Bring Back the Asylums

Homelessness is a complex issue. At the very least, America is not dealing with it constructively. If the nation’s blue cities are littered with homeless encampments, and if no one seems to know what to do about it, we are sorely in need some rational thought about the question.

And that is what medical ethicist David Oshinsky provides us in the Wall Street Journal. Kudos to him for a comprehensive analysis of the problem.

Hundreds of thousands of homeless people foul the environment and contribute to a rising inner city crime rate. About that there is little doubt.

Many of them are mentally ill, and are obviously not being treated. And yet, the issue of treating the homeless, and especially of treating people who might not want to be treated, has long bedeviled the nation. 

In the past, we had asylums to treat these patients. But, that occasionally involved involuntary commitment. These were state psychiatric hospitals.

Massive, architecturally imposing, and set on bucolic acreage, they housed close to 600,000 patients by the 1950s, totaling half the nation’s hospital population. Today, that number is 45,000 and falling.

In the early sixties, President John F. Kennedy signed a bill called the Community Mental Health Act. It was designed to empty the asylums and to have the community take charge of the mentally ill.

The legislation was a response to reports of the horrors committed in asylums, but it was also a response to the discovery of new classes of psychiatric drugs, from neuroleptics like Thorazine to antidepressants like Anafranil. With these medications even schizophrenics could live their lives outside of the asylums.

Oshinsky explains:

A seemingly revolutionary solution soon appeared—a new drug with the potential to treat psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. First marketed in 1955 under the brand name Thorazine, it became the psychiatric equivalent of antibiotics and the polio vaccine. Why keep patients locked away in sadistic institutions when they could be successfully medicated close to home?

The promise of Thorazine coincided with a dramatic assault upon traditional psychiatry led by radical critics such as Michel Foucault and Thomas Szasz. Asylums existed to enslave those who ignored society’s norms, they believed. Who could say with assurance that the people locked away in these places were any more or less insane than the authorities who put them there? It seemed a perfect fit for the 1960s, appealing to emerging rights groups and a counterculture scornful of elites. “If you talk to God, you are praying,” Szasz declared. “If God talks to you, you are schizophrenic.”

As it happened, communities were not prepared to deal with schizophrenics. Besides, many patients refused to take their medication. The Achilles heel of the new policy was that it relied on patients being willing to accept their medication. At times, they needed to take it daily; at times they could take it weekly or monthly. Often they did not want to take it at all. And this does not address the side effects of neuroleptics, like tardive dyskinesia. 

Closing the asylums was the easy part. Getting people to accept a mental health clinic next to their local church or elementary school proved a much tougher sell. Asylum inmates returned home to find their former neighbors unprepared and often unwilling to help. Most of the clinics never materialized. And the promise of Thorazine was blunted, in part, by its nasty side effects. Surveys of those released from state asylums found that close to 30% were either homeless or had “no known address” within six months of their discharge. One critic likened it to “a psychiatric Titanic.”

The mentally ill gained rights, but they were often untreated. Allowing them the freedom to live as they wished sounded like a great idea. And yet, many of the mentally ill preferred to live on the streets and to make a living by committing petty crimes.

As for those who are dangerous, perhaps we will need to return to involuntary commitment. From Adam Lanza to Jared Loughner… no small number of mass murderers were diagnosed as schizophrenic and as homicidal. And yet, their psychiatrists could not have them committed to psychiatric institutions. The American legal system erred on the side of their rights and many people died.

The questions her case raised, however, are more relevant than ever. How does a civilized society deal with severely mentally ill people who refuse assistance? What constitutes the sort of behavior that requires forced hospitalization? Is it time to bring back the asylum?

These issues are intertwined with a fundamental change brought about by deinstitutionalization. Put simply, civil libertarians and disability rights advocates have largely replaced psychiatrists as the arbiters of care for the severely mentally ill. And a fair number of them, with the best of intentions, seem to view the choices of those they represent as an alternative lifestyle rather than the expression of a sickness requiring aggressive medical care.

