Thursday, March 25, 2021



Obsessed Korean-origin psychiatrist loses her job over Trump



She herslf would appear to have OCD

A former Yale professor is suing the university after she was allegedly fired for tweeting about a 'shared psychosis' that 'just about all' of former president Donald Trump supporters suffered from.

Dr Bandy Lee, a former faculty member in the Department of Psychiatry in School of Medicine, filed a complaint against the Yale Monday claiming that she was unlawfully terminated 'due to her exercise of free speech about the dangers of Donald Trump's presidency.'

Dr Lee has been a vocal critic of Trump over the years, notably sending a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2019 claiming that President Trump is showing 'signs of delusion' amid his first impeachment inquiry.

The former professor said in her complaint that Yale fired her for a January 2020 tweet where she described how 'just about all' of Trump's supporters suffered from 'shared psychosis.'

She added that lawyer Alan Dershowitz, a member of Trump's legal team, had 'wholly taken on Trump's symptoms by contagion.'

Dr Lee had been responding to a tweet from University of Minnesota Law Professor and Yale Law School alumnus Richard Painter in relation to Dershowitz describing his sex life as 'perfect,' Hill Reporter reports.

Following her tweet, Dershowitz sent a letter to Yale administrators on Jan. 11, complaining that the professor's post constituted 'a serious violation of the ethics of the American Psychiatric Association' and calling for her to be disciplined. The Yale Daily News said that Dershowitz added in his letter that Lee 'publicly diagnosed [Dershowitz] as psychotic…without ever examining or even meeting' him.

In a statement to the News, Dr Lee expressed that she was not thrilled to have to seek legal action against her alma mater.

'I have done this with a heavy heart, only because Yale refused all my requests for a discussion, much as the American Psychiatric Association has done,' Lee said. 'I love Yale, my alma mater, as I love my country, but we are falling into a dangerous culture of self-censorship and compliance with authority at all cost.'

Court documents state that following Dershowitz's letter, chair of the Psychiatry Department John Krystal told Lee via email that the department 'would be compelled to 'terminate [her] teaching role' if she continued to make similar public statements.

She continued to tweet about the mental fitness of Trump even after Krystal's warning. Lee then met with Krystal and additional unnamed faculty members and was told that she 'breached psychiatric ethics.'

Dr Lee continued tweeting critically of Trump and his mental fitness, and was subjected to follow up meetings with Krystal and other faculty members, the court documents state.

Dr. Lee would learn she was terminated on May 17, 2020. Her numerous appeal attempts in the following months resulted in failure.

A letter Krystal sent to Lee stated that she repeatedly violated the American Psychiatric Association's Goldwater Rule - which states that it is unethical for psychiatrists to comment on a public figure's mental faculties in an official capacity unless granted permission or after a medical examination.

The former Yale faculty member feels that the Goldwater Rule is a 'gag order,' according to the court documents. Lee believes that the rule goes against her role as a psychiatrist 'in light of her belief that Donald Trump posed a dangerous threat to his country and the world,' the complaint reads.

Dr Lee has not been a member of the American Psychiatric Association since 2007.

In her complaint, Lee also claims that she did not diagnose Dershowitz, 'but [was] rather commenting on a widespread phenomenon of "shared psychosis."'

She is looking to be reinstated and is seeking compensation for damages, which include 'economic losses' and 'emotional distress.'

*************************************

Support for Illegal Immigrants Receiving a Pathway to Citizenship Craters Among Democrats

While Politico assures us that illegal immigrants receiving a pathway to citizenship is popular with the electorate, their newest poll could indicate that American’s patience with the never-ending flow over the southern border is ending. From today’s Politico Playbook:

Forty-three percent of voters overall believe that undocumented immigrants who are currently living in the U.S. should have a pathway to citizenship — down 14 points since January. Among Democrats, support for a pathway dropped from 72% to 57% over that period; just one in four Republicans backed the idea, down 10 percentage points.

Looking at the crosstabs, it appears the poll oversampled Democrats. Among respondents, 42% identified as Democrats, 27% as independents, and 31% said they were Republicans. By contrast, Gallup’s most recent poll on political affiliation has independents as the largest group at 41%, Democrats at 32%, and Republicans at 26%. Likewise, the self-reported ideological skew is significantly off from the general population. According to Gallup, conservatives are the largest group at 36%, 35% identify as moderates, and only 25% call themselves liberal. One-third in the Politico/Morning Consult poll identify as liberal.

