- 9
- 38
Hello. Apologies for the lateness, some IRL happened and such and all that.
It is the 1st of Granite of the year 254. This year, you will be exposed to the brilliant tones of Dwarf Fortress as I have become too used to seeing it.
I have been left with a decently prosperous fortress, and the dwarves are happy.
If we are surviving, we can push onward. The deepest mark we have left in the stone is at Elevation 29, in our central stairwell. The depths of the world will make us much more prosperous, if we can exploit them.
...However, that will have to wait for a moment.
The siege is large, and our military is unlikely to win in a straight fight. A full alarm is declared, with the gates to the outside closed.
The dead reach the KOMPACTOR,
and it is hungry. Several dark hunters are pulverized.
Back to delving, then. An exploratory borehole is made in a section easily closed off.
...and somehow, we miss breaching anything at all. At -116, we hit semi-molten rock. Very well: magma forges are my favorite. Let's ignore the siege outside and get at this stuff.
After some careful delving, we find what we're looking for. Hot stuff.
Something else, too.
It sure is pretty, but this year's project is magma exploitation now.
First, a mood to help along, though. Exciting! Mineral gathers everything needed, and works away. The creation ends up being Ethbeshtaron Tureltunur, a chert scepter.
Not particularly interesting or valuable, but it is certainly a sign to move forward with leadership as we move into
Summer
Work on the forge-area starts in earnest, though dwarves are exceedingly cautious despite knowing full well that they're above the magma. Meanwhile, the undead climb the tower noticing the main gate is open, which is great for us as they go in one by one, dampening the mood but being easily dispatched. Due to the location on the borehole and weight of the stone, work is exceedingly slow as many dwarves must hold off the trickle of undead.
Autumn
Yep, work is slow. Bigger concerns on the surface, just boring ones.
To distract from the forgeworks, another mood! WillowWalker creates Tadenshal, a set of tetrahedrite mechanisms.
And at last the forge is up.
Winter
A smelter follows, with the Magma Crafting Area now fully completed. A decently-sized area for future storage is dug on the level above. To commemorate this occasion, pig iron and steel are ordered to be made off of this smelter. The one to make the first steel bar powered by the depths of Armok's creation is Erush Zefonsebïr, a Fish Cleaner necromancer named after nobody.
Lor Cattenkadol is possessed, going less smoothly. My assumption is that a type of thread we do not have is needed: yet, it is late winter, and finding cave spiders may prove too long an undertaking. Still, orders are sent in to make the stuff as soon as we have it. MatsurisAhoge is appointed as our manager, as the previous holder was needed for military work too often and orders kept not getting put into the list.
Overall, an uneventful year, with the dwarves only whittling at the invasion force while the underground project is worked on. But with access to magma, what might the next overseer be able to do? The dwarves are happy enough, the supplies are full enough, and there are many options available.
My successor @BFBugleberry will be sent the save shortly after I fricked up nameclicking the first time. Best of luck!
Player list in order of succession:
- Healthy : Cool, rationalist drama *checks previous usernames* nvm
- Impassionata : YES THIS IS AN IMPASSIONATA POST LMAO
- 76
- 50
Evening all.
I don't know how I feel about inhabiting this place. But I do know I can use it to draft.
Shiri's Slippers
Long time readers will know of my grudge with Scott Alexander, high priest of the SFBA Rationalist Cult. Previously it was suggested that we begin a bombing run of their spaces but I called a 'hold.' Honestly there's no time like the present.
Ultimately my problem with these people is that the demand the status of seriousness without being willing to do the work to be serious. In forums like /r/theschism or themotte, the topics of the day have been, bizarrely, subtracted out of the conversation.
The most important political conversation happening today is about the Supreme Court ruling on the immunity which a President enjoys.
You won't see this talked about.
See I used to think that Scott Alexander's "You Are Still Calling Wolf" was the most damaging piece Scott ever wrote. For his own reputation. For the political damage it did to the brains of his followers.
Scott Alexander doesn't think of himself as a cult leader of course, even though his followers do, and have regular struggle sessions about this fact. See this hilarious exchange in which a twitter thread praises Scott Alexander for not being a prophet.
Now I can't assume everyone has familiarity with the spiritual mechanisms Scott Alexander has engaged with. To recap: Scott Alexander self-consciously wrote Unsong to imitate schizophrenic individuals attempting to write a holy text. Scott Alexander copied the prophet motion without, apparently, understanding what it meant that he did this for his followers.
Then his followers didn't do this either.
