’One of the blessings of living to be 94 is that you get a real sense of what your legacy might be. As early as the ‘70s, the legendary psychiatrist Paul McHugh was warning that hormones and surgery were unsafe treatments for gender dysphoria—something few people wanted to hear. But now, the tide has turned. As The Free Press reported just last week, a detransitioner in the United States has won a malpractice suit for the first time. When Madeleine Kearns caught up with McHugh recently, he said: “The great thing about my life is I’ve been part of my times…’ (Madeleine Kearns via Free Press)

‘President Donald Trump spent the past year using fear and intimidation to keep Hill Republicans in line, with considerable success. Now those tactics are starting to lose their bite — thanks to a small group of Republicans with nothing to lose.
The reasons why this handful of GOP lawmakers feel empowered to spurn their president and their party vary. But they are launching mini-rebellions with increasing frequency. It’s causing headaches for party leaders who want to keep tight control of the legislative agenda in an election year and anxiety among rank-and-file Republicans who are facing intense pressure to stick with Trump.…’ (Meredith Lee Hill via POLITICO)

Unfortunately and ominously, if they can’t be kept in the fold, the Orange Menace has that much more impetus to undermine the electoral process in the midterms.

‘After deciding carbon dioxide does no harm, it was the logical next move.…’ (Alexandra Petri via The Atlantic)

Presented as ‘humor’ but too true.

This is what it looks like when nothing matters

‘Our culture hasn’t yet been fully subsumed by nihilism, but you can also see it everywhere in different forms: in the mass shooters who seem to care about nothing other than performing for others online. In the influencers Photoshopping themselves into Epstein-file photos to get likes or promote their SoundCloud account. In the overnight viral sensations who become brands and try to hawk a predatory meme coin. In the Super Bowl ads for gambling apps. In a culture of AI slop and brain rot, and in an administration that prioritizes propaganda and graft over governing. It threatens to rip us apart for good if we let it.…’ (Charlie Warzel via The Atlantic)

‘The so-called looksmaxxing movement is narcissistic, cruel, racist, shot through with social Darwinism, and proudly anti-compassion. As the name suggests, looksmaxxers share a monomaniacal commitment to improving their physical appearance. They trade stories of breaking their legs in order to gain extra inches, “bonesmashing” their faces with hammers to heighten their cheekbones, injecting steroids and testosterone to inflate their muscles, and even smoking crystal meth to suppress their appetite. If you had to pick a single corner of the internet that best captures the vices of the Trump era, you couldn’t beat the looksmaxxers. Perhaps more than any other group, they reveal the depth of the moral crisis that confronts young men today…

The looksmaxxing movement—ideologically incoherent but rife with juvenile racism—echoes the ongoing Groyperization of the American right. This is particularly evident in the growing antagonism that certain factions express toward Vance. Fuentes, for example, sounded like a looksmaxxer himself when he criticized the vice president last year. “He’s visibly obese and very ugly. He’s got a fat face, no jawline, no chin,” Fuentes said, before shifting to a more familiar topic for him: “His wife and kids are not white!”

Looksmaxxing grew out of the online culture of “incels,” or involuntary celibates, a term that emerged in the 2010s. United by their resentment of women, incels tend to see attractiveness as a straightforward function of genetics—millimeters, symmetry, skin color—and therefore out of their control. Looksmaxxers hold a similarly superficial view of beauty as a kind of rigid mathematics with a single, knowable solution. But they believe that this makes it malleable: One can “ascend” to a higher plane of attractiveness with enough money, effort, and perhaps the willingness to dabble with crystal meth…’ (Thomas Chatterton Williams via The Atlantic)