It's not every decade that I get to see firsthand what is meant by a work of fiction being "ahead of its time." Star Trek is certainly no stranger to this; the original series boasts the first interracial kiss on US television, at a time when people were burning down radio stations for playing Janis Ian's "Society's Child." It also featured a Russian character played by an actor of Soviet descent at the height of the Cold War.
But 24 years ago, the third series of the franchise premiered: Deep Space Nine. And over the course of the show, the story would take twists and turns that, re-watching it today in the current political climate, seem oddly...prescient.
I'm not saying Obama was the real-world Benjamin Sisko. But where we are as a nation is right around the end of the show's fifth season. The Cardassians have taken the station. The Dominion is on the move.
While there has been plenty of analysis of the show as a World War II allegory (which it was obviously meant to be), in relation to today's crisis, I think one of the most important points the series makes is that when dealing with existential threats, there is a razor-thin line to walk that will get you through to the other side. Deviate from that line in any way whatsoever? And you'll either end up as the monster you're fighting, or you'll be torn limb from limb by it.
Two sixth season episodes in particular illustrate this point: "Rocks and Shoals" and "In the Pale Moonlight."
"Rocks and Shoals" is an illustration, bit by bit, of how Major Kira -- who survived the series' equivalent of the Holocaust as a child -- slides into a mindset of rationalization and cooperation in order to survive the Cardassian takeover of the station. A kind of Stockholm Syndrome that one of her people's religious leaders, Vedek Yassim, tries over the course of the episode to clue her into. Eventually, Yassim commits a public suicide in protest of the occupation. And it's only after that, that Kira begins to realize that she's being complicit in not only her own oppression, but that of the entire Alpha Quadrant.
"In the Pale Moonlight" involves Sisko and Garak hatching a plan to get the Romulans into the war as allies against The Dominion. The plan involves manufacturing evidence that The Dominion were planning to violate the non-aggression pact with the Romulans. The short version is that while it doesn't go off exactly as planned, it does happen. Albeit with more unnecessary death and manipulation than Sisko originally wished for.
What these two episodes represent are the two fates on either side of that razor-thin line. Giving up all of your scruples in order to survive, as Kira did, or trying to keep your hands clean, as Sisko tried to do.
We have, at the moment, two extreme factions of progressives. The first faction are The Collaborators. People who think they can compromise with Trump's regime in order to escape unscathed, or at least minimally scathed. If you want examples, look no further than this chart. The only Trump cabinet nominee to receive zero votes from Democrats was Betsy DeVos. All others -- including Jeff Sessions for Attorney General and Rick Perry of all people for Secretary of Energy -- have received at least one vote from Democratic senators, many of whom have shown an astonishing willingness to placate the new administration. In particular Joe Manchin (WV) and Heidi Heitkamp (ND), whose No votes combined can be counted on a single set of hands.
And no, not even Bernie Sanders, the self-appointed anti-corruption guru of the Senate, has really stood up to Trump all that much. On the contrary, he even declared Trump would have him as an ally if he "stands up to corporate America" like he promised to do; Sanders then went on to vote Yes (along with the rest of Congress) to confirm Shulkin for the Secretary of Veterans Affairs, despite Shulkin's ties to for-profit healthcare and his not even being a veteran, a first for the position.
But it's not just Sanders. It's the entire activist landscape and everyone in it who advocates "working with" the new administration rather than opposing it and "empathizing with" the people who voted for Trump, even when they'd been some of Trump's staunchest opponents during the campaign. Spineless louts like Jim Wright, Kyle Plantz, Michael Lerner, and Les Leopold -- unsurprisingly, all white men -- who gleefully throw progressive causes under the bus if they have something to gain in this new era.
Capitulating to oppression -- and that includes the "wait and see, give him a chance" kind of capitulation -- is like a bystander telling someone about to be raped "hey, you might enjoy it." It's just as callous, cruel, and morally reprehensible as committing the rape themselves. If you don't feel scared in Trump's America, it's because you have no reason to. And rather than going with the flow and being a Collaborator, it means you, of all people, have even more of an obligation to be part of the Resistance.
For Major Kira, it took witnessing Vedek Yassim's public suicide in the middle of The Promenade to knock that into her head. Dare we even ask what it's going to take for Manchin and Heitkamp?
The other faction is something of an ideological carbon filter. The side that seeks to remove "impurities" within its own movement. You'll recognize this group as anyone who voted for Gary Johnson or Jill Stein or wrote in Harambe or stayed home or literally did anything other than cast a vote for Clinton. People who are still screaming that Bernie would've won (but won't say how). People who are protesting against Democrats not because of how they're voting but who they're funded by. People whose only mission is "shaking up the establishment" and don't really give a rat's ass what happens as a result.
Some have begun to refer to this faction as the "Alt-Left" (as opposed to the "Alt-Right"), but I think that's giving them entirely too much legitimacy. Being made up largely of the same demographic that finds Trump an attractive candidate, I think it's far more appropriate to simply refer to them as populist anarchists. It's even more telling when, faced with direct comparison to white nationalist propaganda outlet Breitbart, Cenk Uygur is more perturbed at being compared to a publication with fewer unique viewers rather than because Breitbart openly promotes bigotry and Nazi ideas. They're not even two sides of the same coin so much as two parts of the same side of the coin; popular anarchy is the smooth and shiny background, while white nationalism is the stark, in-your-face relief.
This faction, like the Tea Party before it, seeks to essentially kick out everyone that doesn't fall into goose-stepping formation with their ideology of political campaigns run on everyone stuffing $20 in an envelope. For one thing, not everyone has that $20 to throw into an envelope. And even if they did? As someone who has had to work an annual fundraising event for the last 4 years, and for an organization that doesn't require anywhere near the kind of penetration that a political office campaign does, you can't get elected without money. It's just not possible. You have to court large donors if you expect to even win the primary, because coordinating advertising, voter registration drives, and the dissemination of info on vital shit like deadlines takes a fuckton of cash.
Bernie Sanders learned this lesson the hard way. A big part of the reason he didn't get the nomination was because he simply did not run his campaign very well, and his numbers in actual primaries (as opposed to caucuses) reflected that. A huge part of campaigning is registration drives, particularly in primaries because they're closed in most states; you have to be registered as a Democrat in order to vote in the Democratic primary (whereas the national election is completely open; it doesn't matter what party affiliation you have as long as you're registered to vote). Sanders did not do enough to get people who were already registered as Independents in closed primary states to change their party affiliation in order to vote for him in time, or to get new voters who supported him registered as Democrats in time to cast their primary ballots. This had nothing whatsoever to do with the DNC; Sanders could've done this regardless of how much the DNC favored Clinton's campaign (rightfully so, being that she is a Democrat, and the DNC actually gave Sanders some very generous accommodation by letting him run on the Democratic ticket without changing his party; they would've been perfectly within their rights to tell him "LOL NOPE"). But he didn't, because he couldn't. Because his campaign simply did not have the money to pull it off, since he snubbed corporate donors.
Sisko's lesson in "In the Pale Moonlight" is that sometimes, you have to strike a deal with the Devil in order prevent the apocalypse. You have to do things that aren't ideologically -- or even morally -- pure. But you have to do them in order to prevent a total catastrophe from happening. It was a lesson that anyone who voted third party and anyone who still insists they were right to do so is deliberately trying not to learn. Or to put it another way, they're ignoring the 109th Ferengi Rule of Acquisition: dignity and an empty sack is worth the sack.
Resistance in the Trump Era is a moral imperative. We cannot compromise. We cannot "work with him." And at the same time, we may have to do things we find ideologically repugnant in order to have any chance at all of avoiding disaster. We fucked up not by "disregarding the economic anxiety of the white working class" but by not uniting against a very obvious threat. We fucked up by not recognizing evil when it was staring us in the face, and sacrificing unity and victory simply because doing something ideologically impure was an inconvenience.
We must learn from that mistake, or pay dearly for it. We have a moral imperative to fix this mess. Now is not the time for an ideological war with our party's establishment. Unify and survive. Resist or perish.
As Vedek Yassim's final words commanded, "Evil must be opposed!"
Statcounter
Friday, March 31, 2017
Tuesday, March 14, 2017
The Ancient, Cruel Notion At the Core of the ACA "Replacement"
Speaker of the Rich Paul Ryan has finally released a statement on the new "healthcare" bill. Which is really not so much a healthcare bill as it is federally sanctioned mass murder of everyone that Republicans deem undesirable: women, the poor, communities of color, the mentally ill, and the very sick and disabled. The question so many have been asking -- and rightly so -- is how people who purport to be in favor of "family values" and the tenets of Christianity can take a gigantic steaming dump on everything Jesus ever taught. Your answer is an idea that dates all the way back from the Calvinist bullshit of the Middle Ages. This is how far Republicans want to turn back the clock.
In the Calvinist view, disease and illness and injury are just physical manifestations of sin. If you are chosen by God, bad shit will never happen to you; if you're not worthy, welp, sucks to be you don't it? The current Evangelical support of legislation that rewards the rich and punishes the poor is centered around this. In their view, it's only natural that we reward God's "chosen people" so they'll put in a good word for us. Everyone else who is poor and sick? They've already been rejected by God, so who cares about them anyway?
If this sounds like a terrible way to view the world, then congratulations. You're not a sociopath.
Republicans love the fuck out of this sentiment because it absolves them of having to do anything to fix the country's problems, literally all of which go back to poverty. Crime? Drugs? Violence? All directly tied to poverty. Because when people are poor, they get scared. When they get scared, they get desperate. And desperate people do drastic shit in order to survive.
Abortion? Most abortions that occur are done because the mother can't afford to care for a baby, or even the cost of giving birth (bare minimum with no complications, childbirth costs around $30K; abortion is just under $1,000 at its highest). In some professions, she risks being fired from her job just because she's pregnant (it's been illegal since 1978, but it still happens with alarming frequency, and if you can't afford a child, you sure as hell can't afford a good lawyer).
Poverty is also a direct cause of ill health itself. Healthy, nutritious food is expensive. The highly processed food that poor people can afford is loaded with salt, sugar, fat and empty calories (calories that provide no or very few nutrients). Being able to cook requires energy and free time that many working poor families don't have. On top of that, jobs with shitty pay tend to be physically demanding (retail, food service, etc.), and because the pay is awful, employees need to work longer shifts or multiple jobs to buy even the shittiest food. This doesn't even factor stress into the equation, or urban food deserts where there's no grocery stores for miles and your only options are fast food and bodegas (which overwhelmingly sell the aforementioned highly-processed crap food).
For Republicans, the problem is that fixing this mess would require going back to the income tax levels of the mid-20th century, where top-earners paid around 70%, as well as building stronger unions and better regulation of the financial sector to prevent the kinds of market collapses we saw from the 1970s onward. And that, of course, means listening to the people rather than their campaign donors, who tend to skew wealthy as fuck and, like Thorin at the end of The Hobbit, don't want to part with a single coin.
It would be much more beneficial to them if all us pesky poor folk were kept in a highly efficient queue of high birth and death rates, so we could continue to work shitty service jobs for shitty pay until we drop dead of heart attacks and get replaced by the next desperate shmoe. And the easiest way to do that? Restrict abortion and birth control such that the rights to them are merely ceremonial in order to force the birthrate to go up, and gut healthcare for the working classes so we die faster.
That's where the American Health Care Act comes in.
Immediately, you should notice three words missing from the bill's title compared to the ACA: "patient protection" and "affordable." This is not an accident; this bill is not intended to protect patients, nor is it intended to make healthcare affordable in any way unless you're young, rich and already healthy. In other words, already chosen by God, and fuck the rest of us.