The other very very funny recurrence at work here is the SFBA Rationalist Cult's founder, whose work included a number of overtly spiritual calls, led to an early incident in the cult history where they linked hands and sang "We are not a cult." To this day SFBA Rationalist Cultists, when they gather, engage in praise of the founder under an ambiguous amount of irony. And as you all know at this point: in a post-ironic world, all expression is genuine. (I'm referring here to the Valentine's Day musical that some postrats put on as a dating show.)
So these people all have this habitual denial of their spiritual connection. They Think They're Atheists, and atheists can't be in a cult. And if it is a cult, they think it's a benign one, a harmless one, if they're pressed. But secretly, they believe they are an elevated specimen of human thinker, and this was accomplished with Shiri's Slippers.
I thought they were a harmless cult when I first encountered them. The most devastating review of the founder's work was always: what's novel in it isn't good, and what's good in it isn't novel. The SFBA Rationalist Cult literally bricked a bunch of minds in the 2010s and we're only still figuring this out.
Because the consequences of Scott Alexander's foray into politics were that he was one of the foremost beacons of fascism denialism. These people all had a grudge against the academy. They think they're better than schooling. But then they create their own forms and fall down dead wrong.
It turns out that the fools at the academy are better equipped.
There's this crackpot tinge of resentment against the fools at the academy for rejecting their founder's bad writing as bad writing. This is one of the things that make them less a harmless cult and more a destructive torment nexus of incompetence. It's not a coincidence that these people developed idiot confidence and SBF is now under arrest for Big Fraud. They're all frauds. They can't even function as a cult because of their bizarre denial complex around their cultishness.
The consequentialist argument against the utility of the SFBA Rationalist Cult goes something like:
The consequences of Scott Alexander's writing is an island of people separated from mainstream intellectual politics. They're really alone out there.
Fascism
At this point I think it's more important than ever to drag Scott Alexander's flock kicking and screaming into accepting that they were wrong about the fascism. That doesn't mean that I need them to immediately endorse the use of the term 'fascism.'
If there's one thing that I wish they understood, it's that whatever it is that Trumpism represented, the people who were warning of the danger Trump faced were not overreacting. The wolf was real. This incompetence and waste of energy in our politics is an authoritarian bound now by legal processes. They seemed to think that Trump could never succeed at instituting a fascistic purge, and that therefore the people who were warning of Trump's desire to implement a fascist purge were overreacting.
Whether or not the wolf can succeed is somewhat independent of whether or not the wolf exists.
But the real bad wrong turn that Scott Alexander took was writing "Shiri's Scissors."
Shiri's Scissors
Scott postulated a class of controversial statement that caused irrational behavior in people, dividing them from one another. And I was confused by this at first because I was at this point understanding that these people coin phrases as if by instinct. What Scott Alexander was pointing to with "Shiri's Scissors" was the mere word
CONTROVERSIAL.
This is what made Shiri's Scissors an unnecessary concept and bad writing. Controversial topics have always existed.
And I tried to take this up with someone in Scott Alexander's circle and they resisted my notion that it was a pointless concept.
Only now do I understand that there's an alchemical process at work in Shiri's Scissors: it allows people to view controversy as enabling irrational behavior and therefore discarding them.
Instead of controversy being an invitation to dispute, a marker around discourse's present topics of conversation, Shiri's Scissor allowed these cultists to subtract themselves from discourse.
Controversial topics have always existed. Concepts which justified disregarding people who reacted to controversial topics have not.
With Shiri's Scissors
Scott Alexander Cut The Cord
TETHERING
His Cult
To Political Reality
Whether or not you want to use the term fascist, the gathering of physical forces armed with actual weapons to assault the Capitol on 1/6 was an act of war which is exactly the kind of thing the leftists have been warning about. But Scott Alexander and his flock aren't tuned into the Supreme Court hearing today on the most important subject of most thinking minds.
They put Shiri's Slippers on and just walked away. Right off of the map (IN POLITICS THE TERRITORY IS THE MAP IS THE TERRITORY) into a domain of their own making, still bitter at the fact that other people dared find their intellectual contribution bad.
See Shiri's Scissors/Slippers, as a concept, create a reality in which there's just these bizarre artifacts in discourse which are incomprehensible. It makes discourse not just unnecessary but impossible because it contains within it the assumption of the unreasonable (AND THEREFORE, TO THESE BRICKED CULTISTS, INCOMPREHENSIBLE) nature of those with which they interacted with politically.
Postscripts
Cult Takes on Christian Nationalism
An interesting sampling of the topics du jour of these spaces. Both TheMotte and TheSchism platformed this curious bit of "rationality" around the decrease in Christian Nationalism by raw percent. I don't think it's a stretch to say that this is motivated reasoning: these people want to believe that fears of a Christian theocracy are overstated. TheMotte, and TheSchism.
