This was a small regional unit who did not take in the most vulnerable newborns. The pasients under Letbys care were broadly expected to survive. Several of her victims were days from being discharged, and at least one of the twins probably should not have been in the NICU, according the medical witnesses (and Letby agreed to this). There is also a smoking gun here, as someone had injected 2 of the babies with insulin, something that is 100% intentional and could not have happened by mistake.
I still think the hospital massively failed by not picking up this sooner, but there is no doubt there was someone doing deliberate harm. Letby also admitted such in her testimony.
More crime in the UK: The case against nurse Lucy Letby, charged with 8 murders and another 10 attempts of murder is nearing the end. Lucy Letby was a NICU nurse in Countess of Chester hospital at a time where there was a dramatic increase in mortality of new born infants. She was first arrested i 2018 after 1 year of investigations, and then again in 2019 and 2020 when she was was finally charged.
I have followed the court case which has lasted for 8 months somewhat sporadically, and I think the prosecution has made a strong case. The motive seems to be the thrill and excitement of being in the middle of life and death situations, and even to get the attention of a married doctor she fancied (and might have slept with!) Interestingly, the defense had no expert testimony. Their only witness, except Letby, was a plumper who testified that the ward had a sewage leak coinciding with some of the incidents. What has kept me coming back to this case, is how incredibly plain and even boring, Letby appears outside of these charges. No history of violence or aggression, no weird sexual fetishes, no drug use. They have gone through every last text message and email and not found anything offensive, bar discussing her job and the doctor. She had a normal upringing and good relations with her family. I think its very likely she would never have been a murderer if she didnt have access to vulnerable babies as a nurse, which makes it even more of a headf**k, because the crimes she is charged with are against babies! Its absolutely heinous, and my heart breaks for the helpless parents who had no choice but to trust her with the lives of their newborns. She targeted twins and triplets, and one set of parents lost 2 boys.
So where is the culture war angle? I guess the lack of attention and interest that this case has got is baffling to me. Neither BBC nor The Guardian nor Sky news have had it on their frontpage as far as ive seen this week. BBC has confined the whole story to a regional site for Merseyside: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-merseyside-65920366
Apparently a nurse potentially being one of the most prolific female serial killers in history, is not all that exciting in todays newsworld. I guess everyone can have their own biases for why this is happening. Is it the "women are wonderful effect", where a female killer is just so bizarre that it does not warrant any closer scrutiny? Would there be some articles about toxic masculinity if it was a male nurse who killed babies to impress a female doctor? Are people just less upset because she is a conventionally beautiful young woman with blond hair and blue eyes? Some redditors seem to think so, as the first doctor to suspect her was Ravi Jayaram, an Indian male. But I dont buy this either. If her looks where protecting her people would be rallying to her defense, which does not seem to be happening either. The case is mostly ignored.
Is the case just too boring?
rudig
10mo ago
No one seems to have mentioned sperm quality and physical fitness. While I cant guarantee how much it will raise the birth rate, its very obvious that much fewer children are born by chance today than in the past. I think this is likely due to lower sperm quality and lack of physical fitness in both genders. In addition many people go through costly infertility treatment, again often due to environmental factors that lower fertility.
So my suggestion are:
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Make childhood obesity a borderline crime, meaning if a child is overweight, the CPS/medical support systems gets involved. These children get sent to specific schools with focus on healthy food and exercise. The family gets support and educational help, but if nothing helps, the get fines and eventually the child can be taken from them.
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Make computer games illegal, or heavily regulated. Control the internet so its boring and people cant spend hours entertaining themselves on youtube.
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Take a serious look at chemical factors that can be causing the fall in sperm count/testosterone, and outlaw them.
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Children are tested for physical fitness, and if they are too unfit, they are sent to digital detox camps with focus on physical fitness.
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Make housing developments in the most attractive areas only available for families with children
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Give plenty of support to students who become pregnant, also the single ones.
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Affirmative actions for both parents AND grandparents. If a grandparent wants to move jobs/houses to be closer to their kids to help with childrearing they get preferential treatment. Many of the most high status jobs are only available to people with children (the medically infertile can adopt).
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Make being young and/or a single parents less stigmatizing. Students who have children get their student loans forgiven.
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UBI for children, maybe something like 500 USD for the first 2, and then gradually lower it.
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Some sort of matchmaking for gays and lesbian couples so they can have children together. Similar types of matchmaking for singles over 30 who want children but dont want to be in a relationship.
rudig
1yr ago
Its a verbatim translation of this op-ed from Norway: https://www.nrk.no/ytring/gutta-som-ikke-far-damer-1.16355535
rudig
1yr ago
"At night, I’m unable to sleep as I lie there, grinding my teeth and dreaming of the day when she is made to parade naked through the streets of every town in Britain while the crowds chant, “Shame!�? and throw lumps of excrement at her.!
