A nationwide movement known as “Indonesia Tanpa Pacaran” (Indonesia Without Dating) is also calling for February 14 to be nationally recognised as an anti-dating holiday. The group, which has over 1 million followers on Instagram, advocates the idea that dating goes against Islamic teachings, and is an unnecessary step before marriage.
At a rally on February 9, supporters of the movement carried signs reading, "We support February 14 as Indonesia Without Dating Day," and "Erase dating from Indonesia."
In a letter circulated throughout schools in Bandung, Indonesia’s second-largest city, Hikmat Ginanjar, head of the Department of Education, issued a formal ban on any form of Valentine’s Day celebration.
“[Valentine’s Day] has no place in our culture. It’s incompatible with our religious values. We have sent out letters reminding primary and secondary students of this fact,” Cucu Saputra, Secretary of Bandung’s Department of Education, told local media.
Missing an opportunity to use Valentine’s Day to instead provide students with ample sex education, Saputra mentioned that the youth often celebrate the holiday by hosting alcohol-fueled sex parties. He then declared that Valentine’s Day need not be celebrated in Indonesia, because love should be celebrated every day.
Saputra also delegated the task of enforcing the Valentine’s Day ban to individual schools, leaving much open to interpretation.
Over the past 60-some years, scientists around the world have been writing about this mystery. They've analyzed past studies, combed the wards of psychiatric hospitals, and looked through agencies that treat blind people, trying to find a case.* The readiness potential in the brain, the thing which led Libet to suggest its measurement proves there is no free will, is actually closely connected to breathing:
As time goes on, larger data sets have emerged: In 2018, a study led by a researcher named Vera Morgan at the University of Western Australia looked at nearly half a million children born between 1980 and 2001 and strengthened this negative association. Pollak, a psychiatrist and researcher at King's College London, remembered checking in the mental health facility where he works after learning about it; he too was unable to find a single patient with congenital blindness who had schizophrenia.
Scientists at EPFL in Switzerland have shown that you are more likely to initiate a voluntary decision as you exhale. Published in today's issue of Nature Communications, these findings propose a new angle on an almost 60-year-old neuroscientific debate about free will and the involvement of the human brain.I'm not entirely sure what this means, but it maybe means something....
There remains a controversy in scientific circles today regarding the value of lithium therapy in treating Alzheimer's disease. Much of this stems from the fact that because the information gathered to date has been obtained using a multitude of differential approaches, conditions, formulations, timing and dosages of treatment, results are difficult to compare. In addition, continued treatments with high dosage of lithium render a number of serious adverse effects making this approach impracticable for long term treatments especially in the elderly.In a new study, however, a team of researchers at McGill University led by Dr. Claudio Cuello of the Department of Pharmacology and Therapeutics, has shown that, when given in a formulation that facilitates passage to the brain, lithium in doses up to 400 times lower than what is currently being prescribed for mood disorders is capable of both halting signs of advanced Alzheimer's pathology such as amyloid plaques and of recovering lost cognitive abilities. The findings are published in the most recent edition of the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease....
"Microdoses of lithium at concentrations hundreds of times lower than applied in the clinic for mood disorders were administered at early amyloid pathology stages in the Alzheimer's-like transgenic rat. These results were remarkably positive and were published in 2017 in Translational Psychiatry and they stimulated us to continue working with this approach on a more advanced pathology," notes Dr. Cuello.
Encouraged by these earlier results, the researchers set out to apply the same lithium formulation at later stages of the disease to their transgenic rat modelling neuropathological aspects of Alzheimer's disease. This study found that beneficial outcomes in diminishing pathology and improving cognition can also be achieved at more advanced stages, akin to late preclinical stages of the disease, when amyloid plaques are already present in the brain and when cognition starts to decline.Update: I had a feeling lithium as a possible preventative for dementia had a mention before at this blog. It was back in 2014, referencing a NYT article that was very interesting.
His book focuses heavily on his previously undisclosed struggle with anorexia and a mental breakdown so intense that the Priory psychiatrist Justin Haslam described it as one of the worst cases of clinical depression he had ever seen.
His doctors told him that there was a severe imbalance in his brain chemistry and he was put on high doses of medication. The trigger might have been the split from his wife, and the guilt around not seeing his children, but Eccleston’s problems had been brewing for years. Since childhood, he had suffered from body image problems. He wanted to be androgynous – “Still do, because I feel like a prop forward” – but he knew his mum and dad wouldn’t have tolerated their kid dabbling in eye liner on the streets of working-class Salford, where he grew up.I don't mean to sound rude, but he seems to be disturbed enough to have become a comedian instead of an actor. (It also would not be a complete surprise if he later decides he is transgender.)
