Hell's Where I Was Born

Why do academics living in gentrified neighborhoods pretend to care about poor people and people of color while simultaneously ignoring us and contributing to our suffering? You claim to care but you disparage poor Americans who can't afford higher education, people with learning disabilities, you make fun of our depression and trauma, you disparage the profoundness of our suffering and want us to all be positive and conform.

Why do you care about groups of people - people of color, women, the lgbt community - but you use childhood trauma and mental illness to insult right-wingers? You tell those with trauma and mental illness to "just get over it", you mock low self-esteem and pessimism, you egg on suicide to "get rid of the weak." If you disregard another human's life so easily that you would encourage them to commit suicide if they were suicidal, why do you care about oppressed groups? Is it fashion to you? Culture? Were your parents liberals? Do you not experience basic human empathy or are you stuck thinking what the people around you tell you to?

Time again, I've had feeble relationships with people who have alcohol and drug habits. It's tragic for someone to depend on substances to where they lose all connection to themselves and others. It reminds me of that "zombie" ant species that is controlled by fungus.

It's targeted towards women and children.

I think society believes that it takes abuse/sexual assault more seriously than it actually does, so when people come forward and make these allegations, there's an assumption there are going to be bigger consequences for the alleged perpetrator, and so they begin to sympathize with the accused. People believe women and children are more prone to lying. People assume many of these allegations to be some sort of "ploy" to "abuse the system" and gain advantages for the accuser, but when you think about the implications of falsely reporting abuse or sexual assault, it seems a lot less likely.

Children are very unlikely to report abuse. Children understand that doing so could make them vulnerable to both punishment from the parent abuser if the allegations weren't accepted, and to the state's custody which would take them from their parent(s). Children complain. Children exaggerate. But I think it is very, very unlikely that a child would seek to start an abuse case with collected evidence just because their parent took away their Xbox. That just doesn't make sense.

People really think that women have some privilege over men when it comes to assault allegations, but that's inverse to what actually happens. The assumption is that when a women makes an allegation, there's a fleet of support and everyone grabs for their torches and pitchforks. People are immediately skeptical about assault allegations, however, and maybe now more than ever are women accused of lying. It's virulent misogyny and it's revolting.

Individualism is the philosophy of a person's independence and self-reliance, their inner resourcefulness, as opposed to government or social support. This ideology is often associated with the Baby Boomer generation and the Right-wing party to oppose ethical propositions, such as the politics of welfare, and the psychology of philanthropy.

I believe individualism is comparable to nationalism in the sense that both of these concepts aren't inherently wrong, but there's some big issues with the perception of these values in a political and philosophical application.

As an atheist, I understand that people have limited control. We tend to think of ourselves as more in control than we are, through the exaggerated power of our egos, forgetting our limitedness in the process. As a leftist, my philosophy is the care of other human beings, individuals, and I both see the value and the impudence of individualism.

The issue with individualism is its "one-size-fits-all" lens; the presumption and oversimplification of the needs, capacity, and control of the individual. In an organic and probable world, it's ridiculous to assume every human being has the inner resources to achieve their physical and mental needs. We have shown as a civilization that human beings need each other, to give each other resources, to share ideas and advance, and for social consolation. To deny the 4.000 years of human civilization and the modern point of science, technology, and medicine, would be nothing short of arrogant.

"For me, colorblind parenting means something different. It comes from my training and research as a biological anthropologist. In my field, race is understood as a social, historical, and political construct that has little to do with the biology of an individual and their evolutionary history."

I want to stand and shout to the mental health world that you can't insert yourself in someone's perspective just because you have similar experiences. You can't truthfully tell someone you have the answer to all their problems by coercing them to follow your lifestyle, with the justification that you've "been through what they're going through." In other words, just because something works and is true for you doesn't certify it's relevant or effective knowledge for someone else.

We can share ours experiences and suggest things to people, but trying to force someone into seeings things a certain way or living a certain way is bad behavior. If that frustrates you, that's alright. You're allowed to feel upset in the disappointment that you believe you have valuable information, but you've gotta understand that people are going to do what they want, for better or worse, it doesn't matter. The objective is not to force anyone to do anything, but to put the story out there just to be out there, and if it helps someone, that's great.