Once in every billion tweets or so, a man will go so much too far that it bites him in the ass.

Northern Ireland First Minister Arlene Foster has been awarded £125,000 in damages after a defamatory tweet by TV presenter Dr Christian Jessen. Dr Jessen tweeted an unfounded claim that the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) leader had been having an extra-marital affair on 23 December 2019. The post remained online until Dr Jessen deleted it on 7 January 2020.

A judge at the High Court in Belfast said it was an “outrageous libel” which was “grossly defamatory”.

…

He ordered Dr Jessen, who is best known for presenting Channel Four programme Embarrassing Bodies, to pay damages of £125,000 and Mrs Foster’s legal costs.

The judge also addressed the fact that Dr Jessen failed to respond to warnings from Mrs Foster’s lawyer – which became the subject of mainstream media coverage. “The offending tweet remained on the defendant’s Twitter account for two weeks, a Twitter account with 311,000 followers,” he said.

“The tweet was liked approximately 3,500 times and it was retweeted 517 times. “This outrageously bad libel cut [Mrs Foster] to the core, causing her considerable upset, distress, humiliation, embarrassment and hurt.”

So what’s the nice doctor up to?

Like corporate greenwashing only trans-color.

Oh look, a box of 98% sugar “cereal” that’s pushed on kids via cute animals and endless tv ads – but this one is different, because it’s about…um…telling kids to be trans inclusive.

They even put out a press release.

BATTLE CREEK, Mich., May 20, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — Limited-edition Together With Pride cereal hits shelves across the country today, marking the latest collaboration between Kellogg Company and GLAAD. LGBTQ+ icons and friends of GLAAD will start their day with the new cereal to celebrate that no matter who you are or who you love, you are too awesome to fit into a (cereal) box. Fans can get involved by joining the #BoxesAreForCerealChallenge via TikTok and for every box purchased and by uploading your receipt, Kellogg will donate $3* (up to $140,000) to support GLAAD’s efforts in accelerating acceptance and advancing equality for the LGBTQ+ community.

Isn’t that lovely? They’re not about flogging disgusting unhealthy sugar-cereal on kids for $$$, they’re about inclusion and drastic surgery for children.

“Together With Pride cereal marks the latest chapter in a years long partnership with GLAAD and is the evolution of the much-loved All Together cereal, which previously was only available online,” said Doug VanDeVelde, General Manager of Kellogg U.S. Cereal Category. “Our delicious new recipe features berry-flavored, rainbow hearts dusted with edible glitter. We can’t wait for fans to try our latest limited run.” 

That edible glitter is sugar, and so are the “berry-flavored” rainbow hearts. It’s not food, it’s sugar-addiction started early, and it’s made Kellogg rich. Now Kellogg wants kids to get themselves mutilated and stuffed with puberty-blockers. How “kind.”

“Boxes are for cereal, not people” is the embodiment and celebration of Kellogg Company’s commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion, not just within Kellogg Company, but also at the tables of our cereal fans coast to coast. As Kellogg has grown its multiyear allyship with GLAAD, the company hopes to spread the word on allyship and show its support for the transgender and gender nonconforming communities.”

It’s very young children who eat this garbage, so I guess Kellogg’s is recruiting? Hey kids, be trans, it will make you lots of friends among sugar-cereal companies.

“Kellogg’s new Together With Pride cereal will create opportunities for homes and families to have conversations about the importance of acceptance, compassion and understanding, especially when it comes to LGBTQ+ youth,” said GLAAD President & CEO Sarah Kate Ellis. “Kellogg is not only building on an ongoing commitment to support the LGBTQ+ community, but initiatives that spotlight the importance of using correct pronouns to create safe and welcoming spaces for trans and nonbinary people.”

Wow. They really are recruiting – zombie allies if not actual soldiers. Get started on the Magic Pronouns indoctrination early!

Lovely words maybe, but she certainly doesn’t live up to them.

She’s not always asking questions about the world around her, and she’s very hostile to women who asks questions about the world around us that she finds politically unacceptable, aka terfy.

O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave – very very much free, top free, most free of any anywhere.

With just a week to go before the legislative session ends in Texas, a host of bills are making their way to Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk.

One of the pieces of legislation still under consideration would require sports teams to play the national anthem at games.

