Did not realize until today that Cyntoia Brown had already been in prison for 15 years I thought this whole thing was recent and they had tried this 16 year old girl as an adult and sent her to prison last year or some shit she’s fucking 30 now she’s been imprisoned half her life I’m glad she’s getting out in August but I had no idea how much she had already lost
She said this in the context of how incels basically form parasocial death cults when they are ‘blackpilled.’ They come to believe that because they feel terrible about themselves right now, that feeling is objectively true and forever, and even the reality of how the ‘world really works’ and there’s no hope to change it, only to “LDR”. Which is, ‘lie down and rot’, a form of suicide baiting. What’s happened here is that otherwise genuine feelings of pain or insecurity have been validated maybe too much and have evolved into an entire worldview centered around affirmation of pain. And once pain-as-truth becomes social capital, the way people behave changes to maximize its growth and spread.
But I have to say? I feel like I have encountered versions of the very same behavior in my own spaces, on tumblr, on facebook, etc.:
There’s definitely forms of love-bombing that surround mental illness or depression support connections that shower you with confirmation and praise only as long as you reject any steps of managing mental illness, so long as it unstoppably dominates your life. Once you question someone else’s behavior or declare that you’re seeing a therapist or something all your new parasocial friends turn against you.
I’ve seen it in supposedly feminist spaces where women that are otherwise strangers to each other talk each other into hopelessness and heightened fear of sex and fear of other people in their life, especially male figures. Sometimes not even based in a specific personal experience, but instead just this collective ‘dark truth’ of womanhood. TERFs love to do this, and segue younger people into fear of trans women this way.
I’ve seen it happen a lot within lgbt+ spaces where someone’s personal despair about dysphoria, homophobia they face, not being able to find a partner or being judged by family or strangers, or even fear of violence, enters a feedback loop with other people they don’t actually know and don’t have any interests but their own consumption in mind amplifying it, forming these insular enclaves where fear is truth and everyone else is wrong because they don’t feel as terrible about being attracted to the same sex or for being trans as they should. Meanwhile no one struggling within this structure is actually getting the support or help they need, they’re just arguing about it and building cases for, when the mythical support does fall from the sky, why they should get it first.
There’s mounds of discourse where people argue over how because that group couldn’t possibly live as terrible a reality as this group, their lived experience isn’t the order of the universe and therefore doesn’t deserve validity or attention at all. And to argue, inexperienced people fall into the trap of trying to artificially match the despair levels of their critics, or try to counter one black pill with their own black pill which will never be credible to outsiders, resulting in cringy disaster at all vectors. In the red-hot radioactive mess troll accounts prosper.
Which is not to say that all these situations are full of people as baseless as incels– some of them are living very difficult lives, but are using “masochistic epistemology“ as the internal logic of their world. And the effect of such an internal logic is extremely dark self-confirming biases in excess of what is necessary to communicate the dangers of their lives, or cope with hardship. And any similar person who goes off seeking friends who acknowledge their pain is going to find a black hole of people who’d otherwise be peers escalating that very pain in themselves and others in order to confirm it’s all real.
Natalie Wynn herself, a trans woman, struggled with the urge to go to 4chan’s /lgbt/ and wait for the most toxic and hopeless crowds there rip her appearance apart even though it made very little logical sense. The people there shared the same insecurities as her, that they don’t pass, that people will despise them, and in some way hearing those insecurities confirmed rather than denied to her felt more like ‘the real truth’ or ‘what people really think’ than it did to hear praise and encouragement. Even if what they had to say wasn’t anywhere near an objective truth.
The “pain is real” mindset is that hard to shake! It doesn’t matter if you’re smart, prepared to identify the phenomenon with philosophy education, intellectually aware that it’s bad for you. There is a self-harm impulse to ‘face reality’, but a very specific reality that confirms the bias of your pain or insecurity. The comfort zone of discomfort, in a way! It just wants you to not feel crazy for feeling those things and is willing to hurt you even more to prove you’re right about your environment or your life.
Ya ever feel like the ideal body type for women was inherently just classism and the perfect way to treat women like trophies because like back when women were Thick™ as an ideal body type the only women who were able to look like that were the rich and today now the type is super thin and the only women who can look like that are the women who don’t work labour jobs and can afford not to have a carb diet so basically men only go for rich women and have changed how they objectify women not because of some biological quirk that shifts their lust but entirely because the form of the most privileged women has changed therefore the best trophy to keep
It literally was. Fat was hype when malnutrition and starvation were common. A symbol of leisure.
Gucci Skinny was hype when malnutrition from cheap food was common and when most of the middle class had desk jobs. Symbol of control over women who now had more rights.