It's the same Victorian-era bullshit of regarding wealth itself to be a virtue. If you're rich, then you're obviously a shrewd and virtuous person. If you're poor, it's because you obviously did something awful or stupid, so why should you get any sympathy?
This is what lets hard-right God-fearing Christians sleep at night while they vote to slash the safety net for the country's most vulnerable. All that stuff about charity and helping your neighbor? That only goes for people who already have God's favor.
This is one of the biggest reasons I walked away from Christianity in my college years and didn't look back (besides figuring out I was gay). The idea of a "chosen" people never sat well with me, because the next logical step is to dismiss those not "chosen" as deserving of their fate. I'm not saying all Christians do this, not by a longshot; there are many wonderful churches and Christian charities that do a lot of good in the world. But ignoring individual churches who do good things for a minute? All the major players in the Bible who came after Christ promoted this idea of chosen vs. damned, and to defer to God's word (or what people assumed was God's word) rather than trying to understand things on your own. I found myself unable to maintain my faith in a system that just about required me to leave my empathy and critical thinking at the door.
But this is exactly the thought process that has brought us to this point. And it's not just limited to Evangelical fundie whacknuts. Everyone who voted for Trump did so for one reason and one reason alone, regardless of the language they couched their decision in: he is a straight, white, rich cisman, the epitome of privilege, and therefore "chosen." If they vote for him, they can be "chosen" as well.
Only now, with the very real threat of shredding healthcare to a point even worse than it was before the Affordable Care Act, do they realize what "chosen" really means: everyone else is damned.
In the Calvinist view, disease and illness and injury are just physical manifestations of sin. If you are chosen by God, bad shit will never happen to you; if you're not worthy, welp, sucks to be you don't it? The current Evangelical support of legislation that rewards the rich and punishes the poor is centered around this. In their view, it's only natural that we reward God's "chosen people" so they'll put in a good word for us. Everyone else who is poor and sick? They've already been rejected by God, so who cares about them anyway?
If this sounds like a terrible way to view the world, then congratulations. You're not a sociopath.
Republicans love the fuck out of this sentiment because it absolves them of having to do anything to fix the country's problems, literally all of which go back to poverty. Crime? Drugs? Violence? All directly tied to poverty. Because when people are poor, they get scared. When they get scared, they get desperate. And desperate people do drastic shit in order to survive.
Abortion? Most abortions that occur are done because the mother can't afford to care for a baby, or even the cost of giving birth (bare minimum with no complications, childbirth costs around $30K; abortion is just under $1,000 at its highest). In some professions, she risks being fired from her job just because she's pregnant (it's been illegal since 1978, but it still happens with alarming frequency, and if you can't afford a child, you sure as hell can't afford a good lawyer).
Poverty is also a direct cause of ill health itself. Healthy, nutritious food is expensive. The highly processed food that poor people can afford is loaded with salt, sugar, fat and empty calories (calories that provide no or very few nutrients). Being able to cook requires energy and free time that many working poor families don't have. On top of that, jobs with shitty pay tend to be physically demanding (retail, food service, etc.), and because the pay is awful, employees need to work longer shifts or multiple jobs to buy even the shittiest food. This doesn't even factor stress into the equation, or urban food deserts where there's no grocery stores for miles and your only options are fast food and bodegas (which overwhelmingly sell the aforementioned highly-processed crap food).
For Republicans, the problem is that fixing this mess would require going back to the income tax levels of the mid-20th century, where top-earners paid around 70%, as well as building stronger unions and better regulation of the financial sector to prevent the kinds of market collapses we saw from the 1970s onward. And that, of course, means listening to the people rather than their campaign donors, who tend to skew wealthy as fuck and, like Thorin at the end of The Hobbit, don't want to part with a single coin.
It would be much more beneficial to them if all us pesky poor folk were kept in a highly efficient queue of high birth and death rates, so we could continue to work shitty service jobs for shitty pay until we drop dead of heart attacks and get replaced by the next desperate shmoe. And the easiest way to do that? Restrict abortion and birth control such that the rights to them are merely ceremonial in order to force the birthrate to go up, and gut healthcare for the working classes so we die faster.
That's where the American Health Care Act comes in.
Immediately, you should notice three words missing from the bill's title compared to the ACA: "patient protection" and "affordable." This is not an accident; this bill is not intended to protect patients, nor is it intended to make healthcare affordable in any way unless you're young, rich and already healthy. In other words, already chosen by God, and fuck the rest of us.
It's the same Victorian-era bullshit of regarding wealth itself to be a virtue. If you're rich, then you're obviously a shrewd and virtuous person. If you're poor, it's because you obviously did something awful or stupid, so why should you get any sympathy?
This is what lets hard-right God-fearing Christians sleep at night while they vote to slash the safety net for the country's most vulnerable. All that stuff about charity and helping your neighbor? That only goes for people who already have God's favor.
This is one of the biggest reasons I walked away from Christianity in my college years and didn't look back (besides figuring out I was gay). The idea of a "chosen" people never sat well with me, because the next logical step is to dismiss those not "chosen" as deserving of their fate. I'm not saying all Christians do this, not by a longshot; there are many wonderful churches and Christian charities that do a lot of good in the world. But ignoring individual churches who do good things for a minute? All the major players in the Bible who came after Christ promoted this idea of chosen vs. damned, and to defer to God's word (or what people assumed was God's word) rather than trying to understand things on your own. I found myself unable to maintain my faith in a system that just about required me to leave my empathy and critical thinking at the door.
But this is exactly the thought process that has brought us to this point. And it's not just limited to Evangelical fundie whacknuts. Everyone who voted for Trump did so for one reason and one reason alone, regardless of the language they couched their decision in: he is a straight, white, rich cisman, the epitome of privilege, and therefore "chosen." If they vote for him, they can be "chosen" as well.
Only now, with the very real threat of shredding healthcare to a point even worse than it was before the Affordable Care Act, do they realize what "chosen" really means: everyone else is damned.
Wednesday, March 1, 2017
You Can't Compromise With Fear
Normally, I like Jim Wright. But as I've learned over the years, even he suffers from the same problem that every white guy does: since he's not really going to lose much in Trump's America, he feels he has the authority to tell progressives how to win.
His entire post, linked above, is the ramblings of a guy so steeped in his own privilege he's turned the water into milk.
The lede is the only good part of it. But then he starts screaming at fellow liberals to "turn the red sea purple" by "compromising with fear." I very calmly challenged him on Twitter earlier today to explain just how on earth we're supposed to do that, and got blocked for my trouble.
Because, as I finally got him to admit in that thread, you can't compromise with fear.
Not the kind of fear we're dealing with, at any rate. When a child comes to you in the middle of the night scared of monsters under his bed? Your natural instinct is to lift the bedskirt and show him there are no monsters. Maybe check the closet with a flashlight just to go the extra mile. But then the child turns to you and says "no, there really are monsters, they're just invisible so of course you can't see them!" At that point, the child's fear can no longer be compromised with, because he's going to make up reasons to stay afraid.
Trump voters are that child. The monsters under their bed are literally everyone and everything else.
In his post, Jim Wright suggests reaching out to these fearful people instead of dismissing them, by going to churches and assuring them they won't have to marry a gay couple in their house of worship.
I literally laughed out loud reading that, because:
1) why the holy fuck would they believe a word "Crooked Hillary" says? These are the same people chanting "lock her up!"
2) to say that their fear is having to marry a gay couple in their church is to treat it with far more rationality and credibility than it deserves. They don't actually give a shit about that. They don't want gay couples getting married, period. Not in their church, not in any church, not in their courthouses, not in their city, not in their state, not in their country.
The part Mr. Wright doesn't seem to grasp is that compromising with them in any way is compromising with hatred. This is the same guy who was literally targeted by Neo-Nazis, but can't seem to understand that their fear is based on hatred. It's built directly on top of it. Hatred is the foundation of everything conservatives do. They fear change because they hate having to deal with anything different than themselves.
As far as blaming liberals for not showing up at the polls? That is a valid point. At least for privileged white liberals like himself. The problem is that in 2013, the Supreme Court ruled on Shelby County v. Holder in a 5-4 decision that de-fanged the Voting Rights Act. Afterward, we saw a veritable orgy of voter suppression legislation passed.
In key states like Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, and Michigan -- the states which cost Hillary the Electoral College -- many liberals, progressives and moderate conservatives who might've shown up to vote for Hillary were turned away and not permitted to cast a ballot. This is also not even counting the fact that communities of color (who vote largely Democrat) suffer disproportionately high rates of incarceration for non-violent felonies, which in turn means they are legally barred from voting.
Many liberals and progressives didn't show up for the 2014 midterms and 2016 election not because they didn't want to, but because they weren't allowed. Maybe smug white guys with the same privilege Jim Wright has decided to sit it out, largely because of their privilege. But to lump everyone else in with them is not just misleading, but insulting.
If you want to turn the red sea purple? Don't waste your time compromising with fear. Don't lose sleep trying to convince an irrationally scared child to go to bed when he's going to have far more reasons not to than you can keep up with.
You can't dismiss all of their concerns, because they do have valid ones. Poverty, drug use and failing health are just as bad in rural areas as they are in urban, but without any of the (still inadequate) support centers that city dwellers have (soup kitchens, shelters, sliding-scale clinics, etc.). But you can most definitely dismiss their fear, when that fear has equal parts jack and shit to do with their concerns.
You want to mitigate the damage Trump can do? You need to put the pressure on your Congresscritters. The people who put shit on Trump's desk to sign. They're already too scared to hold town halls. Don't let that stop you. Flood their inboxes. Flood their phones. Flood their mailbags. Hold protests. Stop traffic.
Make them so pants-shittingly terrified of losing their seats in 2018 that they'll have no choice but to break with the party line for self-preservation. Force them to be the check on Trump, with the threat that if they won't, you'll elect someone else who will.
Don't compromise with fear, and don't negotiate with terrorists. Resist.
His entire post, linked above, is the ramblings of a guy so steeped in his own privilege he's turned the water into milk.
The lede is the only good part of it. But then he starts screaming at fellow liberals to "turn the red sea purple" by "compromising with fear." I very calmly challenged him on Twitter earlier today to explain just how on earth we're supposed to do that, and got blocked for my trouble.
Because, as I finally got him to admit in that thread, you can't compromise with fear.
Not the kind of fear we're dealing with, at any rate. When a child comes to you in the middle of the night scared of monsters under his bed? Your natural instinct is to lift the bedskirt and show him there are no monsters. Maybe check the closet with a flashlight just to go the extra mile. But then the child turns to you and says "no, there really are monsters, they're just invisible so of course you can't see them!" At that point, the child's fear can no longer be compromised with, because he's going to make up reasons to stay afraid.
Trump voters are that child. The monsters under their bed are literally everyone and everything else.
In his post, Jim Wright suggests reaching out to these fearful people instead of dismissing them, by going to churches and assuring them they won't have to marry a gay couple in their house of worship.
I literally laughed out loud reading that, because:
1) why the holy fuck would they believe a word "Crooked Hillary" says? These are the same people chanting "lock her up!"
2) to say that their fear is having to marry a gay couple in their church is to treat it with far more rationality and credibility than it deserves. They don't actually give a shit about that. They don't want gay couples getting married, period. Not in their church, not in any church, not in their courthouses, not in their city, not in their state, not in their country.
