Sunday, November 19, 2017



The women academics who insist PMT is all in your mind

Feminism is a low-grade form of insanity.  The criterion for insanity is loss of reality contact.  We see just that below. Any man who has seen much of women doesn't need "studies" to be aware of PMT.  It is just so regular.  I remember once having breakfast with a very crabby wife.  But when I came home that night she was full of the milk of human kindness.  I said to her: "You have had your period, haven't you?"  "Yes" she happily replied

With nine out of ten women claiming to be sufferers, no wonder it's long been accepted that premenstrual syndrome will afflict us at some point in our lives.

Indeed, from adolescence onwards we are told to expect a few days every month when we will feel irrationally weepy, snappy and unable to cope with what life has to throw at us.

But is that really the case?

Increasingly, there's an argument that PMT — or premenstrual syndrome (PMS) as it is now known — is little more than a figment of our imagination. One respected health psychologist, Robyn Stein DeLuca, goes so far as to say that PMS is really just evidence of modern women struggling under the burden of trying to have — and do — it all. Put bluntly, it's an excuse for women to get a break.

'Growing up, when we become women, we are told in books, on the internet and in magazines that PMS is out there. We internalise this idea that our bodies must be faulty,' she says.

'The medical community is also to blame. We see this again and again that normal life stages, such as pregnancy and childbirth, are treated as sicknesses that have to have some kind of intervention.

'That perspective encourages women to think of their bodies as instruments that cause illness. But it's more likely that women feel overwhelmed.

'Women are expected to do a lot of things these days — we work, take care of families, we make sure everyone's health is OK, we make the Christmas dinner and a lot of women use PMS as a release valve or if they just can't give any more.

'You lose your good woman crown if you say: 'I just don't feel like doing this right now,' and relinquish your responsibilities. But if you say it's PMS, it's like a get-out-of-jail-free card. It's women's excuse for when they need a break.'

It's a view that will surely have many women howling in outrage.

But, as DeLuca explains in her new book, The Hormone Myth: How Junk Science, Gender Politics And Lies About PMS Keep Women Down, there is scientific evidence that our hormones don't affect us as much as we might imagine.

'Reproductive events like our monthly menstrual cycle, pregnancy or the menopause don't mentally destabilise us,' she says. 'Most women function at a very high level throughout their lives.

'While hormones do cause some physical and emotional symptoms — women can get cramps, bloating and feel depressed — they certainly don't affect us emotionally to the point that it's a big deal. That's where the myth is. That's where it's not true.'

So where did the PMS 'myth' come from? It seems that doctors in as far back as the mid 1800s were writing articles connecting 'hysteria' and women's emotional state with their periods. The phrase 'premenstrual tension' was first coined in 1931, and the term premenstrual syndrome some 20 years later.

Subsequently, there were many psychological studies claiming to uncover how badly women were affected by hormonal changes.

However, DeLuca claims all the psychological studies done on PMS from the Fifties to Eighties had very poor methodology — for example, they failed to use control groups so they could compare one group with another — and defined PMS far too loosely, citing nearly 150 symptoms linked to hormonal changes.

'They were symptoms anyone could have — headaches, feeling tired or cranky — but everyone feels those things some of the time,' says DeLuca.

She believes the real number of women affected by PMS and other hormonal changes is substantially lower — between 3 and 8 per cent, according to the latest studies, she says, rather than the commonly held figure of 90 per cent.

Clinically, women all the time say: 'I'm feeling depressed — I don't know whether it's my hormones.' But the reality is they are overloaded with work, have ailing parents and kids to look after and a myriad reasons why they might be depressed, and yet they immediately think it's hormonal.

'A minority of women do have hormone fluctuations that cause them to suffer serious trouble so they can't function or work effectively. This is known as premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD). The criteria for PMDD is much more strictly defined — there are only 11 symptoms to choose from, such as insomnia, difficulty in concentrating or a marked change in appetite.

'Women have to have at least five to be defined as suffering from PMDD. And they should be treated. But for the rest of us, it's an alteration in mood that has little to do with hormones.'