Instagram Fit ™ is hype because most people are overworked and too broke to exercise or eat properly. A symbol of “leisure” and wealth.
I hope one day that history looks back on ronald reagan as one of the 20th century’s most vile and disgusting serial killers
may i ask why
Remember when like 6 Americans had ebola and it was an international emergency, and Obama flew out to meet survivors? Here is a list of things the United States government did in response: -Increasing the number of Ebola testing labs throughout the U.S. that can quickly and safely screen a potential Ebola specimen
-Educating more than 150,000 health care workers on how to identify, isolate, diagnose, and care for patients under investigation for Ebola
-Developing countermeasures — including the first Ebola vaccine to progress to Phase 2 testing — to prevent and treat Ebola
-Converting at least 10 of the Ebola Treatment Centers into long-term Regional Ebola and Pandemic Treatment Centers for long-term readiness for years to come
-Helping state and local public health systems accelerate and improve their operational readiness and preparedness for Ebola or other infectious diseases
Source: https://whitehouse.gov/ebola-response
When the Reagan administration was faced with tens of thousands of gay men dying, they did nothing. They made jokes. They laughed. They caused an epidemic that killed 40 million people, because they hated gay men and thought we deserved to die.
There is so much more to it. There is a myth perpetuated by Reaganites that he was an historically significant President, in some positive sense. If you are old enough to have voted in 1980, you probably know differently. If you were born after 1980 you have been raised on this myth. He sold Americans a fable about a Hollywood movie-like exceptional past and destiny, and led ordinary people around with portrayals of that mirage while his reactionary robber-baron friends set about dismantling 50 years of progressive advancements for working men and women, on their way to returning themselves to the position of unfettered economic domination they held between the Civil War and the Great Depression. He was a union buster. He gave us Scalia – need I say more? He tried to give us Robert Bork (does anyone under 30 even know who he is?). He lied about Iran/Contra. He avoided dealing with AIDS. He sealed the political sham-show between right wing capitalist kings and the evangelical thought-control snake-oil salesmen. Americans don’t want to hear that they are ordinary citizens of the world, and they don’t want to hear that the aren’t anointed by some deity to lead the world to salvation. They lapped it up, and they continue to do so.
I have to wonder how the response of a more competent presidency to the AIDS crisis might have changed even the global impact of the disease. Where might we be today? How many millions of people would be alive and not suffering? Yes, Reagan was historically significant—for fucking things up in a globally devastating way.
When you hear how he slashed Income taxes, he did on the Wealthy, but he increased the lowest taxrate from 10% to 15%.
His campaign was funded by Christian radicals, whose entire goal was to dismantle Roe vs. Wade and see American women relegated once more to back alleys and dirty knives. He opened the door to religion in politics in a way the postwar McCarthyists never dreamed possible. Now, 36 years after his election, maybe a third of American medical schools offer proper access to even first-trimester abortion training (in an era where that should mean a pill or vaginal suppository), and there are currently fewer doctors trained to perform late stage abortions for the entire US than there were pre-RvW (when such operations were only performed as a heroic measure).
And no one has even touched on his legacy of racial hatred, deliberate destruction of black communities and establishing of COONTELPRO to destroy the lives of black panthers and black activists, his actual murder of black activists and more. He was actually a demon.
If you want to know how many lives could have been saved if the Reagan government had just fucking BUDGETED for AIDS research instead of telling AIDS researchers that they had to beg, borrow or steal any money for AIDS from other programs–then read And The Band Played On:
Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, 20th-Anniversary Edition
by Randy Shilts. And be prepared to have your heart broken at the unadulterated and wildly irresponsible waste.of time and human lives.
After Ronald Reagan was elected in 1981, U.S. funding of the mujahideen increased significantly and CIA Paramilitary Officers played a big role in training, arming and sometimes even leading mujahideen forces.
The CIA trained the mujahideen in many of the tactics Al Qaeda is known for today, such as car bombs, assassinations and other acts that would be considered terrorism today.
FUCK every U.S. President but especially Ronald Reagan.
Reagan was fucking awful. He broke the economy. He ended mental healthcare in any meaningful way. And he put a wreath on Nazi graves because they had people who also died in that war they started….who died while you know, killing millions of people.
Oh it’s much worse than that.
In 1961, decades before he ran for office, he released a spoken word album talking about the evils of socialized medicine provided by the Federal Government.
It was called “Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine,” and the American Medical Association distributed it as part of Operation Coffee Cup which tried to undermine Democratic plans to expand Social Security to cover healthcare.
So you see, we’ve been having this debate for a while now. More than half a century in fact.
