Tumgik
#victimhood
batwingsrosa · 2 days
Text
Snape and what a victim is supposed to look like.
Or: The reason you all hate him so much while making up excuses for other characters!
Would he still be so despised by the fandom, if he had been portrayed as weaker? As more emotional?
No, i don’t think so.
Others have said this before and i have to agree with what they said:
Y‘all are angry, because he is not the perfect victim.
He is not what you would expect a victim of abuse and bullying to look like.
He is confident.
He is strong.
He is sharp.
And he is bitter.
He is so, so bitter.
he harbours resentment.
He does not forgive those who wronged him.
When that is exactly what you would expect from a victim, is it not??
A victim is supposed to look weak and behave weak and to suck it up.
And to forgive.
When you tell people they have to forgive their tormentors, do you really tell them that so that they can heal?
Or…. so you don‘t have to deal with the mess?
Maybe, so you don‘t have to adjust your world view?
People are not obligated to forgive their tormentors.
It doesn‘t matter if they have changed.
What matters is how they made the victim feel.
And if the victim feels if they can forgive them.
And if they chose not to forgive, they turn in something else in your eyes.
They turn into the hater, the bully, the bad guy.
Bacause the victim is supposed to forgive and forget and let it go and not be bitter about it.
A victim is supposed to turn into a good person.
To learn from their experiences to be kinder to others.
To not treat others like they have been treated.
They are not supposed to not be able to let it go.
And if they are not able to do that, well then there‘s something wrong with them.
If a victim doesn‘t turn out the way they wanted them too, well - then they had it coming from the beginning and they probaly deserved what happened to them because they would have turned out bad either way!
Snape is the opposite of what a victim is supposed to be like.
Severus turned into a resentful and bitter adult.
He was never able to move on and heal from his trauma.
And at the same time, he knows who he is and what and doesn‘t make up excuses for his behaviour and instead just accepts himself the way he is.
And that is what makes you so fucking mad.
He turns into an asshole and is not sorry about it.
He is openly resentful and at times hateful.
And he is not fucking sorry about it.
And it makes all of you mad because that is not what is supposed to happen.
And let‘s not lie to yourselves- if he didn‘t have greasy hair and a hooked nose- you would look at him from an entirely different angle.
Like you do with Tom Riddle, or Regulus Black or Draco Malfoy.
147 notes · View notes
selfhealingmoments · 3 months
Text
Tumblr media
570 notes · View notes
billyengland · 7 months
Text
Tumblr media
This ‘Wheel of Privilege’ is being used in schools in the UK (soon in America if liberals /leftist have anything to say about it). It splits everyone into buckets of ‘power’ or ‘marginalized’. It tells children that if they are white or male or ‘cis’ or Christian or European or they speak English or live in an urban city, that they are ‘privileged’.
There is nothing about how privilege is where hard work meets opportunity or about how privilege is earned by those who have prepared themselves for a situation where they are uniquely qualified to succeed. Privilege has nothing to do with class and everything to do with merit.
They should call it "The Wheel of Imagined Victimhood".
Homeschool your kids.
172 notes · View notes
Tumblr media
By: Jon Haidt
Published: Mar 9, 2023
In May 2014, Greg Lukianoff invited me to lunch to talk about something he was seeing on college campuses that disturbed him. Greg is the president of FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression), and he has worked tirelessly since 2001 to defend the free speech rights of college students. That almost always meant pushing back against administrators who didn’t want students to cause trouble, and who justified their suppression of speech with appeals to the emotional “safety” of students—appeals that the students themselves didn’t buy. But in late 2013, Greg began to encounter new cases in which students were pushing to ban speakers, punish people for ordinary speech, or implement policies that would chill free speech. These students arrived on campus in the fall of 2013 already accepting the idea that books, words, and ideas could hurt them. Why did so many students in 2013 believe this, when there was little sign of such beliefs in 2011?
Greg is prone to depression, and after hospitalization for a serious episode in 2007, Greg learned CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy). In CBT you learn to recognize when your ruminations and automatic thinking patterns exemplify one or more of about a dozen “cognitive distortions,” such as catastrophizing, black-and-white thinking, fortune telling, or emotional reasoning. Thinking in these ways causes depression, as well as being a symptom of depression. Breaking out of these painful distortions is a cure for depression. 
What Greg saw in 2013 were students justifying the suppression of speech and the punishment of dissent using the exact distortions that Greg had learned to free himself from. Students were saying that an unorthodox speaker on campus would cause severe harm to vulnerable students (catastrophizing); they were using their emotions as proof that a text should be removed from a syllabus (emotional reasoning). Greg hypothesized that if colleges supported the use of these cognitive distortions, rather than teaching students skills of critical thinking (which is basically what CBT is), then this could cause students to become depressed. Greg feared that colleges were performing reverse CBT. 
