#united states import statistics

[madameducyberversailles]

The ways in which people try to act like colonization is justifiable...Dear fucking god

gen question, what are israelis supposed to do? where are they supposed to go?

This can’t possibly be an honest question…

[anyonghalimaw]

i rlly do not think white global northerners understand how fucking bad the anti sinovac psyop was in context of the philippines and other targeted countries being from the global south, with a history of economic and military intervention and destabilization by the usa specifically.

i live in the philippines and sinovac was the only available vaccine for MONTHS of the pandemic. people were fucking dying and we had no pfizer, no j&j, no astrazeneca, no moderna. sinovac was the ONLY vaccine supply we had. and the supply wasnt even enough for even my small city. we do not have the infrastructure to manufacture our own vaccines and tests. we were entirely reliant on imports from other countries who Did have the capacity to manufacture such things

i got up early for several days straight to go to a pop up walk in vaccination site (were talking there by 7:30am) set up in a fucking public basketball court because it was the only way to get vaccinated, and 3 times i had to go back empty handed so to speak after exposing myself to this massive opportunity for transmission because they fucking ran out of shots and prioritized the elderly and disabled and i didnt have my legal pwd (person with disability) card yet. i had to go to a different barangay (local unit of government) to get my shot MONTHS LATER and only got mine because one of my family was in the local govt and reserved some shots for us.

many filipinos use facebook which is where some of the psyop was conducted because you can use it for free on your phone and it is often where news is disseminated. i know we have that joke about People Believing Anything They See On Facebook but i cannot stress enough that people here get local news from fb the same way you (used to) get news from twitter about shit like localized emergencies and whatnot.

because we are third world, you know that the state of our education system is nothing compared to the states. media and news literacy here is dangerously low and the population is sensitive to mis/disinformation, as can be seen during the 2022 presidential elections where the usa Also interfered lol. i cannot stress enough how much of the population was susceptible to this psyop, especially those in poverty who couldnt afford proper education. hell, even educated people fell for this shit. do you think jhunjhun who didnt finish grade 6 would be able to identify disguised foreign intervention that was in his own language?

we were already recovering from public scrutiny of a different vaccine, a dengue vaccine, which lowered public trust in inoculation. and then the usa goes and does THIS??? i cannot emphasize enough that they are directly responsible for the tens and thousands of unvaccinated covid deaths. they are responsible for my friends having to bury their unvaxxed parents and grandparents at the age of 19. they are responsible for mass death and disability.

but were just a country in the periphery. so who cares about us? our lives are worthless to the usa, which is why they admitted that they did this when they would otherwise "never" to their own population. third worlders arent real people to your government. we are merely statistics and a petri dish for experimentation. so who cares if we die? the real important thing isnt our lives, its that the usa has more control over us than china.

[alex51324]

Useful article from CNN on election-night misinformation.

Key takeaway is that pretty much whatever happens, Trump will claim it's evidence that the election is being rigged against him.

Some additional things to keep in mind--particularly if you haven't been through many of these before:

The winner may or may not be projected on election night. How long it takes depends on a bunch of factors, having to do with the logistics of ballot-counting and how the statistical analysis comes along. Getting a projected winner by midnight and the count taking several days are both well within the range of normal, and neither one suggests that anything nefarious is happening.

Counting of votes always continues for several days after the election, until every vote has been counted. This happens regardless of whether or not the media have "called" a winner, or a candidate has conceded.

Media outlets project election winners based on the data that has come in and their statistical models--they do not "declare" or "decide" who won. The major outlets are very motivated to avoid an incorrect projection*, so if they make a call, it's because they're really sure they have enough information to accurately predict the outcome of the final count.

Usually, when this happens, all of the major media outlets are making the same projection around the same time--within the same hour, at least, and often in the same 10 minutes or so. If there's an outlier, there's a good chance they're either guessing or propagandizing.

Candidates do not get to call the race in their own favor. There's a decent chance Trump will try, but also it's also normal and expected for both campaigns to talk like they're expecting to win; e.g. introducing their candidate as "the next President of the United States" when appearing before supporters at events. (My guess is that if he does try, the mainstream media outlets will simply sanewash it as typical election-night bravado, which is actually fine.)

The only thing that means anything, coming from a candidate/campaign, is a concession. This will often happen after the media has called the race for the other candidate; it usually isn't a surprise. A normal campaign will often go quiet--stop sending people to talk on TV, etc.--when they're getting ready to concede. (Trump arguably** still hasn't conceded 2020, so no one is particularly expecting him to concede any time this coming week.)

It's normal for the numbers to change a lot. There are always some surprises, but there are also standard patterns: results from the southeast usually come in a clump, and put a lot of electoral votes into the Republican column, early in the night. Democrats usually pick up the west coast states, which of course are the last to close their polls and start reporting results***. For the swing states, where we'll probably see a lot of reporting on very incomplete vote totals, results will start coming in first from the rural areas, which lean red; cities take longer to count their votes--because there are more of them--and lean blue.

The more uncertainty there is about the outcome, the more you'll hear about the evolving numbers--news networks have airtime to fill, and there's only so many ways you can say, "Still too close to call." Try not to obsess over these numbers; the news networks have people specially trained to analyze this exact kind of data, and if they can't say how it's going to turn out, you're not going to know, either.

If it ends up being too close to call for several days, there will probably be reporting on small, county-by-county vote dumps. It's important to realize that this is all still the original count of the votes, not a recount or "finding new votes." We only hear about it when the election is so close that these relatively small numbers of ballots are likely to affect the outcome, but it happens every single election. In 2020, Trump repeatedly claimed that ongoing counts were some how irregular, and sometimes demanded that counts be stopped when the current total showed him in the lead. This is, to be clear, nuts; the full & complete count of the votes always takes more than just the one day, and it's a bedrock principle of democracy that every valid ballot is counted.

(* Back in 2000, the Bush-Gore election with the whole Florida debacle, several major news outlets did project winners too soon, and then had to walk back their projections.

This definitely contributed to the chaos that night, and may have also contributed to the widespread perception that Bush was the "real" winner and Gore was dragging the country through multiple recounts, in those first few days when the initial count of wasn't even complete in some states.

As a result, responsible media outlets are much more cautious these days about election-night projections.)

(**On January 7, 2021 he made a statement that was taken as indicating his understanding that Biden had won, or at least that he knew he wouldn't be staying in office, but he never stopped saying he won.)

(***This often looks like the Republican being miles ahead, and then suddenly California reports in and they aren't anymore. Expect Trump to pretend that this is somehow shocking, even though the last time a Republican won California was 1988.

Similarly, he will also pretend to be surprised when, for instance, Philadelphia turns in their first big batch of results, and Harris's numbers jump up.)

[literaryvein-reblogs]

Writing Notes: Hooking your Readers

Hook—The first line, lines, or paragraph meant to grab the reader’s attention

For most people, a night out at the movies includes sitting through the coming attractions. We watch these short bursts of scenes that scare us, intrigue us, make us laugh, and sometimes nearly bring us to tears. No matter the preview, though, if it looks good, we want to go see the movie. An effective “hook” in your story works the same way. You want to grab your reader right away and compel them to continue reading.

Some common strategies for creating a hook & examples:

Anecdote: My hands shook and beads of sweat rolled down my face. I double-checked the directions before assembling my tools and turning up the heat. Making lasagna shouldn’t have been this stressful, but in my grandmother’s kitchen, the stakes were a little higher. 

Direct quote: “Be open and use the world around you.” Toni Morrison gives this advice about the craft of writing, but I find that it applies to most areas of my life.

General statement or truth: Every child, no matter how sheltered or well-adjusted, will experience fear. Whether they are scared of the monster under the bed or the neighbor’s barking dog, children experience fear as a normal and healthy part of childhood.

History: On Wednesday, August 28, 1963, thousands traveled to Washington D.C. by road, rail, and air. There were demonstrators of all races, creeds, and genders. Unafraid of the intimidation and violence they faced, they demonstrated for the rights of all. Known as The Great March on Washington, this day marked an important turning point in the Civil Rights Movement in the United States.

Metaphor: Stretched out in a sunbeam, my cat may seem timid, but really, she’s a lion. She will stealthily stalk her prey, attack without mercy, and leave a trail of blood and guts in her wake. Afterward, as she grooms her luxurious mane, she shows no remorse.

Scene or illustration: Shadows stretch across the pavement as jack-o-lanterns flicker in windows. Little trick-or-treaters scamper from porch to porch, filling their bags with various forms of sugar. It is the day dentists dread most: Halloween.

Sensory description: The stale smell of cigarettes engulfed me as I stepped into the dim, silent apartment. The heat had been turned off, so I could see my breath fog in front of me as I carefully stepped over the old pizza boxes, overturned cups, and random pieces of paper strewn across the floor.

Startling statistic or statement: Teenage drivers crash their cars at nearly ten times the rate of older drivers.

More: Writing Notes & References

[tinyowlthoughts]

YEEEEEESSSSSSS!!!!!!!!!!

Edit to add:

"But this doesn't mean he's going to jail."

You're absolutely right, it doesn't. But you know what it does mean, now that Donald J. Trump, former 45 president of the United States is a convicted felon?

He had to sit there as 12 New Yorkers (the state that 'turned their back' on him) said, 34 times, that he was guilty.

That they didn't believe him.

That they had no faith in his/the defenses version of events.

That they believe he not only cheated on his just-gave-birth wife with a porn star (and damn, is Stormy Daniels a motherfucking star!), but that he also paid her off to hide it before his election.

That they believe Cohen over Trump.

That they think he is a lying sack of shit and weren't afraid to call him out on it (not literally).

Statistically, someone on that jury voted for Trump to be president.

That same person voted for him to be guilty.

And he just had to sit there and take it. No rebuttal. No interruption. No insults or name calling.

He couldn't defend himself, because his defense already failed.

Is he going to jail? Highly unlikely (unless he does something stupid like threaten the jurors/their families/the prosecution/the judge/etc. again, I'm pretty sure the Judge is on his very last tether with Trump).

But the sentencing is July 11.

4 days before the Republican National Convention.

Where it's assumed Trump is going to be their nominee.

Will they nominate a convicted felon?

(...I'm trying to be dramatic and mysterious but let's face it, the RNC would nominate a rotten banana if it was racist and money-grubbing enough.)

What happens in the future is uncertain, but today - right now - Trump WAS convicted.

He is now a convicted felon.

And as a convicted felon there is one very important thing he cannot do.

Vote.

So yeah, he probably won't go to jail, but for now we can just enjoy that 12 New Yorkers called him out to his face and that he, a former president, can't even vote in his own (potential) election.

<3

[gghostwriter]

Time is a Fickle Thing

Girl Dad!Spencer Reid x Fem!Reader

Summary: Spencer realizes how important it is to occupy the present and be active in the little things Trope: Fluff & Comfort w.c: 1.48k a/n: this was inspired by an essay I read over the week titled ‘Learning to Measure time in Love & Loss’ by Chris Huntington. It’s very profound so I would suggest you go read it—Andrew Garfield also read it on the podcast called ‘Modern Love’ so go listen to that too. Not proofread. Comments and reblogs are highly appreciated! 💗 masterlist

There was still an array of paperwork to be done in his desk at Quantico. Case files that needed to be written down and reviewed by his unit chief, Emily.

The past Dr. Spencer Reid—the one who was still wet behind the ears and green in the eyes of his team members, would have found the droll of filling out forms therapeutic. But now at his age of 40, everything else—typing out information and grading essays, were chores that demanded his every waking attention. He had found himself agitated with the looming workload that seemed never ending.

