Another fucking spree shooting. Great.

racism+misogyny is more sinister than misogyny alone

here I was thinking they cancelled each other out.

http://thechrisgethardshow.tumblr.com/post/87041806996/overcome-your-programming-and-be-a-better-man

that is about the closest to otm thing I have read so far

forgive me if this comes off as provincial or whatever but i think malcolm harris has cool stuff to say sometimes and i'm curious for his inevitable al jazeera column on this, for people in the larger-scale press he usually hits intersectional stuff on the nose ime

re: Chris Gethard, apparently he went to my high school, probably just 4 years behind me. Noticed him popping up on friends facebook pages when he started getting known for improv stuff and been seeing him increasingly more and more on tv and whatnot. I think he's gonna get real famous soon, comedy-wise, though this post is getting a lot of attention.

i cannot read any more about this. i'm done.

I don't know who Chris Gerhard is but that is excellent

Wish he'd stop saying 'stick to your guns' tho

lol he quotes the chorus of The The's Lonely Planet almost verbatim

yeah stick to your guns not the greatest choice of words

The Gethard post lost me when he got to "no one was ever out to get me" because, especially for black people, sometimes "they" is a real thing and "they" actually ARE out to get you.

And when he propagated once again the "Columbine killers were lonely, shy kids getting back at their tormentors" myth.

Black kids, whose feelings of persecution are not mostly in their heads, are also not murdering masses like the white boys he is talking to.

Also Phil, I think you are way off.

"Because my fear is that in saying I remember identifying with the Columbine kids, or that Elliot Rodgers said things about his feelings that reflected my feelings at his age, that I’m coming off as sympathetic to them and what they did – that couldn’t be further from the truth." He's talking about identifying with a sense of being treated unfairly despite your superiority, not any of the rest of the mythmaking, and he doesn't let the Columbine dickheads off the hook at all.

Eh, maybe I'm misreading him, TWU. But when he precedes "We were the Columbine kids" with

We were the kids who girls never talked to. We were the kids the popular kids looked down on. We got made fun of. We got laughed at. I remember once entering the locker room of my high school’s gym, where a kid a year older than me named Rick walked up to me and backhand slapped me across the face. I looked up at him and he shrugged and said, “What can you do?” sympathetically. As if even he knew what he did reflecteda way of things that wasn’t fair, even though he was also choosing to do it.

it gets my hackles up.

He follows it with "on many, many levels we were". And then analyzes the similarity and differences in a very sensitive way, I think, with the specific goal of getting young white dudes not to feel like victims owed by an unjust world.

I'm with DJP. Also the statement "the world doesn't owe you anything" -- sans context -- is kind of awful. People aren't owed love or affection or sex but they are all should be treated fairly and decently. The author of the article was owed not being backhanded in the face by that high school bully. Women are owed the right to not be harassed or made to feel unsafe. Humans are owed all sorts of things by virtue of being human. Maybe this is nitpicky because what the author was taking aim at was a particular, odious form of male entitlement but in that case he shouldn't make sloppy, general statements.

yeah, that guy's statement seems a bit off

treesh otm

Actually the statement "the world doesn't owe you anything" is 100% correct and should be internalized so that people stop taking the good things in their lives for granted.

debt is kind of a weird/wrong concept to apply to human relations imo

or maybe not debt, but entitlement

Like, if 25% of the people out there who aren't thinking this way realize "the world doesn't owe me the things in my life that are awesome and I am really fucking lucky", think of the overall empathy increase; the ability to get out of seeing your situation as the default and what is "owed" to any person is instrumental in making people empathic to those who are worse off than them.

I think it's hard to crystallize in words what a healthy attitude towards life/others/ourselves consists of. It's something you kind of have to absorb my osmosis, if you're lucky, by being around good role models. One sad irony is this guy thought all he needed was sex to be happy, whereas what he really needed was a friend.

this kid needed friends or maybe better support years ago, he strikes me as someone who fell through the cracks bc outwardly he appeared to have everything and yet meanwhile he was quiet and solitary and having a running unreliable narration on his own life and perceptions that no one contradicted IRL and people online only reinforced. also I read this weird aside in one piece that mentioned him periodically splashing drinks on couples?

One thing that sticks out about the Gerhard post is that for all his alienated loserdom, he obviously had some good friends. It's "we" this and "we" that - not just "me".

this is a point where the pedant and the 13-year-old converge and point out that dude's name is Gethard

iirc, "the world" is somewhat larger than human society.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjgyznFc18M

true. a herzog nature doc for every child.

Actually the statement "the world doesn't owe you anything" is 100% correct and should be internalized so that people stop taking the good things in their lives for granted.

― On-the-spot Dicespin (DJP), Wednesday, May 28, 2014 6:07 PM (22 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Very true

Meh, the idea that 'the world doesn't owe you anything' is egotistical drivel, the kind of thinking that leads to dangerous situations. We owe fair treatment to others. Basic dignity is something everyone should have.

How does it lead to a dangerous situation

I think it's important not just to not take good things for granted, but to remember that other people should also have these good things. It's the right wing that has such an aversion to the word "entitlements".

No one is talking about entitlements

When the right wing talks about entitlements, they are talking about Social Security, which is not, in fact, an entitlement

Meh, the idea that 'the world doesn't owe you anything' is egotistical drivel, the kind of thinking that leads to dangerous situations. We owe fair treatment to others. Basic dignity is something everyone should have.

Actually, I think the idea that the world doesn't owe you anything is pure egolessness. It's an acknowledgement of your total insignificance.

yeah I didn't mean entitlement in the sense of policy/American politics

xposts: all that phrase means to my mind is a kind of anti-narcissistic gesture (the world does not exist to please you), maybe a more metaphysical notion that universe takes no notice of you (and therefore no one else). it's a healthy mindset in that context rather than a Trojan horse for free market individualism etc. (which seems predicated on some underlying notion of "just rewards.")

The reason they are ideologically opposed to it is that they don't believe people should get stuff simply by being people. To the contrary, there are fundamental human rights and one of them should be healthcare and another one should a decent living standard.

xp to wf

There is a difference between "the world doesn't owe you anything" and "the world doesn't owe me anything" that I did not properly delineate in my previous posts. Context also matters; someone who has been denied housing based on their race is in a very different context from someone who can't get that one cheerleader to notice him during lunch period.

The problem with "everyone is owed basic dignity" is that no one agrees on what "basic dignity" is.

The reason they are ideologically opposed to it is that they don't believe people should get stuff simply by being people.

They do think this though! Think of the zero interest loans all the banks recieved

Are banks not people.

Anyway, you are confused.

I like the idea of taking nothing for granted

Also,

farts.

and yeah it's a different discussion if we're talking housing discrimination vs, like, the Book of Job.

To wit, Treeship is saying "healthcare is a basic right" whereas there is a significant portion of the population, across several class levels, who would say "being able to eat is a basic right". I believe healthcare is a privilege that we, as a nation, should grant to all of our citizens/residents but I don't believe it is a basic right. Believing everyone should have something does not de facto make it a right.

could be taken as a part of "right to life" tho

is it the right not to be deprived of life, or the right to be assisted in living

rights only exist insofar as they are agreed upon by groups of people, they aren't some outgrowth of natural phenomenon (I know this runs contrary to the whole God-given rights thing but take God out of the equation imo)

even putting God aside, there are certain rhetorical benefits to pretending that some rights are intrinsic + self-evident