This past week, the United States has experienced a horrific series of civil rights violations: the Boston Marathon bombing, followed by the lockdown of the entire city under martial law (during which several civilian homes were burst into with military might, in SWAT raids searching for one of the suspects, both of whom were considered armed and highly dangerous), and the passing of a bill (CISPA, or Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act) that allows the United States government to monitor traffic on the internet at its whim and fancy. And that’s not just American citizen’s internet traffic — that includes monitoring of non-Americans accessing US websites too. Canadian civil liberties organizations have asserted that this is very likely to result in further violations of Canadian citizens’ civil liberties as a result (e.g., extradition to the states for alleged “cyber crimes” against the US government).
Also this past week, I observed someone on my Facebook comparing the Boston SWAT raids to the Nazi invasion of Poland and rounding up of Jews at gunpoint. And to my utter shock, not one but two philosophy dudebros came along to defend this individual, on the basis that they think my emotions have clouded my ability to think critically about this outrageously offensive comparison (which directly equates Jews to terrorists, no matter which way you attempt to slice that). This post is going to get personal.
Concern troll warning: Take your “reverse sexism” claims right now and stuff them where the sun doesn’t shine—unless you’re homophobic, in which case, get ready to chew and swallow. If I could literally force-feed it to you, I most certainly would not hesitate.
I’m going to make a full disclosure right now. I am part Jewish. Like the two bombing suspects, I am also part Caucasian. I am even part Polish. That’s all just one side of my family. On the other side of my family, I am part Danish and part English, and my Danish grandfather was just a teenager during the Nazi occupation of Denmark. I am deeply suspicious that he was also a Nazi sympathizer, as there are several things he has said and done, and several things going on in that side of my family, that simply do not add up otherwise. These parts of my identity are all the reasons why I’m typing in English, sitting in an apartment on the west coast of Canada (where I maintain zero contact with my blood family), instead of learning to speak my ancestral tongues while I learn about the land I am connected to by blood.
To suggest that I get emotional about people co-opting the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust (during which, I will remind you, ten million people were murdered) as if to extract the emotional gravity of this part of world history—my history… tens of millions of peoples’ histories—and heap it on top of an already heinous abuse of power as the United States has seen this past week, is to have already grossly understated what I feel when I see this taking place. But to suggest that because I feel such strong emotions, I therefore am unable to think clearly about it, is just fucking ignorant. It is because I can feel all of that emotion that I am more able to think critically about what is happening here.
I am now going to introduce a metaphor for what I think must be going on in the minds of people who actually think that any free speech argument they can muster is in any way a legitimate defence for having radically decontextualized the fucking Nazi Holocaust of all the fucking things in world history. These people—especially the dudebros who voluntarily came to the initial offender’s defence, despite not being prompted to at all by anyone—are Numb Nuts©. They are being repeatedly kicked in the balls, yet are somehow completely desensitized to it, and appear perplexed by anyone who isn’t equally desensitized. (Though I’m confident very few women will fully comprehend this paradox, I can assure you from direct personal experience that being kicked directly in the clitoris is exactly the same scale and magnitude of pain as being kicked in the balls.) They observe someone clutching their pelvis whilst curled up in the fetal position on the ground, trying not to throw up, and shouting “Why the fuck would you do that?!” when they can finally breathe again after the first couple of minutes. Numb Nuts© continue to observe the victim as the pain spreads over their entire body and the urge to vomit slowly creeps up from just below their navel all the way into their throat, tears forming in their eyes and spreading across their reddened face. But rather than, say, demand an end to testicle-kicking everywhere, Numb Nuts© tell this heaving person who is clearly in pain and in need of assistance that if they would just stop feeling it, they could have a rational discussion with them about how their experience of being kicked in the balls really isn’t as bad as they think it is. “I mean, look at me!” they’d say. “I could be getting kicked in the balls right now, and you don’t see me getting all emotional about it!”
This is precisely the problem of philosophy dudebros and their disingenuous attempts to “debate” abortion politics, but truly, only a complete fucking Numb Nuts© could minimize the Nazi Holocaust to defend someone who had already decontextualized it. Maybe they had a point in there, somewhere, about civil liberties. I can’t fucking tell, and I wouldn’t want to have that conversation with them anyway. Not after they’ve just finished defending a comparison as offensive (to literally anyone currently living on the planet) as the Boston lockdown to the invasion of Poland and rounding up of Jews by Nazis.
Maybe these idiots have somehow “forgotten” about these events in world history. Only, they’d also have to live under a fucking mountain to be equally ignorant of the conflict in Gaza, the current renewal of the American Indian Movement of the 60s and 70s that recently gained global attention as Idle No More, the treatment of Japanese Americans and Japanese Canadians on the west coast during WWII (i.e., being raided at gunpoint, forced internment, and often enslavement as well), and innumerable other conflicts that continue to re-shape and re-structure our world. I suggest everyone reading this post also take a moment to read this article on Huffington Post from George Takei about his experiences in a Japanese internment camp, and this article on Al Jazeera on the instant clamouring in mass media to appoint blame for the Boston Marathon bombing on the suspects’ ethnicities alone.
Civil liberties violations should make us feel angry. Human rights violations should make us feel several times more outraged. That enough people are so desensitized to both that even as I limited my social media engagements as much as possible this past week, I was exposed to three separate people who were all trying to shield themselves from criticism, for either perpetrating or defending a grossly inappropriate and offensive comparison between Jews and terrorists (while mass media was promoting the same principle mindset as much as possible across the United States, and the government was passing a bill into law that radically undermines civil liberties — potentially worldwide), should make anyone angry enough to take to the streets in protest over it. That people of the exact same desensitized mental state show up, without fail, at protests of all kinds and try to bait people into endless meaningless debates, as some sort of misguided “tactic” is yet another sign of how prevalent this desensitization to violence really is. You know. In case you didnt already have enough evidence from the moment you realized even a rudimentary grasp of the concept of oppression.
As a society, we have a collective responsibility to keep our social conscience accurately informed by our histories. When we fail to maintain this responsibility, we can be terrorized by the governments that are in place to serve us into being complicit with anything, even though we know that the majority is not held by those in power over us. Those in power know this, maintain society’s collective ignorance of this fact (e.g., mass media corporations in Canada are legally obligated to not express dissent against the Canadian government), and then exploit that collective ignorance to keep us distracted while our remaining liberties are rapidly being chipped away. As is stated in this film (demanding a militant resistance movement in defence of the rights of indigenous peoples—and by extension, everyone else on the continent—to a future for their children), at every phase of the Nazi Holocaust, it was in the Jews’ rational self-interest to comply, even as they were being marched to their deaths into the gas chambers. Meaningful dissent and active resistance are our most important day-to-day decisions.
Numb Nuts© and philosophy dudebros alike seem to have “forgotten” that too. If we want to raise consciousness about what’s recently happened in Boston, and incite people to take meaningful action against an increasingly tyrannical government under which corporations have greater liberty than the nation’s own citizens and corpses have more rights than pregnant women, comparing Boston to the Nazi Holocaust isn’t going to do it. And telling people to just stop feeling that testicle-kicking because it’s somehow “clouding their judgement” isn’t going to work either.
Learn about and always remember where you come from. Acknowledge daily all that it has cost for you to get here. Then do something about it when you recognize that history is beginning to repeat itself. Educate people. Protest. Lobby if you even think it’s possible to have a voice under a government that allowed hundreds of corporations to gain legal personhood under a law that was written to protect Black people from the abuses of slavery. Just don’t fucking sit down and give up trying to fight it. And don’t dare try to convince other people to be just as complacent, or before you know it, those in power over you will find your threshold (loose though it may be) and violate that too.
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martial
I had a similar Facebook beat-down this week after the NZ marriage equality laws passed and someone decided to get all uppity about the meaning of the word “marriage” as a word. Turned into a two-day 450+ post status that only finally ended when someone got unfriended. People on FB can be assholes.
I spent about an hour this morning on the phone with my daughter who lives in Watertown. She’s pretty liberal about any human rights issues and thought locking down Boston was “a little bit of overkill.” But she was the one who was in the severe lockdown– along with her husband; her daughter and her daughter’s boyfriend who had only stopped by on the way to a festival they were missing; the dog, a large yellow lab; and NO COFFEE. Because they were all planning to walk down to Starbuck’s.
So I think my daughter has a pretty good idea what the lockdown was like.
In fact, she was allowed out of her house–into her own back yard, which can’t be seen from the street. Because of the yellow lab, you see. Every single time she went out, a helicopter came over her house. And every single time, she waved at the guys in the helicopter and pointed to the dog. And the helicopter hovered, waiting, until the dog did its business and she and the dog went back inside. That was the Watertown lock down.
And people want to compare *that*to Nazi Germany?
Put cameras on every street corner, monitor all internet traffic. They already monitor traffic for people how download “Nickleback” albums on The Pirate Bay. If they want to monitor internet traffic to protect citizens from people who are conspiring online to do physical harm to others, please don’t mistake this for a “human rights violation”. If you’re not breaking the law then why worry? It’s also funny that people who think this “violates human rights”, because “they are watching us”, are often the same people who believe there is a magic sky daddy who watches them masturbate at night.
I’m sorry but that movie is terribly bad. I am only 30 minutes in so perhaps I shouldn’t judge too quickly but from what I have seen, it really is a terrible movie. It may make a few interesting and relevant points but those points are drowned by a sea of awfulness.
Says the guy who is so paranoid that he thinks that there are Islamist terrorist sleeper cells in every city, town an village in Canada.
(Sigh)
I can’t believe I have to explain to you why this is a problem.
You are aware that law enforcement people are human, yes?
(please say yes, please).
And they are subject to human failings, right?
And that they might, on occasion, not be totally honest wonderful people? That sometimes they might just not have their priorities straight? That maybe one of them had a bad day at work because his boss was an asshole, or a tough day at home because the kids were screaming and s/he has dental work to pay for or tuition, and the spouse was bitching about something completely inconsequential that can create all kinds of tension because neither partner has the energy to deal?