“I could do all the male stuff – I was captain of the sports team and I’d get very physical on the field,” he says, “but I also had this interest in femininity. When I did my first play at Eccles college, Lock Up Your Daughters, I wore mascara and I was like: ‘This is fucking brilliant!’ I was expressing on the outside what I felt on the inside.”
He was never confused about his sexuality, although he says he has always appreciated male beauty. His relationship with his male friends had always been especially intimate, too: “It’s a terrible word, but there were suspicions,” he says, “because of how we were together.”
The right thing to do. No one can stop Trump from handing out corrupt pardons to his sleazy cronies but a prosecutor can and should refuse to revisit what he believes is the proper sentencing recommendation just because it gave the president the sads. People should keep resigning until Bill Barr himself has to go into court and inform the judge personally that he’s been notified by a tweet that the original sentence was too harsh.
“Irony and Outrage: The Polarized Landscape of Rage, Fear, and Laughter in the United States,” is all about how conservatives and liberals not only are drawn to different kinds of media, but tend to have different kinds of psychological makeup.Here's what she says:
Waldman: What are the key differences in psychological profiles that correlate with whether you’re a liberal or a conservative?
I have mixed feelings about this: I think it seems to describe the psychological state of conservatives now - especially American conservatives; but it seems to me it was not always as pronounced as this. I tend to be more interested in the question - how did conservatives go so nuts?Young: The traits that we’re talking about relate to how individuals engage with threats in their world, meaning how much are you monitoring your environment for threats and how much are you cognizant of your own mortality?So that's where this trait “need for cognition” comes into play: that you enjoy thinking. The other one at the center of this is a tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty. If you don't perceive your world to be scary and dangerous, you are not going to be as motivated to process things efficiently because you're not always worried about your survival. And you would not be uncomfortable with situations or texts that are ambiguous.Need for cognition is something that we find is significantly lower amongst social and cultural conservatives. They are more likely to seek order, predictability and routine in their lives. This also translates into how they think about ambiguous texts.And it’s quite intuitive that people who are drawn to abstract art, wild jazz music and stories in literature that are absurd or that don’t resolve — like the plot doesn’t tie up in the end — the kinds of people who are drawn to those things and who enjoy those things are higher in tolerance for ambiguity and they’re higher in need for cognition. They also tend to be liberal.Waldman: So Fox News or conservative talk radio isn’t just about being angry, it’s also about threats.Young: It’s about identifying people, institutions, parties and policies that pose a threat. It’s also about the aesthetic package of that genre, which is didactic and clear. You are never confused about where Sean Hannity stands on an issue. You’re never like, “Oh, that was rather layered. What could he actually mean?”Waldman: “Getting” the joke is also important to people who like satire. Explain what that’s about.Young: The kind of satire that really exemplifies this processing is irony, because irony is saying the opposite of what you intend. This is what humor scholars call incongruity, because there are two competing elements, and it’s the audience who makes sense of them and brings them together.This is something that is really taxing cognitively. Not only are some people not good at it, some people just don’t enjoy it. It’s like riddle solving, where you as the audience are adding something to be able to then understand it.
My father was unfaithful, a philanderer, a serial shagger; there are many words for what he was when terms such as ‘consensual nonmonogamy’ or ‘polyamory’ were not yet in popular use. Adultery is a shameful word, a transgression from the sanctity of marriage; like ‘cheating’, ‘infidelity’ and ‘unfaithfulness’, it is not morally neutral. It derives from the Latin word adulteritas, meaning contamination. It’s no surprise that my father lied about his liaisons in his 12-year marriage to my mother, though he once boasted to his sister – true or false – that there had been 500 affairs. He took pride in being humorously subversive, doing nothing to hide his inappropriate comments to passing women when my brother and I, just children, watched wide-eyed from the back seat of his fancy car.After he finally left his wife and 2 children, he made a return with a surprising proposal:
He went to India with his new girlfriend and was blessed by his guru, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, who put a mala round his neck and gave him a new name. The cult encouraged sexual promiscuity and cast monogamy as merely a social construct. The words adultery and infidelity were not muttered in the dusty pathways between meditation and darshan, when disciples gathered to hear their guru speak. My father had found himself an affirmative culture. He had found his people.But the main reason I thought it worth posting about the essay is this part of it:
On his return six months later, he told my brother and I that he had been reborn. He was cleansed of the past. He introduced my mother to his girlfriend – the three of them seated on the sofa in our living room – and asked if they could both move into the family home, she in the basement, my dad back in my mother’s bed. He wanted to pirouette like a happy prince between his two women. In pure polyamory style, my father asked for my mother’s consent. She stood up and passed him his green fedora hat. ‘You must be joking,’ she said.
