Dear Whinging Little Snot,
First, I refuse to acknowledge or normalize your rhetoric by calling you that ridiculous word you've cooked up. You are not "involuntarily celibate"; let's get that shit out of the way right now. You are not willingly abstaining from sex for religious or moral reasons. "Involuntary" denotes that your lack of a sex life is as beyond your control as your heart muscle, and that's demonstrably, patently bullshit. What you are is insecure, immature, lazy, and selfish.
Second, no, this is not going to be a "take a shower/work out/quit playing video games all day" post, either. Although in many of your cases, taking a shower would certainly be an improvement (yes, I realize the shower is on the first floor of your mother's house and your basement has no elevator, but hey, you gotta put in a little effort, here). This is going to be the raw truth of why you are in your current situation, and how to get out.
Let's start with the "celibate" part. You are not celibate, so much as completely unfuckable (we'll get to the reasons for that in a minute). If a reasonable facsimilie of Jessica Alba walked up to you naked and asked you to fuck her, you would not be able to get your pants down fast enough. That isn't "celibacy" in any sense of the term. You want to have sex, and you are fully willing to have sex if the opportunity presents itself. There just isn't one.
Why? Simple. It's the same reason you're not a star athlete, famous musician, actor, or even a politician. And no, it isn't lack of looks, talent or a good resumé. Plenty of actors, athletes and musicians are famous, ugly and fucking terrible at what they do. And Donald Trump just proved you can be literally the stupidest, most unqualified person in the room and still get the job.
But even the dumbest, most untalented piece of garbage on your TV or radio gets more tail than you because unlike you, they don't expect said tail to fall into their lap purely because they happen to have a dick (even Trump goes out and grabs pussy). They take the risk of going out there and pursuing what they want rather than setting a trap for it and hoping it's just as stupid as they are.
You want tail? Then you have to get out of your mother's basement now and then and actually go out and look for it. Put in some goddamned effort. And no, I don't mean effort into your looks. Again, Donald Trump has proven you can look like something left in a dumpster outside a taxidermist's office and still marry three gorgeous women. The kind of effort you have to put in is all in your attitude. Because that is your problem. Your entire mindset is completely unfuckable.
When I used to think I was straight -- before I realized that while some men were okay in the brain and maybe the face, everything from the neck down was like throwing a bucket of icewater on a cozy campfire -- the boys I found pretty or even intellectually attractive all had one thing in common: positive attitudes. They were funny, upbeat, genuinely good-hearted people. They didn't have to disparage anybody else, either. They didn't have to talk shit about "normies" or "chads." Nor were they "pick-up artists." They were regular goddamn people.
Guess what? Many of them that I knew in high school are happily married now.
What's their secret? It's twofold. Fold the First is they aren't obsessed with sticking their dick in a warm hole. Fold the Second is they have the basic human decency to see women as more than life support systems for the aforementioned warm holes. The reason you guys get no action is because women can tell you're interested in exactly one thing no matter how much you think you hide it. We know because you all give us the same look my cat does when I have a plate of sushi in my hand. My cat is far more mature about it, though.
Having a romantic partner is all a matter of leaving your comfort zone and not being a predatory douchenozzle. And every minute you call yourselves "incels" you're doing both. You are refusing to face the possibility of rejection because your ego has all the integrity of a used dryer sheet, and you are quite literally being a douchenozzle. And a defective one at that. An object whose sole purpose is to be shoved into a vagina, and you can't even get that part right.
You want a girlfriend? You want women to think you're worthy of a chance? Then you need to grow the fuck up and have an attitude deserving of us.
Stop blaming everyone else for why you feel like shit. It's not society's fault. It's not women's fault. It's not "chad's" fault. It's your own goddamn fault because you have a defeatist outlook on your life, thus your entire situation is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Stop thinking of yourself as a "king" who has "had your kingdom stolen from you" by feminism/The Enlightement/whatever. You were never a king. And if you had lived before The Enlightenment, you would have likely been a serf anyway.
Stop thinking of sex as a) something you must have and b) something you're entitled to. Women don't owe you shit, kiddo. You won't die without it, and sex toys have been a thing since ancient Greece, so if you really need to relieve your "urges" there are ways to get around the whole not-having-a-willing-partner thing.
Stop thinking of women as your combination sex doll and babysitter. You're a grown-ass adult, so act like it. You are responsible for your mood and your outlook on life. Nobody else is. Women exist for reasons other than your petty, selfish amusement.
