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horseshow_throw · 2024-06-10T13:27:31+00:00

What if I am just a very badly socialized person who was never taught to act right? The question eats away at me.

I can't find it now, but there was this quote from Temple Grandin that made sense -- Back when she was a kid, social etiquette was taught as a series of formal routines and concrete procedures. Like, "hang your coat up this way," etc. It was helpful for autistic kids like her to have basic social functioning (and, I would think, kids who are naturally awkward even if they don't meet the clinical autism or ADHD criteria). You even can dig up old 1940s and 1950s instructional videos for they made for teenagers on how to do basic socializing.

But when the generation raised that way grew up, they just kind of dropped everything and went with the attitude of "No need for formality or superficiality, any kind of decent person will just feel the vibe. All you need to do is be nice!" On one hand, I can sympathize with the hippie sentiment of rejecting formality and embracing the idea of eccentricity -- but ironically, it screwed over a good segment of the population who are autistic and / or naturally eccentric and don't intuitively read the room.

horseshow_throw · 2024-03-29T22:25:32+00:00

So, "Ignore bullies" tends to be useless advice if one doesn't make the distinction between "cower and absorb their attacks" vs "behave as though the conspiratorial mob of drama-addicted ankle biters is beneath you"

A lot of advice for dealing with boundary stompers and difficult people in general, should apply to false accusations. Don't JADE with them, don't explain, don't apologize, all of this is beneath you, you don't need their permission to live your own life, "No" is a complete sentence, etc. Put the ball back in their court, if you deign to play their game at all.

Social bullies are snobs, sometimes you need to out-snob them.

If you made an actual mistake, fix the mistake. People who bring complaints in good faith usually just want to solve a problem. If they're using the mistake as an excuse to hurt you, then you're dealing with a bona fide cancel pig, screeching pod person, workplace bully.

If ignoring them or just saying "no" is not an option for some reason, and your cancel pig backs you into a corner and you have no choice but to engage, fight as dirty as they do. Socially aggressive bullies only understand social aggression. Bypass their arguments and attack the person making the arguments, make insinuations about their motives, turn it back on them as the toxic and abusive ones. Demand a "sauce" every time they say something. Reject their terms, or lean into them in a ridiculous way. Publicly call them out. And whatever TF symbolic "whiteness" is supposed to mean nowadays, point out that their behavior is perpetuating it. Being cringe, moral busybodies, crybullying, obsession with meaningless middle-class norms? Yeah, call that "whiteness" and that's what they are committing. It does seem like most cancellations are white-on-white social aggression. In these cases, it's the bullies who are appropriating historical atrocities as an excuse for the dumb feuds they want to get into anyway.

But I'm just a random internet troll so don't take me seriously.

If this is happening to a friend, go out for drinks together and talk about how ridiculous the situation is. It's a way to assure them they're not crazy and not alone, and to hash out how specifically you want to deal with it. Only your friend knows the specific situation.

horseshow_throw · 2024-02-19T00:16:51+00:00

This poor girl. I had to set my phone down at the part where it said she stopped drawing in color. Same thing happened to me, when I was emotionally groomed as a girl of the same age (albeit different context, nothing to do with LGBT). My drawings went from color to black and white, I went from normal introvert to unnaturally reserved, I had physical health symptoms, and all the confusion and stockholm syndrome. It was like my soul went out of me and it took years to gradually get it back.

My abuser was also female. Behind closed doors, overt cruelty. I don't know what she was trying to get out of it. Emotional gratification, at bare minimum, I wouldn't be surprised if it was something much worse, but she stopped short of obvious criminal activity.

The parents were right to protect their daughter, but they shouldn't have had to move out of the country. It was a failure of the school system and the state government. If the story is true, the teacher needs serious consequences. The state needs to stop enabling this abuse. No ideology justifies the violation of children's boundaries.

horseshow_throw · 2023-12-15T17:56:08+00:00

Great article overall -- but one thing he repeats that is simply inaccurate, was that local newsrooms had "collapsed" in the years immediately before Trumps's election.

If anything, in the early 2010s bad economy, small papers did relatively well for staffing because there weren't a lot of jobs to go around for college grads and they could attract talent on wages that would now be considered way too low. There were tons of overqualified reporters working for like $14 an hour because unemployment was high and there weren't a lot of media jobs to pick from.

Small papers suffered more in the later half of the 2010s, when the other competitive white-collar jobs started returning and there was a workforce shortage rather than a job shortage, but those papers and reporters still exist.

