject like English Literature can be reduced to a kind of memory test in which essays are regurgitated by rote.

It is hardly surprising, then, that pupils who opt for Critical Thinking courses at GCSE or A-level often perceive it to be a light option, a means to enhance the curriculum vitae without too much exertion. Courses are generally divided into Problem Solving and Critical Thinking, the former concerned with processing and interpreting data, and the latter covering the fundamentals of analysis and argumentation. Pupils learn about common fallacies such as the ad hominem (personal attack), tu quoque (counter-attack) and post hoc, ergo propter hoc (mistaking correlation for causality), along with others derived from Aristotle’s Sophistical Refutations. The Latin may be off-putting, but in truth these are simple ideas which are readily digestible. If one were to discount arguments in which these fallacies were committed, virtually all online disputes would disappear.

That said, the existence of Critical Thinking as an academic subject in its own right might not be the best way to achieve this. As the psychologist Daniel T. Willingham has argued, cognitive abilities are redundant without secure contextual knowledge. Critical thinking is already embedded into any pedagogical practice that focuses on how to think rather than what to think. The increased influence of the new puritans in education presents a problem in this regard, given that they are particularly hostile to divergent viewpoints. Any institution which becomes ideologically driven is unlikely to successfully foster critical thinking, and this is particularly the case when teachers are at times expected to proselytise in accordance with fashionable identity politics. The depoliticisation of schools is just the first step. Critical thinking requires humility; this involves not just the ability to admit that one might be wrong, but also to recognise that an uninformed opinion is worthless, however stridently expressed. Interpretative skills are key, but only when developed on a secure foundation of subject-specific knowledge. This is the basis for Camille Paglia’s view that art history should be built into the national curriculum from primary school level. In her book, Glittering Images (2012), Paglia explains that children require ‘a historical framework of objective knowledge about art’, rather than merely treating art as ‘therapeutic praxis’ to ‘unleash children’s hidden creativity’. Potato prints and zigzag scissors have their place, but we mustn’t forget about the textbooks.

When I was a part-time English teacher at a private secondary school for girls in London, one of my favourite exercises for the younger pupils was to ask them to study a photograph of a well-known work of art for five minutes without speaking, after which time they would share their observations with the rest of the class. So, for instance, I would give them each a copy of Paul Delaroche’s ‘Les Enfants d’Edouard’ (1831), which depicts the two nephews of Richard III in their chamber in the Tower of London just prior to their murder. My pupils knew nothing of the historical context, but after minutes of silent consideration were able to pick out details – the ominous shadows under the door, the dog alerted to the assassins’ footfall, how the older boy stares out at us with a sense of resignation – and offer some personal reflections on their cumulative impact. To create, one must first learn how to interpret.

The kind of humility fostered in the appreciation of great art could act as a corrective to the rise of narcissism and decline of empathy that psychologists have observed over the past thirty years. According to the National Institutes of Health, millennials are three times more likely to suffer from narcissistic personality disorder than those of the baby boomer generation. Writers such as Peter Whittle, Robert Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett have traced the rise of hyper-individualism in Western culture. One particular study revealed that in 1950 only 12 per cent of respondents agreed with the statement ‘I am a very important person’. By 1990, this figure had risen to 80 per cent and the trajectory shows no signs of stopping. One of the ways in which this trend manifests itself is the now common tendency for arguments to deteriorate into accusations of dishonesty. After all, it takes an extreme form of egotism to assume that the only possible explanation for an alternative point of view is that one’s opponent must be lying. In order to think critically, we cannot be in the business of simply assessing conclusions on the basis of whether or not they accord with our own.

An education underpinned by critical thinking is the very bedrock of civilisation, the means by which chaos is tamed into order. Tribalism, mudslinging, the inability to critique one’s own position: these are the telltale markers of the boorish and the hidebound. A society is ill-served by a generation of adults who have not been educated beyond the solipsistic impulses of childhood. At a time when so many are lamenting the degradation of public discourse, a conversation about how best to incorporate critical thinking into our schools is long overdue. Our civilisation might just depend on it.

This is an excerpt from The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World. You can buy the book here. It’s also available as an audiobook.

#Andrew Doyle #The New Puritans #critical thinking #critical social justice #authoritarianism #ideological capture #ideological corruption #academic corruption #instititional capture #institutional corruption #religion is a mental illness

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