I thought the idea was brilliant because I had just begun to see these new ways of thinking among some students at NYU. I volunteered to help Greg write it up, and in August 2015 our essay appeared in The Atlantic with the title: The Coddling of the American Mind. Greg did not like that title; his original suggestion was “Arguing Towards Misery: How Campuses Teach Cognitive Distortions.” He wanted to put the reverse CBT hypothesis in the title.
After our essay came out, things on campus got much worse. The fall of 2015 marked the beginning of a period of protests and high-profile conflicts on campus that led many or most universities to implement policies that embedded this new way of thinking into campus culture with administrative expansions such as “bias response teams” to investigate reports of “microaggressions.” Surveys began to show that most students and professors felt that they had to self-censor. The phrase “walking on eggshells” became common. Trust in higher ed plummeted, along with the joy of intellectual discovery and sense of goodwill that had marked university life throughout my career. 
Greg and I decided to expand our original essay into a book in which we delved into the many causes of the sudden change in campus culture. Our book focused on three “great untruths” that seemed to be widely believed by the students who were trying to shut down speech and prosecute dissent:
1. What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker 2. Always trust your feelings 3. Life is a battle between good people and evil people. 
Each of these untruths was the exact opposite of a chapter in my first book, The Happiness Hypothesis, which explored ten Great Truths passed down to us from ancient societies east and west. We published our book in 2018 with the title, once again, of The Coddling of the American Mind. Once again, Greg did not like the title. He wanted the book to be called “Disempowered,” to capture the way that students who embrace the three great untruths lose their sense of agency. He wanted to capture reverse CBT. 
The Discovery of the Gender-by-Politics Interaction
In September 2020, Zach Goldberg, who was then a graduate student at Georgia State University, discovered something interesting in a dataset made public by Pew Research. Pew surveyed about 12,000 people in March 2020, during the first month of the Covid shutdowns. The survey included this item: “Has a doctor or other healthcare provider EVER told you that you have a mental health condition?” Goldberg graphed the percentage of respondents who said “yes” to that item as a function of their self-placement on the liberal-conservative 5-point scale and found that white liberals were much more likely to say yes than white moderates and conservatives. (His analyses for non-white groups generally found small or inconsistent relationships with politics.) 
I wrote to Goldberg and asked him to redo it for men and women separately, and for young vs. old separately. He did, and he found that the relationship to politics was much stronger for young (white) women. You can see Goldberg’s graph here, but I find it hard to interpret a three-way interaction using bar charts, so I downloaded the Pew dataset and created line graphs, which make it easier to interpret. 
Here’s the same data, showing three main effects: gender (women higher), age (youngest groups higher), and politics (liberals higher). The graphs also show three two-way interactions (young women higher, liberal women higher, young liberals higher). And there’s an important three-way interaction: it is the young liberal women who are highest. They are so high that a majority of them said yes, they had been told that they have a mental health condition. 
Tumblr media
Figure 1.  Data from Pew Research, American Trends Panel Wave 64. The survey was fielded March 19-24, 2020. Graphed by Jon Haidt.
In recent weeks—since the publication of the CDC’s report on the high and rising rates of depression and anxiety among teens—there has been a lot of attention to a different study that shows the gender-by-politics interaction: Gimbrone, Bates, Prins, & Keyes (2022), titled: “The politics of depression: Diverging trends in internalizing symptoms among US adolescents by political beliefs.” Gimbrone et al. examined trends in the Monitoring the Future dataset, which is the only major US survey of adolescents that asks high school students (seniors) to self-identify as liberal or conservative (using a 5-point scale). The survey asks four items about mood/depression. Gimbrone et al. found that prior to 2012 there were no sex differences and only a small difference between liberals and conservatives. But beginning in 2012, the liberal girls began to rise, and they rose the most. The other three groups followed suit, although none rose as much, in absolute terms, as did the liberal girls (who rose .73 points since 2010, on a 5-point scale where the standard deviation is .89). 
Tumblr media
Figure 2. Data from Monitoring the Future, graphed by Gimbrone et al. (2022). The scale runs from 1 (minimum) to 5 (maximum).
The authors of the study try to explain the fact that liberals rise first and most in terms of the terrible things that conservatives were doing during Obama’s second term, e.g., 
Liberal adolescents may have therefore experienced alienation within a growing conservative political climate such that their mental health suffered in comparison to that of their conservative peers whose hegemonic views were flourishing.
The progressive New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg took up the question and wrote a superb essay making the argument that teen mental health is not and must not become a partisan issue. She dismissed Gimbrone et al.’s explanation as having a poor fit with their own data: 
Barack Obama was re-elected in 2012. In 2013, the Supreme Court extended gay marriage rights. It was hard to draw a direct link between that period’s political events and teenage depression, which in 2012 started an increase that has continued, unabated, until today.
After examining the evidence, including the fact that the same trends happened at the same time in Britain, Canada, and Australia, Goldberg concluded that “Technology, not politics, was what changed in all these countries around 2012. That was the year that Facebook bought Instagram and the word “selfie” entered the popular lexicon.”
