I’m expecting it to trend upwards, but probably not reach 10% because although Australian Dollars are being printed hand over fist, the high commodity prices are protecting us from our own folly to some extent. If you are a primary producer then inflation can work in your favour.
I don’t know exactly what it will look like, but I’m going to guess “not good”.
I wouldn’t mind high commodity prices so much if it meant workers were getting paid something high enough to at least qualify as “better than being homeless”, and preferably substantially better than that, but I keep reading stories about workers being forced to work, workers being raped, killed, and otherwise abused, and so on.
I’ve tried to take a break from looking at that stuff long enough to enjoy Christmas, at least, and I did manage to go two days (the 24th and 25th) without looking at any of that depressing stuff, but yesterday (the 27th), I came across a documentary exposing a facility called “Brother’s Home” (English translation, at least), which, on paper at least, was a homeless shelter, but in actuality was kidnapping people whether they were homeless or not in order to collect money from the South Korean government for (allegedly) sheltering the homeless. The police were in on it: one person interviewed for the documentary describes being arrested on his way home from school, accused of stealing a piece of bread he was bringing home from school, tortured until he confessed (even though he hadn’t done it, torture is capable of producing false confessions), and then sent to the so-called Brother’s Home.
In addition to collecting government money for “sheltering” (imprisoning) the allegedly homeless kidnapping victims, rape and sexual assault were rife in the facility, and there was forced labor.
I also read an article that said the Brother’s Home wasn’t the only one doing this type of scam; a lot of alleged homeless shelters were doing this in South Korea at the time. Apparently, in preparation for some Olympic games, the South Korean government wanted the homeless of the streets, out of sight and out of mind, so they funded homeless shelters to do that, and a bunch of them ran scams like described.
bbc [dot] com/news/world-asia-52797527
When I watch / read stories like this, it reminds me why just throwing money at problems isn’t enough to fix them. If you have enough money, you can donate a million dollars or more to a good cause, or at least a cause that appears good according to the advertising, and that money can be squandered by a bunch of con artists who make the problem worse, not better. More important than throwing money at problems is simply establishing safeguards to ensure the money is reasonably well spent.
To clarify (though it’s probably obvious from the context given above), when I talk about ensuring money is reasonably well spent, I mostly mean avoiding the types of egregious abuses committed by the so-called Brother’s Home.
This sort of thing reminds me of why I feel so apathetic about things like Medicaid, Obamacare, Medicare-for-all, and so on. (Medicaid is a program to help the poor with medical expenses. Obamacare is, depending on how you look at it, either a program to help people with pre-existing conditions get health insurance, or else a subsidy to the health insurance companies that works by forcing people to buy said insurance. Medicare-for-all is something that some people in the United States are advocating for in the hopes that it will expand access to healthcare for people who are relatively poor, and by relatively poor, I mean poor in national terms, not in global terms.)
I get that people support / advocate for things like Medicaid, Obamacare, and Medicare-for-all because they really believe these things will help people get potentially life-saving medical care. I know some people object on the basis that they don’t think the taxpayers should have to pay for these things, but this seems a weak argument to me if only because if the US government actually did cut these programs, the money would likely to diverted to the military-industrial complex, not to tax cuts. These programs are among the few ways that taxpayers can actually get a refund of sorts, even if it’s a limited use refund (that is, a refund you’re only allowed to spend on certain types of medical care). To the extent that things like Medicaid and Obamacare actually do pay for life-saving medical care, it probably reduces the lethality of taxation. The way I see it, taxing people to the point they can’t afford life-saving medical care could be considered a sort of murder, but if you give sick people refunds so they actually can afford the medical care, then that can save them from being murdered.
And yet, for all that, even though I understand and sympathize with the reasoning of proponents, and am unconvinced with the above-mentioned arguments of the opponents, I still feel apathetic. And I guess it’s because I don’t think Medicaid or Obamacare (or plans for Medicare-for-all, which has not been implemented) has adequate safeguards to protect against flagrant abuse, Brother’s Home style.
Many doctors, psychiatrists, etc in the United States do not have a professional ethics that includes much of a focus on consent. Medical assault and battery (medical interventions that happen against the express wishes of the patient) are rarely prosecuted and seem to be something of a norm. They are often justified with the claim that the patient is not competent enough to give or withhold consent, and therefore the doctor, psychiatrists, or some other medical person feels entitled to make the decisions for them.
There’s an article hear that discusses a case of medical assault and batter that was caught on camera. The victim’s mother filmed the thing. The fact that a doctor would medically assault on patient on camera just goes to show how normalized this type of thing is. That it’s just so normal, the doctor wasn’t afraid of being filmed.
Psychiatry is basically a legal license to torture. People classified as “mental patients” routinely have their consent or lack thereof ignored. Even when the paperwork says they consent, it’s often a fraud: psychiatrists often interpret refusal to cooperate with alleged treatment as evidence that the patient isn’t competent to make their own decisions, and, knowing this, many patients will fake consent just so the psychiatrist won’t watch them as closely.
Approximately 10,000 women per year (according to this article at least) are tortured in Canada with electroshock alone. I’m guessing the number is probably higher in the United States.