So there! You have to stand up for this anthem if you go to a sports game, and the teams have to play this one song if they do a sports game. Have to, I tell you, it’s mandatory and required and a legal obligation. That’s FREEDOM. You there, why isn’t your hand on your chest? You tryna get arrested or what?

Dubbed the “Star Spangled Banner Protection Act,” Senate Bill 4 would apply to professional sports teams that receive government funds from the state of Texas, requiring them to play the song.

Professional sports teams get money from the state of Texas. Why is that? Don’t they make a profit? Why do they get government money? Texas couldn’t spend the money on more pressing needs?

According to The Texas Tribune, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick made the bill one of his legislative priorities after Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban stopped playing the anthem before home games.

Freedom freedom freedom – which of course does not include freedom to stop playing one particular song.

We ARE land of free n home of brave but that doesn’t mean you get to not sing this one song! Oh hell no. We’ll pass a law to make you sing it or else. Because freedom.

In a public response to the outcry condemning his decision, Cuban expressed support for the anthem, but he said team executives “also loudly hear the voices of those who feel that the anthem does not represent them.” The NBA later said all teams would play the anthem before games.

But why? Seriously, bitter jokes aside, why? Why is this a rule? Games are games, what do they have to do with singing a national song? We don’t have to sing the song in other settings or on other occasions. Why sports games?

Not just Ireland.

When Ann Keen gave birth, the midwives refused to give her anything for the pain. That way, they told her, she would remember it and learn not to be so wicked again. To be treated like an animal in labour, denied the most basic compassion and respect, was simply part of the punishment she had supposedly earned for getting pregnant out of wedlock aged 17. The hospital discharged her without any follow-up care, as if the birth had never happened. But the most grievous part of the story is that she also went home without her baby.

For Keen is one of a still unknown number of unmarried British women coerced into handing over their newborns for adoption between the 1950s and the late 1970s, who are now seeking an apology from Boris Johnson on behalf of the governments of the day. But perhaps just as importantly, they want it acknowledged that they didn’t give their children up willingly. Some were told that if they loved their babies they would want them raised by respectable married couples, not under the shadow of illegitimacy.

It’s not ideal for a 17-year-old, married or not, to be raising a baby. Human puberty happens way before human maturity. But the mitigation for that is social assistance (and adoption if the mother wants it), not bullying the mother into abandoning the baby.

Instead of being briefed about the financial support to which they might be entitled, they were warned that keeping the baby would bring great hardship on their families. And while some consented to adoption under this kind of duress, others say forms were simply signed on their behalf by parents or so-called “moral welfare workers” supervising adoptions…

Oppressive morality, cloaked in religion, is the obvious explanation for how such unthinkable things could have happened. Pregnant teenagers such as Keen would be shipped off by their mortified parents to church-run mother-and-baby homes to hide them from the neighbours, and adoptions were often arranged through church-run agencies

Funny how the god-bothering agencies punished the girls but not the boys or men who got them pregnant.

At the heart of almost every account of a public scandal I have read are people who have somehow become dehumanised in the eyes of officialdom; whose feelings were deemed not to matter.

This particular, often unthinking breed of contempt is there in accounts of how police officers yawned through interviews with Girl A, the gang-raped victim of child sexual exploitation in Rochdale, whose case was initially dropped because they considered her trouble: promiscuous, damaged, not a credible witness. It’s there in the shocking stories of the Windrush generation’s treatment at the hands of the Home Office, and in accounts tumbling out in the wake of the Grenfell Tower fire about how residents’ safety fears were dismissed.

Sorry, we’re all busy attending $5000 dinner parties to discuss how racist we are.

Originally a comment by Nullius in Verba on Not merely the product of individual bias in reply to my request for more background.

People like DiAngelo and Kendi are not aberrations or perversions of CRT. They’re extensions of a framework that traces right back to Derrick Bell at CRT’s beginning. I’ll try to sketch some of the essentials. Theorists really do only have a few basic principles and rhetorical moves. Once you familiarize yourself with them, it’s like a perversely easy game.

