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qqueenofhades · 7 months

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I really really REALLY need to see more people makimg the connection between trump and his russian handlers tbh.......like i know we've somehow gone through the looking glass of putin apologia but that piece abt the NYT you just posted, the bots, the interference: in the bag for trump? Yes. But i dont believe its due to his or even republican power or popularity or forcefulness.......this is a man with so much debt and kompromat thats only getting worse!! Not to sound kwazy BUT WE ARE BEING FULLY INFLITRATED and at the risk of conspiracizing i think the russians are ALSO behind the Times's demise along with so many other information centers etc. Like i KNOW these leftists love him but like. Wouldnt they care a LITTLE abt being manipulated like this???

Trump is 100% an active, willing, and eager Russian agent. That's not even paranoid conspiracy theory, that's just the only reasonable interpretation of the facts:

NOT TO MENTION that in the next two years after the Helsinki conference where Trump kowtowed to Putin in every way, the CIA admitted to losing huge and unusually high numbers of classified informants around the world (not CIA agents, but people secretly working for the American government in often-hostile countries):

Once again, this all happened when Trump was in office, when he was actively handing over CIA intel to the Kremlin against the wishes of the entire national security establishment, and which other experts have suggested was directly as a result of Trump handing over the identities of American informants to Russia, including those stationed in Russia itself:

Now, I could go on, but you get the point. Not to mention that Trump just lost a major UK-based lawsuit against Christopher Steele, the former MI6 agent who was the first to provide documents linking Trump to Russia in the controversial "Steele dossier":

And now: Trump is deeply in hock for hundreds of millions in legal fees and punitive judgments that are only increasing by the day, he somehow just came up with $90 million to appeal the judgment against E. Jean Carroll (nobody knows where he got this money either), and Russian state TV spends all their time openly salivating for Trump's return to the presidency (so he can hand over Ukraine and the rest of NATO and, as he literally said, "let Russia do whatever the hell they want.") I know we're largely numb to all the awful treasonous shit that Trump does, but like. This isn't a conspiracy theory, this is just what's going on in plain sight, and while the Online Leftists have recently become so stupid that I honestly can't tell if it's just terminal brainworms or active Russian psyops, it's strongly indicated that it is in fact a mix of both:

So, like. Just some food for thought.

#anonymous #ask #politics for ts #the giant orange monster

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sizzlingsandwichperfection-blog · 1 year

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Last week, Johnson & Johnson agreed not to enforce their secondary patents on bedaquiline in most countries after a long public pressure campaign by TB activists around the world.

(A special shoutout to Nandita Venkatesan and Phumeza Tisilethe, the two women who led the charge to prevent the patent evergreening in India, which is the only reason generic bedaquiline is in production.)

But the problem of patent evergreening is everywhere--as this NYT story reports, Gilead intentionally denied people access to a drug they knew to be less toxic than alternatives because it wanted to extend its monopoly on HIV drugs for as long as possible.

Similarly, Johnson & Johnson has been intentionally denying people access to affordable bedaquiline, even though they knew they could make a profit even if they decreased the price by 65%.

What's especially galling is that both these companies benefit tremendously from public investment (bedaquiline research was funded primarily by the public), and so we end up paying for it twice--once to develop it, and once to have it available to the sick.

This is infuriating, and it is resulting in the real impoverishment and death of so many people. How does it end? With better governance and regulation. In this respect, India can be a model for us--their courts have done a much better job than U.S. ones of determining what really deserves to be patented and for how long. I'm hopeful that we can learn from the, but disgusted by this ongoing horror.

#coffee company #pharmaceutical companies #it's almost as if we healthcare shouldn't be a market-driven enterprise #like what if the point of healthcare #is not to enrich the already rich #but rather to improve the health of a community #with preferential access for the most marginalized and impoverished

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ovaruling · 1 year

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i am so sick of this

there is an established relationship between advanced age of the father and risks to the mother, to the pregnancy, to the fetus, and later to the child.

older men’s ticking biological clocks are harmful. their ages literally compound the dangers to women and to the children they have. increased age of fathers is related to things like gestational diabetes, preeclampsia, and preterm birth, just to make a few. later health and mental problems have been observed in children of older fathers.

the number of older fathers is increasing. men feel entitled to father children well into elderliness. men also tend to seek out young women with which to have these children. the maternal mortality rate in the U.S. is currently the highest it has been since the 1960s. abortion rights in the U.S. are in extreme peril. this altogether makes the risk to women who reproduce w/ older men much, much greater.

i think we as a society need to start talking about this a bit.

screenshots of additional NYT article under the cut because i couldn’t figure out how to link without the paywall.

#was i not just talking about this #like come the fuck on.#personally my father was 45 when i was conceived (my mother was in her 20s) and i almost died at birth #my mother’s pregnancy was extremely high risk and caused permanent damage to her health #same thing happened with my younger sister—he was 50 when she was conceived #both my sister and i have suffered very poor health throughout childhood and adulthood #and we both have autoimmune disorders that are the first of their kind in either side of the family #just saying.#tagging for ref #older fathers #save

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covid-safer-hotties · 7 days

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NYT: Cuomo Personally Altered Report Which Understated Nursing Home COVID Deaths by Over 50%, Emails Reveal - Published Sept 19, 2024

By Joseph Feldman

NEW YORk – Former Governor Andrew Cuomo personally altered a state report that significantly underreported the number of nursing home deaths from COVID-19 by over 50%, according to emails cited in a new report.