The United States is a totalitarian regime! And so, apparently, is Canada. The first amendment is a lie, a para ingles ver (for the English to see). We don’t have freedom of thought, let alone freedom of speech.
And the depraved torturers can go collect money from Medicaid and other medical insurance programs. For example, Provo Canyon School, a place where Paris Hilton and others were tortured as children, gets funding from Medicaid and other medical insurance programs. And I’m thinking, even if prosecution is difficult, especially considering the police often collaborate with this depraved lunatics, there is no way they should be getting paid to revel in depravity, committing crimes against humanity.
The lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and so on are additional symptoms of a culture that places low value on medical consent.
So, while I understand the desire of people to get a refund on their taxes when they are sick, I really think they should get that money directly, with safeguards to ensure the money goes to the correct person and not a kidnapper or other abuser, not through an insurance program that also funds torture. If a cancer patient wants to go to the beach and relax instead of getting medical treatment for their cancer, that’s no business of mine. If they want to go to Japan for medical treatment, which has better cancer treatment than the United States, that’s no business of mine. I’m not really interested in policing how cancer patients spend their money, beyond some basic ethical standards focusing on the consent of all parties. (The insurance companies, the same ones that fund torture, do police what sort of cancer treatments patients are allowed to try, unless they pay out of pocket.)
But for heaven’s sake, we need to stop funding medical assault and battery and medical torture.
The author of that article supports the idea of informed consent, but unfortunately, many psychiatrists (or “thought police”, regardless of whether they have psychiatric licenses) do not.
See, for example, numerous discussions and articles on the internet about how to fake taking medicine when someone is trying to force you (often called cheeking, since a common strategy is to hide the med in your cheek and then remove it after the thought police leaves), and, on the other side, how to prevent people from cheeking.
One person writes on Quora,
I have this pill that I have been taking that is a mood stabilizer that I use to control my hyper empathy syndrome. this pill is making me feel so much less empathy that I wanted to sh again. my mom won’t take me off the med even tho I told her it made me feel horrible. so tomorrow I am going to put it in my cheek using my tongue. she has to watch me take my meds because last time I would hide them in my drawer so that after I gathered enough pills I would overdose. I practiced today with a cough drop and I went in-front of the mirror to see what it looked like. it was a bit obvious if you used your hand or tongue to put it in your cheek so I tried to take the cup of water, put it up to my mouth and not drink yet, and than I pushed it into my cheek with my tongue, and than I drank the water. that looked less obvious so I’m going try that tomorrow. ill update you guys.
What the thought police are doing to that poor person for the alleged “crime” of feeling too much empathy is a form of torture, and apparently a sort of torture that makes her want to self harm (sh is an acronym for self harm in this context, I think… it seems that being on this medication makes her want to commit suicide, as shown later in the quote).
And here you can read about efforts to prevent cheeking aka “treatment noncompliance”. Apparently, one method used is to make medications dissolve really fast. There’s clear premeditation hear to force people to take medications against their will, which, considering the side effects many of these medications produce, amounts to torture.
Since you’re all talking about psychiatry, I thought you’d find this helpful:
The Lying Liars Who Lie About Psychiatry
lewrockwell [dot] com/2013/05/jon-rappoport/the-lying-liars-who-lie-about-psychiatry
“But we have a mind-boggling twist. Under the radar, one of the great psychiatric stars, who has been out in front inventing mental disorders, went public. He blew the whistle on himself and his colleagues. And for 2 years, almost no one noticed.
“His name is Dr. Allen Frances, and he made VERY interesting statements to Gary Greenberg, author of a Wired article: “Inside the Battle to Define Mental Illness.” (Dec.27, 2010). …”
“… Dr. Allen Frances is the man who, in 1994, headed up the project to write the latest edition of the psychiatric bible, the DSM-IV. This tome defines and labels and describes every official mental disorder. The DSM-IV eventually listed 297 of them.
“In an April 19, 1994, New York Times piece, “Scientist At Work,” Daniel Goleman called Frances “Perhaps the most powerful psychiatrist in America at the moment…” …”
“… Long after the DSM-IV had been put into print, Dr. Frances talked to Wired’s Greenberg and said the following:
““There is no definition of a mental disorder. It’s bullshit. I mean, you just can’t define it.””
Masa is a nixtamalized corn product used to make things like tamales and tortillas. Nixtamalized means the corn is soaked in lime water (the stone lime, not the fruit lime). Corn is naturally calcium deficient, so if you eat un-nixtamalized corn, it can leech calcium from your body, but if you nixtamalize it, it makes it more nutritious.
To give an idea of the general drift of the article:
Almost half of recent college graduates say there was a foreign language requirement at their school, but just 12% of all graduates who were non-majors and non-native speakers were proficient in a second language.
If we examine students who major in a foreign language, they take many courses to help bring them up to conversational fluency and are often required to live and study in a country that speaks their target language just to receive their degrees because their classes weren’t enough.
I read stuff like this, and I feel a distinct lack of regret about not going to college.