The part Mr. Wright doesn't seem to grasp is that compromising with them in any way is compromising with hatred. This is the same guy who was literally targeted by Neo-Nazis, but can't seem to understand that their fear is based on hatred. It's built directly on top of it. Hatred is the foundation of everything conservatives do. They fear change because they hate having to deal with anything different than themselves.
As far as blaming liberals for not showing up at the polls? That is a valid point. At least for privileged white liberals like himself. The problem is that in 2013, the Supreme Court ruled on Shelby County v. Holder in a 5-4 decision that de-fanged the Voting Rights Act. Afterward, we saw a veritable orgy of voter suppression legislation passed.
In key states like Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, and Michigan -- the states which cost Hillary the Electoral College -- many liberals, progressives and moderate conservatives who might've shown up to vote for Hillary were turned away and not permitted to cast a ballot. This is also not even counting the fact that communities of color (who vote largely Democrat) suffer disproportionately high rates of incarceration for non-violent felonies, which in turn means they are legally barred from voting.
Many liberals and progressives didn't show up for the 2014 midterms and 2016 election not because they didn't want to, but because they weren't allowed. Maybe smug white guys with the same privilege Jim Wright has decided to sit it out, largely because of their privilege. But to lump everyone else in with them is not just misleading, but insulting.
If you want to turn the red sea purple? Don't waste your time compromising with fear. Don't lose sleep trying to convince an irrationally scared child to go to bed when he's going to have far more reasons not to than you can keep up with.
You can't dismiss all of their concerns, because they do have valid ones. Poverty, drug use and failing health are just as bad in rural areas as they are in urban, but without any of the (still inadequate) support centers that city dwellers have (soup kitchens, shelters, sliding-scale clinics, etc.). But you can most definitely dismiss their fear, when that fear has equal parts jack and shit to do with their concerns.
You want to mitigate the damage Trump can do? You need to put the pressure on your Congresscritters. The people who put shit on Trump's desk to sign. They're already too scared to hold town halls. Don't let that stop you. Flood their inboxes. Flood their phones. Flood their mailbags. Hold protests. Stop traffic.
Make them so pants-shittingly terrified of losing their seats in 2018 that they'll have no choice but to break with the party line for self-preservation. Force them to be the check on Trump, with the threat that if they won't, you'll elect someone else who will.
Don't compromise with fear, and don't negotiate with terrorists. Resist.
Monday, February 27, 2017
To Err Is Human, To Forgive Is Dangerous If They're Not Sorry
When I was somewhere between kindergarten and third grade, I vaguely remember some incident where the teacher made a kid apologize to me. She then turned to me and said "now what do you say?" When I didn't answer she said "you're supposed to say 'you're forgiven.'"
I looked at her and said "But I don't forgive him, because he's not sorry. He's just saying it because you made him." I'll never forget the look on the teacher's face. It was like somebody had clued her in to a part of the human psyche she'd either forgotten about or had never acknowledged. The script she was used to wasn't being followed. The motions she'd been conditioned to go through were being rejected. All of a sudden, she kind of stood there and questioned reality as she knew it.
This was my first clue that forgiveness is as much a part of the bullshit children get spoonfed by their adult caretakers as Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. It's an arbitrary social convention that everyone follows, but they have no clue why. Other than "it's rude if you don't." It's a rehearsed interaction much the same way that pleasantries and small-talk are. Go off-script? Everyone loses their minds.
As children, we're conditioned that "you're forgiven" is simply the right response to "I'm sorry." And you say you're sorry when you do something bad so that the other person says "you're forgiven" and it's all forgotten about.
It's a ridiculous kindergarten ritual that kids are taught, and after a while the words themselves cease to have any meaning beyond "this is what you say because it's what you've been taught to say." Sorta like those Berlitz phrasebooks. Only you're learning how to phone it in instead of how to hail a taxi in Spanish.
As a result, I've found people by and large view forgiveness as something they're entitled to just for saying they're sorry. Hell, we even call these rehearsed phrases "magic words." You speak them and they get you what you want. So all too often, people will treat them as such. They won't apologize out of genuine remorse, but only because they're expected to. And in return, they expect to be forgiven.
People in these situations don't deserve your forgiveness.
Because what forgiveness is, is granting absolution. Declaring whatever incident that happened "water under the bridge" and returning your relationship to the status quo. This works when someone is genuinely remorseful, because they're going to remember what they did to upset you and not do it again, because they care about not hurting you. The status quo actually means something to them.
But when the person doesn't have genuine remorse? When they're not sorry for what they did, just that they got caught and you're angry? Forgiveness is worse than wasted on these people. Forgiving someone who isn't really sorry rewards their behavior. It effectively tells them they can hurt you, but as long as they say the magic words, there will be no lasting consequences.
That? Is a very dangerous thing to teach someone.
And this doesn't even get into situations of abuse. Far too many therapists and counselors see forgiveness as a necessary step in the healing process, and impart upon their patients the idea that they will never truly heal until they forgive their abuser (whether they get an apology or not). The thing is, not everyone can do this. Even the kindest and most empathic person has limits. And trying to force a person who has already suffered rank abuse over their limit -- trying force them through cajoling and coercion to forgive someone they simply can't -- is going to do nothing but re-traumatize them. They're going to see themselves as a failure all over again.
You are not, under any circumstances, obligated to forgive. Just like the opposite of hatred isn't love, but indifference, the opposite of a grudge is not forgiveness; it's release. You can leave the anger and the hurt behind by simply getting to the point of not giving a shit anymore.
The decision to forgive is as personal as the decision to have sex. If you do decide to do it, make sure it's because you want to and not because you feel it's expected. Going through the motions is just as bad in both scenarios.
I looked at her and said "But I don't forgive him, because he's not sorry. He's just saying it because you made him." I'll never forget the look on the teacher's face. It was like somebody had clued her in to a part of the human psyche she'd either forgotten about or had never acknowledged. The script she was used to wasn't being followed. The motions she'd been conditioned to go through were being rejected. All of a sudden, she kind of stood there and questioned reality as she knew it.
This was my first clue that forgiveness is as much a part of the bullshit children get spoonfed by their adult caretakers as Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. It's an arbitrary social convention that everyone follows, but they have no clue why. Other than "it's rude if you don't." It's a rehearsed interaction much the same way that pleasantries and small-talk are. Go off-script? Everyone loses their minds.
As children, we're conditioned that "you're forgiven" is simply the right response to "I'm sorry." And you say you're sorry when you do something bad so that the other person says "you're forgiven" and it's all forgotten about.
It's a ridiculous kindergarten ritual that kids are taught, and after a while the words themselves cease to have any meaning beyond "this is what you say because it's what you've been taught to say." Sorta like those Berlitz phrasebooks. Only you're learning how to phone it in instead of how to hail a taxi in Spanish.
As a result, I've found people by and large view forgiveness as something they're entitled to just for saying they're sorry. Hell, we even call these rehearsed phrases "magic words." You speak them and they get you what you want. So all too often, people will treat them as such. They won't apologize out of genuine remorse, but only because they're expected to. And in return, they expect to be forgiven.
People in these situations don't deserve your forgiveness.
Because what forgiveness is, is granting absolution. Declaring whatever incident that happened "water under the bridge" and returning your relationship to the status quo. This works when someone is genuinely remorseful, because they're going to remember what they did to upset you and not do it again, because they care about not hurting you. The status quo actually means something to them.
But when the person doesn't have genuine remorse? When they're not sorry for what they did, just that they got caught and you're angry? Forgiveness is worse than wasted on these people. Forgiving someone who isn't really sorry rewards their behavior. It effectively tells them they can hurt you, but as long as they say the magic words, there will be no lasting consequences.
That? Is a very dangerous thing to teach someone.
And this doesn't even get into situations of abuse. Far too many therapists and counselors see forgiveness as a necessary step in the healing process, and impart upon their patients the idea that they will never truly heal until they forgive their abuser (whether they get an apology or not). The thing is, not everyone can do this. Even the kindest and most empathic person has limits. And trying to force a person who has already suffered rank abuse over their limit -- trying force them through cajoling and coercion to forgive someone they simply can't -- is going to do nothing but re-traumatize them. They're going to see themselves as a failure all over again.
You are not, under any circumstances, obligated to forgive. Just like the opposite of hatred isn't love, but indifference, the opposite of a grudge is not forgiveness; it's release. You can leave the anger and the hurt behind by simply getting to the point of not giving a shit anymore.
The decision to forgive is as personal as the decision to have sex. If you do decide to do it, make sure it's because you want to and not because you feel it's expected. Going through the motions is just as bad in both scenarios.
Monday, February 13, 2017
Don't Fear Trump; Fear His Allies
By now, three weeks into Trump's ridiculous shitshow of a presidency, I think there are two glaringly obvious things we need to digest as a country:
1) Resistance is working. The marches, the deluge of calls from constituents, it's working. Betsy DeVos was only confirmed by a tie-breaking vote from the Vice-President because two Republican Senators voted against her. Something that has literally never happened before in a cabinet confirmation.
2) Donald Trump is not who we should be looking at as the real danger. It's the people he's surrounded himself with.
Trump is reminiscent of Poo-Bah from Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado. Pompous, narcissistic, strutting around like the peacock with the biggest feathers and bestowing important-sounding titles on himself to cover up his ineffectual bumbling. The only powers he really has are to sign things and appoint people, and most of those things he signs must be approved by Congress before they even see his desk. Executive orders are really the only place in which he has any teeth, and as we've seen, even those are subject to judicial review.
It all goes back to his actual official title: President of the United States. He presides over the process of governing, and even his say isn't final; laws he signs can be overturned by the Supreme Court if challenged far enough, and his veto can be overridden by Congress with enough votes. He's not a monarch, no matter how many golden toilets he owns.
And unlike his more shrewd predecessors, he's a complete outsider to the governmental process. He quite literally hasn't got the foggiest clue what he's doing. This is a guy who, despite claiming to be the world's greatest businessman, doesn't even read shit before he signs it (literally failing How to Do Business and Not Fuck Up Royally 101). He gets his advice and strategy directly from cable news, and when something doesn't go his way, he whines like a pre-teen douchebag in a Halo tournament on Twitter. At best, he's a useful idiot to the people with the potential to do the real damage.
Trump is that old codger in the nursing home who will sign anything you put in front of him, just because he likes seeing his signature on things. It makes him feel important. Except instead of birthday and Christmas checks to his grandchildren, it's laws and executive orders and military action approvals that affect millions.
It's hard to describe these kinds of people, who are such malignant narcissists and pure fucking evil on every level, but the only reason they haven't gone full comic book villain and subjugated the entire planet is because frankly, they're too fucking stupid to manage such a task. It's why I don't particularly like the comparisons to Hitler; Hitler was able to do the horrifying, world-changing things he did because he was the triple threat of narcissistic, ambitious, and intelligent. Trump is more like Mussolini. Brutal, charismatic, and an utter fucking moron.
The real dangers of his presidency are the people he's appointed to his cabinet, and especially the Congress that confirmed them.
The President was intended to be a check on Congress' power. They can propose and approve all the bills they like, but unless the President signs them or pockets them for ten days in an active session, they don't become law. Think of the President kind of like quality control and safety inspector at a factory, while Congress is the assembly line. The President's job is to approve the product for distribution, or send it back to the assembly line with a list of reasons why it's defective.
If the QA/safety inspector will rubber stamp anything without actually inspecting it? Then the factory can produce whatever it wants, no matter how defective or dangerous. Trump is the QA inspector who is too busy worrying about his side business to care what comes off the assembly line, and has delegated that task to his aides and cabinet. Which leaves them and Congress with an extraordinary amount of power.