The New York Times revealed that emails and congressional documents challenge Cuomo’s claim, made during a congressional hearing, that he had no recollection of seeing or reviewing the state Health Department’s report.

In June 2020, Cuomo’s assistant reportedly sent an email to his senior staff with the message, “Governor’s edits are attached for your review,” according to the Times.

Cuomo, who recently testified before the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, was not under oath during his testimony but was warned he could face criminal charges for knowingly making false statements.

The former governor’s actions during the early stages of the pandemic have drawn criticism, particularly an order to send elderly COVID-19 patients back to nursing homes, which may have led to as many as 9,000 additional deaths. Cuomo acknowledged he referred to this March directive as “the great debacle” in an email sent to his inner circle.

A July 2020 state Department of Health report downplayed the number of nursing home deaths, a move that a U.S. House committee described as part of a “cover-up.” The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic alleged Cuomo’s office had altered the report, but the emails suggest Cuomo was directly involved.

The Times report indicates Cuomo personally added language to the report that placed blame on nursing home staff, visitors, and family members for spreading the virus. During his June questioning by House members, Cuomo claimed he had no recollection of reviewing or editing the report before its release on July 7, 2020.

Although Cuomo is known for avoiding the use of email, the Times noted that none of the emails in question were sent by him.

During a Capitol Hill hearing on September 10, Cuomo’s repeated denials prompted Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY) to label him a “lying sack of s—t.”

Vivian Zayas, co-founder of Voice for Seniors, whose mother died in a Long Island nursing home after contracting COVID-19, attended the hearing. She accused Cuomo of lying, stating, “If he lied to Congress, he committed a crime. He should definitely be investigated.”

Cuomo’s spokesperson, Rich Azzopardi, responded to the email revelations by insisting that nursing home staff spread the virus, aligning with the findings of the original report. Azzopardi also emphasized that Cuomo cooperated fully with the congressional inquiry and argued that the findings align with CDC guidelines in place at the time.

Cuomo, who stepped down in August 2021 amid sexual misconduct allegations, has been rumored to be considering a run for New York City mayor as current Mayor Eric Adams faces growing scandals.

#mask up #covid #pandemic #covid 19 #wear a mask #public health #coronavirus #sars cov 2 #still coviding #wear a respirator

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macrolit · 10 months

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NYT's Notable Books of 2023

Each year, we pore over thousands of new books, seeking out the best novels, memoirs, biographies, poetry collections, stories and more. Here are the standouts, selected by the staff of The New York Times Book Review.

AFTER SAPPHO by Selby Wynn Schwartz

Inspired by Sappho’s work, Schwartz’s debut novel offers an alternate history of creativity at the turn of the 20th century, one that centers queer women artists, writers and intellectuals who refused to accept society’s boundaries.

ALL THE SINNERS BLEED by S.A. Cosby

In his earlier thrillers, Cosby worked the outlaw side of the crime genre. In his new one — about a Black sheriff in a rural Southern town, searching for a serial killer who tortures Black children — he’s written a crackling good police procedural.

THE BEE STING by Paul Murray

In Murray’s boisterous tragicomic novel, a once wealthy Irish family struggles with both the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash and their own inner demons.

BIOGRAPHY OF X by Catherine Lacey

Lacey rewrites 20th-century U.S. history through the audacious fictional life story of X, a polarizing female performance artist who made her way from the South to New York City’s downtown art scene.

BIRNAM WOOD by Eleanor Catton

In this action-packed novel from a Booker Prize winner, a collective of activist gardeners crosses paths with a billionaire doomsday prepper on land they each want for different purposes.

BLACKOUTS by Justin Torres

This lyrical, genre-defying novel — winner of the 2023 National Book Award — explores what it means to be erased and how to persist after being wiped away.

BRIGHT YOUNG WOMEN by Jessica Knoll

In her third and most assured novel, Knoll shifts readers’ attention away from a notorious serial killer, Ted Bundy, and onto the lives — and deaths — of the women he killed. Perhaps for the first time in fiction, Knoll pooh-poohs Bundy's much ballyhooed intelligence, celebrating the promise and perspicacity of his victims instead.

CHAIN-GANG ALL-STARS by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

This satire — in which prison inmates duel on TV for a chance at freedom — makes readers complicit with the bloodthirsty fans sitting ringside. The fight scenes are so well written they demonstrate how easy it might be to accept a world this sick.

THE COVENANT OF WATER by Abraham Verghese

Verghese’s first novel since “Cutting for Stone” follows generations of a family across 77 years in southwestern India as they contend with political strife and other troubles — capped by a shocking discovery made by the matriarch’s granddaughter, a doctor.

CROOK MANIFESTO by Colson Whitehead

Returning to the world of his novel “Harlem Shuffle,” Whitehead again uses a crime story to illuminate a singular neighborhood at a tipping point — here, Harlem in the 1970s.

THE DELUGE by Stephen Markley

Markley’s second novel confronts the scale and gravity of climate change, tracking a cadre of scientists and activists from the gathering storm of the Obama years to the super-typhoons of future decades. Immersive and ambitious, the book shows the range of its author’s gifts: polyphonic narration, silken sentences and elaborate world-building.