Journalist Matt Yglesias also took up the puzzle of why liberal girls became more depressed than others, and in a long and self-reflective Substack post, he described what he has learned about depression from his own struggles involving many kinds of treatment. Like Michelle Goldberg, he briefly considered the hypothesis that liberals are depressed because they’re the only ones who see that “we’re living in a late-stage capitalist hellscape during an ongoing deadly pandemic w record wealth inequality, 0 social safety net/job security, as climate change cooks the world,” to quote a tweet from the Washington Post tech columnist Taylor Lorenz. Yglesias agreed with Goldberg and other writers that the Lorenz explanation—reality makes Gen Z depressed—doesn’t fit the data, and, because of his knowledge of depression, he focused on the reverse path: depression makes reality look terrible. As he put it: “Mentally processing ambiguous events with a negative spin is just what depression is.”
Yglesias tells us what he has learned from years of therapy, which clearly involved CBT:
It’s important to reframe your emotional response as something that’s under your control: • Stop saying “so-and-so made me angry by doing X.” • Instead say “so-and-so did X, and I reacted by becoming angry.” And the question you then ask yourself is whether becoming angry made things better? Did it solve the problem? 
Yglesias wrote that “part of helping people get out of their trap is teaching them not to catastrophize.” He then described an essay by progressive journalist Jill Filipovic that argued, in Yglesias’s words, that “progressive institutional leaders have specifically taught young progressives that catastrophizing is a good way to get what they want.”
Yglesias quoted a passage from Filipovic that expressed exactly the concern that Greg had expressed to me back in 2014: 
I am increasingly convinced that there are tremendously negative long-term consequences, especially to young people, coming from this reliance on the language of harm and accusations that things one finds offensive are “deeply problematic” or even violent. Just about everything researchers understand about resilience and mental well-being suggests that people who feel like they are the chief architects of their own life — to mix metaphors, that they captain their own ship, not that they are simply being tossed around by an uncontrollable ocean — are vastly better off than people whose default position is victimization, hurt, and a sense that life simply happens to them and they have no control over their response. 
I have italicized Filipovic’s text about the benefits of feeling like you captain your own ship because it points to a psychological construct with a long history of research and measurement: Locus of control. As first laid out by Julian Rotter in the 1950s, this is a malleable personality trait referring to the fact that some people have an internal locus of control—they feel as if they have the power to choose a course of action and make it happen, while other people have an external locus of control—they have little sense of agency and they believe that strong forces or agents outside of themselves will determine what happens to them. Sixty years of research show that people with an internal locus of control are happier and achieve more. People with an external locus of control are more passive and more likely to become depressed.
How a Phone-Based Childhood Breeds Passivity
There are at least two ways to explain why liberal girls became depressed faster than other groups at the exact time (around 2012) when teens traded in their flip phones for smartphones and the girls joined Instagram en masse. The first and simplest explanation is that liberal girls simply used social media more than any other group. Jean Twenge’s forthcoming book, Generations, is full of amazing graphs and insightful explanations of generational differences. In her chapter on Gen Z, she shows that liberal teen girls are by far the most likely to report that they spend five or more hours a day on social media (31% in recent years, compared to 22% for conservative girls, 18% for liberal boys, and just 13% for conservative boys). Being an ultra-heavy user means that you have less time available for everything else, including time “in real life” with your friends. Twenge shows in another graph that from the 1970s through the early 2000s, liberal girls spent more time with friends than conservative girls. But after 2010 their time with friends drops so fast that by 2016 they are spending less time with friends than are conservative girls. So part of the story may be that social media took over the lives of liberal girls more than any other group, and it is now clear that heavy use of social media damages mental health, especially during early puberty. 
But I think there’s more going on here than the quantity of time on social media. Like Filipovic, Yglesias, Goldberg, and Lukianoff, I think there’s something about the messages liberal girls consume that is more damaging to mental health than those consumed by other groups. 
The Monitoring the Future dataset happens to have within it an 8-item Locus of Control scale. With Twenge’s permission, I reprint one such graph from Generations showing responses to one of the items: “Every time I try to get ahead, something or somebody stops me.” This item is a good proxy for Filipovic’s hypothesis about the disempowering effects of progressive institutions. If you agree with that item, you have a more external locus of control. As you can see in Figure 3, from the 1970s until the mid-2000s, boys were a bit more likely to agree with that item, but then girls rose to match boys, and then both sexes rose continuously throughout the 2010s—the era when teen social life became far more heavily phone-based. 
Tumblr media
Figure 3. Percentage of boys and girls (high school seniors) who agree with (or are neutral about) the statement “Every time I try to get ahead, something or somebody stops me.” From Monitoring the Future, graphed by Jean Twenge in her forthcoming book Generations.