And, of course, in many cases the alternative to asylums is prison.

The enormous vacuum created by deinstitutionalization has been a calamity for both the mentally ill and society at large. The role once occupied by the asylum has been transferred to the institutions perhaps least able to deal with mental health issues—prisons and jails. The number of inmates in the U.S. in 1955 was 185,000; today, that figure is 1,900,000.

Unsurprisingly, the nation’s three largest mental health facilities are the Los Angeles County Jail, the Cook County Jail in Chicago, and Rikers Island in New York City. Approximately one quarter of their inmates have been diagnosed with a serious mental disorder.

And yet, today's state mental hospitals are inadequate to the need. In part, this explains our homeless crisis, something that is being aggravated by the influx of illegal migrants. 

Anyway, Oshinsky’s recommendation, that we open more psychiatric hospitals, feels reasonable. It is far from obvious that we can easily treat those who are suffering from severe or chronic mental illness. Without a hospital system, it will be nearly impossible. By now we have learned that our most recent experiment has been a rank failure.

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Climate Apocalypse Now

Fortunately, we have learned to be nice to people. It means that we do not dispute the jejeune opinions of members of victim groups.

So when the eminent New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino, regales us with her deepest anxieties about the pending end of the world, when she shares her sense of irrevocable apocalyptic doom and confesses her feeling that she, for not doing enough to forestall the inevitable, is a “self-serving piece of shit” we feel compelled to assent.

If you have nothing else to torment yourself, if the obligations of being responsible for yourself and others are too much to bear, why not indulge a pathetic public freakout about the weather.

As it turns out, Tolentino has a male partner-- they are married but don’t you dare call him a husband-- and a baby. And yet, rather than care for the one or the other, she is having a nervous breakdown over the climate. Here, she describes it:

A couple of years ago, reading a climate report on my phone in the early hours of the morning, I went into a standard-issue emotional spiral thinking about it all. I woke up my boyfriend, seeking consolation; he took in my frenetic wheel-spinning and went back to sleep. The next morning, he drew up a list of thirty action items for us to consider, ranging from phone banking to ceasing international travel to committing eco-sabotage. There were tasks on the list that we had been doing for years—composting food waste, buying secondhand—but many that we had never considered. We had also recently had a baby, whose carbon footprint likely already exceeded that of entire villages in Burundi. I was playing whack-a-mole with my consumer desires. Every day, I felt like a self-serving piece of shit.

Forget, for an instant, about Tolentino’s consumer desires. Forget about her responsibilities toward her baby. What really matters is-- the villages in Burundi. You might not have known it, but now you do. And you have no excuse for not caring about Burundi.

This thinking sounds like it came straight out of middle school; it is just that pathetic.

So, deeply distressed about the weather, Tolentino goes looking for therapists. And she finds a man who had a nervous breakdown over climate change and who found a therapist who helped him to get over it. You will be amazed to discover that said therapist told the young man to give it all a rest. In short, to get out of his mind and into his life. The advice worked wonders. But, it does nothing for the smelts, so Tolentino dismisses it.

Tolentino explains that the right kind of therapist will counsel action, like the climate change activists who stopped traffic in Great Britain the other day, making it impossible for a young mother to take her sick baby to the hospital.

I was drawn to the idea that the right kind of therapist could channel such emotions in a way that prompted serious and sustained efforts to combat climate change. I was also wary of the possibility that a therapist would simply dispel those feelings, helping me to feel more calm about a world on fire. If the goal is for the planet to remain habitable into the next century, what is the right degree of panic, and how do you bear it?

Amazingly, licensed therapists arrive at a state of total conviction, not only about the fact that the climate is changing, and that the world is coming to an end, but that human beings are at fault. They even consider themselves to be eminently qualified to formulate opinions about atmospheric physics.