EASTBOUND by Maylis de Kerangal

In de Kerangal’s brief, lyrical novel, translated by Jessica Moore, a young Russian soldier on a trans-Siberian train decides to desert and turns to a civilian passenger, a Frenchwoman, for help.

EMILY WILDE’S ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF FAERIES by Heather Fawcett

The world-building in this tale of a woman documenting a new kind of faerie is exquisite, and the characters are just as textured and richly drawn. This is the kind of folkloric fantasy that remembers the old, blood-ribboned source material about sacrifices and stolen children, but adds a modern gloss.

ENTER GHOST by Isabella Hammad

In Hammad’s second novel, a British Palestinian actor returns to her hometown in Israel to recover from a breakup and spend time with her family. Instead, she’s talked into joining a staging of “Hamlet” in the West Bank, where she has a political awakening.

FORBIDDEN NOTEBOOK by Alba de Céspedes

A best-selling novelist and prominent anti-Fascist in her native Italy, de Céspedes has lately fallen into unjust obscurity. Translated by Ann Goldstein, this elegant novel from the 1950s tells the story of a married mother, Valeria, whose life is transformed when she begins keeping a secret diary.

THE FRAUD by Zadie Smith

Based on a celebrated 19th-century trial in which the defendant was accused of impersonating a nobleman, Smith’s novel offers a vast panoply of London and the English countryside, and successfully locates the social controversies of an era in a handful of characters.

FROM FROM by Monica Youn

In her fourth book of verse, a svelte, intrepid foray into American racism, Youn turns a knowing eye on society’s love-hate relationship with what it sees as the “other.”

A GUEST IN THE HOUSE by Emily Carroll

After a lonely young woman marries a mild-mannered widower and moves into his home, she begins to wonder how his first wife actually died. This graphic novel alternates between black-and-white and overwhelming colors as it explores the mundane and the horrific.

THE HEAVEN & EARTH GROCERY STORE by James McBride

McBride’s latest, an intimate, big-hearted tale of community, opens with a human skeleton found in a well in the 1970s, and then flashes back to the past, to the ’20s and ’30s, to explore the town’s Black, Jewish and immigrant history.

HELLO BEAUTIFUL by Ann Napolitano

In her radiant fourth novel, Napolitano puts a fresh spin on the classic tale of four sisters and the man who joins their family. Take “Little Women,” move it to modern-day Chicago, add more intrigue, lots of basketball and a different kind of boy next door and you’ve got the bones of this thoroughly original story.

A HISTORY OF BURNING by Janika Oza

This remarkable debut novel tells the story of an extended Indo-Ugandan family that is displaced, settled and displaced again.

HOLLY by Stephen King

The scrappy private detective Holly Gibney (who appeared in “The Outsider” and several other novels) returns, this time taking on a missing-persons case that — in typical King fashion — unfolds into a tale of Dickensian proportions.

A HOUSE FOR ALICE by Diana Evans

This polyphonic novel traces one family’s reckoning after the patriarch dies in a fire, as his widow, a Nigerian immigrant, considers returning to her home country and the entire family re-examines the circumstances of their lives.

THE ILIAD by Homer

Emily Wilson’s propulsive new translation of the “Iliad” is buoyant and expressive; she wants this version to be read aloud, and it would certainly be fun to perform.

INK BLOOD SISTER SCRIBE by Emma Törzs

The sisters in Törzs's delightful debut have been raised to protect a collection of magic books that allow their keepers to do incredible things. Their story accelerates like a fugue, ably conducted to a tender conclusion.

KAIROS by Jenny Erpenbeck

This tale of a torrid, yearslong relationship between a young woman and a much older married man — translated from the German by Michael Hofmann — is both profound and moving.

KANTIKA by Elizabeth Graver

Inspired by the life of Graver’s maternal grandmother, this exquisitely imagined family saga spans cultures and continents as it traces the migrations of a Sephardic Jewish girl from turn-of-the-20th-century Constantinople to Barcelona, Havana and, finally, Queens, N.Y.

LAND OF MILK AND HONEY by C Pam Zhang

Zhang’s lush, keenly intelligent novel follows a chef who’s hired to cook for an “elite research community” in the Italian Alps, in a not-so-distant future where industrial-agricultural experiments in America’s heartland have blanketed the globe in a crop-smothering smog.

LONE WOMEN by Victor LaValle

The year is 1915, and the narrator of LaValle’s horror-tinged western has arrived in Montana to cultivate an unforgiving homestead. She’s looking for a fresh start as a single Black woman in a sparsely populated state, but the locked trunk she has in stow holds a terrifying secret.

MONICA by Daniel Clowes

In Clowes’s luminous new work, the titular character, abandoned by her mother as a child, endures a life of calamities before resolving to learn about her origins and track down her parents.

THE MOST SECRET MEMORY OF MEN by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr

Based on a true story and translated by Lara Vergnaud, Sarr’s novel — about a Senegalese writer brought low by a plagiarism scandal — asks sharp questions about the state of African literature in the West.

THE NEW NATURALS by Gabriel Bump

In Bump’s engrossing new novel, a young Black couple, mourning the loss of their newborn daughter and disillusioned with the world, start a utopian society — but tensions both internal and external soon threaten their dreams.

NORTH WOODS by Daniel Mason

Mason’s novel looks at the occupants of a single house in Massachusetts over several centuries, from colonial times to present day. An apple farmer, an abolitionist, a wealthy manufacturer: The book follows these lives and many others, with detours into natural history and crime reportage.