Or perhaps, that maybe one of those LEOs had an old girlfriend and a bit of a talker mentality.
Or that, as humans with human failings, that they might absorb racist attitudes from the society at large?
That they might make mistakes?
Holy hell, Jaime, you’ve never heard of people wrongly convicted? You’ve never heard of abuse of power? Google “Louisiana cops commit holdups” and see the results.
Let me lay this out for you, Jaime. Civil rights actually help catch criminals. Really, they do!
How does this work? Because it protects law enforcement from their own bad decisions. It forces people to ask things like “can I prove this guy did something? What evidence do I have? Where did it come from?”
Dog knows it isn’t perfect by any stretch. But it’s a start. And that’s kind of the point. Were you like, completely not listening in civics class? Did you miss the reasons we have to have laws that are specific? That people have the right to face their accusers? To see the evidence against them? That’s just the start.
Jesus freaking tap-dancing on a matzoh Christ.
I’ll put this up to ignorance, you’ve obviously never been stopped by a cop. You have obviously never had to worry about a cop who might have had a tough day and decides, “hell with it” and gets angry, so he might, you know, shoot you. You have obviously never, ever felt what it is to face someone who could shoot you right there and never, ever, ever face prosecution. That’s reality for millions of people.
If you don’t care about the right to privacy then will you send me the contents of any computers or data storing devices (phones, cameras, etc); email, banking, social media accounts and passwords; and a webcam tour of your home and all your personal belongings?
The “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear argument” is DOA. Anyone displaying such blatant ignorance ought to be ashamed of themselves. The “we need to monitor everything all the time” argument gives rise to titanic government databases which can and will be used and abused for reasons so far out of their original scope that the two don’t even occupy the same galaxy. The idea that such databases can be used proactively is a joke: law enforcement becomes so drowned in data that it becomes impossible to use it to catch criminals ahead of time and results in computer programs being created to try and find “criminal behavior patterns” in the data in order to justify the databases’ existence. A computer program determining if I’m a potential criminal or not? What a fabulous idea!
Meanwhile, if you’re a person of interest with unpopular political ideas, or perhaps you just did something that rubbed a certain government official the wrong way, then guess who has everything a blackmailer could ever want? Including more than enough information to find some obscure law you broke that people break everyday, but this time, you’re going to be made an example.
So no, let’s not “monitor everything” if you’re willing to throw away for freedom for literally zero increase in security, then feel free to go try living in Iran or China, and let us know how that works out for you.
If you want to see exactly how the cancerous overreach of security agencies and firms in the U.S. alone consume massive resources and data while still failing to catch any criminals, take a look here: http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articles/a-hidden-world-growing-beyond-control/
Thanks. Will correct. Probably one of the top three stupidest published spelling errors I’ve made in the past ten years, haha
Edit: top. Top, not too, thank you autocorrect.
Also Jamie Green:
Yeah, it seems like the first people to complain about potential rights violations are the last to learn what different rights mean(I.e., civil rights vs human rights; positive rights vs negative rights).
Also unfortunately, I don’t believe Marc Emery was actually breaking a law, but was extradited to the states and locked up for selling marijuana seeds online. So, that whole “why worry?!” Uhhh…. That’s why.
“If you don’t have anything to hide, why worry?”
Well, let’s say your a vocal atheist on the internet, but you keep it on the down low since you live in a highly religious area, and your opinions might make you unpopular. Who’s to say that whatever agent of the surveillance state who is going to find that out isn’t going to leak that info and then, without your ever knowing who started the process, somehow everybody finds out something about you that you were intending to keep private?
What if someone is homosexual and isn’t out yet because they feel like they’d face discrimination? Now that the surveillance state knows what sites that person goes to, they can get effectively ‘outed’ just by some agent of the surveillance state who happens to blab about it.
I don’t want jackasses, government or corporate, monitoring me. I want to control who has what information about me. I don’t want anybody knowing what books I read, what movies I watch, what sites I visit, period, unless I told them. Some of this info is already out, and I’m not happy about it.
Also, we have an expectation in the States to be reasonably free from unwarranted search and seizure. Yeah, stop and frisks now and then find a guy with a gun, but it’s mostly just a way for cops to hassle people they racially profile. I don’t like that, and I’ve seen it go down – cops stopping *every single person and car* in a minority neighborhood and getting aggressive and demanding the right to search – which they don’t have. Unless the laws make that a clear NO, you’ll get hassled by the cops, and I don’t want to deal with that.
CISPA thankfully isn’t going to become law just yet. The US has to pass it from both houses, and the Senate isn’t likely to consider it anytime soon. And even then, it’s unlikely to get the necessary 60 votes to pass. Even if it does, Obama has promised to veto it in its current form, which would mean it would have to be ratified again in the Senate at an even higher threshold. There’s still room to breathe, for now. But it’s definitely a good time for any Americans reading this to write their senators.
I’m gonna argue the martial law part. 1) Technically, martial law involves the takeover of civilian authority by the military, which did not happen here whatever you may think of the SWAT teams. I will note that even the Mail did not pull out the phrase “martial law” and if I’d expect anyone to do so inappropriately, it’s a Rupert Murdoch rag. 2) My understanding of the situation is that the stay indoors instruction was more of a polite request for safety reasons than an order backed by threat of coercion, and shutting down mass transit only makes sense when you have evidence that the suspect(s) is still in the area and still a threat, which brings me to the next point . 3) The lockdown occurred after the shootout at MIT which left one of the suspects and an MIT security guard dead. Now, I suppose whether or not a security guard qualifies as a civilian casualty depends on your point of view, but it definitely establishes the existence of a potential public safety hazard.
Frankly, I’m more concerned about how long it took to Mirandize the surviving suspect. Okay, the public safety exception is legally recognized, but it still feels like it took too long after the arrest.
All sounds like fine points to me. Still doesn’t take the sting off of a lot of people who felt (and rightfully so) that their civil liberties were violated.
Also, wasn’t aware that SWAT had tanks. So there’s that.
BOSTON WAS NOT IN LOCK DOWN THERE WAS NO MARTIAL LAW!!!! I live a couple thousand feet from where the bombs went off. Sure there was police presence and sure the Gov. told people to stay in doors when they were chasing the suspect throughout Watertown and its surrounding towns, but no one was treated the way they were during Katrina under the Bush administration where law abiding citizens had their guns taken away and some were even killed. No one was hiding in there hones either. In fact, when they caught th suspect, crowds not to far from the area cheered as they saw this happen. People of Boston may be considered liberal, but many are not, many own guns, hunt and would fight to the death for their homes. What the media an apparently this blogger have done is use this tragedy for politics. I am so disappointed that I will no longer be reading this blog.
Echoing inquisitiveraven a bit, the biggest issue I had with the “lockdown” — and why I have mixed feelings about it — is that I understand that law enforcement people would rather keep the civilian casualties to a minimum, and yo have a guy out there who might be waving a gun around, you want to make sure everyone else is out of the way.
That said, the man was found after hiding out in a boat in a driveway by someone who went out. I can’t help but think that had there been people on the streets he’d have been seen sooner — even if nobody knew who he was, a bunch of 911 calls about a guy walking about with bullet wounds attracts attention, and would have allowed police a better idea of where he was. Had Tsnarnaev died in that boat it might have been days before anyone found him, and then what? Lockdown for a week? A month? Until his body was found?
And while it was a polite request, such requests are not something you mess with from law enforcement, you know?
Then there’s the Miranda issue…
Minor point of info regarding comment 14: MIT cops are not “security guards”, they are real cops, sworn police officers, who go through police academy training.
Other than that, as someone from metro Boston (and an ACLU supporter), I agree with comment 14. It wasn’t martial law and people who went outside weren’t arrested. It wasn’t just that cops were looking for the suspect, it was that they thought he might be planting more bombs. The “lockdown” wasn’t the part that really bothered me. The militarization (both in the use of actual military and the militarization of the police) bothered me a lot. The Watertown searches bothered me a lot – some people got polite requests to let SWAT teams in, but other people got nonconsensual (and warrantless) searches. The subsequent Miranda issue bothers me. There are many major civil liberties problems here. The “lockdown” as implemented, I’m not willing to out-and-out condemn as being one, and too many people who are not from Boston are talking about it in sensationalistic terms.
Anyway, getting back to the original issue…yeah, comparing the Boston searches, however problematic, to Nazi raids, is gross and offensive. I am half-Jewish, and also part-Romani, and my mother-in-law’s sister and much of my extended family on my father’s side died in the Holocaust. My spouse, who is full-blood Ashkenazi, had his life threatened repeatedly by actual neo-Nazi gangs in Florida when he was a teenager. So people comparing the Boston searches to the Nazis can shove it. Please learn how to condemn civil liberties violations and human rights violations without referencing the Nazis. Too many people regardless of ideology have not learned how this works.
At least, given all this outrage about what happened in Boston, I can assume that I will see all these outraged people in the streets with me next time I’m at some sort of civil liberties or human rights-related protest…oh wait, probably not. Well, at least I can assume that they’ll pay attention to the fact that we’re protesting, and stick up for us with the public, and use social media to decry police abuses…haha, no, just kidding, I’m not that naive.
Yes, people were killed. By citizens who had been “law abiding” up until the point where black people tried to take shelter in their neighbourhoods, at which point it was open season on hurricane victims.
See, I’m of the mind that people who disproportionately react to things shouldn’t have guns, but that’s just me.
Then again, I’m pretty sure you’ve never read this blog before, so I will miss the absence of your powerful intellect not at all.
Being liberal and owning guns, hunting, and defending your home are not mutually exclusive.
I would argue that in general, liberals are slightly less trigger-happy.
