David 6395

Scottish, getting on a bit. Lefty, republican.

[The White Bear @ScotsWhiteBear]

To give you an idea of how British politics has degraded into deranged radical-right lunacy, just consider what the public reaction would have been had a politician in the 60s or 70s proposed the following:

[No Red Text @NoRedText]

You can be very well assured that absolutely every troon who complains about the infographic has not read it, given it addresses every single one of their objections from the outset.

It is the result of an exhaustive count of the prison population.

https://t.co/6KmCe9oNjO

[Helen Joyce @HJoyceGender]

This whole thread is brilliant. But this is the single most extraordinary stat: if women committed serious offences at the same rate as men who ID as women do (using Scottish figs), more than 10,000 women would be in jail for such crimes. In reality there are just 77.

[🎩Laird of the Manor🎩 @LairdOfThManor]

A small public service announcement from the Department of Things That You Should Know…

It has not “peeked” your interest.
Nor has it “peaked” your interest.

…It has piqued your interest.

You are not “phased” by something.
You are fazed by it.

If you’ve had a long day, you are weary.
If you suspect someone is an idiot, you are wary.

It is “due course”, not “do course”.
“Per se”, not “per say”.

And while we’re here, it’s “could have”, not “could of”, but that particular battle may already be lost.

Thank you for your attention during this brief outbreak of grammatical housekeeping.

This has been a @LairdofthManor announcement.🎩💙

[David 6395 @brienger1]

@bbc5live AI will not create jobs. It will bring everything to some manner of dread idiocy. Generic answers, no subtlety. The most common notions raised to the status of that which is right. There is no hope.

[Relearning Economics @RelearningEcon]

The strangest criticism of Keynesian economics is the claim that government spending cannot create wealth because it only redistributes existing money.

By that logic, no investment creates wealth. Building a factory merely redistributes money to construction workers. Hiring engineers merely redistributes money to engineers.

The point is not the money. The point is what the money mobilizes.

When an economy has unemployed workers, idle factories, and unused resources, the problem is not a lack of productive capacity. The problem is a lack of spending to activate that capacity.

A dollar spent hiring an unemployed worker does not simply transfer income. It increases output. The worker now produces goods and services that did not exist before.

Wealth is not money. Wealth is production.

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A Russian psychologist spent 10 years proving that the act of talking to yourself out loud is one of the most powerful cognitive tools the human brain has, and almost nobody outside his field has read the work.

His name was Lev Vygotsky.

He worked in Moscow in the 1920s and died of tuberculosis in 1934 at the age of 37. He had no laboratory, no funding, almost no English readers, and a body of work that the Soviet government suppressed for two decades after he died.

He produced the foundational theory of how human cognition actually develops, and the central piece of that theory was a behavior almost every adult is faintly embarrassed about.

Vygotsky noticed that young children talk to themselves constantly. They narrate their own actions, they argue with imaginary opponents, they instruct themselves through tasks out loud.

The dominant theory at the time, from the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, said this was a sign of cognitive immaturity that children would eventually grow out of as they learned to think properly.

Vygotsky said the exact opposite.

He argued that this self-directed speech was the most important cognitive event in the entire developmental window, because it was the moment a child first started to use language as a tool to control their own mind. The child was not failing to think. The child was learning how to think by externalizing the process and listening to themselves do it.

He predicted that as children matured, this out-loud self-talk would not disappear. It would go underground. It would become silent inner speech, which is the running monologue every adult has inside their own head for the rest of their life.

The voice you hear when you read this sentence is the direct descendant of a four-year-old narrating their own block tower.

For 50 years almost nobody outside Russia had access to his work, and the few researchers who did pick it up could not get funding to test it. Then in the early 2000s the experiments finally started to pile up, and what they found was that Vygotsky had been right about something even more important than he knew.

The first major study came from Gary Lupyan at the University of Wisconsin and Daniel Swingley at the University of Pennsylvania in 2012. They ran a simple visual search experiment. Participants were shown 20 images at once and asked to find a specific object, like a banana or a chair. In one condition they searched silently. In the other condition they were told to say the name of the object out loud to themselves while looking for it.

The participants who spoke the target name out loud found the object significantly faster, with higher accuracy, than the participants who searched in silence. The effect was strongest when the spoken word matched a familiar object the brain already had a strong category for.

Saying the word out loud literally tuned the visual system to detect that thing better. The researchers called it the label feedback effect, and the implication was that the act of vocalizing a goal physically changes how the brain processes the world while pursuing it.

