A New Trend in Psychotherapy: Encouraging Learned Helplessness. In this video by FAIR, Christine Sefein, a professor of clinical psychology discusses her resignation from Antioch College. She could no longer thrive in a department that now seeks to validate its patients' claims of learned helplessness and identitarian blaming. The new approach also intentionally overlooks maladaptive behaviors. According to Sefein, this new approach destructively locks people into a belief that they are powerless. This new approach endangers patients who are feeling desperate.
This new affirmation therapy taught by Antioch is a major change from traditional approaches to psychotherapy, which properly emphasized empowering therapy, adaptive coping skills, strong social support system, exercise, meditation and, when needed, medication.
Making this situation all-the-worse is the well documented rise in anxiety depression and self-harm among young adults.
For more on FAIR (Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism) visit FAIR's extensive website and videos.
I don't know whether Sirota's numbers are accurate, but I agree with his sentiment. Sirota often writes about these issues and the too-cozy relationship between lawmakers and their donors.
I agree with almost everything David writes — which he does with his usual concision and pellucidity. There is no question that Trump had countless conflicts of interest in Russia, with his Moscow hotel plans high among them, and had been money laundering for Russian oligarchs for years. No question that he was absolutely willing to accept Russia’s — or any country’s — illicit support, and no doubt he actually asked for it. I saw him do it, on national television, in the campaign. We all did.
The Russians also tried to corrupt the election through online shenanigans; and Manafort’s delivery of polling data to Moscow was deeply shifty. And everyone lied about almost everything. There’s equally no doubt that Trump obstructed justice in trying to stymie the Russia investigation. Again, he told us so on television. More pertinently, people have been prosecuted and gone to jail for their misdeeds in this whole miasma of near-treasonous sleaze.
But this was not what the MSM tried to sell us from the get-go. What they and the Democrats argued — with endless, breathless, high-drama reporting — was that there was some kind of plot between Trump and Russia to rig the election and it had succeeded. Investigating this was hugely important because it could expose near-treason and instantly remove Trump from power via impeachment. This was the dream to cope with the nightmare. . . .
So David now moves the goalposts to “cooperation.” What’s with all these progressively less culpable c-words? But who wouldn’t have Trump “cooperated” with to get elected? He was an all-round huckster, with no ethics, no sense of propriety, and essentially a thug, who got a boner watching human beings being crushed by tanks in Tiananmen Square. And do we have any evidence ever of Trump having the brains, the discretion, the attention to minute detail, or the competent staffing that would have been needed to pull off such a scheme? Please.
Several years ago, I distrusted the phrase "fake news." It was often uttered by Donald Trump, for whom I have almost no respect.
I’m convinced that the great majority of us act rationally based upon the information to which we expose ourselves. If we are exposing ourselves only to false information, however, we will believe and act “rationally” based on that false information. Once upon a time, I heavily relied upon NYT/WP/NPR/MSNBC, but am no longer able to freely trust these sources. These are big organizations with high-paid reporters, editors and purported fact-checkers. Over the past few years, despite all of this high-paid talent, I have seen each of these organizations blatantly and proudly trumpet false information. I’m not claiming that everything these outlets publish is false. Far from it. They are all big tents and they all publish many excellent articles. That said, they have failed so thoroughly and dramatically on so many high-profile stories in the past few years (including basic facts concerning Kyle Rittenhouse and Russiagate) that I have reset my default setting to “Suspicious” on their high-profile news stories, especially when the story could effect a national election.
And not only have each of these outlets published steady streams of false stories, each of them has intentionally suppressed important stories that run counter to their chosen narratives. Some of the biggest lies are told by writing statements that are completely true while simultaneously suppressing evidence that will put these “true” facts into a completely different frame (e.g., following the death of George Floyd, the above outlets refused to publish Harvard economist Roland G. Fryer’s 2019 statistical analysis on police shootings (Discussed by Sam Harris here), statistics that run counter some of the main narratives of the “defund the police” crowd. This is my introduction to Andrew Sullivan’s recent article, “When all the Media Narratives Collapse: In case after case, the US MSM just keep getting it wrong.” I have expanded on Sullivan’s article with my own.
The WP apparently trying to mitigate damages in the libel suit they are now apparently worrying about. Responsible professional journalism would have been evidence-based from the very beginning. I probably need to add that I'm no fan of Kyle Rittenhouse. He is not any sort of hero to me. I write this as someone who has seen the widespread decline in the the ability of legacy news outlets that I formerly trusted.
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