A couple years back, someone told me I seemed smart for someone who hadn’t been to college. I shot back that 93% of the world’s population doesn’t have a college degree, but I’m fairly sure that doesn’t mean that 93% of the world’s population is stupid.
And then it’s weird how much college-educated people talk in jargon, even on philosophical matters, and just sort of take their jargon for granted, rather than recognizing it as specific to their world view. I feel like a lot of people who haven’t been to college are actually better at explaining their thoughts in a more down to earth way.
E.g. I had a conversation with one friend who went to college, as well as some friends of that friend… I think we were discussing some white supremacist shooter, and the topic came up, whether the white supremacist shooter was insane or not. I think that, unless you want to make the argument that there is no such thing as insanity (which is an interesting and worthwhile argument), someone who is so racist that they go on a shooting/killing spree is by definition insane. My friend disagreed, and said that racism was an ideology, was not the same thing as insanity, and also, instead of insane, we should say neurodivergent, because that term isn’t stigmatizing the way “insane” is.
I don’t think I recall ever even hearing the term neurodivergent before. It sounds like some college jargon. But after looking it up, it doesn’t describe what I mean when I deem someone to be “insane” or “crazy”. Apparently, the term neurodivergent is often used to describe people with autism, based on the theory that they are neurologically different than so-called “neurotypical” people.
But I’ve met people said they had been diagnosed with autism who seemed, to me, as sane as any random person I might meet on the street (which is to say, not 100% sane, but at least, not any more insane than is normal in the United States). They might have been a bit odd, but when I really think someone is insane, I do not merely mean that they are odd.
Nor do I wish to pretend that psychological differences are invariably caused by neurological ones, which would seem to be the implication if I walked around calling people “neurodivergent” or “neurotypical” based solely on my observations of their psychological status. I really don’t think anyone should be putting those sort of labels on other people without actually examining a scan of their bran (and having the expertise necessary to judge how normal that brain scan is).
What I mean when I say that a white supremacist shooter is insane by definition, is that there is clearly something wrong inside his head that is making him do horrible violent things that a psychologically healthy person wouldn’t do. If I understood better what exactly that was, perhaps I would be more specific. “Insane” is sort of a generic term.
And when I say that torture (or situations producing psychological stress similar to torture) can make people crazy, what I means is that it is possible for the psychological effects of torture to include the suppression of moral thinking and other adverse psychological symptoms. So far as I know, this has nothing to do with neurology, and in any case, if it does have something to do with neurology, I don’t have the expertise to evaluate it from that perspective anyway.
“Born in the Gulag: Why a North Korean Boy Sent His Own Mother to Her Death: Life inside North Korea’s Camp 14 so twisted 13-year-old Shin In Geun that he betrayed his mother and only brother.”
If you read the story, it discusses how a young child in a Gulag, under psychological stress comparable to torture, betrayed his own mother and brother. Later, after escaping and living in better circumstances, he eventually felt remorse over that. (I recall reading a more detailed version of that story in the past, but anyway.)
I would say that torture made Shin In Geun crazy (or perhaps more precisely, “psychological stressors comparable to torture made him insane in the sense of severely inhibiting his conscience” , since so far as I know, the torture as more narrowly defined (beating, burning, etc) happened after he betrayed his mother, but even before that, he was subjected to the poor living conditions and authoritarian environment of the Gulag), but I wouldn’t make any judgement about how typical his neurology is/was. I don’t like the neurotypical/neurodivergent way of looking at things… it seems too close to genetics. A lot of people thinking that way are probably thinking in terms neurotypicality or lack thereof probably have a genetic view where someone’s genetics cause them to grow a different sort of brain, and that (from their perspective) is why people think differently. Now, I suppose torture could cause some kind of neurological damage (though I haven’t really studied that, and there would be obvious ethical problems with torturing people and performing brain scans before / after the torture to see if anything changed), but suffice it to say, what happened to Shin in Geun could presumably have happened to almost anyone subjected to similar circumstances, regardless of initial neurological condition. The type of insanity I’m talking about there is not one produced by some sort of birth defect (if indeed it’s even possible for birth defects to make people insane), but rather, one produced by living in a psychologically toxic environment.
Going back to the subject of thought police (who often have psychiatric licenses), I think they spend way too much time diagnosing people with nonsensical words and forcing them to take medications, and not enough time contemplating the psychological effects of torture (including torturing people by forcing them to take unwanted medications with nasty side effects).
I’m not sure if anyone followed that rant, but it felt good to type it.
To give an idea of the general drift of the article:
Almost half of recent college graduates say there was a foreign language requirement at their school, but just 12% of all graduates who were non-majors and non-native speakers were proficient in a second language.
If we examine students who major in a foreign language, they take many courses to help bring them up to conversational fluency and are often required to live and study in a country that speaks their target language just to receive their degrees because their classes weren’t enough.
I read stuff like this, and I feel a distinct lack of regret about not going to college.
A couple years back, someone told me I seemed smart for someone who hadn’t been to college. I shot back that 93% of the world’s population doesn’t have a college degree, but I’m fairly sure that doesn’t mean that 93% of the world’s population is stupid.