When the discussion of the gender-by-politics interaction broke out a few weeks ago, I thought back to Twenge’s graph and wondered what would happen if we broke up the sexes by politics. Would it give us the pattern in the Gimbrone et al. graphs, where the liberal girls rise first and most? Twenge sent me her data file (it’s a tricky one to assemble, across the many years), and Zach Rausch and I started looking for the interaction. We found some exciting hints, and I began writing this post on the assumption that we had a major discovery. For example, Figure 4 shows the item that Twenge analyzed. We see something like the Gimbrone et al. pattern in which it’s the liberal girls who depart from everyone else, in the unhealthy (external) direction, starting in the early 2000s. 
Tumblr media
Figure 4. Percentage of liberal and conservative high school senior boys (left panel) and girls (right panel) who agree with the statement “Every time I try to get ahead, something or somebody stops me.” From Monitoring the Future, graphed by Zach Rausch.
It sure looks like the liberal girls are getting more external while the conservative girls are, if anything, trending slightly more internal in the last decade, and the boys are just bouncing around randomly. But that was just for this one item. We also found a similar pattern for a second item, “People like me don’t have much of a chance at a successful life.” (You can see graphs of all 8 items here.) 
We were excited to have found such clear evidence of the interaction, but when we plotted responses to the whole scale, we found only a hint of the predicted interaction, and only in the last few years, as you can see in Figure 5. After trying a few different graphing strategies, and after seeing if there was a good statistical justification for dropping any items, we reached the tentative conclusion that the big story about locus of control is not about liberal girls, it’s about Gen Z as a whole. Everyone—boys and girls, left and right—developed a more external locus of control gradually, beginning in the 1990s. I’ll come back to this finding in future posts as I explore the second strand of the After Babel Substack: the loss of “play-based childhood” which happened in the 1990s when American parents (and British, and Canadian) stopped letting their children out to play and explore, unsupervised. (See Frank Furedi’s important book Paranoid Parenting. I believe that the loss of free play and self-supervised risk-taking blocked the development of a healthy, normal, internal locus of control. That is the reason I teamed up with Lenore Skenazy, Peter Gray, and Daniel Shuchman to found LetGrow.org.) 
Tumblr media
Figure 5. Locus of Control has shifted slightly but steadily toward external since the 1990s. Scores are on a 5-point scale from 1 = most internal to 5 = most external. 
We kept looking in the Monitoring the Future dataset and the Gimbrone et al. paper for other items that would allow us to test Filipovic’s hypothesis. We found an ideal second set of variables: The Monitoring the Future dataset has a set of items on “self derogation” which is closely related to disempowerment, as you can see from the four statements that comprise the scale:
I feel I do not have much to be proud of. Sometimes I think I am no good at all. I feel that I can't do anything right. I feel that my life is not very useful.
Gimbrone et al. had graphed the self-derogation scale, as you can see in their appendix (Figure  A.4). But Zach and I re-graphed the original data so that we could show a larger range of years, from 1977 through 2021. As you can see in Figure 6, we find the gender-by-politics interaction. Once again, and as with nearly all of the mental health indicators I examined in a previous post, there’s no sign of trouble before 2010. But right around 2012 the line for liberal girls starts to rise. It rises first, and it rises most, with liberal boys not far behind (as in Gimbrone et al.).
Tumblr media
Figure 6. Self-derogation scale, averaging four items from the Monitoring the Future study. Graphed by Zach Rausch. The scale runs from 1 (strongly disagree with each statement) to 5 (strongly agree). 
In other words, we have support for Filipovic’s “captain their own ship” concern, and for Lukianoff’s disempowerment concern: Gen Z has become more external in its locus of control, and Gen Z liberals (of both sexes) have become more self-derogating. They are more likely to agree that they “can’t do anything right.” Furthermore, most of the young people in the progressive institutions that Filipovic mentioned are women, and that has become even more true since 2014 when, according to Gallup data, young women began to move to the left while young men did not move either way. As Gen Z women became more progressive and more involved in political activism in the 2010s, it seems to have changed them psychologically. It wasn’t just that their locus of control shifted toward external—that happened to all subsets of Gen Z.  Rather, young liberals (including young men) seem to have taken into themselves the specific depressive cognitions and distorted ways of thinking that CBT is designed to expunge.
But where did they learn to think this way? And why did it start so suddenly around 2012 or 2013, as Greg observed, and as Figures 2 and 6 confirm?
Tumblr Was the Petri Dish for Disempowering Beliefs
I recently listened to a brilliant podcast series, The Witch Trials of J. K. Rowling, hosted by Megan Phelps-Roper, created within Bari Weiss’s Free Press. Phelps-Roper interviews Rowling about her difficult years developing the Harry Potter stories in the early 1990s, before the internet; her rollout of the books in the late 90s and early 2000s, during the early years of the internet; and her observations about the Harry Potter superfan communities that the internet fostered. These groups had streaks of cruelty and exclusion in them from the beginning, along with a great deal of love, joy, and community. But in the stunning third episode, Phelps-Roper and Rowling take us through the dizzying events of the early 2010s as the social media site Tumblr exploded in popularity (reaching its peak in early 2014), and also in viciousness. Tumblr was different from Facebook and other sites because it was not based on anyone’s social network; it brought together people from anywhere in the world who shared an interest, and often an obsession.