Why, then, are women so wedded to the idea that we're slaves to our hormones? DeLuca believes the idea of PMS being a debilitating disorder is drummed into us when we are teenagers — and we quickly latch on to it, using it as an excuse for a wide range of symptoms.

DeLuca doesn't just blame women for the PMS myth, however. She also says the syndrome is perpetuated by men to invalidate women's anger — to stop them from succeeding.

'If a woman is angry or complaining, men can just attribute it to her time of the month,' she says.

'Throughout time, men have used PMS, or the idea that women are hormonal lunatics and have mercurial moods, to keep them out of power. It keeps people from thinking women should be leaders. After all, how can we let women make big decisions or be dependable when their crazy hormones can strike at any time?'

In short, says DeLuca, blaming a woman's hormones is the easy — or even lazy — answer to any ill. In pregnancy, we're told they give us baby brain and we can't function cognitively. In menopause, they affect our memory and give us mood swings. When we give birth, they give us postpartum depression.

'Memory tests done, however, show very small differences between pregnant and non-pregnant women when it comes to memory,' says DeLuca.

'We attribute our behaviour to what we have learned. And as for hormones causing postpartum depression, that's the biggest myth of all. The largest predictor of whether a woman is going to have it is if a woman was depressed before she has the baby. Overwhelming research says it has nothing to do with hormones.'

DeLuca is certainly not alone in her views. Sarah Romans, professor of psychological medicine, is another female academic who wholeheartedly agrees with DeLuca's theory that PMS is little more than a dangerous fiction.

Professor Romans conducted a review in 2012 to examine the prevailing research on PMS and concluded that out of 47 studies, nearly 40 per cent of them found no association of mood with a woman's menstrual cycle.

'We weren't looking at women who claimed to have PMDD, which is a very severe disorder, but instead the general population. We discovered women who kept a diary day-by-day were experiencing mood changes all over the month, not just connected to their cycle,' she says.

'To claim women turn into premenstrual wrecks suggests a woman is nothing more than her biology and the political ramifications of this are enormous.

'Indeed, would you say that about a man? After all, men have a reproductive aspect to their function, but we don't say that because they may be more testosterone-driven at certain times of the month, they may not have good judgment and we should keep them out of decision-making roles in the same way people say that about women.'

Like DeLuca, Professor Romans believes women are raised to use PMS as a cause for life's woes — something she sees more and more with the rise of the 'Sandwich Generation', women who juggle work, raising children and elderly parents.

'Clinically, women all the time say: 'I'm feeling depressed — I don't know whether it's my hormones.' But the reality is they are overloaded with work, have ailing parents and kids to look after and a myriad reasons why they might be depressed, and yet they immediately think it's hormonal.

'And their husbands think it, too. It's extraordinary.' So what's the answer? DeLuca is emphatic — no matter how weepy you might feel as your period approaches, she believes women need to stop perpetuating the myth of PMS and address the real issues that are troubling us.

'Instead of using PMS as a way to get a break, women need to turn round and tell their partners and families to do the food shopping or to pick up their socks or just to do more and help,' she says. 'Women need to be more generous with themselves. If they are angry or upset, they shouldn't just blame it on PMS, but they have reasons to be moody and angry and they should express their anger and own it.

Yet others remain unequivocal about its existence.

Professor John Studd, a consultant gynaecologist who runs the London PMS and Menopause Clinic and treats about eight to ten women a day with PMS, insists: 'PMS is a very real and distressing disorder, and it's so obvious because it happens at the same time every month. Yes, the range of PMS symptoms may be large and extend from depression, anxiety and anger to exhaustion and loss of libido, but the research is not vague or unscientific and has been thoroughly proven.

'It is clearly connected to a woman's menstrual cycle with the symptoms usually starting seven to 14 days before a period starts, and ceasing when it comes.'

The cause, Professor Studd says, is usually sensitivity to the hormone progesterone. 'Some women, we're not sure why, are more intolerant to their own progesterone than others,' he says.