Leslie Davenport, a licensed therapist in Washington State, is a pioneer in the climate-therapy field. In the nineteen-eighties, she became anxious about what was happening to the planet, and did things to allay that anxiety: she signed petitions, she searched for environmental organizations that she could support. Then it occurred to her that climate change was caused by human behavior, and human behavior was her field of expertise.

So, climate change is caused by human beings, this being the epiphany that visited a woman who knows nothing about the climate or about physics. She has no qualifications in the field, but since she belongs to an oppressed minority group, we are obliged to accept her views as gospel.

Serious climate scientists, like Richard Lindzen, emeritus of MIT and William Happer, emeritus of Princeton, disagree with her. Who has more credibility on the subject? Link here.

We will ignore Davenport’s counsel, because if she thinks she is an expert on atmospheric physics, she needs some serious help. 

More importantly, she is describing an epiphany, one that corresponds to the larger freakouts sustained by Tolentino and her ilk. An epiphany is a religious experience, one that does not turn her toward God, but that makes her a cult follower of the Goddess of the Planet.

Tolentino is not describing therapy. She is not discussing how she can be a better mother or how she can better conduct her life. She does not even consider how she can be a better wife, because she, a married woman, considers herself a partner, not a wife. Climate science has taught her that she is a worthless piece of shit, so we can certainly agree that it has not enhanced her self-esteem.

From the depths of her atmospheric despair she wants to find solace in joining a cult, no more or no less. It supersedes all other duties and obligations. She has offended the Goddess and the angry Goddess will destroy all of us.

So, Tolentino recounts the sad story of an Alaskan whose community livelihood was wiped out by the catastrophe of the Exxon Valdez. That this was caused by human error, not by greenhouse gasses, does not cross anyone's mind.

He does not consider how to rebuild his community, but, he decides to consult with his ancestors. Ancestor worship, a staple of pagan religions leads you back to polytheism. 

You have to read it to believe it.

One rainy day, after the Exxon Valdez disaster, Lankard went down to Eyak Lake and, “ranting and raving,” asked his ancestors for guidance—for a green arrow toward becoming an activist. After an hour, the drizzle stopped and the northern lights emerged, chartreuse. Lankard went on to found multiple nonprofits, including the Native Conservancy, the first Indigenous-led land trust in the States. 

As for Tolentino, she is sure that the goddess will punish us in the end.

It may be impossible to seriously consider the reality of climate change for longer than ninety seconds without feeling depressed, angry, guilty, grief-stricken, or simply insane. The earth has warmed about 2.3 degrees Fahrenheit since pre-industrial times, and the damage is irreparable. Vast zones of hypoxic water expand in the oceans; wild bees, fireflies, and birds are disappearing; one study suggests that around half of trees currently alive will be dead in forty years.

By a new definition of insanity does not lie in continuing to do the same thing and expecting a different result. It lies in the belief that we know to a certainty what is going to happen tomorrow.

As any serious scientist can tell you, there is no such thing as a scientific fact about tomorrow. And besides, climate fanatics like Tolentino do not for an instant consider the cost of shutting down the energy grid and plunging the world into darkness. She and her ilk do not consider what will happen to the baby who cannot go to the hospital because a band of fanatics is stopping traffic.

We ought to throw some serious doubt on people who insist that they possess absolute incontestable truth. For the record, and as you know already, science is based on skepticism. Incontrovertible truths are religious dogma. 

The real story lies in the fact that certain adults are grooming young people and are forcing them to have nervous breakdowns. These dogmatic beliefs can never be tested against reality, so you must take them as gospel truth. If you disagree the Goddess of the Planet will punish you severely.

In a commentary on Tolentino’s screed (via Maggie's Farm), Lisa Schiffren writes this:

Moreover: stop repeating overwrought tales of doom to an impressionable young people. Do not let your contributors write things like, “The ice sheets keep melting, the permafrost keeps releasing its methane, and the future continues to harden into a psychic zone of suffering and dread. By mid-century, hundreds of millions of people will be displaced because of global warming." No wonder "a 2021 survey of Gen Z-ers [found that] fifty-six percent agreed that 'humanity is doomed'.” That's what they've been taught since early childhood! The blame for their depression falls squarely on their teachers and the media for propagating this deception. It's deeply irresponsible.