Phelps-Roper interviewed several experts who all pointed to Tumblr as the main petri dish in which nascent ideas of identity, fragility, language, harm, and victimhood evolved and intermixed. Angela Nagle (author of Kill All Normies) described the culture that emerged among young activists on Tumblr, especially around gender identity, in this way:
There was a culture that was encouraged on Tumblr, which was to be able to describe your unique non-normative self… And that’s to some extent a feature of modern society anyway. But it was taken to such an extreme that people began to describe this as the snowflake [referring to the idea that each snowflake is unique], the person who constructs a totally kind of boutique identity for themselves, and then guards that identity in a very, very sensitive way and reacts in an enraged way when anyone does not respect the uniqueness of their identity. 
Nagle described how on the other side of the political spectrum, there was “the most insensitive culture imaginable, which was the culture of 4chan.” The communities involved in gender activism on Tumblr were mostly young progressive women while 4Chan was mostly used by right-leaning young men, so there was an increasingly gendered nature to the online conflict. The two communities supercharged each other with their mutual hatred, as often happens in a culture war. The young identity activists on Tumblr embraced their new notions of identity, fragility, and trauma all the more tightly, increasingly saying that words are a form of violence, while the young men on 4chan moved in the opposite direction: they brandished a rough and rude masculinity in which status was gained by using words more insensitively than the next guy. It was out of this reciprocal dynamic, the experts on the podcast suggest, that today’s cancel culture was born in the early 2010s. Then, in 2013, it escaped from Tumblr into the much larger Twitterverse. Once on Twitter, it went national and even global (at least within the English-speaking countries), producing the mess we all live with today.
I don’t want to tell that entire story here; please listen to the Witch Trials podcast for yourself. It is among the most enlightening things I’ve read or heard in all my years studying the American culture war (along with Jon Ronson’s podcast Things Fell Apart). I just want to note that this story fits perfectly with both the timing and the psychology of Greg’s reverse CBT hypothesis. 
Implications and Policy Changes
In conclusion, I believe that Greg Lukianoff was exactly right in the diagnosis he shared with me in 2014. Many young people had suddenly—around 2013—embraced three great untruths:
They came to believe that they were fragile and would be harmed by books, speakers, and words, which they learned were forms of violence (Great Untruth #1). 
They came to believe that their emotions—especially their anxieties—were reliable guides to reality (Great Untruth #2).
They came to see society as comprised of victims and oppressors—good people and bad people (Great Untruth #3).
Liberals embraced these beliefs more than conservatives. Young liberal women adopted them more than any other group due to their heavier use of social media and their participation in online communities that developed new disempowering ideas. These cognitive distortions then caused them to become more anxious and depressed than other groups. Just as Greg had feared, many universities and progressive institutions embraced these three untruths and implemented programs that performed reverse CBT on young people, in violation of their duty to care for them and educate them. 
I welcome challenges to this conclusion from scholars, journalists, and subscribers, and I will address such challenges in future posts. I must also repeat that I don’t blame everything on smartphones and social media; the other strand of my story is the loss of play-based childhood, with its free play and self-governed risk-taking. But if this conclusion stands (along with my conclusions in previous posts), then I think there are two big policy changes that should be implemented as soon as possible: 
1) Universities and other schools should stop performing reverse CBT on their students
As Greg and I showed in The Coddling of the American Mind, most of the programs put in place after the campus protests of 2015 are based on one or more of the three Great Untruths, and these programs have been imported into many K-12 schools. From mandatory diversity training to bias response teams and trigger warnings, there is little evidence that these programs do what they say they do, and there are some findings that they backfire. In any case, there are reasons, as I have shown, to worry that they teach children and adolescents to embrace harmful, depressogenic cognitive distortions.
One initiative that has become popular in the last few years is particularly suspect: efforts to tell college students to avoid common English words and phrases that are said to be “harmful.” Brandeis University took the lead in 2021 with its “oppressive language list.” Brandeis urged its students to stop saying that they would “take a stab at” something because it was unnecessarily violent. For the same reason, they urged that nobody ask for a “trigger warning” because, well, guns. Students should ask for “content warnings” instead, to keep themselves safe from violent words like “stab.” Many universities have followed suit, including Colorado State University, The University of British Columbia, The University of Washington, and Stanford, which eventually withdrew its “harmful language list” because of the adverse publicity. Stanford had urged students to avoid words like “American,” “Immigrant,” and “submit,” as in “submit your homework.” Why? because the word “submit” can “imply allowing others to have power over you.” The irony here is that it may be these very programs that are causing liberal students to feel disempowered, as if they are floating in a sea of harmful words and people when, in reality, they are living in some of the most welcoming and safe environments ever created.