“Daddy,” a sweet voice murmured beside him. The source—a small body nestling closer to his side.

He hummed in reply, absentmindedly as his brain was preoccupied with estimating how many hours he needed to finish checking submissions in lieu of sleep.

Tiny hands patted his cheeks. “Daddy,” the sweet voice now coated with a hint of urgency.

Spencer’s hazel eyes locked with a pair of replicas. “Yes, Aurora?”

“What happens next?”

Shaking his head, he glanced down at her choice for a bedtime story, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and realized it was the end of a chapter. Reading together was a sacred ritual he formed ever since he had found out you were pregnant.

It made you giggle when you pointed out that she, still a fetus cocooned safely in your body, would not understand the works of The Giving Tree or The Rainbow Fish. He rattled of statistics that although she couldn’t understand the meaning, she could still hear quite well.

In truth, he wanted her to know him—his voice, his presence. Her father who was quite scared to bring in an innocent into the world.

Still, scared even.

Her pink bottom lip jutting out into a frown, reminiscent of the ‘look’ his wife gives to him that renders him speechless and pliable to demands.

It was fascinating how you and him created such a perfect combination—a seven year old daughter who was into reading, as he was, and confident, as you were.

“Daddy, what happens next?”

The corners of his mouth lifted into a smile. The look of exasperation on her tiny face was adorable.

Everything about her was captivating.

“Well, sweet pea,” he began to close the book. “That would be a story for another night.”

“But—”

“Remember what we promised?”

She sighed, gripping her white bunny—a gift from Aunt Penelope, closer. “One chapter only.”

“That’s right,” tucking the stray tendrils away from her angelic face.

As he started to stand up from his precarious lying position on her gingham patterned bed, Aurora’s tiny warm hands gave his sleeves a double tug.

“You’re forgetting something, Daddy.”

He leaned in to give her forehead a kiss.

“Is that it?” He teased.

She giggled, her feet kicking under the covers. “No!”

Brushing his fingers behind her neck—her tickle spot that matched yours. “What about this one?”

Aurora squealed, her infectious happy energy warming his heart. She was a treasure and he felt blessed to be considered her father.

“Stop Daddy, stop!” She sat up, hands crossing over her chest to state she meant business.

Spencer conceded, showing his hands in front of him—a sign of surrender. If she was standing, he could just imagine her little foot stomping on the ground and taking in a wide stance she learned from observing Uncle Morgan.

“Mommy always said you never forget anything,” she argued. “She said you have an ei-eid—perfect memory.”

“Eidetic memory, Aurora, and yes, mommy is right.”

She tilted her head then, her wavy hazel hair swaying behind her. “Then how come you don’t remember?”

“How about giving me a clue then?”

She huffed. “Best part, worst part, Daddy! You forgot to ask me!”

Oh.

That was another ritual he added when Aurora started to learn how to string words along. Although there were nights away from a case that he could not read to her, he always made it a point to ask her via call the best and worst part of her day. It made him feel connected with her even though he was miles away.

“Oh how could I forget, sweet pea,” Spencer sat back on the bed, tucking her back as he went. “Now, can I know what your worst part is?”

She went silent for a moment. Deep in thought, brows scrunching together.

“When Mommy didn’t allow me to wear my new rain boots to school. She said it’s because it wasn’t raining but I really wanted to wear them.”

He laughed, having heard of the small disagreement you had which made you late for work. “We only wear rain boots when the weather is sad, remember?”

Aurora nodded.

“And what about the best part?”

She smiled, the answer quickly spilling out of her. “This is, Daddy.”

Spencer could feel the effect her simple words had to his system. It warmed his heart that expanded for two when she came into the world. It put a halt to any train of thought in his brain.

“Want to know a secret?” He whispered. “This is mine too.”

Tiny hands rubbed her drooping eyes before further nestling in her bed. “Good night, Daddy. I love you.”

He slowly crept out of the room.

“I love you too,” he flicked the light off and closed the door behind him.

Spencer found himself repeating those words and slowly lamenting over missed milestones in her burgeoning life.

Her first steps.

Her first tooth falling out.

Her latest family presentation in school in which you recorded her explaining where he was and what he does for a living—catching bad guys.

In his focused dedication in trying to make the country a better place for her future, Spencer had forgotten to appreciate the present, her growth, and the very notion that time could not be reversed to live the mundane things that make everyday worth living.

Aristotle once said ‘time crumbles things; everything grows old under the power of time and is forgotten through the lapse of time.’

It was a concept he was familiar with by the ripe age of nine, having spent his early youth in isolation and soaking up every thinking thought from the great minds that had roamed this planet before him.

He never forgot the words—not that his memory would allow him to.

And yet, as he found himself sitting on his desk, a cup of fresh tea in front of him, the phrase came to surface like a forgotten pair of lucky socks hidden within the depths of a cabinet.

Perhaps it was his heart that kept it hidden or better yet forgotten, a feat on its own. Perhaps during his tender age, he had yet sculpted the capacity to digest what it meant to his very soul.

Or perhaps, it was a sign from the unknown to focus and live in the present.

She was growing and becoming her very own person right before his unfocused eyes.

Spencer sighed, feeling a pair of arms glide to wrap around his shoulders.

“What’s got you so down, handsome?” You left a kiss on his cheek.

He intertwined your hands together. “It’s just—I missed out on so many milestones. Does that make me an absentee father?”

You walked around him before propping yourself on his lap. “I don’t think so, Spence. Why? What brought this on?”

“I found myself thinking about work when I should be focused on spending time—reading to Aurora. It made me feel sad that she was looking forward to our nightly routine and there I was, thinking about paperwork.”

There was a flash of sadness in your eyes as you caressed his cheek. “That’s alright. We all have our moments, Spence. You just got caught up with life and the responsibilities it has given you,” a lithe finger twisted a loose tendril blocking hos vision. “I know—we know, Aurora and I, that you being busy doesn’t mean you love us any less.”

“I just wish I wouldn’t miss anymore, love.”

You trailed kisses all over his cheeks, the corners of his mouth, before landing perfectly on his awaiting lips. “And I know you’d try your best moving forward.”

“Have I told you I love you?” He teased, arms securely on your waist. “Because I do and I feel lucky to have an understanding partner as you.”

“I love you too, Spence, and Aurora loves you too,” you giggled. “And between you and me, I think you’re still her favorite parent.”

Head thrown back, he laughed, thighs shaking from your admission. “It’s because I cave more to her whims more than you do.”

“Well, there’s that too.”

You gave him another kiss.

“We can try to be more present next time—together. I won’t let you doubt yourself. Okay?”

“Okay.”

Comments and reblogs are highly appreciated!

[hussyknee]

Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death9 to the 37 396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186 000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza. Using the 2022 Gaza Strip population estimate of 2 375 259, this would translate to 7·9% of the total population in the Gaza Strip

(Source: The Lancet)

The Lancet is one of the oldest and highest impact peer-reviewed medical journals in the world. Deliberate undercounting of deaths is a key feature of genocides.

The Electronic Intifada estimated it at 193,000 a few days before.

The reported number of martyrs on Wednesday this week was 37,718. It’s important to note that this number only includes martyrs who have been identified by name and civil ID number through the beleaguered health ministry in Gaza. Given the breakdown of reporting systems due to heavy destruction of infrastructure and personnel, this number, even with its limited parameters, is a gross underestimation. Based on more accurate figures of approximately 370 people killed daily, multiplied by 264 days of genocide, the actual number is closer to 97,680 martyred. (Per OCHA estimate of 15 martyrs per hour: Over the course of 264 days, which amounts to 6,336 hours, this number would roughly be 95,040).

...

Based on these estimates, both conservative and data-driven, respectively, the actual figures are likely as follows: • 377,280 buildings destroyed completely or partially • 95,040—97,680 martyred • 221,760 injured • 24,750 dead or dying from starvation • 42,000 missing (presumed dead, kidnapped by Israel’s occupying forces or possibly trafficked). The following ranges represent conservative estimate or lower range of data-driven population estimates: • 17,050—94,049 with chronic illnesses dead from lack of medication • 14,408—255,985 dead from epidemics resulting from Israel’s assault This means the actual number of dead is closer to 194,768—511,824 people, with 221,760 injured. And counting.

(Source: The Electronic Intifada)

Israel surrounded the last remaining hospital in the Gaza Strip with tanks and ordered it evacuated and shut down 12 hours ago.

If you still want to believe the pussy-footing toll of counted and reported deaths that can stand up to Western propaganda, after nine fucking months of dropping more than 70,000 tons of bombs on a 41 kilometer strip, exceeding World War II bombings in Dresden, Hamburg, London combined, rather than the statistical breakdown of humanitarian orgs and medical journals, then have at. There's no point telling you to believe the victims and question your own biases towards your own heavily propagandized establishments.

But if you can do basic math, then please use The Lancet's estimated death toll. The massacre of 8% of the Gaza Strip is a conservative estimate and still apocalyptic. Resist all attempts to diminish it. Remember that this is the result of the United States's obstruction of justice and open-handed abetting of genocidaires. Keep fighting.

Btw:

While the war itself is estimated to have generated between 420,265 and 652,552 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) so far—equivalent to burning more than 1.5 million barrels of oil—this figure soars to more than 61 million tonnes when pre-and post-war construction and reconstruction are included. This is more than the annual emissions of 135 individual nations—but there is currently no legal obligation for militaries to report or be held accountable for their emissions.

(Source: EuroNews)

[drdemonprince]

Between 500 to 1,000 study subjects were recruited from each of the 23 countries sampled in Napier’s study, for a total number of 16,756 participants. Each participant was asked to report their attitudes toward transgender women and transgender men on scale from 1 to 9, with 1 representing “extremely positive” feelings, and 9 representing “extremely negative” feelings. Attitudes toward gay men and lesbians were also recorded, to echo the Bettinsoli et al 2020 paper that Napier’s work builds upon.

In addition to reporting their feelings toward trans and gay people, Napier’s survey respondents were also asked whether they believed it was possible for a person to be a gender other than the one assigned to them at birth (Napier calls this a “gender identity denial" measure), and to report their religiosity, conservatism, age, and education level. Region of course was also a crucial variable in the study, and so analyses are performed both on the level of individual country, and pooled in order to draw comparisons between Western- and non-Western people.

The first important finding to flag here is that, when collapsed across all countries sampled, participants were consistently more biased against trans women than they were trans men.

When isolating survey respondents by region, however, Napier found that non-Westerners reported a greater bias against trans women. Participants in Western nations still appear to have greater dislike for trans women than trans men, on average, but when isolated by region, the pattern did not reach the level of statistical significance. As in her previous analyses, Napier found that the men in her sample were more biased against trans individuals overall, compared to women, and that non-Western men were particularly prejudiced.

Next, Napier turned her focus to the measure of “gender identity denial” — which asked participants where it is possible for a person to be a gender other than the one they were considered at birth.

Participants from Russia, China, India, Peru, Hungary, South Africa, Poland, and the United States disagreed the most strongly with the idea that a person’s gender can change, of all the 23 countries sampled. Spain, a nation that offers hormone replacement therapy on an informed consent basis, ranked as far and away the least transphobic region in the sample, with respondents generally considering it possible for a person to change their gender identity from what they were considered at birth.

