kai
@firedust.bsky.social
philosophy & psychotherapy | leftism | mostly retweets.
Reposted by kai
I think this prediction is holding up pretty well, and maybe I should have noted the failure of the Turn Charlie Kirk Into A Martyr moment might have been the pinnacle of the phenomenon. In some deep way I think the New Right Loser Men fail to understand what state power can and can't do for them.
November 20, 2025 at 8:23 AM
I think this prediction is holding up pretty well, and maybe I should have noted the failure of the Turn Charlie Kirk Into A Martyr moment might have been the pinnacle of the phenomenon. In some deep way I think the New Right Loser Men fail to understand what state power can and can't do for them.
Reposted by kai
Olivia's comment reminds me of Kołakowski's 'law of infinite cornucopia': 'there is never a shortage of arguments to support any doctrine you want to believe in for whatever reasons'.
Generalising this, this includes how we interpret the utterances of others to make them sound 'reasonable' to us
Generalising this, this includes how we interpret the utterances of others to make them sound 'reasonable' to us
November 19, 2025 at 8:41 AM
Olivia's comment reminds me of Kołakowski's 'law of infinite cornucopia': 'there is never a shortage of arguments to support any doctrine you want to believe in for whatever reasons'.
Generalising this, this includes how we interpret the utterances of others to make them sound 'reasonable' to us
Generalising this, this includes how we interpret the utterances of others to make them sound 'reasonable' to us
Reposted by kai
AI medical scribes MUST include consent, extreme privacy guardrails, and realistic evaluations — none of which are really true for the systems currently (and extensively!) in use. Otherwise this is just another step in a long parade of clinicians, researchers, and medical systems abusing patients.
My provider used ai to take notes #therapy #psychiatrist #ai #artificialintelligence
TikTok video by kathleenorlaith
www.tiktok.com
November 9, 2025 at 4:07 PM
AI medical scribes MUST include consent, extreme privacy guardrails, and realistic evaluations — none of which are really true for the systems currently (and extensively!) in use. Otherwise this is just another step in a long parade of clinicians, researchers, and medical systems abusing patients.
Reposted by kai
Day 27 of #septempera - the connoisseur.
September 27, 2025 at 6:07 PM
Day 27 of #septempera - the connoisseur.
Reposted by kai
I liked this piece by Lily Hu. (Though I don't like the use of "positivist", of course!) In general I think the interesting political fights are about what can be changed and how, and that a lot of the discussion re polls just misses the forest for the trees.
www.bostonreview.net/articles/how...
www.bostonreview.net/articles/how...
How to Lie with (Political) Statistics - Boston Review
Inside the data wars over Democratic strategy.
www.bostonreview.net
September 16, 2025 at 5:13 PM
I liked this piece by Lily Hu. (Though I don't like the use of "positivist", of course!) In general I think the interesting political fights are about what can be changed and how, and that a lot of the discussion re polls just misses the forest for the trees.
www.bostonreview.net/articles/how...
www.bostonreview.net/articles/how...
Reposted by kai
New research published in The Lancet finds that Western unilateral sanctions have caused 38 million deaths since 1970. The average death toll ranges from 400,000 to over 1 million per year.
Staggering levels of violence. This system is intolerable and must be replaced.
Staggering levels of violence. This system is intolerable and must be replaced.
September 15, 2025 at 7:35 PM
New research published in The Lancet finds that Western unilateral sanctions have caused 38 million deaths since 1970. The average death toll ranges from 400,000 to over 1 million per year.
Staggering levels of violence. This system is intolerable and must be replaced.
Staggering levels of violence. This system is intolerable and must be replaced.
Reposted by kai
It’s baffling to me that so much of the U.S. (and the world) has decided that letting their kids get sick at school all the time (and spread illness to their parents and everyone else) is preferable to just … adequately cleaning indoor air
August 29, 2025 at 2:40 PM
It’s baffling to me that so much of the U.S. (and the world) has decided that letting their kids get sick at school all the time (and spread illness to their parents and everyone else) is preferable to just … adequately cleaning indoor air
Reposted by kai
wrote about thomas chatterton williams www.vulture.com/article/post...
Zero Tolerance
Five years after the George Floyd protests, many liberals blame “wokeness” for stifling open debate. So why can’t they handle being disagreed with?
www.vulture.com
August 5, 2025 at 12:30 PM
wrote about thomas chatterton williams www.vulture.com/article/post...
Reposted by kai
I have been saying this for years. The qualitative evidence has long pointed towards trans women and AMAB non-binary people coming out later in life - on average - than other trans people.
