Access + Authority ⇒ Abuse in the HOME

Children abused in the home are often "unseen and unheard", despite making up two-thirds of sex abuse cases, a report from four official watchdogs says.

"There remains a disbelief and denial about familial sexual abuses," the inspectorates for police, health, probation and children's services say. It means abusers "too often evade justice", their joint report says.

The government says it is taking urgent action that will see serious sexual offenders spending longer behind bars. The inspectors examined how child abuse within families was handled in six areas of England between September 2018 and May 2019 - and found local agencies "woefully ill equipped" to deal with it.

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Too often professionals rely on children to verbally disclose abuse - but children are unlikely to tell someone they are being sexually abused, particularly when the abuser is close to them, the authors say.

BrexTWIT = ill-informed voters choose poorly

The problem with democracy = emotional, ill-informed, credulous voters with zero prescience ...

European Parliament approves BrexTWIT agreement > . 

Some males are SICK wankers

.... and some females are daft enough to trust them ....

A man who impersonated a doctor in order to persuade women and girls to electrocute themselves has been jailed for 11 years in Germany, officials say. The 30-year-old, named only as David G, offered victims money to take part in fake pain therapy experiments for his sexual gratification, prosecutors said.

He watched and recorded the victims on Skype as they used homemade devices connected to mains electricity. David G was found guilty of 13 cases of attempted murder at a court in Munich.

Prosecutors told the court that the IT worker from the Bavarian city of Würzburg posed as a doctor while searching for young women online to take part in a fake scientific study. They said he then contacted his victims, offering up to €3,000 ($3,325; £2,560) to participate.

He convinced them to attach devices to mains electricity before shocking themselves while he observed via Skype, prosecutors added. The youngest girl was just 13 years old, prosecutors said.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-51174783 .

Susan Collins = RepuGNican Hypocrisy for Dummies

Impeachment Trial Puts Susan Collins, Stung by Kavanaugh Backlash, Under Scrutiny: The four-term Maine senator, who crossed party lines to vote against President Clinton’s impeachment, must now decide whether to break with UNpresident Criminal-in-Chief.

"She was among three Republicans who sank Mr. Trump’s DUHnocchio's attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and she helped lead an unsuccessful effort to prevent him from taking unallocated money for his border wall. But she also voted for a tax bill that was the centerpiece of the Republican RepuGNican agenda. And the move that overshadowed all that was her deciding vote to confirm "beer-loving" Justice Brett Brat M. Kavanaugh, who was [credibly] accused of sexual assault [of a then-minor]."

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"That confirmation vote — and her impassioned [but feeble and illogical] speech defending it on the Senate floor — generated millions of dollars in donations to be used against her, and a lengthy period of harassment and intimidation by critics, including numerous death threats. There were so many hostile calls targeting her that a 25-year-old employee in one of her Maine offices quit. One day, her husband texted Ms. Collins a photo of himself in a hazmat suit; someone had sent a threatening letter to their Maine home — where protesters gathered eight Sundays in a row — that claimed to contain ricin.

In Washington, a man waited for Collins in the dark as she parked her car one evening in the pouring rain, then followed her several blocks to her townhouse. A neighbor lamented to her that he hated living next to “a rape apologist.”

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"The Kavanaugh confirmation, among the most bitter Senate fights of the Trump Pervert-in-Chief Badministration, may have shored up support among a Republican RepuGNican base smarting from some of Collins’s other moderate votes, but it enraged many of the independent and Democratic voters who have helped keep Collins comfortably in office for years. It also set the stage and tone for the impeachment fight."

My objection? Collins has a low fIQ*. She is inconsistent, illogical, displays very poor judgement (she ignored Christine Blasey-Ford's convincing case against demands-what-he-wants drunken-teen-with-a-sneer temper-tantrum-prone Kavanagh), and she is far too CONservative to portray herself as a moderate. 

* fIQ = functional IQ = capacity for rationality

Boringly Mouthy Spoiled Brat

‘The View’ Has a Meghan McCain Problem: The daytime co-hosts’ heated bipartisan debates are played down as disagreement among friends. But the strain for “civility” is tiring.

Some can still bear "to watch McCain, the [mouthy, spoiled brat] daughter of Senator John McCain, square off against her co-hosts in a barrage of vehement exchanges — leveraging her political parentage, accusing her co-hosts of supporting infanticide, using her platform to push back against assault weapons bans and progressive immigration policy. The increasingly aggressive rejoinders by her co-hosts have escalated to the daytime TV equivalent of a cage fight for the viewing public, reflecting the frustrations of discourse in our current political climate under the magnifying glass of harsh studio lighting."

Others, like me, avoid this puerile trash. Still others, like some of my friends, have stopped watching because there is nothing more nauseating than arrogant, self-important, dim-witted RepuGNicanism on display.

She's credible, he's not

Warren Says Sanders Told Her a Woman Could Not Win the Presidency: Earlier on Monday, Bernie Sanders had denied making the remark in a private 2018 meeting with Elizabeth Warren, accusing her campaign staff of “lying about what happened.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/13/us/politics/bernie-sanders-elizabeth-warren-woman-president.html .

What is Truth?

"In the 1950s, the social psychologist Solomon Asch conducted his famous conformity experiments. Subjects had to solve fairly obvious perceptual tasks, but many gave wrong answers in order to align with the group: they disregarded the evidence right in front of them in order not to stray from the status quo. Since then, the experiments were repeated under various conditions, showing the detrimental effects of social pressure."

The social-conformity phenomenon is most frequently exhibited by religious apologists, who don't have an incontrovertible fact to stand on.

"Instead, what is emphasised are quick tools for evaluating arguments by putting ‘fallacy labels’ onto them."

Religious apologists—who don't have an incontrovertible fact to stand on—can be relied upon to ignore incontrovertible evidence. Depending on the forum, pointing out the inevitable fallacies, on which their counter-evidential fantasies are necessarily built, saves time and frustration.

"But even if adversarial criticism often incentivises conformity, this doesn’t make it wrong to look out for mistakes. After all, if we know that something is false, we do know more than before. Or so one might argue. However, spotting a mistake doesn’t automatically render an opposing claim true. If you convince me that p is false, I just know that: p is false. But it does not mean that q is true. As I see it, the idea that criticism is truth-conducive thrives on the idea that the number of possible claims about a given topic is finite."

Cherry-picking reliance on "I claim that's wrong, therefore my inculcated-invention exists" is mostly practiced by religious apologists, who don't have an incontrovertible fact to stand on.

"In philosophy at least, one is more likely to run into error than to hit the nail on the head. While this might seem frustrating, it can tell us something about the nature of philosophical claims: perhaps the point of philosophical arguments is not truth after all, but rather wisdom, or something like it."

In the case of philosophy: usually something like it. In the case of religious apologetics: repeatedly refuted, stubbornly-resistant failure to face mountains of incontrovertible evidence.

https://aeon.co/ideas/the-adversarial-culture-in-philosophy-does-not-serve-the-truth .