That's the reason why, despite committing multiple impeachable offenses, nobody in Congress has actually made a move to draw up those articles; Trump, being both a narcissistic, attention-starved toddler as well as rock fucking stupid, is the perfect broken valve through which a Republican Congress can pass all the shitty bills it wants. Pence isn't nearly so pliable, having real experience in public office and thus knowing how to read things before he signs them. Congress won't impeach him unless he does something which makes even that kind of a payoff not worth their while anymore.
The people Trump has chosen for his cabinet are right out of the narcissist's playbook. People who flatter him and who think much like he does. He's used to surrounding himself with spineless yes-men who, like the residents of Peaksville, OH, will tell their child overlord whatever he wants to hear in order to keep their jobs. And he fancies the U.S. government to be merely an extension of his business empire. Ergo, he expects the people he appoints to do whatever he says (despite that the opposite is literally the function of the cabinet; above all else, they're supposed to warn the President when a bill on his desk is a bad idea).
These yes-men that Trump thinks he's got in his pocket? Include Steve Bannon, an avowed white supremacist who literally wants to destroy the government. Jeff Sessions, a guy deemed too racist to be a federal judge under one of the most racist Presidential administrations in recent memory (Reagan, 1986). Rex Tillerson, an oil tycoon who was awarded the Russian Order of Friendship and is a close buddy of Putin. These are the people who have Trump's ear. The people he trusts to put stuff in front of him to sign, like the old senile codger he's turning out to be.
And just like the guy in the nursing home, he's not willfully signing away power of attorney to his eldest child that just replaced all his heart medication with Tic-Tacs; he simply signed whatever he was told to sign. Trump is hardly the danger, here. The real danger is the people around him who know exactly how to play him to do their awful bidding.
Those are the people we need to vote the fuck out in 2018. Provided we still have a country by then.
1) Resistance is working. The marches, the deluge of calls from constituents, it's working. Betsy DeVos was only confirmed by a tie-breaking vote from the Vice-President because two Republican Senators voted against her. Something that has literally never happened before in a cabinet confirmation.
2) Donald Trump is not who we should be looking at as the real danger. It's the people he's surrounded himself with.
Trump is reminiscent of Poo-Bah from Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado. Pompous, narcissistic, strutting around like the peacock with the biggest feathers and bestowing important-sounding titles on himself to cover up his ineffectual bumbling. The only powers he really has are to sign things and appoint people, and most of those things he signs must be approved by Congress before they even see his desk. Executive orders are really the only place in which he has any teeth, and as we've seen, even those are subject to judicial review.
It all goes back to his actual official title: President of the United States. He presides over the process of governing, and even his say isn't final; laws he signs can be overturned by the Supreme Court if challenged far enough, and his veto can be overridden by Congress with enough votes. He's not a monarch, no matter how many golden toilets he owns.
And unlike his more shrewd predecessors, he's a complete outsider to the governmental process. He quite literally hasn't got the foggiest clue what he's doing. This is a guy who, despite claiming to be the world's greatest businessman, doesn't even read shit before he signs it (literally failing How to Do Business and Not Fuck Up Royally 101). He gets his advice and strategy directly from cable news, and when something doesn't go his way, he whines like a pre-teen douchebag in a Halo tournament on Twitter. At best, he's a useful idiot to the people with the potential to do the real damage.
Trump is that old codger in the nursing home who will sign anything you put in front of him, just because he likes seeing his signature on things. It makes him feel important. Except instead of birthday and Christmas checks to his grandchildren, it's laws and executive orders and military action approvals that affect millions.
It's hard to describe these kinds of people, who are such malignant narcissists and pure fucking evil on every level, but the only reason they haven't gone full comic book villain and subjugated the entire planet is because frankly, they're too fucking stupid to manage such a task. It's why I don't particularly like the comparisons to Hitler; Hitler was able to do the horrifying, world-changing things he did because he was the triple threat of narcissistic, ambitious, and intelligent. Trump is more like Mussolini. Brutal, charismatic, and an utter fucking moron.
The real dangers of his presidency are the people he's appointed to his cabinet, and especially the Congress that confirmed them.
The President was intended to be a check on Congress' power. They can propose and approve all the bills they like, but unless the President signs them or pockets them for ten days in an active session, they don't become law. Think of the President kind of like quality control and safety inspector at a factory, while Congress is the assembly line. The President's job is to approve the product for distribution, or send it back to the assembly line with a list of reasons why it's defective.
If the QA/safety inspector will rubber stamp anything without actually inspecting it? Then the factory can produce whatever it wants, no matter how defective or dangerous. Trump is the QA inspector who is too busy worrying about his side business to care what comes off the assembly line, and has delegated that task to his aides and cabinet. Which leaves them and Congress with an extraordinary amount of power.
That's the reason why, despite committing multiple impeachable offenses, nobody in Congress has actually made a move to draw up those articles; Trump, being both a narcissistic, attention-starved toddler as well as rock fucking stupid, is the perfect broken valve through which a Republican Congress can pass all the shitty bills it wants. Pence isn't nearly so pliable, having real experience in public office and thus knowing how to read things before he signs them. Congress won't impeach him unless he does something which makes even that kind of a payoff not worth their while anymore.
The people Trump has chosen for his cabinet are right out of the narcissist's playbook. People who flatter him and who think much like he does. He's used to surrounding himself with spineless yes-men who, like the residents of Peaksville, OH, will tell their child overlord whatever he wants to hear in order to keep their jobs. And he fancies the U.S. government to be merely an extension of his business empire. Ergo, he expects the people he appoints to do whatever he says (despite that the opposite is literally the function of the cabinet; above all else, they're supposed to warn the President when a bill on his desk is a bad idea).
These yes-men that Trump thinks he's got in his pocket? Include Steve Bannon, an avowed white supremacist who literally wants to destroy the government. Jeff Sessions, a guy deemed too racist to be a federal judge under one of the most racist Presidential administrations in recent memory (Reagan, 1986). Rex Tillerson, an oil tycoon who was awarded the Russian Order of Friendship and is a close buddy of Putin. These are the people who have Trump's ear. The people he trusts to put stuff in front of him to sign, like the old senile codger he's turning out to be.
And just like the guy in the nursing home, he's not willfully signing away power of attorney to his eldest child that just replaced all his heart medication with Tic-Tacs; he simply signed whatever he was told to sign. Trump is hardly the danger, here. The real danger is the people around him who know exactly how to play him to do their awful bidding.
Those are the people we need to vote the fuck out in 2018. Provided we still have a country by then.
Tuesday, January 10, 2017
"Princess Mononoke" Is Still a Terrifyingly Beautiful and Chillingly Relevant Film
This month, Fathom Events screened Hayao Miyazaki's 1997 film Princess Mononoke in select theatres to celebrate the movie's 20th anniversary. And I think it's something sorely needed, for a new generation to see this movie. Because if anything, it's even more relevant now than when it was made, current events considered.
While many bloggers have declared Rogue One the movie we needed to see in order to affirm our resistance to oppression and fascism, I would argue that the message in Princess Mononoke is far more comprehensive. While Rogue One celebrates diversity with a great cast and the fight for freedom against a very oppressive (and very white) evil empire, at the end of the day it's still the simplistic space opera of the same stripe as the movies it's a prequel to; the good and bad guys are obvious. You know who to root for.
The world we live in, as much as we would like to believe otherwise, is not so clearly divided. It never has been.
In Princess Mononoke, the title character, Ashitaka, is the last crown prince of a persecuted ethnic group, the Emishi, that was supposedly wiped out five centuries before. In a battle to save his village from the crazed Boar god Nago, he is injured by the demonic presence that had driven the boar mad, and cursed with a demon mark that will eventually consume his body and kill him. As a result, he is ordered to leave his village to prevent the curse from spreading. And with him goes his people's last hope of survival.
As he journeys west, he soon discovers that Nago was transformed from a god to a demon because of what has been happening to the forests; man has been destroying the forests to build forges and get to the iron ore in the ground beneath them, in order to build weapons that they use to hunt the animals that guard the forest. Ashitaka soon learns that what drove Nago mad was rage at the forest's suffering, and the humans that have caused it. His fight is then taken up by Okkoto, another Boar god, who wishes to exterminate the humans and save the forest.
In particular, the humans of a village called Irontown, led by Lady Eboshi, and the men who follow her partner Jigo, a monk who seeks the favor of the Emperor against the local warlord Asano. In Irontown, Ashitaka is enraged to learn of the destruction Lady Eboshi's efforts have caused. But it's tempered by learning that the citizens of Irontown are the most downtrodden members of society. Brothel girls, lepers, etc. Lady Eboshi takes them all in and gives them a place to both feel safe and have a purpose.
But as a result of her destruction of the forest, Lady Eboshi has earned the hatred of the Wolf god Moro, and her three children: her two Wolf pups, and her human daughter San (the eponymous princess), an abandoned child that was thrown at her feet by her own parents when they escaped Moro's wrath. Rather than eat her, Moro adopted her as one of her own. Due to Lady Eboshi's efforts to destroy the forest for its wood and iron, San (and to a lesser extent, Moro) has made it her mission to kill her.
Later on, a plot unfolds between Lady Eboshi and Jigo to harvest the head of the Great Forest Spirit to gain the Emperor's favor. They're successful, but the result is that the Great Forest Spirit drains all life from the landscape while searching for his head. Ashitaka and San return it to him, ending the destruction and repairing the land.
On the surface, the film seems relevant only because of environmental issues. But it's so much more than that. At its heart, Princess Mononoke is a film about the destructive power of hatred, and how we must end the cycle with empathy and compassion for all creatures, not just the ones we belong to.
The four main characters are all foils to each other. Ashitaka represents the best that humanity can be; he wants a perfect solution, for everyone to stop killing each other and to coexist peacefully. As a direct contrast to him, there is Jigo, a self-serving scoundrel who doesn't care what kind of destruction he causes as long as he gets what he wants out of it. In the middle of those two extremes you have San and Lady Eboshi, two sides of the same coin. While San has renounced her humanity, Lady Eboshi completely embraces it, both the destructive and compassionate parts.
While it's true that Lady Eboshi wishes to destroy the forest to get to the iron, she does so because she wants to provide a better life for the people she's rescued. The old and sick, the brothel girls, the lepers...the literal dregs of society that nobody wants to take care of, and that other leaders (like Asano) were implied to be outright purging. As one of the lepers says, she is the only person to treat them as fellow human beings. Despite outward appearances, Lady Eboshi is a kind and compassionate woman...but only toward her fellow humans. She has none of that empathy for the forest or the animal gods that guard it. While she seeks to defend her own home, she has no qualms about razing the home of Moro and San and Okkoto to the ground.
On the flip side, the same could be said for San. She will defend the forest to her last, but has little compassion for the humans defending their home from her Wolf brothers. The only reason she doesn't kill Ashitaka the two times she has the chance is because he appeared to be on her side; the first human she's met who ever showed her any kind of compassion.
And really, that's what sets off the entire chain of events. Ashitaka's mission from the beginning is to see what's happening "through eyes unclouded by hate." And as a result of sticking to that principle, he not only lifts Nago's curse from himself, but ultimately ends the war between the humans and the forest gods.
And it's not an easy mission. Throughout the film, character after character asks, suspects, and demands to know which "side" Ashitaka is on. His motives are questioned by everyone because he doesn't act in the interests of any one person (not even himself, evident when he breaks up Lady Eboshi and San's fight and carries her safely out of Irontown with a gaping bullet wound). And throughout the movie, his motive is the same; to make everyone stop causing suffering.
