Linkage

I mentioned that the two reasons for not writing that I hear most often from people are variations on “I’ve got nothing to say.”

The first version is when someone says they’ve got nothing to say because they’re not qualified to write on a particular topic. “After all, there are real experts out there who know far more than me. So I’ve got nothing to say.”

But then once you do actually understand a topic, the second version appears. “If I know about this, then everyone knows about this. It’s obvious. So I’ve got nothing to say.”

In both cases, you absolutely should be writing and sharing! In the first instance, you’ve got the beginner’s mind—a valuable perspective. In the second instance, you’ve got personal experience—another valuable perspective.

In other words, while it seems like there’s never a good time to write about something, the truth is that there’s never a bad time to write about something.

So write! Share! Publish!

Charlie Kirk, the head of the MAGA propaganda behemoth Turning Point USA, recently unveiled a novel theory as to why young women tend to vote for Democrats. Unwilling to admit that women can think for themselves, Kirk floated the theory that birth control pills cause brain damage.

"Birth control like really screws up female brains," he falsely claimed before a crowd at a recent church event streamed on the far-right site Rumble. Claiming the pill "increases depression, anxiety [and] suicidal ideation," he then blamed women's voting patterns on hormonal contraception. "It creates very angry and bitter young ladies and young women," Kirk argued. "Then that bitterness then manifests into a political party that is the bitter party. I mean, the Democrat Party is all about 'bring us your bitterness and, you know, we’ll give you free stuff.'”

[…]

As the Washington Post reported last month, right-wing activists have been flooding social media with the same lies that Kirk was echoing in this video. It's a well-financed disinformation campaign, getting a major boost from MAGA billionaire Peter Thiel, who has aggressively financed teams of messengers to falsely claim that hormonal birth control "tricked our bodies into dysfunction and pain." Doctors report that the tidal wave of misinformation about birth control is creating a health care crisis, including women who "come in for abortions after believing what they see on social media about the dangers of hormonal birth control." 

Yes, I know; we've been here before, but:

Albrecht in 2021 addressed this failure when speaking to Heise, saying, per Google's translation:

"The main problem there was that the employees weren't sufficiently involved. We do that better. We are planning long transition phases with parallel use. And we are introducing open source step by step where the departments are ready for it. This also creates the reason for further rollout because people see that it works."

More here from the Document Foundation.

An interview with Brent Toderian:

The fact that you get pockets of urbanism out in the suburbs can be a result of a few things. One, sometimes these pockets are original urban places — traditional towns or villages that stood on their own, initially — that got gobbled up by sprawl. And they’ve become special places within those suburbs. I know so many suburban communities where, if you ask where the best place is, they will name those places, because they’re the places with scale, character, and walkability.

[…]

I’ve worked on New Urbanist projects that are walkable and mixed, and even have some density in their core, but you get to them by getting off the interchange of the highway. The urbanist project is plugged into the big-infrastructure, suburban genetic code.

It’s very difficult to retrofit the growth pattern of cities on a project-by-project basis. You get islands of right in a sea of wrong. It ultimately has to come down to a new system, a new genetic code at a regional scale — which is really hard to do, but important.

[…] 

There’s an old Chinese proverb that says: The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago; the second-best time is now. So wherever you are in the learning curve, stop doing the wrong thing! [laughter]

That’s often the hardest part. It’s easier to start doing the right thing, because you get credit for those things. What’s hard is to stop doing things that don’t match your new vision — building wider roads and more lanes, or building big-box retailing on your periphery. It’s not enough to start doing the right thing, you have to stop doing the wrong thing. 

There is an increasing demand for trans and gender diverse (TGD) health services worldwide. Given the unique and diverse healthcare needs of the TGD community, best practice TGD health services should be community-led. We aimed to understand the healthcare needs of a broad group of TGD Australians, how health professionals could better support TGD people, and gain an understanding of TGD-related research priorities. An anonymous online survey received 928 eligible responses from TGD Australian adults. This paper focuses on three questions out of that survey that allowed for free-text responses. The data were qualitatively coded, and overarching themes were identified for each question. Better training for healthcare professionals and more accessible transgender healthcare were the most commonly reported healthcare needs of participants. Findings highlight a pressing need for better training for healthcare professionals in transgender healthcare. In order to meet the demand for TGD health services, more gender services are needed, and in time, mainstreaming health services in primary care will likely improve accessibility. Evaluation of training strategies and further research into optimal models of TGD care are needed; however, until further data is available, views of the TGD community should guide research priorities and the TGD health service delivery.

Informed consent means that a trans person could access gender-affirming care without any need for mental health  treatment or a lengthy assessment process. This model is routine in the vast majority of all non-transgender medical care. Cisgender people routinely access similar hormonal medications as trans people without a mental health diagnosis for conditions like polycystic ovarian syndrome, precocious puberty, menopause, loss of virility with age, and birth control.

Many doctors worldwide use a gatekeeping approach to gender-affirming care, but the informed consent model for transgender hormone replacement therapy is also widespread in the United States—a map of IC providers created by activist and journalist Erin Reed lists nearly 1,000 such providers in this country. This has been the result of decades of advocacy by the trans community to have our healthcare approached similarly to other comparable treatments. 