2) The US Congress should raise the age of “internet adulthood” from 13 to 16 or 18
What do you think should be the minimum age at which children can sign a legally binding contract to give away their data and their rights,  and expose themselves to harmful content, without the consent or knowledge of their parents? I asked that question as a Twitter poll, and you can see the results here:
Tumblr media
Image: See my original tweet.
Of course, this poll of my own Twitter followers is far from a valid survey, and I phrased my question in a leading way, but my phrasing was an accurate statement of today’s status quo. I think that most people now understand that the age of 13, which was set back in 1998 when we didn’t know what the internet would become, is just too low, and it is not even enforced. When my kids started 6th grade in NYC public schools, they each told me that “everyone” was on Instagram.
We are now 11 years into the largest epidemic of adolescent mental illness ever recorded. I know so many families that have been thrown into fear and turmoil by a child’s suicide attempt. You probably do too, given that the recent CDC report tells us that one in ten adolescents now say they have made an attempt to kill themselves. It is hitting all political and demographic groups. The evidence is abundant that social media is a major cause of the epidemic, and perhaps the major cause. It's time we started treating social media and other apps designed for “engagement” (i.e., addiction) like alcohol, tobacco, and gambling, or, because they can harm society as well as their users, perhaps like automobiles and firearms. Adults should have wide latitude to make their own choices, but legislators and governors who care about mental health, women’s health, or children’s health need to step up.
It’s not enough to find more money for mental health services, although that is sorely needed. In addition, we must shut down the conveyer belt so that today’s toddlers will not suffer the same fate in twelve years. Congress should set a reasonable minimum age for minors to sign contracts and open accounts without explicit parental consent, and the age needs to be after teens have progressed most of the way through puberty. (The harm caused by social media seems to be greatest during puberty.) If Congress won’t do it then state legislatures should act. There are many ways to rapidly verify people’s ages online, and I’ll discuss age verification processes in a future post. 
In conclusion: All of Gen Z got more anxious and depressed after 2012. But Lukianoff’s reverse CBT hypothesis is the best explanation I have found for Why the mental health of liberal girls sank first and fastest.
318 notes · View notes
cosmicjoke · 1 month
Text
Everybody these days is so ready to be offended, to the point in which nobody is willing to entertain the possibility that someone being offensive might just be an innocent and unintended mistake on their part, rather than a deliberately malicious act or expression.
And really, I think that readiness to be offended is a product of wanting to be, because being a victim in today’s world actually wins you social status, wins you attention from your peers, and also serves as an excuse for one’s own bad behavior. You’re allowed greater leeway, given a wider berth and more of a pass for being shitty if you can convince everyone you’re a victim. You’re regarded as special, or of more worth, more deserving of acknowledgement and sympathy if you can claim to be a victim. Today’s culture has turned being a victim into a coveted social status, rather than what it really is, which is a tragedy.
Real victims rarely, if ever, want to talk about their victimhood, or their experiences of being victimized. It’s often a source of shame for them, undeserved as those feelings are. It’s traumatizing and painful. It’s humiliating and embarrassing.
This treatment of victimhood as some sort of sought after status or desirable rank, as some kind of special designation that can win you the admiration and praise of your peers, is incredibly damaging to real victims. It continually undermines their own experiences and trauma, to see others appropriating it for their use, as a means of bolstering their social standing, as a way to gain some reward.
Has any, true victim ever felt rewarded for being a victim? Have they ever bragged about being a victim? Have they ever felt the rush of greater acceptance and praise from their peers for being victimized? Have they ever felt a thrill at identifying themselves as a victim or as part of a marginalized group?
If you feel any of those things when talking about how much of a victim you are, maybe you need to step back and reassess your claims, and think about the ways in which you’re not only undercutting the experiences of real victims by using the status to bolster your own social standing, but also the ways in which you’re re-traumatizing real victims by treating the idea of victimhood like it’s some sort of contest to see who’s the most deserving of sympathy and adulation.
Maybe next time you take offense at something, before jumping down the throat of the person who’s offended you and accusing them of doing it on purpose, ask yourself if you’re really offended, or if you just want to be, because then you can claim to be a victim and win all the excellent prizes that being a victim in todays culture brings.
28 notes · View notes
blackswaneuroparedux · 10 months
Text
Tumblr media
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.
C.S. lewis
122 notes · View notes
i-dunno-or-do-i · 8 months
Text
Ugh! Ever known one of these types? The perpetual victim—which of course has nothing to do with being a real victim. First off, real victims will often question themselves, or think they deserve bad things or abuse, and may have low self-esteem…maybe not, but one thing is for sure, they don’t come from a place of grandiosity and thinking themselves better than everyone.