The heinous civil liberties violations were the furthest thing from a polite request for people to stay indoors. I also agree that the militarization of the response was seriously problematic.
Of related note and worth mentioning, Obama is making a lot of his supporters unhappy, and is gradually turning himself into quite the hypocrite. There have been people comparing him to Bush and printing out posters of him wearing a Hitler moustache since the occupy movement. Ugh.
While I agree with some of the points here, there are more than a few factual errors.
First, there was no martial law, the Gov. issues a “Shelter in place” order. Shelter_in_place, this is similar to an evacuation order given in case of a hurricane like Katrina, except that it advises to stay indoors, rather than getting out of the area. This is a civilian emergency protocol, (the link shows several other times it has been issues in the US), and is very, very different from Martial Law.
Second, Police/FBI/Swat were not busting into homes, unless there were signs of a break in and no one answered the door. In all other cases the house was either left along(all entrances secure and no answer, or inhabitants present and answered, with a search following). I am not aware of any case where the inhabitants refused a search request, or that the police then conducted a search anyways. If such a thing happened, please provide evidence for it.
Thirdly, CISPA has been passed by the house of representatives before, about a year ago. The bill then failed in the Senate, and President Obama had stated(or his press sec. stated) that he would have veto’d the bill. In any case, the bill had been defeated before and likely will be again. Regardless, it is not now, nor has ever been, the law of the land in the USA. (and hopefully never will be.) If anything, you should be asking people to write their senators to express their hatred of this bill, and want to see it struck down again, not lamenting it being a law, since it isn’t.
Lastly, to whomever had an issue with the lateness of the Miranda warnings being issues(I don’t think it was you Haifisch), there are several reasons for this. 1) the suspect was hospitalized, and was not able to be questioned for 24-48 hours. At the time he was concious and able to respond to police, the public safety exception was invoked. 2) Public safety exceptions state that any “evidence” gained during this time is not able to be used in a court case against the subject. This is done to garner the best chance of success in finding information to prevent further death/injury. Once the 48 hour window has expired, the subject is then mirandized.
So, a Civilian governor issued an emergency protocol, during an emergency(A suspect at large who had set off several explosives, both at a large gathering and to escape police later). The FBI, other state police, and the National guard were called in to assist in the search for subject in order to do so in the safest and quickest way possible.
What heinous civil liberties were violated here? I am all for people educating themselves about abuses by the government, but I find it Ironic that you called for it, considering you don’t seem to be very well educated about what happened.
kbonn: I appreciate the breakdown there. On your first point, does the Shelter in Place order have the force of law? That is, can someone who decides, of their own prerogative, to violate the order and take a stroll down the street, be arrested, fined, etc? If not, was it made clear that the order was voluntary, not compulsory? If the answer to the first is yes, or the second is no, then I’d say that there’s a civil rights issue, regardless of how polite things were (as our author notes, it’s still JUST a civil rights issue, and not comparable to actual human rights issues, but civil rights are worth getting the details right about, too).
On your second point, again, the issue becomes, “How do the police phrase the request to enter a home?” If it’s stated as, “We are attempting to confirm that the suspect is not still in this area. It would be helpful to us if you would let us confirm he’s not in hiding here,” that’s one thing. If it’s “Let us in! We need to search this building!” and leaving it up to the homeowner to even be aware that they have a choice in the matter, then it’s another.
On the third issue–sadly, a lot of us don’t trust Obama on civil rights issues anymore, at least with regard to the limits of the security state. So yeah, his press secretary’s promise that he would veto the bill is less reassuring than it might be if the president still had the Left’s confidence on this point.
On Miranda and the public safety exception: You’re just wrong, in the second point you make. Statements made during questioning under the PSE are still considered valid evidence in a subsequent trial. From the Source of All Knowledge (bolding mine):
Re: Jamie: obvious asshat, and troll, too.
I live in Waltham, one town over and about ten minutes away from where the suspect was apprehended in Watertown.
Throughout the entire process the Shelter in Place was phrased as a request and that Deval Patrick and the BPD were ASKING and ADVISING residents to stay indoors and for businesses to close. I got an email from my workplace at 6am on Friday saying they were closing the office for the safety of employee’s in the affected towns.
I’ve yet to speak to anyone in the area who felt that this was an act of Martial Law or anyone claiming to have had SWAT force a search of their homes. The only people I’m hearing these sort fo things from are from people who do not live here. Residents of the area were more than happy to abide by the Shelter in Place request and there were people in the streets in Watertown cheering and clapping when the suspect was apprehended.
This was not Martial Law and this was not a Civil Liberties violation to the people who live here.
Kbonn
There are people whose homes were burst into who would disagree with you.
An anecdote (you know what they say about anecdotes and data, but this particular anecdote makes me wonder what the data would show if collected):
Last night I was talking to a friend who has a bunch of friends living in Watertown. Most of them are white women. One is a man of color.
She commented that her white women friends there all said “Oh yeah, the search was no problem, the SWAT team were polite, they just looked in my closets!” The man of color reported that the team that came to his house pointed guns in his face, yelled at him, and put him in restraints (cuffs, I presume, though I didn’t ask) while they searched his place.
Not everyone whose home was searched in Watertown was necessarily treated the same way. And people’s opinions on what went down may be naturally influenced by whatever their own experience of the process was.
@Nicole: I and my spouse live in the area, a couple of miles from Watertown (and I work in Waltham, actually). Most of my friends live in the area. Most people I know in the area did not find shelter-in-place to be heinous, but some thought it was an overreaction, and many had problems with the militarization and home-searching aspects. Like I said before, I have problems with those aspects too. People in the Boston area don’t all agree with each other. I don’t like this new trend where people on whatever side assert that actual metro-Bostonians think x about what happened and so everyone else should defer to that view. The actual metro-Bostonians I know range from people who were completely fine with everything the authorities did to tinfoil-hat conspiracy theorists who complained about everything, with most being somewhere in the middle.
I do live in the area, and I have yet to hear from people I know(and I know people who live blocks from where the shootout was) that they were treated poorly or that their homes were searched against their will.
IF it did happen, that is awful. But so far I haven’t heard any reports of it, and I have been looking. Everything has been 3rd or 4th hand. So either find something concrete, or stop claiming it.
@Freemage, I agree, I don’t trust Obama, or either party on civil liberties at all. I was just pointing out in this case, Obama has been on the right side, also, that Haifish’s claims were misleading or wrong. CISPA is not the law of the land, and hopefully won’t be.
Also, in terms of Public Safetey exception, you are correct, it can be admissable.
“Under this exception, to be admissible in the government’s direct case at a trial, the questioning must not be “actually compelled by police conduct which overcame his will to resist,” and must be focused and limited, involving a situation “in which police officers ask questions reasonably prompted by a concern for the public safety.” – from wikipedia.
In other words, your right to not self incriminate are trumped by safety of others. Does anyone actually have a serious problem with this? This is not an exemption to treat the suspect incorrectly, merely that the right to remain silent is suspended due to the (possible) immediate danger to others.
I see this a point of discussion rather than a blatant disregard for civil liberties. I am against torture in all cases, but I don’t see how a right to remain silent is more important than the right of others to be alive.
My son-in-law’s first cousin lives in the part of Watertown that was cordoned off and searched thoroughly. (With no results. It turned out the boat where the kid hid was just five houses away.)
The cousin had the police come to the door of her apartment. She told them she was fine, they didn’t need to search inside, and they thanked her and left. They did search the basement of the building. But they took her word that she wasn’t sheltering the fugitive.
[I’m getting tired of fixing your comment formatting, Jamie. Please learn how to use HTML tags. – C]
Re: Jamie: obvious asshat, and troll, too.
You continue to make a fool out of yourself. Name calling as you have done here and in other posts towards me is not constructive. Remove the pickle from whence it came and while you’re at it try and add something a little more intelligible than “asshat” to the convo.
Kbonn
Perhaps you conveniently missed the mention of restraints on Canadian news corporations and what they are allowed to say. Many of Canada’s news media outlets are also owned by US corporations.
Perhaps you believe everything you see in media, and believe that this is the full story. I’d suggest to you that you rethink this attitude.
Perhaps it is possible that most people were treated with a tolerable degree of dignity. No one resisted, who you’ve been speaking to anyway, so we’ll never know if that might have changed things for them. Other people weren’t so lucky.
When you’re all complying with “polite” requests by people who are armed with several weapons each, flying over your homes in helicopters, and driving through you neighbourhoods in tanks, I hardly think you’re being asked politely and I dare say I hardly think you’re complying because you’re just as “polite”.
Perhaps you missed that point too.
I think warning people that Jamie’s contributions are useless and can be skipped is a useful contribution to the conversation. Anyone disagree (besides Jamie, obviously)?
Forgot to add:
Organizers of a marathon in Vancouver, BC are looking into “terrorism insurance” because of Boston.
…seriously.
I wish people would stop acting like being emotional is bad. Emotion is basically the foundation for the human condition. Why shouldn’t I shoot you? Because you don’t want to die, because you are afraid to die, because your family would mourn you, because other people also don’t want to die would become afraid, blah blah blah blah blah. There is no objective reason that humanity needs to exist. If we all stopped wanting to live tomorrow and offed ourselves, no force in the universe would notice or care. Emotions are our premise, our foundation, our starting point. Yes, we can (and should) use logic to navigate reality, but logic alone cannot give us a reason to navigate one way or another. It’s kind of like how a compass can tell you if you’re accidentally going south instead of north, but it can’t tell you whether you should be going north or south. We have to decide what we want the achieve using logic, and even in this sentence can’t be made without referring to emotion (wanting).
Jamie Green@30:
On what basis do you think you get to make these decisions for other people who disagree? Incidentally, we disagree on the basis of many cogent arguments already made in this thread which you seem to have rather conveniently ignored.
From my perspective SallyStrange seems right on and you do seem to be an asshat. You seem a little too stupidly earnest to be a troll though. But I can understand why she’d think so because I also find it hard to understand authoritarian attitudes like your own — especially among atheists who usually tend to be pretty anti-authoritarian.