NOT EVEN THE DEAD by Juan Gómez Bárcena

An ex-conquistador in Spanish-ruled, 16th-century Mexico is asked to hunt down an Indigenous prophet in this novel by a leading writer in Spain, splendidly translated by Katie Whittemore. The epic search stretches across much of the continent and, as the author bends time and history, lasts centuries.

THE NURSERY by Szilvia Molnar

“I used to be a translator and now I am a milk bar.” So begins Molnar’s brilliant novel about a new mother falling apart within the four walls of her apartment.

OUR SHARE OF NIGHT by Mariana Enriquez

This dazzling, epic narrative, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell, is a bewitching brew of mystery and myth, peopled by mediums who can summon “the Darkness” for a secret society of wealthy occultists seeking to preserve consciousness after death.

PINEAPPLE STREET by Jenny Jackson

Jackson’s smart, dishy debut novel embeds readers in an upper-crust Brooklyn Heights family — its real estate, its secrets, its just-like-you-and-me problems. Does money buy happiness? “Pineapple Street” asks a better question: Does it buy honesty?

THE REFORMATORY by Tananarive Due

Due’s latest — about a Black boy, Robert, who is wrongfully sentenced to a fictionalized version of Florida’s infamous and brutal Dozier School — is both an incisive examination of the lingering traumas of racism and a gripping, ghost-filled horror novel. “The novel’s extended, layered denouement is so heart-smashingly good, it made me late for work,” Randy Boyagoda wrote in his review. “I couldn’t stop reading.”

THE SAINT OF BRIGHT DOORS by Vajra Chandrasekera

Trained to kill by his mother and able to see demons, the protagonist of Chandrasekera’s stunning and lyrical novel flees his destiny as an assassin and winds up in a politically volatile metropolis.

SAME BED DIFFERENT DREAMS by Ed Park

Double agents, sinister corporations, slasher films, U.F.O.s — Park’s long-awaited second novel is packed to the gills with creative elements that enliven his acerbic, comedic and lyrical odyssey into Korean history and American paranoia.

TAKE WHAT YOU NEED by Idra Novey

This elegant novel resonates with implication beyond the taut contours of its central story line. In Novey’s deft hands, the complex relationship between a young woman and her former stepmother hints at the manifold divisions within America itself.

THIS OTHER EDEN by Paul Harding

In his latest novel, inspired by the true story of a devastating 1912 eviction in Maine that displaced an entire mixed-race fishing community, Harding turns that history into a lyrical tale about the fictional Apple Island on the cusp of destruction.

TOM LAKE by Ann Patchett

Locked down on the family’s northern Michigan cherry orchard, three sisters and their mother, a former actress whose long-ago summer fling went on to become a movie star, reflect on love and regret in Patchett’s quiet and reassuring Chekhovian novel.

THE UNSETTLED by Ayana Mathis

This novel follows three generations across time and place: a young mother trying to create a home for herself and her son in 1980s Philadelphia, and her mother, who is trying to save their Alabama hometown from white supremacists seeking to displace her from her land.

VICTORY CITY by Salman Rushdie

Rushdie’s new novel recounts the long life of Pampa Kampana, who creates an empire from magic seeds in 14th-century India. Her world is one of peace, where men and women are equal and all faiths welcome, but the story Rushdie tells is of a state that forever fails to live up to its ideals.

WE COULD BE SO GOOD by Cat Sebastian

This queer midcentury romance — about reporters who meet at work, become friends, move in together and fall in love — lingers on small, everyday acts like bringing home flowers with the groceries, things that loom large because they’re how we connect with others.

WESTERN LANE by Chetna Maroo

In this polished and disciplined debut novel, an 11-year-old Jain girl in London who has just lost her mother turns her attention to the game of squash — which in Maroo’s graceful telling becomes a way into the girl’s grief.

WITNESS by Jamel Brinkley

Set in Brooklyn, and featuring animal rescue workers, florists, volunteers, ghosts and UPS workers, Brinkley’s new collection meditates on what it means to see and be seen.

Y/N by Esther Yi

In this weird and wondrous novel, a bored young woman in thrall to a boy band buys a one-way ticket to Seoul.

YELLOWFACE by R.F. Kuang

Kuang’s first foray outside of the fantasy genre is a breezy and propulsive tale about a white woman who achieves tremendous literary success by stealing a manuscript from a recently deceased Asian friend and passing it off as her own.

#new york times #100 books #reading list #2023 #books #reading #have you read any of these titles?

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jimhines · 2 years

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2022 Writing Income

It’s that time again – for fifteen years now I’ve been writing an annual blog post about my income as a writer. Money tends to be an uncomfortable, even taboo topic, but I think it’s important to help counter the myths that we’re all multimillionaires living in Glass Onion-style mansions. (Side note: If anyone wants to pay millions of dollars for my book, I’ll happily update this blog post from my private island mansion.)

Remember, every writer’s career is different, and I’m only one data point.

Prior Years: Here are the annual write-ups going back to 2007: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021.

In 2016, instead of a personal income write-up, I did a survey of almost 400 novelists about their income.

My Background: I’m a primarily “traditionally published,” U.S.-based SF/F author with 15 books in print from major New York publishers. The first of those books came out from DAW in 2006. I have an agent, and have been with them since about 2004.