This assessment is only worth mentioning because the poll may underestimate Americans’ current views on a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants. One consistent theme is that men, regardless of other factors, support a pathway to citizenship at lower rates than women. Millennials and Generation X also support it at rates lower than Baby Boomers. The only generation that approves at a rate higher than 50% is Generation Z, whose oldest members are 24 and only started to vote in 2015. This finding makes sense because those who identify their occupation as “student” have a similar approval rate for a pathway to citizenship, higher than any other occupation.

It often seems as if Democrats attempt to use their stance on immigration as a pander to Hispanic voters to cover for their “demographics is destiny” beliefs. Unfortunately for them, the poll confirms, as is often pointed out, that approving of illegal immigrants is not a majority view in that population. With the top line at 43%, Hispanic voters only support a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants at 44%. Hispanic voters also prefer deportation for illegal immigrants at a rate of 24%, which is higher than that sentiment among black voters, where only 10% registered that preference.

Voters most concerned about the economy and security have the lowest appetite for a pathway to citizenship along with those without a college degree. Income does not seem to make as big a difference, with only 42-44% expressing a preference for a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants whether they report income of less than $50,000 or over $100,000. The notable political affiliations where deportation is preferred to legal residency are Republicans and ideological conservatives as well as ideological moderates and men whose party ID is independent. These groups may be driving the top-line results, where 27% prefer deportation of illegal immigrants to legal residency.

While Politico asserts that these results are a sign that Republican messaging about the crisis of illegal immigrants at the border is working, the evidence for that view is pretty thin. Only 50% of registered voters believe there is a crisis at the border, and the ideological split is stark. Among Democrats and those who lean Democrat, only 31% see the current border situation as a crisis. Republicans and those who lean to the right report this view 75% of the time. The message does not seem to be reaching across the aisle, despite the corporate media’s recent criticisms.

This poll is not the only one to show that Americans’ patience with a porous border is reaching its limit. Rasmussen polling reports that their Immigration Index has fallen 20 points on a scale of 100 since October 2020. Respondents answered the poll from February 28th to March 4th, and the result is the third consecutive survey establishing a new record low. A result above 100 indicates Americans want a more expansive immigration system. Results below indicate support for a more restrictive immigration system.

Rasmussen also found that 67% of likely voters view the situation at the border as a crisis. Likely voters in Rasmussen’s polls go through a set of screening questions to determine their propensity to vote in midterm elections. When asked about accountability for the border crisis, likely voters said:

If there is a border crisis, whose fault is it? Fifty-three percent (53%) of voters agree with the statement: “President Biden himself … has caused the [border] crisis with both his rhetoric and his policies.” That’s a quote from column last week by former Trump administration official Ken Cuccinelli. Thirty-eight percent (38%) of voters disagree and 10% are not sure.

Any way you cut these results, it is a problem for the Biden administration. It will be difficult for them to satisfy the radical left, which is driving the Democrats’ legislative priorities given the view of moderate and Republican voters on the border and illegal immigrant questions. Democrat politicians on the border are also nervous. Representative Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) released photos of the migrant facilities to Axios to highlight the crisis, and two more Democrats from border districts have announced their retirements ahead of 2022. President Trump flipped several border counties in November of 2020, and Republican candidates down-ticket may fare just as well in the area if this crisis persists.

************************************************

Hitting Woke Herd Immunity?

We have become an absurd society obsessed with race but without any mechanism to develop a logical category of victimization and reparation.

Two recent polls suggest wokism is beginning to recede on a variety of fronts, from less trust in Black Lives Matter and more confidence in the police, to suspicion that the Capitol “insurrection” account is being used to unfairly suppress political expression while Antifa, increasingly, is seen as a terrorist organization whose violence has been ignored improperly by authorities.

There are tens of millions of Americans who either have been stung, or turned off, by McCarthyite wokeness (and thus have anti-wokeness antibodies). More have been vaccinated from its latest virulent strains by their own values of judging people as individuals, not as racial or gender collectives. So lots of Americans have developed peremptory defenses against it. The result is that daily there are ever-fewer who are susceptible to the woke pandemic. And it will thus begin to fade out—even as the virus desperately seeks to mutate and go after more institutions.