The second major study came out of the University of Michigan and Michigan State in 2017. The lead researchers were Ethan Kross and Jason Moser, and they used both EEG and fMRI to record what happens inside the brain when people talk to themselves while emotionally upset.

They asked participants to recall painful autobiographical memories and reflect on them in two different ways. Some used the first person, saying things like "why am I feeling this way." Others used the third person, referring to themselves by their own name, saying things like "why is John feeling this way."

The brain scans showed that the simple act of switching from first person to third person, even silently, decreased activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, the region responsible for rumination and self-referential pain. Within a single second of using their own name instead of the word I, participants showed measurably lower emotional reactivity. The shift required no extra cognitive effort. It cost the brain nothing. And it worked.

Kross described the mechanism in his interviews. Talking to yourself by name creates a small amount of psychological distance from your own experience. Your brain processes the situation more like a problem belonging to someone else, which means it can analyze it instead of drowning in it.

What Vygotsky had intuited in 1934 turned out to be even more powerful than the developmental theory he built it into. The voice you use to talk to yourself is not background noise. It is one of the most precise cognitive tools the brain has, and you can change how it works just by changing the pronoun you use.

People who talk through problems out loud are not anxious or unstable. They are running an externalized version of a process the rest of us are running silently and worse. The kindergartener narrating their block tower, the surgeon muttering through a procedure, the engineer pacing a hallway describing a bug to nobody, the athlete repeating a cue to themselves before a free throw, they are all using the same ancient mechanism that builds and steers human thought.

You can run the experiment yourself the next time you are stuck on something hard. Stop trying to solve it silently in your head. Say it out loud. Describe what you are seeing. Walk yourself through the steps as if you were explaining it to a colleague who is not in the room.

And when something genuinely upsets you, switch to your own name. Ask why this person is feeling this way, instead of why I am feeling this way.

The voice you have been told to keep quiet your entire life is one of the oldest pieces of cognitive technology you own.

Most people are still embarrassed to use it.

[les paul junior 🍔🍺🎸🚍🐕 @lespauljunior3]

@SimplyShae13 https://t.co/m0iepPkRiA

There are more victims of trans murderers than there are trans homicide victims.

The eleven victims in the last 16 years.

Either johns, partners, drug dealer or family.

Stick to the facts. The hyperbole helps nobody.

[Stats For Gender @statsforgender]

Medical records of 10,270 trans-identified patients found 58% had at least 1 psychiatric diagnosis. This compares to just 13.6% of patients without trans identities. Trans-identified patients showed greater prevalence of every psychiatric condition queried
https://t.co/raZCuVSCef

[David 6395 @brienger1]

It would be great if you fired out some World Cup toons @BellBelltoons. These two still make me laugh.....

[David 6395 @brienger1]

@4HumanUnity @Acyn Any country that executes people is not civilised.

[Professor Alice Sullivan @ProfAliceS]

Prof Michael Biggs and Dr Ace North @hedgehognothog

Transgender Homicides in Britain, 2000-2025: Victims and Perpetrators

"Almost all cases involved natal males identifying as transwomen. The victim-perpetrator ratio among these individuals closely resembles that for males overall and differs markedly from that for females. BBC News published more than four times as many articles on transgender victims as on perpetrators, contributing to perceptions of exceptional vulnerability."

https://t.co/LhBNNUwMy0

[Stats For Gender @statsforgender]

Finnish registry data shows that after adjustment, gender-referred adolescents were 3 to 6 times more likely to require psychiatric care than the control group. This elevated level of psychiatric need persisted even when compared with matched peers.

https://t.co/vES3smKdhB

[Emma Hilton @FondOfBeetles]

If you grow male brain neurones and female brain neurones on a plate, then subject them to injury via stretching, the female neurones "break" earlier and the male neurones recover quicker, because they activate a stronger and more efficient inflammatory response.

Female brains are more fragile under injury conditions, and they don't recover as well.

[EllenMaybeRipley @maybe_ellen]

Here's a list of transwomen who have raped, harassed, tortured and murdered women and girls, some of them in female spaces. These are the people whose right to be in female spaces TRAs are fighting for.