It's not within their capacity to understand that a threatened minority might resort to fascism, the fascism might drive people away from the church, and that Christian Nationalism can still be a very real threat. These are the people who have said nothing about the Trump Supreme Court case.
Cult Takes on Lab Leak Origins for Coronavirus
Now I will admit that I'm more willing to believe that COVID came from zoonosis than I was before engaging this material. But I want to share some reading I've done in Blood Money, a book about Chinese mindsets and tactics in dealing with the US as an adversary.
Roughly, the Wuhan lab was built with the help of French scientists. Then the Chinese government kicked the French scientists out.
It was always a possible black site.
Scott Alexander's coverage of his cult's perfect thinking about perfect thinking about viruses is one of the worst things Scott Alexander wrote, but not the most damaging.
As mentioned earlier, the DEFUSE grant was rejected. Further, the grant said that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was responsible for finding the viruses, and the University of North Carolina would do all the gain-of-function research. This was a reasonable division of labor, since UNC was actually good at gain-of-function research, and WIV mostly wasn't. They had done a few very simple gain-of-function projects before, but weren't really set up for this particular proposal and were happy to leave it for their American colleagues.
Even if WIV did try to create COVID, they couldn't have. As Yuri said, COVID looks like BANAL-52 plus a furin cleavage site. But WIV didn't have BANAL-52. It wasn't discovered until after the COVID pandemic started, when scientists scoured the area for potential COVID relatives. WIV had a more distant COVID relative, RATG-13. But you can't create COVID from RATG-13; they're too different. You would need BANAL-52, or some as-yet-undiscovered extremely close relative. WIV had neither.
Are we sure they had neither? Yes. Remember, WIV's whole job was looking for new coronaviruses. They published lists of which ones they had found pretty regularly. They published their last list in mid-2019, just a few months before the pandemic. Although lab leak proponents claimed these lists showed weird discrepancies, this was just their inability to keep names consistent, and all the lists showed basically the same viruses (plus a few extra on the later ones, as they kept discovering more). The lists didn't include BANAL-52 or any other suitable COVID relatives - only RATG-13, which isn't close enough to work.
Could they have been keeping their discovery of BANAL-52 secret? No. Pre-pandemic, there was nothing interesting about it; our understanding of virology wasn't good enough to point this out as a potential pandemic candidate. WIV did its gain-of-function research openly and proudly (before the pandemic, gain-of-function wasn't as unpopular as it is now) so it's not like they wanted to keep it secret because they might gain-of-function it later. Their lists very clearly showed they had no virus they could create COVID from, and they had no reason to hide it if they did.
If there's one thing I want you to understand, it's this:
These people have almost no ability to understand deception.
The notion that China lies about the purposes of the lab just doesn't enter the picture.
Are you sure the Chinese would not use US science to create a virus that then escaped?
And then lie about it?
We're not going to know the truth. China may never reveal what it knows. But these people are not very good at finding the truth because they're not very good at understanding lies.
And these are the people who believe that AI can be 'aligned.'
They fundamentally don't understand humans. They don't understand deception.
They refuse to see the wolf of the present political era. They have deliberately chosen to walk away from mainstream politics with their Magic Stupid Slippers.
This is what a truly dangerous cult looks like. Most dangerous cults self-destruct. The bad ones are those that get big enough to confuse a large enough number of people.
POV: You're Scott Alexander and you're tired at people yelling at you about the fascism your side missed.
There's also a pattern I want to discourage, where one side will come up with some new trivial finding, or re-dredge up and re-package something that everyone already everyone else had already considered, then release it as THE SMOKING GUN! Then they release another SMOKING GUN!, and another, and after five or six SMOKING GUNS, they say their opponents are stubborn and refuse to yield to evidence, since they've obstinately ignored every single SMOKING GUN! without changing their probability even a little bit.
I've saved the chaser. This is how Scott chose to close his coverage.
But fifth, if the coronavirus' story is a comedy, all of this - Rootclaim, the debate, the $100K - is a tragedy. Saar got $100 million, decided to devote a big part of his life to improving human reasoning, and came up with a really elegant system. He was so confident in his system, and in the power of open discussion, that he risked his money and reputation on an accept-all-comers debate offer . Then some rando who nobody had ever heard of accepted the challenge, turned out to be some kind of weird debate savant, and won, turning what should have been Rootclaim's moment of triumph into a bitter defeat. Totally new kind of human suffering, worthy of Shakespeare.
I look forward to the movie, especially seeing who plays the dashing young blogger who helped the participants meet.
POV: You're the high priest of a cult of reason, worshiping a false god of perfect information, perfectly understood. These people don't just believe that salvation is possible through brainthinking alone, they believe that they have achieved salvation and are enlightened by their own intelligence.