Stop thinking of women as all whores/sluts/evil bitches/etc. who are not deserving of your dick even though you want to stick it in us so bad it's torn a hole in your pants. In fact? If you hate women as much as your Reddit posts indicate, you'd be better off finding something that isn't a fellow human to bust your nuts in. You don't have to risk breeding, and nobody else need put up with your loser ass. Everyone wins.
The reason "normies" get laid and you don't is because "normies" actually put in the effort both at meeting other people and at being enjoyable to hang around. You lazy skid marks in the underwear of humanity do the dating equivalent of whipping out your dick and telling us "it ain't gonna suck itself."
No shit, kiddo. Of course it won't suck itself. We invented the penis pump for a reason.
Statcounter
Friday, December 30, 2016
Thursday, December 29, 2016
6 More Signs of a Toxic Friendship: Covert Ops
In my previous installment, I clued you guys in to 6 signs your best friend might be an asshole. And as I noted in that post, there are, in fact, way more than 6 ways to do it. Some assholes are a lot sneakier about their behavior, and won't be quite as blatant about the motives. At least not at first.
Some Toxic Assholes are more like Special Forces than first-line infantry. They use a much less overt strategy for extracting supply so as to avoid detection, because we're generally familiar with the more boisterous narcissists. But once you know the pattern, you can figure these people out before they have a chance to do you real harm.
So I'm presenting to you 6 more signs of a toxic friendship, with a lot more subtlety:
1. Their Sob Story Brings Everyone to the Yard (Damn Right, It's Always Better Than Yours)
Some people really are the fire hydrants in the dog park of life. But like actual dog parks, those fire hydrants are exceedingly rare. For the Toxic Asshole, life is just that; they are a special and uniquely abused person such that absolutely nobody can understand their pain because they have suffered more than your puny mind could ever imagine. Whatever problems you may have, they have more. If you had a bad day, they had a worse one. At all times there is an Olympic-level contest for Most Shat Upon Person On Earth, and they always take home a gold.
Guys? Real people who have had actual shitty lives don't do this, for a very simple reason; those experiences were fucking awful and they don't like talking about them for literally no goddamned reason. There is shame, vulnerability, grief, and bitterness in spades, and people who have experienced these events don't want to relive them. They certainly don't view them as bragging rights.
The Toxic Asshole, on the other hand, sees having a shitty life as a status symbol. Something that makes them better than everyone else in the room. They will use their supposedly Dark and Troubled Past to gain your sympathy and to shield themselves from criticism, and as a bonus, they get to make you look like the asshole while they wear the Holy Halo of Victimhood. It's a perfect setup to milk all the attention until they're like a weepier, whinier Jabba the Hutt.
Now of course, nobody decent wants to assume that a person is lying out their ass when they talk about awful shit that happened to them, so that kind of puts us in a tight spot; if they're telling the truth, we'll feel pretty guilty for dismissing it as attention-grabbing, and frankly it'll make us no better than the people who defend actors and athletes instead of the people they assault.
Which is why it's important to remember that what distinguishes an actual fire hydrant in the dog park of life from the puddle of piss at the base of said fire hydrant is the person's behavior, not their history. If they're talking about what happened to them in order to make you feel less alone, and to reassure you that it's possible to face something horrific and still come out okay the other side? Not an asshole.
If, on the contrary, they talk about what happened to them in order to dismiss and downplay whatever has happened to you? Definitely an asshole. That's a dick move, no matter how you slice it.
2. They Constantly Inform You of Their Virtues
Genuinely empathetic, caring, generous, sensitive people don't have to tell you how empathetic, generous, sensitive and caring they are; they'll show you. Toxic Assholes will do the exact reverse. They'll tell you, every chance they get, how they're such honest people and how much they care about everybody and put themselves last, but their behavior will not line up.
They'll claim to love honesty and hate fakers, but when you give them your honest opinion and it's something they don't want to hear, they will absolutely lose their shit at you. They'll claim to be empathetic to a fault, but they can't seem to tell that their behavior is hurtful to you. They'll claim to be sensitive and always aware of the mood of a room, but for some reason they're unable to determine when you're stressed the hell out and need them to shut up for a while. They'll claim to be generous and giving, but you find they beg for gifts and money far more often than they bestow them.
They do this so you'll have a harder time believing what you see and experience, and so that other people are less likely to believe you as well. Particularly if they didn't witness anything shitty. It's a much more subtle form of gaslighting, in that you'll remember what they've said they are and internalize it through constant repetition, so that whenever they do something cruel, you'll blame yourself first. I mean, you know they're such nice people, they wouldn't do this without a reason, right?
