Newly Released CASS Study Highly Critical of Transgender Ideology

From the Free Press, a summary of the recent Cass Review that is highly critical of transgender ideology:

A long-awaited report out this week found that medical professionals in the UK who advocate for gender transition in children are misguided ideologues.

Written by British pediatrician Dr. Hilary Cass, The Cass Review, which is nearly 400 pages and took more than four years to compile, comes to the following conclusions: Thousands of vulnerable young people were given life-altering treatments with “no good evidence on the long-term outcomes of interventions to manage gender-related distress.”

“It has been suggested that hormone treatment reduces the elevated risk of death by suicide in this population, but the evidence found did not support this conclusion.”

“Social justice” ideology is driving medical decision-making, and “the toxicity of the debate” has created an environment “where professionals are so afraid to openly discuss their views.”

Activists insist the science on this matter is settled, but Cass’s tone recalls a stern British nanny calmly explaining to unruly children how to get their room in order. She shows us that everything about this issue is unsettled, and unsettling. For instance, she notes that “social transition”—when very young children assume other gender identities—is an “active intervention” that may set youths on a path to medical transition. And it may even make gender dysphoria worse.

From the National Review:

Which argument is more compelling? That children distressed by their sexual characteristics should be given counseling that acknowledges sex is immutable and aims to resolve their distress by treating its root psychological causes? Or the argument that asserts that sex can be changed, dismisses the cause of distress as irrelevant, and declares that any children who ask to have their sexual characteristics disfigured through drugs and surgeries should be given the go-ahead on the understanding that if they later regret it, it’s their problem?

Thanks to the tireless work of whistleblowers, journalists, and concerned citizens — the British public has given the only sane and responsible answer.

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Peter McCullough Offers Update on COVID Vaccination Injuries

I'm not a doctor and I have no specialized knowledge about these claims. That said, Peter McCullough has has been a stern critic of the main approaches taken by the medical establishment regarding treatment for COVID. He is also a stern critic of the unwillingness of the corporate media and the medical establishment to acknowledge the numerous injuries that result from the COVID vaccinations. Stunning show of hands at the beginning of this video featuring Dr. Peter McCullough.   He states:

  • 1/3 of the people who took the shots have no adverse affects
  • About 2/3 of the people had sore arms, and they are far more likely to have adverse effects in the heart based on PET scans. This is because the spike protein continues the circulate and the body can't break it down. There are numerous reports of blood clots and cardiac arrest years after the shots (min 10).

At 6:50 min, McCullough offers an approach to break down the spike protein. One can buy these in many places without a prescription. McCullough discusses these supplements and others (at min 8) that might be helpful. Here is his proposed spike cleanse protocol:

Continue ReadingPeter McCullough Offers Update on COVID Vaccination Injuries

CIA Cutout USAID Denies Funding the Creation of COVID Virus

I'm not a scientist, so I don't claim to know the truth here, but I do know that every corporate media outlet was constantly obsessed with COVID until most of the "conspiracy theories" turned out to be true and until the whole thing started looking worse than shady. I can see enough to know that if "news" media were run by reporters and editors who were naturally curious, they'd be all over this story.

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Majority Democrat Position: The Government Should Decide What is True.

Glenn Loury's introduction to his podcast interview of Dan Shellenberger:

Maybe my least surprising political position is advocacy for free and open discourse. Without free speech as a bedrock principle, democracy would mean little. If we can’t, as private citizens, receive, judge, and debate ideas and information, the decisions we make on the basis of that information cannot themselves be considered “free” in any meaningful sense. If some central authority prevents me from discussing information—or even the possibility of the existence of information—that could change people’s minds about that authority’s course of action, all of our rights have been damaged.

But over the last five years, a whole raft of ideas potentially threatening to dominant media and government narratives have found themselves shut out of “legitimate” discourse. Having concerns about the side effects of COVID vaccines, advocacy for the chosen presidential candidate of the Republican Party, and opposition to funding Ukraine would seem, in another time, like normal positions any person in the US could hold. And yet many legacy media outlets treat those positions as anywhere from delusional to treasonous. Such positions are often labeled as sources of “misinformation,” dangerous ideas to which, we’re told, ordinary First Amendment protections may not apply.

In an age when almost all of us rely, to some degree, on web-based platforms for our information, the line between government censorship and platform terms of service can seem vanishingly thin. In fact, in this week’s episode, the journalist Michael Shellenberger suggests the line may not exist at all. In this clip, he draws my attention to a startling poll that finds a huge increase in the number of Democratic or Democratic-leaning voters who want to see the government censor “misinformation” online. But who decides what counts as misinformation? When platforms seek government guidance on that definition, we have good reason to ask whether the apparent freedom they offer is government censorship by another name.

Continue ReadingMajority Democrat Position: The Government Should Decide What is True.

Intelligent People Excel at Fooling Themselves

This is an excellent 15-min video by After Sokol. Psychologist have found that highly intelligent people are great at fooling themselves, especially when they form tribes.

Here is an excerpt from the video:

Kahan and a team of researchers found that test subjects who scored highest in numeracy were better able to objectively evaluate statistical data when told it related to a skin rash treatment, but when the same data was presented as relating to a polarizing subject, gun control, those who scored highest on numeracy actually exhibited the greatest bias. The correlation between intelligence and ideological bias is robust, having been found in many other studies … These studies found stronger biases in clever people on both sides of the aisle.

And since such biases are mutually contradictory, they can't be a result of greater understanding. So what is it about intelligent people that makes them so prone to bias? To understand we must consider what intelligence actually is. In AI research, there's a concept called the orthogonality thesis. This is the idea that an intelligent agent can't just be intelligent, it must be intelligent at something because intelligence is nothing more than the effectiveness with which an agent pursues a goal. Rationality is intelligence in pursuit of objective truth. But intelligence can be used to pursue any number of other goals. And since the means by which the goal is selected is distinct from the means by which the goal is pursued. The intelligence with which an agent pursues its goal is no guarantee that the goal itself is intelligent.

As a case in point, human intelligence evolved less as a tool for pursuing objective truth than as a tool for pursuing personal well being, tribal belonging, social status, and sex. And this often required the adoption of what I call fashionably irrational beliefs and fibs which the brain has come to accept that. Since we're a social species, it is intelligent for us to convince ourselves of irrational beliefs if holding those beliefs increases our status and well being. Dan Kahan calls this behavior, identity protective cognition, or IPC, by engaging in IPC people bind their intelligence to the service of evolutionary impulses, leveraging their logic and learning not to correct delusions, but to justify them. Or, as the novelist Saul Bellow put it a great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep. What this means is that while unintelligent people are more easily misled by other people, intelligent people are more easily misled by themselves.

See also, the work of Dan Sperber, discussed here.

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