Try addressing some of the many arguments made against your position instead of waving them away. Otherwise in my opinion you’re the one making a fool of yourself.
Eristae@35:
Because thanks to our culture’s folk psychology about the interaction of emotion and intellect “you’re being irrational!” is an effective way to discredit someone — even if the person saying so is red-faced and spitting at the time.
Yes, exactly…who is it that spends a lot of time thinking about stuff they don’t actually care about at some level? I’ve never met such a person. We get up in the morning and go about our days because we care to do so, not because we lay in bed performing a cost/benefit analysis of the expense and trouble of getting breakfast vs. lying in bed and going hungry.
Indeed, emotion IS cognition. It’s just more direct and less conscious than logic-type cognition. It may or may not be rational, but emotional content is not related to whether it’s rational or not.
And of course let’s not forget that denigration of emotions is highly associated with denigration of femininity and women in our culture, since we have cultural constructs going back centuries that tell us that man=logical=good and woman=emotional=bad.
Please explain how my stating what I would be willing to sacrifice is equal to me making decisions for a group of strangers I’ve met online? Hypocrite, you are stating your opinions too, does that mean you are making decisions for me?
Funny how you take issue with someone getting emotional and resorting to ad hominem to try to discredit someone, when you just finished coming up with this brilliant ad hominem of your own:
Are you trying to offer an ironic satirical lesson in hypocrisy here? If not, I move that YOU are the doo doo head. You see how that works?
You don’t understand what an ad hominem is. An ad hominem isn’t merely insulting someone, it’s arguing against a person’s assertion based on an irrelevant fact about the person. For example, if I said that you were wrong and that you smelled really bad, this would not be an ad hominem, no matter how upset being called smelly might make you. It would only be an ad hominem if I argued that you were wrong because you were smelly. Daniellavine did not do that. Daniellavine called you a stupidly earnest asshat. Daniellavine did not declare that your argument was wrong because you were a stupidly earnest asshat.
@40
Duly noted. However he DID try to discredit me by using personal attacks, while taking issue with that very approach in his VERY NEXT BREATH. So while you’re interjecting, what do you call THAT?
I did a little more research and I found that ad hominem can simply mean directed against a person rather than against his arguments. So it was an attack ad hominem. Even saying that you are wrong AND you smell really bad, saying that you smell really bad is ad hominem. He did not address ANY arguments, only made assertions based on ad hominem. So he also would find under this definition of Ad Hominem:
attacking an opponent’s character rather than answering his argument.
Daniellavine commited two logical fallacies. Ad hominem and straw man. He did the unforgivable sin of committing an Ad hominem straw man fallacy. What a doo doo head. After all, what relevance is it to any argument I have made that I am an asshat (and I resent that remark). It is a straw man. And it is also an ad hominem.
1) Discrediting people using personal attacks is sometimes but not always wrong. For example, when Ted Haggard went out and had gay sex with a prostitute, people pointed out that he was a liar and raging hypocrite. This was done with at least a partial attempt to discredit him. What it ultimately comes down to is whether or not the characteristic in question is relevant and if it is something that should cause discrediting. The basis of this post is (I believe) that a person’s emotions should not be used as a discrediting agent
Or, in simple terms, Ted Haggard being a liar and a hypocrite is relevant to his status as a moral authority and it is a justified discrediting agent. Being upset by Nazis is not relevant as to whether or not a person can speak about the Nazis and being upset about the Nazis is not a justified discrediting agent.
2) I fail to see how Daniellavine is doing that. I read the post in question several times, and I still don’t see it. Well, unless you think that being called an asshat is inherently an attempt to discredit you, which I would have to disagree with. Instead, I see it as an expression of emotion (in this case probably scorn) towards what you have said. Expressing negative emotions is not inherently an attempt to discredit.
@43
1:) So it was or it wasn’t ad hominem according to the definition in the dictionary?
2:) It was his assertion that due to interaction of emotion and intellect, calling someone irrational (by definitaion an ad hominem) is an effective way to discredit someone.
Now, calling someone an asshat is akin to saying that they are irrational. There are some possibilities here: one he was trying to discredit someone (me) attacking their character (ad hominem). Or two, he was not trying to discredit my character, but only attacking my character in order to avoid attacking an argument (still an ad hominem but also a straw man). Or both. I really don’t see another option.
Either it was an irrelevant opinion about my character (ad hominem straw man) or it was a relevant opinion about my character (ad hominem).
Either way, he seemed to show some kind of disdain for this tactic in the very next post he made (hypocrisy and also sweet sweet irony).
Nobody’s avoiding your arguments, dude. Your arguments suck, and we’re speculating about why they suck so hard. Best theory so far: you’re an asshat who’s a bit too earnest to be a troll. Speculating about why you are so wrong is more interesting than explaining one more time why you are wrong, only to be ignored, at this point.
It wasn’t an ad hominem according to the definition of the term. If you’re going to argue that you’ve decided that ad hominem means something else and that therefore you should get to insist this was an ad hominem but not a logical fallacy, I am likely to break my desk as I smack it with my head.
It can be effective.
No, it isn’t.
Once again, attacking your character isn’t automatically an ad hominem for the reason I explained. I will repeat it, although I don’t think it will do any good. Ad hominem is a fallacious use of logic wherein a person a person attempts to disprove an argument by way of an insult. It is not the mere act of insulting someone alone.
It goes like this:
Person A makes claim X.
Person B makes an attack on person A.
Therefore A’s claim is false.
It does does not go like this:
Person A makes claim X.
Person B makes claim not X for some logical or factual reason
Therefore A’s claim is false.
And then Person B insults Person A.
I am so profoundly tired of people tossing around the names of logical fallacies without having any idea as to how they work or why they are logical fallacies. A logical fallacy is an incorrect application of logic. It is when the argument’s form is not in line with the rules of logic. Calling you names by itself has nothing to do with the form of the rules of logic. I swear, there should be some kind of rule that you need a license to start using the names of fallacies, and this license would only be issued to people who could explain why the fallacy is a fallacy.
And I’m going with the option of Daniellavine was insulting you. If you disagree, then point me at where Daniellavine said that your arguments were false because you are an asshat. It does not count if Daniellavine said that your argument was false for some reason and then insulted you. Even if the two happen in proximity to each other, that doesn’t necessarily mean an ad homenim. Show me where Daniellavine argues that your argument is wrong because of some trait of yours. Otherwise, it is important to remember there is no fallacy of “and they said mean things to me.” You can debate the morality of saying mean things to you, but it’s not a fallacy.
Nowhere do I see Daniellavine expressing disdain for all forms of insulting at all times in all circumstances. Daniellavine has repeatedly dealt with your arguments and has now insulted you independently of dealing with your arguments. Nowhere do I see Daniellavine claiming that your arguments were false because you were an asshat. Instead, I see Daniellavine claiming that you are an asshat for repeatedly presenting false arguments. These two situations are not interchangeable. The first one is ad hominem logical fallacy, the second is not.
As a side note, insisting that someone is a hypocrite and therefore their argument is is false is actually an ad hominem. For real. I can’t decide for sure if that’s is going on, but it’s a specific kind of ad hominem.
So I’m waffling as to whether you are engaging in an ad hominem against Daniellavine by declaring Daniellavine’s arguments false because (according to you) Daniellavine’s actions are hypocritical, or if you’re just insulting Daniellavine. I am currently of the opinion that you are doing the second, but I am of that opinion for the same reason I believe it wasn’t an ad hominem for Daniellavine to call you an asshat. If simply insulting someone is an ad hominem (and it is not), then both of you would be engaging in it. Which is always an odd thing to witness.
If I address a person’s arguments, tell them why they are utter shite, and complete my thought with a back-handed assessment of their character, this is not an ad hominem.
If, however, a person makes an argument and I just call them an asshole and refuse to engage them except with insults, that is an ad hominem.
And if a person is insulted by someone who addressed the shittiness of their arguments, and proceeds to call that an ad hominem, that’s called fucking whining. Grow a fucking spinal column and act like the vertebrate you evolved to be.
Trivial, but how so? If you think you can think rationally while simultaneously having your head up your ass, you may be an asshat yourself.
You are right, smarty pants. I now have a better understanding and I have been mixing up an ad hominem attack and an ad hominem logical fallacy. He couldn’t have committed a logical fallacy, because he was not using logic. Only repeating ad hominem attacks based on emotion that had previously been blurted out by someone else. What a poo brain.
I tend to have that effect on people.
@16’s ass – Hahahaha! The old “I used to read this blog but now I won’t!” gambit. Delicious!
JG- Significantly less delicious! I wish colon-P looked more like Mr. Yuk.
I didn’t find your Mark Emery anecdote very thought provoking, sorry. The only other guy who tried to argue my point started off like this “(Sigh)
I can’t believe I have to explain to you why this is a problem.
You are aware that law enforcement people are human, yes?
(please say yes, please).”
So I DIDN’T and still havn’t read it, because that is too damn patronizing to catch my interest.
The other person who argued my point, I did acknowledge and that was Smrnda, and I replied to that person. Then there was the two feminists who are constantly pushing their agenda, and only spouted insults. Then there is my dear daniellavine who is playing hero and sucking up to the radical feminists, just repeating their insults.
Is daniellavine the one who “addressed the shittiness of my arguments” by using ad hominem attacks or was it the feminists who “addressed the shitiness of my arguments” by using ad hominem attacks?
So all in all, i’d have to say your own argument here is pretty shitty. It has been addressed. And you have just been fed a platter of your own shit. So eat up.
Another chickenshit, with nothing interesting to say but, insults. Very thought provoking, though, none the less! Thanks for contributing!
I didn’t understand a word you just said, boy!
