RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/the-crisis-of-generation-z/

The youth aren’t doing well — not in America, at least. Even before Covid, experts were ringing the alarm bells about a decade-or-so-long trend of American teens and tweens experiencing a steady uptick in anxiety, depression and self-harm symptoms.

Late last year, US surgeon general Dr. Vivek Murthy published an official advisory attempting to raise awareness of this issue. As the accompanying press release explained, “from 2009 to 2019, the share of high school students who reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness increased by 40 percent, to more than one in three students. Suicidal behaviors among high school students also increased during the decade preceding Covid, with 19 percent seriously considering attempting suicide, a 36 percent increase from 2009 to 2019, and about 16 percent having made a suicide plan in the prior year, a 44 percent increase from 2009 to 2019.” Murthy described the situation as a “dual crisis” — the terrible impact of Covid layered atop an already dire youth-mental-health landscape.

The most viscerally upsetting presentation of the stats I’ve seen is a graphic representation of CDC data for emergency room visits for self-inflicted injuries among 10- to 19-year-olds. It shows a truly jarring and sudden uptick that started in 2009 — a terrifyingly steep line shooting up toward the heavens.

Both sexes are suffering, but the pain hasn’t been distributed equally between them. As the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who has written at length about this phenomenon, put it in testimony he submitted to a congressional subcommittee, “the base rate for mood disorders is always higher for girls than boys, particularly after puberty, which means that a doubling of the rate produces far more additional sick girls than boys… [and] there are some disorders and age groups for which girls are up far more, especially for self-harm, which is a much more common way of manifesting anxiety in girls than in boys.”

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/court-rejects-googles-attempt-to?utm_source=email

A federal district court in California on Friday denied Google’s motion to dismiss a lawsuit alleging that the Silicon Valley giant is violating federal antitrust laws by preventing fair competition against its YouTube video platform. The lawsuit against Google, which has owned YouTube since its 2006 purchase for $1.65 billion, was brought in early 2021 by Rumble, the free speech competitor to YouTube. Its central claim is that Google’s abuse of its monopolistic stranglehold on search engines to destroy all competitors to its various other platforms is illegal under the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, which makes it unlawful to “monopolize, or attempt to monopolize…any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations.”

It is rare for antitrust suits against the four Big Tech corporate giants (Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon) to avoid early motions to dismiss. Friday’s decision against Google ensures that the suit now proceeds to the discovery stage, where Rumble will have the right to obtain from Google a broad and sweeping range of information about its practices, including internal documents on Google’s algorithmic manipulation of its search engine and the onerous requirements it imposes on companies dependent upon its infrastructure to all but force customers to use YouTube.

Founded in 2013, Rumble began experiencing explosive growth in the run-up to the 2020 election. Americans were encountering escalating and aggressive Big Tech censorship of political content as the election approached. Conservative politicians, followed by a wide range of heterodox voices on the right and left, began migrating by the millions away from Google’s YouTube to Rumble, which has promised and provided far more permissive free speech rights. That was at the time when Google and other Big Tech platforms — at the urging of the Democratic-controlled Congress — began aggressively increasing its censorship of political video content on YouTube in the name of combatting “disinformation” and “hate speech.”

The explosive user growth which Rumble enjoyed in 2020 has continued to rapidly increase, as Big Tech generally, and Google specifically, clamped down further on dissident views in the name of the COVID pandemic, and now even more so with respect to the US/NATO role in the war in Ukraine. More and more prominent politicians, journalists and commentators, along with smaller content creators, have either been banned by YouTube or left on their own accord to join Rumble as Google’s crackdown on free speech intensifies. The ability to speak more freely on Rumble regarding the most contentious political debates has become one of the key drivers of the exodus of users from YouTube to Rumble.

https://www.commonsense.news/p/the-beginning-of-the-end-of-gender?utm_source=email

Over the past three decades, the Gender and Identity Development Service at the Tavistock Clinic in London has seen thousands of British children for gender dysphoria, with a British minister noting a more than 4,000 percent increase of referrals for girls alone in the last decade. But on Thursday, Britain’s National Health Service announced that it was closing down Tavistock for good—and, in effect, rebuking the common American medical approach known as “gender-affirming care” for treating children with gender dysphoria. This can include a mix of puberty suppressants, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries, interventions in minors that can lead to irreversible effects.

For years, whistleblowers have rang the alarm about shoddy care at Tavistock. Psychologists who worked there, like Sonia Appleby and Sue Evans, said that vulnerable children were being prematurely rushed to transition. Parents confronted the head of the clinic. A courageous detransitioned woman, Keira Bell, said that kids at Tavistock were unable to understand the ramifications of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. The National Institute for Care and Excellence, a governmental body that creates evidence-based guidelines, found that the link between transitioning and improved psychological function was, in fact, very weak. (The oft-cited justification for childhood transition is that if gender-dysphoric kids are not allowed to transition, they will commit suicide, despite the lack of evidence for this claim.)

And then, the coup de grace: The widely respected pediatrician Dr. Hilary Cass, in an independent study of Britain’s care for transgender children, found that Tavistock’s approach was unsustainable and children were receiving inadequate care. There was, Dr. Cass wrote in her report, “a lack of consensus and open discussion about the nature of gender dysphoria and therefore about the appropriate clinical response,” among many other issues.

The National Health Service is following Cass’s recommendation to shut down Tavistock and replace it with a series of centers in regional hospitals. The bottom line: There will be no more top-down, one-size-fits-all transitioning for kids with gender dysphoria in the UK.

The question is how Americans will react.