On the other hand, these perpetual victims often MAKE others real victims via forms of abuse. They’re never at fault; never accountable; never self aware or introspective; never sorry or conciliatory; never humble…BUT, they’re always superior to others; they know more than everyone including experts in their own fields; they’re always right; always of the belief they’re above rules and law—that none of that applies to them; they usually have a chip on their shoulder as perpetual victims…someone is always out to get them…everyone is so mean snd the perpetual victim wallows in self pity…they’re master manipulators and divisive; they have no genuine empathy because the world revolves only around them and their grand sense of self.
It’s really scary when you have a huge part of the population overlooking this behavior especially as it relates to people with situational power. Very, very dangerous combination.
69 notes · View notes
conscious-love · 2 years
Text
Tumblr media
seerutkchawla ~ Instagram
755 notes · View notes
twitterexile · 23 days
Text
Tumblr media
18 notes · View notes
eternalistic · 7 months
Text
Tumblr media
31 notes · View notes
selfhealingmoments · 2 months
Text
Tumblr media
333 notes · View notes
Text
Tumblr media
Glenn Loury: The answer I’m taking from you, to my question of how do we get to antisemitism, is that the world is divided into oppressors and victims. The oppressors are white, the victims are BIPOC.
Jews are white, ergo, Jews are oppressors. Palestinianss, I guess by extension of this kind of logic, are people of color, are incorporated somehow into the BIPOC coalition, so they are the victims.
And that’s their account of this conflict that has sued over the last 75 years since the founding of the state of Israel.
I guess I want to say about that, that is a gross oversimplification that actually betrays the responsibility to educate here, regardless of "whose side you’re on," we can get to figuring out what we want to say and what we want to do about the conflict and what’s wrong and what’s right. But let’s just understand the circumstance.
And that is ahistorical and ignorant and should be objected to strongly, should not be tolerated in an institution of higher education.
Tabia Lee: Yes, and unfortunately, Glenn, it’s not only being tolerated, it’s being held up as the only way to understand these geopolitical and world issues in many institutions. And if you even suggest that there’s other ways to view this, that we don’t have to view everything through a matrix of domination and oppression, even just saying that got me labelled as a pariah.
This is the environment that people are working in, and often you don’t hear about it because what happens for us as faculty members, we're advised, at least I was, by many mentors, you know, Lee, just resign. It’ll be like this never happened.
I could’ve taken that option. I could’ve done that. But I felt like there were people who were being very unprofessional bullies and gangsters in a learning environment. So, if I just disappear quietly and save myself, right, then I’m contributing to the problem as well. So that’s why I chose to go public. I knew the risks, I knew that I would probably never get another tenure track position.
Once I went public, hearing from people across the nation that it wasn’t just California. You know, sometimes people say, California, you guys are a little weird over there. That's just the California thing. This is happening all over the place.
==
"Another aspect of the construction of whiteness is the way certain groups have moved into or out of that race. For example, early in our history Irish, Jews, and Italians were considered nonwhite—that is, on a par with African Americans. Over time, they earned the prerogatives and social standing of whites by a process that included joining labor unions, swearing fealty to the Democratic Party, and acquiring wealth, sometimes by illegal or underground means. Whiteness, it turns out, is not only valuable; it is shifting and malleable." -- "Critical Race Theory (Third Edition)," Delgado & Stefancic
This, partly, gives the game away. "Whiteness" is so malleable that activists can decide that anything they don't like falls under this banner, just as they declared everyone to be a Nazi (before becoming Nazis themselves).
27 notes · View notes
myfandomrealitea · 4 months
Note
about your latest post, some people also think that you're only allowed to consume certain types of fanfiction if you are consuming it to cope with real life trauma you have.
But the only way to prove that you are doing that is by telling random strangers on the internet about it and I frankly don't believe these people have the right to know about what I've been through or not.
Again, another perfectly valid point.
Exploiting victims by forcing themselves to out their victimhood and their trauma (and indeed, potentially their own vulnerability) is the exact opposite of the so-called 'victim protection' that a lot of people hide behind as a smokescreen to dictate fandom spaces.
I also genuinely don't think that a lot of people consider just how restricted the arts and fandom spaces would become if we instated half the regulations and laws that they wanted us to. Or just how many victims it would negatively effect.
Victims owe nobody their story or their experiences. Victims do not have to jump through hoops presented by random internet strangers in order to access resources that provide comfort, healing and closure.
I am a victim. I have no issues in being open about how I am a victim.
I can absolutely promise you that if I was required to out myself and prove my victimhood solely in order to access fanfiction, I would simply not. Part of the safety of fanfiction is how easily accessible and anonymous it is. If I don't want them to, nobody has to know I'm accessing it. Nobody has to know I'm reading it. Nobody has to know why I'm reading it.
By forcing victims to out themselves, you are actively opening them up to further harm. You are actively alerting predators and people who want to cause harm exactly who a potential personal victim is.