[Welcome to the moderation list, Jamie. Unless your posts start being even remotely related to the topic at hand (instead of being about you or how mean people are being to you), they won’t see the light of day. – C]
I wish I understood why Jamie’s comments about “philosophy dudebros” attract philosophy dudebros, like the idiot above who mistook himself for Socrates while not knowing what an ad hominem is, or having a basic grasp of spelling. As a fan of philosophy, I cringe in horror when I read these threads.
Perhaps what’s going on is that Jamie’s generally right, so the only remaining room to maneuver is to argue about what “is” is?
You continue to make a fool out of yourself.
That’s some really impressive “situational awareness” you’ve got there.
Are you really . . .
. . . yes, I suppose you are.
“Irrational” is a term with a long history of being used to dismiss entire groups of people, with perhaps the most prominent group being women. “Women are emotional, men are rational/women aren’t rational like men are” is a common trope that persists event today in the general public and often pops up when women do things like run for political office or merely exist within time with female body functions (the common dismissal of women not being logical because they are “PMSing” or being “on the rag”), and there are sizable religious movements that openly use the supposed irrationality of women to argue that men should rule over women and that women should submit to men. If you really want, I will go out and find examples for you.
“Asshat” has no historical or current use that is equivalent. No one is going to hold that you are inherently an asshat due to some physical characteristic and then use that label to systematically oppress you. You don’t have to worry that your supposed asshatness is going to be used against the entire group that you belong to that is regularly dismissed as being an asshat. You don’t have to worry that the status of your group as equal human beings is going to be threatened by an accusation that you are all innately asshats.
They are not the same thing. They are not even in the same league or category.
“Ad hominem attack” as something other than an “ad hominem logical fallacy” isn’t a thing. If you want to assert that someone is insulting you rather than dealing with your arguments, then say that they are insulting you rather than dealing with your arguments. Don’t just stuff the title of an ad hominem on it. I know that people are inclined to do it because they feel that it grants them a certain authority and perception of being both intelligent and learned, but wanting to bolster your argument by seemingly being philosophical is not sufficient justification for co-opting and misusing a term.
“Asshat” to me means a combination of dumb and callous. Being stupid is not the same as being irrational.
Saith <a href="http://freethoughtblogs.com/crommunist/2013/04/24/philosophy-dudebros-boston-nazis/#comment-157717"Eristae:
Bazinga!
(Well done, by the way.)
I totally composed a three paragraph response that ended with a Misfits reference, and while looking for a good version of the song on Youtube without triggering disgusting comments all over the top, I realized I have nothing useful to add to this topic and just wasted a lot of time on nothing.
I ain’t no philo bro of a dude, ya better think about it baby!
@Jamie
Many people have very legitimate reasons to be anonymous online and everyone should have a right to online privacy. It’s already been state here, but consider those who are in the closet homosexuals, atheists, or people who have unpopular political opinions. This just scratches the surface of the types of people who will be denied an outlet of communication in a state of constant monitoring. Also, if you’ve ever read Ed Brayton’s blog, you would know that police abuse their power all the fucking time. A constant surveillance state creates a much larger potential for abuse from those in power. Also, many people simply do not want their computer activity being monitored by large copororations and governments whom they cannot trust.
Most people aren’t crooks though. If you are suggesting that we violate the privacy of the majority of Americans just so we can catch a few crooks, then your statement about valuing privacy is full of shit. Privacy rights apply to everyone, not just innocent people.
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” – Benjamin Franklin
It’s not up to you to decide what rights people should sacrifice so you feel a little safer.
ah, yes. “only the guilty have to fear the police”, the slogan of every police state ever.
what privileged bullshit.
Reading this thread has been interesting to say the least. Jaime, the reason I sounded condescending is that your argument is, frankly, first-year junk I wouldn’t accept from an undergraduate, certainly not as you have framed it. It’s old and tired and has been refuted a zillion times — most famously by the very people who drafted the Bill of Rights. They did not want to make life easy for criminals.
Let’s turn this around, Jaime. What specific proposals do you have to curb abuses of power by law enforcement if we are under surveillance all the time? How would you go abut it? Remember, when the cop finds out you reported him he might — using all that information he has to hand — decide to tell everyone your porn surfing habits, or show up at your house an just blow your brains out. How would you stop that guy, or prevent him from getting to that point? How would you offer recourse to people who suffer from an abusive police force? Are you unaware of why the Knapp Commission, to name one, was convened?
If you come up with stuff that’s at that level, be prepared for people to be a bit frustrated with you.
I am so glad that boston marathon bombing thing was solved finally. It was so scary going to my doctor’s appointment with two national guard on every corner and in the subways, all armed with AR-15’s, *shudders*.
I thought that was overkill, then within a couple of days (or was it next day?) they shut down the entire friggin subway system and whole parts of Boston, until they looked like a ghost town. All for one guy bleeding in a boat on the edge of a river. Scary times 8~|
Shutting down the MBTA seems to be a fairly common occurrence in Boston. I’ve lived there for two years, and the manhunt was the fourth citywide shutdown here I’ve seen. The other three were for weather events (Hurricane Irene, Hurricane Sandy, and Winter Storm Nemo). If I recall correctly, we actually were *ordered* off the roads for Nemo; if you were caught driving and weren’t law enforcement or healthcare personnel, you were facing a stiff fine or up to a year in prison. The shelter-in-place was presented as a voluntary safety measure and a way that we could help the police. (I actually think this was a pretty brilliant bit of propaganda.) But overall, every time I hear someone express surprise or suspicion at how fast the city was shut down, I’m basically like, Why? We do it all the time.
I keep hearing conflicting reports about whether or not Franklin Street was supposed to be within the original search perimeter or not. If it was, goddamn fess up and figure out who cut corners and goddamn fire them. If it wasn’t, somebody needs to take a second look at their procedure for estimating proper search perimeters.
I do not have a problem with having thrown a lot of firepower after this one dude per se, since, to me, what was really scary about the marathon bombings was the realization that this is what terror looks like after you’ve dedicated a lot of time and resources to coming up with and implementing most of the sensible precautions and contingency plans. The death toll was kept at 3, which is 3 too many but is also low for something that gets to be international news, and particularly when you compare it to the number of injured and the number of lost limbs, you really to see what a difference it made that there were so many medical personnel on-site already; that even though the medical tents were intended just to treat dehydration and running injuries, they were equipped to be turned into trauma centers very quickly; that Boston generally has excellent hospitals. Security at the marathon is heavy enough that these guys were limited to what they could carry on their bodies without looking suspicious–maybe they would have liked to plant additional bombs before the marathon, since they seem to have made a bunch more, but that’s hard to do, since the whole area is swept and constantly under surveillance during setup. They probably could have killed more people with AK-47s but good luck sneaking an AK-47 onto the T. (Or taking your car into downtown Boston on Marathon Monday.) When you generally run stuff well and mitigate damage and do a lot of prevention and eventually somebody blows shit up anyway, I fully support having a contingency plan that involves coming down on them like a ton of bricks. But this definitely raises a lot of “who watches the watchmen” sort of questions and also a lot of issues about how to do the thing properly. The BPD has apparently done a lot of disaster preparedness training: good. The BPD has a serious problem with being enormously bigoted assbags: very not good. Law enforcement needs to not be able to fuck with people just cuz they feel like it, but law enforcement does need to exist and it does need to have enough power to enforce the law (law needs to exist. And it needs to be good law. “Don’t blow up civilians at public events” is a good law). Figuring out exactly how to do this can actually be sort of complicated and reasonable people can disagree on the specifics.
In addition to being wildly and fantastically insensitive and generally sucking at life, people who compare pretty much anything that isn’t the Holocaust to the Holocaust are also usually NOT interested in any kind of discussion or debate, or of finding a workable solution, no matter how much they protest that they are. They are interested in being declared Right as soon as possible. You can tell because they take complicated issues and try to make them look more black-and-white than they are by comparing them to the Holocaust.
I live in the southern area of North Shore so I wouldn’t be aware if they shut the entire city down like that before because I also don’t want TV and live a super isolated life. It was just the first time I had experienced it because I hardly ever get out and the bombings occurred the day before they shut the city down and I just so happened to be going to a doctor’s appointment in the city. Tbh, had I not had that doctor’s appointment, even the whole bombing itself I might not have actually even heard about the bombing until weeks after it happened.
I’ve lived in Everett for like five years almost now, but I rarely go into Boston itself so I wouldn’t be the most knowledgeable on these things. Tbh someone who lived in Boston for 8 months would know way more about Boston than I do.
As far as comparing the deployment of the cops and national guard to the holocaust, that’s pretty disgusting and disgraceful, I definitely agree. I still think their SOP was overkill given what their objective was (to catch one guy) but, tbh, I don’t think most people really cared and were in fact glad they deployed. It can just, you know, be kind of scary seeing dudes on every corner armed with AR-15’s kitted out in full battlegear. It’s not indicative they are catching one guy…I had for a while there thought maybe the terrorist deployed NBC weaponry or something…I dunno. Maybe their SOP was good in the last analysis, it just seemed like overkill
I just also have to say that I think this analysis is really good, and the rest of your analysis is actually pretty impressive even though we disagree on the extent of the particulars. I totally agree with the idea of fully supporting having a contingency plan that involves coming down on them like a ton of bricks. It’s the only thing thing that stops them in the end: the Op4 is stopped by thoroughness in preparation coupled with fine tuned and meticulously careful raw brute force in action.
Oh hey btw cynicalromantic, I didn’t realize it was you for some reason, lol.
Long time no see.