Even as they stand in proud ignorance of contemporary politics.
) gets bullied by fitnesscirclejerk for how he reacted to a simple "Take a Dump" comment. 
- 11
- 31
Online fitness communities have a huge problem with 
posters asking stupid questions about weight loss because "eat less" is apparently a difficult concept. Lucky for us, the brave OG /r/fitnesscirclejerk users were around to shit on people all day. This image explains FCJ
I'm way too lazy to link funny comments, find your own drama, it all starts with a fairly simple post.
Best way to lift to keep numbers/strength while losing 5-7 lbs?
Im just doing 5x5 right now, i think Starting Strength, but I need to lose about 5-7 lbs
. Should I just keep lifting the same amount of weight that I am now while trying to lose weight?
I hope that made sense, Like If I lift more I would get bigger so should I just stay at my current lifting numbers or even lessen the weight im lifting?
It takes only 2 minutes to get a response
Take a dump
Edit: Thank you to whoever downvoted me for asking a question that was not covered in the FAQ. You all are a great help to people looking for help. While answers like "Take a dump." are the top comment. /s No wonder people say avoid Fittit.
EDIT: THANKFULLY THERE WERE PEOPLE HERE WHO PMd ME WHO WERE IDIOTS AND COULD ACTUALLY READ THAT ANSWERED MY ACTUAL QUESTION WHEN THEY SAW IT WAS NOT ANSWERED IN THE FAQ.
THE IMMATURE LOSERS WHO ARE POLLUTING THIS SUBREDDIT SHOULD PROBABLY TRY AND IMPROVE YOURSELF. ITS SAD WHEN PEOPLE WOULD RATHER RIDICULE THEN TEACH. PLEASE DONT REPRODUCE.
Now normally this would end here, but for some reason he keeps posting and people just keep telling him to take a dump, (i'm not quoting stuff, go find all the take a dump easter eggs)
He even makes his own SRD thread Downvotes rain down after downvoters keep answering question that was never asked.
A month later he comes back to gloat
A 7 lb. dump? Darn. Must have hurt dat dere O-ring
A good redditor posted this, unfortunately your sad kind outnumbers the opposite.
Ugh. Why do people like you exist? You are not the dark nor the light in a painting. You are simply without purpose. I can't imagine a life that involves saying the foulest of shit just in hopes of making someone, somewhere, feel a little bit worse.
The worst part about your bullshit, is that it wasn't even shocking to the point where some people could possibly find it funny. You are the burnt edge of a poptart. Something that doesn't even have the impact to ruin... just something that needs to be broken off and discarded.
How meaningless of a life you live.
This spreads to other parts of reddit too.
FCJ: This just in: OldManSteve still being told to take a dump
Watch me steer OldManSteve in the right direction
More random content
A year later this is still going on and /u/oldmansteve comments in /r/fitnesscirclejerk
The moral of this story: Take a Dump fatties.
- 42
- 55
One year ago, on this very day, http://rDrama.net was changed forever. The four decadent Houses found themselves faced with their dark reflection: House Edgy. This accursed house of rejects and malcontents has tormented dramatards ever since. Our antics are as varied as our users, who all have their very own unique Kingdom Hearts OCs.
VICTORIES OVER SITE ADMINS
We gave Joan cancer
Washed-up has-been /u/Joan_Wayne_Gacy thought it would be good fun to relive his glory days of being on top of /r/drama by making a cutest pets competition. Unfortunately, he failed to consider that cute animals are an affront to House Edgy's sensibilities. When submissions came, our very own @TheDunceonMaster submitted the worm Grek, as worms crawl in the Earth's filthy skin, just as we listen to "CRAWLING IN MY SKIN THESE WOUNDS THEY WILL NOT HEAL" on loop. After rallying the edgelords, Grek won with 68 votes, beating the admin plant pick,
@The_Homocracy's beloved Booberry. (We're chill with Homocracy now, he's one of us.) This hurt Joan's feelings. But a deal's a deal, and the money we earned from winning the contest bought us /h/edgy. No capybara shenanigans involved. Joan got cancer shortly after and has been removed as an admin and probably died. Afterwards, I fed Grek to my pet frog because even winners deserve tragic endings.
We got Idio axed.
Our very own @Don_wei exposed Idio as a p-dophile. After Idio banned Don for speaking truth to power, we took our revenge. The resulting fallout let to us taking over the entire site, plastering it with anti-Idio sentiment. Before the day was over, Idio was removed as an admin, and our very own
@HeyMoon was selected as his replacement.
VICTORIES OVER OTHER HOUSES
The Ping Group
!edgelords is the biggest ping group of all House ping groups, with 60 users. House Furry's !furries has 52, House Vampire's !vampires has 23, House Femboy's !bottoms has 11, and House Racist's !aryans has a pathetic 4. WE ARE BIGGER THAN FURRY AND RACIST COMBINED.
The Holes
During the past year, both /h/vampire and /h/racist were deleted due to inactivity. While they have been re-created: the message is clear. Vampires just don't give enough shits about themselves to maintain a hole. /h/racist, on the other hand, was taken down by House Edgy sleeper agent @SlackerNews' web of alts and spies. /h/edgy was crowdfunded from the start and has never been deleted.
Racist's Breakdown
Aside from their ping group and hole, House Racist are in a bad spot. Their supreme leader, @Sleepy_Major_General, who tried to strike down House Edgy at its very creation, has been demopped and left the site, as well as his lieutenant,
@Penny. Racists are aimless and lifeless, almost as dead as Vampire.
JUST COOL SHIT WE DID FOR OURSELVES
By the way, did you know that House Edgy has the most OC of any House? Take a look at the beautiful artwork made by us:
and
and
by @hyt4
and
and
by @Jumm
and
by @Elon_SUSk
and
by @Cdace
And finally, the BLACKSOULS emoji line by @Chapose
THE FUTURE?
This last year has been great, but I have an announcement to make regarding our futures.
HOUSE EDGY IS NOT A REAL HOUSE.
HOUSE EDGY IS THE ONLY REAL HOUSE.
What have the other Houses done that can even compare to us? Icons for their names and awards? They didn't do those, those were granted by jannies. What other House has done the operations we have? What other House had to fund its own hole initially? What other House can compare to the amount and quality of OC that we make? None.
House Vampire, House Furry, House Femboy, and House Racist: you will never be real Houses.
- 14
- 22
Academia represents both the best and worst in our species. It is through academic institutions have helped humans share knowledge, helping us to build on our already massive body of giants. It's a cliche statement but Isaac Newton was correct when he wrote “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” I've personally experienced this phenomenon, and with great gratitude, I thank past writers for the concepts and ideas that now inform my own writing. I may not be a literary giant in any sense of the word, but the work I produce for my personal enjoyment is a culmination of all I have learned from my predecessors.
On the darker side of things, academia is a highly bureaucratic system often molded by politics over knowledge. This type of environment tends to attract some of the worst kinds of people in society - intelligent but malicious. They crave the prestige of being part of the intellectual club - perhaps even adding the coveted Dr. to their name - and climbing the power structures.
Academia is far from the only place that functions in this manner, and I'm sure you can think of other workplaces that inevitably end up what millennials would call “toxic”. Many factors lead to this situation, and today I'd like to discuss just one element - mean girls.
To be clear from the outset, this isn't a post that aims to attack women or criticize their existence in the workplace. I believe that any country that doesn't allow women in the workforce instantly halves their intellectual capacity. I am focusing on one kind of woman in the workplace and the effects they tend to have.
With that being said, I do apologize if I come across as misogynistic at any point. If you feel that I am being sexist, please comment.
What is meanness?
Anyone has the capacity to be mean. We've all been mean at some point, some of us have done it today.
At this point, I should make something clear. Meanness, as we use them, refers to intentionally enacted cruelty. It requires a malicious mind, which we all have. So here's an example to show what I am attempting to illustrate. A soldier kills their enemy with a headshot. That's violent, but it's not mean. The soldier then walks up to their victim and spits in their face. Now we're dealing with meanness. The intent is cruelty for cruelty's sake.
An important aspect of cruelty is that the one acting cruelly expects to receive nothing except the knowledge that their target is in pain or suffering, either physically or psychologically. Another example. A group of soldiers gain access to the dressing rooms of their opponents. They take all the clothing and equipment to gain an edge in the war. That's not mean, that's warfare. They also collectively poop in the middle of the room. Now that is mean. They gain nothing but the knowledge that their opponents will be humiliated when they find a steaming shit. Cruelty for its own sake.
Taking things a little further, when we talk about meanness in the modern day, we almost are never referring to heinous acts. A mother abusing their child is mean, but we'd seldom call it that. We'd use a “stronger” word like heinous. If the mother pranks the child by waking them up with ice water, that's what we'd call mean.
What do mean girls do?
First, we'd need to outline what a mean girl is. These are women who have advanced into adulthood and continued high school behavior but with the benefit of experience and finesse. They're not going to trip you on the corridor, call you a b-word, or tell you to your face that you're not invited to their party. No, it's a different monster altogether.
When the mean girl acts, it's often so well-crafted that you can never truly call it out. Genuine cases of “microaggressions”. They're lawful evil, never breaking the rules as they break your soul. Oftentimes, it'll be years later and you'll still be hurt by what a mean girl said
because the statement itself was innocuous but obviously deeply insulting
. It's a trick women are particularly good at pulling off, and I'll give examples a little later.We need to talk about two species of mean girls - the equal and the senior.