[…]

How do we know that informed consent works better? Well, to start, granting trans people significant levels of autonomy over their medical care is in line with the ethics of the medical profession, which directs doctors to engage in shared decision-making and uphold client autonomy whenever possible. As Bryan Murray puts it in a piece for the American Medical Association Journal of Ethics,  “Informed consent is at the heart of shared decision making—a recommended approach to medical treatment decision in which patients actively participate with their doctors.” Scholar Madeleine Lipshie-Williams points out that the gatekeeping mode for gender-affirming care is at odds with how the majority of medicine is practiced in the U.S.: “[the gatekeeping model], which requires medical professionals to provide official opinions on a trangender patient’s readiness to accept and undergo care, stands in contrast to the majority model of medical consent in the US.” Lipshie-Williams also argues that the informed consent framework is preferable because it is necessary for the normalization of trans identities: “there cannot be a depathologizing of transgender identity as long as transgender individuals are required to be seen by mental health specialists to confirm both the validity of their own self-proclaimed identity, as well as their mental fitness to consent to medical interventions that have been broadly accepted as necessary. There is an inherent contradiction in declaring medical care necessary whilst simultaneously maintaining that those for whom it is necessary continue to lack the capacity to consent to this care without assistance.”

Where are downtowns headed? One simple answer is intriguing, if somewhat fanciful: Perhaps they are headed to the suburbs.

They may be headed to places like Tempe, Ariz. In the past four years, in this suburban town of 184,000 that’s 10 miles outside Phoenix, a development has begun to rise that is explicitly trying to re-create downtown vitality and ambience in a seemingly unlikely place. Culdesac Tempe, which has drawn a fair amount of publicity, allows no cars inside its 17-acre expanse. Its goal, when built out, is to contain more than 700 apartments, 16,000 feet of retail commerce and 1,000 residents. “The removal of the car,” writes Robert Steuteville of the Congress for the New Urbanism, “allows for a porous, fine-grain urban pattern with a network of narrow, shaded pedestrian-only paseos, intimate courtyards and a central plaza.”

If you are familiar with the Phoenix area, you may be inclined to dismiss the importance of the development because Tempe is a college town, home to Arizona State University, and towns full of students and faculty are often thought to be entities unto themselves. But that’s not the case with Hampstead, a development gradually taking shape 12 miles outside of Montgomery, Ala. It advertises itself bluntly as an attempt to bring the city to the suburbs. “Imagine living in a community where you can walk to work, where your kids can (really) walk to school,” one brochure exults. The project managers tout “an opportunity for an active lifestyle without even reaching for the car keys.” That’s basically the whole selling job.

[…]

All of the experiments seem pointed, to a large extent, at people under 35 years of age, a group that still desires the density and variety of the center-city lifestyle, even as downtown commercial spaces remain disturbingly empty. And intriguingly, all of this is brewing even though conventional suburban office parks are experiencing worrisome vacancy rates.

All these things have increased housing demand, as have the grab bag of government subsidies for homebuyers: first home owner grants, stamp duty concessions, mortgage deposit guarantee schemes and shared equity schemes.

Saul Eslake sardonically calls them “builders’ and land developers’ profit margin expansion grants”, and notes that once again John Howard’s fingerprints are on them.

“Almost 60 years of history – since Menzies introduced the first home owners’ grant scheme at the instigation of the Young Liberals’ then president, John Howard – shows that anything that allows Australians to pay more for housing than they otherwise would have has resulted in more expensive housing, not in more people owning houses.

“Suppose a first homebuyer can afford to spend $500,000. And then the state government comes along and says, ‘Well, you won’t have to pay $50,000 on stamp duty’, then the homebuyer thinks, ‘Well, okay, I can now afford to spend $550,000.’ Probably buying the same house, because there’ll be someone else with the same stamp duty exemption competing for it.”

While HB 1521 does not apply to private businesses like bars, cafés, grocery stores, restaurants, and shopping malls, one of the law’s many insufficiencies is that the average Floridian doesn’t actually know what it does.

According to sources who spoke with The Daily Beast, that lack of information has resulted in vigilante behavior, in which civilians attempt to enforce the statute in venues where it does not actually apply. They say they have been stopped and questioned while using the locker room at the gym and the bathroom at the gas station, among other places. The double whammy of the harm the law already does—and then how broadly it’s being used to target an already vulnerable population—has made it difficult for trans Floridians to participate in the outside world or go about their day just like everyone else.

Gina Duncan, strategic partnerships manager for Equality Florida, says that the “general public is misinterpreting these bills,” resulting in increased reports of harassment to the statewide LGBTQ+ advocacy group. A trans woman in central Florida, for instance, recently contacted her after she was prevented from using the restroom at a local cinema. Duncan says that the woman reported that a male customer had appointed himself the bathroom monitor, and was “challenging anyone, who in his opinion, appeared to be transgender.”

Last month, the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, Michael Gove MP, announced a new and expanded definition of extremism as part of the Government’s Counter Terrorism Strategy. 

[…]

Extremism is now defined as: “the promotion or advancement of an ideology based on violence, hatred or intolerance, that aims to:

1. Negate or destroy the fundamental rights and freedoms of others; or
2. Undermine, overturn or replace the UK’s system of liberal parliamentary democracy and democratic rights; or
3. Intentionally create a permissive environment for others to achieve the results in (1) or (2).”

While to some this may seem like a reasonable measure to protect against threats to democracy, the imprecise language leaves too much room for interpretation and potential misuse. The third of these – aiming to “intentionally create a permissive environment for others” is especially subjective and problematic: merely stating that legitimate grievances or drivers of extremism need to be tackled could be interpreted as falling within this definition.

[…] 

The new guidance is non-statutory, meaning it will not be enshrined in law and will only affect parliamentarians and civil servants who will no longer be allowed to engage with groups that supposedly meet the new definition. The government’s independent reviewer of state threat legislation, Jonathan Hall KC, has warned that this defines people as extremists by “ministerial decree”.

It is important to ask why the government have renewed their focus on extremism since 7 October, without proposing legislative changes and therefore denying parliamentary scrutiny. This may be because a previous attempt to redefine extremism by the Cameron government, failed to find a “legally robust” definition. However, regardless of how the new definition of extremism is applied, there will, no doubt, be a wider chilling effect on free speech.