For us to get through what needs to happen next, our society and we as individuals need to learn how to accept feedback that our behavior needs change and sit with the discomfort of being wrong.
I see over and over again that people are so uncomfortable with this idea that they

distance themselves from reality when others make complaints. You see them question if you're sure that is what happened, they make excuses and wonder if you maybe interpreted it wrong, or maybe you invited it all because if YOU did something wrong here then they can distance
themselves from the idea that similar abuse might occur to them. Instead we need to be supporting people who are speaking truth to abusers. We need to not tone police them, gaslight them, or diminish their stories. But this is exactly where people go first because they are so
unable to sit with the discomfort of reality. They would rather denial that anything happened at all. Then they are safe from it too.

The problem is that this mechanism provides cover for abusers and gives them the space to abuse. It discourages people from coming forward.
And if you try to talk to an abuser about their behavior they won't hear it either. There will always be something wrong with how you phrase your complaints, purity tests, gaslighting, and further abuse.

But there is a moment between the complaint and the response where a breath
can make the difference between denial and transformation.

One deep breath and then listen to the person making the complaint. Hear what they are saying. Treat it as though it is a real thing. Be there with them in their discomfort. Don't speak in ways that protect in instead
be vulnerable to the change. Realize what needs changing, how you are responsible for it. Increase your emotional literacy. And then a new relationship can form where it is based on mutual respect and shared reality.

It is this one moment from taking in the complaint & reacting
that makes all the difference. You can turn away from the discomfort or turn to the discomfort. Turning away is disavowing reality. Turning to is joining reality.

And this is where we are as a country today.

We are trying to have discourse about the abuses but all we are
getting is the denial, derailing, purity tests, gaslighting, and more abuse.

You can see how each time a person turns away from reality they get further and further from it. Compounding over and over again until the only place it can go is violence. And calls to change are being
rejected so violently we now have entire groups of citizens vowing to murder people in the streets and they double down even then saying it is their right to kill, that what they are doing is the best thing they could do.

Murder. And they still won't see the abuse.

More from Society

Brief thread to debunk the repeated claims we hear about transmission not happening 'within school walls', infection in school children being 'a reflection of infection from the community', and 'primary school children less likely to get infected and contribute to transmission'.

I've heard a lot of scientists claim these three - including most recently the chief advisor to the CDC, where the claim that most transmission doesn't happen within the walls of schools. There is strong evidence to rebut this claim. Let's look at


Let's look at the trends of infection in different age groups in England first- as reported by the ONS. Being a random survey of infection in the community, this doesn't suffer from the biases of symptom-based testing, particularly important in children who are often asymptomatic

A few things to note:
1. The infection rates among primary & secondary school children closely follow school openings, closures & levels of attendance. E.g. We see a dip in infections following Oct half-term, followed by a rise after school reopening.


We see steep drops in both primary & secondary school groups after end of term (18th December), but these drops plateau out in primary school children, where attendance has been >20% after re-opening in January (by contrast with 2ndary schools where this is ~5%).
I've seen many news articles cite that "the UK variant could be the dominant strain by March". This is emphasized by @CDCDirector.

While this will likely to be the case, this should not be an automatic cause for concern. Cases could still remain contained.

Here's how: 🧵

One of @CDCgov's own models has tracked the true decline in cases quite accurately thus far.

Their projection shows that the B.1.1.7 variant will become the dominant variant in March. But interestingly... there's no fourth wave. Cases simply level out:

https://t.co/tDce0MwO61


Just because a variant becomes the dominant strain does not automatically mean we will see a repeat of Fall 2020.

Let's look at UK and South Africa, where cases have been falling for the past month, in unison with the US (albeit with tougher restrictions):


Furthermore, the claim that the "variant is doubling every 10 days" is false. It's the *proportion of the variant* that is doubling every 10 days.

If overall prevalence drops during the studied time period, the true doubling time of the variant is actually much longer 10 days.

Simple example:

Day 0: 10 variant / 100 cases -> 10% variant
Day 10: 15 variant / 75 cases -> 20% variant
Day 20: 20 variant / 50 cases -> 40% variant

1) Proportion of variant doubles every 10 days
2) Doubling time of variant is actually 20 days
3) Total cases still drop by 50%

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