After this, Napier combined attitudes toward both trans women and trans men to compute an overall measure of transphobic attitudes, and built a model examining the effects of all variables in the study, as well as how those variables interacted with one another. Once again, she discovered that men feel more negatively toward trans people than women do, and that non-Western men, in particular, expressed greater transphobia.

Napier also discovered that more highly educated people were generally less transphobic, regardless of region. Older people, on average, were more biased against trans people, and this effect was heightened in non-Western countries. Conservatism was associated with more transphobic bias, particularly in Western countries such as the United States. In Western countries, higher religiosity predicted greater transphobia, though it did not in non-Western countries.

So far, these results mostly line up with Napier’s predictions, and most of the existing social psychological literature on the subject. Nothing super surprising here. Where things get a little more complicated, though, is in step two of the analyses, where Napier entered attitudes toward gay men and lesbians as a control.

After controlling for attitudes toward gay people, younger people were actually found to be more transphobic than elders in the Western countries in the sample. What this means, in essence, is that for older people in countries like the United States, attitudes toward gay people and trans people pretty much hang together: either you accept all LGBTQ individuals, or you don’t.

But among the younger generations, homophobia and transphobia are somewhat more independent. Perhaps on account of rising transphobic rhetoric, a sizeable number of young people in Western countries support gays but strongly dislike trans people. The LGB without the T movement sadly seems to have found some converts among the newer generations.

When controlling for attitudes towards gays and lesbians, the effect of education and conservatism on transphobia largely dropped away. This suggests that more educated people are more tolerant towards both gays and trans folks (which is not super surprising), and that conservatives are less tolerant toward both (also a pretty predictable result).

The effects of religion however, flipped: when controlling for anti-gay bias, highly religious people were actually less biased against trans folks than the non-religious were.

This suggests there’s a contingent of highly religious people who are more tolerant toward trans people than they are gay people. This may indicate they believe that transness, which is a matter of identity or personal feeling, is not a choice or not sinful, whereas being gay is. Since some religious doctrines preach specifically about the evils of gay sex, it’s possible some highly religious individuals view transness more neutrally. But truthfully, more study would be needed to tease this effect apart.

Finally, Napier examined the relationship between “gender identity denial” and general transphobia. She found that people who do not believe it’s possible to change one’s gender are in fact more transphobic (no surprise there), and that a person’s beliefs about the changeability of gender had an influence on transphobia that was statistically independent of homophobia.

In other words, transphobia isn’t just the result of homophobic people applying their bigotry to all members of the LGBTQ umbrella equally — rather, transphobia reflects, in some part, a person’s ideology about what gender is and whether it is changeable.

This might not sound like it’s a big deal, but it suggests that the rhetoric of TERFs, “gender critical activists,” and far-right transphobes about the immutability of gender might have had an influence on public attitudes over the years. People who hate trans folks aren’t just doing it because they hate all queers — they’ve developed specifically transphobic beliefs about how the world operates. Transphobes are therefore not merely “ignorant” about what trans people are — they know about us, and they have constructed a worldview that deliberately shuts us out and makes them more biased against us.

I wrote about an impactful new study on the public's attitudes toward trans women and trans men across the globe -- you can read my full write-up and critique of the study (or have it narrated to you by the Substack app) at drdevonprice.substack.com

[gem-de-lune]

Vibe Check 12/12

Teenie Read: Sungchan

6 of Swords + 4 of Swords + Temperance [The Stars]

This is the combination of 3 questions. Firstly in regards to Sungchan's current state- he is generally well. He seems to be in a resting period of transition. He is calm though- very collected. Very put together. In comparison to the previous read for him he seems a lot more active in that he was actively seeking something or to solve something with others. But in this case, it's like that has already wrapped up, and things are in the process of moving without him having to really do much else. It's active in the sense of finding the path out of the storm and confidently making his way there.

With the 4 of Swords and Temperance these are supportive with the question of if there are any recent developments. It basically just reiterated the 6 of Swords but offered more perspective. As stated, he is not AS active because there is not much else to do other than follow the path and wait. Little by little something is brewing, so he is currently resting and preparing. There's a lot of "knowing" energy here. He is kinda secretive this time- or vague. But the general consensus is that there is something in place it is just going to be better to step away from negativity and chaos to let it play out.

This was confirmed for me with the Stars card which I asked in regards to having anything more he wanted to share in particular. The words "wait a bit, have some faith" popped out when reading this all together. Everything will balance out eventually- I think he is aware of this.

SM Current Energy regarding the situation

6 of Pentacles + 9 of Pentacles

I am feeling as though there has been a majority shift in a very specific way- pentacles...meaning money. They are looking at things for the long term as always. They are beginning to look at what is more profitable for the long term and realistically the growth they would like to accomplish. This has a lot to do with their saturn return in the 9th house i feel- and I am thinking they are seeing Seunghan has a moneymaker this way or a way to achieve this stability bc Riize is currently not stable. Specifically, I think they may believe the long-term benefits of his addition MAY contribute to a better outlook down the road. But it is just a sentiment, not a firm decision. Moreover- this sentiment seems to be very egotistical- in that as stated before- someone has convinced someone else who was against Seunghan's return- that this was their original thought. Oop.

What is the current plan to bring Seunghan back (from the people on his side at SM)

10 of Pentacles + 6 of Wands + King of Swords

Money money money and winning. This is a smart individual ensuring that long term monetary goals are met and that someone feels some kind of acclaim. Very similar to what I mentioned above and in other readings. Stability and the feeling of triumph- with a lower emphasis on how the acrual effected individuals feel on a personal level is what will lead to success in Seunghan's return. The emotions of others hold no value to the King unless it is going to bring the Pentacles or victory (6 of wands). He is also egotistical. Right now it's about guiding someone like a puppet by using their desires like a dangling carrot. Showing the results they want to see and letting them speak for themself. They probably have data analysts making presentations on pros and cons.

Is there anything we can do to convince SM to bring him back atp?

2 of Swords + 3 of Pentacles

Since this is a Yes/No question- the answer is Maybe. Right now, rather than focusing on convincing SM- it seems it is more important to create a more united front in the form of creative display or presentation of protest. Even if we try to convince SM- it seems that they have heard and seen all they need to see and hear. Right now we just need to back up the data and not mess up the statistics.

Oracle

Sun + Taurus

Never much to add on with this oracle specifically bc it speaks for itself- but i would emphasize that riling up the conservative bull is what is needed to see results quickly- and that we need not be negative. Like Sungchan- he is sitting in positivity and manifesting his outcome after putting in the work. We should be doing the same and then some.

Bottom of the Deck

King of Chalices + The Chariot

Sometimes I will flip another card on the bottom if it means something more, and yup, yup. I'm telling you rn....it is never a coincidence when cards like the Chariot continue to pop up over and over during readings for a specific topic. There is an emphasis on creativity and activity here. I read this in the last reading as well, but a creative project depicting all 7 members would be very impactful, is what I think.

Final Notes:

Sungchan is a Virgo and since I know Virgos verrrrrrrrry well (my bestie), if he is saying anything, he is saying to look at him and do as he does. Bc as a Virgo, he thinks yall can be dumb sometimes even if he finds it cute. Relax, wash your hands, clean your room. Don't be gross. Take a shot (if ur of age- chill) and chill out. This is a period in which resting is okay as long as we do not lose our passion. Take a break. Come back. Don't forget why we are doing this. Don't forget why we were so upset- because it was never about simply only wanting Seunghan back- it is about what having him back represented and still would represent: his innocence, changing of times, the legal accountability fans need to have on their foul actions, and the accountability the company needs to take for their idiotic choices. Don't forget, but don't be negative. Use positive rhetoric to show those things WILL happen- or rather, have already* happened.

[alexanderwales]

Look, I'm sorry, there's nothing to learn from this post, this is just me complaining about a lack of legibility and expertise available to the amateur.

I wish that international trade data were easier to make sense of. Sometimes you can go to the larger industry groups and get a PDF that breaks down what's moving where and why, but other times the data seems sparse on the ground, or it's just not public-facing, so I'm left with these statistics that don't actually tell me much.

I was looking up potato imports and exports, to win an argument online (of course), and found this in the list of largest import flows:

Imports to Canada from USA (1.52% of the world imports, $92 million according to external trade statistics of Canada)

Imports to USA from Canada (7.4% of the world imports, $447 million according to external trade statistics of USA)

So of the top 10 largest import flows for "potatoes, fresh or chilled", two of those spots are ... USA and Canada sending potatoes back and forth across the border?

Obviously there's got to be some kind of reason for this. The United States and Canada have a long border with each other, so maybe, in spite of friction crossing the border, it actually does make sense for certain parts of the United States to trade their potatoes to Canada, and in other places, for Canada to trade their potatoes to the United States.

Or possibly these are different types of potatoes, with certain kinds suited to growing in Canada and other kinds suited the growing in the United States, and those are what's getting traded across borders.

Or maybe it's the growing season, which is different between the two countries, so that it's a seasonality thing, and the flow of imports depends on the month, which would make sense.

Or the border simply does not provide all that much friction, and so we should expect that they just trade back and forth, because this is as meaningless as trade across arbitrary points within a singular country.

The data seems very scant though, and frustratingly, I feel like there's a potato farmer who just has this information at their fingertips. I am not averse to emailing random farms in Idaho, but I'll exhaust some other avenues first.

Like asking tumblr!

Are you a potato farmer, or do you know one? Can you make sense of the intra-industry trade thing for me with some specific examples of what's going on?

[antiporn-activist]

I thought y'all should read this

I have a free trial to News+ so I copy-pasted it for you here. I don't think Jonathan Haidt would object to more people having this info.

Tumblr wouldn't let me post it until i removed all the links to Haidt's sources. You'll have to take my word that everything is sourced.

End the Phone-Based Childhood Now

The environment in which kids grow up today is hostile to human development.

By Jonathan Haidt

Something went suddenly and horribly wrong for adolescents in the early 2010s. By now you’ve likely seen the statistics: Rates of depression and anxiety in the United States—fairly stable in the 2000s—rose by more than 50 percent in many studies from 2010 to 2019. The suicide rate rose 48 percent for adolescents ages 10 to 19. For girls ages 10 to 14, it rose 131 percent.

The problem was not limited to the U.S.: Similar patterns emerged around the same time in Canada, the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, the Nordic countries, and beyond. By a variety of measures and in a variety of countries, the members of Generation Z (born in and after 1996) are suffering from anxiety, depression, self-harm, and related disorders at levels higher than any other generation for which we have data.

The decline in mental health is just one of many signs that something went awry. Loneliness and friendlessness among American teens began to surge around 2012. Academic achievement went down, too. According to “The Nation’s Report Card,” scores in reading and math began to decline for U.S. students after 2012, reversing decades of slow but generally steady increase. PISA, the major international measure of educational trends, shows that declines in math, reading, and science happened globally, also beginning in the early 2010s.

As the oldest members of Gen Z reach their late 20s, their troubles are carrying over into adulthood. Young adults are dating less, having less sex, and showing less interest in ever having children than prior generations. They are more likelyto live with their parents. They were less likely to get jobs as teens, and managers say they are harder to work with. Many of these trends began with earlier generations, but most of them accelerated with Gen Z.

Surveys show that members of Gen Z are shyer and more risk averse than previous generations, too, and risk aversion may make them less ambitious. In an interview last May, OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman and Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison noted that, for the first time since the 1970s, none of Silicon Valley’s preeminent entrepreneurs are under 30. “Something has really gone wrong,” Altman said. In a famously young industry, he was baffled by the sudden absence of great founders in their 20s.