I suppose the first thing to note would be that CRT’s philosophical lineage is critical theory. I mean, it’s in the name, but it’s very easy to read it as the critical in “critical thinking” rather than in “critical theory”. As such, it inherits all the good and ill from its progenitor. Per the wiki entry on Derrick Bell, whose work informed CRT’s genesis, “Bell and other legal scholars began using the phrase ‘critical race theory’ (CRT) in the 1970s as a takeoff on ‘critical legal theory’, a branch of legal scholarship that challenges the validity of concepts such as rationality, objective truth, and judicial neutrality. Critical legal theory was itself a takeoff on critical theory, a philosophical framework with roots in Marxist thought.” It is important not to gloss over the concepts against which CLT, and by inheritance CRT, is set in opposition. CLT critiques the very concept of rationality—not whether anyone ever achieves perfect rationality, but whether the concept per se is problematic. That is, it advances the notion that rationality is not and should not be part of legal intentionality. Similarly, it opposes the ideas that objective truth should be a relevant concept in law and that the judiciary should strive for neutrality.

Critical race theory opposes even more ideas most of us would consider fundamental. According to early theorist Richard Delgado, CRT has no truck with “equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.” To clarify, he means that the ideas that the law should treat people equally, that it is possible to use reason as a legal tool, that rational inquiry is to be preferred over emotional response, and that constitutional law should be neutral are all problematic and in need of radical deconstruction. Opposition to equal treatment generates the CRT rejection of individualism and rights-based solutions to, well, anything.

I guess I shouldn’t let Marx off the hook here, either. CRT and, to the best of my understanding, the rest of the critical theories, inherit the idea of false consciousness (derived) from Marxist theory. This is the idea that citizens exist in a state of delusion. The proles can’t see that they are oppressed; the bourgeoisie can’t see that they are oppressors. Marx theorized that a subset of the proletariat would “awaken” to their oppression and spontaneously organize a revolution against their overlords. Applied to racism, the idea yields minorities who cannot see that they are oppressed and whites who cannot see that they are oppressors.

So when we see someone say, “Objectivity itself is the reification of white male thought,” that is directly derivable from early CLT/CRT critiques of objective truth and rationality. What society constructs as objectivity is a creation of white males and is patterned after that which white males value. The only reason that you might think that objective truth exists or matters is therefore white colonialization of your consciousness. You’ve internalized your oppression and exist in a state of false consciousness.

When Kendi says that it’s impossible for a white person to be not-racist, he’s drawing on Bell’s own notion of interest convergence. That is, white people only do things that converge with their interests. Since it is in white people’s interest to maintain their dominance over other races, those interests and associated activities are perforce racist. When Kendi supports removing anti-discrimination language from a state constitution or says that what we need is an unaccountable ministry of diversity (NewSpeak: MiniDiv), he’s merely continuing the assault on the notion of equal treatment before the law.

When DiAngelo goes on about white fragility, that’s again false consciousness and opposition to rationality. On the CRT view, reasoning and rationality that reach conclusions other than those approved by CRT support the status quo. Supporting the status quo is equivalent to supporting racist structures of dominance and oppression. Therefore, all such reason is automatically rejected. This is not a bug. It’s a feature. White people are “fragile” because their false consciousness renders them so, reacting unfavorably to being labeled racist. They respond with argument, because reason and rationality are tools of white supremacy. They become upset, hurt, and angry because their dominance is partly supported by their inability to see their own dominance; undermining that support causes emotional instability.

Like, it’s not difficult to take the basic tenets and go places we really, really shouldn’t, and to do so entirely validly.

Cashing in.

Were White Fragility to be adapted as reality TV, the result might look something like this: A collection of affluent white women, equipped with varying degrees of vanity and self-delusion, gather at a well-appointed dinner table. There, they face down a pair of unsparing judges prepared to see right through them. Who’s racist? Time to find out. White wine flows; white women admit shameful secrets. They get squirmy; they get angry; they turn on each other. If one of them starts to cry, she has to leave. She will find tissues in the designated crying room.

The Real Housewives of White Fragility?

The Bravo version of Robin DiAngelo, in other words, might look a bit like Race2Dinner. Begun in 2019 by Regina Jackson and Saira Rao, Race2Dinner gathers groups of eight white women at the home of a white host, where Jackson and Rao facilitate a discussion about race over dinner.

And collect $5,000 along with the meal.