It's a far sneakier technique than people realize, and some assholes are so frighteningly good at it they can keep the charade up for years (the one in my life, fortunately, wasn't the sharpest spork in the drawer, so it didn't take as long as it could have to figure out her game). But at the end of the day, the proof is in the pudding. If they're constantly informing you of virtues that their actions don't support, you're dealing with a Toxic Asshole.
3. They "Hate Drama" (But It Follows Them Around Like Nancy Drew)
Like #2, this goes in the "informed virtues" column, but deserves its own entry because the way it plays out is slightly different. It's perfectly possible for people who aren't toxic to get embroiled in drama all the time because they have lousy taste in friends (particularly if they were raised by Toxic Asshole parents, so they don't realize that that level of drama and chaos in a circle of friends isn't normal or healthy). But again, somebody who actually hates drama at the very least doesn't try their damnedest to make it worse.
A Toxic Asshole is the eye of a perpetual shitstorm. Drama doesn't just happen to them; it follows them, envelops them, and tears up everything around them while they remain that calm, smugly smiling center complaining about how they're always getting caught up in other people's shit. When in reality, they're the ones holding the spoon.
These types of assholes will invariably have a string of friendships and relationships that crashed and burned like a Michael Bay movie, and all you need to do is look at the common link between every single one.
It's particularly easy to tell because the Toxic Asshole won't ever shut up about it. They will rehash the story over and over and over again, often "remembering" embellishments they'd never mentioned before (especially if they're telling it to a new source of narcissistic supply). Because they hate drama the way a heroin junkie hates needles. It's a mildly annoying tool they use in order to get their attention fix.
4. They Swallowed the DSM Whole
I need to add a disclaimer to this part: mental illnesses are very much a real thing (street cred: I was diagnosed with major depression two years ago and am on medication for it). And being interested in psychiatry as a hobby is also a real and very harmless thing. These by themselves have nothing to do with being a Toxic Asshole.
This point is again related to #1, but deserves its own special mention because the way it plays out may be slightly different. It's very, very common for Toxic Assholes to be armchair psychiatrists and diagnose not just themselves, but their victims. Ironically, they will often accuse victims who have seen through their bullshit and walked away of being narcissists or "crazy."
This is, of course, a combination of projection and gaslighting. It's their attempt to make you doubt yourself and take the blame, and make you wonder if you're really the problem. If this has happened to you? Let me assure you right now that if you've thought about your behavior for any length of time, combing through your actions and motives for traits of narcissism and feel sick at the thought it might be true, you are not a narcissist. Narcissists don't have that level of self-awareness or ability to examine their own behavior, since the crux of the entire disorder is that they are infallible, perfect beings.
Toxic Assholes will also self-diagnose, and the more alphabet soup labels they can pile onto themselves, the better. They do it for a couple of reasons: 1) uniqueness, specialness 2) it gives them something to blame for any shitty behavior they get called on (the asshole in my life who inspired these posts diagnosed herself with bipolar, borderline personality disorder, PTSD, and at least two others that I forgot). But funnily enough, they'll never self-diagnose with narcissistic personality disorder.
On the surface, they'll even seem very knowledgeable on the subject. But their understanding of the material is shallow at best; they can only draw superficial correlations, and they refuse to pick up on the nuances of any of the disorders they claim they or others have. They're only interested in regurgitating information to sound smarter than you. An intellectual smokescreen to hide the fact they know they have no idea what they're on about.
5. They Fish For Validation
Because Toxic Assholes have no idea how friends, people and emotions work, they are constantly pushing you to see how much you can take. One of their favorite little tests is false humility: putting themselves down in order to get you to disagree and praise them.
Now, there are people out there who have self-deprecating tendencies and aren't Toxic Assholes; again, the difference is pretty telling. Someone who genuinely thinks horrible shit about themselves is not likely to scream it from the rooftops the way the Toxic Asshole does, and somebody who uses self-deprecation strictly for humor is going to smile and laugh when they do it to let everyone know they're not serious (because in order to use it as humor, these types have learned to laugh at themselves).
The Toxic Asshole, by contrast, does the very weird combination of being totally humorless about how terrible they are while at the same time laying it on thick to the point of farce. And being the empathetic, wonderful people-pleaser you are, you fall right into the trap of counteracting their Woe Is Me with praise and reassurance of how great they are and how lucky you feel to call them a friend. Just as they planned it.
This accomplishes two goals. Goal the First is that it lets them draw their supply from you with very little effort, because you're all too eager to give it up. Goal the Second is that it builds the narrative of them being such a put-upon mistreated victim, and when the going gets rough they can claim you're Just Like All the Others and skip off into the sunset with their next schmoe.
Maya Angelou put it best: "When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time." When the Toxic Asshole starts going on and on about how they're a shit friend and everyone eventually figures that out and leaves them, take it as the giant double hurricane flag it is and get the fuck out of there. Because there is literally no reason that someone who isn't a Toxic Asshole would say that (see #3).
6. They Make You Apologize For Calling Them Out
This is the granddaddy of all moves in the covert Toxic Asshole's playbook. A kind of confrontational judo where you bring up a grievance with their behavior, and before you know it you're apologizing for hurting their feelings. And you don't even realize it because they've thrown your footing off so hard you forgot what your own complaint was about. The hardest-to-spot Toxic Assholes are fucking masters at this particular brand of bullshit.
If there is one thing that will make the mask slip and the Toxic Asshole lose their shit faster than 0.5 past lightspeed, it's being called out on something they did. And the easiest way for them to restore the rightful order of their bizarro world is to make you say you're sorry for disrupting their delusion.
There are many ways of doing this, and they're all carefully honed from observing your own weaknesses over time. Some of the most common are sulking/silent treatment, agreeing with you in an over-the-top manner and declaring themselves unworthy of friendship, threatening self-harm or suicide, and dragging a third party into the crossfire. No matter the method, they all play on the same thing, with the same goal: making you feel guilty for speaking up.
That's really the aim of the covert Toxic Asshole. They want to make you so guilty and afraid of upsetting them that you stay and do their bidding because it's less painful than the consequences. As with their more easily detected counterparts, the strategy is the same.
Walk away. Block on social media. Do not engage. No Contact.
Once they've shown you what they are, believe them.
Some Toxic Assholes are more like Special Forces than first-line infantry. They use a much less overt strategy for extracting supply so as to avoid detection, because we're generally familiar with the more boisterous narcissists. But once you know the pattern, you can figure these people out before they have a chance to do you real harm.
So I'm presenting to you 6 more signs of a toxic friendship, with a lot more subtlety:
1. Their Sob Story Brings Everyone to the Yard (Damn Right, It's Always Better Than Yours)
Some people really are the fire hydrants in the dog park of life. But like actual dog parks, those fire hydrants are exceedingly rare. For the Toxic Asshole, life is just that; they are a special and uniquely abused person such that absolutely nobody can understand their pain because they have suffered more than your puny mind could ever imagine. Whatever problems you may have, they have more. If you had a bad day, they had a worse one. At all times there is an Olympic-level contest for Most Shat Upon Person On Earth, and they always take home a gold.
Guys? Real people who have had actual shitty lives don't do this, for a very simple reason; those experiences were fucking awful and they don't like talking about them for literally no goddamned reason. There is shame, vulnerability, grief, and bitterness in spades, and people who have experienced these events don't want to relive them. They certainly don't view them as bragging rights.
The Toxic Asshole, on the other hand, sees having a shitty life as a status symbol. Something that makes them better than everyone else in the room. They will use their supposedly Dark and Troubled Past to gain your sympathy and to shield themselves from criticism, and as a bonus, they get to make you look like the asshole while they wear the Holy Halo of Victimhood. It's a perfect setup to milk all the attention until they're like a weepier, whinier Jabba the Hutt.
Now of course, nobody decent wants to assume that a person is lying out their ass when they talk about awful shit that happened to them, so that kind of puts us in a tight spot; if they're telling the truth, we'll feel pretty guilty for dismissing it as attention-grabbing, and frankly it'll make us no better than the people who defend actors and athletes instead of the people they assault.
Which is why it's important to remember that what distinguishes an actual fire hydrant in the dog park of life from the puddle of piss at the base of said fire hydrant is the person's behavior, not their history. If they're talking about what happened to them in order to make you feel less alone, and to reassure you that it's possible to face something horrific and still come out okay the other side? Not an asshole.
If, on the contrary, they talk about what happened to them in order to dismiss and downplay whatever has happened to you? Definitely an asshole. That's a dick move, no matter how you slice it.
2. They Constantly Inform You of Their Virtues
Genuinely empathetic, caring, generous, sensitive people don't have to tell you how empathetic, generous, sensitive and caring they are; they'll show you. Toxic Assholes will do the exact reverse. They'll tell you, every chance they get, how they're such honest people and how much they care about everybody and put themselves last, but their behavior will not line up.
They'll claim to love honesty and hate fakers, but when you give them your honest opinion and it's something they don't want to hear, they will absolutely lose their shit at you. They'll claim to be empathetic to a fault, but they can't seem to tell that their behavior is hurtful to you. They'll claim to be sensitive and always aware of the mood of a room, but for some reason they're unable to determine when you're stressed the hell out and need them to shut up for a while. They'll claim to be generous and giving, but you find they beg for gifts and money far more often than they bestow them.
They do this so you'll have a harder time believing what you see and experience, and so that other people are less likely to believe you as well. Particularly if they didn't witness anything shitty. It's a much more subtle form of gaslighting, in that you'll remember what they've said they are and internalize it through constant repetition, so that whenever they do something cruel, you'll blame yourself first. I mean, you know they're such nice people, they wouldn't do this without a reason, right?
It's a far sneakier technique than people realize, and some assholes are so frighteningly good at it they can keep the charade up for years (the one in my life, fortunately, wasn't the sharpest spork in the drawer, so it didn't take as long as it could have to figure out her game). But at the end of the day, the proof is in the pudding. If they're constantly informing you of virtues that their actions don't support, you're dealing with a Toxic Asshole.
3. They "Hate Drama" (But It Follows Them Around Like Nancy Drew)
Like #2, this goes in the "informed virtues" column, but deserves its own entry because the way it plays out is slightly different. It's perfectly possible for people who aren't toxic to get embroiled in drama all the time because they have lousy taste in friends (particularly if they were raised by Toxic Asshole parents, so they don't realize that that level of drama and chaos in a circle of friends isn't normal or healthy). But again, somebody who actually hates drama at the very least doesn't try their damnedest to make it worse.
A Toxic Asshole is the eye of a perpetual shitstorm. Drama doesn't just happen to them; it follows them, envelops them, and tears up everything around them while they remain that calm, smugly smiling center complaining about how they're always getting caught up in other people's shit. When in reality, they're the ones holding the spoon.
These types of assholes will invariably have a string of friendships and relationships that crashed and burned like a Michael Bay movie, and all you need to do is look at the common link between every single one.
It's particularly easy to tell because the Toxic Asshole won't ever shut up about it. They will rehash the story over and over and over again, often "remembering" embellishments they'd never mentioned before (especially if they're telling it to a new source of narcissistic supply). Because they hate drama the way a heroin junkie hates needles. It's a mildly annoying tool they use in order to get their attention fix.
4. They Swallowed the DSM Whole
I need to add a disclaimer to this part: mental illnesses are very much a real thing (street cred: I was diagnosed with major depression two years ago and am on medication for it). And being interested in psychiatry as a hobby is also a real and very harmless thing. These by themselves have nothing to do with being a Toxic Asshole.
This point is again related to #1, but deserves its own special mention because the way it plays out may be slightly different. It's very, very common for Toxic Assholes to be armchair psychiatrists and diagnose not just themselves, but their victims. Ironically, they will often accuse victims who have seen through their bullshit and walked away of being narcissists or "crazy."
This is, of course, a combination of projection and gaslighting. It's their attempt to make you doubt yourself and take the blame, and make you wonder if you're really the problem. If this has happened to you? Let me assure you right now that if you've thought about your behavior for any length of time, combing through your actions and motives for traits of narcissism and feel sick at the thought it might be true, you are not a narcissist. Narcissists don't have that level of self-awareness or ability to examine their own behavior, since the crux of the entire disorder is that they are infallible, perfect beings.
Toxic Assholes will also self-diagnose, and the more alphabet soup labels they can pile onto themselves, the better. They do it for a couple of reasons: 1) uniqueness, specialness 2) it gives them something to blame for any shitty behavior they get called on (the asshole in my life who inspired these posts diagnosed herself with bipolar, borderline personality disorder, PTSD, and at least two others that I forgot). But funnily enough, they'll never self-diagnose with narcissistic personality disorder.
On the surface, they'll even seem very knowledgeable on the subject. But their understanding of the material is shallow at best; they can only draw superficial correlations, and they refuse to pick up on the nuances of any of the disorders they claim they or others have. They're only interested in regurgitating information to sound smarter than you. An intellectual smokescreen to hide the fact they know they have no idea what they're on about.
5. They Fish For Validation
Because Toxic Assholes have no idea how friends, people and emotions work, they are constantly pushing you to see how much you can take. One of their favorite little tests is false humility: putting themselves down in order to get you to disagree and praise them.
Now, there are people out there who have self-deprecating tendencies and aren't Toxic Assholes; again, the difference is pretty telling. Someone who genuinely thinks horrible shit about themselves is not likely to scream it from the rooftops the way the Toxic Asshole does, and somebody who uses self-deprecation strictly for humor is going to smile and laugh when they do it to let everyone know they're not serious (because in order to use it as humor, these types have learned to laugh at themselves).
The Toxic Asshole, by contrast, does the very weird combination of being totally humorless about how terrible they are while at the same time laying it on thick to the point of farce. And being the empathetic, wonderful people-pleaser you are, you fall right into the trap of counteracting their Woe Is Me with praise and reassurance of how great they are and how lucky you feel to call them a friend. Just as they planned it.
This accomplishes two goals. Goal the First is that it lets them draw their supply from you with very little effort, because you're all too eager to give it up. Goal the Second is that it builds the narrative of them being such a put-upon mistreated victim, and when the going gets rough they can claim you're Just Like All the Others and skip off into the sunset with their next schmoe.
Maya Angelou put it best: "When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time." When the Toxic Asshole starts going on and on about how they're a shit friend and everyone eventually figures that out and leaves them, take it as the giant double hurricane flag it is and get the fuck out of there. Because there is literally no reason that someone who isn't a Toxic Asshole would say that (see #3).
6. They Make You Apologize For Calling Them Out
This is the granddaddy of all moves in the covert Toxic Asshole's playbook. A kind of confrontational judo where you bring up a grievance with their behavior, and before you know it you're apologizing for hurting their feelings. And you don't even realize it because they've thrown your footing off so hard you forgot what your own complaint was about. The hardest-to-spot Toxic Assholes are fucking masters at this particular brand of bullshit.
If there is one thing that will make the mask slip and the Toxic Asshole lose their shit faster than 0.5 past lightspeed, it's being called out on something they did. And the easiest way for them to restore the rightful order of their bizarro world is to make you say you're sorry for disrupting their delusion.
There are many ways of doing this, and they're all carefully honed from observing your own weaknesses over time. Some of the most common are sulking/silent treatment, agreeing with you in an over-the-top manner and declaring themselves unworthy of friendship, threatening self-harm or suicide, and dragging a third party into the crossfire. No matter the method, they all play on the same thing, with the same goal: making you feel guilty for speaking up.
That's really the aim of the covert Toxic Asshole. They want to make you so guilty and afraid of upsetting them that you stay and do their bidding because it's less painful than the consequences. As with their more easily detected counterparts, the strategy is the same.
Walk away. Block on social media. Do not engage. No Contact.
Once they've shown you what they are, believe them.
Wednesday, December 21, 2016
I'm Confused, You Say "Liberal" Like It's a Bad Thing
Few things crack me up about angry conservatives more than their use of "liberal" as an insult to people like me. It's no more insulting than calling me a brunette. Or short. Or Italian. It's what I am. If you're trying to turn what I am into a thing to insult me with, then you need to go back to kindergarten and re-learn how to be mean, because you're doing it all wrong.
Liberals believe in equality in all its forms. Economic equality. Gender equality. Marriage equality. Racial equality. Liberals want everyone to have the same starting point, so that one group doesn't have to work ten times as hard for the same paycheck. Liberals want everyone to enjoy the same rights, respect, and humanity. Liberals want a system that works because everyone benefits from it. A world where there are no losers.
So the fact you think you can insult me by calling me a compassionate, realistic person who doesn't want anybody to be left behind? That is fucking hilarious.
What rural white straight Christian America needs to realize is that progressives are, in fact, working to improve their lives as well. Progressive policies will put a fuck of a lot more money and power and freedom in their pockets than conservative ones will. But there's one little catch: we're not going to do it at the expense of minorities. You want a piece of the pie? You have to make exactly one concession. And that concession is to respect the rights of everyone else at the table.
But that, unfortunately, is where we keep losing them. These are people drunk on hatred, violence and ignorance. Stoned out of their goddamned minds on it. They will not let go of it for anything, and like the Skinner box rat, they will ignore the food lever and pull the drug lever until they all drop dead.
And no, before any conservative assumes what I'm about to say next, I don't want that to happen. I would much rather see them come to their senses and get on board the train that isn't heading straight for a fucking cliff. But if they're going to insist on being lost causes, then there is literally nothing anyone can do to get them out of that box and away from that lever. You can't help an addict that doesn't want to quit. You can't make an intelligent peacemaker out of someone who likes being an ignorant, hateful bigot.
The only reason progressives will leave you behind is because you give us no goddamn choice. We have far more important shit to do and far more pressing problems to fix. We can't sit around and waste time coddling your feelings when people on this train are dying. And it's frankly a long enough train that if you get your shit together, you can hop on at any point.
So you want a slice of the pie? You make that concession. It's your turn to sacrifice something for once. We're out of time, out of options, and out of fucks.
Liberals believe in equality in all its forms. Economic equality. Gender equality. Marriage equality. Racial equality. Liberals want everyone to have the same starting point, so that one group doesn't have to work ten times as hard for the same paycheck. Liberals want everyone to enjoy the same rights, respect, and humanity. Liberals want a system that works because everyone benefits from it. A world where there are no losers.
So the fact you think you can insult me by calling me a compassionate, realistic person who doesn't want anybody to be left behind? That is fucking hilarious.
What rural white straight Christian America needs to realize is that progressives are, in fact, working to improve their lives as well. Progressive policies will put a fuck of a lot more money and power and freedom in their pockets than conservative ones will. But there's one little catch: we're not going to do it at the expense of minorities. You want a piece of the pie? You have to make exactly one concession. And that concession is to respect the rights of everyone else at the table.
But that, unfortunately, is where we keep losing them. These are people drunk on hatred, violence and ignorance. Stoned out of their goddamned minds on it. They will not let go of it for anything, and like the Skinner box rat, they will ignore the food lever and pull the drug lever until they all drop dead.
And no, before any conservative assumes what I'm about to say next, I don't want that to happen. I would much rather see them come to their senses and get on board the train that isn't heading straight for a fucking cliff. But if they're going to insist on being lost causes, then there is literally nothing anyone can do to get them out of that box and away from that lever. You can't help an addict that doesn't want to quit. You can't make an intelligent peacemaker out of someone who likes being an ignorant, hateful bigot.
The only reason progressives will leave you behind is because you give us no goddamn choice. We have far more important shit to do and far more pressing problems to fix. We can't sit around and waste time coddling your feelings when people on this train are dying. And it's frankly a long enough train that if you get your shit together, you can hop on at any point.
So you want a slice of the pie? You make that concession. It's your turn to sacrifice something for once. We're out of time, out of options, and out of fucks.
Tuesday, December 6, 2016
The Other Conversation About Mental Illness Nobody Wants to Have
As much as I love that we're finally having a much needed talk about mental illness, there is a highly disturbing undercurrent that I've been seeing all through the current rhetoric. In particular, around purported "support" communities on sites like Tumblr. Yeah, I know, I heard the collective groan, too. But while it's easy to dismiss Tumblr as the indie coffeeshop of the internet at which disaffected millenial hipsters gather, it's important to remember that it's a really big indie coffeeshop with 550 million users (almost 380 million of which are millenials, and this is going back to 2015). Thus, it's a significant influence, however dumb it may be.
And this disturbing undercurrent I've noticed is that a lot of the rhetoric around Tumblr appears to be pro-illness, and very much anti-recovery/management.
What I mean by this is that anytime a user brings up information or advice on how to get back to living, invariably somebody will barge in calling it "neurotypical bullshit" and not-so-subtlely implying that if you can function, you're not really ill. And that commentary will get shared and reblogged far more widely than the original advice.
As someone with diagnosed major depression and on medication for it, I can't even begin to tell you how fucking dangerous this is. And it's the conversation everyone seems to want to shut down.
Because from what I can gather, these Tumblr types are treating being mentally ill the same as they treat being LGBT or brown or some other born-with-it attribute that's perfectly normal. Thus, any attempt to manage the symptoms of a mental illness is seen as "changing who you are" on the order of ex-gay therapy or some shit.
And well, let's just say there's a reason we call them mental illnesses instead of mental personality traits or mental superpowers. These disorders are not a normal and healthy part of the human experience like homosexuality is; they are, in fact, serious problems whose symptoms need to be managed so that the patient can lead as full and happy a life as possible. And that is not achieved by outright encouraging maladaptive and dangerous behaviors and shitty coping mechanisms, while rejecting any attempts at symptom management as "ableism."