Generations are not monolithic, of course. Many young people are flourishing. Taken as a whole, however, Gen Z is in poor mental health and is lagging behind previous generations on many important metrics. And if a generation is doing poorly––if it is more anxious and depressed and is starting families, careers, and important companies at a substantially lower rate than previous generations––then the sociological and economic consequences will be profound for the entire society.

What happened in the early 2010s that altered adolescent development and worsened mental health? Theories abound, but the fact that similar trends are found in many countries worldwide means that events and trends that are specific to the United States cannot be the main story.

I think the answer can be stated simply, although the underlying psychology is complex: Those were the years when adolescents in rich countries traded in their flip phones for smartphones and moved much more of their social lives online—particularly onto social-media platforms designed for virality and addiction. Once young people began carrying the entire internet in their pockets, available to them day and night, it altered their daily experiences and developmental pathways across the board. Friendship, dating, sexuality, exercise, sleep, academics, politics, family dynamics, identity—all were affected. Life changed rapidly for younger children, too, as they began to get access to their parents’ smartphones and, later, got their own iPads, laptops, and even smartphones during elementary school.

As a social psychologist who has long studied social and moral development, I have been involved in debates about the effects of digital technology for years. Typically, the scientific questions have been framed somewhat narrowly, to make them easier to address with data. For example, do adolescents who consume more social media have higher levels of depression? Does using a smartphone just before bedtime interfere with sleep? The answer to these questions is usually found to be yes, although the size of the relationship is often statistically small, which has led some researchers to conclude that these new technologies are not responsible for the gigantic increases in mental illness that began in the early 2010s.

But before we can evaluate the evidence on any one potential avenue of harm, we need to step back and ask a broader question: What is childhood––including adolescence––and how did it change when smartphones moved to the center of it? If we take a more holistic view of what childhood is and what young children, tweens, and teens need to do to mature into competent adults, the picture becomes much clearer. Smartphone-based life, it turns out, alters or interferes with a great number of developmental processes.

The intrusion of smartphones and social media are not the only changes that have deformed childhood. There’s an important backstory, beginning as long ago as the 1980s, when we started systematically depriving children and adolescents of freedom, unsupervised play, responsibility, and opportunities for risk taking, all of which promote competence, maturity, and mental health. But the change in childhood accelerated in the early 2010s, when an already independence-deprived generation was lured into a new virtual universe that seemed safe to parents but in fact is more dangerous, in many respects, than the physical world.

My claim is that the new phone-based childhood that took shape roughly 12 years ago is making young people sick and blocking their progress to flourishing in adulthood. We need a dramatic cultural correction, and we need it now.

1. The Decline of Play and Independence 

Human brains are extraordinarily large compared with those of other primates, and human childhoods are extraordinarily long, too, to give those large brains time to wire up within a particular culture. A child’s brain is already 90 percent of its adult size by about age 6. The next 10 or 15 years are about learning norms and mastering skills—physical, analytical, creative, and social. As children and adolescents seek out experiences and practice a wide variety of behaviors, the synapses and neurons that are used frequently are retained while those that are used less often disappear. Neurons that fire together wire together, as brain researchers say.

Brain development is sometimes said to be “experience-expectant,” because specific parts of the brain show increased plasticity during periods of life when an animal’s brain can “expect” to have certain kinds of experiences. You can see this with baby geese, who will imprint on whatever mother-sized object moves in their vicinity just after they hatch. You can see it with human children, who are able to learn languages quickly and take on the local accent, but only through early puberty; after that, it’s hard to learn a language and sound like a native speaker. There is also some evidence of a sensitive period for cultural learning more generally. Japanese children who spent a few years in California in the 1970s came to feel “American” in their identity and ways of interacting only if they attended American schools for a few years between ages 9 and 15. If they left before age 9, there was no lasting impact. If they didn’t arrive until they were 15, it was too late; they didn’t come to feel American.

Human childhood is an extended cultural apprenticeship with different tasks at different ages all the way through puberty. Once we see it this way, we can identify factors that promote or impede the right kinds of learning at each age. For children of all ages, one of the most powerful drivers of learning is the strong motivation to play. Play is the work of childhood, and all young mammals have the same job: to wire up their brains by playing vigorously and often, practicing the moves and skills they’ll need as adults. Kittens will play-pounce on anything that looks like a mouse tail. Human children will play games such as tag and sharks and minnows, which let them practice both their predator skills and their escaping-from-predator skills. Adolescents will play sports with greater intensity, and will incorporate playfulness into their social interactions—flirting, teasing, and developing inside jokes that bond friends together. Hundreds of studies on young rats, monkeys, and humans show that young mammals want to play, need to play, and end up socially, cognitively, and emotionally impaired when they are deprived of play.

One crucial aspect of play is physical risk taking. Children and adolescents must take risks and fail—often—in environments in which failure is not very costly. This is how they extend their abilities, overcome their fears, learn to estimate risk, and learn to cooperate in order to take on larger challenges later. The ever-present possibility of getting hurt while running around, exploring, play-fighting, or getting into a real conflict with another group adds an element of thrill, and thrilling play appears to be the most effective kind for overcoming childhood anxieties and building social, emotional, and physical competence. The desire for risk and thrill increases in the teen years, when failure might carry more serious consequences. Children of all ages need to choose the risk they are ready for at a given moment. Young people who are deprived of opportunities for risk taking and independent exploration will, on average, develop into more anxious and risk-averse adults.

Human childhood and adolescence evolved outdoors, in a physical world full of dangers and opportunities. Its central activities––play, exploration, and intense socializing––were largely unsupervised by adults, allowing children to make their own choices, resolve their own conflicts, and take care of one another. Shared adventures and shared adversity bound young people together into strong friendship clusters within which they mastered the social dynamics of small groups, which prepared them to master bigger challenges and larger groups later on.

And then we changed childhood.

The changes started slowly in the late 1970s and ’80s, before the arrival of the internet, as many parents in the U.S. grew fearful that their children would be harmed or abducted if left unsupervised. Such crimes have always been extremely rare, but they loomed larger in parents’ minds thanks in part to rising levels of street crime combined with the arrival of cable TV, which enabled round-the-clock coverage of missing-children cases. A general decline in social capital––the degree to which people knew and trusted their neighbors and institutions––exacerbated parental fears. Meanwhile, rising competition for college admissions encouraged more intensive forms of parenting. In the 1990s, American parents began pulling their children indoors or insisting that afternoons be spent in adult-run enrichment activities. Free play, independent exploration, and teen-hangout time declined.

In recent decades, seeing unchaperoned children outdoors has become so novel that when one is spotted in the wild, some adults feel it is their duty to call the police. In 2015, the Pew Research Center found that parents, on average, believed that children should be at least 10 years old to play unsupervised in front of their house, and that kids should be 14 before being allowed to go unsupervised to a public park. Most of these same parents had enjoyed joyous and unsupervised outdoor play by the age of 7 or 8.

2. The Virtual World Arrives in Two Waves

The internet, which now dominates the lives of young people, arrived in two waves of linked technologies. The first one did little harm to Millennials. The second one swallowed Gen Z whole.

The first wave came ashore in the 1990s with the arrival of dial-up internet access, which made personal computers good for something beyond word processing and basic games. By 2003, 55 percent of American households had a computer with (slow) internet access. Rates of adolescent depression, loneliness, and other measures of poor mental health did not rise in this first wave. If anything, they went down a bit. Millennial teens (born 1981 through 1995), who were the first to go through puberty with access to the internet, were psychologically healthier and happier, on average, than their older siblings or parents in Generation X (born 1965 through 1980).

The second wave began to rise in the 2000s, though its full force didn’t hit until the early 2010s. It began rather innocently with the introduction of social-media platforms that helped people connect with their friends. Posting and sharing content became much easier with sites such as Friendster (launched in 2003), Myspace (2003), and Facebook (2004).

Teens embraced social media soon after it came out, but the time they could spend on these sites was limited in those early years because the sites could only be accessed from a computer, often the family computer in the living room. Young people couldn’t access social media (and the rest of the internet) from the school bus, during class time, or while hanging out with friends outdoors. Many teens in the early-to-mid-2000s had cellphones, but these were basic phones (many of them flip phones) that had no internet access. Typing on them was difficult––they had only number keys. Basic phones were tools that helped Millennials meet up with one another in person or talk with each other one-on-one. I have seen no evidence to suggest that basic cellphones harmed the mental health of Millennials.

It was not until the introduction of the iPhone (2007), the App Store (2008), and high-speed internet (which reached 50 percent of American homes in 2007)—and the corresponding pivot to mobile made by many providers of social media, video games, and porn—that it became possible for adolescents to spend nearly every waking moment online. The extraordinary synergy among these innovations was what powered the second technological wave. In 2011, only 23 percent of teens had a smartphone. By 2015, that number had risen to 73 percent, and a quarter of teens said they were online “almost constantly.” Their younger siblings in elementary school didn’t usually have their own smartphones, but after its release in 2010, the iPad quickly became a staple of young children’s daily lives. It was in this brief period, from 2010 to 2015, that childhood in America (and many other countries) was rewired into a form that was more sedentary, solitary, virtual, and incompatible with healthy human development.

3. Techno-optimism and the Birth of the Phone-Based Childhood

The phone-based childhood created by that second wave—including not just smartphones themselves, but all manner of internet-connected devices, such as tablets, laptops, video-game consoles, and smartwatches—arrived near the end of a period of enormous optimism about digital technology. The internet came into our lives in the mid-1990s, soon after the fall of the Soviet Union. By the end of that decade, it was widely thought that the web would be an ally of democracy and a slayer of tyrants. When people are connected to each other, and to all the information in the world, how could any dictator keep them down?

In the 2000s, Silicon Valley and its world-changing inventions were a source of pride and excitement in America. Smart and ambitious young people around the world wanted to move to the West Coast to be part of the digital revolution. Tech-company founders such as Steve Jobs and Sergey Brin were lauded as gods, or at least as modern Prometheans, bringing humans godlike powers. The Arab Spring bloomed in 2011 with the help of decentralized social platforms, including Twitter and Facebook. When pundits and entrepreneurs talked about the power of social media to transform society, it didn’t sound like a dark prophecy.

You have to put yourself back in this heady time to understand why adults acquiesced so readily to the rapid transformation of childhood. Many parents had concerns, even then, about what their children were doing online, especially because of the internet’s ability to put children in contact with strangers. But there was also a lot of excitement about the upsides of this new digital world. If computers and the internet were the vanguards of progress, and if young people––widely referred to as “digital natives”––were going to live their lives entwined with these technologies, then why not give them a head start? I remember how exciting it was to see my 2-year-old son master the touch-and-swipe interface of my first iPhone in 2008. I thought I could see his neurons being woven together faster as a result of the stimulation it brought to his brain, compared to the passivity of watching television or the slowness of building a block tower. I thought I could see his future job prospects improving.

Touchscreen devices were also a godsend for harried parents. Many of us discovered that we could have peace at a restaurant, on a long car trip, or at home while making dinner or replying to emails if we just gave our children what they most wanted: our smartphones and tablets. We saw that everyone else was doing it and figured it must be okay.