And then it’s weird how much college-educated people talk in jargon, even on philosophical matters, and just sort of take their jargon for granted, rather than recognizing it as specific to their world view. I feel like a lot of people who haven’t been to college are actually better at explaining their thoughts in a more down to earth way.
E.g. I had a conversation with one friend who went to college, as well as some friends of that friend… I think we were discussing some white supremacist shooter, and the topic came up, whether the white supremacist shooter was insane or not. I think that, unless you want to make the argument that there is no such thing as insanity (which is an interesting and worthwhile argument), someone who is so racist that they go on a shooting/killing spree is by definition insane. My friend disagreed, and said that racism was an ideology, was not the same thing as insanity, and also, instead of insane, we should say neurodivergent, because that term isn’t stigmatizing the way “insane” is.
I don’t think I recall ever even hearing the term neurodivergent before. It sounds like some college jargon. But after looking it up, it doesn’t describe what I mean when I deem someone to be “insane” or “crazy”. Apparently, the term neurodivergent is often used to describe people with autism, based on the theory that they are neurologically different than so-called “neurotypical” people.
But I’ve met people said they had been diagnosed with autism who seemed, to me, as sane as any random person I might meet on the street (which is to say, not 100% sane, but at least, not any more insane than is normal in the United States). They might have been a bit odd, but when I really think someone is insane, I do not merely mean that they are odd.
Nor do I wish to pretend that psychological differences are invariably caused by neurological ones, which would seem to be the implication if I walked around calling people “neurodivergent” or “neurotypical” based solely on my observations of their psychological status. I really don’t think anyone should be putting those sort of labels on other people without actually examining a scan of their bran (and having the expertise necessary to judge how normal that brain scan is).
What I mean when I say that a white supremacist shooter is insane by definition, is that there is clearly something wrong inside his head that is making him do horrible violent things that a psychologically healthy person wouldn’t do. If I understood better what exactly that was, perhaps I would be more specific. “Insane” is sort of a generic term.
And when I say that torture (or situations producing psychological stress similar to torture) can make people crazy, what I means is that it is possible for the psychological effects of torture to include the suppression of moral thinking and other adverse psychological symptoms. So far as I know, this has nothing to do with neurology, and in any case, if it does have something to do with neurology, I don’t have the expertise to evaluate it from that perspective anyway.
See for example
theatlantic [dot] com/international/archive/2012/03/born-in-the-gulag-why-a-north-korean-boy-sent-his-own-mother-to-her-death/255110/
“Born in the Gulag: Why a North Korean Boy Sent His Own Mother to Her Death: Life inside North Korea’s Camp 14 so twisted 13-year-old Shin In Geun that he betrayed his mother and only brother.”
If you read the story, it discusses how a young child in a Gulag, under psychological stress comparable to torture, betrayed his own mother and brother. Later, after escaping and living in better circumstances, he eventually felt remorse over that. (I recall reading a more detailed version of that story in the past, but anyway.)
I would say that torture made Shin In Geun crazy (or perhaps more precisely, “psychological stressors comparable to torture made him insane in the sense of severely inhibiting his conscience” , since so far as I know, the torture as more narrowly defined (beating, burning, etc) happened after he betrayed his mother, but even before that, he was subjected to the poor living conditions and authoritarian environment of the Gulag), but I wouldn’t make any judgement about how typical his neurology is/was. I don’t like the neurotypical/neurodivergent way of looking at things… it seems too close to genetics. A lot of people thinking that way are probably thinking in terms neurotypicality or lack thereof probably have a genetic view where someone’s genetics cause them to grow a different sort of brain, and that (from their perspective) is why people think differently. Now, I suppose torture could cause some kind of neurological damage (though I haven’t really studied that, and there would be obvious ethical problems with torturing people and performing brain scans before / after the torture to see if anything changed), but suffice it to say, what happened to Shin in Geun could presumably have happened to almost anyone subjected to similar circumstances, regardless of initial neurological condition. The type of insanity I’m talking about there is not one produced by some sort of birth defect (if indeed it’s even possible for birth defects to make people insane), but rather, one produced by living in a psychologically toxic environment.
Going back to the subject of thought police (who often have psychiatric licenses), I think they spend way too much time diagnosing people with nonsensical words and forcing them to take medications, and not enough time contemplating the psychological effects of torture (including torturing people by forcing them to take unwanted medications with nasty side effects).
I’m not sure if anyone followed that rant, but it felt good to type it.
Also:
Thought police (including psychiatrists who forcibly imprison, drug, and/or electroshock people, and similar individuals) are crazy!
Considering people go to college as part of getting psychiatric licenses to legally torture other people, I guess colleges are teaching people to be crazy.
Merry Christmas!
And a Happy New Year … hopefully better than the previous two at any rate.
As per the traditional games of the season, anyone want to predict what the next 12 months will look like on this chart?
https://tradingeconomics.com/australia/inflation-cpi
I’m expecting it to trend upwards, but probably not reach 10% because although Australian Dollars are being printed hand over fist, the high commodity prices are protecting us from our own folly to some extent. If you are a primary producer then inflation can work in your favour.