Peak wokeness is nearing also because if it continued in its present incarnation, then the United States as we know would cease to exist—in the sense that 1692-93 Salem or 1793-94 Paris could not have continued apace without destroying society. Woke leftism exists to destroy and tear down, not to unite and build. It is not designed to play down and heal racial differences, but to accentuate and capitalize on them.

Scattershot Immunity

The methodology of cancel culture is utterly incoherent and unsustainable. The shark was jumped by the case of the Dr. Seuss books—banned by some local school districts, even as Dr. Seuss Enterprises, in terror, pulled some of the late Theodor Seuss Geisel’s publications of its own accord. If the author of The Cat in the Hat is now an enemy of the people, then anyone and all can be so designated.

That is, after 70 years and millions of books in the houses of millions of Americans, our generation’s new Soviet censors have now decided that Seuss’s books of the late 1940s and 1950s do not conform to our 2021 sensibilities and thus should be banned. The same kind of canceling of Disney films and cartoons, and of particular novelists and social critics is now a matter of record.

But what are to be the new standards of Trotskyization as we go forth? Can the Governor of New York be excused for months of policies that led to nearly 15,000 unnecessary deaths, but not for inappropriate kisses and touching of women? Or will he, as an Emmy-winning woke official, be exempt from punishment for both types of transgressions?

There are no logical standards that dictate who is and who is not canceled. For now, all we know about the rules of wokeness is that living leftists are mostly not canceled by the woke mob for the thought crimes that ruin both the non-Left or the generic dead.

The operating assumption is that the uncovered sins of the progressive are aberrations and not windows into their dark souls. Or perhaps woke leftism works on the same principle as carbon credits: the more you act progressively, the more pluses you have when minuses are summed up.

Most who have claims of being non-white are likely to find partial vaccination from the woke mob. Those who are independently wealthy or successfully self-employed likewise have some immunity. Then there are the defiant, the proverbial “Don’t Tread on Me” folks, who will fight, and thus encourage the zombie walkers to detour around them.

The only consistent pattern of woke punishment is the shared logic of the lions and water buffalos at the ford—devour the sacrificial, single, and vulnerable while avoiding the robust herd with retaliatory horns.

The Woke Tax

Wokeness eventually would put an unsustainable economic strain on the system. Wokeness is siphoning off billions of dollars from a productive economy through a sort of value-subtracted tax. We are spending a great deal of labor and capital for merit to be replaced in college admissions, in hiring, in grants, in publication, in the selections of awards, and in movies and videos, in everything—as racial, ethnic, and sexual identity considerations replace meritocratic, literary, artistic, and technological criteria, rather than just augment, them.

Americans also are investing lots of capital in preempting wokeness—writing/saying/acting in ways that are not productive, but simply defensive. Diversity oaths, and diversity applications, pledges, and statements take some time to read and digest. It will not be long before insurers will sell “woke insurance,” the premiums adjusted upward for those more conservative and of the wrong genealogy. It won’t be long before we all carry cards certifying that “At no time, did I say, hear, or think anything . . . .”

At a time of $1.7 trillion in student aggregate debt, and existential financial crises in universities during the zoom virtual campus, is higher education really so rich that it can add layers and layers of six-figure-income diversity and equity coordinators?

Most will not invent, create, teach, or produce. Instead, they are not merely monitoring but hindering those who do—either out of a need to justify their apparat or from self-importance. To believe otherwise is to suggest that on, say, May 1, 2020, the United States was an utterly racist society, without civil rights protections or any reparatory programs for those deemed unfairly victimized in the past.

The result is that billions of Americans’ hours are invested in woke reeducation and diversity training, in workshops and group confessionals, and in adjudicating and punishing those who do not comply. Ad hoc and personal cancel culture results in thousands of days of unproductive labor as functionaries scour the internet on the scent of a past misspoken word, or an ancient but now incorrect gesture that can return to ruin a rival or an enemy.

Our economy will soon mimic the totalitarian ones of old. Our commissars are like those of the old Red Army—ordering Soviet commanders’ counter-offensives during the Great Patriotic War to ensure that tank battalions were advancing ideologically correctly rather than just tactically or strategically soundly.