I’ve self-published a middle grade fantasy and a few short collections. I’ve also sold about 50 short stories to different magazines and anthologies.

I’ve never hit the NYT or USA Today bestseller lists.

I’m currently the sole parent of a teenager (at home) and a 22-year-old (at college). I have a day job that’s just over half-time, both for the paycheck and the benefits.

2022 in Summary: There’s no gentle way to say this. The last several years have kind of sucked. Losing my wife to cancer in 2019 completely derailed my writing. I was hoping 2022 would be a comeback year, but life had other plans…

I did write and sell two new short stories and one nonfiction piece, which was nice. I’ve got a finished middle grade book that’s been on submission for a while. I finished a standalone fantasy that’s been sitting with my publisher for a while.

Normally, my editor is pretty quick about responding, but last year wasn’t normal for DAW, either. DAW was acquired by Astra House. A lot of their time and energy went into that deal. I’m hoping for the best, but things still haven’t settled into the new “normal.”

Last year did see the release — finally — of Terminal Peace, the third book in the Janitors of the Post-Apocalypse series. I’m thrilled and relieved to see that book in print, but it came out right in the middle of the Astra House acquisition, which may have impacted things like promotion and publicity.

I also finished the first draft and started revising a new standalone middle grade fantasy with series potential.

2022 Income: The biggest check was the publication payment for Terminal Peace. All total, before taxes and various expenses, the writing brought in $13,957.16. While that’s absolutely nothing to sneer at, and I’m grateful for the success, it’s also a dropoff from the past couple of years. To be blunt, if you look at the cumulative graph, things have been slumping a bit.

Income Breakdown:

Patreon has been a small but steady and helpful source of income. My thanks to everyone for that!

As usual, my U.S. novels are the biggest piece of the pie. The short fiction category is a bit higher this year, thanks to those two new stories. I didn’t self-publish anything new in 2022, but if that middle grade book doesn’t sell, I’d like to publish that one later this year.

Novels (U.S. editions): $8,542.83

Novels (Non-U.S. editions): $473.25

Self-Published: $1158.24

Short fiction: $892.86

Audio: $521.04

Patreon: $1668.94

Other: $700

I mentioned earlier that things have been in a bit of a slump, and I need to focus on breaking out of that. Some things I can’t currently control. Tomorrow I could wake up to an offer from DAW on the book they’ve got, and maybe an email from my agent that the middle grade title he’s been shopping around went to auction and got a six-figure advance. But I can’t make these things happen.

Priority #1 is to keep writing. If I’m not doing that, other goals are pretty much moot.

Priority #2 is to figure out some alternate options. It may be time to put more time and effort into self-publishing as a complement to my traditionally published work.

The biggest thing making me anxious is that I’m pretty much out of contract. The paperback of Terminal Peace comes out this year, but for the first time in about 15 years, I don’t have the security, the luxury, or the deadlines of a signed contract. In some ways, this is freeing: I can write whatever I want. But there’s no guarantee as to when things will see print. Submitting to the traditional publishers is a long, slow process…

From talking to other writers who’ve been doing this a while, I’ve learned that pretty much every career has its ups and downs. Personal, pandemic, and publisher issues have been a bit of a perfect storm for me these past few years, but I’m not going anywhere. After 27 years as a writer, I’m excited to see what comes next.

Wrap Up:

I hope this has been helpful. As always, feel free to share the post and/or ask questions.

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palestinegenocide · 2 months

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The ‘NYT’ justifies Israeli slaughter of Palestinian civilians as necessary tactic

Joe Biden condemned the attack on Donald Trump yesterday, saying, “It’s sick… The idea that there’s political violence or violence in America like this is just unheard of.”

Sadly, there is considerable evidence that Biden is wrong, and there has long been political violence in America.

What no one in public life can dispute is that political violence aimed at Palestinians is an enduring condition of Palestinian life. And Israel – an occupying apartheid state committing what most experts call war crimes akin to genocide – is willing to kill endless numbers of civilians to achieve its supposed goals in Palestine.

And the New York Times will then justify the killings as necessary military tactics.

This week saw yet two more massacres of Palestinian civilians. Israel bombed a school in Nuseirat refugee camp and killed 16.

Then Israel bombed what it had called a safe zone in Mawasi, killing at least 90. And how many others are buried under rubble and sand?

In each case, Israel said it was going after Hamas leaders. And American officials had little to say about the massacres. No, they are just numb to a genocide that is being carried out with American weaponry, with the president’s blessing. It is sick, to use Biden’s words, and tragic that we will have to wait for history, in another 10 or 20 years, until the best minds of mainstream discourse admit what any decent person can see before their eyes right now.

The lack of outrage stands in sharp contrast to the overwhelming condemnation of Russian bombings in the Ukraine, including an attack on a hospital this week that some said should go to the International Criminal Court. Israel must never be held to any standard. And the world sees it.

Abetting the war crimes is the New York Times. It ran a long article this week about how Hamas fights, saying that Hamas hides its “ghost army” among civilians, leaving Israel no alternative but to slaughter civilians.

They hide under residential neighborhoods, storing their weapons in miles of tunnels and in houses, mosques, sofas — even a child’s bedroom — blurring the boundary between civilians and combatants. … After Israeli ground troops invaded in late October, Hamas went further in transforming civilian areas of Gaza into military zones, setting traps in scores of neighborhoods and creating confusion about what a combatant looks like by dressing its fighters as civilians.