Jackson and Rao ask guests to describe racist things they’ve recently done and press them on any evasions. Often the examples that emerge involve silence: failing to speak up or intervene. Sometimes they consist of thoughts or feelings: assuming that the Black teens pulled over in a white neighborhood must have been doing something wrong. Sometimes the guests struggle to think of what to say. “Not knowing is classic white behavior,” Rao told me. “You don’t know, because it would ruin your entire image of being the perfect, nice white lady. I’m sure you’re intimately familiar with this, being a white woman.”

Heads they win, tails you lose.

When they first started out, they charged $2,500 per dinner, to be covered by the host or divided among her guests.

“That’s peanuts,” Jackson told me when we spoke over Zoom. “People pay more than that to go to a yoga conference.”

Damn right! Make it 50k – make it 100k. Karens have all the money.

Their business model, unsurprisingly, attracted attention. In February 2020, a Guardian article on their dinners made the rounds online, inspiring umbrage and hilarity across the political spectrum. 

I’m pretty sure I did a post on that article, but I haven’t been able to find it. I’m very sure I read it, at least. It’s interesting to learn how helpful it was to the nice facilitators.

Jackson and Rao, meanwhile, received an influx of new inquiries about their service and signed a deal to write a book called White Women: Everything You Already Know About Your Own Racism and How to Do Better. They also raised the fee for each dinner to $5,000.

Cha-ching! Thanks, Guardian!

Lisa Bond serves as Race2-Dinner’s “resident white woman”; Jackson and Rao hired her to help organize events after she hosted her own dinner two years ago. (Bond had initially balked at the cost, but after seeing a post from Rao and Jackson about how many white women balked at the cost, she resolved not to be like the others.) Last summer, Bond said, she fielded some 300 emails in a three-month period and had nearly 100 follow-up phone calls of 30 or 45 minutes each. Of those, three women proceeded to book an event. “We get excuse after excuse after excuse,” Bond said. “It’s typical white-women fashion.”

An excuse isn’t actually required. It isn’t school or a court date or a job.

Jackson and Rao, who live in Denver, met in 2018, when Rao ran an underdog primary campaign against Democratic congresswoman Diana DeGette — “literally the patron saint of toxic white womanhood,” Rao said.

Literally. Who knew it was a literal category?

One of the past year’s few in-person dinners took place three days after the attack on the Capitol. Rao said that one woman — “the only woman in the group who seemed remotely willing to do this work, period” — had a question at the end of the evening. She looked at Jackson, and she looked at Rao, “and she goes, ‘Do you see any difference between us and the people that stormed the Capitol?’ And we both said, ‘No.’ ” The assembled women, a group of Colorado business and nonprofit leaders, “lost their entire minds,” Rao recalled. “So this notion of not all white people, not all white women — that is completely unchanged.”

What about all opportunistic profiteering women?

It’s ok because women are Karens.

A former City bank worker took upskirt images of his female colleagues and covertly filmed them as they walked around the office, a court heard today.

Charles Sleilati, 53, made more than 300 videos of women he worked with at the leading bank, and also amassed around 1,000 images of random women in restaurants and on public transport.

Westminster magistrates court heard Sleilati was reported by whistleblowers within his Bishopsgate office, after concerns about his behaviour.

“The defendant was seen by other members of staff in an open-plan office taking pictures, filming up women’s skirts, and down their tops”, said prosecutor Komal Varsani.

He probably identifies as a porn producer. You have to respect his idenniny.

Sleilati, who has sought psychological help since his arrest, admits he videoed some of the victims under their desks, angling the camera to film up their skirts.

Never mind them. Imagine what he must have been going through – all that hard work to angle the camera just right, because those bitches wouldn’t just show him what he wanted to peer at.

“Marion Millar’s” [not her real name, I gather] appointment with the Scottish Stasi was supposed to be in progress now but they have (cough cough) “postponed” it. I suspect that’s a cowardly way of saying they’re trying to figure out how to cancel the whole thing, and stalling while they try harder. This has the benefit (from their point of view) of prolonging their torment of Marion. From our point of view it has the benefit of underlining what chickenshit sadists they are.

What a shower.