Melodramatic? Perhaps. But 280 former generals, admirals, and national security officials signed a letter warning that if Trump were to bring in any federal troops to keep the peace after the capital violence of late May and early June, riots that saw systematic attacks on police, vandalism, arson, injuries, and looting, and neared the White House grounds, he should be considered a dictatorial threat. “There is no role for the U.S. military in dealing with American citizens exercising their constitutional right to free speech, however uncomfortable that speech may be for some,” they insisted.

The same group remained mute when nearly 30,000 troops flooded the streets of the capital in the aftermath of the January 6 riot inside the Capitol building. They maintain their silence as barbed wire and fencing now cordon off the city, and thousands of troops remain without a terrorist or insurrectionist enemy in sight—a militarization of the capital not seen since the Civil War. Tolerable and intolerable violence is predicated on ideology, not its nature or magnitude.

Warring on the Past

No society can long exist if it believes that its own founding principles, its customs and traditions, its very origins are evil and must be erased. Tearing down statues of Abraham Lincoln, and redefining 1776 and 1787 as 1619, are many things, but one thing they are not is coherent. Trump was considered nutty when he warned that the statue topplers would go from Confederate monuments to Washington and Jefferson—and then when they did just that he was further ridiculed for being prescient.

Who were the long-dead men who devised a system whose natural and eventual fruition is what attracts indigenous people from Oaxaca, the destitute from Somalia, or the politically oppressed from Vietnam? If evil white people founded an evil system solely for their own evil purposes, why would anyone nonwhite dare risk his life to eat from the alluring fruit of the inherently long-ago poisoned tree?

If Americans are to accept that their Declaration of Independence and Constitution were frauds, abject falsifications of the real unspoken founding of 1619, then again what is to replace them? Whose statues are to rise, which books are we to be authorized to read, whose science are we to turn to?

Everyone has feet of some clay. For every cancellation, then must there be commensurate bowdlerizing? Is there no adultery, or unkind treatment of women or plagiarism in the past of Martin Luther King, Jr? No violence or criminality in the life of Malcolm X? Did Cesar Chavez never send his goons to the border to beat back illegal aliens? Was Margaret Sanger only a sometimes advocate of eugenic abortion? Are the written biographies of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson to be freed of anti-Semitism and petty corruption? Is Louis Farrakhan an ecumenical leader in the way FDR was not? Was JFK really our first feminist?

Are we to look to those who erased our supposedly awful past for guidance?

Is it to be the architect of the 1619 Project? Long ago the ecumenical Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote that “the white race is the biggest murderer, rapist, pillager, and thief of the modern world . . . The descendants of these savage people pump drugs and guns into the Black community, pack Black people into the squalor of segregated urban ghettos and continue to be bloodsuckers in our community.”

Is going back into one’s student days to find such an embarrassing rant, in the fashion of the accusers’ of Brett Kavanaugh’s desperate but false allegations, unfair? If so, this past summer Hannah-Jones bragged that, yes, it would be “an honor” if the summer rioting—700 police officers injured, 40 deaths, and billions in property damages and hundreds—be called henceforth “the 1619 riots.”

At the height of tensions, she advised, “Destroying property, which can be replaced, is not violence.” And she added, “Any reasonable person would say we shouldn’t be destroying other people’s property, but these are not reasonable times.” Did the Times consider its essayist inflammatory?

Tribes

In our self-celebrated liberal society are we all to be reduced to identifying by race? But first, do we even have the ability to ascertain who is and is not white or black or brown?

Most illiberal societies in the past that tried such stigmatization of race, ethnicity, or religion did not end so well—from the Ottomans and the Third Reich to the former Yugoslavians, Rwandans, and Iraqis. One eighth, one fourth, or one half makes one a person of color—or not color? Shall we seek knowledge of one-drop of tell-tale bloodlines from the archived jurisprudence of the antebellum South?

If Peruvian George Zimmerman had only used his matronymic, and Latinized his first name, then would a Jorge Mesa have become a sympathetic character who lost a fair fight with Trayvon Martin rather than reduced by the New York Times to a strange category of “white Hispanic” hoodlum, with the additional odor of a Germanized patronymic.

