Opinion
Is “OF THE PEOPLE, BY THE PEOPLE, FOR THE PEOPLE” coming back?
The next election could be the “Peoples’ Election”.
We should bring back; “Of the people, By the people, For the People”.
You know the ones that don’t demand but get the job done. Working hard to put a roof over their head, pay their taxes, has no advocates, looking for no special treatment, and quietly goes about living their lives.
Politically, we ran off the rails electing politicians who just politic for the sake of politicking. Election after elections they run, sometimes jumping from one arena or seat to another.
Perhaps they started with good intentions but after a few elections they get in a rut, burn out but they are used to the life style, the power, the name recognition and it is easier to win with the name recognition and past campaign experience.
But is it right?
Don’t they lose touch with the lives of non-political citizens? There are many who want things, demand changes and policies from the politicians and they do ingratiate themselves with politicians for their own personal gain.
Former Premier Ralph Klein’s wife put it starkly after Ralph retired. “They stopped calling, they stopped visiting.” I remember another politician saying that when he lost the election, his phone stopped ringing.
Perhaps the lifers, the politicians who run again and again, need this? They need people to just call.
The U.S. President can only be the president for 2 terms, and there is a reason for that. A new president will bring new perspectives, new ideas, and have less baggage. We don’t have term limits, maybe we should?
Perhaps the new politicians will push the boundaries. Instead of subsidizing an area for decades, perhaps let them find their own way to survive. The downtown is one example that comes to mind after decades of throwing money at it, let it downsize, disappear or evolve on it’s own. Sink or swim? I believe it will adapt on its’ own.
Perhaps we could stop investing in building new neighbourhoods and invest in the older neighbourhoods?
Perhaps stop investing in singular events and invest in something the current residents can enjoy everyday?
Politicians have done surveys, created committees and heard from the population but their voices seem muted compared to the voices of the few in the inner circle.
So perhaps we should bring in term limits to give “Regular People” an opportunity to bring new ideas, new energy and a new perspective to politics. A new twist to an old idea.
Every politician thinks they are the best person for the position they hold, but the world will not end if someone new takes the seat.
Perhaps the world may change for the better, and political lifers, could be the road block? Possible?
Perhaps the next election could be the “Peoples’ Election”.
Frontier Centre for Public Policy
Transition Troubles: Medical Risks and Regret Among Trans Teens
From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy
By Lee Harding
Do teens going through cross-gender hormones and surgeries know what they’re doing? A leak of internal conversations by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health shows even some doctors administering the procedures have serious doubts.
The U.S. advocacy organization Environmental Progress, led by president and founder Michael Shellenberger, made the leaks public.
“The WPATH Files show that what is called ‘gender medicine’ is neither science nor medicine,” Shellenberger said in a press release.
A short list of excerpts highlighted many telling comments.
Child psychologist Dianne Berg, who co-authored the child chapter of the 8th edition of WPATH Standards of Care, said young girls don’t understand what it means to get male hormones.
“[It is] out of their developmental range to understand the extent to which some of these medical interventions are impacting them. They’ll say they understand, but then they’ll say something else that makes you think, oh, they didn’t really understand that they are going to have facial hair.”
Canadian endocrinologist Dr. Daniel Metzger acknowledged, “We’re often explaining these sorts of things to people who haven’t even had biology in high school yet.”
Metzger said neither he nor his colleagues were surprised at a Dutch study that found some young post-transition adults regretted losing their fertility.
“It’s always a good theory that you talk about fertility preservation with a 14-year old, but I know I’m talking to a blank wall. They’d be like, ew, kids, babies, gross,” Metzger said.
“I think now that I follow a lot of kids into their mid-twenties, I’m like, ‘Oh, the dog isn’t doing it for you, is it?’ They’re like, ‘No, I just found this wonderful partner, and now want kids.’ … It doesn’t surprise me.
“Most of the kids are nowhere in any kind of a brain space to really talk about [fertility preservation] in a serious way.”
While youth keeps some from grasping the lifelong consequences of their actions, mental illness does the same for others. But that doesn’t always mean the doctors refuse to transition them.
One gender therapist administered cross-sex hormones to a patient with dissociative identity disorder. The therapist said asking the split personalities if they approved the treatment was ethical. Otherwise, a lawsuit could follow.
In one case, a nurse practitioner struggled with how to handle a patient with PTSD, major depressive disorder, observed dissociations, and schizoid typical traits who wanted to go on hormone therapy. Somehow the clear moral dilemma was lost on Dr. Dan Karasic, lead author of the mental health chapter of WPATH Standards of Care 8.
Karasic replied, “I’m missing why you are perplexed… The mere presence of psychiatric illness should not block a person’s ability to start hormones if they have persistent gender dysphoria, capacity to consent, and the benefits of starting hormones outweigh the risks…So why the internal struggle as to ‘the right thing to do?’”
Testosterone injections carry cancer risks for those born female. In one case, a doctor acknowledged a 16-year-old had two liver masses, one 11 cm by 11 cm, and another 7 cm by 7 cm, and “the oncologist and surgeon both have indicated that the likely offending agent(s) are the hormones.”
The friend and colleague of one doctor received close to ten years of male hormones, leading to hepatocarcinoma. “To the best of my knowledge, it was linked to his hormone treatment… it was so advanced that he opted for palliative care and died a couple of months later,” the doctor said.
Some female-born transitioning patients had terrible pain during orgasms, while males on estrogen complained of erections “feeling like broken glass.”