It was the same for older children, desperate to join their friends on social-media platforms, where the minimum age to open an account was set by law to 13, even though no research had been done to establish the safety of these products for minors. Because the platforms did nothing (and still do nothing) to verify the stated age of new-account applicants, any 10-year-old could open multiple accounts without parental permission or knowledge, and many did. Facebook and later Instagram became places where many sixth and seventh graders were hanging out and socializing. If parents did find out about these accounts, it was too late. Nobody wanted their child to be isolated and alone, so parents rarely forced their children to shut down their accounts.

We had no idea what we were doing.

4. The High Cost of a Phone-Based Childhood

In Walden, his 1854 reflection on simple living, Henry David Thoreau wrote, “The cost of a thing is the amount of … life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” It’s an elegant formulation of what economists would later call the opportunity cost of any choice—all of the things you can no longer do with your money and time once you’ve committed them to something else. So it’s important that we grasp just how much of a young person’s day is now taken up by their devices.

The numbers are hard to believe. The most recent Gallup data show that American teens spend about five hours a day just on social-media platforms (including watching videos on TikTok and YouTube). Add in all the other phone- and screen-based activities, and the number rises to somewhere between seven and nine hours a day, on average. The numbers are even higher in single-parent and low-income families, and among Black, Hispanic, and Native American families.

In Thoreau’s terms, how much of life is exchanged for all this screen time? Arguably, most of it. Everything else in an adolescent’s day must get squeezed down or eliminated entirely to make room for the vast amount of content that is consumed, and for the hundreds of “friends,” “followers,” and other network connections that must be serviced with texts, posts, comments, likes, snaps, and direct messages. I recently surveyed my students at NYU, and most of them reported that the very first thing they do when they open their eyes in the morning is check their texts, direct messages, and social-media feeds. It’s also the last thing they do before they close their eyes at night. And it’s a lot of what they do in between.

The amount of time that adolescents spend sleeping declined in the early 2010s, and many studies tie sleep loss directly to the use of devices around bedtime, particularly when they’re used to scroll through social media. Exercise declined, too, which is unfortunate because exercise, like sleep, improves both mental and physical health. Book reading has been declining for decades, pushed aside by digital alternatives, but the decline, like so much else, sped up in the early 2010s. With passive entertainment always available, adolescent minds likely wander less than they used to; contemplation and imagination might be placed on the list of things winnowed down or crowded out.

But perhaps the most devastating cost of the new phone-based childhood was the collapse of time spent interacting with other people face-to-face. A study of how Americans spend their time found that, before 2010, young people (ages 15 to 24) reported spending far more time with their friends (about two hours a day, on average, not counting time together at school) than did older people (who spent just 30 to 60 minutes with friends). Time with friends began decreasing for young people in the 2000s, but the drop accelerated in the 2010s, while it barely changed for older people. By 2019, young people’s time with friends had dropped to just 67 minutes a day. It turns out that Gen Z had been socially distancing for many years and had mostly completed the project by the time COVID-19 struck.

You might question the importance of this decline. After all, isn’t much of this online time spent interacting with friends through texting, social media, and multiplayer video games? Isn’t that just as good?

Some of it surely is, and virtual interactions offer unique benefits too, especially for young people who are geographically or socially isolated. But in general, the virtual world lacks many of the features that make human interactions in the real world nutritious, as we might say, for physical, social, and emotional development. In particular, real-world relationships and social interactions are characterized by four features—typical for hundreds of thousands of years—that online interactions either distort or erase.

First, real-world interactions are embodied, meaning that we use our hands and facial expressions to communicate, and we learn to respond to the body language of others. Virtual interactions, in contrast, mostly rely on language alone. No matter how many emojis are offered as compensation, the elimination of communication channels for which we have eons of evolutionary programming is likely to produce adults who are less comfortable and less skilled at interacting in person.

Second, real-world interactions are synchronous; they happen at the same time. As a result, we learn subtle cues about timing and conversational turn taking. Synchronous interactions make us feel closer to the other person because that’s what getting “in sync” does. Texts, posts, and many other virtual interactions lack synchrony. There is less real laughter, more room for misinterpretation, and more stress after a comment that gets no immediate response.

Third, real-world interactions primarily involve one‐to‐one communication, or sometimes one-to-several. But many virtual communications are broadcast to a potentially huge audience. Online, each person can engage in dozens of asynchronous interactions in parallel, which interferes with the depth achieved in all of them. The sender’s motivations are different, too: With a large audience, one’s reputation is always on the line; an error or poor performance can damage social standing with large numbers of peers. These communications thus tend to be more performative and anxiety-inducing than one-to-one conversations.

Finally, real-world interactions usually take place within communities that have a high bar for entry and exit, so people are strongly motivated to invest in relationships and repair rifts when they happen. But in many virtual networks, people can easily block others or quit when they are displeased. Relationships within such networks are usually more disposable.

These unsatisfying and anxiety-producing features of life online should be recognizable to most adults. Online interactions can bring out antisocial behavior that people would never display in their offline communities. But if life online takes a toll on adults, just imagine what it does to adolescents in the early years of puberty, when their “experience expectant” brains are rewiring based on feedback from their social interactions.

Kids going through puberty online are likely to experience far more social comparison, self-consciousness, public shaming, and chronic anxiety than adolescents in previous generations, which could potentially set developing brains into a habitual state of defensiveness. The brain contains systems that are specialized for approach (when opportunities beckon) and withdrawal (when threats appear or seem likely). People can be in what we might call “discover mode” or “defend mode” at any moment, but generally not both. The two systems together form a mechanism for quickly adapting to changing conditions, like a thermostat that can activate either a heating system or a cooling system as the temperature fluctuates. Some people’s internal thermostats are generally set to discover mode, and they flip into defend mode only when clear threats arise. These people tend to see the world as full of opportunities. They are happier and less anxious. Other people’s internal thermostats are generally set to defend mode, and they flip into discover mode only when they feel unusually safe. They tend to see the world as full of threats and are more prone to anxiety and depressive disorders.

A simple way to understand the differences between Gen Z and previous generations is that people born in and after 1996 have internal thermostats that were shifted toward defend mode. This is why life on college campuses changed so suddenly when Gen Z arrived, beginning around 2014. Students began requesting “safe spaces” and trigger warnings. They were highly sensitive to “microaggressions” and sometimes claimed that words were “violence.” These trends mystified those of us in older generations at the time, but in hindsight, it all makes sense. Gen Z students found words, ideas, and ambiguous social encounters more threatening than had previous generations of students because we had fundamentally altered their psychological development.

5. So Many Harms

The debate around adolescents’ use of smartphones and social media typically revolves around mental health, and understandably so. But the harms that have resulted from transforming childhood so suddenly and heedlessly go far beyondmental health. I’ve touched on some of them—social awkwardness, reduced self-confidence, and a more sedentary childhood. Here are three additional harms.

Fragmented Attention, Disrupted Learning

Staying on task while sitting at a computer is hard enough for an adult with a fully developed prefrontal cortex. It is far more difficult for adolescents in front of their laptop trying to do homework. They are probably less intrinsically motivated to stay on task. They’re certainly less able, given their undeveloped prefrontal cortex, and hence it’s easy for any company with an app to lure them away with an offer of social validation or entertainment. Their phones are pinging constantly—one study found that the typical adolescent now gets 237 notifications a day, roughly 15 every waking hour. Sustained attention is essential for doing almost anything big, creative, or valuable, yet young people find their attention chopped up into little bits by notifications offering the possibility of high-pleasure, low-effort digital experiences.

It even happens in the classroom. Studies confirm that when students have access to their phones during class time, they use them, especially for texting and checking social media, and their grades and learning suffer. This might explain why benchmark test scores began to decline in the U.S. and around the world in the early 2010s—well before the pandemic hit.

Addiction and Social Withdrawal

The neural basis of behavioral addiction to social media or video games is not exactly the same as chemical addiction to cocaine or opioids. Nonetheless, they all involve abnormally heavy and sustained activation of dopamine neurons and reward pathways. Over time, the brain adapts to these high levels of dopamine; when the child is not engaged in digital activity, their brain doesn’t have enough dopamine, and the child experiences withdrawal symptoms. These generally include anxiety, insomnia, and intense irritability. Kids with these kinds of behavioral addictions often become surly and aggressive, and withdraw from their families into their bedrooms and devices.

Social-media and gaming platforms were designed to hook users. How successful are they? How many kids suffer from digital addictions?

The main addiction risks for boys seem to be video games and porn. “Internet gaming disorder,” which was added to the main diagnosis manual of psychiatry in 2013 as a condition for further study, describes “significant impairment or distress” in several aspects of life, along with many hallmarks of addiction, including an inability to reduce usage despite attempts to do so. Estimates for the prevalence of IGD range from 7 to 15 percent among adolescent boys and young men. As for porn, a nationally representative survey of American adults published in 2019 found that 7 percent of American men agreed or strongly agreed with the statement “I am addicted to pornography”—and the rates were higher for the youngest men.

Girls have much lower rates of addiction to video games and porn, but they use social media more intensely than boys do. A study of teens in 29 nations found that between 5 and 15 percent of adolescents engage in what is called “problematic social media use,” which includes symptoms such as preoccupation, withdrawal symptoms, neglect of other areas of life, and lying to parents and friends about time spent on social media. That study did not break down results by gender, but many others have found that rates of “problematic use” are higher for girls.

I don’t want to overstate the risks: Most teens do not become addicted to their phones and video games. But across multiple studies and across genders, rates of problematic use come out in the ballpark of 5 to 15 percent. Is there any other consumer product that parents would let their children use relatively freely if they knew that something like one in 10 kids would end up with a pattern of habitual and compulsive use that disrupted various domains of life and looked a lot like an addiction?

The Decay of Wisdom and the Loss of Meaning 

During that crucial sensitive period for cultural learning, from roughly ages 9 through 15, we should be especially thoughtful about who is socializing our children for adulthood. Instead, that’s when most kids get their first smartphone and sign themselves up (with or without parental permission) to consume rivers of content from random strangers. Much of that content is produced by other adolescents, in blocks of a few minutes or a few seconds.

This rerouting of enculturating content has created a generation that is largely cut off from older generations and, to some extent, from the accumulated wisdom of humankind, including knowledge about how to live a flourishing life. Adolescents spend less time steeped in their local or national culture. They are coming of age in a confusing, placeless, ahistorical maelstrom of 30-second stories curated by algorithms designed to mesmerize them. Without solid knowledge of the past and the filtering of good ideas from bad––a process that plays out over many generations––young people will be more prone to believe whatever terrible ideas become popular around them, which might explain why videos showing young people reacting positively to Osama bin Laden’s thoughts about America were trending on TikTok last fall.

All this is made worse by the fact that so much of digital public life is an unending supply of micro dramas about somebody somewhere in our country of 340 million people who did something that can fuel an outrage cycle, only to be pushed aside by the next. It doesn’t add up to anything and leaves behind only a distorted sense of human nature and affairs.

When our public life becomes fragmented, ephemeral, and incomprehensible, it is a recipe for anomie, or normlessness. The great French sociologist Émile Durkheim showed long ago that a society that fails to bind its people together with some shared sense of sacredness and common respect for rules and norms is not a society of great individual freedom; it is, rather, a place where disoriented individuals have difficulty setting goals and exerting themselves to achieve them. Durkheim argued that anomie was a major driver of suicide rates in European countries. Modern scholars continue to draw on his work to understand suicide rates today. 

