On the issue of access to information for adopted persons #knowyouridentity, there are others who have more expertise in this than me but since I didn't get time to make all the points I would have liked to on @morningireland earlier, here are some thoughts (Thread ⬇️)

The previous AG advised that it would be unconst to provide an unlimited right to access info in leg - reasons were not given but we can presume this opinion is based on the result in the IOT vB case, which is a misreading of that case, while privacy was prioritised in that case

The SC indicated that this was an issue which should properly be dealt with by the Oir, which is entitled to conduct a balancing exercise and decide that one right should prevail over the other. The only prob would be if one set of rights was completely disregarded

Also, the weight of law and legal opinion is on the side of the right to know your identity, a CoA judgmnt last feb identified a right right to have your identity correctly recognised by the State and that was said to encompass a right to have a birth certificate and a passport.

The ECHR has recognised identity rights in respect of a variety of adoption information context & under EU law a person’s name is their personal data to which they have a right & personal data can lawfully be restricted only if there is clear legislation that allows for it

.@claudiahammond introduces the panel discussion on elitism in occupational psychology with @NancyDoylePsych @TomCalvard @PavtweetKhurana and Ben Williams, former Chair of @ABPsychologists

Ben starts by taking a poll on the topic, do we feel the profession is elitist? 22% say yes, 13% say not at all. #DOPconf

Ben says if success comes to the "best" in a profession, how accessible is it? Or do factors such as network bring you to the elite? Challenging to level the playing field. #DOPconf

Turning to @PavtweetKhurana, who takes issue with "best". Who defines it, standards mapped against what? Does school define access? We can have an elite without elitism, it is exclusion that is problematic. #DOPconf

And now @NancyDoylePsych who talks about lack of disability, racial and other areas of representation in Occupational Psychology. #DOPconf

As Mark Twain once said, "there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics." Here's a thread that looks at Premier Kenney's claim that the international border testing pilot program of air travellers has been a "success." #ableg

At his Jan. 1 presser, Kenney noted the the pilot program had a test positivity rate of 1.48% compared to an overall positivity rate from testing done in the province of about 7%. See video link at approximately 3:15:

Indeed, Kenney's numbers for the pilot project are accurate. Of the 18,021 travellers who had participated as of December 17, 1.48% had tested positive after arriving in

But was it appropriate to compare the results among travellers who were presumably screened before boarding and found asymptomatic to those from recent testing results among Albertans who are overwhelming if not entirely symptomatic or have had a known contact with the disease?

Perhaps, it would have been better if Kenney had compared those results to those done among similarly asymptomatic Albertans. As @CBCFletch noted in an October 23 tweet, 659,000 tests among people with no symptoms found a positivity rate of just 0.11%....

I'd love to think that @michaelsheen's thoughts and responses to Welsh nationhood are the start of a new wave of discussion surrounding who, what, why and how of Welsh Independence.

As support and engagement for #IndyWales increases and the integrity of "Britain" spirals out of control to its inevitable demise, so does the argument against it which more often than not a wave of regurgitated clichés that we must endure.

In turn we have to be careful about this ourselves. We cannot repeat the same rhetoric without evolving our point. And let's be honest Welsh Independence is a good enough point as it is but what can we do to bring those into the fold?

There's plenty of things we can do. Discussion is a key point. It'e tiring for me when I'm the butt of jokes in work for supporting IndyWales and starting a business that's based on it. Yet the arguments by these people are always the same; too poor, too small, too dumb. Boring.

Centuries of misrule, subservience, servitude and asset stripping have led this country and all those within its borders to suffer. And suffer as a whole we have. our shared history with England is a hard one, filled with

It's crazy how 50% of the country rioted all year for a violent felon who overdosed... yet this dickslap of a "relief" package (VASTLY less popular across the spectrum than Fentanyl Floyd) will get nothing.

I wonder why that is?

I work for a subsidiary of a vaguely "American" conglomerate with ~70K employees that operates in about 80 countries, primarily exploiting cheap Chinese labor. China is literally our business model. This year our CEO sent out no less than 3 company-wide memos about SaInT fLoYd.

Employees were encouraged to attend protests, even in the midst of a so-called "pandemic."

Even employees in Europe. Presumably even the employees in China (although they are kept behind a wall of secrecy).

EVERY employee worldwide was offered unlimited time off to protest?