Why does class bow to race, since the former seems to trump the latter. If we forget percentages for a moment, and also forget that we are individuals, not anonymous cogs of vast racial wheels, in absolute numbers, there are roughly (in some studies) more poor white people—both those earning incomes below the poverty level and those with no income at all—than all other commensurate poor minorities combined. Were these supposed to be the targets of Barack Obama’s “clingers” remarks, or Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables,” John McCain’s “crazies,” or Joe Biden’s “dregs,” “chumps,” and “Neanderthals”?

Apparently, the supposedly all-powerful, all-determining Oz-like role of racial supremacy and the unearned privilege that accompanies it, have aided those 26 million white impoverished very little. Or perhaps they did not get the message that they were recipients of unearned, all-determinative white privilege.

Or perhaps they were just people, like the poor of all other races, who suffer from lack of or access to education or vocational training, the stagnation of entry-level incomes, divorce, family dissolution, bad luck, poor health, substance abuse, economic ill-winds, cultural disadvantages, self-inflicted pathologies, or all the other criteria that can make every one of us of every race susceptible to ravages of poverty.

Given that, in absolute numbers alone, there are more minorities that are not poor than the number of white people who are, how is it that class considerations are forgotten? Or for that matter, does any child’s destiny rest on just race—or a two-parent household living in Menlo Park rather than Parlier, or growing up with college-educated parents or high-school dropouts? And does race really determine all the other criteria that foster wealth or poverty?

Note the artifact that those who are now classified as nonwhite are wisely not often seeking to rebrand themselves as “white” to share in intractable “white privilege ”—in the fashion of the past when white majority racism was undeniable. Why are Asian-Americans, on average, enjoying over $20,000 more in average household income than so-called whites?

Why more commonly would so-called white people create an entire industry of constructing pseudo-minority identities—from Elizabeth Warren to Rachel Dolezal to Ward Churchill to Alec Baldwin’s wife, Hilaria—if not for careerist or social advantage or wishing to be cool by claiming not to be “white”? Why has the new racist “passing for non-white” replaced the old racist “passing for white”?

These are admittedly absurd questions. But they are quite apt for an absurd society obsessed with race but without any mechanism to develop a logical category of victimization and reparation.

Predicating wokism on race is a tricky business, even if one could define and identify race, quantify its role in determining class status, and convince millions that it is moral to judge people by how they look.

Like the Salem witch trials and the McCarthyite hysteria, when wokism fades, we are likely to see its real catalysts revealed. And they will not be found to be misplaced idealism, nor heartfelt desire for a more ecumenical society, but mostly the age-old, narcissistic destructive road to career enhancement, fueled by customary ancient fears, envies, and hatreds.

*************************************

Australia: Greens senator retracts rape claim against Home Affairs Minister, apologises



This would normally be a matter of no general interest except for one thing: It is an example of the lie about rape that regularly sprouts from Leftist women: The lie that women do not lie about rape. "Believe the woman", they say.

Women in fact lie prolifically. There are many cases -- particularly in Britain -- where rape allegations have been found in court to be false. Britain has even jailed some of false accusers in the more egregious cases

It is just amazing how readily Leftists resort to psychopathic lies -- lies that are easily found out to be lies. If they wish something to be true, they act as if it were true. Their reality-contact is very poor It is a major mental defect in them


Greens senator Larissa Waters has issued an “unreserved” apology to Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton after calling him a “rape apologist” last month.

The Courier-Mail revealed on Saturday Mr Dutton had sent a legal letter to the Queensland senator demanding the apology and removal of online posts containing the insult.

Senator Waters’ comments were made on social media site Twitter in February, in reaction to a news article in which Mr Dutton referred to not knowing the “he said, she said” in the Brittany Higgins rape allegations that have rocked Parliament.

“WOMEN DO NOT LIE ABOUT BEING RAPED (Peter Dutton) YOU INHUMANE, SEXIST RAPE APOLOGIST,” she posted, with similar comments made in a press release.

Tonight she posted an apology to both Twitter and her own website.

“On 25 February 2021 I published a media release on my website, posted on my Twitter account, and made in the course of a press conference false and defamatory statements that Peter Dutton is a rape apologist, that he has sought to conceal and dismiss reports of rape, and that he has no sympathy for victims of rape,” she said.

“I accept that there was no basis for those allegations and that they were false. I unreservedly apologise to Minister Dutton for the hurt, distress and damage to his reputation I have caused him.”

Senator Waters’ original tweet was no longer online last night.

***************************************

My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)

*****************************************

No comments: