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This might not be as unpopular an opinion as it was a few years ago, but here goes: Lucy Letby is not only 100% innocent, but none of the babies in her case were murdered at all, and instead died from natural causes associated with their grave medical states coupled with understaffing, mismanagement, poor ward hygiene, and some incompetence from well-meaning but undertrained staff. Absent the egomaniacal hallucinations of god-complex-having consultants who insist they know better than the pathologists who did the autopsies and found only poor care and serious illness and nothing suspicious, this would never have been brought to the police. In fact, when it was brought to them, they at first said "nah there's nothing here" until the consultants in question really pushed them.

I finished 2 books on her case in the last week, Unmasking Lucy Letby (the more "on the fence" of the two books, written by two BBC correspondents) and Reasonable Doubt (this one is very much an advocacy book which is 100% on Letby's side). I've also read the report from the international panel of experts (one of whom is an expert who wrote a paper in 1989 which the prosecution used against her, something said expert shot down as a complete misunderstanding of his work). Even the talk page of her Wikipedia article is worth parsing. The upshot of all that reading is this: the evidence against this woman is non-existent. It's not just that the evidence is weak, but there is none. There is no evidence of malfeasance at all, let alone that of a serial killing nurse, and certainly not of Lucy Letby being that serial killer.

There are so many professionals and experts - not internet-based true crime conspiracist wankers who I have hitherto ignored - who are calling this a huge miscarriage of justice, and literally NO ONE is coming out in support of her conviction apart from the ones who brought the case in the first place. Like, you'd expect to get a lot more "well, not sure, but..." from neonatal doctors and statisticians and pathologists and psychologists and endocrinologists, but you don't see that at all; every single expert in their respective field who has come out publicly about this case has been uniformly on the side of her complete innocence. That just doesn't happen in cases where the evidence is in any way convincing. The same is true for her nursing colleagues; they all said they never saw her do shit, and in fact she was one of the best among them. They still maintain that view.

This might just be the worst miscarriage of justice I've ever seen, and I grew up with the Birmingham Six and the Guilford Four & Maguire Seven ringing in my ears. At least in their cases, there was physical evidence used against them. It was bullshit and the science was flawed, but no one at the time knew that. Letby doesn't even having shit science against her. The entire case is an outbreak of hysteria amongst 3 or 4 consultants who had personal beef with Letby because of complaints she posted about them to higher-ups which threatened their careers.

Confirmation bias + no understanding of even elementary statistics + "I'm fuckin' Nancy Drew up in this bitch!" egomania from those consultants = this fucked up case.

I also think it's repugnant what was done to the families of those dead children. The lunatics who built this case against Letby really took the unimaginable heartache and grief of the parents and told them "actually, no, it's so much worse than you thought. That nice nurse who you thought was so caring and trustworthy? She offed your kid right under your nose." Once Letby is exonerated and compensated (something I would happily stake my life on), those parents are gonna have to find a place for the new depths of suffering the news brings. Now they're back to being the parents of a sick kid who died, and not members of a worldwide exclusive cohort of victims of a serial killer, a killer onto whom they had focused their anger and sadness for so many years but who is now shown to be innocent and irreversibly damaged because of the ordeal. I don't know how many years of therapy will be needed to untie that particular Gordian knot of ambivalence. They deserve compensation as well. And the consultants who jury-rigged this bullshit case deserve prison, but at the very least they should be struck off the medical register. In fact, the only time they should be allowed within the grounds of a hospital ever again is when their corpses are wheeled into the morgue in 30 years.

COME AT ME.

P.S. I didn't go into specific evidence and debunking of said evidence because it's all covered in the aforementioned books and articles. I'm happy to regurgitate what I've read if you want to go toe-to-toe with me on it (e.g. "but what about the post-it note with her confession on it!" etc.), but it's honestly better if you just read the material if you're interested in the topic. I'm deferring to experts here, I myself don't know shit about fuck. As I said, I'm not leaning on true crime sleuths or conspiracy theories or podcasts, I'm focusing only on expert opinion published by credentialed and recognised experts. Until I heard about such people and their opinions, I'd never given Letby's guilt a second thought. I'm not a "truther", and I would argue that the "truther" or the "conspiracist" in this particular case is the one who puts a woman in prison for life based on a 9/11 truther-style cherry-picking excursion, cherry-picking both "evidence" that fits their narrative and "experts" who are actually not experts in the fields they need to be for their expertise to matter. The non-truther position, in my opinion, is the one that sees scientific consensus on a given topic and defers to it. The consensus is very much on Letby's side.

Before we get into it, let me just say that I understand that removing a major component of a dish may cause it to become something else. So cheeseless pizza may no longer technically be "pizza". To this I say: no one gives a fuck, please go officiate a spelling bee or whatever it is you do for fun, ya gatekeeping linguaFREAK.