After ovulation, progesterone is passed into the bloodstream from the ovaries, which is where problems can begin. While the Pill is often the first line of treatment as it steadies hormone levels, treatment at Professor Studd's clinic usually involves suppression of ovulation and progesterone via gels containing oestrogen, applied to the skin.

As for the new theory that PMS doesn't exist, Professor Studd is insistent: 'If I have a patient with PMS and she has this treatment, she'll be better in two months, so to say it doesn't exist is just not true.'

SOURCE






Quid est Veritas?
   
“Quid est veritas?” Pontius Pilate asked Jesus of Nazareth. What is truth? It is in short supply in the 21st century. Western civilization is not really in decline, as many fret. It is reverting to its Greco-Roman pre-Christian norms.

It may be right that Pilate said “Quid est veritas?” but in John 18:38, Pilate is recorded as saying "Τί ἐστιν ἀλήθεια", in Greek. Latin was Pilate's native language but educated Romans spoke Greek

In the Roman Empire, the vast majority of the wealth was held by the top two percent. Gnosticism was on the rise with a logically incoherent worldview that echoed Christianity and promoted androgyny. “Science said” became all the rage even then. People gave lip service to the gods, but it was mostly for show. We are going full circle.

Nowadays every cultural-sociological movement has a medical doctor and a scientist with a PhD to form the basis of their claims. There are doctors who promote the idea that vaccines cause autism. There are scientists claiming having children is “scientifically proven” to harm the environment so smaller families are a moral obligation. Some doctors will tell you life does not begin until a child exits a womb. Others will tell you that it is scientifically possible for a boy to become a girl. We are even told that though we might pick whether we are a boy or girl, we are born heterosexual or homosexual.

Language then tracks the political consensus of the scientific community. And it is a political consensus. Secular liberals have worked very hard to co-opt cultural institutions so that, regardless of truth, science reflects opinion instead of the other way around. The two-parent heterosexual nuclear household may be, for thousands of years, the most stable way in which to raise kids, but get a bunch of liberal sociologists masquerading as scientists together in a room and soon they’ll tell you science says the two-parent heterosexual nuclear household is bigotry, white supremacy and part of the patriarchy.

The Associated Press has gotten in on this game. The opposite sex’s pronouns or new ones can now be used to describe people. A single person can talk about himself in the plural sense to reject the conformity of language. One boy can be they and a girl can be he or even ze instead of she. Likewise, Caitlyn Jenner always was and Bruce never was because in the mind-numbing logic of “gender conformity,” Caitlyn was always there just waiting to be revealed.

Truth no longer matters because truth can be whatever one wants. This is a disease of society that started in our culture and floated downstream into our politics. In the ‘90s, conservatives screamed that character mattered as they tried to impeach Bill Clinton for a lie under oath. The lying under oath, for which Clinton lost his law license, is overshadowed by his affair with a White House intern. In the '90s, feminists praised Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky was declared an empowered female. Conservatives who said Lewinsky was a victim were shouted down by prominent feminists who said they would have gladly performed the same sex act on the president in appreciation for what he did for feminists.

Now, decades later, many of the people who promoted the Clintons are throwing them under the bus. Bill is an abuser and Hillary his apologist. It is a sign the Clinton power is at an end. One could hardly imagine this change of heart from the Left if Hillary had been elected. But the Right is not spared the cultural rot. They served as apologists for a man caught on video bragging that famous men could grab women inappropriately among other terrible things he said and did. They excuse their own behavior by pointing to liberals defending Clinton. Only now is the Left throwing Clinton aside to provide legitimacy in their attacks against Roy Moore. Conservatives demand everyone believe Juanita Broderick, Paula Jones, and Kathleen Willey, but they dismiss all of Roy Moore’s accusers.

Truth has, it would seem, given way to tribe. But truth has a way of reasserting itself. Pontius Pilate asked what was truth, and that truth died on a cross only to conquer death. It is that truth that will one day come calling against asking not what is truth, but what have we done?

SOURCE





Being Shoved Into Meaninglessness

David Limbaugh
   
I’m an advocate of higher education and all, but so much for assuming that the development of common sense and sound judgment are part of the package.