You are also dictating that that victim is lesser than you, and that you have a degree of control over them. You are, in part, becoming their abuser by deciding that they are inherently dependent on you and what you decide for them.
47 notes · View notes
brumeraven · 2 months
Text
👺: Those Thankless Years || mech pilots, stigmatization, expectations, victimhood, disability, dehumanization, guilt, oww oww owww, somehow ended up with at least 3 references in this
There was an alley I passed by every day, twice a day, back and forth, morning and evening, as my schedule demanded, as I left my home before dawn and returned after nightfall.
Wasn't actually an alley; an intercostal space, between the ribs of a Beast that had fallen here years ago, now reclaimed by the city. Ghastly thing to leave standing, but then it'd been years since one of them had gotten anywhere near a population center, and memories had faded.
Was a sort of shrine now, what passed for one; a few more true believers crowded into the narrow space each time I passed, stringing lights of all sorts together in garish reverence.
Never bothered to look inside. Didn't need to; already knew what I'd see.
Another fucking Stig.
See, the world had needed the Seraphs back then, when the Beasts came. And that man? The one who'd made angels? Well, he'd given the people exactly what they'd needed.
Hope.
Hope and a belief in the future. No matter what it cost him. No matter what it cost us.
The first ones we cobbled together from dolls and half-assed prayer, pushed both machine and pilot to their breaking points. But people hated seeing their idols broken and shattered. We needed Seraphs to be impeccable icons of our cause, striding hymns of human exceptionalism.
So we did what we always do: hid all our dirty little secrets behind a facade and made it someone else's problem.
Don't remember who realized we could invert Halo fields. Don't want to.
All I know is I every morning I leave home and work at forgetting until it's time to sleep.
It was the dirtiest kludge of them all, to feed it back at the pilots, but it made the Seraphs truly were unstoppable. I've seen a Brumeraven put three talons clean through a core without a mark, the cruelest Flame any Beast could muster left our shining protectors unsullied.
All of that turned inwards instead, hollowing out the pilots instead.
Seemed kinder at first. No more broken bones or necrosis. And when they couldn't maintain a field any more, they got a grand send off.
"Compassionate Discharge," out the door with accolades and nothing more.
We never asked if they'd wanted it. We'd made them, but we never thought to ask if they wanted to be heroes. If they wanted to be martyrs.
That's how we ended up with this problem. People stopped caring about the gods we'd built. They'd rather worship the ones we'd made instead.
The kids had seemed physically fine when we'd released them. Wasn't until they began to turn back up as Stigs that we knew what we'd done.
Today...today I decided to take a look on my way home.
And there she was, at the end of the alley, in the middle of that neon necropolis.
Alone, staring at nothing, eyes glazed and unfocused, careless of the meager hundred kneeling all around her, heedless of the mismatched flowers and benedictions and prayers heaped at her feet, if none closer than a meter. No one would touch the divine.
It was all worthless.
Even from where I was, it was easy to see her marks. Half her jaw' torn away, a perfect simulacrum of golden light in its place, crazed lines spiderwebbing outwards across most of her face.
Golden scars covered most of her body, cuts here, burns there, cracks shot through her.
All of that hope. All of that conviction that had once shook the heavens, moved machines that towered over the city, stood tirelessly in guard of us all...
It was all wasted now. Twisted up and turned inwards, an endless struggle to contain the Void that tried to tear her apart.
And her devotees, well, they worshipped her.
They worshipped her fragility.
Worshipped her resilience.
A whole fucking church, crying out her name.
A hundred voices praising her bravery. And not a one asked what she wanted.
But I could. I could care. I could push my way through the crowd. Give her the bread and cheap wine I'd bought to get me through the night. Hug her, show her she was still human, try to fill those cracks, show the congregation how little she was, how great she could still be...
Phaw. What did it matter anyways. They believed in her past.
Tannin and ethanol as bitter ablution, the screw lid cast over my shoulder in lieu of salt. Who believed in a future anyways?
I put my head down, pulled my hood low, trying to hide her. From her.
Maybe tomorrow.
~👺
9 notes · View notes
Photo
Tumblr media
I do not wish women to have power over men; but over themselves.
- Mary Wollstonecraft
American intersectional feminism, intellectually incoherent and inherently misogynistic, has pitted men against women which is why modern feminism is in a cul de sac. Women’s liberation for them is merely commodification as Mary Harrington has put it succinctly.
The question is how you frame the question which makes all the difference. As Ayn Rand - perhaps the only thing she ever got right - put it another way: the question isn't who's going to let me; it's who's going to stop me.
Modern feminism focuses on the former with self-pitying victimhood as a bourgeois luxury belief. First wave feminists focused on the latter through a recognition of differences in biological sex, and yet had the grit and the determination to succeed on their own merits.  
109 notes · View notes
daaft-prick-69 · 9 days
Text
Tumblr media
7 notes · View notes