my post that said "refusing to consider that mentally ill people ARE acting rationally is one of psychiatry's main violences" got a tag saying basically "actually yeah we modern psych professionals usually do assume patients are acting with reason". which is a really wild thing to say. (please do not track down and berate this person)

i have not been every single mental health patient ever, however i have been me, and um. the idea that i was acting rationally simply was not an option to my therapists and psychiatrists for 9 years. it was absolutely not considered.

Robin Olds: “If we keep flying the way they tell us to, we’re not coming home.”

The US Air Force was operating under strict doctrine designed far from real combat. Flight routes were predictable. Strike timings were effectively known. Enemy pilots could anticipate when and how American aircraft would arrive. Losses kept increasing, and command treated them as acceptable attrition.

Olds had already survived one war. He saw the pattern immediately. American pilots were being guided into predictable traps because bureaucracy valued procedure over adaptation. The system demanded obedience. It did not reward deviation, even when deviation meant survival.

Olds made a decision that broke doctrine at multiple levels. He designed a deception operation that imitated vulnerable aircraft to lure enemy fighters into combat on his terms. The plan required altered call signs, modified flight patterns, and deliberate misdirection toward higher command.

The defining moment came when Olds approved the mission anyway. The operation worked. Enemy fighters responded exactly as expected and were taken down in large numbers. Losses on the American side dropped significantly afterward. The balance in the sky shifted almost instantly. The enemy was forced to adapt because predictability had been broken.

Official reports praised the success while avoiding the method behind it. Commanders were relieved by the outcome but unsettled by what it exposed. Olds had revealed a dangerous truth. That the doctrine itself was flawed. That strict obedience had been the real weakness.

Olds was recognized publicly but restricted privately. Promotions slowed. Assignments changed. He was respected for his effectiveness but viewed with caution as someone willing to break rules when lives were at stake.

Olds understood something institutions resist admitting. That in combat, survival often depends on controlled disobedience. That rigid systems punish those who prove they are wrong.

History remembers the victories. It rarely remembers the risk. That one man accepted personal consequences as the price of challenging a system that preferred predictable loss over uncomfortable truth.

The uncomfortable truth is this. Military institutions claim to reward initiative, but only after it succeeds. Until then, the people who save lives by breaking the rules are treated as problems to be managed, not lessons to be learned.

#TheVietnamWar #USAF

#RIP

I hope Thira gets a cool dress when she's King

THE RAPE OF PARADISE...

Columbus and the Birth of Racism in the Americas. Dr. Jan Carew

★ 𝐅𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐃𝐨𝐜𝐭𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐞 ★

~ Imagination

Fence (Rogue + Heir): One who steals and redistributes (through) the aspect which they embody. Doctrine (Mind + Hope): The patterns intertwined in imagination; the belief in logic and reasoning; the practical approach to faith.

Fence of Doctrine: One who embodies a consistency in creative ideas. One who, paradoxically, uses this to take the predictable trends of one idea and apply it to another creative venture entirely. One who, by putting trust into the the universal nature of broad logic, represents a steadfast routine of creation which can be directed into multiple different imaginative projects.

Prone to: Starting several new projects, mental flexibility, pattern recognition, applying said recognized patterns to new material, adaptability without compromising the consistent self, innovation. Watch out for: Starting/brainstorming crafts/projects/tasks without following through, indecisiveness, finding a way to apply pre-tested methods to projects to the point of limiting one's ability to stay open to new techniques (on the opposite end, being too eager to push the bounds of pre-established methods, and consequently making a project fall apart from the lack of a solid foundation).

~ Chance

I’ve been trying to understand why the LDS Church feels so different from the one older generations grew up in. Not just doctrinally, but in how it relates to people and how authority is exercised. This is a systems explanation that started making sense to me once I stopped looking at individual decisions and started looking at patterns.

At a certain point, the same dynamics keep repeating.

What I keep coming back to is how personal psychology, delayed authority, and centralized power interact in a church that treats leadership decisions as revelation.