I don’t know exactly what it will look like, but I’m going to guess “not good”.
I wouldn’t mind high commodity prices so much if it meant workers were getting paid something high enough to at least qualify as “better than being homeless”, and preferably substantially better than that, but I keep reading stories about workers being forced to work, workers being raped, killed, and otherwise abused, and so on.
I’ve tried to take a break from looking at that stuff long enough to enjoy Christmas, at least, and I did manage to go two days (the 24th and 25th) without looking at any of that depressing stuff, but yesterday (the 27th), I came across a documentary exposing a facility called “Brother’s Home” (English translation, at least), which, on paper at least, was a homeless shelter, but in actuality was kidnapping people whether they were homeless or not in order to collect money from the South Korean government for (allegedly) sheltering the homeless. The police were in on it: one person interviewed for the documentary describes being arrested on his way home from school, accused of stealing a piece of bread he was bringing home from school, tortured until he confessed (even though he hadn’t done it, torture is capable of producing false confessions), and then sent to the so-called Brother’s Home.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_p4xNEZPJw
In addition to collecting government money for “sheltering” (imprisoning) the allegedly homeless kidnapping victims, rape and sexual assault were rife in the facility, and there was forced labor.
I also read an article that said the Brother’s Home wasn’t the only one doing this type of scam; a lot of alleged homeless shelters were doing this in South Korea at the time. Apparently, in preparation for some Olympic games, the South Korean government wanted the homeless of the streets, out of sight and out of mind, so they funded homeless shelters to do that, and a bunch of them ran scams like described.
bbc [dot] com/news/world-asia-52797527
When I watch / read stories like this, it reminds me why just throwing money at problems isn’t enough to fix them. If you have enough money, you can donate a million dollars or more to a good cause, or at least a cause that appears good according to the advertising, and that money can be squandered by a bunch of con artists who make the problem worse, not better. More important than throwing money at problems is simply establishing safeguards to ensure the money is reasonably well spent.
To clarify (though it’s probably obvious from the context given above), when I talk about ensuring money is reasonably well spent, I mostly mean avoiding the types of egregious abuses committed by the so-called Brother’s Home.
This sort of thing reminds me of why I feel so apathetic about things like Medicaid, Obamacare, Medicare-for-all, and so on. (Medicaid is a program to help the poor with medical expenses. Obamacare is, depending on how you look at it, either a program to help people with pre-existing conditions get health insurance, or else a subsidy to the health insurance companies that works by forcing people to buy said insurance. Medicare-for-all is something that some people in the United States are advocating for in the hopes that it will expand access to healthcare for people who are relatively poor, and by relatively poor, I mean poor in national terms, not in global terms.)
I get that people support / advocate for things like Medicaid, Obamacare, and Medicare-for-all because they really believe these things will help people get potentially life-saving medical care. I know some people object on the basis that they don’t think the taxpayers should have to pay for these things, but this seems a weak argument to me if only because if the US government actually did cut these programs, the money would likely to diverted to the military-industrial complex, not to tax cuts. These programs are among the few ways that taxpayers can actually get a refund of sorts, even if it’s a limited use refund (that is, a refund you’re only allowed to spend on certain types of medical care). To the extent that things like Medicaid and Obamacare actually do pay for life-saving medical care, it probably reduces the lethality of taxation. The way I see it, taxing people to the point they can’t afford life-saving medical care could be considered a sort of murder, but if you give sick people refunds so they actually can afford the medical care, then that can save them from being murdered.
And yet, for all that, even though I understand and sympathize with the reasoning of proponents, and am unconvinced with the above-mentioned arguments of the opponents, I still feel apathetic. And I guess it’s because I don’t think Medicaid or Obamacare (or plans for Medicare-for-all, which has not been implemented) has adequate safeguards to protect against flagrant abuse, Brother’s Home style.
Many doctors, psychiatrists, etc in the United States do not have a professional ethics that includes much of a focus on consent. Medical assault and battery (medical interventions that happen against the express wishes of the patient) are rarely prosecuted and seem to be something of a norm. They are often justified with the claim that the patient is not competent enough to give or withhold consent, and therefore the doctor, psychiatrists, or some other medical person feels entitled to make the decisions for them.
There’s an article hear that discusses a case of medical assault and batter that was caught on camera. The victim’s mother filmed the thing. The fact that a doctor would medically assault on patient on camera just goes to show how normalized this type of thing is. That it’s just so normal, the doctor wasn’t afraid of being filmed.
qz [dot] com/1177627/assault-and-battery-in-the-delivery-room-the-disturbing-trend-of-obstetric-violence/
Psychiatry is basically a legal license to torture. People classified as “mental patients” routinely have their consent or lack thereof ignored. Even when the paperwork says they consent, it’s often a fraud: psychiatrists often interpret refusal to cooperate with alleged treatment as evidence that the patient isn’t competent to make their own decisions, and, knowing this, many patients will fake consent just so the psychiatrist won’t watch them as closely.