Durkheim’s observations are crucial for understanding what happened in the early 2010s. A long-running survey of American teens found that, from 1990 to 2010, high-school seniors became slightly less likely to agree with statements such as “Life often feels meaningless.” But as soon as they adopted a phone-based life and many began to live in the whirlpool of social media, where no stability can be found, every measure of despair increased. From 2010 to 2019, the number who agreed that their lives felt “meaningless” increased by about 70 percent, to more than one in five.

6. Young People Don’t Like Their Phone-Based Lives

How can I be confident that the epidemic of adolescent mental illness was kicked off by the arrival of the phone-based childhood? Skeptics point to other events as possible culprits, including the 2008 global financial crisis, global warming, the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting and the subsequent active-shooter drills, rising academic pressures, and the opioid epidemic. But while these events might have been contributing factors in some countries, none can explain both the timing and international scope of the disaster.

An additional source of evidence comes from Gen Z itself. With all the talk of regulating social media, raising age limits, and getting phones out of schools, you might expect to find many members of Gen Z writing and speaking out in opposition. I’ve looked for such arguments and found hardly any. In contrast, many young adults tell stories of devastation.

Freya India, a 24-year-old British essayist who writes about girls, explains how social-media sites carry girls off to unhealthy places: “It seems like your child is simply watching some makeup tutorials, following some mental health influencers, or experimenting with their identity. But let me tell you: they are on a conveyor belt to someplace bad. Whatever insecurity or vulnerability they are struggling with, they will be pushed further and further into it.” She continues:

Gen Z were the guinea pigs in this uncontrolled global social experiment. We were the first to have our vulnerabilities and insecurities fed into a machine that magnified and refracted them back at us, all the time, before we had any sense of who we were. We didn’t just grow up with algorithms. They raised us. They rearranged our faces. Shaped our identities. Convinced us we were sick.

Rikki Schlott, a 23-year-old American journalist and co-author of The Canceling of the American Mind, writes,

"The day-to-day life of a typical teen or tween today would be unrecognizable to someone who came of age before the smartphone arrived. Zoomers are spending an average of 9 hours daily in this screen-time doom loop—desperate to forget the gaping holes they’re bleeding out of, even if just for … 9 hours a day. Uncomfortable silence could be time to ponder why they’re so miserable in the first place. Drowning it out with algorithmic white noise is far easier."

A 27-year-old man who spent his adolescent years addicted (his word) to video games and pornography sent me this reflection on what that did to him:

I missed out on a lot of stuff in life—a lot of socialization. I feel the effects now: meeting new people, talking to people. I feel that my interactions are not as smooth and fluid as I want. My knowledge of the world (geography, politics, etc.) is lacking. I didn’t spend time having conversations or learning about sports. I often feel like a hollow operating system.

Or consider what Facebook found in a research project involving focus groups of young people, revealed in 2021 by the whistleblower Frances Haugen: “Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rates of anxiety and depression among teens,” an internal document said. “This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.”

7. Collective-Action Problems

Social-media companies such as Meta, TikTok, and Snap are often compared to tobacco companies, but that’s not really fair to the tobacco industry. It’s true that companies in both industries marketed harmful products to children and tweaked their products for maximum customer retention (that is, addiction), but there’s a big difference: Teens could and did choose, in large numbers, not to smoke. Even at the peak of teen cigarette use, in 1997, nearly two-thirds of high-school students did not smoke.

Social media, in contrast, applies a lot more pressure on nonusers, at a much younger age and in a more insidious way. Once a few students in any middle school lie about their age and open accounts at age 11 or 12, they start posting photos and comments about themselves and other students. Drama ensues. The pressure on everyone else to join becomes intense. Even a girl who knows, consciously, that Instagram can foster beauty obsession, anxiety, and eating disorders might sooner take those risks than accept the seeming certainty of being out of the loop, clueless, and excluded. And indeed, if she resists while most of her classmates do not, she might, in fact, be marginalized, which puts her at risk for anxiety and depression, though via a different pathway than the one taken by those who use social media heavily. In this way, social media accomplishes a remarkable feat: It even harms adolescents who do not use it.

A recent study led by the University of Chicago economist Leonardo Bursztyn captured the dynamics of the social-media trap precisely. The researchers recruited more than 1,000 college students and asked them how much they’d need to be paid to deactivate their accounts on either Instagram or TikTok for four weeks. That’s a standard economist’s question to try to compute the net value of a product to society. On average, students said they’d need to be paid roughly $50 ($59 for TikTok, $47 for Instagram) to deactivate whichever platform they were asked about. Then the experimenters told the students that they were going to try to get most of the others in their school to deactivate that same platform, offering to pay them to do so as well, and asked, Now how much would you have to be paid to deactivate, if most others did so? The answer, on average, was less than zero. In each case, most students were willing to pay to have that happen.

Social media is all about network effects. Most students are only on it because everyone else is too. Most of them would prefer that nobody be on these platforms. Later in the study, students were asked directly, “Would you prefer to live in a world without Instagram [or TikTok]?” A majority of students said yes––58 percent for each app.

This is the textbook definition of what social scientists call a collective-action problem. It’s what happens when a group would be better off if everyone in the group took a particular action, but each actor is deterred from acting, because unless the others do the same, the personal cost outweighs the benefit. Fishermen considering limiting their catch to avoid wiping out the local fish population are caught in this same kind of trap. If no one else does it too, they just lose profit.

Cigarettes trapped individual smokers with a biological addiction. Social media has trapped an entire generation in a collective-action problem. Early app developers deliberately and knowingly exploited the psychological weaknesses and insecurities of young people to pressure them to consume a product that, upon reflection, many wish they could use less, or not at all.

8. Four Norms to Break Four Traps

Young people and their parents are stuck in at least four collective-action traps. Each is hard to escape for an individual family, but escape becomes much easier if families, schools, and communities coordinate and act together. Here are four norms that would roll back the phone-based childhood. I believe that any community that adopts all four will see substantial improvements in youth mental health within two years.

No smartphones before high school  

The trap here is that each child thinks they need a smartphone because “everyone else” has one, and many parents give in because they don’t want their child to feel excluded. But if no one else had a smartphone—or even if, say, only half of the child’s sixth-grade class had one—parents would feel more comfortable providing a basic flip phone (or no phone at all). Delaying round-the-clock internet access until ninth grade (around age 14) as a national or community norm would help to protect adolescents during the very vulnerable first few years of puberty. According to a 2022 British study, these are the years when social-media use is most correlated with poor mental health. Family policies about tablets, laptops, and video-game consoles should be aligned with smartphone restrictions to prevent overuse of other screen activities.

No social media before 16

The trap here, as with smartphones, is that each adolescent feels a strong need to open accounts on TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and other platforms primarily because that’s where most of their peers are posting and gossiping. But if the majority of adolescents were not on these accounts until they were 16, families and adolescents could more easily resist the pressure to sign up. The delay would not mean that kids younger than 16 could never watch videos on TikTok or YouTube—only that they could not open accounts, give away their data, post their own content, and let algorithms get to know them and their preferences.

Phone‐free schools 

Most schools claim that they ban phones, but this usually just means that students aren’t supposed to take their phone out of their pocket during class. Research shows that most students do use their phones during class time. They also use them during lunchtime, free periods, and breaks between classes––times when students could and should be interacting with their classmates face-to-face. The only way to get students’ minds off their phones during the school day is to require all students to put their phones (and other devices that can send or receive texts) into a phone locker or locked pouch at the start of the day. Schools that have gone phone-free always seem to report that it has improved the culture, making students more attentive in class and more interactive with one another. Published studies back them up.

More independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world

Many parents are afraid to give their children the level of independence and responsibility they themselves enjoyed when they were young, even though rates of homicide, drunk driving, and other physical threats to children are way down in recent decades. Part of the fear comes from the fact that parents look at each other to determine what is normal and therefore safe, and they see few examples of families acting as if a 9-year-old can be trusted to walk to a store without a chaperone. But if many parents started sending their children out to play or run errands, then the norms of what is safe and accepted would change quickly. So would ideas about what constitutes “good parenting.” And if more parents trusted their children with more responsibility––for example, by asking their kids to do more to help out, or to care for others––then the pervasive sense of uselessness now found in surveys of high-school students might begin to dissipate.

It would be a mistake to overlook this fourth norm. If parents don’t replace screen time with real-world experiences involving friends and independent activity, then banning devices will feel like deprivation, not the opening up of a world of opportunities.

The main reason why the phone-based childhood is so harmful is because it pushes aside everything else. Smartphones are experience blockers. Our ultimate goal should not be to remove screens entirely, nor should it be to return childhood to exactly the way it was in 1960. Rather, it should be to create a version of childhood and adolescence that keeps young people anchored in the real world while flourishing in the digital age.

9. What Are We Waiting For?

An essential function of government is to solve collective-action problems. Congress could solve or help solve the ones I’ve highlighted—for instance, by raising the age of “internet adulthood” to 16 and requiring tech companies to keep underage children off their sites.

In recent decades, however, Congress has not been good at addressing public concerns when the solutions would displease a powerful and deep-pocketed industry. Governors and state legislators have been much more effective, and their successes might let us evaluate how well various reforms work. But the bottom line is that to change norms, we’re going to need to do most of the work ourselves, in neighborhood groups, schools, and other communities.

There are now hundreds of organizations––most of them started by mothers who saw what smartphones had done to their children––that are working to roll back the phone-based childhood or promote a more independent, real-world childhood. (I have assembled a list of many of them.) One that I co-founded, at LetGrow.org, suggests a variety of simple programs for parents or schools, such as play club (schools keep the playground open at least one day a week before or after school, and kids sign up for phone-free, mixed-age, unstructured play as a regular weekly activity) and the Let Grow Experience (a series of homework assignments in which students––with their parents’ consent––choose something to do on their own that they’ve never done before, such as walk the dog, climb a tree, walk to a store, or cook dinner).

Parents are fed up with what childhood has become. Many are tired of having daily arguments about technologies that were designed to grab hold of their children’s attention and not let go. But the phone-based childhood is not inevitable.

The four norms I have proposed cost almost nothing to implement, they cause no clear harm to anyone, and while they could be supported by new legislation, they can be instilled even without it. We can begin implementing all of them right away, this year, especially in communities with good cooperation between schools and parents. A single memo from a principal asking parents to delay smartphones and social media, in support of the school’s effort to improve mental health by going phone free, would catalyze collective action and reset the community’s norms.

We didn’t know what we were doing in the early 2010s. Now we do. It’s time to end the phone-based childhood.

This article is adapted from Jonathan Haidt’s forthcoming book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.

[fuckyeahgoodomens]

I don't really get the whole strikes thing and what it has to do with Good Omens to be renewed, I got that Amazon has to pay writers and actors the right amount of money for their work but the thing is, if they negotiate, all is settled and they can renew the series? Or there's more? Also, rewatching the show all over again is really helpful? I'm sorry I know it's dumb for me to ask this but I'm not very educated on this matter, Good Omens is the first TV series I have watched in a long time.

Hiya! Yes, until the amazon studio is willing to negotiate and settle with the writers (and actors), the writers are on strike which means no work can be done on the script, it's like frozen in time from before the strike started (imagine Crowley snapping fingers on the script :)) (and Neil did some work on the S3 script even tho the show isn't renewed yet), when the strike ends the time gets unfrozen and Neil will be able to work on the S3 scripts again plus Amazon needs to renew it for S3. They might make the decision during the strike but maybe they will do it after strike. For the decision they will look at the statistics of Good Omens on prime (not only but it will play a big part). So:

Introduce new people to the ineffability and have them watch��S1+S2, new people watching Good Omens are important.