To say the least.

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Saturday Miscellany

First, if it had appeared anywhere else, it would have been denounced as sexist. New York Times editorialist Michelle Cottle explained this week the difference between male and female bonding. 

Responding to the simple fact that today’s Americans have few friends and fewer social relations, Cottle raised the salient point-- men connect with men and women connect with women-- differently.

Which is where playtime comes in. Pursuing a hobby is widely recognized as a good way to meet people and establish connections. But the folks who study this sort of thing say it is especially useful for men because of a fundamental difference in how the genders bond. Boiled down: Women talk; men do stuff.

Women share their feelings. Men do things together.

While women can maintain ties through conversation-heavy engagements, the experts say, men are better served by side-by-side bonding. That is, they participate in activities together, during which community and camaraderie are established. On occasion, between rounds of bocce or even rounds at the sports bar, the men may bring up how much they hate their boss or the results of their latest stress test. Behold! Male bonding in action.

In truth, this is self-evident. And yet, kudos to Cottle for bringing it to the resolutely anti-sexist readers of the New York Times.

Second, on the Fox News watch, the channel introduced its new evening lineup this week, the one that was made necessary by its firing of Tucker Carlson.

The results were a ratings calamity. Opening at 8:00, Jesse Watters had 800,000 fewer viewers than did Tucker. Great decision by the executives at Fox.

Third, yesterday I reported on the rise and fall of corporate diversity officers. I based my remarks on a Financial Times story. On cue, the Wall Street Journal echoed the point yesterday.

This, from the Journal:

In interviews, current and former chief diversity officers said company executives at times didn’t want to change hiring or promotion processes, despite initially telling CDOs they were hired to improve the talent pipeline. The quick about-face shows company enthusiasm for diversity initiatives hasn’t always proved durable, leaving some diversity officers now questioning their career path. 

New analysis from employment data provider Live Data Technologies shows that chief diversity officers have been more vulnerable to layoffs than their human resources counterparts, experiencing 40% higher turnover. Their job searches are also taking longer. 

Fourth, obviously, I have not seen the movie about Barbie. I have nothing of consequence to say about it. For your edification, however, here are a few remarks from The Daily Mail reviewer Sarah Vine.

'Barbie or no Barbie, it’s not intrinsically that good a film. It’s uneven, disjointed, the plot makes no real sense — and the dead hand of corporate America weighs heavily upon it. 

'But my main objection is that Barbie is not really a film about Barbie at all. 

'It’s one hour and 54 minutes of extended misandry, dressed up with a few fun dance routines and one or two (granted fairly decent) jokes. 

'Every male character is either an idiot, a bigot or a sad, rather pathetic loser. 

'If the roles were reversed, and a male director made a film about how all women were hysterical, neurotic, gold-digging witches, it would be denounced — quite rightly — as deeply offensive and sexist.'

Fifth, according to the former chairman of Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian gas company that put Hunter Biden on its board of directions, the president’s crackhead son is dumber than his dog. What more is there to say.

Sixth, reports tell us that industry and manufacturing are returning to America. It’s called onshoring. It is reducing our dependence on foreign manufacturers.

And yet, in the semiconductor wars, a battlefield where the future of civilization is being played out, something strange is happening in Arizona. You recall that Taiwan Semiconductor, the leading manufacturer of a certain type of chips, was going to build a new production facility in Arizona. Everyone cheered American technical expertise and ingenuity.

And yet, now the project has been delayed. The problem, a shortage of skilled workers. The company chairman, Mark Liu, explained that he might have to bring in workers from Taiwan.

Two cheers for the American educational system.

Seventh, as though on cue, the Wall Street Journal reported this morning about a tool making factory in Texas. It could not make a wrench.

