ragebutt
oh cool, tackling the key issues facing us right now
“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semite has the right to play.”
It’s also often the best thing from a human rights perspective. Low low prices at walmart come from exploited workers, and not just the american ones who are getting fucked. Like conditions that make the average american worker experience feel like king shit. Or just straight up actual ass slavery.
But therein lies the issue. How do I pay higher prices when I am living paycheck to paycheck? I don’t want to support this broken system of exploitation but i certainly have a vested interest in my own survival. How do i solve this when even buying basics, like food, requires participating in industries that are exploitative to their core
A real noodle scratcher
He has a history that is highly suspect and it’s absolutely shocking he didn’t get blown up during the metoo era
When he had a practice he had a 19 year old patient. He allegedly molested this patient. He denies these claims. What is undeniably true is that he made this patient an intern at his practice
Because of his inappropriate hiring practices he was required by the licensing board to hire another psychologist to sit in on all of his sessions. This rendered his practice no longer financially viable
This article pushes back against some of the more sensationalized reporting of the time this blew up but (imo) it’s somewhat of an issue to do so. The issue being that a licensing board generally requires a substantial burden of proof even now to substantiate claims like sexual molestation of clients, especially so in 1988 Texas. What I’m saying here is that to the licensing board the sexual molestation claim was likely a “he said, she said” moment, where dr Phil steadfastly denied any wrongdoing and there was no evidence other than the woman’s testimony. Given that the board was probably reticent to issue discipline on this matter out of fear that it would result in legal response from dr phil, and somewhat understandably so as the justice system’s burden of proof for sexual assault victims is often quite high. Essentially if they had say, suspended or even stripped his license over this he could have had this action easily reversed and even sued for damages
This is almost certainly why the licensing board took the action they did. They 100% believed that girl. The requirement to have your sessions monitored by another professional is extremely severe and fairly unprecedented. It is their way of saying “we absolutely do not trust you at all, we know you are a scumbag, but legally we do not have the authority to revoke your ability to practice”. Ethics boards will do things like this: now you, at your expense, have to pay another professional to make sure you don’t groom any more women. And if you try to do so we will have testimony that you did. But most likely you will recognize that we don’t want you around anymore and give up (which he did, for a bit. He even let his license lapse. He is not licensed, to be clear. He has not been in some time). When you do his show you sign a contract saying you are receiving “advice” from some guy and not psychotherapy from a psychologist. I bet they do not make this clear to guests because they probably aren’t big on informed consent.
He found a loophole. Doctor is not a protected title. “Psychologist”, “professional counselor”, “lawyer”, “surgeon”, etc are legally protected titles. If you practice under these titles without the associated licensure and credentials you can go to jail. But if you’ve earned your doctorate and say “I have years of experience” you can do whatever. If Oprah props you up to a national stage that’s fine too, even if your style of “therapy” is not really therapy at all but really just confrontation and bullying. Also they obviously leave out he had to close his practice in disgrace.
That said, he was accused of changing in front of the girl often. And she was quoted as saying:
“He’d be running his hand up and down the inside of my thigh all the way up to my panties. He’d put his hands between my legs. He’d reach in my blouse and touch my breasts. He pulled my breasts out of my bra and kissed them.”
So yeah, real piece of shit and not just like “oh he rubbed her shoulders and made her uncomfortable”, though even that would be fucked up and gross. He genuinely sexually assaulted this girl
This is like, day 1 ethics for a therapist. Dual relationships. Clients are clients are clients. You don’t hang out with them, you don’t go to their birthday parties, you don’t friend them on social media, you certainly don’t hire them for a fucking job in your practice. This is in part so you can try to remain impartial as a clinician but mostly to protect clients as there is an inherent power imbalance in this relationship that can easily be taken advantage of (as seen here, plus he was like 38 when all this happened to the 19 year old girl so that power dynamic too)
scumbag
A shitty cell phone pic from Manuel Antonio National Park in Quepos, Costa Rica
bonus:
Saw this cool frog, took a picture, showed to this guy, and he was like “oh those are like super poisonous”
It’s basically a protection thing that some mobile devices and laptops do. Essentially if it booted before that it would probably immediately shut off right after it booted if power were disconnected. It charges to a point where power can be disconnected for a few minutes and you’ll be okay, then it boots
Hopefully the switch 2 has fast charging
There’s a Nilered video on youtube where he makes an extremely expensive cookie out of reference ingredients
Be forewarned that it’s extremely frustrating to watch. His general chemistry content is very interesting and well explained. But whenever he has to cook anything he becomes a complete doofus that cannot handle even the most basic of research. Like the man will research dozens of papers for hours and successfully make aerogel but then waste thousands of dollars in reference materials because he googled “cookie recipe” and just wrote down the first thing he found without reading anything about the process or technique
His coffee roasting video is similar and it makes me wonder if the food videos he makes are simply rage bait. He doesn’t post them often (frankly he doesn’t post often in general) so I genuinely wonder if he just really despises cooking and baking
Not shocking to hear, he’s a scumbag at heart. But now if you say that people will be like “uhhh how can you say that he’s donated so much money”
Then when you point out he’s donated literally 0% of his overall current net worth, his past (and current, apparently) behavior has arguably as much humanity if not more than he has offset, etc you’ll get whataboutism. “What have you done??”