The senior mean girl
When I mention the senior mean girl, I'm referring to a woman who is a higher rank than you in the institution. It doesn't have to be too much. She's just the project manager, for example. It gets worse, of course. The senior mean girl can be your boss, full-time supervisor, teacher, or department manager.
Carole Stephens states:
Mean girl behavior can be used to demonstrate the power a senior female attorney has over a novice female attorney. When treatment is flagrant, brazen, and unashamed, itcan be expressed in sexual harassment, physical abuse, biased hiring practices, or exposing women to a hostile, male-dominated workplace.
https://www.proquest.com/openview/f72a25218726baada8d740f118be4ff1/1
I've experienced such a mean girl. They weren't delusional about who they were and what they were doing. They explicitly told me “I like fighting”. I promise you they feel 0 guilt about what they do and in some cases they see themselves as morally justified. During my time in university, I got a glimpse of the environment. Holy shit, they literally make each other cry with their words, and scheme against each other for the same Chad. It's mind-blowing. My current workplace has like 2 women total and it's so based, none of this nonsense happens. Just goals to reach and shitposting on Slack. Women are incapable of constructing such a workplace. A majority female workplace will eventually involve someone making someone else cry.
Mean girls use the following strategies:
- Putting you in impossible situations
You are verbally given Section A of a task to complete. When you're done, you're scolded for not doing Section B as well. There are many other ways this can happen. The point is that you're made to seem completely incompetent for your inability to complete a task you were never fully instructed to do.
- Hanging their power over you
It's never explicitly stated of course. They'll never say “I'm the boss, you do what I say.” The threats are much more subtle. It'll be something like “if you keep doing that, we won't be colleagues anymore.” She is straight up telling you “do what I say or you're fired.” The consequence is that you know feel like you're walking on eggshells at work, terrified that you might piss her off. Of course, this behavior isn't exclusive to women, but it's definitely part of the mean girl arsenal.
- Displays of power
This can be as simple as standing over you as you work. You can't say anything about it because she's not doing anything wrong. But when you're sitting and someone is standing and looking down on you, it's obvious they want you to intimately know the power difference between the two of you.
Sometimes it's little verbal comments meant to make you feel small or stupid. For example, a meeting tomorrow begins at 8am. Mean girl: “And that means 8am, Sneedman. Alright?.” Nothing explicitly bad was said, but it was still an act of minimizing someone by suggesting they're so flawed they need special instructions to function.
- Public shaming and humiliation
This is perhaps the most powerful tool in their arsenal. A mean girl with power over you will never call you into their office for a private discussion if they have a problem. Instead, they'll wait for a meeting where all the staff is there, then you will be chastised.
They have to wait for a public crowd to start a full explanation of every frickup you've had at work. If they have enough power, it can be an astonishing thing to witness. When I was in university, I witnessed a woman with power completely eviscerate someone during a meeting, going full-on personal, to a room full of silence.
One of the biggest benefits of being the senior mean girl is that nobody can do anything about it. Nothing at all. If a senior mean girl snaps at you at work until you're trembling, then that's that. Nobody's going to help you nor will she face consequences.
There are so many ways to be absolutely vicious while still remaining perfectly within bureaucratic limits. They are the masters of putting up a finger to your face but never truly touching you. The senior mean girl can verbally attack you in a room full of people and nobody will help you for two important reasons:
1. They are afraid of becoming the next target
2. They don't want to lose their job or jeopardize their career
That's why co-workers will stay silent when they see bullying in the workplace. The bully controls their paychecks! You know what's going on is wrong but you also gotta eat.
The shaming game
Senior mean girls in power in academia will often play this game, and be sure that it is a game. It begins like this: You wait for a public event, somewhere liberals of your ilk will be convening. If it is a regular conference where academics give presentations followed by a crowd asking questions, you raise your hand, you point to your target, and you claim that they are a racist. Your reasoning doesn't have to be too strong. You can point to a single sentence taken out of context in a book they wrote a decade earlier. You can accuse them of saying something racist in the very presentation they were giving that day, whether or not the speaker intended to be racist.
The target is now caught in a Kafka trap. If they deny the claim, they seem more racist. If they admit it, they are now labeled a racist and may be shunned by the academic community. What happens next? Well, during my time in my department, some cried, some did actually fight back, sticking to their principles, but most were simply dejected, remained silent, and offered no rebuttal.
Mean girls are bullies in the truest sense. A bully isn't someone who attacks someone of the same power level. That's just a fight. A bully is someone who enacts cruelty on someone incapable of fighting back.