To thecynicalromantic
I still remember the library and Kippo’s, thanks for listening. It actually helped a lot. My life hasn’t really changed much, but I like to dissociate (well you know that). It’s spring now, it was mid-october when we met iirc. I’m still looking for housing, but when these two social workers showed up, things got way way better, so I’m still doing the whole scared to go outside my room deal, but it’s not nearly as bad. I still can’t figure out why I didn’t recognize your name in the post, maybe I’m not used to the format. :+) I’m not sure how long I’ll be here, but it’s nice to see you again in a way. I wanted to get to know you better at one point I remember, but I don’t push the issue and I tend to enjoy having people internally dehumanize me more quickly anyway, it just seems more honest or something rather them dragging it out and then just dehumanizing me anyway. It is interesting to see you here, for some reason I could have sworn you were a different poster posting in reply. Oh well, nice to see you ^.^ I go on and on and repeat myself over and over again like a broken record, anyway /waves
Mhmmm, the cops (BPD) are enormously bigoted assholes. They do need to not be able to mess with people just cuz they feel like it. I avoid cops’ line of sight strenuously, eye to eye contact (well that’s easy for me heh) I avoid as well. Cops are my best friend when I’m they’re interacting with me, and the worst amoral people who I strenuously avoid when I’m not interacting with them.
The city is way too overwhelming, I never would have moved here had I the choice. Also I said “but I dissociate”, I guess I meant to say is that I don’t push my situation hard because there’s really nowhere to go, so I dissociate. I mean, I’m still looking for housing, for sure, it’s just I blank out whatever I can in my life and try to forget I forgot even. It’s not.,..it’s really bad, but then if I dissociate well enough, my life goes from “Gee I am thinking about this and it’s really bad, but now, I’m not thinking about it, so it’s just some sort of vague living hell where I am roasting forever in a life not worth living, but I can’t imagine why”. I have to blank it out, the city, miserable existence, asshole LEO everywhere that hate transpeople and others.
It can’t exist to think about for long, because to grasp reality is to let it influence me than it already does. I know it exists, better to not know and forget I forgot. If I do anything about it, I’ll wind up a terrorist too, and I at least like the idea that my life could get better, even as remote as it is, so I won’t encourage it to get worse with chances of making it better even way more far removed.
Life played a game of chess and I am a rook down but I’m not checkmated yet. A setup, a bad hand, but I remember what my grandfather said when he taught me how to play chess (which I’ve been doing more of lately): “It’s not over until it’s over”.
I have struggled with dissociation of many kinds for my whole life — and even what you’ve said about knowing cops personally… Fuck, the last one in my life was sexually harassing his coworkers, abusing police records to stalk multiple women and myself, and fucking anything he could get his hands on that had two legs and a vulva. All behind his estranged wife’s back, between trips to the park with his kids.
That’s about where I’m going to leave that, except to say it that it all went public in a national spotlight when someone accused him of rubbing shoulders with a serial killer, and in the very pit of my stomach I genuinely did not know whether or not it could be true.
I pretty much fucking hate cops. All of them. Especially the ones I don’t know personally who have beaten the shit out of my friends for protesting tuition hikes and/or who have never been held accountable for jerking off on the job while dozens of women were disappearing on a pig farm.
(((hugs)))
That makes sense. As a woman, as a TS woman especially, I avoid cops at all costs almost. I can’t risk interactions with them. Maybe I get lucky and don’t get a sociopath and also don’t get a bigot, but the chances are against it, and if somehow I managed to avoid interacting with a bigot, the alternative isn’t appealing…I think avoid, hide, disappear, instant stockholm syndrome, are words and phrases that come to mind when I think of cops and interacting with them.
Cops in my view are enforcers of the status quo and little else, which makes them extremely dangerous to me and those like me. I always feel very unsafe speaking to one or even just catching the gaze of one. When I think of your experiences, reading them, and those of others, I feel sad but thankful I can learn my intuitions and assessments of cops are correct. I grew up with them watching me everywhere I went, I was always on their radar, simply due to what they perceived me to be. I feel like that hasn’t changed much, only now they stare in a different way. I’ve been searched before probably 5 or 6 times in my life by cops, just due to the color of my skin. I’m one of the lucky ones. You and your friends have not been so fortunate. You have my condolences.
I don’t know any cops personally, I’ve never been friends with one. I don’t imagine it would be easy given the power structure they reenforce, but one thing I’ve learned about myself is that I can be friends and love anyone; given enough time I will find the good in them and encourage it, and value it.
Regarding dissociation, music helps me simultaneously process emotions and trauma and dissociate.
This song helped me get through the night and process emotions in my replies to you and cynicalromantic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXMMAgjzuxg
Classical music has always been one of the traditional ways of dissociation and processing emotions for me I listen to the song, process my emotions, and allow myself to resolve them in moral value for self and others, usually compassion and understanding, oftentimes resignation as well.
What can be changed will be, in my life this is very little. This means I dissociate a lot, and since life is a living nightmare I respond by walling off whole segments of it as I can, to cope. There are alternatives, but it’s not what I learned from a very young age. I learned if I dissociate well then I’m not really being abused, or oppressed, someone else is, maybe a facet of me, maybe another person, maybe just a sister of sorts, but not me. And that person has an unfortunate existence, but I can’t change her, I can only change me and if I can’t change her it’s because we are both oppressed, but I think I care about her as much as I can, when I am present.
Cops in my view are enforcers of the status quo and little else
Being a cop is one of the few inherently immoral professions* – to be a cop you agree to enforce a body of laws against people, unquestioning, and with no exception. Who actually agrees with an entire body of laws? So the cop is agreeing to enforce laws that they do not agree with. That’s the simplest form of it, but of course cops, being human, will tend to selectively turn a blind eye to some situations and not to others. The worst form of it is when they don’t enforce the laws they’ve agreed to upon themselves. I’ll start changing my belief about cops when I see cops ticket themselves for speeding or arresting themselves for DUI. After all, “sworn to uphold the law” doesn’t give much room for interpretation, yet interpret they do.
(* being in marketing is another, since – as Richard Feynman once pointed out – marketing consists of selling something as being better and more desirable than you know it to be)
I wrote:
enforce a body of laws against people
That “against” was chosen carefully. Because if the body of laws the cops were enforcing were completely agreeable to all the people, there would be no need for cops. So, it follows that there are people who do not agree with the body of law that the cops are enforcing; i.e: it’s an inherently adversarial relationship. The cops have sworn to uphold and inflict an arbitrary body of law.
If you find yourself feeling a bit skeevy about cops, it’s for the simple reason that they are most likely your enemies.
Oops. I was just being a philosophical dudebro, wasn’t I?
I’m gonna STFU now.
@sleepingwytch
Oh my, it was back in October? and it’s… May already? o.O I’m sorry I’ve been so remiss. I lost my job and had a pretty big depressive break over this fall/winter, so I simply couldn’t handle going back to the A+ forums; the constant onslaught of assholes and trolls was making me too irritable and upset. (I pulled back on a lot of reading & posting pretty much everywhere, and spend most of the winter rereading children’s books. Couldn’t really handle being around people in real life, either, although that didn’t make me feel any less sad and whiny about being alone… depression’s fun like that).
Spring + being employed again has me feeling a bit better, though, so if you want to get dinner sometime, PM me at the A+ forums; I’ll start checking my messages there again.
@Marcus Ranum —
While I understand that police officers end up enforcing stuff selectively and abuse power, I also am more charitable than you, I think. That’s because at one level or other being a cop is a pretty thankless job. And there’s actually a sort of labor relations issue, in that the management (governments at the local level) often end up incentivizing the job in all the wrong ways to attract all the wrong kinds of people.
But a shorter version: someone has to enforce laws. Even if you individually don’t agree with them all the time in every situation. Do police often fail in enforcing laws meant to protect some groups? Yes. But what’s the alternative? Private security forces? I mean, I have met a few of the people who work in law enforcement. Some are jerks and power-hungry idiots, and some are genuinely interested in serving their local community, in some way. That’s where the labor relations issue comes up – often the incentives work against the latter folks.
Just like I can’t work up much hate for people in the military. I hate the fact that our government sends people off to go to war, unnecessarily. I can’t get too mad at a guy I know who was in the military and has become a bit of a right wing authoritarian, because he was doing his job and he wasn’t the one who thought invading Iraq was a good idea. Nor was he ever in a position to give all that many orders to thousands, you know?
(It’s also worth noting that the old-time socialists envisioned a worker-peasant-soldier governing class. There was a reason for that).
Nor can I get too self-righteous about the way people live or the jobs they choose, because none of us chose to be born and raised where we were and I, for one, have a life to lead and rent to pay, you know? I can’t assume that I would ever, ever make a better decision if my circumstances were different.
(My rule: if something makes me feel good about myself I am probably telling myself lies. 🙂 )
My persistent experience with cops, with the sole exception of when a man had spat all over my face and strangled me this past December, is that while their job is to uphold a body of laws (including those they don’t agree with), they interpret their job as the duty to pick and choose which violations of those laws will successfully reach the point of a court hearing or trial, thus which violations they should exercise their authority over.
In other words, they actively look for reasons to not do their jobs. This is why so many women report being slut-shamed or victim-blamed after domestic or sexual violence. It’s also why cops have repeatedly done precisely the same to me, even when someone has threatened to smash my fucking head in simply for existing while trans, or threatened to kill me simply for saying something as accurate and non-offensive as “eggs have a lot of cholesterol in them”.
Of cops, I am not even a slight fan. And yet, I don’t go around breaking laws. I experience regular intervals of violations to my rights, and I am literally at the point that I fucking hate cops.
I would love to message you, the problem for me is that I don’t have access to my A plus account, plus, even if I did, I swore I wouldn’t be returning to the forum (long story, I won’t discuss it here).
I wonder if there is another way to contact you? Should I place an old but easily disposable email of mine here?
I would love to have dinner with you, I feel so happy just thinking about it. <3
=)
“Of cops, I am not even a slight fan. And yet, I don’t go around breaking laws. I experience regular intervals of violations to my rights, and I am literally at the point that I fucking hate cops.”