Approximately 10,000 women per year (according to this article at least) are tortured in Canada with electroshock alone. I’m guessing the number is probably higher in the United States.
madinamerica [dot] com/2019/05/stop-shocking-torturing-women/
The United States is a totalitarian regime! And so, apparently, is Canada. The first amendment is a lie, a para ingles ver (for the English to see). We don’t have freedom of thought, let alone freedom of speech.
And the depraved torturers can go collect money from Medicaid and other medical insurance programs. For example, Provo Canyon School, a place where Paris Hilton and others were tortured as children, gets funding from Medicaid and other medical insurance programs. And I’m thinking, even if prosecution is difficult, especially considering the police often collaborate with this depraved lunatics, there is no way they should be getting paid to revel in depravity, committing crimes against humanity.
The lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and so on are additional symptoms of a culture that places low value on medical consent.
So, while I understand the desire of people to get a refund on their taxes when they are sick, I really think they should get that money directly, with safeguards to ensure the money goes to the correct person and not a kidnapper or other abuser, not through an insurance program that also funds torture. If a cancer patient wants to go to the beach and relax instead of getting medical treatment for their cancer, that’s no business of mine. If they want to go to Japan for medical treatment, which has better cancer treatment than the United States, that’s no business of mine. I’m not really interested in policing how cancer patients spend their money, beyond some basic ethical standards focusing on the consent of all parties. (The insurance companies, the same ones that fund torture, do police what sort of cancer treatments patients are allowed to try, unless they pay out of pocket.)
But for heaven’s sake, we need to stop funding medical assault and battery and medical torture.
I put “Medicaid funding torture” into Google and found this “Hearing Before the Committee on Education and Labor” of the US House of Representatives.
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=oqDDfQ3tLCEC&pg=PA54&lpg=PA54&dq=medicaid+funding+torture
Apparently, Medicaid is the primary source of funding for a lot of child torture programs in the United States.
Of relevance, certain psychatric medications are known to decrease lifespan.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/science-isnt-golden/201109/full-disclosure-needed-about-psychiatric-drugs-shorten-life
The author of that article supports the idea of informed consent, but unfortunately, many psychiatrists (or “thought police”, regardless of whether they have psychiatric licenses) do not.
See, for example, numerous discussions and articles on the internet about how to fake taking medicine when someone is trying to force you (often called cheeking, since a common strategy is to hide the med in your cheek and then remove it after the thought police leaves), and, on the other side, how to prevent people from cheeking.
One person writes on Quora,
quora [dot] com/How-can-I-fake-taking-a-pill-I-need-to-show-people-that-Im-taking-it-but-then-fake-take-it-What-should-I-do
What the thought police are doing to that poor person for the alleged “crime” of feeling too much empathy is a form of torture, and apparently a sort of torture that makes her want to self harm (sh is an acronym for self harm in this context, I think… it seems that being on this medication makes her want to commit suicide, as shown later in the quote).
And here you can read about efforts to prevent cheeking aka “treatment noncompliance”. Apparently, one method used is to make medications dissolve really fast. There’s clear premeditation hear to force people to take medications against their will, which, considering the side effects many of these medications produce, amounts to torture.
journals [dot] sagepub [dot] com/doi/pdf/10.1177/070674370304800521
Since you’re all talking about psychiatry, I thought you’d find this helpful:
The Lying Liars Who Lie About Psychiatry
lewrockwell [dot] com/2013/05/jon-rappoport/the-lying-liars-who-lie-about-psychiatry
“But we have a mind-boggling twist. Under the radar, one of the great psychiatric stars, who has been out in front inventing mental disorders, went public. He blew the whistle on himself and his colleagues. And for 2 years, almost no one noticed.
“His name is Dr. Allen Frances, and he made VERY interesting statements to Gary Greenberg, author of a Wired article: “Inside the Battle to Define Mental Illness.” (Dec.27, 2010). …”
“… Dr. Allen Frances is the man who, in 1994, headed up the project to write the latest edition of the psychiatric bible, the DSM-IV. This tome defines and labels and describes every official mental disorder. The DSM-IV eventually listed 297 of them.
“In an April 19, 1994, New York Times piece, “Scientist At Work,” Daniel Goleman called Frances “Perhaps the most powerful psychiatrist in America at the moment…” …”
“… Long after the DSM-IV had been put into print, Dr. Frances talked to Wired’s Greenberg and said the following:
““There is no definition of a mental disorder. It’s bullshit. I mean, you just can’t define it.””
In happier news, I recently noticed that the most affordable brand of organic masa I could find is from an employee-owned company, King Arthur Baking.
https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/blog/2018/06/05/why-employee-ownership-matters
Masa is a nixtamalized corn product used to make things like tamales and tortillas. Nixtamalized means the corn is soaked in lime water (the stone lime, not the fruit lime). Corn is naturally calcium deficient, so if you eat un-nixtamalized corn, it can leech calcium from your body, but if you nixtamalize it, it makes it more nutritious.
Mostly unrelated note about college, though after that I go into the topic of mental health again:
“College Is Worthless: And we know it because of foreign language requirements.”
https://medium.com/no-echo/college-is-worthless-4d802f488e1c
To give an idea of the general drift of the article:
I read stuff like this, and I feel a distinct lack of regret about not going to college.