‘What if the affair had nothing to do with you?’ Perel asks her clients. In her work with couples who are dealing with the fallout of infidelity, one motivation that crops up a lot is self-discovery, a quest for a new or lost identity. In my father’s case, there was boarding school from the age of seven. From the intimate safety of his mother’s love, he was flung to a place where he had to abide by new rules along with hundreds of other little boys. No one looking out for you, no familial soil in which to grow.I have always thought that boarding school from a young age would be emotionally harmful, but I have never felt sure whether I was just projecting from what I am sure would have been my own poor reaction if ever it had been proposed that I had to leave home for schooling. I wonder if it has been more broadly studied, or if that book is the only one on the topic?
In Boarding School Syndrome: The Psychological Trauma of the ‘Privileged Child’ (2015), the British psychoanalyst Joy Schaverein recognises a set of patterns of behaviour among people, such as my father, who have been sent away to prep school, including an inability to recognise emotions in one’s self and in others, to talk about feelings, and to form durable close relationships: all revolving around problems with intimacy. The boys are so young when they lose their primary attachment that they haven’t yet learned the right words to articulate their feelings. ‘There are no words to adequately express the feeling state and so a shell is formed to protect the vulnerable self from emotion that cannot be processed,’ writes Schaverein.
From the certainties of home life, my dad was thrown into an anarchy where the older boys bullied those who were younger or vulnerable. As an adult, my father confessed to his sister that he had been raped. He was certainly coerced into sex games between the boys, all of them abandoned and rudderless. He grew into puberty with very little privacy, and only limited outlets for his natural curiosity. Is this what distorted his relationship to sex? Sex as power, sex as escape? It was euphoric to win over beautiful strangers. In that moment, everything felt right.
First off, it’s hardly just Americans who don’t like subtitles. No one likes subtitles. They’re only common in markets where film revenues aren’t high enough for studios to recoup the cost of producing dubbed versions.This sounds, of course, like he's saying that he prefers dubbing to subtitles.
A Sydney psychiatrist who posted “bizarre” alt-right conspiracy theories he claimed were the directives of US President Donald Trump to his practice’s official website has been struck off the medical register.
The Dee Why doctor Russell Everard McGregor claimed Trump had taped evidence of a global Satanist paedophile network, that 9/11 was faked, and that the ABC was part of an international deep state network covering up the crimes of the elite.
Many of the 300-plus posts from 2018 onwards related to the debunked QAnon conspiracy that suggests Trump is leading a crusade against “deep state” forces who protect satanic paedophile rings.
“Fight with your keyboard, knowledge and pen,” McGregor wrote in one post in January 2018.
“Follow Q breadcrumbs on 8chan.
“The evil truth will be hard for most to bear. Be brave. Seek loved ones and offer compassion to friends and family.”
Taylor has “unreservedly” apologised to Moore for relying on the falsified figures but has denied consistently that either he, or anyone in his office, altered the City of Sydney document to inflate travel expenditure. Taylor has said the document with the incorrect numbers was obtained from the council website.
But the council has produced evidence showing that its publicly available annual reports has only ever contained accurate figures. Metadata and screenshots from the council’s content management system showed the annual reports on its website had not been changed since they were originally uploaded.
The hazards are psychological as well as physical. One paper on the psychological harm suffered by slaughterhouse employees in the US noted that abattoir workers
view, on a daily basis, large-scale violence and death that most of the American population will never have to encounter.There’s even a form of post-traumatic stress disorder linked to repetitive killing: Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress (PITS). Symptoms can include depression, paranoia, panic and dissociation.
Another study noted relatively high levels of anxiety, anger, hostility and psychoticism among slaughterhouse workers. Symptoms can also include violent dreams and some workers seek treatment similar to that used to help war veterans....
Surprisingly, Flinders University research has found female abattoir workers had higher propensities for aggression – particularly physical and verbal – than their male colleagues. The study had a small sample size, but pointed to the need for more nuanced research into meatworkers, including gender differences.
The work is monotonous and unrelenting. Author Timothy Pachirat, who wrote about his time working at a slaughterhouse in the US, notes
the reality that the work of the slaughterhouse centers around killing evaporates into a routinized, almost hallucinatory blur. By the end of the day […] it hardly matters what is being cut, shorn, sliced, shredded, hung, or washed: all that matters is that the day is once again, finally coming to a close.Author Gail Eisnitz, who researched the industry for a book, quoted a slaughterhouse worker as saying:
Down in the blood pit they say that the smell of blood makes you aggressive. And it does. You get an attitude that if that hog kicks at me, I’m going to get even. You’re already going to kill the hog, but that’s not enough. It has to suffer.