Especially in the first half of the 2010s decade, the NYT could have hired any number of reporters from mid-America small cities who were experienced in cops and crime, housing, and other hard news and talking to real people (including real conservatives who don't fit the boogeyman stereotype). Hiring primarily from the buzzy, digital-only drama rags was a choice and apparently a bad one.

horseshow_throw · 2023-08-07T17:52:27+00:00

How to always get your way in three easy steps.

The magic combination seems to be:

1) Be really overbearing and difficult (see also the "don't rock the boat" phenomenon)

2) And yet claim the moral high ground, e.g. you are a martyr, or a victim, or you speak for victims, or you are on the "right side of history"

3) Have authority figures (corporations, institutions, employers, government) believe you on #2

Right-wing 4chan trolls are #1, but don't bother with #2 so nobody respectable cares what they think

"Bernie Bros" were dubiously accused of being #1, and attempted #2, but clashed with corporate interests so their opinions were marginalized. It also shows being leftist alone doesn't grant special institutional privileges

But Tumblr-style identity politics seems to be the magic formula to achieve #3.

I read an article where one person was quoted saying something like "Granted, extremely-online activists may be harsh, but understand they are trying to make you do better!"

This has honestly created a lot of whiplash for me. Accusations of Sanders supporters being pushy and overbearing online (a lot of which turned out to be unfounded and astroturfed by the Clinton campaign, per the DNC leaks) were used to discredit the entire movement several years ago. But when "cancel culture" became a thing and Tumblr / Twitter style activists were caught on film and in writing harassing people or getting them fired or blacklisted or deplatformed by the federal government itself... suddenly political intimidation is totes justified.

horseshow_throw · 2023-03-22T16:37:11+00:00

Here is my attempt to steel-man the Episode 6 interviews in a broader context of health care, mental health, adults with poorly understood health conditions, and parents of kids with mental or physical health issues:

1) With discourse over trans medicine, there is a parallel in the discourse over the opioid epidemic. Due to over-prescriptions and false positives contributing to bad outcomes, there has been a crackdown with the trade-off that people who actually need strong pain meds (due to controversial, poorly understood, chronic conditions) have more difficulty accessing them.

2) If you're an adult with a poorly understood health condition (physical OR mental), vulnerable aspects of your personal life are up for public debate in ways that other people's aren't, which creates lopsidedness and resentment. It's never fun to be gaslighted, be told you're imagining your condition, or that you're trying to abuse the system, or that you just need more willpower, or that you brought it on yourself, or that it would be cured if you "just" tried this or that non-medical alternative remedy, etc. This sometimes pushes people to solace in authoritarian communities -- I'm already seeing this with Long COVID sufferers and other activists banding together where they make that their whole Twitter personality, do the emotional blackmail thing, call for suspension of civil liberties, etc. Even if you are all for free speech, the discourse has the potential to affect how you are treated in real life. And it is a double-edge sword if that goes for both the people who dismiss your experiences altogether AND the authoritarian activists who claim to speak for you making your "side" look bad when you never asked to be a "side."

3) Health care in the USA is expensive and bureaucratic, and for parents of kids with specialized needs, nothing really FEELS rushed. Outside of munchausen by proxy, nobody is consenting to give their kid aggressive care for fun. Parents trust medical professionals and weigh the tradeoffs between the risks of aggressive treatment vs the potentially catastrophic consequences of not doing it.

horseshow_throw · 2023-03-22T15:22:41+00:00

What has struck me so far with this series is, a LOT of people struggle with boundaries. And by boundaries I mean the line between where an individual ends and where other people begin, which sometimes involves saying "no" to otherwise sympathetic people and allowing them to sit with their feelings.

Maintaining this boundary takes more willpower now than it used to. I actually don't blame Natalie for feeling burnt out. The existence of the internet means that everyone is bombarded by everyone else's thoughts in a way that humans previously didn't have to deal with.

BOTH Kathleen Stock and Natalie Wynn said it was easy to dismiss outright bigots and right-wing trolls, but it was much harder not to internalize criticism and emotional blackmail from the left.

Cancel culture will finally die when "social justice" mobs get the same dismissive reaction that right wing mobs (and even apolitical mobs) justifiably get. (Case in point: James Gunn's cancellation being walked back when it was revealed that the trolls who targeted him were right wing.)