It's especially prevalent against the simplest of advice. For instance, a very common piece of (hella good) advice for people with disorders that encourage isolation and stagnation (depression, various anxiety disorders, avoidant personality disorder, etc.) is as simple as making yourself get bathed and dressed in the morning and doing simple maintenance on your living space (wash the dishes, take out the trash/recycling, etc.).
I can tell you firsthand this is important as hell; depression in my case makes me feel sluggish and worthless and it's very easy to get into a rut of "fuck it" and spend all day housebound and still in my pyjamas. Because I have so little energy or desire to expend it, that going out to do what needs done feels like I'm being told to climb Everest. Forcing myself to get washed and dressed first thing in the morning gets me over that hurdle. It prevents me from curling up in that ditch and turning off the world.
This is not a "bootstraps" argument. Getting dressed in the morning does not cure depression, nor does being able to get dressed in the morning mean I don't still have it. What it means is that I've made it over a very important hurdle very early in the day, so if I have to do something else that requires pants? I'll be less likely to shirk the task because hey, already got pants! But to the Tumblr crowd, this is "internalized ableism" because having depression is something I can't control and the rest of the world should understand that.
Welp, allow me to answer in a way they'll be able to process it:
And this disturbing undercurrent I've noticed is that a lot of the rhetoric around Tumblr appears to be pro-illness, and very much anti-recovery/management.
What I mean by this is that anytime a user brings up information or advice on how to get back to living, invariably somebody will barge in calling it "neurotypical bullshit" and not-so-subtlely implying that if you can function, you're not really ill. And that commentary will get shared and reblogged far more widely than the original advice.
As someone with diagnosed major depression and on medication for it, I can't even begin to tell you how fucking dangerous this is. And it's the conversation everyone seems to want to shut down.
Because from what I can gather, these Tumblr types are treating being mentally ill the same as they treat being LGBT or brown or some other born-with-it attribute that's perfectly normal. Thus, any attempt to manage the symptoms of a mental illness is seen as "changing who you are" on the order of ex-gay therapy or some shit.
And well, let's just say there's a reason we call them mental illnesses instead of mental personality traits or mental superpowers. These disorders are not a normal and healthy part of the human experience like homosexuality is; they are, in fact, serious problems whose symptoms need to be managed so that the patient can lead as full and happy a life as possible. And that is not achieved by outright encouraging maladaptive and dangerous behaviors and shitty coping mechanisms, while rejecting any attempts at symptom management as "ableism."
It's especially prevalent against the simplest of advice. For instance, a very common piece of (hella good) advice for people with disorders that encourage isolation and stagnation (depression, various anxiety disorders, avoidant personality disorder, etc.) is as simple as making yourself get bathed and dressed in the morning and doing simple maintenance on your living space (wash the dishes, take out the trash/recycling, etc.).
I can tell you firsthand this is important as hell; depression in my case makes me feel sluggish and worthless and it's very easy to get into a rut of "fuck it" and spend all day housebound and still in my pyjamas. Because I have so little energy or desire to expend it, that going out to do what needs done feels like I'm being told to climb Everest. Forcing myself to get washed and dressed first thing in the morning gets me over that hurdle. It prevents me from curling up in that ditch and turning off the world.
This is not a "bootstraps" argument. Getting dressed in the morning does not cure depression, nor does being able to get dressed in the morning mean I don't still have it. What it means is that I've made it over a very important hurdle very early in the day, so if I have to do something else that requires pants? I'll be less likely to shirk the task because hey, already got pants! But to the Tumblr crowd, this is "internalized ableism" because having depression is something I can't control and the rest of the world should understand that.
Welp, allow me to answer in a way they'll be able to process it:
Because again, depression is not a personality trait. It's a mental illness. It has symptoms which adversely affect daily life, and those symptoms need to be managed. Not to achieve some arbitrary definition of "normal" but because the symptoms of depression are highly unpleasant themselves. Managing them is part of feeling better and happier.
Encouraging other people to engage in harmful behavior patterns because you personally like using your all too often self-misdiagnosed alphabet soup mental illness as an excuse to get out of doing shit you don't want to do? That is ableism. Worse, actually.
We need to have frank discussions about mental illness because we need it to be seen as an illness rather than a character flaw. What these Tumblr types are doing is exactly the opposite; they are treating the illness as a character trait that cannot and should not be changed and overcome.
That is not the conversation we need to be having. Please, cut it the fuck out.
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