The Times accepted the view that this sneakiness justifies Israel’s tactics:

Israeli officials say that Hamas’s tactics explain why Israel has been forced to strike so much civilian infrastructure, kill so many Palestinians and detain so many civilians.

So Israel has been “forced” to kill 40,000 Palestinians.

This is moral idiocy. Of course Hamas hides among civilians. That is what guerrilla armies fighting overwhelming force underwritten by a superpower have done forever. The revolutionaries in colonial America did the same thing.

“I was shocked by the story, it is unbelievable,” media critic Donald Johnson writes. “The Times wrote this to defend every attack on civilians and civilian infrastructure that Israel has carried out. They couldn’t have done it any different if they handed it over to the Israeli government to write. Every single thing Israel does— it is Hamas’s fault.”

Johnson wrote to the Times and raised the most obvious analogy, the U.S. massacres of villages in Vietnam.

“I am old enough to remember Americans making the same excuses about My Lai. Your reporters are a disgrace, your paper is a disgrace. You might as well have had the IDF write that article.”

#free gaza #gaza strip #israel #israel is a terrorist state #genocide #jerusalem #gazaunderattack #gaza #free palestine #palestine #hamas #jew #hostages #jews

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itsawritblr · 5 months

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The Courage to Follow the Evidence on Transgender Care.

(WOW, the New York Times -- which a couple years ago had an ad about a qu**r girl who wished for a world in which J.K. Rowling wasn't the author of Harry Potter -- has published yet another opinion piece about trans, this one about the Cass Review. Personally, I think he's too lenient, but at least he's bringing attention to the review to Americans. )

(For those who can't read the NYT page, here's the text.)

Opinion, David Brooks, April 18, 2024.

Hilary Cass is the kind of hero the world needs today. She has entered one of the most toxic debates in our culture: how the medical community should respond to the growing numbers of young people who seek gender transition through medical treatments, including puberty blockers and hormone therapies. This month, after more than three years of research, Cass, a pediatrician, produced a report, commissioned by the National Health Service in England, that is remarkable for its empathy for people on all sides of this issue, for its humility in the face of complex social trends we don’t understand and for its intellectual integrity as we try to figure out which treatments actually work to serve those patients who are in distress. With incredible courage, she shows that careful scholarship can cut through debates that have been marked by vituperation and intimidation and possibly reset them on more rational grounds.

Cass, a past president of Britain’s Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health, is clear about the mission of her report: “This review is not about defining what it means to be trans, nor is it about undermining the validity of trans identities, challenging the right of people to express themselves or rolling back on people’s rights to health care. It is about what the health care approach should be, and how best to help the growing number of children and young people who are looking for support from the N.H.S. in relation to their gender identity.”

This issue begins with a mystery. For reasons that are not clear, the number of adolescents who have sought to medically change their sex has been skyrocketing in recent years, though the overall number remains very small. For reasons that are also not clear, adolescents who were assigned female at birth are driving this trend, whereas before the late 2000s, it was mostly adolescents who were assigned male at birth who sought these treatments.

Doctors and researchers have proposed various theories to try to explain these trends. One is that greater social acceptance of trans people has enabled people to seek these therapies. Another is that teenagers are being influenced by the popularity of searching and experimenting around identity. A third is that the rise of teen mental health issues may be contributing to gender dysphoria. In her report, Cass is skeptical of broad generalizations in the absence of clear evidence; these are individual children and adolescents who take their own routes to who they are.

Some activists and medical practitioners on the left have come to see the surge in requests for medical transitioning as a piece of the new civil rights issue of our time — offering recognition to people of all gender identities. Transition through medical interventions was embraced by providers in the United States and Europe after a pair of small Dutch studies showed that such treatment improved patients’ well-being. But a 2022 Reuters investigation found that some American clinics were quite aggressive with treatment: None of the 18 U.S. clinics that Reuters looked at performed long assessments on their patients, and some prescribed puberty blockers on the first visit.

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Unfortunately, some researchers who questioned the Dutch approach were viciously attacked. This year, Sallie Baxendale, a professor of clinical neuropsychology at the University College London, published a review of studies looking at the impact of puberty blockers on brain development and concluded that “critical questions” about the therapy remain unanswered. She was immediately attacked. She recently told The Guardian, “I’ve been accused of being an anti-trans activist, and that now comes up on Google and is never going to go away.”

As Cass writes in her report, “The toxicity of the debate is exceptional.” She continues, “There are few other areas of health care where professionals are so afraid to openly discuss their views, where people are vilified on social media and where name-calling echoes the worst bullying behavior.”

Cass focused on Britain, but her description of the intellectual and political climate is just as applicable to the U.S., where brutality on the left has been matched by brutality on the right, with crude legislation that doesn’t acknowledge the well-being of the young people in question. In 24 states Republicans have passed laws banning these therapies, sometimes threatening doctors with prison time if they prescribe the treatment they think is best for their patients.

The battle lines on this issue are an extreme case, but they are not unfamiliar. On issue after issue, zealous minorities bully and intimidate the reasonable majority. Often, those who see nuance decide it’s best to just keep their heads down. The rage-filled minority rules.

