What Happened Today: July 21, 2022
The depression racket; New York’s first polio case in a decade; Rise of the Gen Z bimbo
The Big Story
With billions of dollars on the line, psychiatrists have for years prescribed selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) to tens of millions of people despite strong evidence showing that the claims behind the antidepressant drugs are false. A major new meta-analysis published this week in the journal Molecular Psychiatry rejects the widespread theory that depression is caused by a chemical imbalance, deeming it “not empirically substantiated.” According to the study, which is based on an exhaustive analysis of 17 earlier reviews, “there is no evidence of a connection between reduced serotonin levels or activity and depression.” The study does not prove that antidepressants like Prozac don’t work, only that any relief of depression they produce is not a result of the only way they claim to work, which is by regulating serotonin. Multiple studies show the drugs work only modestly better than placebos. SSRIs are also associated with a host of side effects and have been linked to an increased risk of suicide in some studies.
While the psychiatric and pharmaceutical industries as a whole have endorsed the “chemical imbalance” theory of depression, there has long been a vocal minority of medical professionals and researchers disputing that claim who were largely drowned out by industry consensus and the drug companies’ multibillion-dollar marketing campaigns. For psychiatrists, part of the appeal of SSRIs is that they are “easier to prescribe and give to people than provide more time intensive things like psychotherapy,” the chair of psychology at the State University of New York, told DailyMail.com. Currently, an estimated 13% of American adults take antidepressants with the numbers even higher among women. The antidepressant industry is currently valued at $15 billion per year, with strong growth projected over the next decade.
In the Back Pages: The Rise of the Female-to-Female Transsexual
The Rest
→ New York health officials reported the state's first known polio case in a decade in an unvaccinated young adult in Rockland County. The patient first showed symptoms a month ago and has now developed paralysis. The patient, who is unvaccinated, is believed to have contracted the disease from someone who received a live strain of polio in an oral vaccine. The oral version of the polio vaccine is no longer given in the U.S., suggesting it was transmitted by someone who had recently traveled abroad.
Read More: https://www.statnews.com/2022/07/21/n-y-state-detects-polio-case-first-in-the-u-s-since-2013/
→ President Biden tested positive for COVID-19 on Thursday morning and is reporting mild symptoms. In a letter announcing the diagnosis, Biden’s doctor, Dr. Kevin O’Connor, stated that the president went to bed feeling fine on Wednesday night, and woke up on Thursday with a runny nose, occasional dry cough, and fatigue, before testing positive. “Consistent with CDC guidelines, he will isolate at the White House and will continue to carry out all of his duties fully during that time,” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said. President Biden will also receive Paxlovid, an antiviral drug that has had success in mitigating the symptoms of COVID-19 in older patients.
→ The Russian Justice Ministry is closing the Russian operations of the Jewish Agency for Israel, an organization dedicated to helping Jews emigrate to Israel and the largest Jewish nonprofit organization in the world. The closure comes just weeks after the JA publicly denied earlier reports that it was being shut down by Moscow apparently in response to criticism of Russia from Yair Lapid, who became Israel’s acting prime minister in the wake of the government being dissolved in July, and who has been more outspoken in his condemnations of Russia’s war in Ukraine than his predecessor, Naftali Bennett. News of the closure has led to finger-pointing in all directions, with JA officials accusing Lapid of mishandling the issue and Israeli officials accusing the JA of the same.
Read More: https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-712718
→ Pending approval from the Federal Trade Commission, which is expected to come as soon as next month, Microsoft will purchase Activision Blizzard, a gaming company with a $62 billion market cap that, if acquired, will make Microsoft the largest gaming company in the country. Microsoft has also just inked a deal with Netflix to support the streaming service’s advertising technologies. Taken together, the two contracts show Microsoft making a splashy entrance into the entertainment-media sector. Microsoft is not currently competitive in the streaming wars, which mitigates the risk that a Netflix purchase would face any antitrust hurdles, and increases the chance that we’ll soon see Microsoft competing for streaming content and customers with Amazon, Apple, and Disney.
→ Speaking of tech-giant acquisitions, Amazon announced Thursday that it was buying health care company One Medical in a cash deal valued at $3.9 billion. As part of its growing health care services business, the purchase gives Amazon access to both the company’s virtual business and its physical locations in a dozen markets across the U.S. Following news of the deal, shares of One Medical’s parent company, 1Life Healthcare (ONEM), shot up by 65% in early trading Thursday.
→ Priced out of purchasing a home in America, where the housing market in most metropolitan areas is surging—along with crime, homelessness, and a general sense of dysfunction—Americans are relocating to Europe at the highest rate in years. Most Americans don’t have the means to flee failing cities, but for those who do, they’re finding a far more favorable real estate market overseas. Sotheby’s International Realty noted a 40% increase in requests from Americans interested in moving to Greece compared to last year, and reported that Americans made up 12% of the real estate company’s revenue in Italy during the first quarter of 2022 compared to 5% the year before. And it’s not just the jet set that are buying up homes. Middle-class Americans are taking advantage of remote work options and Europe’s looser housing market. A resident of Atlanta, for example, was looking to buy a place for herself and her son, but couldn’t afford much stateside—even with $300,000 in cash on hand. In Sicily, however, she snatched up a 3,100-square-foot house, a smaller second home, and a sizable storefront for just over $60,000 bucks. “I would never have looked to buy in Italy if the market in the U.S. hadn’t been so crazy,” she told Bloomberg.
→ San Diego has been classified by the CDC as having high levels of COVID-19 transmission, leading the city’s Unified School District to impose a mask mandate for all of the city’s schools. Those who don’t want to wear masks, the city’s Unified Board president, Dr. Sharon Whitehurst-Payne, said in an interview, “don’t have to go to the school at all other than via Zoom.” With this decision effective immediately, it now seems likely that San Diego will still have a mask mandate in place come the start of the fall term. Numerous recent studies have called into question the effectiveness of masking as a means to reduce the spread of COVID, especially in settings like schools where enforcing proper wear is difficult.
→ NUMBER OF THE DAY: $700,000
The amount that Bill de Blasio raised in his failed run for Congress, and also the amount that J.D. Vance has loaned his campaign in his ongoing (albeit apparently failing) bid for Congress. Both men are exploiting the same loopholes in campaign finance rules to use funds that they raised through their campaigns to pay off various debts, in what one campaign finance watchdog recently called a “shell game.”
Bill de Blasio bowed out of the race for New York’s 10th Congressional seat on Tuesday, but the campaign was not a total failure, as the former mayor successfully raised almost enough money to fully pay off his sizable debts: $425,000 will be needed to pay a lobbying firm that helped him with his congressional campaign, and $320,000 will need to go to NYC’s coffers, after the city foot the bill for de Blasio’s use of the NYPD as the security detail for his failed 2020 presidential run—even after the city’s conflicts board told de Blasio he could not do so.
J.D. Vance, who is currently running for Senate in Ohio, lent his campaign $700,000, which he is now fundraising to repay, raising all sorts of conflict of interest issues—such as whether this incentivizes public officials to run for office in the hope of paying back their debts. The practice of repaying one’s own campaign contributions to oneself had been limited by the Supreme Court in 2002, but Sen. Ted Cruz successfully appealed the court’s decision last year, clearing the way for candidates to resume the practice.
Vance and de Blasio can now let those debts hang, run for office down the road, and use funds raised by future campaigns to pay these debts back. “It turns out that de Blasio’s short-lived run for Congress was the perfect tool for him to convince donors to give him new money which he can now use to pay off his old debts,” one campaign finance lawyer said. And with the Supreme Court’s recent reversal, candidates can even charge interest on the loans they make to their campaigns, turning a tidy profit in the process.
Read More: https://www.thecity.nyc/2022/7/19/23270761/de-blasio-congress-debts-nypd
→ MAP OF THE DAY
Much has been said about Russia’s military missteps in Ukraine, from the assumption that the Russian troops would be welcomed warmly to the army’s failure to adequately feed and supply its troops. Now Ukrainians are offering yet another explanation: The Russians were using maps of Ukraine from last century. The Security Service of Ukraine (SSU) posted pictures of several maps to Facebook, and claimed that they had seized these maps from captured Russian officers. The maps, the SSU claims, date back to the 1960s and 1970s, when Ukraine looked a good deal different than it does today—and indeed was part of the Soviet Union. “On the maps of the occupiers,” the SSU’s statement claims, “the Saltivsky residential area of Kharkiv, which was built up since the beginning of the 1970s, is completely missing. The Travianske and Muromske reservoirs, built in the 1970s, are also missing. And the state border between Ukraine and Russia is drawn with a ballpoint pen, as it was not on the maps at all.”
Additional reporting and writing provided by The Scroll’s associate editor, David Sugarman
TODAY IN TABLET:
Ilhan’s Country: Traveling through East Africa and Minnesota reveals a story more quintessentially American than either the congresswoman or her detractors want to admit
By Armin Rosen
Read More: https://www.tabletmag.com/contributors/armin-rosen
SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something you want to tell us about that’s going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.
Introducing The Scroll’s newest regular contributor, Katherine Dee, better known online as Default Friend, with a column on why Gen Z’s self-declared “bimbos” are embracing a version of femininity so campy it might as well be drag.
Who is the Gen Z bimbo?
A November 2020 Rolling Stone article declares that she’s “back, like for real!” The U.K.’s CHECK-OUT Mag explains “how TikTok and Gen Z redefined the core principles of being a bimbo” as though it’s a real political movement campaigning on the platform of bimboism. A Refinery29 headline announces the “rise of the new-age bimbo.” And recently, The New York Times ran an op-ed titled “Meet the Self-Described ‘Bimbos’ of TikTok.”
The story goes that “bimbofication”—which, it should be noted, is a word borrowed from a genre of “transformation” pornography and erotic fan art, where men and women metamorphize into what I can only politely describe as “surgically enhanced” sex dolls—is no longer a derisive label. No, Gen Z creators are reclaiming the bimbo to be “empowering.”
The most cited among these Zoomer TikTokers is a Chicago woman named Chrissy Chlapecka, whose now iconic TikTok proclaims that the bimbo “isn’t dumb. […] She’s actually a radical leftist, who’s pro-sex work, pro-Black Lives Matter, pro-LGBTQ+, pro-choice,” and “will always be there for her girls, gays, and theys.” Other articles are less prescriptive and leave out the explicitly progressive political agenda, postulating that it’s a reaction to our information-dense culture. It’s about vibes. It’s about confidence. It’s about, as Chrissy Chlapecka suggests, empowerment.
But what's going on, exactly? Is it a fashion trend, a self-help movement, a nascent digital community, a subculture? If you surf TikTok (or really, any social media platform), you’ll quickly discover that while the hashtags #bimbotok, #bimbo, #bimbofication, #bimbology, et al. are composed of millions of posts, there are only a small number of creators who consistently embrace the label. Many of them are the same few creators mentioned in every Gen Z bimboism explainer: @fauxrich, @gsgetlonelytoo, @ChrissyChlapecka, and @griffinmaxwellbrooks. There are a handful more, but they don’t seem to share enough to make them a cohesive subculture, per se. It’s more like they’re all taking inspiration from the same Pinterest or Tumblr mood board.
I’m not suggesting that it’s nothing, though. Taken together, @fauxrich, @gsgetlonelytoo, @ChrissyChlapecka, and @griffinmaxwellbrooks have follower counts tallying in the millions, with Chrissy alone clocking in at 4.8 million TikTok followers. TikTok is notorious for its inflated numbers—that is, something like 100,000 followers on TikTok isn’t as “valuable” as 100,000 followers on a platform like Twitter—but even for TikTok’s standards, close to 5 million is a hell of a lot. She’s earned her explosion of trend pieces.
To the extent that the bimbo subculture divorced from Chrissy & company’s fame is a genuine phenomenon, it seems like it can be distilled into four distinct categories (excluding the preexisting genre of pornography).
First, it’s an aesthetic. Online, “aesthetics” are labels for images often posted together that evoke similar moods. The “bimbo aesthetic,” also sometimes called bimbocore, which shares its name with a musical microgenre, evokes the early 2000s, hot pinks, screencaps from movies and shows like Mean Girls, Legally Blonde, and The Simple Life, and plenty of photos of thin, tan, blond women. It’s present on TikTok, but it’s more the domain of websites like Tumblr, Pinterest, and Twitter. Like most digital aesthetics, you know it when you see it. As they say, it’s more of a “vibe.”
Second, it’s a meme, and it’s not necessarily borrowed from the familiar bimbos of the ’50s, like Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield, or even the ’90s and early ’00s, like Pamela Anderson or Elle Woods from Legally Blonde. That’s not to say that they don’t take inspiration from the bimbos of yesteryear but that’s not its origin point. According to KnowYourMeme, it’s more likely that it’s a case of a pornographic trope bleeding into nonpornographic culture. Way back in 2020, TikTokers made videos of their “bimbo walks,” showing off their transformation—in jest or not—from normal she, he, or they to fully fledged bimbohood. (The Stacy to Becky “de-bimbofication” image macro, a piece of erotic fan art that went viral in 2017 and stayed viral, is also well-known among the internet-addled.) Something I think is interesting, and has remained underappreciated in the flurry of think pieces about Gen Z bimbos, is that this isn’t the first meme or even “vibe” to be highly influenced by porn …