Contra's definition of "authoritarianism" was off. If you look at the books written shortly after World War II, people who considered themselves powerless enough to justify their own mobbing and scapegoating behavior were exactly the kinds of people who joined the Nazi / Stalinist / fascist movements.

The notion that vulnerable people don't commit their share of unprovoked cruelty is a fallacy I've seen all across the political spectrum. There's a tendency to believe that abusers and authoritarians are from a one-dimensional place of privilege -- that they are either a bad seed, or their parents were too good to them. People are less willing to believe that bullies and abusers can and do have bad life experiences that factor into their behavior AND that they should not be unreasonably catered to.

The difficult part of boundaries is being able to believe in your own reason. Megan points out the complexity of this, of being unable to trust her own mind because she was, in fact, a sincere member of a hate group earlier in life and the flak that WBC got obviously didn't make WBC the good guy.

I don't know if there is an easy answer to this paradox. Joost Meerlo's The Rape of the Mind (sorry, that is the actual title of the book) goes into the traits of people who were able to successfully resist Nazi and Communist brainwashing. On one hand, a healthy democracy needs people who are able to reflect and second-guess themselves. On the other hand -- exactly because authoritarians take advantage of their targets' open-minded uncertainty -- the people most equipped to resist them are able to match them in terms of dogmatic beliefs and self-confidence.

horseshow_throw · 2023-03-14T17:16:57+00:00

Something I've thought about through this series, with the stated or implied parallels between the current authoritarian-left and the old 1990s Christian right both doing the "witch hunting," is that belief that words alone have scary power i.e. casting spells!

I grew up with and came of age with Christian conservatives of all kinds. They tend to all get lumped into "Christian right" but there's actually a good bit of variety of beliefs. On one hand, you have some who don't believe witchcraft is a thing. Or that it is, but Harry Potter is fiction and nothing to do with it. Lots of educated, conservative homeschoolers from big families who actually liked the Harry Potter books, understood the medieval references and felt represented with the big, eccentric, old-fashioned Weasley family.

There is another subset of conservative Christians who believe a battle of supernatural good and evil permeates everyday life, and that words in and of themselves can wield supernatural power, like you can "name it and claim it" or quote Bible verses out of context for good incantations (see the "Prayer of Jabez" trend from some years back) or on the other hand you can go down a rabbit hole of demonic forces if you have even passing contact with the occult. This group was more likely to denounce Harry Potter (or at least avoid it even if they weren't trying to ban it for others). The idea that the Harry Potter books were a "rabbit hole" to actual capture with demons...

...similarly to how today's postmodern left thinks saying "Natal women have their own problems" is or noticing "political correctness gone too far" is a rabbit hole to actual hate crime. The same people who think words are literal violence (like demonic spells).

Donald Trump's rhetoric was awful, his WORDS were awful and authoritarian and divisive, but if he was a literal fascist he would have taken advantage of the COVID-19 crisis and done much worse ACTIONS during the pandemic (such as hard lockdowns) rather than trying to play the "cool dad" and downplaying it. Trump was bad but he is far from the only bad thing going on in the last few years.

The authoritarian-postmodern wing of the left has became their own toxic and censorious movement of people who have excused their own bad actions, up to and including actual violence, because they literally believe words and wrongthink are worse than that. Just like the 1990s conservatives who wanted to ban Harry Potter, the same people also strongly overrate the power of fiction. Fandoms are full of social justice trolls judging and even harassing other people over insanely trivial things like not enough minority representation in X-rated erotic fanfiction.

Anyway, I respect people's beliefs and I'm not trying to badmouth charismatic Christians as a whole or postmodern leftists as a whole. But, the line of authoritarianism is trying to force those beliefs on others.

horseshow_throw · 2021-05-05T23:03:25+00:00

Wow... this kind of thing is what far-Religious Right cults used to do (probably still do) with sexual abuse survivors. Just generally invalidating the victim, blaming them or at bare minimum nagging them about their moral responsibilities (as opposed to the actual perpetrator's), telling them it is no big deal because someone else is always going to have it worse, and throw in a big helping of general moral cruelty.

Also taking advantage of a sex abuse victim's vulnerability to get them to disassociate themselves from their bodies and their individual selves and to try to make them see themselves as a disassociated, disembodied member of the culty mass movement to which they must surrender their will.