Cass showed enormous courage in walking into this maelstrom. She did it in the face of practitioners who refused to cooperate and thus denied her information that could have helped inform her report. As an editorial in The BMJ puts it, “Despite encouragement from N.H.S. England,” the “necessary cooperation” was not forthcoming. “Professionals withholding data from a national inquiry seems hard to imagine, but it is what happened.”

Cass’s report does not contain even a hint of rancor, just a generous open-mindedness and empathy for all involved. Time and again in her report, she returns to the young people and the parents directly involved, on all sides of the issue. She clearly spent a lot of time meeting with them. She writes, “One of the great pleasures of the review has been getting to meet and talk to so many interesting people.”

The report’s greatest strength is its epistemic humility. Cass is continually asking, “What do we really know?” She is carefully examining the various studies — which are high quality, which are not. She is down in the academic weeds.

She notes that the quality of the research in this field is poor. The current treatments are “built on shaky foundations,” she writes in The BMJ. Practitioners have raced ahead with therapies when we don’t know what the effects will be. As Cass tells The BMJ, “I can’t think of another area of pediatric care where we give young people a potentially irreversible treatment and have no idea what happens to them in adulthood.”

She writes in her report, “The option to provide masculinizing/feminizing hormones from age 16 is available, but the review would recommend extreme caution.” She does not issue a blanket, one-size-fits-all recommendation, but her core conclusion is this: “For most young people, a medical pathway will not be the best way to manage their gender-related distress.” She realizes that this conclusion will not please many of the young people she has come to know, but this is where the evidence has taken her.

You can agree or disagree with this or that part of the report, and maybe the evidence will look different in 10 years, but I ask you to examine the integrity with which Cass did her work in such a treacherous environment.

In 1877 a British philosopher and mathematician named William Kingdon Clifford published an essay called “The Ethics of Belief.” In it he argued that if a shipowner ignored evidence that his craft had problems and sent the ship to sea having convinced himself it was safe, then of course we would blame him if the ship went down and all aboard were lost. To have a belief is to bear responsibility, and one thus has a moral responsibility to dig arduously into the evidence, avoid ideological thinking and take into account self-serving biases. “It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence,” Clifford wrote. A belief, he continued, is a public possession. If too many people believe things without evidence, “the danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should become credulous, and lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them; for then it must sink back into savagery.”

Since the Trump years, this habit of not consulting the evidence has become the underlying crisis in so many realms. People segregate into intellectually cohesive teams, which are always dumber than intellectually diverse teams. Issues are settled by intimidation, not evidence. Our natural human tendency is to be too confident in our knowledge, too quick to ignore contrary evidence. But these days it has become acceptable to luxuriate in those epistemic shortcomings, not to struggle against them. See, for example, the modern Republican Party.

Recently it’s been encouraging to see cases in which the evidence has won out. Many universities have acknowledged that the SAT is a better predictor of college success than high school grades and have reinstated it. Some corporations have come to understand that while diversity, equity and inclusion are essential goals, the current programs often empirically fail to serve those goals and need to be reformed. I’m hoping that Hilary Cass is modeling a kind of behavior that will be replicated across academia, in the other professions and across the body politic more generally and thus save us from spiraling into an epistemological doom loop.

#cass review #the cass review #cass report #the cass report #transgender #trans #trans insanity #the tide is turning #gender critical #gender ideology #gender identity #gender cult #gender madness

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centrally-unplanned · 1 year

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I love deconstructing 'lifestyle' articles like these, they are such a gold mine of biases and narrative formation by the chattering classes. Here we have a wonderful premise:

Now, Ms. Margo is living a dream of many American women who are seeking relationships abroad, some of whom cite the toxic dating scene in the United States

Well, no objection from me that the US has toxic dating norms. But, hm, idk, 'many women' - is this a true trend amoung the American Female? Lets see who this article features:

Ms. Margo fell in love with the city (and its men). She found a gig teaching English in Paris and moved there after she graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in May 2019.

Okay, not *that* crazy but I do think I know what kind of Sarah Lawrence grad gap years in Paris before her law degree;

For Cindy Sheahan...At the end of 2017, she quit her job and traveled throughout Southeast Asia for leisure, and she started using Tinder.

That isn't...most people can't list as their full time job "Dating in Thailand";

For Frantzces Lys...she started a podcast called “Chronicles Abroad” with her co-host, who had met Ms. Williams, 40, in Malaysia. In 2018, Ms. Lys interviewed Ms. Williams, the founder of a consultancy, and the two kept in touch. They started dating years later.

Oh yeah the extremely relatable situation of a podcast host and boutique consultancy founder travelling to Mayalsia!!

“When you decide to just live your life for yourself, you actually end up stumbling upon people that match your energy and the same ideals and values,” said Ms. Lys, a 42-year-old founder of a wellness company.

Oh a wellness company, who hasn't founded one of those!!! And a link to their company, wow thanks NYT, that was definitely gonna be my follow-up for Ms. Lys:

Cepee Tabibian, who moved to Madrid at 35 from Austin, Texas, felt similarly.

Okay that could be normal, what do she d-

In 2020, she met her partner, who is Spanish. Now, she is the founder of She Hit Refresh, a community that helps women over the age of 30 move to a different country.