I sincerely cannot understand what can make a grown person have such an intensity of emotion for someone who isnt a murderer or rapist og war criminal or the like. Meghan Markle is very annoying, sure, but this is beyond unhinged. I realize brits love their royal family, but surely after all the Diana/Charles escapades and then recently with prince Andrew, they learned to temper their emotions just a bit?
rudig
1yr ago
Mt Gox and the Dao hack were bad, but there where so few people involved compared to now, and those that got burned where more ideologically committed. Now with the implosion of Celsius, Luna and FTX a huge number of normies are getting burnt, and they (and their families, friends etc) will never look at crypto again and always think of it as a scam.
Oz actually did alot better than the R governor candidate, so the split-ticket voting was in his favor. Mastriano was the disaster candidate in Pennsylvania, and possibly dragged Oz down with him.
Interesting read. I also enjoyed the comments.
Generally people are less likely to socialize if they (real or perceived) have low social standing. So people who cant keep up with the joneses financially will retreat sooner. I also think obesity plays a role here for the same reason. Im a MD and even though I know the official obesity stats, Im still shocked when I walk around the hospital. The number of really obese young people, who I almost never notice in the city. I think many of them feel so much shame, they retire entirely from social life.
rudig
1yr ago
7% of the population being south Asian but only 800 000 hindus is a bit strange. The number of Sikhs would suggest the south-Asian immigration to Canada has been disproportionally non-hindu. Is this likely to change or will Hindus become bigger and bigger share of the population?
I used this as a specific example because it happened to me when I took one of these guys to meet my friends. He was livid about George Floyds criminal background not getting enough attention, he kept repeating statistic about black/immigrant criminality and also said something about Obamas dad being a mass-murderer (and how this was somehow suppressed by the internet, but he had seen proof before it was scrubbed).
Imo this is not a good way of making a first impression, and he absolutely refused to accept it. He was adamant that he was the only man I had ever met who had a spine, and was quite proud of himself for saying controversial things that upset people.
In my friend group we keep things easy and light when we first meet someone. We dont even make edgy jokes really, so this kind of demeanor was seriously off-putting (as was his refusal to tone it down). Even my parents who are somewhat conservative never talk like this, and IMO this is the crutch of the problem. Regular conservative people dont base their whole identities around being provocative, they just try to live their lives according to their values.
rudig
1yr ago
On the internet there are a lot of men who are conservative in a way that is informed by their resentments. They feel that the leftist world order hasn’t taken care of them and so they reject it. Fair enough. Obviously women don’t like these men because they aren’t successful or confident or handsome. If they had attractive traits they wouldn’t be resentful in the first place.
This is very true in my experience. Another thing ive noticed is that men like this often have a big part of their social circle online, so they dont realize how off putting their behaviour is to "normies". They actually think everyone agrees with them but is afraid to say it out loud due to political correctness. They dont understand that discussing race and crime with someone you just met signals low social skills for example, so when they inevitably get rejected they think its "wokism" and doubles down on it.
A similar thing can be seen in first generation immigrants who dont understand the social cues of their new society. They act in a way that signals low status, with the corresponding lack of dating success. If they dont have the ability to introspect and work on themselves the easiest solution is to decide that its all due to racism, and become resentful.
rudig
1yr ago
I think you´re wildly exagerating how often people die from falls. Im a medical doctor and have worked many yours in emergency rooms where people came in after all kinds of falls. Very rarely did someone actually die from a fall. The only ones I remember where people who fell from the top of staircases. Freak accidents obviously happen, but would be a bit strange to use to make legal precedent.
By the same logic you could say that the old man that the two young men where harassing could have died from a heart attach in trying to get away from them (the were high on methampethamine and armed).
it seems to me that the acquittal was the correct decision; armed or not, if the person who was killed was running after the killer with clear intent to harm him, then the killer had every right to defend himself with deadly force.
Even when the shooter was armed (+ with a friend) and the victim was unarmed and alone?
When I was growing up there were some teenage boy in my school who used to blow up the postbox of a grumpy old neighbourhood man (I have no idea if he wad grumpy before or after they started doing this). And everytime he used to come running after them and they would run away as fast as they could. I guess by this line of thinking, if one of them had a gun, they could get away with shooting him because he had "clear intent to harm".
You could do the same exercise with Islam 1940 and find that the biggest islamic empire decriminalized homosexuality (the Ottomans in 1858), while most of Europe still had laws penalizing sodomy until after WW2. Even Sweden didnt decriminalize sodomy until 1944.
You could look at the treatment of jews in the islamic world, and conclude that it was far more tolerant than the treatment of jews in most of Europe and Russia. Majority muslim Albania was the only country in Europe to come out of WW2 with a higher jewish population than before the war.
Basically, just as Islam 1940 could undergo huge changes, so can Islam 2022.
And without going into the whole can of worms that is colonialism (and I personally dont think religion or culture played a role here, as others would have done the same if they had the ability), one could look at a snapshot of Europe and her colonies in the first half of the 20th century and conclude that christianity is irredeemably violent.
Oslos immigrant population is 33%, granted some of the biggest immigrant groups are western European. But if you add up non-euro immigrants (the biggest of which is pakistani and somali) the number is still over 20%.
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