But the most important part, and the one that is most relevant right now, is that even when it becomes evident that there is no negotiating and Ashitaka must choose a side, the side he chooses is always the side of the oppressed. San, the Wolves, the citizens of Irontown, the peasants being massacred by Asano's men. When Ashitaka must choose to help one side over the other, he always chooses the side that is disadvantaged in some way.
Where we are as a country right now? We need that. We need more Ashitakas. People who would rather see peace, but when forced to choose a side, will help those who need the extra hand most.
Because what we are fighting is not a war of land or resources. We're fighting a purely ideological war, but with the potential to kill just as many as all the other physical conflicts we've seen combined. Because like forest gods, like Jigo's men, like Irontown, like Asano's men, the soldiers in this war are motivated by hatred. And as Ashitaka demonstrated in the film and as millions before us have demonstrated throughout history, you can't fight hatred with more hatred. The only thing that will accomplish is to perpetuate the cycle of violence, suffering and pain. If you fight hatred with hatred, it will eventually eat you alive.
You conquer hatred with empathy, love, compassion and healing.
That's really what the whole movie is about. In order to break the cycle of war, you must have empathy and compassion for others. Even for others who are not like you. Even for others who are trying to destroy you. No, this doesn't mean roll over and take their abuse, but nor does it mean to strip them of their humanity the way they've done to you. Because if you become what you hate in order to win, then you don't actually care about the cause; you only care about winning.
At the end of the day, equality is not about revenge. Equality is not about making other people suffer as you have. Equality is about making sure nobody else suffers as you've done, that nobody else need go through the same pain and horror and hardship that you've endured. Equality is about leaving this world a better place than you found it.
We must see the world with eyes unclouded by hate. It's the only way we're going to lift this curse.
While many bloggers have declared Rogue One the movie we needed to see in order to affirm our resistance to oppression and fascism, I would argue that the message in Princess Mononoke is far more comprehensive. While Rogue One celebrates diversity with a great cast and the fight for freedom against a very oppressive (and very white) evil empire, at the end of the day it's still the simplistic space opera of the same stripe as the movies it's a prequel to; the good and bad guys are obvious. You know who to root for.
The world we live in, as much as we would like to believe otherwise, is not so clearly divided. It never has been.
In Princess Mononoke, the title character, Ashitaka, is the last crown prince of a persecuted ethnic group, the Emishi, that was supposedly wiped out five centuries before. In a battle to save his village from the crazed Boar god Nago, he is injured by the demonic presence that had driven the boar mad, and cursed with a demon mark that will eventually consume his body and kill him. As a result, he is ordered to leave his village to prevent the curse from spreading. And with him goes his people's last hope of survival.
As he journeys west, he soon discovers that Nago was transformed from a god to a demon because of what has been happening to the forests; man has been destroying the forests to build forges and get to the iron ore in the ground beneath them, in order to build weapons that they use to hunt the animals that guard the forest. Ashitaka soon learns that what drove Nago mad was rage at the forest's suffering, and the humans that have caused it. His fight is then taken up by Okkoto, another Boar god, who wishes to exterminate the humans and save the forest.
In particular, the humans of a village called Irontown, led by Lady Eboshi, and the men who follow her partner Jigo, a monk who seeks the favor of the Emperor against the local warlord Asano. In Irontown, Ashitaka is enraged to learn of the destruction Lady Eboshi's efforts have caused. But it's tempered by learning that the citizens of Irontown are the most downtrodden members of society. Brothel girls, lepers, etc. Lady Eboshi takes them all in and gives them a place to both feel safe and have a purpose.
But as a result of her destruction of the forest, Lady Eboshi has earned the hatred of the Wolf god Moro, and her three children: her two Wolf pups, and her human daughter San (the eponymous princess), an abandoned child that was thrown at her feet by her own parents when they escaped Moro's wrath. Rather than eat her, Moro adopted her as one of her own. Due to Lady Eboshi's efforts to destroy the forest for its wood and iron, San (and to a lesser extent, Moro) has made it her mission to kill her.
Later on, a plot unfolds between Lady Eboshi and Jigo to harvest the head of the Great Forest Spirit to gain the Emperor's favor. They're successful, but the result is that the Great Forest Spirit drains all life from the landscape while searching for his head. Ashitaka and San return it to him, ending the destruction and repairing the land.
On the surface, the film seems relevant only because of environmental issues. But it's so much more than that. At its heart, Princess Mononoke is a film about the destructive power of hatred, and how we must end the cycle with empathy and compassion for all creatures, not just the ones we belong to.
The four main characters are all foils to each other. Ashitaka represents the best that humanity can be; he wants a perfect solution, for everyone to stop killing each other and to coexist peacefully. As a direct contrast to him, there is Jigo, a self-serving scoundrel who doesn't care what kind of destruction he causes as long as he gets what he wants out of it. In the middle of those two extremes you have San and Lady Eboshi, two sides of the same coin. While San has renounced her humanity, Lady Eboshi completely embraces it, both the destructive and compassionate parts.
While it's true that Lady Eboshi wishes to destroy the forest to get to the iron, she does so because she wants to provide a better life for the people she's rescued. The old and sick, the brothel girls, the lepers...the literal dregs of society that nobody wants to take care of, and that other leaders (like Asano) were implied to be outright purging. As one of the lepers says, she is the only person to treat them as fellow human beings. Despite outward appearances, Lady Eboshi is a kind and compassionate woman...but only toward her fellow humans. She has none of that empathy for the forest or the animal gods that guard it. While she seeks to defend her own home, she has no qualms about razing the home of Moro and San and Okkoto to the ground.
On the flip side, the same could be said for San. She will defend the forest to her last, but has little compassion for the humans defending their home from her Wolf brothers. The only reason she doesn't kill Ashitaka the two times she has the chance is because he appeared to be on her side; the first human she's met who ever showed her any kind of compassion.
And really, that's what sets off the entire chain of events. Ashitaka's mission from the beginning is to see what's happening "through eyes unclouded by hate." And as a result of sticking to that principle, he not only lifts Nago's curse from himself, but ultimately ends the war between the humans and the forest gods.
And it's not an easy mission. Throughout the film, character after character asks, suspects, and demands to know which "side" Ashitaka is on. His motives are questioned by everyone because he doesn't act in the interests of any one person (not even himself, evident when he breaks up Lady Eboshi and San's fight and carries her safely out of Irontown with a gaping bullet wound). And throughout the movie, his motive is the same; to make everyone stop causing suffering.
But the most important part, and the one that is most relevant right now, is that even when it becomes evident that there is no negotiating and Ashitaka must choose a side, the side he chooses is always the side of the oppressed. San, the Wolves, the citizens of Irontown, the peasants being massacred by Asano's men. When Ashitaka must choose to help one side over the other, he always chooses the side that is disadvantaged in some way.
Where we are as a country right now? We need that. We need more Ashitakas. People who would rather see peace, but when forced to choose a side, will help those who need the extra hand most.
Because what we are fighting is not a war of land or resources. We're fighting a purely ideological war, but with the potential to kill just as many as all the other physical conflicts we've seen combined. Because like forest gods, like Jigo's men, like Irontown, like Asano's men, the soldiers in this war are motivated by hatred. And as Ashitaka demonstrated in the film and as millions before us have demonstrated throughout history, you can't fight hatred with more hatred. The only thing that will accomplish is to perpetuate the cycle of violence, suffering and pain. If you fight hatred with hatred, it will eventually eat you alive.
You conquer hatred with empathy, love, compassion and healing.
That's really what the whole movie is about. In order to break the cycle of war, you must have empathy and compassion for others. Even for others who are not like you. Even for others who are trying to destroy you. No, this doesn't mean roll over and take their abuse, but nor does it mean to strip them of their humanity the way they've done to you. Because if you become what you hate in order to win, then you don't actually care about the cause; you only care about winning.
At the end of the day, equality is not about revenge. Equality is not about making other people suffer as you have. Equality is about making sure nobody else suffers as you've done, that nobody else need go through the same pain and horror and hardship that you've endured. Equality is about leaving this world a better place than you found it.
We must see the world with eyes unclouded by hate. It's the only way we're going to lift this curse.
Friday, December 30, 2016
An Open Letter to the "Incel" Male, From a Woman Who Used to Think She Was Straight
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.
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.
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.
Monday, November 14, 2016
We Already Understand White Rust Belt Voters
The day before today,One day, making tracks
In the prairie of Prax,
Came a North-Going Zax
And a South-Going Zax.
And it happened that both of them came to a place
Where they bumped. There they stood.
Foot to foot. Face to face.
“Look here, now!” the North-Going Zax said, “I say!
You are blocking my path. You are right in my way.
I’m a North-Going Zax and I always go north.
Get out of my way, now, and let me go forth!”
“Who’s in whose way?” snapped the South-Going Zax.
“I always go south, making south-going tracks.
So you’re in MY way! And I ask you to move
And let me go south in my south-going groove.”
Then the North-Going Zax puffed his chest up with pride.
“I never,” he said, “take a step to one side.
And I’ll prove to you that I won’t change my ways
If I have to keep standing here fifty-nine days!”
“And I’ll prove to YOU,” yelled the South-Going Zax,
“That I can stand here in the prairie of Prax
For fifty-nine years! For I live by a rule
That I learned as a boy back in South-Going School.
Never budge! That’s my rule. Never budge in the least!
Not an inch to the west! Not an inch to the east!
I’ll stay here, not budging! I can and I will
If it makes you and me and the whole world stand still!”
Of course the world didn’t stand still. The world grew.
In a couple of years, the new highway came through
And they built it right over those two stubborn Zax
And left them there, standing un-budged in their tracks.
-- The Zax, by Dr. Seuss (1953)
Now that the existential dread and Oh My Fucking Gods What Have We Done? stage of grief has passed, I'm back and I'm pissed the fuck off. Now starts the anger stage, and it's just going to keep on keeping on from there.
So to start this one? Stop fucking telling progressives how we need to understand the rust belt and where we went wrong in not coddling and appealing to the "concerns" of rural white voters. We already understand them, way the fuck better than you do.
It's not "economic anxiety." These folks do not give a rat's sweet pink ass about their financial situation. Because if they did, they would recognize that some jackass real estate mogul from New York Fucking City who built his career by not paying his bills and playing with bankruptcy also doesn't give a rat's sweet pink ass about helping them out. They voted for him because he wants to get rid of all the people they hate. Brown people, Jews, Muslims, the disabled, LGBT...literally anyone that isn't a straight white conservative Christian.
That's not anxiety. That's bigotry. And they were all too happy to vote for it. Even the ones who voted for a black guy just four years ago. Because it's a lot easier to take out your impotent rage on someone else than to fix your own shit.
Yeah, I'm fucking going there. The reason I do not feel a single scrap of sympathy for rural white America is because literally every fucking problem they bitch about is their own fucking fault. Because they refuse to adapt to a changing world, and like permanent spoiled goddamned children, they expect to get what they want when they want it and seriously fuck everyone else's priorities.
They don't want a job. They want their old job. They want to do exactly what they were doing before, nevermind that their old job is obsolete and being done by a robot. And they refuse to learn the skillset required to get a new one, because as conservatives they don't want to change. Period. End. Like literal fucking toddlers, they are going to stamp their feet and scream and demand that candy bar at checkout no matter how many times they're told it ain't happening.