I usually just wind up with stockholm syndrome with people that abuse me. My pervasive developemental delay (emotions) at eight years old due to Autism means it’s basically very difficult for me to hate anyone. I don’t hate the people who inflicted the viscious trauma I’ve received in life like others do. It’s very hard to hold onto hate, and my mother once told me that “the thing I like about you the most, is, that you never hold a grudge…” my mother sexually abused me…..
…..
I don’t hate her. And my dad beat me viciously for being trans, before I ever left diapers. I don’t hate him either. I’m too simple to hate like other people, but maybe I can hate sometimes, I just feel so simple. I’ve gone through obscene amounts of trauma myself (not involving cops though) in my life, well beyond what most people can even fathom, and I have a stockholm syndrome that is so refined now, it’s kind of ridiculous in a way.
But what I learned about stockholme syndrome is that I accept it, and I own it, and I like it and I want it. I do want to love and see the humanity in people who abused me or keep doing so, because it’s only in seeing their humanity, and giving my love to them in whatever way that I can, that they will see their inhumanity towards me.
((((hugs)))) I knew you were trans before you said so (GQ I think I heard). It’s so cruel isn’t it? One of my roommates indirectly threatened to kill me, people online have threatened to kill me, my landlady threatened to evict me, one of my roommates was in planning stages to kill me with his sister’s boyfriend until a DV incident with his girlfriend had the cops showing up, and then the social workers showed up from fair housing center for me and magically my roomates’ attitudes and those of my landlady got way way better, almost a 180. I have no idea how that happened, but someone must have told them they would all wind up in jail if I was found to be dead.
I just, hatred is such a burden for me, and I understand why others have it, and you should, it’s correct. I have it in my own way, I guess it’s just more primitive with me and I tend to stockholm syndrome a lot more.
I think in my worldview there are only suffering human beings, an endless sea of tragedy, pain, and trauma. It’s not the most positive worldview.
Also @cynicalromantic
“Couldn’t really handle being around people in real life, either, although that didn’t make me feel any less sad and whiny about being alone… depression’s fun like that). ”
(((hugs))) =( My life is a living nightmare, but then you already know that. My response to life is to convert my trauma to comedy, lots of which sounds insane often enough.
((hugs)) again, I guess I really feel sad now for you. I await your presence, like a light in my life, piercing the darkness and trauma. I was diagnosed with Major Depression when I was 16, so I very much know how that goes. I…anxiety attacks, suffocating severe ones, are coming back in my life more frequently. It’s getting really bad. I think you can see I typed a message to you before this one, in reply to your message to me, but to reiterate, we need to find a communication medium other than the A+ forums as I lost access to my account there and, in any event, swore not to use that forum anymore for reasons I won’t go into here.
We need to establish a means of communication. May I give you an old email address of mine or do you think we should pursue another way?
@thecynicalromantic
I just created a livejournal account with the same precise, exact name as this one (sleepingwytch) and messaged you with other contact information.
((hugs)) again for you. The darkness in my life has become far more suffocating recently. I usually reach out to other people, before I go from being very suicidal to massively suicidal. It’s…just how I am.
The isolation is really extreme, I lost my immediate and extended family too, but you know this. I am associating too many things now in my head and need to dissociate again because I am starting to feel overwhelmed.
I will lay down soon.
The only ‘cop’ I ever admired (detective really): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buE_jLEZrf4
I think I read parts of the unabridged versions of most sherlock holmes books, but they were so dry (yuck). I read ALL of the Trixie Belden and Nancy Drew books (and a few hardy boys books). Reading the Sherlock Holmes stuff was pure masochism =)
Sherlock Holmes really isn’t a cop though I should say, I mean he would be considered a detective type of cop nowadays, but back then his role wasn’t what we think of as ‘cop’, and a good deal more than what we call detective nowadays. He was sort of like this oldschool spook that was a combination of NSA, FBI, Statie, Detective, Municipal Cop, Forensics, and Genius, all rolled into one. I loved the Trixie Belden and Nancy Drew novels more than anything else, although they didn’t have the enigma Holmes had. Trixie Belden as a book series I liked the most, and I read all of those along with Nancy Drew. I guess I just loved detective novels as a child. I must have read 50 all in all (Trixie Belden + Nancy Drew + non abridged complete version of sherlock holmes novels and parts of the unabridged versions, plus a few hardy boys novels). I always liked Nancy Drew’s sort of persona, if you will. Of course, I’ve read a few thousand books in my lifetime so far…
Where was I? Oh yes, Nancy Drew. Holmes was quaint but Nancy Drew was a real heroine for me I always thought, and a role model. I also loved Carmen San Diego, and I watched a lot of that until my parents cut off the TV when I was 13 years old. I always thought Carmen San Diego was like the coolest villain ever, seriously.
But back to reality: in the real world cops and detectives are mostly just corrupt assholes working for rich assholes ultimately. It’s intriguing to think of a thoroughly atheist society and how they would function in a thoroughly atheist Monarchy..
@ HaifischGeweint
Also, regarding abuse, I got kicked, punched, bullied, spat on, and verbally harassed all throughout elementary, especially by two bullies on the bus, all for being trans. By the time I was in the fifth grade I had been called a faggot hundreds of times, and this was postceeded by the aforementioned physical abuse, so it was definitely faggot as in ‘you dirty gay boy. Nevermind I wasn’t attracted to boys….They never listened to me. I even spoke of my crushes of other little girls, and they would just make it worse. I definitely know what that kind of abuse is like, and in fact my dad beat me hundreds of times, viciously, ruthlessly, because it was super obvious I was trans: the way I carried myself was ridiculously effiminate and I kept insisting I was a little girl and could I play with other little girls. My father beat me hundreds of times that way before I ever left training diapers. By the time I was five years old I had days where I was constantly suicidal and had this recurring dream of jumping off the Mississippi bridge 20 times.
Oh where was I? Yes, you are trans. I think I heard you are GQ, but I am not sure. Which pronouns do you prefer, and if there is more than one set, just feel free to ask for different pronouns on a whim and I will do so.
I am Sally at present, it’s nice to meet you.
To avoid further confusion, I usually use the name Alice, as that is my legal name, but I am really Molly, Sally, Alice, Lisa, Violette, and Sarah. They are not branches to Alice, but exist parallel, sisters I suppose you could say. We share the same body though. They’ve existed since I was a small child but I felt scared to reveal them until now. I’ve learned that human beings not caring is actually double edged: if people don’t care enough, then if you tell them you are actually more than one person sharing the same body, they usually just roll their eyes because they don’t care anyway, and those that do care, maybe they understand more I guess.
@HaifischGeweint — I get that your experience has been negative, in a way that I probably won’t ever have to deal with. I’m submitting that the problem is not the individual policemen as much as it is the labor relations issue I brought up. (Labor relations is something I am more familiar with). The constraint you describe — picking which violations to exercise authority over — I mean, I could just as well argue that schoolteachers actively look for ways not to do their jobs and they are all just a bunch of corrupt union moochers, because they don’t try to get in everything in the book, you know? Plainly that’s not true, the problem is that they have a ton of other things to juggle and deal with.
How are police evaluated at their job? Number of arrests? How much control do they have over their workplace? That is going to create a certain set of incentives, just like evaluating teachers via standardized tests will. I think that kind of stuff has a pretty large effect on not only the way they do their work but who decides to join law enforcement.
(Just like there’s a self-selection among teachers, too — almost by definition the smart dude in college who wants to make money will go work for a hedge fund or something, rather than teach. If teachers were paid $500,000 a years to start the kind of person doing it would be very different).
Or to put it another way: during WW II the police forces in some countries were active collaborators with the occupying Germans. It was no accident that those places coincided with areas where fascist parties had made inroads to those authority figures. Where that didn’t happen, the cops see someone handing out leaflets and say “I say, there’s a jaywalker over there…” And resistance cells could operate more freely. (Sadly, fascist parties were successful in far too many places).
@Sleepingwytch — See: USSR for exhibit A in operating in a society that was at least officially atheist, China for exhibit B. The behavior of law enforcement wasn’t all that different in many respects.
And I bring all this up not because I want to “deny your experience” (I really hate that phrase, but there it is) but because I ( trying to) approach this in a way that doesn’t just leave me saying “well, fuck it we are all doomed.”
@Jesse, it’s ok I don’t think you are trying to deny my experience, if anything I am engaging in wishful thinking, sadly: Mao’s china was very, very socially conservative in certain ways:
http://revcom.us/a/140/Mao_true-story-en.html
” In 1917, Mao founded the “New People’s Study Society.” This group of young activists opposed opium smoking, gambling, drinking, prostitution and corruption and opposed the oppression of women. Mao argued that women should be “independent persons”—that men could not be free unless women were also liberated. The group started evening classes for workers where Mao taught history, discussed “current affairs,” and read newspapers to the workers. A poster announcing his classes read: “Come and listen to some plain speech¼ you can wear any clothes you want.””
Stalinism was very much anti-LGBT, as is belorussian society nowadays. I just think it’s hard for my mind to cope with the fact that Castro’s regime ordered tens of thousands of LGBTIQA people, just like me, or Haifisch, to be murdered. Castro’s regime since apologized in last 10 years or something, sure, but that’s still tens of thousands of people killed by an atheist regime. If atheist regime do that to people, that is really really scary. Stalinism was very anti-LGBT, so was Maoism. yes Stalinism, Maoism, Cuban Che Guevara Stalinism, etc, was for women’s rights, yes, very much so. But for straight women’s rights in the context of the nuclear family….not LGBTIQA rights, not transwomen’s rights…etc.
It’s just hard to imagine that every society hates me, it’s difficult, somedays I get almost delusional about it, I’m sorry. =(
It’s so hard to cope with how evil people are, it’s just so difficult sometimes. I am doubled Red and Monarchist, so that doesn’t help either..
sleepingwytch I think you are grossly overestimating both my investment in learning about your personal history and my capacity to learn about the most horrendous experiences of complete strangers without feeling the need to protect myself from being re-traumatized in the process.
