There has been another racist attack on property in Galway, where I live: Arsonists have burned down a house that the local council was preparing for new residents. A family from the Traveller Community were about to move in. Late on Sunday night, just before 5 am, attackers set the […]
Stereotyping
Fact-checking the racists: The psychological approach of Ireland’s alt-right
Releasing the Genie Notwithstanding frantic after-the-fact efforts to rehabilitate the town’s reputation, there is little doubt that alt-right/far-right extremists successfully infiltrated that public meeting in Oughterard. The townspeople currently protesting the proposed Direct Provision facility (Ireland’s version of an asylum seeker reception centre) are not members of any far-right organisation. They are […]
The media and transphobia: How Christianity gets a free pass
Lilit Martirosyan’s speech in the Armenian parliament has gone viral. Addressing a panel on human rights, Martirosyan described the plight of the trans community in Armenia. She explained how her own experience of threats and violence reflect the challenges that she and other trans people face in the country: I […]
If you spend 20 years gaslighting your patients, perhaps you should think twice before accusing *them* of trolling *you*
This week we learned that online activists are silencing scientists in the UK: Reuters contacted a dozen professors, doctors and researchers with experience of analysing or testing potential treatments for chronic fatigue syndrome. All said they had been the target of online harassment because activists objected to their findings. Only […]
The Triumph of Eminence-Based Medicine
Lines are drawn A quarter of a million Britons are believed to have myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), the condition that sometimes overlaps with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). ME/CFS is a severe debilitating illness that renders patients either temporarily or perennially immobile. Sufferers will have often led very active lives before being […]
Forty-one international scientists have signed a declaration supporting Cochrane’s decision to withdraw its controversial review of exercise therapy in ME/CFS
And I’m one of them. This is important not least because of claims appearing over the weekend that Cochrane pulled its controversial review due to pressure from brain-addled trouble-making “patient activitists,” rather than for scientific reasons. Claims that Cochrane had been harassed were made not by Cochrane themselves, but, rather, […]