Trump just happens to be the enabling grandparent this cycle, and his promise specifically is "you will get your old life back because I will get rid of those whom you've been convinced by years of bigoted pandering bullshit are responsible for all your problems." That's a sewer into which neither John McCain nor Mitt Romney was willing to crawl; even they have standards. Trump has none.
You want to see real economic anxiety? Go to the urban core. Where people are fighting for higher wages, better education, affordable childcare, affordable housing, student loan forgiveness and more affordable college, more efficient mass transit, etc. All the shit that will actually improve their lives in a tangible way. The truly economically anxious don't blame the already marginalized for their situation; they do what they have to in order to get by. The truly economically anxious adapt.
And therein lies the difference. Rural America does not want to adapt. Rural America does not want to do what needs to be done. They want to do the same shit they've been doing and just have it magically work this time. They want the rest of the world to cater to them.
They are those two stubborn Zax, and the world is not going to stand still.
Friday, November 11, 2016
RIP America: 7/4/1776 - 11/9/2016
60 million people just screamed “I HATE YOU” at the top of their lungs. We can’t undo that. We never will. Thinking it was even possible is the white rabbit that lead us down this deep dark hole.
It’s over. There is, literally, nothing left to do. It doesn’t matter how well we organize, how qualified a candidate we put forth. There are too many people in this godforsaken lake of shit that calls itself a country who would elect the very embodiment of evil as long as he feeds their hatred. There are too many journalists who care more about perceived fairness than accuracy. There are too many people who will let perfect be the enemy of sane. There are simply far too many people who do not want a better world for everyone, only for people like themselves.
I’m done fighting. I’m done hoping. We’ve reached the end. If it’s not going to get any better, then let it fucking burn.
There is nothing left to save. May nuclear war wipe us off the fucking map before Trump makes us suffer death by a thousand cuts.
It’s over. There is, literally, nothing left to do. It doesn’t matter how well we organize, how qualified a candidate we put forth. There are too many people in this godforsaken lake of shit that calls itself a country who would elect the very embodiment of evil as long as he feeds their hatred. There are too many journalists who care more about perceived fairness than accuracy. There are too many people who will let perfect be the enemy of sane. There are simply far too many people who do not want a better world for everyone, only for people like themselves.
I’m done fighting. I’m done hoping. We’ve reached the end. If it’s not going to get any better, then let it fucking burn.
There is nothing left to save. May nuclear war wipe us off the fucking map before Trump makes us suffer death by a thousand cuts.
Monday, November 7, 2016
Protest Votes Are Merely An Excercise In Straight White Guy Privilege
There, I said it. And now I will explain why this is not an opinion, but a motherfucking fact.
Were this a normal election, I literally would not care if a bunch of angry straight white guys in good health decided to write in Donald goddamned Duck as their candidate. But this is not a normal election.
This is an election in which Hillary Clinton not winning means we have guy who flies off on vengeance-driven Twitter crusades at 2am in charge of the nuclear codes.
This is an election in which Hillary Clinton not winning means a guy who is to stand two civil trials for large scale fraud and raping a 13-year-old girl has the power to sign bills.
This is an election in which Hillary Clinton not winning means a guy who has no idea how the government works will hold the nation's highest public office.
This is an election in which Hillary Clinton not winning means a guy who thinks he has the right to sexually assault whomever he wants to just because he's rich will have to meet with other world leaders, many of whom have wives and daughters and quite a few of whom are women.
This is an election in which Hillary Clinton not winning means a guy who wants his political opponents jailed or assassinated has the power to issue executive orders.
This is an election in which Hillary Clinton not winning means a guy who has expressed borderline incestuous interest in his own daughters has the power to pardon convicted rapists.
In other words, were the nation made up of sane, rational people, the very idea of a Trump presidency should scare the holy shit out of everyone enough to make sure he lost by a landslide, simply because we'd become the United States of Fuck This Guy. But of course, if that were the case, Trump would never have gotten the nomination at all.
So here we are.
Unfortunately, while Clinton is still leading, there is a sizeable contingent of people -- many of whom supported Bernie Sanders of all people -- who plan to either throw their votes away entirely on a 3rd party candidate, or not even bother hiding their childish tantrum and vote for the Orange Menace himself. And these people are, by and large, straight white cisgendered men in general good health, voting in a way that screams "I know I'm one of the most privileged demographics in this country and I don't give a shit about anything but my feelings."
Why? Because for them, even a Trump presidency isn't as bad as an establishment candidate since none of the things he wants to do will affect them directly. Thus, the blow to their pride that would be casting a vote for a woman is of far greater concern.
Yes, I'm going there, because the evidence is literally right in front of your faces.
Bernie Sanders has been involved in Congress for even longer than Clinton has. She was elected as a U.S. Senator in 2001; Sanders first got elected as U.S. Representative in 1991. They support many of the same policy positions. They're certainly further on the same page than Jill Stein, Gary Johnson, or Saints preserve us, Trump. And yet, Sanders is the favored anti-establishment "maverick" candidate, while Clinton has been "in politics too long" and therefore "corrupt."
They are virtually the same candidate. But only one of them is female, so obviously that one is no good.
And this is the result of Clinton being the subject of a Republican smear campaign for nearly three decades. Longer than half the electorate has been alive. There is no way in Hell that people haven't internalized that nonsense in some form.
And yes, it's nonsense. Literally every single anti-Hillary argument boils down to "she's unfit to be President because she embodies qualities we still do not find acceptable for women; she does not back down and shut up when a man is talking." Every single "scandal" she's been embroiled in has fallen apart under even minor scrutiny. Every. Single. One. But for insecure privileged white men who felt their balls shrivel up and retreat when she got up on that stage and accepted the nomination, they will cling to any excuse not to vote for her no matter how ridiculous it is. It doesn't matter that her opponent is literally a fascist dictator fanboy. They will, as Varys said of Joffrey Baratheon, "see this country burn if they can be kings of the ashes."
For those of us who are not straight white men in general good health, this election is quite literal life and death. I'm a gay woman with two chronic health conditions. I have friends who are also women, LGBT, disabled, cancer patients, black, Native, and Hispanic. People who would not survive 4 years under Trump, no matter how Congress ends up leaning. I have already voted Hillary Clinton not just because she is the most qualified candidate to ever run for this office, period, but because I will do anything I have to to make sure that the people I care about make it through the next four years alive.
This is not an election to cast a protest vote in. There is too much at stake. This is not about you. This is not about your fucking 'conscience.' Because if your conscience is telling you to vote against someone just because she's a woman, no matter what, then you need to get a new one because yours is fucking broken. This is a fucking emergency.
And I'll tell you what we do in emergencies: we break glass.
Were this a normal election, I literally would not care if a bunch of angry straight white guys in good health decided to write in Donald goddamned Duck as their candidate. But this is not a normal election.
This is an election in which Hillary Clinton not winning means we have guy who flies off on vengeance-driven Twitter crusades at 2am in charge of the nuclear codes.
This is an election in which Hillary Clinton not winning means a guy who is to stand two civil trials for large scale fraud and raping a 13-year-old girl has the power to sign bills.
This is an election in which Hillary Clinton not winning means a guy who has no idea how the government works will hold the nation's highest public office.
This is an election in which Hillary Clinton not winning means a guy who thinks he has the right to sexually assault whomever he wants to just because he's rich will have to meet with other world leaders, many of whom have wives and daughters and quite a few of whom are women.
This is an election in which Hillary Clinton not winning means a guy who wants his political opponents jailed or assassinated has the power to issue executive orders.
This is an election in which Hillary Clinton not winning means a guy who has expressed borderline incestuous interest in his own daughters has the power to pardon convicted rapists.
In other words, were the nation made up of sane, rational people, the very idea of a Trump presidency should scare the holy shit out of everyone enough to make sure he lost by a landslide, simply because we'd become the United States of Fuck This Guy. But of course, if that were the case, Trump would never have gotten the nomination at all.
So here we are.
Unfortunately, while Clinton is still leading, there is a sizeable contingent of people -- many of whom supported Bernie Sanders of all people -- who plan to either throw their votes away entirely on a 3rd party candidate, or not even bother hiding their childish tantrum and vote for the Orange Menace himself. And these people are, by and large, straight white cisgendered men in general good health, voting in a way that screams "I know I'm one of the most privileged demographics in this country and I don't give a shit about anything but my feelings."
Why? Because for them, even a Trump presidency isn't as bad as an establishment candidate since none of the things he wants to do will affect them directly. Thus, the blow to their pride that would be casting a vote for a woman is of far greater concern.
Yes, I'm going there, because the evidence is literally right in front of your faces.
Bernie Sanders has been involved in Congress for even longer than Clinton has. She was elected as a U.S. Senator in 2001; Sanders first got elected as U.S. Representative in 1991. They support many of the same policy positions. They're certainly further on the same page than Jill Stein, Gary Johnson, or Saints preserve us, Trump. And yet, Sanders is the favored anti-establishment "maverick" candidate, while Clinton has been "in politics too long" and therefore "corrupt."
They are virtually the same candidate. But only one of them is female, so obviously that one is no good.
And this is the result of Clinton being the subject of a Republican smear campaign for nearly three decades. Longer than half the electorate has been alive. There is no way in Hell that people haven't internalized that nonsense in some form.
And yes, it's nonsense. Literally every single anti-Hillary argument boils down to "she's unfit to be President because she embodies qualities we still do not find acceptable for women; she does not back down and shut up when a man is talking." Every single "scandal" she's been embroiled in has fallen apart under even minor scrutiny. Every. Single. One. But for insecure privileged white men who felt their balls shrivel up and retreat when she got up on that stage and accepted the nomination, they will cling to any excuse not to vote for her no matter how ridiculous it is. It doesn't matter that her opponent is literally a fascist dictator fanboy. They will, as Varys said of Joffrey Baratheon, "see this country burn if they can be kings of the ashes."
For those of us who are not straight white men in general good health, this election is quite literal life and death. I'm a gay woman with two chronic health conditions. I have friends who are also women, LGBT, disabled, cancer patients, black, Native, and Hispanic. People who would not survive 4 years under Trump, no matter how Congress ends up leaning. I have already voted Hillary Clinton not just because she is the most qualified candidate to ever run for this office, period, but because I will do anything I have to to make sure that the people I care about make it through the next four years alive.
This is not an election to cast a protest vote in. There is too much at stake. This is not about you. This is not about your fucking 'conscience.' Because if your conscience is telling you to vote against someone just because she's a woman, no matter what, then you need to get a new one because yours is fucking broken. This is a fucking emergency.
And I'll tell you what we do in emergencies: we break glass.
Monday, October 3, 2016
Happy Hour With Mussolini: The Rise of Donald Trump Explained
This election cycle is unlike anything we've seen on U.S. soil in living memory. The last time we had such a forward-thinking candidate matched up against the rotting remains of last year's compost stash was when The Party of Lincoln was literal; being anti-slavery was the same level of radical as being feminist, pro-climate science, and anti-crony capitalism is today. And by all accounts, Stephen Douglas was just as batshit looney tunes during the debates as Trump was last week.
It's the kind of once-a-century circus on the Island of Misfit Toys that has people on both sides of the red-blue spectrum asking "where the fuck are we and how did we get here?" To answer that question, we'll have to go across the Atlantic and roughly a century back in time, to where and when conditions were very similar.
In the immortal words of Sophia Petrillo: picture it, Sicily, 1916.