The consequence? You go to work walking on eggshells, afraid you might trigger the senior mean girl who genuinely has the ability to frick up your life on a whim. Never get yourself in this position. Always have an escape route, money saved, and don't tolerate mean girls in power for too long.
The equal mean girl
Most of the time, you'll be dealing with the equal mean girl. She works in the same office as you, maybe even the same job. On the surface, nothing is differentiating the two of you as professionals, but the mean girl will make sure you feel much smaller than them.
Her plan of attack is almost always shunning. The mean girl will never tell you to frick off. It's more subtle than that. You just don't get invited to events, then the mean girl makes it clear that you missed out by describing the event while you're in earshot. The pain of being shunned is the aim. She wants to upset you.
Shunning can also take the form of convincing you that nobody would want to work with you. It's not that you're arbitrarily being shunned - it's happened because you're deathly flawed in some way - you're too fat, not smart enough, you're a liar, and in some cases “you're a racist!”.
In addition to shunning, you also get gossip which is an insanely effective way to frick up someone's life whether you're male or female. I'm being serious, if you don't like someone and you can't fight them, spread rumors effectively instead.
The best rumors have an inkling of truth in them: “Sneedman visits the pig farm.” They then get twisted: “Sneedman fricks pigs, here is a picture of him going to the pig farm.” As many men wiser than myself have stated: when women want to hurt you, they go for reputational damage.
They may take a genuine flaw of yours - maybe you do lie sometimes. This flaw will then be magnified and spread to everyone to ensure that nobody even talks to you anymore. You're no longer a person who told a lie - you're a pathological liar, and nobody should speak to you ever because nothing you say is true. Viola! Now you have no reputation and you're shunned.
Lastly, mean girls are linguistic geniuses. They know how to say the perfect things with plausible deniability yet still clearly being harsh. I'll give you an example. Once a woman asked me why I'm vegetarian. I explained that I had read some books that changed my mind. Her response “Oh, so you just read those books.” There's nothing obviously objectional about that, but it's an obvious insult. Through this strategy, you are stuck with the pain of being insulted but with the inability to insult back without looking like the instigator.
Carole Stephens states it best:
Mean girl incivility encourages women to engage in unkind exchanges while remaining affable and approachable. The more socially adept a woman is, the better she is at engaging in mean girl incivility in a discrete way.
Conclusion
These tactics are psychologically damaging. Many don't recover from these experiences of being a target of mean girls at work. A lot of the research is geared toward mean girls doing it to each other, but rest assured mean girls can also frick up men.
With legs full of scars I have permanently darned myself to inceldom. Even if a woman did like my personality, she would still have to deal with the mess I've made of myself. The worst part is that I know it's not over. The darkness will return and I will crawl back to the razorblade as I always have.
I am forced to accept that I'll never experience intimacy and love with a woman despite craving it. In addition to being 5 foot 1, I am also covered in self-harm scars.
What does a hug feel like? I don't think I've experienced one this year. Also, have you ever dealt with a mean girl? I'd like to hear the stories.
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I've been put on lithium for Bipolar Disorder. Apparently it's potentially toxic so I have to take blood samples frequently. My psychiatrist wants me to be hospitalized again but I refused because I don't want to and I don't think I need to. I just admitted I have suicidal ideation but no plans. So long as I don't go manic, I'll still be able to refuse. I'm getting good sleep lately so I don't think a manic episode is coming anytime soon. Shit only gets bad when I only get an hour of sleep and feel fine afterwards. Let's talk a bit about South African history.
Following the end of apartheid in 1994, there were fears that revenge was going to be the norm. Several pieces of writing can be found on this "Swaart gevaar" or "black danger" that would come with democracy. Some whites fled, but many decided to stay and embrace the multicultural society. To help heal the wounds of apartheid, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was held. The aim was to air out all the crimes of humanity that occurred. Those who gave honest testimony would be given amnesty while those who were deemed to be politically motivated would face justice. It was also a platform for victims to tell their stories.
Instead of retributive justice, the country turned to restorative justice, which is an approach to justice that personalizes the crime by having the victims and the offenders mediate a restitutive agreement to the satisfaction of each. Victims take an active role in the process. Meanwhile, offenders take meaningful responsibility for their actions, taking the opportunity to right their wrongs and redeem themselves, in their own eyes and in the eyes of the community. This approach is based on a theory of justice that considers crime and wrongdoing to be an offense against an individual or community, rather than the State.
Do you agree with restorative justice, or do you think retribution is superior? Mull over this as we delve into the intricacies of the TRC.