Janel George at the American Bar Association on Critical Race Theory:

CRT is not a diversity and inclusion “training” but a practice of interrogating the role of race and racism in society that emerged in the legal academy and spread to other fields of scholarship. [ Kimberlé ] Crenshaw—who coined the term “CRT”—notes that CRT is not a noun, but a verb. It cannot be confined to a static and narrow definition but is considered to be an evolving and malleable practice. It critiques how the social construction of race and institutionalized racism perpetuate a racial caste system that relegates people of color to the bottom tiers. CRT also recognizes that race intersects with other identities, including sexuality, gender identity, and others*. CRT recognizes that racism is not a bygone relic of the past. Instead, it acknowledges that the legacy of slavery, segregation, and the imposition of second-class citizenship on Black Americans and other people of color continue to permeate the social fabric of this nation. 

*Note the non-mention of sex. Trans people and LGB people count but women don’t. Janel George is a woman but left women out.

That aside – again I ask – is this so crazy? There’s been some progress, but it’s far from complete. Is that a hideously woke thing to say? There are statistics that back it up – on health, education, income, wealth, incarceration, debt – basic stuff like that.

Some “key tenets”:

• Acknowledgement that racism is a normal feature of society and is embedded within systems and institutions, like the legal system, that replicate racial inequality. This dismisses the idea that racist incidents are aberrations but instead are manifestations of structural and systemic racism.

• Rejection of popular understandings about racism, such as arguments that confine racism to a few “bad apples.” CRT recognizes that racism is codified in law, embedded in structures, and woven into public policy. CRT rejects claims of meritocracy or “colorblindness.” CRT recognizes that it is the systemic nature of racism that bears primary responsibility for reproducing racial inequality.

I’m guessing that’s where the conservatives ask to get off the bus. I’m guessing they’d rather think it’s individual Sin as opposed to socially embedded. I think that’s just fatuous. How could we possibly think it’s not embedded? Unless we live in the world with bags over our heads.

• Recognition of the relevance of people’s everyday lives to scholarship. This includes embracing the lived experiences of people of color, including those preserved through storytelling, and rejecting deficit-informed research that excludes the epistemologies of people of color.

Ok that sounds like an opening to bullshit. If the idea is that storytelling should trump research, then no.

It could be a mixed bag – some reasonable claims and some groupthinky faddish crap.

Why conservatives are so freaked out about Critical Race Theory, or what they say is Critical Race Theory.

Critical race theory is an academic concept, a form of analysis developed in the 1970s and ’80s by legal scholars including Derrick Bell and Kimberlé Crenshaw. It suggests that our nation’s history of race and racism is embedded in law and public policy, still plays a role in shaping outcomes for Black Americans and other people of color, and should be taken into account when these issues are discussed.

Is any of that especially wack or even surprising?

According to Christopher F. Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and perhaps the foremost popularizer of critical race theory alarmism on the right, CRT “prescribes a revolutionary program that would overturn the principles of the Declaration and destroy the remaining structure of the Constitution.” Supposedly, under the auspices of CRT, children are being taught Aztec chants whose “clear implication” is “the displacement of the Christian god.” Critical race theory has been purposely mischaracterized as a divisive form of discourse that pits people of color against White people, that reduces children to their race.

I think maybe people who don’t live it are easily lulled into thinking it was all solved years ago and there’s really nothing much left to do, apart from imprisoning ever more “super-predators.”

But maybe CRT is all a crock. But I still don’t know exactly what kind of crock.

That was the goal, after all.

Low-income immigrants in the US who struggled to afford basic needs during the coronavirus pandemic avoided seeking government benefits and other assistance because of immigration-related concerns, according to a new report by the Urban Institute.

Of course they did, and that’s exactly what Trump and his goons wanted them to do. Cunning plan succeeded.

Immigrants, and especially immigrant women, have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic-induced recession, enduring higher unemployment rates than workers born in the United States, the Migration Policy Institute reports.

While the economy sputtered, more than a quarter of adults in low-income immigrant families said they or their partner lost a job, the Urban Institute found. Roughly half said the pandemic had negatively affected their family’s employment, whether through layoffs, furloughs, lost income or other threats to their livelihoods.

…

But, even as low-income immigrant families worried about meeting their needs, a sizable chunk – 27.5% – decided against using non-cash government benefits or other help because of immigration-related concerns. They didn’t apply for or stopped participating in nutrition, health and housing programs, which could have provided the life-sustaining basics they needed.