Watch S2 on repeat (entirely to the end (you can have it playing in the background, from time to time pause so you are not confused with a bot), first month is especially important).

Write to amazon to negotiate with the strikes and make S3, AMAZON STUDIOS, 1620 26TH STREET SUITE 4000N, SANTA MONICA, 90404, United States - you can address it to Jennifer Salke who is now a head of Amazon studios,  cs-reply@amazon.com  (physical letter is better but to be safe let’s write both :))

Rate the season and also write a review (some trolls wrote some bigoted reviews so it's good to show that there are people who appreaciate the show and take time to write reviews)

When engaging on social media with Good Omens content use tags - twitter now uses #GoodOmens, #RenewGoodOmens, #GiveMeS3OrGiveMeDeath

[deadpresidents]

Thanks for being real today.

I get people wanting to be hopeful.

But I can't with "it will be okay" and "we will survive this."

It was not okay for Heather Heyer, Joseph Rosenbaum, Anthony Huber, Joyce Fienberg, Richard Gottfried, Rose Mallinger, Jerry Rabinowitz, Cecil & David Rosenthal, Bernice & Sylvan Simon, Daniel Stein, Melvin Wax, Irving Younger, Andre Anchondo, Jordan Anchondo, Arturo Benavides, Leonardo Campos, Angie Englisbee, Maria Flores, Raul Flores, Guillermo "Memo" Garcia, Jorge Calvillo García, Adolfo Cerros Hernández, Alexander Gerhard Hoffman, David Johnson, Luis Alfonzo Juarez, Maria Eugenia Legarreta Rothe, Maribel (Campos) Loya, Ivan Filiberto Manzano, Elsa Mendoza Marquez, Gloria Irma Márquez, Margie Reckard, Sara Esther Regalado Moriel, Javier Rodriguez, Teresa Sanchez, Juan Velazquez, or any of the other people killed by white supremacists whose actions were aided and abetted by the Trump presidency. These people did not survive. Not to mention all the people who haven't survived COVID, but might have if the Trump administration had taken timely action. Or the women who have died after being refused appropriate medical care because of the rapist and his buddies that Trump appointed decided with some weird pastor in the 1600 said was more important than the lives of actual living, breathing, human beings. Or the school children who would not have been shot to death if we had actual gun control laws in this country, a thing that would have been possible to achieve if Trump had lost in 2016.

Yeah, sure, the majority of us in the United States will probably survive. That's how statistics work. And if that's what somebody needs to hear in order to move forward, then I guess saying such things has a purpose. But it's looking pretty shitty for anybody living in Ukraine and to me, it comes across as disrespectful to the people whose lives have been lost in no small part thanks to what goes down in US elections.

I needed somebody today who would say not only that this is not okay, but this is *really* not okay.

Thanks for being that voice.

Thank you for this. I can't help but write what I feel, even if some of it hasn't been the most optimistic message to send. There is a reality that we need to come to terms with in order to find some way forward. I'm pissed off and I'm disgusted with this country, so I'm going to keep doing what I've been doing because it is therapeutic for me right now and I'm too old to go around punching and kicking people.

I do want to say that I'm also cognizant of the fact that some people just need some time to allow this reality to settle. I certainly don't want to add to the stress or darkness that some of us are feeling right now. There is no denying that this is fucking terrible, but we will regroup and find a way through it. It won't be easy and we're going to have to fight, but I don't want anybody to think that there is genuinely no hope. There's always something that we can do, even if it seems bleak.

If I'm writing something or somebody else is saying something that you're not ready to hear, it's okay to do what you need to do to remain healthy. These posts are going to be here whenever you might feel like reading them. You can and should step away from this if you just need a fucking break. It doesn't mean you're any less ready or willing to fight this battle than anybody else. Even if Trump and the rotten MAGA cult takes control of every lever of power, you can gain a personal victory by not allowing them to completely crush your faith in the future. You can be depressed and despair, but do not give up. Do not give them that power over you. We will find a way. We will get through this. We will figure out what it is that we need to do and who we need to back and how we need to attack, but taking care of your personal health and well-being is more immediately important than the bigger political battle or the next step in the resistance. Take care of yourselves first and we'll still be here and ready to eventually harness this anger and frustration and fucking disgust to defeat the MAGA movement and Trump's Christian nationalist personality cult.

The main thing, though, is that if you're really having a tough time in the immediate future, step away, take some time, go for a walk, read something that has absolutely nothing to do with Donald Trump or American politics (if you need suggestions, I always have book recommendations!), and regroup. Again, we'll get through this, and as goofy and weird and ridiculous as Tumblr can be at times, there's always a community of people on this site willing to listen and help each other when we're struggling. So, if you are having trouble getting to tomorrow, reach out because there are scores of people here who will help get there with you.

[eternal-echoes]

The poll

I don't think it's just that; I think more and more people are realizing that every child deserves a mother and a father and legalizing gay marriage deliberately deprives a kid of one of them. Orphans and children of single parents always long for their missing parents.

While there are unfortunate circumstances like death of a parent or divorcing an abusive spouse that makes it inevitable, ultimately since children are made through the biological union of a man and woman, their spiritual relationship with them should be preserved.

Since we're not just a material being, we're also of both body and soul. Not Cartesian dualism but Hylomorphism where the union of body and soul makes one nature.

The only two ways a gay couple can have a baby is either through surrogacy and/or adoption. Along with its ethical concerns with buying a baby, a gay couple taking a newly born baby from his/her mother is depriving that child with the much needed bonding time with the mother (i.e. breastfeeding, cuddling, etc). It's illegal to sell a puppy within 8 weeks of birth because it would be too cruel to separate it from its mother,* then how much more devastating would it be when it comes to a human child? And a child's need for a mother doesn't stop when he/she no longer needs to be breastfed, the mother is essential for the child's emotional maturity as well.

Here is a video of Ryan T. Anderson back in 2014. I'll highlight some important points but the whole video is really good.

Marriage exists to unite a man and a woman as husband and wife to then be equipped to be mother and father to any children that that union produces. It's based on the biological fact that men and women are distinct and complementary, it's based on the anthropological truth that reproduction requires a man and a woman, it's based on the social reality that children deserve a mother and a father. ... Marriage is the institution that different cultures and societies, across time and place, developed to maximize the likelihood that that man commits to that woman, and then the two of them take responsibility to raise that child. Part of this is based on the reality: there's no such thing as parenting in the abstract; there's mothering and there's fathering. Men and women bring different gifts to the parenting enterprise. Rutgers sociologist professor David Popenoe writes, "The burden of social science evidence supports the idea that gender differentiating parenting is important for human development and the contribution of fathers to childrearing is unique and irreplaceable." He then concludes, "we should disavow the notion that mommies can make good daddies, just as we should disavow the popular notion that daddies can make good mommies. The two sexes are different to the core and each is necessary, culturally and biologically for the optimal development of a human being." ... The impact of marriage. So why does marriage matter for public policy? Perhaps there's no better way to analyze this than looking to our own president, President Barrack Obama: "We know the statistics that children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime, nine times more likely to drop out of schools, and 20 times more likely to end up in prison. They're more likely to have behavioral problems or run away from home, or become teenage parents themselves. And the foundation of our community are weaker because of it." ... President Obama sums it up very well: what we've seen in the past 50 years since the War on Poverty began, is that the family has collapsed. At one point in America virtually every child was given the gift of a married mother and father, those numbers right now: it's more than 50% of Hispanics children are born outside of wedlock, more than 70% of African Americans are born outside of wedlock. And the consequences for those children are really serious. The State's interest in marriage is not that it cares about my love life, or your love life, or anyone's love life just for the sake of romance. The State's interest in marriage is ensuring that those kids have fathers who are involved in their lives. ... If the biggest social problem we face right now in the United States is absentee dads, how will we insist that fathers are essential when the law redefines marriage to make fathers optional? ... Think about the social consequences if that's the direction the slippery slope in which marriage redefinition would go. For every additional sexual partner I have, and for the shorter lived those relationships are, the greater the chances that I create children with multiple women, without commitment with either to those mothers or to those kids. It increases the likelihood of creating fragmented families and then big government will step in to pick up the pieces with a host of welfare programs that truly drain the economic prospects of all of our states. ... So for all those reasons this is why the State and all states have an interest in preserving the definition of marriage as a union, permanent and exclusive of a man and a woman.

Also an article supporting some of Ryan T. Anderson's points:

It’s worse to be raised by a single mother, even if you’re not poor.

The reason for this is that fathers tend to be the disciplinarian in the family. They provide the moral framework in his children's lives.

Reminder that even though the Catholic Church does not support gay marriage, it doesn't mean that she hates gay people. There is a ministry called Courage International where people with same-sex attractions are encourage to live chaste and holy lives.

*Original wording taken from here.

[literaryvein-reblogs]

can you do a post about the forms of paranoia? Making up situations and anonymous online interactions, getting lost in your own head kinda of situation? 🥹😍

Writing Notes: Paranoia

PARANOIA

A paranoid state (i.e., a condition characterized by delusions of persecution or grandiosity that are not as systematized and elaborate as in a delusional disorder or as bizarre as in paranoid schizophrenia. Also called paranoid condition.)

A former diagnosis for a relatively rare disorder, distinct from paranoid schizophrenia, in which the person reasons rightly from a wrong premise and develops a persistent, well-systematized, and logically constructed set of persecutory delusions, such as being conspired against, poisoned, or maligned. It is equivalent to persecutory-type delusional disorder.

Historically, any psychiatric disorder characterized by persistent delusions. See also classical paranoia below.

In ancient times, any mental disorder or delirium.

An unfounded or exaggerated distrust of others, sometimes reaching delusional proportions. Paranoid individuals constantly suspect the motives of those around them, and believe that certain individuals, or people in general, are ‘‘out to get them.’’

The word paranoia comes from ancient Greek: nóos means ‘thought’; para- means ‘going beyond’.

In theory, the term denotes a mind that goes beyond the usual field of thought.

In practice, even in ancient Greek, it indicated a delusional manner of thinking.

But the concept was not as well known as it is today.

It was 19th century German psychiatry that brought it into modern discourse.

In politics, the word paranoia is often used to criticize an opponent, though probably few of the people who use it could actually explain what it means. Only rarely has the term been used self-critically.

Classical Paranoia

Conceptualized in the 19th century by German physician Karl Ludwig Kahlbaum (1828–1899) and later refined by Emil Kraepelin.

A rare disorder characterized by elaborate, fixed, and systematic delusions, usually of a persecutory, grandiose, or jealous character, that develop insidiously, cannot be accounted for by any psychiatric disorder, and exist in the context of preserved logical and orderly thinking.

Delusional Disorder

In DSM–IV–TR, (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fourth edition, the diagnostic standard for mental health professionals in the United States) any one of a group of psychotic disorders with the essential feature of one or more nonbizarre delusions that persist for at least 1 month but are not due to schizophrenia.

The delusions are nonbizarre in that they feature situations that could conceivably occur in real life (e.g., being followed, poisoned, infected, deceived by one’s government).

Diagnosis also requires that the effects of substances (e.g., cocaine) or a medical condition be ruled out as causes of the delusions.

Formerly called paranoid disorder.

7 types of delusional disorder are specified, according to the theme of the delusion:

Erotomanic type: Central theme of the delusion is that another person is in love with the individual.

Grandiose type: Central theme of the delusion is the conviction of having some great (but unrecognized) talent or insight or having made some important discovery.