The future may be even stranger, according to one doctor.
“I think we are going to see a wave of non-binary affirming requests for surgery that will include non-standard procedures. I have worked with clients who identify as non-binary, agender, and Eunuchs who have wanted atypical surgical procedures, many of which either don’t exist in nature or represent the first of their kind and therefore probably have few examples of best practices,” the doctor said.
Unsurprisingly, some people regret their medical transitions and want to change back. Some WPATH members want to discount this altogether. WPATH President Marci Bowers admitted, “[A]cknowledgment that de-transition exists even to a minor extent is considered off limits for many in our community.”
An unnamed researcher thought it was just a matter of perspective, saying, “What is problematic is the idea of detransitioning, as it frames being cisgender as the default and reinforces transness as a pathology. It makes more sense to frame gender as something that can shift over time, and to figure out ways to support people making the choices they want to make in the moment, with the understanding that feelings around decisions [may] change over time.”
Should our physical being be substantially altered and re-altered according to our feelings? Is transitioning a matter of mental health or self-expression? At least Alberta is putting the brakes on these dubious practices for minors. Other provinces should follow.
Lee Harding is a research fellow for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
Artificial Intelligence
Character AI sued following teen suicide
|
The last person 14-year-old Sewell Setzer III spoke to before he shot himself wasn’t a person at all. | ||
It was an AI chatbot that, in the last months of his life, had become his closest companion. | ||
Sewell was using Character AI, one of the most popular personal AI platforms out there. The basic pitch is that users can design and interact with “characters,” powered by large language models (LLMs) and intended to mirror, for instance, famous characters from film and book franchises. | ||
In this case, Sewell was speaking with Daenerys Targaryen (or Dany), one of the leads from Game of Thrones. According to a New York Times report, Sewell knew that Dany’s responses weren’t real, but he developed an emotional attachment to the bot, anyway. | ||
One of their last conversations, according to the Times, went like this: | ||
|
||
On the night he died, Sewell told the chatbot he loved her and would come home to her soon. | ||
|
||
This is not the first time chatbots have been involved in suicide. | ||
In 2023, a Belgian man died by suicide — similar to Sewell — following weeks of increasing isolation as he grew closer to a Chai chatbot, which then encouraged him to end his life. | ||
Megan Garcia, Sewell’s mother, hopes it will be the last time. She filed a lawsuit against Character AI, its founders and parent company Google on Wednesday, accusing them of knowingly designing and marketing an anthropomorphized, “predatory” chatbot that caused the death of her son. | ||
“A dangerous AI chatbot app marketed to children abused and preyed on my son, manipulating him into taking his own life,” Garcia said in a statement. “Our family has been devastated by this tragedy, but I’m speaking out to warn families of the dangers of deceptive, addictive AI technology and demand accountability from Character.AI, its founders and Google.” | ||
The lawsuit — which you can read here — accuses the company of “anthropomorphizing by design.” This is something we’ve talked about a lot, here; the majority of chatbots out there are very blatantly designed to make users think they’re, at least, human-like. They use personal pronouns and are designed to appear to think before responding. | ||
While these may be minor examples, they build a foundation for people, especially children, to misapply human attributes to unfeeling, unthinking algorithms. This was termed the “Eliza effect” in the 1960s. | ||
|
||
Garcia is suing for several counts of liability, negligence and the intentional infliction of emotional distress, among other things. | ||
Character at the same time published a blog responding to the tragedy, saying that it has added new safety features. These include revised disclaimers on every chat that the chatbot isn’t a real person, in addition to popups with mental health resources in response to certain phrases. | ||
In a statement, Character AI said it was “heartbroken” by Sewell’s death, and directed me to their blog post. | ||
Google did not respond to a request for comment. | ||
|
||
The suit does not claim that the chatbot encouraged Sewell to commit suicide. I view it more so as a reckoning with the anthropomorphized chatbots that have been born of an era of unregulated social media, and that are further incentivized for user engagement at any cost. | ||
There were other factors at play here — for instance, Sewell’s mental health issues and his access to a gun — but the harm that can be caused by a misimpression of what AI actually is seems very clear, especially for young kids. This is a good example of what researchers mean when they emphasize the presence of active harms, as opposed to hypothetical risks. | ||
|
||
“Artificial intimacy programs use the same large language models as the generative AI programs that help us create business plans and find the best restaurants in Tulsa. They scrape the internet so that the next thing they say stands the greatest chance of pleasing their user.” | ||
We are witnessing and grappling with a very raw crisis of humanity. Smartphones and social media set the stage. | ||
More technology is not the cure. |
-
Indigenous2 hours ago
Indigenous Catholic Priest questions “The murder of 215 Indigenous Children” at Kamloops Indian Residential School
-
Artificial Intelligence1 hour ago
Character AI sued following teen suicide
-
Frontier Centre for Public Policy30 mins ago
Transition Troubles: Medical Risks and Regret Among Trans Teens
-
Alberta2 days ago
Preparation, swift response define wildfire season
-
Alberta2 days ago
Alberta Bill of Rights Amendment, Bill 24 – Stronger protections for personal rights
-
Automotive2 days ago
Biden-Harris Admin’s EV Coercion Campaign Hasn’t Really Gone All That Well
-
Alberta2 days ago
Another Blow To The Carbon Tax
-
Economy2 days ago
One Solution to Canada’s Housing Crisis: Move. Toronto loses nearly half million people to more affordable locations