The world’s largest tool company couldn’t figure out how to make a wrench.

Stanley Black and Decker built a $90 million factory on the edge of Fort Worth, Texas, intending to burnish the Made-in-the-U.S.A. luster of the Craftsman brand by forging mechanics’ tools with unprecedented efficiency. But the automated system was a bust, and the tools that were supposed to be pumped out by the million are so hard to find that some consider them collector’s items. 

In March, 3½ years after breaking ground, Stanley announced it was closing the factory. The property is now being advertised for sale.

The Craftsman plant was a high-profile example of a drive among U.S. manufacturers to bring offshored plants back home. Government incentives and a desire to shorten supply chains have sparked a factory-building boom. The high cost of American labor makes automation critical for plants to turn a profit.

Eighth, and now we have the news that grooming works. Reports have it that some 40% percent of the student body at Brown University-- my own alma mater, incidentally-- now consider themselves to be LBBTQ. A third of the students at Princeton and a quarter of those at Yale and Harvard also embrace sexual ambiguity.

Some students believe that the schools are simply allowing more students to be who they really are. In truth, it seems that the grooming mania has done serious damage to America's best and brightest college students. Of course, if they are that easily manipulated, they might not be the best and the brightest.

And yet, I offer this sidelight, one that no one has dared bring up. How many of the students at these formerly great institutions are now lining up for mental health counseling. Last I heard, from a reliable source at a liberal arts college, the number was 40%. 

So, our radical leftist culture has not only made young people sexually ambiguous, it has produced an epidemic of mental illness and emotional distress.  

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Fewer Diversity Executives, Please

In the aftermath of the George Floyd insurrection, the call went out across America. Diversity uber alles, was the battle cry. Companies joined the movement and hired more diversity, equity and inclusion officers. They wanted to have a workforce that looked like America.  The Financial Times has the story.

Com­pan­ies pledged bil­lions of dol­lars in 2020 to sup­port black work­ers and com­munit­ies. They also rushed to recruit diversity pro­fes­sion­als: hir­ing of chief diversity officers jumped 169 per cent between 2019 and 2022, accord­ing to jobs-focused social net­work LinkedIn, mak­ing this the fast­est-grow­ing exec­ut­ive role in US com­pan­ies.

Cynics did not really believe it. They thought that the companies were simply engaging in good corporate public relations. They expected that the diversity officers who were hired at the height of the George Floyd insurrection would not be on the job for a very long time.

So now, as though someone rang a bell, a number of diversity executives are leaving their jobs. This has especially impacted the entertainment industry.

The exits of sev­eral high-pro­file US diversity exec­ut­ives are fuel­ling fears over cor­por­ate Amer­ica’s com­mit­ment to racial equity in the face of tougher eco­nomic and polit­ical con­di­tions.

Diversity and inclu­sion lead­ers at Dis­ney, Net­flix, Warner Bros Dis­cov­ery and the Academy of Motion Pic­ture Arts and Sci­ences have resigned or been let go in recent weeks.

The companies are not replacing the officers they are letting go. Apparently, the jobs were not really jobs, but were designed to make the companies look good-- to prevent lawsuits and to ensure that the media did not attack them for not being sufficiently diverse.

Consider this:

Dis­ney, which has faced sus­tained pres­sure from con­ser­vat­ives over its diversity ini­ti­at­ives, announced in June that Laton­dra New­ton would be leav­ing “to pur­sue other endeav­ours”. Net­flix’s head of inclu­sion strategy, Vernā Myers, said she would step down in Septem­ber to run her own con­sult­ing busi­ness while still advising the stream­ing group.

Asif Sadiq, chief global DEI officer at Warner Bros Dis­cov­ery, told staff on June 30 that Karen Horne, the stu­dio’s top diversity exec­ut­ive in North Amer­ica, would leave as a part of a broader restruc­tur­ing. Sim­ilar roles at tech­no­logy com­pan­ies includ­ing Twit­ter have been cut as part of wider industry job cuts over the past year.