I don’t want philanthropy to be contingent on the whims of billionaires. Gates has done a lot but it still has major issues, there is no real transparency, and it’s still authoritatively controlled because he has a great deal of influence over his foundation. The even bigger issue is that he is by far the exception. Other billionaires donate minimally only to maximize tax benefits and only to issues they have been personally impacted by.
The other day I was with people who were watching a football game. The eagles won and I asked why the owner gets to speak first at the trophy ceremony, let alone at all, given it was the teams effort. This led to a whole discussion but one thing that came up was how he donates so much money to autism research because he has a grandson with autism. This was meant to appeal to me because I have a background working in autism research and I work with people with autism a lot.
all I could think is “how fucked up is it that we have to hope that an obscenely rich person personally experiences the issue for them to decide to bequeath funding?” This inherently means that things with a much higher rate of prevalence, like autism (1 in 36, roughly) or dementia (prevalence varies widely by age range (2% to 13%) but ~10 million cases per year), will get tons of money. But what about far less common things? I’ve worked with people who have extremely rare conditions. Angelmans syndrome, prader willi, chromosomal deletions, (rates of 1-2 per 10,000) or extremely rare things like hellers syndrome (rates of 1-2 per 100,000).
This is why we fund things like NIMH, so that money can be fairly dispersed to ensure that all things are researched. Teams of people research what needs to be researched. This isn’t even just about equity; sometimes researching lesser known disorders leads to discoveries that are applicable in a broader context
But instead we let a few oligarchs hoard money. Most of them don’t bother to fund this stuff at all and they few that do only bother to do so when it’s something personally relevant to them. We have no say in the matter.
the filter is on the website, not the model. It will answer about Tiananmen and other censured topics with local models, this has been documented by many
ChatGPT et al on the other hand will continue to give their subversive answers to questions that only get updated when they blow up on twitter. If you don’t like it? Tough shit
I am a therapist who does desensitization for specific phobias as part of my repertoire and one of the things I do somewhat regularly is needle desensitization for kids that struggle to get their vaccinations and blood draws, especially kids with autism. It’s no fun but unfortunately a part of life.
Often when I do it their parents have to leave the room or look away which is outright cowardly and sends a really bad message to their child who is terrified of needles
anti vaccination originally started rising in popularity because a lot of parents of kids with autism wanted an explanation for why their kids were “disabled” (keep in mind this goes back to like the 90s leading up the the discredited wakefield study in 1998). Then it had other people latch on for similar reasons, by the early to mid 2000s those people were blaming ADHD, dyslexia, generic “learning disabilities”, allergies, etc on vaccination. This is all pretty well established.
But I have this theory that it kept growing in popularity because people were simply afraid of getting needles. Covid was the catalyst for it to truly explode because a great deal of adults could skip most compulsory vaccinations. Before Covid if you were really stupid you could skip flu shots and your parents probably forced you to get most of the truly necessary ones ages ago. But then all of a sudden the big bad government is saying you need to get a big scary needle!! And not just one, but two!! And then maybe get them indefinitely!
The core kooks who say it has 5g nanochips or whatever probably truly believe that. But that’s probably a small minority. A great deal more are probably people who are otherwise sensible but are willing to enter delusional beliefs and are extremely susceptible to the kooks rhetoric because it allows them to believe something that enables them to endorse what they truly want to do, which is avoid the extremely brief moment of pain, because they are entitled whiny babies that cannot handle even a second of discomfort
This is just my theory though
To back this up with garbage anecdotal data I have talked to physician friends who describe adult patients having a much lower likelihood of getting bloodwork orders filled, a much lower rate of getting things like flu shots and newer vaccinations like hepatitis, shingles, hpv, chickenpox, etc.