Every bit of moral panic about trans boys coming out young also betrays a deep transmisogyny.
Every bit of moral panic about trans boys coming out young also betrays a deep transmisogyny.
3 Aug 25 - New study shows vast "over-representation of trans boys" turns out to be vast _under-representation_ of trans girls bec. they: a) come out ~10 years later; b) start puberty later; & c) delay transitioning longer because of deep social animus towards AMAB femininity.
tinyurl.com/yrwvmxws
tinyurl.com/yrwvmxws
August 4, 2025 at 9:04 AM
I have been saying this for years. The qualitative evidence has long pointed towards trans women and AMAB non-binary people coming out later in life - on average - than other trans people.
Every bit of moral panic about trans boys coming out young also betrays a deep transmisogyny.
Every bit of moral panic about trans boys coming out young also betrays a deep transmisogyny.
Reposted by kai
Interesting read and to Liam's testament, the clarity with which is dissects a usually amorphous pejorative like "woke" has led to fruitful conversation! My own thoughts: The distinction between wokeness as egalitarianism & wokeness as a professional-managerial method within egalitarianism is big.1/
My Retrospective on Wokeness in detail! Blogs are for just saying stuff, after all. So here is my attempt to say what was distinctive (if anything) about a recent era of socio-cultural life, what (if anything) changed, and what (if anything) was to the good
sootyempiric.blogspot.com/2025/08/woke...
sootyempiric.blogspot.com/2025/08/woke...
Wokeness: a Retrospective
In recent times my online sphere has had a fair few people make the claim that, in some sense, the culture has moved on from Woke. The d...
sootyempiric.blogspot.com
August 1, 2025 at 11:29 AM
Interesting read and to Liam's testament, the clarity with which is dissects a usually amorphous pejorative like "woke" has led to fruitful conversation! My own thoughts: The distinction between wokeness as egalitarianism & wokeness as a professional-managerial method within egalitarianism is big.1/
Reposted by kai
Gaztambide offers a helpful comparison in the introduction to his People’s History of Psychoanalysis between the way that “fatalism” among oppressed & marginalized communities is addressed as a clinical problem by multicultural psychology & liberation psychology (as theorized by Ignacio Martín-Baró)
August 1, 2025 at 6:54 PM
Gaztambide offers a helpful comparison in the introduction to his People’s History of Psychoanalysis between the way that “fatalism” among oppressed & marginalized communities is addressed as a clinical problem by multicultural psychology & liberation psychology (as theorized by Ignacio Martín-Baró)
Reposted by kai
Check out this new exciting work by @francesghart.bsky.social! We find that contra-hedonic functions of NSSI & eating disorder behaviors are not just present but *prevalent*.
In other words: sometimes people engage in self-destructive behaviors not to escape negative emotions, but to amplify them.
In other words: sometimes people engage in self-destructive behaviors not to escape negative emotions, but to amplify them.
(4/6) We found that: (1) contra-hedonic functions are not just present but prevalent, (2) contra-hedonic functions are most common for NSSI, and (3) contra-hedonic functions are consistently associated with a desire to self-punish.
July 25, 2025 at 6:47 PM
Check out this new exciting work by @francesghart.bsky.social! We find that contra-hedonic functions of NSSI & eating disorder behaviors are not just present but *prevalent*.
In other words: sometimes people engage in self-destructive behaviors not to escape negative emotions, but to amplify them.
In other words: sometimes people engage in self-destructive behaviors not to escape negative emotions, but to amplify them.
Reposted by kai
I don't give a fuck if a piece of media depicts sexual violence, which is a flexible, expansive concept. Men are violent because our entire political culture enables them to be, not because 'evil' fiction corrupted them. When fascists come at you with a wedge issue you say "no," not "yes, and."
July 25, 2025 at 12:52 AM
I don't give a fuck if a piece of media depicts sexual violence, which is a flexible, expansive concept. Men are violent because our entire political culture enables them to be, not because 'evil' fiction corrupted them. When fascists come at you with a wedge issue you say "no," not "yes, and."
Reposted by kai
"In contemporary therapy research the dominance of clinical trials has all but dissolved theoretical debates, instead focusing almost solely on which therapeutic interventions can best alleviate the symptoms of mental disorder"
Sahanika Ratnayake discusses the intersection between cognitive-behavioural therapy and evidence-based health research.
thepolyphony.org/2025/06/04/t...
thepolyphony.org/2025/06/04/t...