A couple years back, someone told me I seemed smart for someone who hadn’t been to college. I shot back that 93% of the world’s population doesn’t have a college degree, but I’m fairly sure that doesn’t mean that 93% of the world’s population is stupid.
educateinspirechange [dot] org/how-many-people-of-the-world-have-a-college-degree/
And then it’s weird how much college-educated people talk in jargon, even on philosophical matters, and just sort of take their jargon for granted, rather than recognizing it as specific to their world view. I feel like a lot of people who haven’t been to college are actually better at explaining their thoughts in a more down to earth way.
E.g. I had a conversation with one friend who went to college, as well as some friends of that friend… I think we were discussing some white supremacist shooter, and the topic came up, whether the white supremacist shooter was insane or not. I think that, unless you want to make the argument that there is no such thing as insanity (which is an interesting and worthwhile argument), someone who is so racist that they go on a shooting/killing spree is by definition insane. My friend disagreed, and said that racism was an ideology, was not the same thing as insanity, and also, instead of insane, we should say neurodivergent, because that term isn’t stigmatizing the way “insane” is.
I don’t think I recall ever even hearing the term neurodivergent before. It sounds like some college jargon. But after looking it up, it doesn’t describe what I mean when I deem someone to be “insane” or “crazy”. Apparently, the term neurodivergent is often used to describe people with autism, based on the theory that they are neurologically different than so-called “neurotypical” people.
But I’ve met people said they had been diagnosed with autism who seemed, to me, as sane as any random person I might meet on the street (which is to say, not 100% sane, but at least, not any more insane than is normal in the United States). They might have been a bit odd, but when I really think someone is insane, I do not merely mean that they are odd.
Nor do I wish to pretend that psychological differences are invariably caused by neurological ones, which would seem to be the implication if I walked around calling people “neurodivergent” or “neurotypical” based solely on my observations of their psychological status. I really don’t think anyone should be putting those sort of labels on other people without actually examining a scan of their bran (and having the expertise necessary to judge how normal that brain scan is).
What I mean when I say that a white supremacist shooter is insane by definition, is that there is clearly something wrong inside his head that is making him do horrible violent things that a psychologically healthy person wouldn’t do. If I understood better what exactly that was, perhaps I would be more specific. “Insane” is sort of a generic term.
And when I say that torture (or situations producing psychological stress similar to torture) can make people crazy, what I means is that it is possible for the psychological effects of torture to include the suppression of moral thinking and other adverse psychological symptoms. So far as I know, this has nothing to do with neurology, and in any case, if it does have something to do with neurology, I don’t have the expertise to evaluate it from that perspective anyway.
See for example
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/03/born-in-the-gulag-why-a-north-korean-boy-sent-his-own-mother-to-her-death/255110/
“Born in the Gulag: Why a North Korean Boy Sent His Own Mother to Her Death: Life inside North Korea’s Camp 14 so twisted 13-year-old Shin In Geun that he betrayed his mother and only brother.”
If you read the story, it discusses how a young child in a Gulag, under psychological stress comparable to torture, betrayed his own mother and brother. Later, after escaping and living in better circumstances, he eventually felt remorse over that. (I recall reading a more detailed version of that story in the past, but anyway.)
I would say that torture made Shin In Geun crazy (or perhaps more precisely, “psychological stressors comparable to torture made him insane in the sense of severely inhibiting his conscience” , since so far as I know, the torture as more narrowly defined (beating, burning, etc) happened after he betrayed his mother, but even before that, he was subjected to the poor living conditions and authoritarian environment of the Gulag), but I wouldn’t make any judgement about how typical his neurology is/was. I don’t like the neurotypical/neurodivergent way of looking at things… it seems too close to genetics. A lot of people thinking that way are probably thinking in terms neurotypicality or lack thereof probably have a genetic view where someone’s genetics cause them to grow a different sort of brain, and that (from their perspective) is why people think differently. Now, I suppose torture could cause some kind of neurological damage (though I haven’t really studied that, and there would be obvious ethical problems with torturing people and performing brain scans before / after the torture to see if anything changed), but suffice it to say, what happened to Shin in Geun could presumably have happened to almost anyone subjected to similar circumstances, regardless of initial neurological condition. The type of insanity I’m talking about there is not one produced by some sort of birth defect (if indeed it’s even possible for birth defects to make people insane), but rather, one produced by living in a psychologically toxic environment.
Going back to the subject of thought police (who often have psychiatric licenses), I think they spend way too much time diagnosing people with nonsensical words and forcing them to take medications, and not enough time contemplating the psychological effects of torture (including torturing people by forcing them to take unwanted medications with nasty side effects).
I’m not sure if anyone followed that rant, but it felt good to type it.
Also:
Thought police (including psychiatrists who forcibly imprison, drug, and/or electroshock people, and similar individuals) are crazy!
This note about college is mostly unrelated, though after that I go into the topic of thought police and mental health again:
“College Is Worthless: And we know it because of foreign language requirements.”
https://medium.com/no-echo/college-is-worthless-4d802f488e1c
To give an idea of the general drift of the article:
I read stuff like this, and I feel a distinct lack of regret about not going to college.