You’re reminding me of several people who have done the same, all for malicious purposes. Please stop.
Jesse you seem to believe that a police officer’s job is to enforce the law. I’m telling you that it most certainly is not that simple. You can take my word for it as someone who has had frequent interactions with police no matter what they happened to be doing (whether that is living as a shut-in or actively protesting something in public). Or you can choose to ignore my experience.
But further debate about the validity of your ideas about it is not an available option.
Ok, so like, I got triggered. YOU SHARED your personal experiences. That triggers trauma in other people, just as me then sharing mine triggers trauma in you.
This isn’t a one way street.
I wasn’t malicious before, but I most certainly am from here on out, banned from this website or not.
You can go fuck yourself asshole, you’re not the only victim in life who gets triggered.
And by fuck yourself I mean that, and I mean I am most certainly intending malicious things to you from now on.
You won’t dehumanize me asshole.
Ban me, I dare you, I will enjoy stacking up more hate chips against assholes in this movement giving how badly marginalized I’ve been within it.
Fuck you.
FUCK YOU.
Privileged dogshit Halffish.
Point clearly illustrated. Instinct affirmed. Go fuck yourself.
You know what else? Next time you care to either fabricate or embellish upon an honest narrative about yourself while you wax poetic about a dissociative disorder, try NOT attempting to publish an autobiography in the comments section of an article written by someone who struggles with the very disorder you’re attempting to make up as you go along.
I’d also suggest NOT trying to claim “triggered” status AFTER the magnificent volume of sensitive, highly personal, and likely false information you have disclosed, allegedly about yourself, but most certainly without being prompted to do so. I may have a (known and well-established) mental health problem (that many people have been direct witnesses to for literally years) and a horrendous past (which you’ll notice that except for relevant events in the past year, I did NOT get into here), but that doesn’t mean I’m fucking stupid enough to fall for this shit.
@HalfischGewent — That’s why I brought up the labor relations issue — it IS way more complicated than just enforcing the law. “Police officers have a job to enforce laws” and “Police forces become agents for maintaining the status quo” and “Incentive structures have an effect on who joins” aren’t mutually exclusive.
So let me put it another way then. What would you propose as a way of dealing with the twin needs of law enforcement — which has to happen at some level or other — and not having cops just be enforcers for the status quo? I am really asking here. What should a police-like enforcement agency look like? Be structured as?
It’s not ignoring your experience, it’s asking what do we do in light of that. I would ask the same thing if someone said “I hate Americans because they killed my family in Iraq”. It isn’t denying their experience to say, “how can we stop this from happening again?” How do we make sure that what you went through doesn’t happen anymore? In that case it’s trying, for instance, to elect people who don’t think bombing brown folks is the go-to solution. (That’s obviously a tiny part of it). And asking why it is we have a system that ends with people getting bombed, how that system can make such acts more likely (or less).
It also isn’t denying your experience or ignoring it to say that there are some poor, brown folks, even in my own city, who have asked for more cops in their neighborhoods, for all kinds of reasons, but none of them was so that the cops could be status quo enforcers. Again, this isn’t mutually exclusive from yours. But it highlights the complexity you brought up.
So what do we DO? That’s what I want to know. I mean, I agree with you a big chunk of the time. You have the experience that would inform this. That’s why I ask. What’s your vision? Or more prosaically, what would you demand of a local city council to go some way to fixing this? Is there some concrete measure(s) they could take to make it so that you don’t have to deal with the shit you have been through?
Maybe you wrote it all up someplace. and if so I’d love to read it, really. But I have read your stuff here for a while and I am not getting a proper sense of it.
I don’t have the answer you are prompting me for off hand. Assuming I did, why would I post it in the comments section, and not as a blog post unto itself, which it clearly would substantiate all on its own?
It’s not false in the slightest: I was diagnosed with Class A, Chronic Paranoid Schizophrenia when I was 16 years old. That’s since been reformed to Autism and Complex PTSD. Nothing in my narrative is embellished in the slightest, in fact. Dissociation of the sort I’ve described is very serious and destructive.
You triggered me, you don’t get to say who you did or didn’t trigger. Not only am I not lying, I’m not lying at all. I have Medicare…Medicare…I get SSDI. You’re just an asshole.
I’m not making up anything, at all. You’re a sociopath.
Attached is an edited form of my SSA-1099, showing my yearly income, and attached is an edited image of my medicare card, Sociopath. Because, after all, if I’m just inventing trauma in life, how do I then have a medicare card and an SSA-1099 indicating Disability received?
You won’t dehumanize me just because you’re some dogmatic skeptic who believes that any claims of dissociation that don’t agree with your ideology must indicate a false narrative. You, like the rest of the lying flith bullshit artists on this board are very much a sociopath, very much intending to harm disabled people like me.
Actual people who are actually disabled, like me, won’t just keep putting up with being marginalized by Sociopaths like you.
You’re ridiculously privileged, read the links and weep about how wrong you are:
http://imgur.com/hoRMxSU,BLXcNu1
(Uploaded SSA-1099 and Medicare)
You see that? That’s the sound of you coming up with more bullshit reasons why you’re somehow right anyway.
I don’t make anything up, in the slightest even. The reason I get marginalized is because merely stating what I’ve been through threatens the Biggest Victim Complex of some people in this movement, who most certainly don’t believe in Intersectionality in the slightest. And that would include you. Empirical verification of my claims sucks, for you, badly in fact. Also, I’d love to see you try living in Greater Boston area on 8.2k a year. It’s easy to talk smack before you’ve seen documents. Now that you’ve seen them, you just look like the lying sociopath you are. So easy to blame me for the exact sociopathic, narrative denying behavior your engaging in, hunh?
Not so easy now. You’re nothing but scum.
From a quick glossing over of your comment, I’m an asshole, a sociopath, scum.
You’ve been watching too much ableist cinema if you think sociopathy can be effectively diagnosed from a blog comment, and if you think the typical presentation of paranoid schizophrenia is multiple personalities.
Go fuck yourself and don’t bother responding again.
Whether you are actually a sociopath or not, the behavior you’re engaging in is most certainly sociopathic.
I will keep responding until you ban me sociopath. I won’t let you bully me you piece of shit.
“and if you think the typical presentation of paranoid schizophrenia is multiple personalities.”
There’s nothing typical about the narrative of my life, as described here or anywhere else. I was diagnosed with Class A paranoid Schizophrenia at age 16, and then Diagnosed with Chronic Paranoid Schizophrenia at age 21 after getting out of the military.
Try using logic: if I am presenting an atypical abuse narrative and stating a history of schizophrenia with an atypical abuse narrative, then an atypical presentation of schizophrenia could result. Except, and this is where we part ways: my diagnosis was REFORMED to Complex PTSD and Autism, which present with the same symptoms.
You’re just a lying sack of shit, and a bully, definitely sociopathic behavior. Scum. You’re less than nothing.
http://imgur.com/hoRMxSU,BLXcNu1#1
Also, while I’m at it, since I’m the only one putting forth empirical evidence here, here’s me doc dropping (doxxing) myself:
http://imgur.com/a/7ZQVp#0
Almost every single major claim I’ve made about my narrative in life can be backed up by those documents. And I’m not afraid to post them either: unlike you I actually know I’m a nobody.
Go ahead and engage in more armchair psychiatry when you’re grossly unqualified, to backup your sociopathic behavior.
Sociopathic behavior gets people called sociopaths, deal with it asshole.
This is why people like you are a complete joke to me: I”M THE ONE DOXXING MYSELF, ME. THAT MAKES YOU A FUCKING JOKE! A total fucking joke in fact.
You’re a joke, a lying sack of sociopathic shit, and I’m laughing, because I’ve known this about people like you for years: jokes, everyone of you, bad jokes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting
“The term derives from the 1938 stage play Gas Light (known as Angel Street in the United States), and the 1940 and 1944 film adaptations. The plot concerns a husband who attempts to convince his wife and others that she is insane by manipulating small elements of their environment, and subsequently insisting that she is mistaken or misremembering when she points out these changes. The title stems from the dimming of the house’s gas lights which happens when the husband is using the gas lights in the attic while searching there for hidden treasure. The wife accurately notices the dimming lights, but the husband insists she is imagining.
The term “gaslighting” has been used colloquially since at least the late 1970s to describe efforts to manipulate someone’s sense of reality. In a 1980 book on child sex abuse, Florence Rush summarized George Cukor’s 1944 film version of Gas Light, and writes, “even today the word [gaslight] is used to describe an attempt to destroy another’s perception of reality”.[4] The term was further popularized in Victor Santoro’s 1994 book Gaslighting: How to Drive Your Enemies Crazy, which outlines ostensibly legal tactics the reader might use to annoy others.”
and
“Psychologist Martha Stout states that sociopaths frequently use gaslighting tactics. Sociopaths consistently transgress social mores, break laws, and exploit others, but are also typically charming and convincing liars who consistently deny wrongdoing. Thus, some who have been victimized by sociopaths may doubt their perceptions.[6] Jacobson and Gottman report that some physically abusive spouses may gaslight their partners, even flatly denying that they have been violent.[3]
Psychologists Gertrude Gass and William C. Nichols use the term “gaslighting” to describe a dynamic observed in some cases of marital infidelity: “Therapists may contribute to the victim’s distress through mislabeling the women’s reactions. […] The gaslighting behaviors of the husband provide a recipe for the so-called ‘nervous breakdown’ for some women [and] suicide in some of the worst situations.”[7]”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting
“Gaslighting is a form of mental abuse in which false information is presented with the intent of making a victim doubt his or her own memory, perception and sanity.[1] Instances may range simply from the denial by an abuser that previous abusive incidents ever occurred, up to the staging of bizarre events by the abuser with the intention of disorienting the victim.”
@ HaifischGeweint
that is a blog post then that I would really, really want to read. I’m serious.
I’ll give it some thought. Equally serious.