Michael Maria Pentholm, Karen White, Katie Dolatowski, Jessica Winfield, Tara Desousa, Janiah Monroe, Kristen Lukess, Lisa Hauxwell, Laken McKay, Aliea Rose Brown, Paula Witherspoon, Davina Ayrton, Johanna Wolf, Hanna Tubbs, Christopher Hambrook, Dakota Nieves, Tarah Jo Morgan, Marie Dean, Jessica Brennan, Rachel Smith, Marcia Walker, Synthia China Blast, Michelle Winter, Paris Bregazzi, Melissa Wilson, Barbie Kardashian, Jessica Smith, Wolfgang Schmidtd, Chloe Thompson, Denen Anderson, Kadence Pinder, Beth Hannay, Leah Harvey, Julie Marshall, Blaine Maney, Amber Thorden, Evi Amati, Babs Longmire, Rachel Fenton, Jorven Seren, Claire Goodier, Kim Marie Johannson, Steven Hayes, Jacinta Brooks, Alexander Eshawn Lions, Ashley Winter, Steph Ricciardi, Vicky Green, Ella Davies, Melissa Addis, Madilyn Harks, Jessica Marie Hann, Michelle Martinez, Nicole Summers, Shauna Patricia Smith, Evelyn Young, Claire Goodier, Allison Woolbert, Nur Ahmed, Vyvyenne Ward, Laura McCann, Lisa Jones, Rayne Aloysius Constantine Rose Bennett, Louise Foord, Robert Glanowski, Lily Bate, Alyssa Celusta, Sora Kuykendall, Lydia Helena Vision, Ava Jones, Alex Ray Scott, Diego Melendez, Paris Green, Tiffany Scott, Zoe Lynes, Vicky Green, Pauline Long, Chloe Walker, Toni Prince, Lana Laws, Christyl Knight, Carrie Cooper, Jasmine Hill, Diamond Blount, Nicola Florida, Dawn Love, Stacey Pool, Alexis Herschell, Scarlet Shadows, Karen Louise Lawson, Nicola Cope, Gina Owen, Kayleigh Louise Woods, Claire Darbyshire, Kira Leverton, Kathleen Carpenter, Donna Perry, Karen Jones, Carol Lea, Michelle Lewin, Alanna Nicole Partin, Yostin Murillo, Peter Selby, Wendy Jones, Rose Whitby, Daryl Graves, Diana Guevara, Jason Croker, Jody Matthew Burke, Patricia Trimble, Klaus T, Sally Dixon, Milan Wash, Adree Edmo, Jayden Dean, Paul Denyer, Bruno Meirelles, Pandora Electra, Robert Gordon Cummins, Danielle Rose Gemini, Amber McLaughlin, Brooke Lyn Sonia, Nonnie Lotusflower, Tianne Miller, Narsimha Bichappa Shirvati, Brandy Wood, Isla Bryson, Kelly McSean, Michelle Renee Lamb, Andrea Balcer, Ketan Shende, Serenity Alana Mann, Sacho Samson, Harryetta Thompson, Jenna Hansen, Jane Beck, Audrey Robinson, Lexi-Rose Crawford, Carissa Marie Radcliffe, Jolene Charisma Starr, Zara Jade, Rhiley Carlson, Claire Fox, Robert William Perry II, Tanya Howes, Loana Luna, Dwight Chisolm, Amy George, Stuart Bulling, Lorena Santana, Christopher Williams, Alyssa Christine Trenchard, AK, Danielle Edney, Julie Shepherd, Izzabella Raymundo, Stephanie Hayden, Sophie Louise Carter, Autumn Cordellioné, Katana Paris, Shauna Kavanagh, Zera Lola Zombie, Nicole Rose Campbell, April Welsh, Tânia Ferrinho, Scarlet Moon Shadows, Laura Miller, Thorsten Heinz, Tara Pearsall, Adam McDonald, Samantha Norris, Abigail Waller, Rachel Queen Burton, Maria Childers, Xenia Jade Millar, Anonymous in Mumbai, Krystel Lauzon, Amber FayeFox Kim, Ash Cooper, Natalie Pershall, Kazumi Watanabe, Claire Caballero, Jacqui McWilliams, Sabrina/Morrigan Hetke, Jo White, July Justine Shelby, Joanna Evans, Louise Thomas, Miquel Toni Riera Prats, Ömer (Lara K), Emma Davies, Lexi Secker, Pierre Parsons, Claire Anderson, Michell Silva Perez, Michelle Blessent, Cassidy Honsinger, Elijah Thomas Berryman, Sean Windingland, Duane Owen, Dana Rivers, Alfie Howe, Marceline Harvey, Chloee-Mae Danvers, Jamie Kim Belladonna, Catarina da Lapa, Renee Mills, Aria Peers, an unnamed Norwegian, Danielle Marie Whitebird, Makayla Craig, Angel Hill, Farin Kinar, Reiyn Keohane, Michelle Ward, Levana Ballouz, Francesca Bartkus, María López Barrera, Autumn Tulip Harper, Richard Kenneth Cox, Oliver smith, Rebecca Clark, Dakota Rose Austin, Catherine Lynn, Naomi O’Brien, Nicola Watson, Bunny Autumn Colasimone, Tiffany Aching and Sophie KoKo.