Spencer W. Kimball

Spencer W. Kimball was not far removed from polygamy. He was the grandson of Heber C. Kimball, lived in Arizona near post Manifesto polygamist communities, and came into leadership surrounded by men who still believed Doctrine and Covenants 132 meant plural marriage, not symbolic eternal sealing.

He also lived through the Richard R. Lyman excommunication from inside the Quorum. That mattered. Sexual theology wasn’t abstract for him. It had already destroyed an apostle.

When Kimball talked about sexuality, especially within marriage, it was almost always framed as duty rather than desire. There was no real attempt to integrate eros into holiness. Instead, sex became something dangerous that had to be tightly controlled. That mindset shows up clearly in The Miracle of Forgiveness and in the 1982 First Presidency letter that intruded directly into marital intimacy.

What stands out to me is that not all of his peers agreed with this approach. Hugh B. Brown explicitly said the Church does not involve itself in the bedrooms of its members. That tells us Kimball’s views weren’t inevitable or universal.

The Church later walked back the 1982 letter, quietly stopped promoting The Miracle of Forgiveness, and abandoned some of the most damaging purity based rhetoric Kimball had normalized. That’s the point where it stopped feeling like “just the era” to me. When an institution quietly retreats from a framework it once enforced, it’s usually because harm became impossible to ignore.

Russell M. Nelson

Russell M. Nelson shows a different version of the same structural problem.

As a junior apostle, he gave a General Conference talk criticizing the use of the word Mormon. In the very next session, Gordon B. Hinckley publicly corrected him. That kind of correction is rare in LDS leadership culture, especially in that setting.

The disagreement was public, unresolved, and then simply shut down. There was no space for it to be worked through. It just sat there.

Decades later, once Nelson became president, the exact same position returned, unchanged, but now framed as revelation. Mormon was suddenly a victory for Satan. Along with that came a presidency marked by sharp reversals, heavy personal branding, unprecedented temple announcements, and a tendency to moralize past member obedience without acknowledging institutional responsibility.

I don’t think this requires assuming revenge or pettiness. It makes sense if you understand how a delayed power hierarchy works. In a system where disagreement cannot be resolved and authority eventually becomes unilateral, suppressed preferences don’t disappear. They wait.

Dallin H. Oaks

Dallin H. Oaks is the most troubling example for me.

As BYU president, he presided over an institution that engaged in aversive conditioning and electroshock therapy on gay students. That this happened is not really disputed. What is disputed is administrative knowledge and moral accountability.

Oaks has consistently denied awareness or responsibility, even as documentation and scholarship suggest the issue was known at an institutional level. What makes this worse is that denial has been paired with continued opposition to LGBTQ inclusion and with the disciplining or excommunication of those who publicly refuse to support him.

This is where the idea of consent falls apart for me. The Church claims moral authority while withholding transparency, denying harm, and punishing dissent. That isn’t informed consent. It’s coercive authority.

The pattern

These are three very different men, but the same mechanism keeps showing up.

In a centralized, gerontocratic system where authority is delayed for decades, personal psychology doesn’t get checked. It gets sanctified.

Kimball’s sexual alienation became shame based doctrine. Nelson’s unresolved disagreement became revelation framed reversal. Oaks’s institutional denial became loyalty enforced over moral repair.

Each time, God’s will is claimed, members absorb the cost, corrections happen quietly if they happen at all, and accountability never flows upward.

Why this matters now

The Church today still asks for enormous levels of time, loyalty, obedience, and money. But it provides less local community, less transparency, and less return on that investment than it once did. At the same time, it centralizes authority, dilutes the distinctiveness that once gave people identity, and reframes late social adaptation as revelation.

Millennials and Gen Z aren’t leaving because they’re offended. They’re leaving because the numbers don’t add up anymore.

My conclusion

I can’t believe an institution that repeatedly sanctifies personal and institutional failure, suppresses dissent rather than addressing harm, retroactively moralizes obedience, and demands loyalty without accountability is being led by God.