Disinformation for hire, a shadow industry, is quietly booming

While CBT is certainly related to changing habits and behaviors, and while it's conceivable that Internet use by some individuals might become so problematic that a therapist needs to get involved, CBT is not necessary to be intentional about things.

My general point was: the Internet has changed, so if you're still using your old habits, you'll probably need to change those. If a person finds they cannot muster the will to do so, perhaps then they should see a therapist and consider CBT, but this also doesn't need to be that complicated. Sometimes awareness is all that is required.

> While I don't know your personal situtation, and don't want to be rude, or 'diss' you in any way, 4 years seems harsh. I would long have quit that, because it would seem ineffective to me. Like talking to a wall, parking meter, or something like that. Maybe change therapist?

I've seen a few therapists during that time, and each has been really instrumental in my progress. I'll probably be seeing someone for the majority of my adult life.

I've spoken about this openly in other threads, so feel free to dive deeper into my comment history if you are curious, but I'm working through deep seeded issues stemming from complex trauma that spanned the entirety of my childhood.

One does not unravel decades of trauma in a year, or four years, for that matter, and I'm eternally grateful for the trauma-aware therapist I'm working with now - someone who I will probably continue seeing for many years to come. I'm a very different person than I was four years again, or even a year ago. These things take time.

Please take this in the sprit it is intended, but I would recommend not handing out recommendations related to mental health without understanding the situation. I'm concerned at where this thread started (mis-application of CBT) and is ending. Again, please don't take this the wrong way, but I'd be careful not to derail others who may be earlier in their journeys, not yet sure how to navigate all of this.

Do you have a source for your claim?

You're actually conflating two different things, in case it wasn't clear.

This might be the most childishly shallow and one sided reply I've ever read. Pathetic.

Agree totally that NYT's framing of Cotton's position and statements was not reality based. If it exists, political bias is less significant than confirmation bias and echo chamber effects. Snopes has no excuse for not performing a basic check of NYT editorialized claims.

Please read the NYT editorial (2/17) [0] and Cotton's tweet (2/16) [1] again. The NYT claimed "Mr. Cotton later walked back the idea that the coronavirus was a Chinese bioweapon run amok." There is no walk back in that tweet. There is a continued questioning of the Chinese food market claims. Bioweapon is placed within the less likely range of different possibilities that start with natural transmission, noted by Cotton as being "still the most likely."

The tweet is in response to claims by a Washington Post article [2], later corrected with the statement "Earlier versions of this story and its headline inaccurately characterized comments by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) regarding the origins of the coronavirus. The term “debunked” and The Post’s use of “conspiracy theory” have been removed because, then as now, there was no determination about the origins of the virus."

I'd like to visit your statement As you have surely seen, in his twitter thread the senator does list "the engineered-bioweapon hypothesis" as a possible option, and also says that "the so-called experts" do not really know any better.

The full final tweet in the thread is "We ought to be transparent with the American people about all this. Maybe some of these so-called experts think they know better. I don’t. And they really don’t either."

In your statement it sounds like Cotton is claiming experts aren't a good source for judging among possibilities. I think a stronger text-based interpretation is that he is writing about _transparency_ and that some people who are claimed as experts don't want transparency.

At least two of Cotton's public statements focused on Covid origins cited the Huang et al Lancet article [3] which was authored by physicians on the scene. Cotton didn't lend "credence to a possibility that scientists widely dismissed." He drew attention to the fact that there was authentic scientific disagreement with the claims of Chinese authorities about the origins.

The tragedy in all this is that the hypothesizing the virus' origin wasn't the significant part of the message. It was an example for the broader point that the outbreak was serious and that Chinese authorities were not behaving with candor. The specific analogy Cotton made repeatedly was to the Soviet Chernobyl response.

0. https://web.archive.org/web/20200217083402/https://www.nytim...

1. https://twitter.com/SenTomCotton/status/1229202134048133126?...

2. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/02/16/tom-cotto...

3. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...