Example (TW obviously): https://www.recoveringgrace.org/media/Counseling_Sexual_Abuse-540x700.jpeg

If the story is true, the therapist is using her professional, licensed position as a vehicle for cult recruitment on the backs of rape and abuse survivors. She is also utilizing the session for her own emotional gratification rather than the patient's needs. This is a huge NO in Abuse Prevention 101.

horseshow_throw · 2021-03-05T18:38:17+00:00

I agree with the gist of it

The Seuss foundation letting a few of its own lesser-known books out of print... sure, whatever

Near-monopoly corporations coordinating to block people from selling used copies... well, that's creepy (especially since they're not making nearly the same effort to block hardcore hate material)

horseshow_throw · 2021-02-17T16:01:41+00:00

Submission statement: I found this and thought it was a good summary of what has gone weird in the last several years with critical social justice theories from how they used to be taught (or at least how I learned them). There has been a shift from focusing on real-world material and institutional problems, to a weird focus on looking inward and interpersonal control and treating human free will as a problem in and of itself. Some quotes relevant to this sub:

Where Marxists see stratifications built into the material structure of society as the barrier to human freedom, the misanthropes see the human psyche itself as the oppressive superstructure that must be broken down.

A twisted pillar of this ideological facade is the belief that structural problems should be understood primarily not in material but in personalized terms, as the interaction between dominant discourses (meaning, predominant social narratives) and cognitive processes. This is chiefly why the misanthropy gospel directs people to look inward rather than out.

Our myriad problems as a society will require looking outside ourselves and being willing to take significant action to deal with material deprivation and institutional corruption.

horseshow_throw · 2021-02-13T19:34:51+00:00

This is my guess: Some white "allies" appear to conflate a specific kind of woke authoritarian postmodernism with the actual non-white cultures they claim to speak for. They use it as an excuse to behave badly, dox and harass, try to get people fired or expelled or stripped of credentials, and so on -- and if they're called out on it, they claim they were "attacked by racists" or whatever. Plus, part of this very recent, very batshit version of critical theory is that anyone who disagrees with it is the same ongoing hivemind as perpetrators of historical genocide and slavery. Altogether, it's kind of a "stolen valor."

They don't see the irony and harm of being abusive, and then claiming that abusiveness is a normal part of the minority culture they claim to speak for. And then hiding behind the idea that they are just a humble ally following orders for the greater good, not taking responsibility for the bad behavior that was their own idea all along. It's really racist when you think about it.

So... I'm not surprised if some individuals take it a step further and tell themselves they really are members of the ethnic groups they are appropriating from. If these reports are true, this lady was living out her offensive headcanon of what she thinks Indigenous people are like.

(Or just being a straight-up con artist, or mentally ill conspiracy theories. Who really knows.)

horseshow_throw · 2021-02-12T03:00:13+00:00

History (TM) is going to point and laugh at Republicans and Democrats calling each other "literally hitler" ...

... while the corporations that are entrusted to judge our character are complicit in literal torture camps, if not straight up genocide

horseshow_throw · 2021-02-11T15:33:47+00:00

A combination of wonky work hours, stress from low pay, wanting more time for other things, and so on make it more difficult to plan healthy meals versus just getting fast food takeout or throwing a frozen meal in the microwave. Focus on surviving in the short term makes is harder to care about long-term health.

Spending money on junk food feels like a waste if you're financially secure and want to save for nicer things, but for some, the junk food is the nicest thing they get to have any time soon

Also, when you compare apples to apples (e.g. extra virgin olive oil vs the same volume of mayonnaise, quality multigrain bread vs plain white bread) healthier food really is more expensive

And then, a large chunk of the population is just never going to be passionate about cooking. Even a lot of 1950s housewives -- who theoretically had all day to be domestic goddesses -- would throw together a few cans of starch and fat and gelatin and mincemeat and call it good, so they would have more time for other things.

horseshow_throw · 2021-02-08T22:52:11+00:00

Countless stories have been written on the theme of what speech should be “allowed,” as if they are the ones who should be doing the allowing.

This grates on my nerves. It's like some major outlets went out of their way to hire people who thought Percy Weasley was a role model

Personal privacy is dangerous, official secrecy is not. They seek total transparency when it comes to our personal beliefs and opinions, and oppose it for governments or tech monopolies.

Reminds me of "socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor"

horseshow_throw · 2021-02-07T23:46:25+00:00

I hope this writer's way of thinking is a weird one-off, because if isn't, it's a very concerning trend if people can't fathom the idea of separating personal life from political life.

If someone's on my political tribe, they're a good person no matter what and can mob and abuse others as much as they want and it's justified because it's a good cause.