A couple years back, someone told me I seemed smart for someone who hadn’t been to college. I shot back that 93% of the world’s population doesn’t have a college degree, but I’m fairly sure that doesn’t mean that 93% of the world’s population is stupid.
educateinspirechange [dot] org/how-many-people-of-the-world-have-a-college-degree/
And then it’s weird how much college-educated people talk in jargon, even on philosophical matters, and just sort of take their jargon for granted, rather than recognizing it as specific to their world view. I feel like a lot of people who haven’t been to college are actually better at explaining their thoughts in a more down to earth way.
E.g. I had a conversation with one friend who went to college, as well as some friends of that friend… I think we were discussing some white supremacist shooter, and the topic came up, whether the white supremacist shooter was insane or not. I think that, unless you want to make the argument that there is no such thing as insanity (which is an interesting and worthwhile argument), someone who is so racist that they go on a shooting/killing spree is by definition insane. My friend disagreed, and said that racism was an ideology, was not the same thing as insanity, and also, instead of insane, we should say neurodivergent, because that term isn’t stigmatizing the way “insane” is.
I don’t think I recall ever even hearing the term neurodivergent before. It sounds like some college jargon. But after looking it up, it doesn’t describe what I mean when I deem someone to be “insane” or “crazy”. Apparently, the term neurodivergent is often used to describe people with autism, based on the theory that they are neurologically different than so-called “neurotypical” people.
But I’ve met people said they had been diagnosed with autism who seemed, to me, as sane as any random person I might meet on the street (which is to say, not 100% sane, but at least, not any more insane than is normal in the United States). They might have been a bit odd, but when I really think someone is insane, I do not merely mean that they are odd.
Nor do I wish to pretend that psychological differences are invariably caused by neurological ones, which would seem to be the implication if I walked around calling people “neurodivergent” or “neurotypical” based solely on my observations of their psychological status. I really don’t think anyone should be putting those sort of labels on other people without actually examining a scan of their bran (and having the expertise necessary to judge how normal that brain scan is).
What I mean when I say that a white supremacist shooter is insane by definition, is that there is clearly something wrong inside his head that is making him do horrible violent things that a psychologically healthy person wouldn’t do. If I understood better what exactly that was, perhaps I would be more specific. “Insane” is sort of a generic term.
And when I say that torture (or situations producing psychological stress similar to torture) can make people crazy, what I means is that it is possible for the psychological effects of torture to include the suppression of moral thinking and other adverse psychological symptoms. So far as I know, this has nothing to do with neurology, and in any case, if it does have something to do with neurology, I don’t have the expertise to evaluate it from that perspective anyway.
See for example
theatlantic [dot] com/international/archive/2012/03/born-in-the-gulag-why-a-north-korean-boy-sent-his-own-mother-to-her-death/255110/
“Born in the Gulag: Why a North Korean Boy Sent His Own Mother to Her Death: Life inside North Korea’s Camp 14 so twisted 13-year-old Shin In Geun that he betrayed his mother and only brother.”
If you read the story, it discusses how a young child in a Gulag, under psychological stress comparable to torture, betrayed his own mother and brother. Later, after escaping and living in better circumstances, he eventually felt remorse over that. (I recall reading a more detailed version of that story in the past, but anyway.)
I would say that torture made Shin In Geun crazy (or perhaps more precisely, “psychological stressors comparable to torture made him insane in the sense of severely inhibiting his conscience” , since so far as I know, the torture as more narrowly defined (beating, burning, etc) happened after he betrayed his mother, but even before that, he was subjected to the poor living conditions and authoritarian environment of the Gulag), but I wouldn’t make any judgement about how typical his neurology is/was. I don’t like the neurotypical/neurodivergent way of looking at things… it seems too close to genetics. A lot of people thinking that way are probably thinking in terms neurotypicality or lack thereof probably have a genetic view where someone’s genetics cause them to grow a different sort of brain, and that (from their perspective) is why people think differently. Now, I suppose torture could cause some kind of neurological damage (though I haven’t really studied that, and there would be obvious ethical problems with torturing people and performing brain scans before / after the torture to see if anything changed), but suffice it to say, what happened to Shin in Geun could presumably have happened to almost anyone subjected to similar circumstances, regardless of initial neurological condition. The type of insanity I’m talking about there is not one produced by some sort of birth defect (if indeed it’s even possible for birth defects to make people insane), but rather, one produced by living in a psychologically toxic environment.
Going back to the subject of thought police (who often have psychiatric licenses), I think they spend way too much time diagnosing people with nonsensical words and forcing them to take medications, and not enough time contemplating the psychological effects of torture (including torturing people by forcing them to take unwanted medications with nasty side effects).
I’m not sure if anyone followed that rant, but it felt good to type it.
Also:
Thought police (including psychiatrists who forcibly imprison, drug, and/or electroshock people, and similar individuals) are crazy!
Considering people go to college as part of getting psychiatric licenses to legally torture other people, I guess colleges are teaching people to be crazy.