The Collision of Talking Therapy and Evidence Based Medicine
Sahanika Ratnayake discusses the intersection between cognitive-behavioural therapy and evidence-based medicine in health research.
thepolyphony.org
June 4, 2025 at 11:46 AM
"In contemporary therapy research the dominance of clinical trials has all but dissolved theoretical debates, instead focusing almost solely on which therapeutic interventions can best alleviate the symptoms of mental disorder"
Reposted by kai
This is junk science that will hurt people: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
July 13, 2025 at 7:44 PM
This is junk science that will hurt people: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Reposted by kai
In our preprint "Limited evidence for reduced learning rate adaptation in anxious-depression, before or after treatment", led by @stephsuddell.bsky.social and Lili Zhang, we fail to find a robust association between anxious-depression and learning rate adaptation
osf.io/preprints/ps...
osf.io/preprints/ps...
June 18, 2025 at 1:16 PM
In our preprint "Limited evidence for reduced learning rate adaptation in anxious-depression, before or after treatment", led by @stephsuddell.bsky.social and Lili Zhang, we fail to find a robust association between anxious-depression and learning rate adaptation
osf.io/preprints/ps...
osf.io/preprints/ps...
Reposted by kai
Love is all too often the reason we give when we don’t act to stop bad things, big or small. Nonetheless the global precariat sometimes does take the risk of combating violence, without knowing what is on the other side. This, too, is theorized everywhere as love. lareviewofbooks.org/article/an-u...
An Unkillable Streak of the Utopian | Los Angeles Review of Books
Sophie Lewis considers Keiran Goddard’s “I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning.”
lareviewofbooks.org
June 14, 2025 at 11:51 AM
Love is all too often the reason we give when we don’t act to stop bad things, big or small. Nonetheless the global precariat sometimes does take the risk of combating violence, without knowing what is on the other side. This, too, is theorized everywhere as love. lareviewofbooks.org/article/an-u...
Reposted by kai
it has never been more over for evo psych than it is right now. this was all i had left, and it's gone, it's fucking gone
June 11, 2025 at 10:47 AM
it has never been more over for evo psych than it is right now. this was all i had left, and it's gone, it's fucking gone
Reposted by kai
I think it is actually quite a striking feature of contemporary analytic philosophy that a non-trivial amount of time is spent arguing about the appropriate immediate emotional reaction to micro-fictions.
June 2, 2025 at 7:54 AM
I think it is actually quite a striking feature of contemporary analytic philosophy that a non-trivial amount of time is spent arguing about the appropriate immediate emotional reaction to micro-fictions.
Reposted by kai
Remembered this and how gender fascism is just another localised, historically and culturally contingent manifestation of fascism—it is gender-first fascism, but not *exclusively* so, and its other manifestations and permutations will inevitably rise up when given sufficient space to grow and feed
May 28, 2025 at 10:31 AM
Remembered this and how gender fascism is just another localised, historically and culturally contingent manifestation of fascism—it is gender-first fascism, but not *exclusively* so, and its other manifestations and permutations will inevitably rise up when given sufficient space to grow and feed
Reposted by kai
I'm of the opinion that you should be absolutist in your moral principles about policy. local, so-called strategic compromise with reaction is the first step that leads to the fascist hell we now live in
IMO unless you are very particular kinda person (say, employed as an electoral strategist for someone seeking office) it's not really worth worrying about the electoral calculus of standing on this or that principle. You're very probably just not electorally significant either way.
April 19, 2025 at 12:48 AM
I'm of the opinion that you should be absolutist in your moral principles about policy. local, so-called strategic compromise with reaction is the first step that leads to the fascist hell we now live in
Reposted by kai
Video obtained by my colleague Farnaz Fassihi shows how the IDF deliberately attacked, over several minutes, a convoy of ambulances and other emergency vehicles in #Gaza. #Israel wrongly claimed that the vehicles drove without emergency signals and headlights. www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/w...
Video Shows Aid Workers Killed in Gaza Under Gunfire Barrage, With Ambulance Lights On (Gift Article)
The U.N. has said Israel killed the workers. The video appears to contradict Israel’s version of the incident, which described the vehicles as “advancing suspiciously” without headlights or emergency ...
www.nytimes.com
April 5, 2025 at 12:50 AM
Video obtained by my colleague Farnaz Fassihi shows how the IDF deliberately attacked, over several minutes, a convoy of ambulances and other emergency vehicles in #Gaza. #Israel wrongly claimed that the vehicles drove without emergency signals and headlights. www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/w...