It is not just the entertainment business:

Bey­ond the enter­tain­ment industry, evid­ence is mount­ing that busi­ness is cur­tail­ing invest­ment in inclu­sion ini­ti­at­ives three years after George Floyd’s murder put pres­sure on com­pan­ies to do more to address racial inequit­ies.

Truth be told, companies are in the business of making a profit. If they discover that diversity and equity do not contribute to the bottom line, they are likely to correct.

The new policy on diversity hiring has not been limited to the entertainment business.

That trend has reversed over the past year. Hir­ing of diversity officers fell 4.51 per cent, even as recruit­ing for other exec­ut­ive roles grew, LinkedIn found.

The num­ber of new diversity, equity and inclu­sion pos­i­tions at North Amer­ican com­pan­ies has also con­trac­ted since peak­ing in 2021, accord­ing to Rev­elio Labs, which tracks work­place trends.

DEI officers have been buf­feted by eco­nomic con­di­tions that have triggered lay-offs and by polit­ical con­tro­ver­sies, said Alina Polon­skaia, a diversity con­sult­ant at Korn Ferry.

Does this mean that the party is over? It suggests as much. And yet, given the sensitivity of the issue, companies will continue to keep up appearances, all the while working to sustain the bottom line.

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Creating Your New Self

Among today’s young intellectuals Tara Isabella Burton stands out. Having missed out on an American education, the kind that will most likely ruin your mind, she earned a doctorate in theology from Oxford.

Thus, her commentaries are always thoughtful and always worth reading. Her book, Strange Rites, argues persuasively that our culture has taken a decided turn toward pagan idolatry. The book is worth a read.

Now, Burton has just published a new book, called Self-Made wherein she analyzes a Western cultural deformity, the belief that one can remake or recreate oneself, that one can be whatever one wants to be.

We see it in transmania, the notion that you can change sexes at will, depending on your belief. Behind the theory lies the notion that society, with its rules and regulations, creates a false and sociable Self, one that alienates us forever from our true selves. The theory suggests that we can be what we want to be, but that society or the culture or civilization represses our inner truth because it wants to make us cogs in the machine.

Consider this a variation on a theme by Freud, but it is certainly not limited to him. Any ideology that promises liberation from society’s expectations, and from the roles we were born into, shares this illusory thought.

Anyway, in an essay from Persuasion, Burton presents her argument:

To many, self-making is a gospel of liberation. You can become whoever you want to be. No matter who or how you were born, your race or class or gender or family, you can wipe the slate clean, determine your own destiny, become self-made. It’s the narrative at the heart of the myth of The American—the promise, as Frederick Douglass ringingly put it, that anyone could “make the road on which they had travelled.” It is the narrative with which so many of us have been inculcated from birth: that our “true” or “authentic” selves are derived from our internally-felt sensations or our creative powers, and that our lives ought to be a process of expressing and “manifesting” that reality, overcoming the social and communal obstacles that stand in our way. Life, in other words, is the process of becoming our best selves, while throwing off the shackles of social expectation.

Nicely put. You are potentially a work of art, a block of marble that you craft into your true self. It means that there is a special virtue in breaking the rules, in defying expectations, in transforming yourself, for example, into a member of the opposite sex. 

Burton continues:

At its best, the quintessentially modern narrative of self-making—one that has become more widespread and more robust in the Internet Age—can indeed be an avenue for freedom from both oppression and repression. But the narrative also has a darker side. As often as not, as it has played out since the advent of modernity, the gospel of self-making has been less about freeing individuals to choose their own destinies as about identifying a new aristocracy, just as exclusive as the old one. The sole difference in the new way of being is that it may be money, “style,” or “spirit”—as opposed to purely lineage—that creates the right to transcend society’s rules. 

Nowadays, Burton continues, everyone has a smart phone and everyone has an online presence through social media. We can take on various characters, avatars, and present those as our truth. And we become indignant when anyone rejects that true self.