That’s what Trump wanted to happen. He wanted them to go without and be afraid.

The British Journal of Medicine.

Yes, the British Journal of Medicine.

MEDICINE.

Interesting.

If it has the word “critical” in it, it must be dangerous, is that the idea?

Across the United States, state legislatures are showing a newfound interest in — and aversion to — critical race theory, or CRT, an academic movement that systematically considers how even seemingly neutral laws, regulations and social norms can have different impacts on particular racial and ethnic groups. It examines how legislatures at times target racial minorities for adverse treatment — such as recent voter suppression laws in Arizona, Georgia and Iowa — and, at other times, are simply indifferent to how new laws will impact those outside the majority.

And this should be stamped out because…why, exactly?

CRT originated in U.S. law schools in the 1970s and remains well established and widely accepted there. But in recent weeks, some Republican-dominated state legislatures have adopted laws that ban the teaching of critical race theory in public schools. Some, such as the laws in Idaho and Oklahoma, even restrict the use of CRT in public colleges and universities. Other states, including Georgia and Utah, are actively considering similar legislation or administrative action. A bill has even been introduced in the U.S. House (where the Democratic majority presumably will reject it).

I can easily believe there’s some work that Identifies As CRT that is shite, but that doesn’t mean all CRT is shite, and it seems most unlikely that it is. Given US history it seems all but impossible that it is.

Education Week has an explainer on what CRT is:

Critical race theory is an academic concept that is more than 40 years old. The core idea is that racism is a social construct, and that it is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also something embedded in legal systems and policies.

So the opponents think…what? That racism is not embedded in legal systems and policies [in the US]? How could that possibly be in a country built on slavery? Race-based slavery?

I suppose that is what they think. That was then, this is now, racism is ancient history. We had the Civil War, and Martin Luther King, and…and Martin Luther King and what more do these people want? Meanwhile the prison stats sit on a shelf somewhere.

Fundamentally, though, the disagreement springs from different conceptions of racism. CRT thus puts an emphasis on outcomes, not merely on individuals’ own beliefs, and it calls on these outcomes to be examined and rectified. Among lawyers, teachers, policymakers, and the general public, there are many disagreements about how precisely to do those things, and to what extent race should be explicitly appealed to or referred to in the process.

In other words the people angry about CRT are focusing on “I am not a racist!!!” when the point is that it’s not about you, it’s about what racism has embedded in our laws and practices so deeply that we don’t even see it.

Oh yay, more gentle reminders! I love gentle reminders!!

…………………………………….Wut?

That’s not a reminder, it’s wholly new information, and it’s word salad.

It goes on and on like that.

It’s stupid, it’s boring, it’s incoherent. (And how do you “fall in any kind of umbrella”?)

Meanwhile, glaciers are melting and sea levels are rising and forests are vanishing while people spin out the doctrines of this trivial meaningless new religion.

The weather must be stormy in Florida right now.

Manhattan’s district attorney has convened the grand jury that is expected to decide whether to indict former president Donald Trump, other executives at his company or the business itself should prosecutors present the panel with criminal charges, according to two people familiar with the development.

…

The move indicates that District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr.’s investigation of the former president and his business has reached an advanced stage after more than two years. It suggests, too, that Vance believes he has found evidence of a crime — if not by Trump then by someone potentially close to him or by his company.

Vance’s investigation is expansive, according to people familiar the probe and public disclosures made during related litigation. His investigators are scrutinizing Trump’s business practices before he was president, including whether the value of specific properties in the Trump Organization’s real estate portfolio were manipulated in a way that defrauded banks and insurance companies, and if any tax benefits were obtained illegally through unscrupulous asset valuation.

Any bets?

Michael Beschloss has been having fun with it.

Originally a comment by Nullius in Verba on The pressure continues.

By “gender-affirming healthcare” he means puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and amputation of breasts or genitals. It’s at least debatable whether those items are healthcare at all.

TRA language games hide horrible nonsense behind a respectable veneer. There’s a difference between affirmative care and gender-affirmative “care”. The former is when the therapist affirms that the client/patient is, in fact, experiencing something. The latter is when the therapist affirms that the experience is veridical or that beliefs based on that experience are correct. Denying the patient’s phenomenological experience is unhelpful, while accepting it can build the trust required for progress.