Not Sicily proper, but close enough. The middle of World War I. The Italian Socialist Party had declared itself neutral and opposed Italy's involvement in the war. But a prominent member, writer and professor Benito Mussolini was having none of that. A fan of eugenics, who believed that WWI was a golden opportunity for Italians in Austria-Hungary to prove just how superior they were, Mussolini changed his tune from Marxist Socialism to the kind of scary ideology that would make him besties with Hitler later on; that of nationalistic fervor and the mandate that "superior" peoples dominate the "inferior" ones.
WWI was the European version of Iraq and Afghanistan, only it lasted half as long because in those days, countries still used actual declarations of war rather than merely committing troops to an area indefinitely. But it was just as popular-and-then-unpopular an albatross as Iraqi Freedom later became. And Mussolini saw the same kind of opportunities in WWI that conservatives saw in Iraq; profit, and a chance to bomb the shit out of brown people. And just like Iraq, it eventually proved to be more trouble than it was worth for the Italian Socialists when it started to divert money away from important shit like food and infrastructure.
The Italian Socialist Party eventually gave Mussolini the boot over his pro-war stance, and he responded by forming the Italian Fascist Party, which promoted the need for the "elite" to show the rest of those plebes how to live. And that could only happen if everyone in the country united under the banner of superiority and self-determination, and Seriously, Fuck Those Slavs.
If this sounds frighteningly familiar, that's because it's all happening again. Only replace Italian Fascism with the Tea Party and Mussolini with Donald Trump. It's the same zombie ideology wearing a flimsier, made-in-China hat.
Trump is taking advantage of the same kind of people Mussolini did. Uneducated, low-information country folk who miss the Good Old Days when they were the biggest fish in the pond. And he had a cult of personality much the same way Trump does. He "told it like it was." He peddled the idea that Italians were inherently superior, and if only they could stop their petty squabbling and agree on everything, they could bring their country back to its glory days of law and order. "Make Italy Great Again" indeed. What's more, the Italian Socialist Party that had ousted him saw the whole thing as an overly long joke, until the Blackshirt squads started "restoring order" by getting rid of everyone Mussolini didn't like.
Oh yes, the Blackshirts were very much real. WWI veterans who swore an oath to Mussolini and carried out all the ugly stuff like kidnappings, murder, bombings, and general mayhem in the name of scaring people into line. The fascia in fascism; they bound everything together with the promise of swift and scary judgment against those who didn't conform. Today, we'd recognize them as the "sovereign citizen" movement. The Timothy McVeighs and Cliven Bundys of the U.S..
And the years between WWI and WWII were the crucible in which this explosive mixture of nationalist fervor, childish fear and resentment, and the apathy of the opposition cooked and eventually boiled over.
Like Trump supporters today, Mussolini's followers viewed him as a genius, someone whose success meant he was inherently better than everyone below him. Mussolini himself fanned the flames by attributing his wealth and prosperity not to luck or being born into the upper middle-class and thus having more advantages, but to having inherently better attributes than other men. Much like Trump's "very good brain."
And that's not the only similarity. Both men dodged military service themselves while later advocating for war (Mussolini did eventually serve, but only because it was a condition of his pardon for, ironically, falsifying immigration papers in Geneva). Both men cultivated a propaganda machine that associated their names with prestige and value (despite the fact that nearly everything Trump has ever slapped his name on no longer exists). Both men's visions centered on a glorious empire with themselves at the top (Mussolini wanted to reforge the Roman Empire, while Trump merely wants to dominate the airwaves).
The common thread that really ties the two together, though, is that neither man was/is dangerous by himself; on their own, people like Mussolini and Trump are no more concerning than that hardcore conservative relative of yours who ruins Thanksgiving every year. The danger is in their followers. Nobody would've taken Mussolini or his movement seriously without the March on Rome; had it not been for 30,000 pissed-off Blackshirts and the very real threat of an armed communist revolt, Il Duce would've been remembered more like Leon Czolgosz.
Likewise, what makes the prospect of a Trump presidency legitimately terrifying is not the kind of laws he could enact even with a Republican Congress (because frankly even his own party can't stand him), but the fact that being elected president has the potential to embolden his fiercest supporters to translate their hatred into the kind of violence we haven't seen in nearly a century.
And these modern-day Blackshirts have body armor, semi-automatics, and much larger magazines than their 1920s counterparts.
There's a saying in toxicology that the dose makes the poison, and it's true in politics as well. The support makes the movement. Followers are the difference between your hardcore right-wing relative ruining Christmas dinner, and a neo-fascist right-wing lunatic ruining your country.
Still, a charismatic leader who tells angry people precisely what they want to hear isn't quite enough on its own. As I mentioned before, it's the apathy of the opposition that's the final catalyst. And yes, we have that, too.
Like the Italian Socialists, today's Democratic Socialists are not taking the threat of President Trump seriously enough. He's written off as a joke candidate, much the way Mussolini was. To the point that some who supported Bernie Sanders' run for the nomination have declared their intent to either stay home or vote a protest candidate rather than cast a vote for Clinton.
Edmund Burke told us over two centuries ago why this attitude is dangerous:
It all boils down to this: don't do nothing.
Don't be the apathetic opposition that looks on and lets this happen again because we forgot what happened the last time. Be the generation that remembers. Be the generation that votes, because there is too much at stake here to throw your voice down the gutter or not use it at all.
Be the generation that tells the Angry Fuckhead Movement that this shit will not be tolerated anymore.
Be the the generation that, when the mob and the press and the whole world tell them to move, plants themselves like trees beside the river of truth, and tells the whole world — "No, you move.'
It's the kind of once-a-century circus on the Island of Misfit Toys that has people on both sides of the red-blue spectrum asking "where the fuck are we and how did we get here?" To answer that question, we'll have to go across the Atlantic and roughly a century back in time, to where and when conditions were very similar.
In the immortal words of Sophia Petrillo: picture it, Sicily, 1916.
Not Sicily proper, but close enough. The middle of World War I. The Italian Socialist Party had declared itself neutral and opposed Italy's involvement in the war. But a prominent member, writer and professor Benito Mussolini was having none of that. A fan of eugenics, who believed that WWI was a golden opportunity for Italians in Austria-Hungary to prove just how superior they were, Mussolini changed his tune from Marxist Socialism to the kind of scary ideology that would make him besties with Hitler later on; that of nationalistic fervor and the mandate that "superior" peoples dominate the "inferior" ones.
WWI was the European version of Iraq and Afghanistan, only it lasted half as long because in those days, countries still used actual declarations of war rather than merely committing troops to an area indefinitely. But it was just as popular-and-then-unpopular an albatross as Iraqi Freedom later became. And Mussolini saw the same kind of opportunities in WWI that conservatives saw in Iraq; profit, and a chance to bomb the shit out of brown people. And just like Iraq, it eventually proved to be more trouble than it was worth for the Italian Socialists when it started to divert money away from important shit like food and infrastructure.
The Italian Socialist Party eventually gave Mussolini the boot over his pro-war stance, and he responded by forming the Italian Fascist Party, which promoted the need for the "elite" to show the rest of those plebes how to live. And that could only happen if everyone in the country united under the banner of superiority and self-determination, and Seriously, Fuck Those Slavs.
If this sounds frighteningly familiar, that's because it's all happening again. Only replace Italian Fascism with the Tea Party and Mussolini with Donald Trump. It's the same zombie ideology wearing a flimsier, made-in-China hat.
Trump is taking advantage of the same kind of people Mussolini did. Uneducated, low-information country folk who miss the Good Old Days when they were the biggest fish in the pond. And he had a cult of personality much the same way Trump does. He "told it like it was." He peddled the idea that Italians were inherently superior, and if only they could stop their petty squabbling and agree on everything, they could bring their country back to its glory days of law and order. "Make Italy Great Again" indeed. What's more, the Italian Socialist Party that had ousted him saw the whole thing as an overly long joke, until the Blackshirt squads started "restoring order" by getting rid of everyone Mussolini didn't like.
Oh yes, the Blackshirts were very much real. WWI veterans who swore an oath to Mussolini and carried out all the ugly stuff like kidnappings, murder, bombings, and general mayhem in the name of scaring people into line. The fascia in fascism; they bound everything together with the promise of swift and scary judgment against those who didn't conform. Today, we'd recognize them as the "sovereign citizen" movement. The Timothy McVeighs and Cliven Bundys of the U.S..
And the years between WWI and WWII were the crucible in which this explosive mixture of nationalist fervor, childish fear and resentment, and the apathy of the opposition cooked and eventually boiled over.
Like Trump supporters today, Mussolini's followers viewed him as a genius, someone whose success meant he was inherently better than everyone below him. Mussolini himself fanned the flames by attributing his wealth and prosperity not to luck or being born into the upper middle-class and thus having more advantages, but to having inherently better attributes than other men. Much like Trump's "very good brain."
And that's not the only similarity. Both men dodged military service themselves while later advocating for war (Mussolini did eventually serve, but only because it was a condition of his pardon for, ironically, falsifying immigration papers in Geneva). Both men cultivated a propaganda machine that associated their names with prestige and value (despite the fact that nearly everything Trump has ever slapped his name on no longer exists). Both men's visions centered on a glorious empire with themselves at the top (Mussolini wanted to reforge the Roman Empire, while Trump merely wants to dominate the airwaves).
The common thread that really ties the two together, though, is that neither man was/is dangerous by himself; on their own, people like Mussolini and Trump are no more concerning than that hardcore conservative relative of yours who ruins Thanksgiving every year. The danger is in their followers. Nobody would've taken Mussolini or his movement seriously without the March on Rome; had it not been for 30,000 pissed-off Blackshirts and the very real threat of an armed communist revolt, Il Duce would've been remembered more like Leon Czolgosz.
Likewise, what makes the prospect of a Trump presidency legitimately terrifying is not the kind of laws he could enact even with a Republican Congress (because frankly even his own party can't stand him), but the fact that being elected president has the potential to embolden his fiercest supporters to translate their hatred into the kind of violence we haven't seen in nearly a century.
And these modern-day Blackshirts have body armor, semi-automatics, and much larger magazines than their 1920s counterparts.
There's a saying in toxicology that the dose makes the poison, and it's true in politics as well. The support makes the movement. Followers are the difference between your hardcore right-wing relative ruining Christmas dinner, and a neo-fascist right-wing lunatic ruining your country.
Still, a charismatic leader who tells angry people precisely what they want to hear isn't quite enough on its own. As I mentioned before, it's the apathy of the opposition that's the final catalyst. And yes, we have that, too.
Like the Italian Socialists, today's Democratic Socialists are not taking the threat of President Trump seriously enough. He's written off as a joke candidate, much the way Mussolini was. To the point that some who supported Bernie Sanders' run for the nomination have declared their intent to either stay home or vote a protest candidate rather than cast a vote for Clinton.
Edmund Burke told us over two centuries ago why this attitude is dangerous:
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."The reason I've taken the time and energy to write this is because this exact scenario strikes a very personal chord with me; my grandfather escaped Fascist Italy in the 1930s. He died in 2007, which I'm actually glad for. Because my grandfather loved the United States; he would not have wanted to be alive to witness the rise of the same kind of man he risked death at sea and capture/deportation to get the fuck away from.
It all boils down to this: don't do nothing.
Don't be the apathetic opposition that looks on and lets this happen again because we forgot what happened the last time. Be the generation that remembers. Be the generation that votes, because there is too much at stake here to throw your voice down the gutter or not use it at all.
Be the generation that tells the Angry Fuckhead Movement that this shit will not be tolerated anymore.
Be the the generation that, when the mob and the press and the whole world tell them to move, plants themselves like trees beside the river of truth, and tells the whole world — "No, you move.'