[Steve Stewart-Williams @SteveStuWill]

The most male-typical and female-typical reasons for hospital admissions in England (NHS data 2022–25).

https://t.co/JP8E3LkntK

[Artur Nadolny @ArturNadol7566]

SHE REPORTED NHS FRAUD. THEY GAVE HER CANCER AND A P45

Sharmila Chowdhury @sharmilaxx spent 30 years working in the @NHS without a single disciplinary mark. Then she caught two consultant radiologists at Ealing Hospital NHS Trust billing the NHS for sessions they were spending at a private hospital down the road. Double-dipping on public money.

Straightforward fraud.

She reported it. To her line manager. To the Medical Director. To the HR Director. To Counter Fraud. To the Chief Executive. To Number 10. To the Treasury. She had a paper trail so solid that ITV later sent undercover cameras to the hospital and caught the same consultants still at it years later, taking cash from patients for private ultrasounds inside an NHS building.

The Trust's response? They sacked her. On fabricated counter-allegations.

The man who raised those allegations later sent an email signed off "0800-F***-YOU-B****." He received a 'Top Mentor' award from the Trust that same year.

Sharmila won at tribunal.
She won her appeal. The judge asked the Trust to reinstate her. The Trust said no. She was blacklisted across the NHS.

One job offer was withdrawn the moment they found out who she was. Her legal costs hit £130,000. She developed breast and lung cancer, which her doctors believe is linked to the years of sustained stress.

The consultants kept their jobs.

George Osborne couldn't get involved. Andrew Lansley couldn't get involved. David Cameron couldn't get involved. Because everyone decided it was an "employment matter."

A proven fraud case, covered by ITV, the Guardian, Daily Mail and Channel 4, and the official position of Her Majesty's Government was: not our problem.

This is what the UK does to people who try to protect public money. It destroys them and promotes the people they were trying to stop.

Read Sharmila's full case: sharmilachowdhury_com

Sources: Health Select Committee written evidence | @DailyMail | @Independent | @BBCNews | @Channel4 | @guardian | @thetimes | @DailyMirror | @Channel4News |

[Christian Wolf @KrischanWolf]

„Gender-affirming care“: all questions answered.

It is simply no care at all; it is harm.

After following up all (!) Finnish patients under 23 years referred for “gender”, the authors of this paper found that

“in adolescents who underwent medical gender reassignment, psychiatric morbidity increased markedly during follow-up—rising from 9.8% to 60.7% in feminising gender re-assignment and from 21.6% to 54.5% in masculinising gender re-assignment. After adjusting for prior psychiatric treatment, all gender-referred adolescents had similarly elevated risks of psychiatric morbidity, with hazard ratios approximately three times higher than female controls and five times higher than male controls.”

This is a cohort of over 2,000 patients followed for up to 25 years. The 100% ascertainment of the fate of all Finnish “gender” patients <23 sets this report worlds apart from all other reports in the field: almost all other reports suffer from extreme rates of drop-outs making them methodically completely worthless medical fairy tales.

Of further note, on social contagion, the authors report that

“those referred after 2010 had greater psychiatric needs than earlier cohorts, both before (47.9% vs. 15.3%) and ≥ 2 years after (61.3% vs. 14.2%) referral.”

My psychiatry teacher at medical school always claimed that patients with psychiatric disorders very often seek self-treatment, frequently leaning towards trendy and accessible options.

This was back in the 1980s, and he was primarily referring to marijuana. He died in 2010 but would surely have recognised this very phenomenon in “gender-affirming care”.

[James Cantor @JamesCantorPhD]

"Among adolescents who underwent medical gender reassignment, psychiatric morbidity increased markedly during follow-up—rising from 9.8% to 60.7% in feminising gender re-assignment and from 21.6% to 54.5% in masculinising gender reassignment."
Ruuska 2026 https://t.co/iJ6gBLwrgA