Oh yeah, funny sidebar: nobody in the company knows anyone who works in the Chinese office. I can name employees in the Poland branch or the French branch or Japan, but nobody has ever met a single Chinese branch employee. This is apparently a CCP regulation lol

Anyways, back to the point--management wanted us out there protesting/rioting! They made it abundantly clear. And it seems weird that they were encouraging it in every country, right?

Literally a multinational corporation stoking worldwide racial protests. So weird!

So, I was asked to write down my thoughts on the coup for a major newspaper earlier this week.

I told them no, and let me tell you why.

In 2016, after the election I wrote an op-ed on white nationalism and the alt-right for a major newspaper and appeared on MSNBC.

I was hyped to have the opportunity to share my expertise with a wider audience.

I wasn't prepared for what came next.

The op-ed was shared pretty widely. It is probably as close as I've come to a viral piece.

I wrote for a prestigious pub, and people were reading about my scholarly research.

Cool, right?

Not quite.

The day the op-ed was published I was at an amusement park with my partner, two kids, nephew and niece, one of my sisters and her partner.

While waiting on the kids to get off a ride, I started getting messages from folks asking if I was okay.

I was confused. Why wouldn't I be okay?

Well, then, folks were like, "Uh, there are some pretty nasty threats being lobbed at you on Twitter."

THREAD, PT DEUX -- it was a lovely long weekend, I’m feeling rested and energized, and lucky for you I’ve got some more great criminal justice policy ideas to share. Real exciting stuff, I promise. Let’s flesh these out: 1/9

Ok, so to reduce unnecessary contacts between police and people/communities of color, here’s what we’re going to do: end the war on drugs. 2/9

Right now we needlessly make felons out of 10,000+ Virginians per year for narcotics possession, so for that we’re going to end the war on drugs. 3/9

Reduce court fines and fees, prevent disenfranchisement, demilitarize police departments, eliminate mandatory minimums? I’ve got a great idea for those, as well: end the war on drugs 4/9

Oh, and police and prison budgets are bloated, driving state and municipal governments into debt, with no societal benefit to show for it. So in order to save a crap ton of cash we’re also going to end the war on drugs 5/9

1/ How many times have u been told that ‘Imposter syndrome’ is an internal problem? That it’s your responsibility to make it go away from your mind. That it’s entirely a figment of your own imagination. Well I don’t think so, but the journey to this conclusion has been painful 🧵

2/ Let’s start with the definition of Imposter syndrome: it’s basically those feelings of inadequacy & doubt in your abilities to do the things that you’ve proved successful in doing by virtue of your achievements & qualifications. This in turn affects your confidence to do them.

3/We’re told women, particularly those from minoritised backgrounds, have this more intensely though it can affect anyone. I’ve certainly felt it throughout my life intensifying at times of stress and overload. But is it entirely internally triggered? Well, this is the narrative.

4/ You go to courses, you read articles, you speak to mentors and what they usually tell you is that it’s all in your mind. Perhaps triggered by your social upbringing & cultural background. So you must work on it. But I’ve realised recently that it’s not just that.

5/ Some people in your surroundings trigger this, to be fair to them perhaps unconsciously. They may have in their minds a stereotype of you that is inadequate & incapable of achieving what you’ve achieved in reality. So they do or say things that trigger the feeling in you..

IMHO, this article — https://t.co/wLiWDOZrvm — is an important corrective to fatalism about the new strain. As in, "welp, there are probably already at least a handful of cases of the new strain already here, so no matter what we do now, it's gonna spread." Not necessarily so.

"10 to 20 percent of infected people may be responsible for...80 to 90 percent of transmission."

"An early run of bad [or good!] luck...can produce dramatically different outcomes."

New Zealand had 277 separate introductions; only 19% of them led to more than 1 additional case.

That's all referring to the original COVID strain, but I haven't read anything suggesting that the same pattern doesn't apply to the new variant. Not sure if we know yet, but it's at least possible a lot of people don't spread it (while the few that do, spread it *A LOT* a lot).

Here's what we know, or think we know:

* The new variant is here, with probably at least a handful of undetected cases.

* The new variant is so wildly contagious that, once it gains a foothold, cases WILL spike.

* Cases stopped rising steeply around Nov. 10 (by onset day).

It seems like 1 of 2 things is true:

1) New variant arrived in October or earlier, and helped cause our November spike. We then reined it in, without even realizing it was here.

2) New-variant community spread is low-level thus far, at least thru ~Xmas. No superspreaders yet.

CW Nightmare

In the torn out belly of an old, sprawling hotel, I found myself investigating strange happenings in the fledgling restaurant that sprouted in the blasted ruin.