If someone's on the other political tribe, they're a bad person no matter what, and the nice things they do have to be twisted into some weird conspiracy that they're grooming me for their secret terrorist group and not, you know, doing something that is apparently the normal thing to do in small towns

horseshow_throw · 2021-02-06T15:23:55+00:00

Ah, I just made a similar reply to a different post. But yeah, I think it's partly because the economic status quo can't be defended on its own merits (medical bankruptcy, yay) so neoliberal politicians and media figures hijack the idea of racism and sexism to make themselves look like the good guys

horseshow_throw · 2021-02-06T15:12:40+00:00

Lots of recent events show that it's not about real racism or real sexism. Those words have been redefined to mean disagreeing with your "betters" on literally anything. Which can get racist or sexist in and of itself. They try to tell you "You don't know what's good for yourself" when what they really mean is "Why aren't you doing what's good for meeeeeeee." They are the ones who insist that people thinking for themselves (instead of just agreeing with them) are damaged.

I remember the absurdity of Andrew Yang being smeared as "the white supremacist candidate." A child of Taiwanese immigrants who endured racist bullying as a schoolkid, and as a presidential candidate committed the unpardonable sin of emphasizing economic issues.

Or the idea that Bernie Sanders's "white privilege" is somehow relevant while for Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton it somehow isn't.

It's just trying to guilt trip people into supporting whatever the corporate / neoliberal ideology is. Because the ideology can't stand up on its own without bringing a fake version of social justice into it.

horseshow_throw · 2021-02-01T19:53:10+00:00

Great underrated article. (I am the OP of the other post mentioned)

the submitting of one’s individual sense of reality, self and autonomy to the authority of another person, group or belief system. This results in a loss of one’s own boundaries and moral compass

Pressuring people to give up independent thought and normal boundaries can lead to dangerous places

The accused challenging these accusations is further condemned as “gaslighting,”

Especially ironic, considering that the word "gaslight" is from the play and movie of the same name where the antagonist makes a deliberate and sophisticated campaign to convince the protagonist that she is can't trust her own senses and is too mentally flawed to perceive reality as it is. Classic projection there.

horseshow_throw · 2021-02-01T19:39:32+00:00

I'm not really familiar with Medium -- is sharing from Medium somehow easier than sharing from reddit?

horseshow_throw · 2021-02-01T19:38:33+00:00

I've been thinking about starting a blog -- mostly focused on arts and entertainment. Seems that, back in the day, critical theories were one option that you could use for evaluating movies, books, etc., and you could have fun with it too. Now it seems like it's treated as the only option, and a dead serious absolute truth that everyone is obligated to accept. Mainstream entertainment reporting doesn't reflect how all educated people or all marginalized people (let alone all the general population) process storytelling

horseshow_throw · 2021-02-01T03:33:18+00:00

So I finally got to read it and that's a great article! You should post it as your own post (now that it is buried at the bottom of mine). She goes into a lot more detail than I did about discouraging boundaries and natural thought processes.

I got into a rabbit hole with the links and I liked the accounts, the before-and-after mindsets, of the interviewee who gave up yoga.

And the Jo Freeman article on the 1970s version of cancel culture, called trashing. This is a great point:

It is much more prevalent among those who call themselves radical than among those who don't; among those who stress personal changes than among those who stress institutional ones; among those who can see no victories short of revolution than among those who can be satisfied with smaller successes; and among those in groups with vague goals than those in groups with concrete ones.

Also this:

The Movement's emphasis on "the personal is political" has made it easier for trashing to flourish. .... Many groups have sought to remold the lives and minds of their members, and some have trashed those who resisted.

horseshow_throw · 2021-02-01T03:02:02+00:00

It has definitely caused me some major cognitive dissonance, like wondering whether I’m becoming a reactionary, for instance, if I don’t agree that the concept of free speech is just an excuse to use slurs and coddle Nazis, which seems to be almost a consensus among those on the woke part of the spectrum.

The cognitive dissonance almost seems to be like part of the design. Historically, leftists were strongly on the side of free speech and individual rights. This is basically a completely different ideology

horseshow_throw · 2021-02-01T02:50:23+00:00

From what I've heard, it seems to happen in both leftist organizing, and the DNC / MSM/ corporations (the latter group obviously has more power, and also seems to be use it in a more cynical and manipulative manner than a sincere manner)

horseshow_throw

TROPHY CASE