Jealous type: Central theme of the individual’s delusion is that his or her spouse or lover is unfaithful.

Persecutory type: Central theme of the delusion involves the individual’s belief that he or she is being conspired against, cheated, spied on, followed, poisoned or drugged, maliciously maligned, harassed, or obstructed in the pursuit of long-term goals.

Somatic type: Central theme of the delusion involves bodily functions or sensations.

Mixed type: This subtype applies when no one delusional theme predominates.

Unspecified type: The dominant delusional belief cannot be clearly determined or is not described in the specific types (e.g., referential delusions without a prominent persecutory or grandiose component).

Criteria for delusional disorder in DSM–5 and DSM-5-TR also include the following:

The delusions may be either nonbizarre or bizarre (i.e., implausible), and

their potential presence as a result of an ingested substance, a medical condition, or another mental disorder sometimes associated with firmly held delusional beliefs (e.g., obsessive-compulsive disorder, body dysmorphic disorder) must be ruled out.

Paranoid perceptions and behavior may appear as features of a number of mental illnesses, including depression and dementia, but are most prominent in 3 types of psychological disorders:

paranoid schizophrenia,

delusional disorder (persecutory type), and

paranoid personality disorder (PPD).

Individuals with paranoid schizophrenia and persecutory delusional disorder experience what is known as persecutory delusions: an irrational, yet unshakable, belief that someone is plotting against them.

Persecutory delusions in paranoid schizophrenia are bizarre, sometimes grandiose, and often accompanied by auditory hallucinations.

Delusions experienced by individuals with delusional disorder are more plausible than those experienced by paranoid schizophrenics; not bizarre, though still unjustified.

Individuals with delusional disorder may seem offbeat or quirky rather than mentally ill, and, as such, may never seek treatment.

Persons with paranoid personality disorder tend to be:

self-centered,

self-important,

defensive, and

emotionally distant.

Their paranoia manifests itself in constant suspicions rather than full-blown delusions. The disorder often impedes social and personal relationships and career advancement.

Some individuals with PPD are described as ‘‘litigious,’’ as they are constantly initiating frivolous law suits.

PPD is more common in men than in women.

Typically begins in early adulthood.

The exact cause of paranoia is unknown. Potential causal factors may be:

genetics,

neurological abnormalities,

changes in brain chemistry, and

stress.

Paranoia is also a possible side effect of drug use and abuse (for example, alcohol, marijuana, amphetamines, cocaine, PCP).

Acute, or short term, paranoia may occur in some individuals overwhelmed by stress.

A summary of paranoid personality disorder (PPD) in the DSM-IV:

The principal defining features of paranoia are pervasive and unwarranted mistrust and suspiciousness of others.

People who are paranoid are locked into a rigid and maladaptive pattern of thought, feeling, and behavior based on the conviction that others are “out to get them.”

Their perception of the world as a threatening place drives them to be highly alert to any evidence suggesting that they are being victimized.

A constant search for proof of their victimization often leads them to misinterpret others’ comments and behaviors.

Hypersensitivity to slights, both imagined and real, combined with the tendency to have excessive confidence in their own knowledge and abilities, create tension in interpersonal relationships and leave social networks depleted.

If we want to assess where someone’s paranoia fits in the spectrum, we need to look at 4 key factors:

How much the person believes the paranoid thoughts.

How preoccupied the person is with the thoughts.

How distressing the thoughts are.

How much the thoughts interfere with everyday life.

Studies found that some people who respond in a paranoid way have 3 distinct emotional characteristics:

A greater tendency to worry.

Higher levels of anxiety.

Negative feelings about themselves and other people.

Some researchers have found that paranoia may be caused by the subtle interaction of 4 factors:

Anomalous experiences and ambiguous events

Our emotions

Our previous experiences

The way we reason

TREATMENT

Paranoia that is symptomatic of paranoid schizophrenia, delusional disorder, or paranoid personality disorder should be treated by a psychologist and/or psychiatrist.

Antipsychotic medication such as thioridazine (Mellaril), haloperidol (Haldol), chlorpromazine (Thorazine), clozapine (Clozaril), or risperidone (Risperdal) may be prescribed, and

cognitive therapy or psychotherapy may be employed to help the patient cope with their paranoia and/or persecutory delusions.

Antipsychotic medication, however, is of uncertain benefit to individuals with paranoid personality disorder and may pose long-term risks.

If an underlying condition, such as depression or drug abuse, is found to be triggering the paranoia, an appropriate course of medication and/or psychosocial therapy is employed to treat the primary disorder.

Don’t just accept your suspicious thoughts: question them.

Paranoid thoughts often seem really compelling and plausible—which is ironic since, by definition, they won’t stand up to careful scrutiny. Instead of taking them at face value, we need to challenge these thoughts, weighing up the evidence for and against, and seeking out alternative explanations for the way we’re feeling. Some questions people can ask themselves:

Is there anything that might suggest the paranoid thought could be wrong?

What would I say to a friend who came to me with a similar problem?

Are there any alternative explanations for what seems to have happened?

If I was feeling happier, would I still think of things in the same way? Are my past experiences getting in the way of me seeing the present situation clearly?

Sources: 1 2 3 4 5 6 ⚜ More: Writing Notes & References

Hope this helps with your writing! Use these notes as a quick reference. More research may be needed to write your story. I recommend reading the sources included here, but there are also numerous others.

[mariacallous]

There are few circumstances under which inflation can be comforting. But in the wake of Donald Trump’s victory over Vice President Kamala Harris in the U.S. presidential election, one of them appears to be when it serves as an alibi for an electorate’s sharp turn toward meanness, selfishness, and a hard-edged type of identity-centered nationalism.

Many Americans have used inflation to explain away the country’s embrace of radical political change. Yet this ignores basic facts about the U.S. economy. Before the election, I wrote a column highlighting some of these remarkable statistics, noting that the country has recently far outpaced its G-7 peers in economic growth and brought unemployment down to nearly historic lows; that inflation, after briefly surpassing 9 percent in 2022, has plunged to 2.6 percent; and that gasoline prices, one of the most important pocketbook issues for Americans, are relatively low.

Even George F. Will, a dean of conservative columnists in Washington, indirectly laid bare the ridiculousness of this explanation. As he wrote this week, Trump “ran promising to increase living costs” due to the large tariffs he has vowed to impose on imports.

But to fully understand why the inflation explanation doesn’t add up, one must examine the broader nature of Trump’s program—specifically, its retrograde racial politics. After all, Trump was explicit about his policy priorities during the campaign, and the president-elect’s staffing moves and statements since Nov. 5 have reaffirmed his intentions.

Trump has quickly announced a prospective team of hard-liners to execute his priorities on the border and immigration. This includes Stephen Miller as his deputy chief of staff for policy; Tom Homan as his so-called border czar, and South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem as the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. By all indications, Trump will rely on this team to carry out a sweeping expulsion of millions of undocumented migrants.

Pulling off such a feat would disrupt the economy and everyday life on a scale with few comparisons in U.S. history. Trump’s zealous associates have pledged to carry out workplace raids and suggested deporting whole families to meet their goals. Given the small size of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, accomplishing deportations on this scale would probably require using the National Guard—including by dispatching units from Republican-led states to Democratic-governed ones, a move of dubious legality.

Trump has long devoted himself to laying the groundwork for this. Since his first presidential campaign, he has denounced Mexicans as “rapists,” alleged that countries such as Venezuela have emptied their prisons to inundate the United States with “criminals,” and amplified vile and baseless claims that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, are preying on the community’s pets.

More overtones of white nationalism and nativism can be found in Trump’s infamous 2018 disparagement of what he called “shithole countries,” which in his definition are home to Black and brown people. Meanwhile, Elon Musk, a top Trump ally and now formal advisor to the president-elect, has called for women to have more babies—calls that conservative pundit Tucker Carlson, another prominent Trump backer, has echoed while also casting the issue in explicitly racial terms.

Hinting at a much broader anti-immigration agenda, Trump and his surrogates have also repeatedly inveighed against birthright citizenship, a provision of the U.S. Constitution. Trump’s efforts to call into question who “real” Americans are date back to 2011, when he started saying that he had “real doubts” about Barack Obama’s citizenship and demanded that the then-president produce his birth certificate. Couple this with Trump’s other comments suggesting a preference for immigrants from Nordic countries, and a sense of racial purpose running through many of his fondest projects begins to emerge.

This racial agenda also lurks in the Trump movement’s designs on remaking the country’s education system. In Florida and other states, Trump allies have launched a wholesale attack on books that are frank about the country’s history of slavery and its aftereffects as well as those that discuss gender and sexuality in anything but heteronormative ways.

Meanwhile, Trump couches his hostility toward diversity and inclusion initiatives in higher education as a way to protect the country’s white population from discrimination. In July, for instance, he said, “I will direct the Department of Justice to pursue federal civil rights cases against schools that continue to engage in racial discrimination. And schools that persist in explicit unlawful discrimination under the guise of equity will not only have their endowments taxed, but through budget reconciliation, I will advance a measure to have them fined up to the entire amount of their endowment. A portion of the seized funds will then be used as restitution for victims of these illegal and unjust policies—policies that hurt our country so badly.”

Trump’s nomination of Pete Hegseth as his secretary of defense appears to have been made in a similar spirit. Hegseth, a veteran Fox News host with no policy background, has made a name for himself attacking diversity efforts in the military, saying that Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the Black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, should be fired for his support of “woke” programs. Trump’s transition team is reportedly considering creating a “warrior board” of retired military officials that, some analysts fear, would be able to purge military officers who are not loyal to Trump. If he is confirmed by the Senate, Hegseth could be essential to carrying out that board’s recommendations.

All of this fits with a pattern of stoking culture wars based largely on white resentment in the interest of sustaining political support. As historian David W. Blight wrote in an astute New York Times column, “Trump exploited our social fissures to make them deeper, uglier, ever more bitter and therefore useful. We were reminded that culture wars are won by fueling them, not by seeking harmony. Unity coalitions and kindness and joy don’t win elections in a bitterly divided society where neighbors and family members are not on the same team.”

As perceptive as Blight’s assessment is, it misses the important global dimensions of Trump’s strategy and appeal. By pledging to abandon international climate agreements at a time of dangerous levels of warming (which even the head of Exxon Mobil says is a mistake), by opposing wind power and vowing to “drill baby, drill,” by threatening to impose unilateral tariffs on other countries as a core economic strategy, by pretending that the United States can prevail through tough guy optics and bluster, Trump is engaging in an elaborate fantasy that is both pedigreed and dangerous.

It is an approach to politics that is based on nostalgia for a time when, as the historian Greg Grandin has written, the world seemed for many Americans to be an open frontier—that period in the 19th and 20th centuries when it was permissible to pretend that “America” essentially meant “white,” and that with sufficient will, Washington could bend the rest of the globe to its whims.

There were elements of this ethos in past administrations—notably, in the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush—but even those leaders knew that going it alone and humiliating allies was not smart, and that appeals to racial identity carried political dangers. Trump, however, fully taps into chagrin over the loss of that unquestioned privilege.

What is more, Trump’s brand of voluntarism—his vision of a United States that can say no to whatever displeases it—arrives at a time of relative decline in Washington’s standing in the world compared with its principal rival, China, and even with a larger set of rising middle powers. The United States is about to learn that in order to succeed, it will need strong cooperation with others and more internal harmony of its own. Four years on the path that Trump is setting could be an expensive learning process for the entire nation.