A Pew Research Center poll found that 77 percent of Democrats with a bachelor’s degree or more believe a person’s gender can be different from the sex they were “assigned at birth.” You’ll remember that Democrats are the party of science, and Republicans the Neanderthal science-deniers.

First we have to ask ourselves why in the world it would occur to anyone of any gender at any time or any place even to conduct such a survey. It would be like surveying people to find if they believe ears are for hearing or eyes for seeing.

It would be disturbing enough if only 77 percent of Democrats with this level of education thought gender is determined biologically. But 23 percent? That’s a whole new level of weird — unless you define “weird” as being outside the mainstream. What’s weird is how weird the mainstream has become — at least on the political Left. This doesn’t speak well for higher education in this country, does it? Then again, you wouldn’t be surprised if you had seen the core curricula of America’s “great” universities — and many of the required reading assignments in the classes.

I watched an interesting video of a young conservative from a liberal family explaining why he could dialogue with liberals and still love them because we all share common goals. It is leftists, he said, who don’t even share our goals anymore, and it is very difficult to find any common ground with them.

I thought to myself when watching the video, “Yes, we do share some of the same goals: less crime, less poverty, etc., but increasingly the mainstream Democratic Party is embracing or strongly enabling certain extremist ideas. There is just no denying that the party has lurched leftward.”

Reading these poll results, sadly, tends to validate my concerns, which is not something I’m happy about. How can a significant percentage of people of any respected group, much less of the higher-educated subset of that group, be so wrongheaded? People urging bipartisanship should explain how we find common ground with such stunningly different worldviews.

I’m hoping this chasm is partially due to the phrasing of the survey questions or fear of political correctness policing — but still, it’s seriously problematic.

I don’t doubt, by the way, that some very small fraction of a percentage of people sense they are trapped in their bodies and feel more like the opposite biological gender. I recently talked to such a person and am sure he was sincere. He has always felt like he should have been born a female. Note that he fully acknowledges, however, that he wasn’t. He doesn’t dispute the biological reality.

So I have no inclination to judge such people. If they feel opposite their biological gender, they do. It’s above my pay-grade to fully understand this. But I think we’re dealing with something more than this. Cultural activism is at work here.

Just look at the language the Pew survey uses to address these ideas: A human being’s gender is “assigned at birth.” You surely don’t believe this language is accidental, do you?

To have an assignment there must be an assignor. If they mean God, or even nature, I’d have no quarrel, but it’s clear they are talking about human agents (doctors or other health care providers) as assignors. This suggests some arbitrariness in the determination, or at least something that is subject to question.

It is not subject to question. Absent some biological aberration we are born either male or female, and no amount of linguistic manipulation can alter that reality, even though it obviously alters some people’s perception of the reality.

Yes, there is certainly an agenda at work here; with the Left everything is political. There is an effort to normalize that which is not normal, which introduces uncertainty into things certain. We have not evolved, but are being pushed headlong into moral relativism and further into post-modernism and beyond, where there is no such thing as truth and reality is just a function of the individual’s preference.

This is moral chaos, intellectual chaos and biological chaos. It is nihilism. If truth is no longer defined as that which corresponds with reality, we have completely untethered ourselves from our foundations of meaning and significance. Parents with any remaining affinity for traditional values must surely be concerned about what we are bequeathing our children.

I’m not citing these ominous trends to score political points, and I acknowledge they are not solely the fault of just one political party, though they are disproportionately prevalent in that party. This is a societal and cultural problem that has polluted downstream political waters.

Indeed, these developments transcend politics. At the risk of subjecting myself to anti-Christian scoffing, I believe we are in the throes of spiritual warfare, which is one reason I’m not attempting to unduly demonize people falling prey to it. I used not to believe in the devil, but that was then, and this is now. I have no other rational explanation for morality and truth routinely being turned on their very heads — for right being considered wrong, and unreality masquerading as reality. Satan is the first and great deceiver, and many people, most of them unwittingly, are being deceived.

Pray for America. Pray for mankind.