Reposted by kai
A good summary of the right-wing ‘intellectuals’—motivated by personal grievance and vendettas against perceived conspiracies of secret leftist and Jewish elites, alliances with white supremacists and tech billionaires for spoils and lucre, anti-science and anti-democracy thinking. That’s them
Grievances such as "I was fired for sleeping with undergraduates," "I was suspended after years of racist comments, some directly about my students," "I was uninvited from a lecture after comparing BLM to Nazis," "The university didn't discipline a grad student who criticized me on Twitter."
March 2, 2025 at 1:41 PM
A good summary of the right-wing ‘intellectuals’—motivated by personal grievance and vendettas against perceived conspiracies of secret leftist and Jewish elites, alliances with white supremacists and tech billionaires for spoils and lucre, anti-science and anti-democracy thinking. That’s them
Reposted by kai
Time to tap that self-promotion sign.
When we asked people what % of people can be reasonably called 'racist', the mean is ~30 on a 0-100 scale, with wide variation. Ordinary people don't seem to use 'racist' in a way that implies racists are vanishingly rare.
philpapers.org/rec/HANMCI
When we asked people what % of people can be reasonably called 'racist', the mean is ~30 on a 0-100 scale, with wide variation. Ordinary people don't seem to use 'racist' in a way that implies racists are vanishingly rare.
philpapers.org/rec/HANMCI
February 24, 2025 at 10:41 PM
Time to tap that self-promotion sign.
When we asked people what % of people can be reasonably called 'racist', the mean is ~30 on a 0-100 scale, with wide variation. Ordinary people don't seem to use 'racist' in a way that implies racists are vanishingly rare.
philpapers.org/rec/HANMCI
When we asked people what % of people can be reasonably called 'racist', the mean is ~30 on a 0-100 scale, with wide variation. Ordinary people don't seem to use 'racist' in a way that implies racists are vanishingly rare.
philpapers.org/rec/HANMCI
Reposted by kai
Brendan Moore's psychoanalytic and deconstructive reading of the fears of social media among parents and doctors is an example of the kind of theoretically informed writing about contemporary culture and politics that The OLR Supplement aims to feature.
olrsupplement.com/2025/01/16/t...
olrsupplement.com/2025/01/16/t...
![Indeed, it’s worth asking whether doctors are not themselves unduly predisposed (contagiously triggered) by media exposure to inquire about a social media cause for these recently developed violent tics, and a biological cause in less explosive tics. The theory of social contagion is everywhere in this reporting, which is predictable, because, as far as metaphors go, social contagion is quite contagious. Its descriptive powers, appealing but vacuous, are applied to phenomena as various as obesity, autism, trans identity, criminality and now tics. Having a fat friend, according to this logic, is enough to make one fat,[11] while having a trans friend will make one’s child trans.[12] What is curious here is not that humans are assumed to be affected by their relationships with others, but that this relationality is being defined as pathological in a special way. Somewhere, it is implied, there are forms of embodiment and identities which inhere and suffice in themselves—but not the tics and trans identities of my/our children.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:ykogj6vcfefcnbu4mpjz64bb/bafkreic3fxt55662b5zy6kjkvq7t35dm5xj3svjxsprvk2d26jofb3movu@jpeg)
![If contagiousness is already there at the beginning of—is the beginning of—psychic life, then it is responsible as much for what goes right as for what goes wrong. TikToks about mental health, for example, like those counseling vagus nerve stimulation for unspecified feelings of emotional distress, are there to make us feel less alone through the dual balm of the quick fix delivered by the comforting friend. The warm therapist or the fellow traveler-in-trauma gives us an insight (memorising the sound of someone’s footsteps is a hold-over from childhood trauma) or a hack (take ice baths, abolish capitalism), but what they are offering above all is themselves. As one empirically backed theory of psychotherapeutic action suggests, it is the relationship that cures rather than any specific technique. This can happen only by contagiousness, by the patient’s capacity to imbibe the therapist and the therapist’s ability to make themselves available to such introjection.[13] That contagiousness operates not only from ego to ego, but from unconscious to unconscious—that is to say, it evidently does not just obey the simple rules of monkey see, monkey do. What exactly gets transmitted is always a surprise.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:ykogj6vcfefcnbu4mpjz64bb/bafkreidge4uh7m4di22ef4bbwrzf5zxazhbl4oionntvfaklsvxs6p3ffe@jpeg)
February 3, 2025 at 5:38 PM
Brendan Moore's psychoanalytic and deconstructive reading of the fears of social media among parents and doctors is an example of the kind of theoretically informed writing about contemporary culture and politics that The OLR Supplement aims to feature.
olrsupplement.com/2025/01/16/t...
olrsupplement.com/2025/01/16/t...