Swarthy men gutted the collapse, using every nail & timber to build the eatery and it's long tables.
1🧵

I swear to have seen a spider, large as a dinner plate, with an ape-like face and twitching human fingers for legs, ground down to bloody points. But only a flash witnessed in a broken pane of glass. The bike thing was some illusion. A twisting of light and color, nothing more.

It was then , in the darkening hours of the day, that six young travelers entered, seating themselves at the single large feast table. Colorful, happy, bawdy souls in all, they seemed unaffected by the haze of terror that lingered among the workmen.
3🧵

I found no sign of mold or damp, gas or chemical, any phenomenon to explain the various sightings.
The matron, dutiful and mild in manner, brought the travelers beer, soft pretzels, and honey butter - leaving them to chitter and indulge.
4 🧵

The workmen, in the growing dark, left as quickly as a flock of larks, in one writing mass at the foreman's whistle. Unashamed in their obvious terror. Each man nodded to me, the stranger, in quiet gratitude and sorrowful fancy, as I dared to remain after dark.
5 🧵

My friend @RiirReeRii comes out with another argument against The Trinity

P1) God exists a se (From the definition of "God)
P2) The Father begetting the Son/Generation is a causal relation.
C1) Therefore, the Son exists ab alio.
P4) The Son is God (From, "Trinity")

C2) Therefore, the Son exists a se (From 1, 4)
C3) Therefore, the Son is exists both a se and ab alio (From C1 and C3)
C4) Therefore, "The Son" Is self-contradictory
C5) Therefore, The Trinity is self-contradictory

By a se we are just referring to God's aseity (i.e, the term a se means "through itself"). Aseity refers to God's uncaused, independant, unconditioned, necessary, etc. Existence.

We are simply exemplifying how God's existence is independant from and unaffected by anything outside of him. It's important to note that "Aseity" doesn't just mean "metaphysical necessity" / "existence in every possible world", since we could have Ab Alio necessities as well.

Ab Alio simply meaning, "Through another." In contrast with A se.

The second Premise might seem a bit weird. Someone might argue that the relation between the Father and the Son isn't "causal" in any sense. But this is just heretical.

The republican speeches today are familiar to any abuse survivor.

"I hate that you made me hit you. I've never hit anyone before, so that's how awful you've been to me to make me do that. And the way you keep pushing this, it feels like you're trying to make me go there again."

So much cultural criticism boils down to chewing on the strange result of popular genre chum--guilty pleasure stuff--being taken more seriously than it was really designed for or capable of sustaining.

Im thinking about the furors around American Dirt, Bridgerton, and WW84, which, in different ways, are all objects meant to be consumed for pleasure without thinking too much about why and how. And then you think about them and you're like "wow, this sucks."

Scads of thrillers as bad or worse than American Dirt are published constantly, and no one but their readers notices, but THIS one got lots of "serious" attention, so it was held to real literary standards and eviscerated.

Bridgerton is an adaptation of romance novels--not serious alt-history--but when claims for the progressive work it was doing were made, lots of folks were like "wow, this seems pretty silly and kinda careless?"

And the conversation around WW84 is fascinating because of the strange way "comic book movie" is simultaneously "stupid goofy fun, not supposed to make sense" and "this is an allegory for America under Trump" (doubly vexed by the "saving cinema!" role WW84 was slotted into)

In my annual, ritual meditation on King, I keep thinking about those misused,spontaneous references to his “four little children” in “I Have a Dream.” As many have noted, this passage has been pressed into the work of domesticating King’s radical project, into inserting him 1/

into a reactionary, progressivist narrative emphasizing just how far “we’ve” come & overcome. Thinking too about the fact that King’s most enduring rhetorical tropes—the touchstones of American memory of the Civil Rights struggle—the dream, the mountaintop, the Promised Land, 2/

are all chosen from the end of the addresses in which they appeared. The beginnings of these speeches are seldom emphasized, although they are rich with suggestions for thinking about time and tense, ending and beginning, past and present. In his last sermon, 3/

“I See the Mountaintop,” widely considered his most apocalyptic, King took as his point of departure, the matter of time. “If I were standing at the beginning of time, “ he began, “with the possibility of a general, panoramic view of the whole of human history up to now, and 4/

The Almighty said to me, “Martin Luther King, which age would you like to live in?” King then takes the reader on an imaginary journey through the ages, pausing at historic sites and momentous occurrences, ending with Lincoln signing the Emancipation Proclamation. Then /5