In our own era, the gospel of self-making has become nearly universal. Anyone with a smartphone—85 percent of America’s population—can create a digital avatar, a filtered selfie, a personal brand, in order to capitalize on the dizzying potential of the attention economy, which often rewards aesthetic curation with economic success. Self-help doctrines like “manifesting” promise that anyone can connect to the energy of the universe and that that energy can be harnessed to help us achieve our goals in this life. 

Burton believes that this new religious dogma has turned us all into commodities:

The demand to create our own selves for cultural and financial success alike has transformed us all into commodities: as we desperately attempt to prove that we—and we alone—are worthy originals, demigods with the right to determine our own lives.

And she remarks that the new religion, a form of pagan idolatry, allows us to consider ourselves to be gods, to be superhuman beings, in the Nietzschean sense of the term. It is a powerful illusion, far more powerful than the call to rebel against society’s rules and laws. It’s a more modern form of liberation theology, but one that has been embraced by many people who should know better.

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Wednesday Potpourri

First, Air Force veteran Arthur Walters Jr. just turned 104. We wish him health and happiness.

Naturally, everyone wants to know the secret to his longevity. He has happily explained that he does not take any medication, but gives credit to his two good friends, Jim Beam and Jack Daniels.

Obviously, he also has a great sense of humor.

Second, whatever else it excels at, America is leading the world in the consumption of prescription drugs. We are 5% of the population and we consume 80% of the opiates.

Dr. Paul Marik offered this advice:

So rather than focus on lifestyle changes and healthy eating and healthy living — which can make a major impact on disease — we're so obsessed with using medications which do not work and may have side effects. And people are addicted for their life.

Third, Julie Burchill is obviously an acquired taste. Since most of her writing appears in Britain and addresses local topics, she is not well known on these shores.

We happily quote her recent comment on transgenderism:

Because there comes a point when encouraging men to believe they are women is cruel.

Speaking for women, Burchill takes offense at the current dogmas about transgenderism:

They’re ceaselessly confirmed in their delirious claims that they’re better lesbians, better breast-feeders, that their fauxginas – basically wounds which are never allowed to heal – make them better sex-partners for some lucky man who will never know the difference.… The tragedy of trans is that for them the opposite is true, their lingerie and lipstick highlighting the fact that they often resemble construction workers on a drag-stag night.

Fourth, the right to privacy in Joe Biden’s military. A female recruit was forced to shower with male recruits who considered themselves to be female. Said recruits continued to have and to display male genitalia. The situation violated the woman’s privacy, but this did not register in the pea brains of the Biden Pentagon.

And then, to add insult to injury, she was forced to sleep between two males who considered themselves to be female, but who had retained male genitalia.

One recalls that only 16% of males who think they are women undergo the surgery.

Fifth, the U. S. Army is 15,000 short of its target of 65,000 recruits. Pentagon officers consider it a crisis, but none of them seem to have concluded that people simply do not want to join a woke military that does not respect women’s privacy rights.

Sixth, transmania will doubtless give rise to a blizzard of lawsuits. It has done so in Great Britain and has caused a number of European countries to ban gender mutilation.

And now, in America, we have the case of Prisha Mosley.

She underwent medical intervention to give her the appearance of being male, but is now detransitioning.

The Daily Mail has the story:

She says she was confused and battling mental health problems when clinicians prescribed her cross-sex hormones and recommended a double breast removal after brief consultations, one lasting only two minutes. In her 53-page complaint, she says her doctors 'lied', including by saying testosterone jabs would solve her problems and make her 'grow a penis.' She has since decided to 'detransition' and live as a woman, and seeks financial damages. The treatments left irreversible scars, she says, including a deep voice, body and facial hair, pain in her neck and shoulders, a damaged vagina, and she will most likely not be able to have kids or breastfeed.

Seventh, the New York Times, feminist bastion that it is, wants us to respect women for their minds and not their genitalia. We all agree.