Affirming the patient’s disordered belief structure, however, is not just unhelpful, it is bizarre and obviously so. In response to what other psychological condition can you imagine the suggested reaction would be affirmation? Pick a disorder at random and say, “Yes, …” Patient presenting with anorexia? Yes, you are a fat fatty. Grandiose delusional identity? Yes, you are the King of Spain. Agoraphobia? Yes, something terrible will happen if you go outside. Social anxiety? Yes, they’re all going to laugh at you. Depression? Yes, everything is terrible and terrible and will never get better, and so are you. Schizophrenia? Yes, the voices are real and you should do whatever they tell you. And so on and so forth.

Gender-affirmative healthcare is not healthcare at all. It solves nothing and instead feeds the disorder, perpetuates the illness, exacerbates the pain. In short, it is the opposite and antithesis of healthcare.

Hey it was just rough sex, rough open-air sex, don’t kink-shame.

A teenager who killed an underage schoolgirl after buying her drink and abandoning her at a city beauty spot on a winter’s night was jailed today.

Ewan Fulton bit Mhari O’Neill on her breast and throttled her before leaving her in an intoxicated state on Edinburgh’s Calton Hill where her body was found by a dog walker.

Kink-shaming. So he choked her, so he bit her on the breast – so what? She probably loved it! Or was too drunk to notice. It’s nobody else’s business what kinksters get up to in the privacy of their own – er, in the privacy of Calton Hill.

I’ve been to Calton Hill. I expect everyone who’s ever set foot in Edinburgh has. It’s this big lump in the middle of the city, from which you can get a great view. It’s not quite the same thing as a discreet hotel room, with heating and duvets and desk clerks who call the police if some guy tries to take a drunk 15-year-old to a room.

He knew it was freezing cold. He bought a large bottle of vodka before heading up the hill with her.

Mr Prentice said that pathologists had decided that on balance they considered that hypothermia, with intoxication, was the most probable mechanism of the Portobello High School pupil’s death.

Probably so. You pour half a large bottle of vodka down a 15-year-old’s throat and take most of her clothes off and choke her and then leave her there on a cold night, she’s likely to die of hypothermia.

Fulton, now aged 20, admitted killing Miss O’Neill, who died on December 7 or 8 in 2018, when he appeared at the High Court in Edinburgh today.

He took part in sexual activity with the schoolgirl and bit her breasts and compressed her neck and culpably and recklessly endangered her health and life and exposed her to risk of injury and death.

He provided her with alcohol which resulted in her becoming intoxicated and incapable of looking after herself.

Kink, though.

More on belligerent trans-promoter Doctor Jack Turban:

Jack Turban, insistent critic of Abigail Shrier’s book on transitioning of young girls, constantly claims puberty blockers are safe. He is paid by a firm that manufactures them.

Jack Turban, MD, fellow in child and adolescent psychiatry at Stanford University School of medicine, bills himself as an Allopathic & Osteopathic Physician. But he’s famous for his advocacy for certain positions regarding transgender medicine – for advocating for the ‘Gender Affirming Care for Trans and ‘gender-diverse’ youth’ as part of his work on ‘Pediatric Gender Identity’ and vigorously advocating for, and downplaying the risks of medical transition, while selling books on the same.

…

Suitably inflammatory and triggering, Turban’s shown himself to be quite willing to tag any questioning of the ‘affirmative’ model as ‘conversion therapy’ that will certainly lead to suicide and follows it up with smears of anyone questioning his rhetoric as ‘right wing bigots’ – that tried and tested strategy of any activist seeking to shut down conversation.

…

According to Open Payments Search Tool used to track payments made by drug and medical device companies to physicians and teaching hospitals, Jack Turban has received at least  $15,000 (US) from Arbor Pharmaceuticals, manufacturers of Triptodur™, (triptorelin) which, through extended release injectable suspension, has been shown to arrest or reverse the clinical signs of puberty, in cases of precocious puberty – the exact purpose Arbor advocates Triptodur for.

How interesting, and how very convenient. A physician insistently promoting the ‘benefits’ of puberty blockers, who repeatedly insists on their safety and who seemingly has endless amounts of time to attack, denigrate, and smear doctors who disagree, has at least a 15,000 USD incentive to sanitize and push a drug, paid directly by the manufacturers.