I want to try to convince you to give cheeseless pizza a shot, because I think Big Cheese™ has been depriving humanity of the true deliciousness of pizza for millennia.

Cheese on pizza (and this includes the cheese substitutes that you might find on vegan or vegetarian pizzas) is like taking a carefully-crafted meal, flavoured and spiced to perfection, and then saying to the customer "hey, do you want me to dump a thick molten layer of bitter yellowish-white slime over everything? It'll completely overpower every other flavour on the dish, and will leave your mouth feeling weird and gross after you're done eating." and the customer is like "HELL YEAH!"

If you enjoy many toppings with lots of veg and whathaveyou, you are not getting the full experience when cheese is there cockblocking your tastebuds like an ugly friend at a bar. The sauce, the bread, the peppers, the onions, the 'shrooms, the pepperoni, they're all full of flavour and each flavour stands on its own and simultaneously complements the other flavours. Dumping a pound of cheese on top of it makes it all coalesce into a murky nondescript lump, something akin to trying to listen to music in a wind tunnel while wearing a thick deerstalker hat with the ear flaps down. It's like the difference between having an intellectually-stimulating conversation with a like-minded person, and trying to be heard as you discuss football stats with a drunk stranger in a bar where the sound system is cranked up to max volume at all times.

If you're someone who just likes a straight Margherita pizza, where cheese is very much the "main event", then this doesn't really apply. I concede that even the most delicious pizza sauce and most fancy base bread are not quite enough to blow anyone's mind with flavour if that's all you're working with. But if you like adding toppings, allow them to be the main event for one day, and when you do, give yourself over the involuntary urge to start singing A Whole New World when the flavours awaken hitherto dormant olfactory neurons that you didn't even know you had.

In many online pizza shops, you can untick "cheese" when choosing your toppings, and they'll respect your choice, and you won't receive a wellness check from the police or anything. You can do it with Domino's, and many of my local pizza places do it, too. You can also buy frozen pizzas sans cheese or cheese substitutes, although this is fairly rare (they think removing cheese means you need to replace it with some other gunk that does the same job, which is obviously not helping matters). And of course, you can make or buy bases and build your own pizza at home.

Try it. TRUST ME BRO.

#FuckCheeseOnPizza

I assume one becomes a chef because they have a love for cooking and food and the artistry involved, but I can't think of anything more eroding to that love of the craft than the kind of working day I see chefs and other kitchen staff go through. It seems to an outsider like me that it's basically a shift-length panic attack, every day. But that can't be the case, or no one would do the job!

For example, what kind of story would Geralt the Witcher tell his kids? "Once upon a time there was some normal everyday shit that went how it always goes"?

Must be the equivalent of realworld kids saying "Daddy tell me the story about the Tesco delivery again! The one where they forgot the 2L bottle of Pepsi Max!"

It's kinda strange to imagine a person's face being locked out of the arts because a character or actor who looked like them got there first.

It's considered invasive in Indian and Pacific Ocean islands, and is native to the United States. Much to my surprise, there's no mention of Australia!

Be safe out there 💀🗡️🐌

TL;DR: There are two levels of annoyance here. One is the person having to use wanky language to get around censorship. The other is the person who can't help but take to the comments and complain about it, boringly, and without any attempt to offer solutions. I put it to you, good sir, that person #2 is the one who ought to give his larynx a rest.

Yeah, it's annoying to see and hear the words "unalived" and "ess ehhed" in place of "murdered" and "sexually assaulted", but they are not words people use in speech in the real world or even when talking to each other directly online. They are like "LOL"; only demented cunts (or people being ironic) walk around the real world saying "ell oh ell". No one is running down the street screaming "he's trying to unalive me, someone help!" Language is doing just fine.

People in the comments under videos which use these terms are incessantly complaining about "brainrot" being the death-knell of language. These people are tedious wankers who need to chill the fuck out and find something else to fret over, like microplastics or fascism. We all understand why these annoying terms are used, and it's not because the people using them enjoy using them. If they want their content to make it through a blunt and braindead censorship algorithm, they have no choice. We all know this. So maybe shut the fuck up about it? "Unalived" is not a hot new word being used by kids; these words are not changes to the language, they're linguistic backdoors that allow people to say what they need to say while simultaneously not triggering a censorship bot, and that's all they are.

And not for nothing, and somewhat off-topic, but literally every generation that has ever existed frets over the youth's behaviour and the way they use language. Even Plato was whining about it in exactly the same way people do today. This doesn't need to be a tradition you blindly adhere to. You can choose to not be that old reactionary fuck talking apocalyptically about the next generation and just accept that language is and always will be an organic and ever-shifting entity, and that the only people who attempt to crowbar it into a rigid relational database are grating bores and grammar nazis, or, god forbid, the French.

The shrink served 5 years of a 12-year sentence for the murder.