Jesus fucking Christ none of these people are real. They are full-hog in the industry of packaging and selling their Life of Insight & Discovery for $500 an hour over zoom sessions to non profits hosting leadership seminars, their dating isn't dating its brand management. I don't doubt they authentically love their life but this, shockingly, is not a trend, is not a sample, is not ethnographic data, this is an ad buy by a sliver of globe-trotting wealthy woman masquerading as journalism.

Absolutely the only relatable person is:

Alexis Brown, for example, noticed a lack of “effort and intention” from the men she was dating in Atlanta, where she attended Spelman College.

When she traveled across Europe for vacation from October 2022 to January 2023, however, the people she dated made it clear that they wanted to spend time with her.

Who takes way more words than is necessary to tell me she had a polycule stretching from Paris to Prague during her study abroad, which, good for her, that is what study abroad is for. Shockingly, this is not a new development in the collegiate experience!

Buried amoung the branded bullshit is Alexis's real gem and the only true 'thesis' of the article:

“The dating culture in the U.S. is that it’s cool and normalized to be indifferent to someone and not really express how you genuinely feel,” Ms. Brown, 23, said.

Which is essentially that in Europe people will "express emotion" unlike the cold, busy America. I don't doubt this, but I would hope a writer at the NYT's could have slightly more social awareness; the 'reason' Americans do not "express emotion" is that if they did you would dump them right on their ass on the first date.

Someone telling you, to quote Ms Margo:

“This one guy was like, ‘I ran through traffic just to look into your eyes once, and if you don’t want to go on a date with me, I can die happy knowing that I just met you,’” said Ms. Margo, a 28-year-old English teacher from Los Angeles.

As an opening line is cringe and uncomfortable, because they do not know you. They are lying and you know they are lying, it is a horrible foundation for a long term relationship. American dating norms have been hammering this lesson home on every participant (but if we are being honest, its primarily women hammering this home on men) and it is probably right to do. Anyone who does this lacks credibility.

But when you are in ~*Paris*~, you don't care about their credibility, because you lack it yourself. You are on vacation, you have no future, just a sequential present. If the guy who tells you your eyes are his world turns out to be a clingy failson who requires at least a blowjob a day to keep his mood stable, you can just *get up and leave the country*, you cannot be trapped because nothing is keeping you there. By placing an ocean between yourself and your social standing you can radically change your standards.

And you know what, there is something to that! Maybe the 18-point-checklist you mentally process every Tinder swipe through as you plan out your dream wedding on Cape Cod to a status-swollen ghost in a Tom Ford speckle-gray blazer while on lunch break from your quant analysis job at a digital marketing start-up in Chelsea isn't the best baggage to bring into a first date! Through radically shifting your social context it might be possible to jar your brain out of what is holding it back. Its not what you found in Paris, but what you left behind in America, that could actually make a difference... and that reality could give this article some heft.

But then say that instead of trying to sell me on the idea that:

For Ms. Margo, a Black woman who attended predominantly white institutions throughout her school years, she felt ignored in the United States, as if she “was not an option,” she said. In Paris she felt seen.

France is less racist than the campus of Sarah Fucking Lawrence against black people. No wonder the humanities are dying if they are teaching this level of self awareness.

#haven't stretched that Last Psychiatrist muscle in a while - good times #mini-essay

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metamatar · 1 year

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(btw NYT's anti china hysteria is getting journalists in india arrested)

In August 2023, The New York Times published a story “A Global Web of Chinese Propaganda Leads to a U.S. Tech Mogul”. The story investigated whether Chinese funding was being funnelled to advocacy and media organisations across the world to defend the internal authoritarianism of the Chinese state. One of the countries included was India, with a fleeting reference to an Indian digital news organisation NewsClick, which the report said “sprinkled its coverage with Chinese government talking points”.

The report did not suggest that the organisation had committed any crime – let alone sedition or terrorism against the Indian state. But on October 3, the police in Delhi swooped down on the homes of 46 people connected to NewsClick – journalists, staffers, contributors, including academics, historians, satirists – seizing their phones and laptops, subjecting them to hours of questioning, largely about their coverage of protests by farmers and by Muslim women. NewsClick’s founder and editor-in-chief Prabir Purakayastha and the head of the human resources department Amit Chakraborty were arrested under the draconian anti-terror law, the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act.

When asked about the police action, anonymous government officials invoked the New York Times article. Indian TV channels – nearly all of which are propaganda channels for the Modi regime – used the NYT story to frame the issue as a question of whether “press freedom” should be respected at the cost of “national sovereignty”.

[...] The NYT story has become a pretext to escalate an ongoing campaign to persecute and imprison some of India’s most courageous journalists, academics and activists on baseless charges of abetting “Maoist terrorism”. [...] NYT’s failure to separate specific issues of financial impropriety, propaganda, and political opinion from each other, I feared, would endanger the courageous work of journalists associated with NewsClick: for example, investigations into the financial scandals involving Gautam Adani, the tycoon who is known to be a close associate of the Indian Prime Minister. [...] The story had mentioned several media platforms (a YouTube channel in the US for instance) without identifying these by name, but had chosen to name NewsClick. It had cherry-picked an inoffensive and rather lame line from a NewsClick video and presented this as evidence of pro-China propaganda: “China’s history continues to inspire the working classes.” I pointed out that this is a simple statement of opinion, and cannot be construed as Chinese government propaganda.

Left-wing softness on China or Russia might harm Uyghurs or Ukrainians, and the political health of the Left itself, but this was hardly a problem for the Modi regime.

#india

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