Tuesday, September 13, 2016
Nobody "Put" You In the "Friendzone"
You walked in there all by yourself. And you remain there 100% by your own choice.
No, it's not your fault that the woman (because this seems to be exclusively a straight guy thing) you're interested in rejected you, but that's not what the "friendzone" is. You don't just get there by being rejected. You get there by choosing to stay friends with the woman who rejected your romantic advances, despite not actually wanting a friendship with her at all.
See, the "friendzone" is really just the dysfunction junction between Resentment Road and Dishonesty Boulevard. It's what happens when a guy, for whatever reason, refuses to admit to himself that staying just friends with a woman he wants to be romantically involved with but who has made it clear that's not happening is too much for him to handle emotionally. And so he remains friends with her in order to not seem shallow, but spends the entire friendship bitching and moaning about how difficult and unpleasant it is.
And this goes about as well as anyone sane expects it to. Eventually, the guy does one of two things:
1) he tries, without success, to weasel his way past her boundaries no matter how many times she unequivocally shuts that shit down, until he explodes at her and shows his true colors.
2) he finally wises up and realizes that a friendship isn't enough and quietly severs contact.
And this is all provided he doesn't threaten to kill her (or worse, actually kill her).
What the guy misses from the very beginning, though, is that the only reason any of this happens, the only reason the friendzone even exists for him, is because he chooses to stay friends with someone he does not want to be friends with.
The friendzone is not a prison cell. You are not locked up in there against your will. You have the option to leave at any time; furthermore, you have the option of never entering in the first place.
As a member of the mysterious tribe called "Girl," I'll let you in on a little secret: women don't expect a guy they just rejected to stay friends with them. It's nice if the guy is cool with it, but we really do understand if he's not. So at least to us, it's way the fuck less creepy and douchey to say "look, I gotta be straight with you here, I don't think I can handle staying just friends." Women are frankly more inclined to respect your honesty.
Certainly less creepy and douchey than claiming our friendship still means so much to you while going behind our backs to whine to anyone who will listen how we're such frigid bitches because we won't give a Nice Guy like you even a handjob.
Because since men are supposedly the more logical of the sexes, let's break this down as such: if you don't really want a friendship with this woman and she has made it clear that friendship is the only relation she's willing to have with you, why would you bother staying friends with her at all? Why would you remain friends when you've already admitted it's difficult and painful and unpleasant? Because last I checked, that is everything a friendship is not supposed to be.
As much as I really hate to reduce women to consumable goods, sometimes that's the only way men can understand because that's how they've been trained to think of us: do you hang around outside Home Depot hoping one day they'll start carrying Cristal champagne? Do you stalk the baristas at your local Starbucks to buy winter coats? Do you loiter around your local Apple store looking for outdoor camping equipment?
Of course you don't. Because you know that those stores are not offering the thing you want to buy. And no matter how much you beg and plead and stamp your feet, they never will.
So why would you hang around a woman whose only offering is a relationship you already know you don't want?
You are under no obligation whatsoever to remain friends with a girl when she tells you friendship is all she wants from you. You are free to leave the friendzone whenever you want by simply leaving the friendship.
Nobody is saying that you can't feel hurt or disappointed or even a little angry when rejected by someone you're into. But it's how you react and how you choose to handle it that means the difference between being an actual nice guy, or a creepy, predatory douchelord.
You have a right to those feelings. What you don't have a right to do is lie to a woman's face and then get pissed off at her for believing you. You don't have a right to her being, and you never will.
No, it's not your fault that the woman (because this seems to be exclusively a straight guy thing) you're interested in rejected you, but that's not what the "friendzone" is. You don't just get there by being rejected. You get there by choosing to stay friends with the woman who rejected your romantic advances, despite not actually wanting a friendship with her at all.
See, the "friendzone" is really just the dysfunction junction between Resentment Road and Dishonesty Boulevard. It's what happens when a guy, for whatever reason, refuses to admit to himself that staying just friends with a woman he wants to be romantically involved with but who has made it clear that's not happening is too much for him to handle emotionally. And so he remains friends with her in order to not seem shallow, but spends the entire friendship bitching and moaning about how difficult and unpleasant it is.
And this goes about as well as anyone sane expects it to. Eventually, the guy does one of two things:
1) he tries, without success, to weasel his way past her boundaries no matter how many times she unequivocally shuts that shit down, until he explodes at her and shows his true colors.
2) he finally wises up and realizes that a friendship isn't enough and quietly severs contact.
And this is all provided he doesn't threaten to kill her (or worse, actually kill her).
What the guy misses from the very beginning, though, is that the only reason any of this happens, the only reason the friendzone even exists for him, is because he chooses to stay friends with someone he does not want to be friends with.
The friendzone is not a prison cell. You are not locked up in there against your will. You have the option to leave at any time; furthermore, you have the option of never entering in the first place.
As a member of the mysterious tribe called "Girl," I'll let you in on a little secret: women don't expect a guy they just rejected to stay friends with them. It's nice if the guy is cool with it, but we really do understand if he's not. So at least to us, it's way the fuck less creepy and douchey to say "look, I gotta be straight with you here, I don't think I can handle staying just friends." Women are frankly more inclined to respect your honesty.
Certainly less creepy and douchey than claiming our friendship still means so much to you while going behind our backs to whine to anyone who will listen how we're such frigid bitches because we won't give a Nice Guy like you even a handjob.
Because since men are supposedly the more logical of the sexes, let's break this down as such: if you don't really want a friendship with this woman and she has made it clear that friendship is the only relation she's willing to have with you, why would you bother staying friends with her at all? Why would you remain friends when you've already admitted it's difficult and painful and unpleasant? Because last I checked, that is everything a friendship is not supposed to be.
As much as I really hate to reduce women to consumable goods, sometimes that's the only way men can understand because that's how they've been trained to think of us: do you hang around outside Home Depot hoping one day they'll start carrying Cristal champagne? Do you stalk the baristas at your local Starbucks to buy winter coats? Do you loiter around your local Apple store looking for outdoor camping equipment?
Of course you don't. Because you know that those stores are not offering the thing you want to buy. And no matter how much you beg and plead and stamp your feet, they never will.
So why would you hang around a woman whose only offering is a relationship you already know you don't want?
You are under no obligation whatsoever to remain friends with a girl when she tells you friendship is all she wants from you. You are free to leave the friendzone whenever you want by simply leaving the friendship.
Nobody is saying that you can't feel hurt or disappointed or even a little angry when rejected by someone you're into. But it's how you react and how you choose to handle it that means the difference between being an actual nice guy, or a creepy, predatory douchelord.
You have a right to those feelings. What you don't have a right to do is lie to a woman's face and then get pissed off at her for believing you. You don't have a right to her being, and you never will.
Wednesday, September 7, 2016
An Open Letter to the Hipster Edgelords
Nobody gives a shit about you.
No, really. Nobody cares what obscure piece of media you're currently creaming yourself over. Nobody cares how much you hate social media (but still post on it every day for gods-know-why). Nobody cares that you hate everything popular purely because of its popularity. Nobody cares that you hate most of humanity for literally no reason other than you think it makes you unique and therefore cool (spoiler: it doesn't).
Because see, as geeks we all went through that phase where we were so desperate to prove we were better than other geeks to cover up for our inability to function outside mom's basement that we took every opportunity to wave our geek boners at anything we thought they were long enough to slap. Fortunately, we grew out of that fucked-up mentality by the time society expected us to be functional adults.
But you? Oh no. Growing up into a mature member of society is entirely too mainstream. You're still chasing that banner of Better Than All Those Other Nerds because you're such a worthless, useless sack of piss and vinegar that you have no other purpose in life. And it's your own damned fault.
And no, you don't get to use the myriad of excuses you've racked up over the years, that so many people gave you a fucking pass on because you happen to be straight, male, cisgendered and white.
Don't have a job? Since you seem to love spewing bullshit on the internet 24/7, guess what? You can totally get paid to do that. You don't really need money to start, either. And with modern accessibility features on all operating systems, even a physical disability isn't a barrier. You have a computer, you have internet access, and boom. With a little work and--
Oh yeah. That's your problem. "Effort" is a dirty word in your language. After all, it's easier to bitch and moan all day about how every popular video game, band, movie, and TV show sucks and get into forum and Facebook spats at 2AM than contribute anything meaningful to the media landscape. After all, bitching and moaning gets you the payoff you're after -- the smug assurance that you're Better Than All Those Other Nerds -- and you don't have to do a goddamn thing except piss people off (which is easy, since you're an asshole).
But at the end of the day? Guess what? The blogger who writes about stuff they like, popular or not, gets to take home a paycheck, make friends, and have fun. People give a shit about them.
You? Get to sulk in the lone corner of your mom's basement with your friends, Empty Cheeto Bag and Jizz Shirt, once your Better Than All Those Other Nerds high wears off and you gotta go get into an online dick-waving contest so you can shoot up again.
And still, nobody gives a shit about you. And nobody ever will. Because you don't give anybody a reason to care since you're too busy pissing them off for your own childish amusement.
So if you still want to keep on keeping on on the Road to Nowhere that is being Better Than All Those Other Nerds? Fine.
I think you should just be aware that seriously, no one gives a shit.
No, really. Nobody cares what obscure piece of media you're currently creaming yourself over. Nobody cares how much you hate social media (but still post on it every day for gods-know-why). Nobody cares that you hate everything popular purely because of its popularity. Nobody cares that you hate most of humanity for literally no reason other than you think it makes you unique and therefore cool (spoiler: it doesn't).
Because see, as geeks we all went through that phase where we were so desperate to prove we were better than other geeks to cover up for our inability to function outside mom's basement that we took every opportunity to wave our geek boners at anything we thought they were long enough to slap. Fortunately, we grew out of that fucked-up mentality by the time society expected us to be functional adults.
But you? Oh no. Growing up into a mature member of society is entirely too mainstream. You're still chasing that banner of Better Than All Those Other Nerds because you're such a worthless, useless sack of piss and vinegar that you have no other purpose in life. And it's your own damned fault.
And no, you don't get to use the myriad of excuses you've racked up over the years, that so many people gave you a fucking pass on because you happen to be straight, male, cisgendered and white.
Don't have a job? Since you seem to love spewing bullshit on the internet 24/7, guess what? You can totally get paid to do that. You don't really need money to start, either. And with modern accessibility features on all operating systems, even a physical disability isn't a barrier. You have a computer, you have internet access, and boom. With a little work and--
Oh yeah. That's your problem. "Effort" is a dirty word in your language. After all, it's easier to bitch and moan all day about how every popular video game, band, movie, and TV show sucks and get into forum and Facebook spats at 2AM than contribute anything meaningful to the media landscape. After all, bitching and moaning gets you the payoff you're after -- the smug assurance that you're Better Than All Those Other Nerds -- and you don't have to do a goddamn thing except piss people off (which is easy, since you're an asshole).
But at the end of the day? Guess what? The blogger who writes about stuff they like, popular or not, gets to take home a paycheck, make friends, and have fun. People give a shit about them.
You? Get to sulk in the lone corner of your mom's basement with your friends, Empty Cheeto Bag and Jizz Shirt, once your Better Than All Those Other Nerds high wears off and you gotta go get into an online dick-waving contest so you can shoot up again.
And still, nobody gives a shit about you. And nobody ever will. Because you don't give anybody a reason to care since you're too busy pissing them off for your own childish amusement.
So if you still want to keep on keeping on on the Road to Nowhere that is being Better Than All Those Other Nerds? Fine.
I think you should just be aware that seriously, no one gives a shit.
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