SOURCE





No, Colin Kaepernick Is No Muhammad Ali


   
GQ magazine named former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick its 2017 “Citizen of the Year.” In doing so, GQ overlooked NFL Houston Texans’ J.J. Watt, who raised some $37 million for hurricane relief. Many of Kaepernick’s supporters liken his protest to that of boxer Muhammad Ali, who refused to be inducted into the military. The comparison is not well-taken.

For whatever reason, Kaepernick chose not to give the magazine an interview, passing up an opportunity to clearly explain the purpose of his protest. At first, Kaepernick insisted his protest was about the alleged epidemic of police brutality against blacks. Shortly after he started his protest, Kaepernick said: “There’s a lot of things that need to change. One specifically is police brutality. There’s people being murdered unjustly and not being held accountable. The cops are getting paid leave for killing people. That’s not right.”

Contrast this with Muhammad Ali’s protest. He argued that his religious beliefs made him a conscientious objector who ought not be forced to join the military. In doing so, Ali faced up to five years in prison and was stripped of his ability to fight in the U.S. for more than three years, his prime years as an athlete. While the heavyweight title-holder avoided prison during his appeals process — that ended up in the Supreme Court — he was forced to hand over his passport, which prevented him from fighting overseas, as well.

Banned from boxing and stripped of his world heavyweight title, Ali argued his case on the road, speaking at a number of colleges and universities, where he repeatedly stated that he would rather abide by his religious convictions rather than violate them in order to make money. Martin Luther King Jr. urged his followers to “admire [Ali’s] courage. He is giving up fame. He is giving up millions of dollars to do what his conscience tells him is right.”

By contrast, Kaepernick wants to have it both ways. The NFL allows players to stand or not, depending upon their own choice. So the league actually gives players permission to stand or not to stand for the national anthem. In Ali’s case, his refusal to join the military cost him the ability to earn a living in his chosen profession.

The Supreme Court eventually sided unanimously with Ali, ruling that the appeal board failed to properly specify the reason why Ali’s application for a conscientious-objector exemption had been denied. The ruling required Ali’s conviction to be overturned, and the court said the record shows that Ali’s “beliefs are founded on tenets of the Muslim religion as he understands them.” After his Supreme Court victory, Ali could have sued for lost wages, arguing that he was illegally forbidden from working as a fighter. Ali refused, arguing that he would rather look ahead than exact revenge.

Kaepernick, on the other hand, filed a grievance against the NFL, claiming the owners “colluded” against hiring this mediocre-quarterback-turned-locker-room distraction.

What about the merits of Kaepernick’s argument? Is there an epidemic of police brutality against blacks? The answer is no.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, police shootings against blacks have declined almost 75 percent since 1968. Of the 963 people shot and killed by police in 2016, 233 were black, and 466 were white. Most people could not name a white person killed by the police, because the media are far less interested in a white person killed by a cop than a black person killed by one. Last year, a grand total of 17 unarmed blacks were killed by the police, according to The Washington Post. Contrast this with the approximately 6,000 to 7,000 blacks killed annually, almost all — as many as 90 percent — by other blacks. Where is Kaepernick on the fact that the No. 1 cause of preventable death for young blacks is homicide, while the No. 1 cause of preventable death for young white men is “unintentional injuries,” or accidents?

San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich, who supports Kaepernick, said: “It’s easier for white people because we haven’t lived that experience. It’s difficult for many white people to understand the day-to-day feeling that many black people have to deal with. …

"When somebody like Kaepernick brings attention to this, and others who have, it makes people have to face the issue because it’s too easy to let it go because it’s not their daily experience. If it’s not your daily experience, you don’t understand it.”

As to Popovich’s assertion about the “day-to-day feeling that many black people have to deal with,” what of the 1997 Time/CNN poll that found 89 percent of black teens found little or no racism in their day-to-day lives? And more black teens than white teens agreed that “failure to take advantage of available opportunities” was a bigger problem than racism. And this was 20 years ago, before the election and re-election of a black president.

Kaepernick’s protest was bogus from the start, and it only helped to create greater unnecessary tension between the black community and the police. “Citizen of the Year,” indeed.

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here

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