But then, the Times, which once offered women advice on how best to sext, has now done a rigorous scientific study to discover-- the best vibrator. Yes, indeed, female Times readers presumably pick up the paper to research this issue.

If you would like to spare yourself a subscription to the Times, the best vibrator is called the Magic Wand Rechargeable. Precisely why it needs to be recharged, I will leave to your imagination.

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Woke Therapy

We have become increasingly aware of the dominance of woke ideology in schools, in the media and in government. Most of those who propound this groupthink are not shy about advertising their intention. 

Yet, we are often blissfully unaware of the influence that this ideology has in therapy sessions. How has woke ideology transformed the field of therapy, and how can we discover what is happening behind closed doors?

If things are as bad as we think they are, more and more therapists insist that the only real problem their patients have is bigotry. They even deny treatment to those who refuse to acknowledge their bigotry.

If, perchance, a Wall Street Journal op-ed explains, you complain to your therapist that you missed out on a fellowship because it was given to someone who fulfilled a diversity quota, the therapist will pronounce you a bigot and will tell you either to deep six your bigotry or to go elsewhere.

No kidding:

A patient came to a clinic where I worked a few years ago. He was looking for help with depression but also told his therapist that he was feeling frustrated after having lost out on a research fellowship. The patient, who was white, felt the reason was affirmative action. The therapist was Arab. A group of psychiatrists, social workers and psychologists discussed the case at a clinic-wide meeting and came to an apparent consensus: Confront the patient and tell him that if he didn’t overcome his biases, he would be transferred elsewhere. They argued that it would be unfair for a clinician of color to have to provide therapy to a “racist” patient.

One understands that if your therapist thinks that you are racist, you should probably find another therapist. And yet, woke ideology has infested the major national psycho guilds:

The American Psychological Association has decried “traditional masculinity.” The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association published a paper describing “Whiteness” as a “malignant, parasitic-like condition.” Two years ago, a prominent psychiatrist speaking at Yale shared her fantasies of killing white people. Recently, the president of the APA’s division of psychoanalysis said that therapists should “center Palestine . . . as a central working tenet of any clinical praxis.”

One senses the dank odor of anti-Semitism, mixed with a general hatred of America. One understands that the people  who think this way are mentally challenged, not so much in terms of emotional development, but in terms of general intelligence. If this is what they have learned in graduate school, they have been transformed into blithering fools and imbeciles.

Being profoundly stupid, they have tried to enhance their billable hours by embracing leftist politics. One might say that we ought to forgive them, because they do not know what they are doing.

One forthcoming study charts a more than 500% increase in politically slanted communiques at the APA from 2000-02 to 2017-19. A 2018 study showed that psychology departments, like most of academia, have extreme bias, with almost 17 registered Democratic professors for every one Republican. The bias is larger at higher ranked schools, and most Republican academics report higher rates of self-censorship.

If anti-racism training has made its way into corporate offices, we should not be surprised that it has made its way into counseling sessions.

The American Counseling Associations’ official competency guidelines frame counselors and clients as either “privileged” or “marginalized.” The National Association for Social Work, which represents many therapists, has a code of ethics requiring “all members of the social work profession to practice through an anti-racist and anti-oppressive lens.”

In part, this involves a failure to educate. The people, mostly of the female persuasion, who practice therapy are simply undereducated. Or else, perhaps the profession attracts those who are mentally deficient, and who could not pass courses in science or math:

Years of one-sided education have made many of them unable to tolerate being around people with different views, much less support them as empathic therapists.

Consider this a portrait of a profession in decline. When politicians and talking heads talk about how drug addicts should receive proper treatment, keep in mind that these mentally deficient therapists will be charged with treating them.

It is well enough known that drug addiction is extremely difficult to treat. Perhaps the nation’s streets are littered, not with people who do not have access to treatment, but with people who have undergone the inadequate treatment that is currently available. 

You do not really think that today’s woke therapists are capable of treating much of anything, do you?

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