Reasons for the TRC
It shouldn't need to be stated, but several atrocities occurred during apartheid. This is without considering the several freedom fighters who went "missing". Some of the most tragic incidents are:
In 1960, the Sharpeville Massacre occurred, an event that garnered international attention and outrage. When protestors convened outside a police station to protest pass laws, police opened fire and killed 69 people
Another notable protest occurred on the 16th of June 1976 when students in Soweto marched to Orlando West Junior Secondary School. Teargas and bullets were released, resulting in fatalities of children. Most famously, Hector Peterson was one of the victims.
Subsequent waves of protests meant that by the end of the year, the government issued an official (although likely underestimated) casualty figure of 575 dead. This was the heyday of apartheid, but it led to complete condemnation from the international community and sanctions were put in place. Eventually, when F.W. de Klerk came into power, apartheid laws were slowly repealed. In 1994, the first democratic election was held and the ANC was voted into power, allowing Nelson Mandela to become president just four years after serving a 27-year prison sentence.
South Africa experiences hope
Americans will be familiar with the metaphor of the melting pot. In South Africa, we have the rainbow nation. When democracy was won, a wave of optimism swept the nation. Along with this came the idea of the prosperous, racially integrated ‘rainbow nation'. The idea became so popular that the rainbow became a shorthand for a nation seeking reconciliation and unity after decades of racial and political tensions.
The TRC consisted of three committees: Human Rights Violations, Amnesty, and Reparation and Rehabilitation. For the first time, the TRC process allowed for the voicing of injustices rendered audible in the public domain, and harrowingly revealed the pain, grief, and trauma that had previously been borne in silence and anonymity by victims and their families. The TRC was also aimed at a restoration of humanity, and comprised a drama of national proportions.
Significantly, however, four kinds of narrative truth were recognised by the TRC:
factual – objective, empirical, impartial, legal, forensic
social or dialogue – the kinds established by social interaction, discussion and debate
subjective – personal memories and experiences
reconciliatory – stories about healing that were future-oriented.
The first TRC hearing was held on 15 April 1996 in East London. When Fort Calata's widow, Nomonde, let out a piercing wail on remembering her husband's murder, the entire East London hall, led by Bishop Desmond Tutu, stood up and began singing Senzenima – what have we done? – a chorus to her agony, those present taking on her trauma collectively. (Many who testified to apartheid atrocities were having to ‘speak the unspeakable', and were reduced to conveying their pain in a realm outside of language.) Fort Calata was one of the Cradock Four, a group which included Matthew Goniwe, Sparrow Mkonto and Sicelo Mhlawuli, who were murdered by security operatives in the Eastern Cape in June 1985.
Over 50 public hearings were held over 1888 days, more than 20000 reports/statements on 38000 incidents involving 14000 deaths were taken from victims/survivors (although only about 2000 were heard in the public hearings themselves, i.e. 10%), and 7116 applications were made for amnesty (of which 1167 were granted, i.e.16%). Amnesty could only be applied for in respect of acts committed with the complicity, if not proven approval, of apartheid leaders (e.g. the military, government and security forces) in pursuit of alleged enemies of the state. The Amnesty Committee concluded its work on amnesty applications by perpetrators in May 2001 (3 years after the five-volume TRC report was released in October 1988), but work continues to prosecute those not granted amnesty. Some ex-members of the Security Police and Bureau of Civil Cooperation have been serving prison sentences for murder, illegal arms possession and fraud e.g. Eugene de Kock, the Vlakplaas Commander (known as “Prime Evil” in the media), Dirk Coetzee and Craig Williamson.
Post TRC - Was forgiveness worth it?
Jacob Dlamini's text Native Nostalgia which discusses the possibility of the existence of a nostalgia for a pre-democracy past. In the introduction, Dlamini provides statements from South Africans who reveal a dissatisfaction with post-1994 society and a longing for the past. anxieties surrounding life in the new South Africa have resulted in some portions of the population believing that their survival was more secure during apartheid. Thus, while the arrival of democracy may have brought some hope to South Africa, views of the country's socio-political state after 1994 have led to scepticism regarding the possibility for post-Apartheid prosperity.
These views are exemplified in the case of South African Brandon Huntley who applied for refugee status in Canada, claiming that the government failed to protect him from racially motivated attacks. His lawyer, South African Russell Kaplan, claims that one of Huntley's intentions was to inform the world “what a sickly place South Africa is”.
The biggest setback is the lack of change that followed the TRC. The thing about rainbows is that the colors are separate, which is the case in South Africa. Arial photos taken by Johnny Miller reveal that economic divisions created by Apartheid still stratify the Western Cape. Using a drone, he captures how the segregation is not created by any natural phenomena but instead is caused by the manmade divisions of Apartheid. The photo below is of Lwandle/Nomzamo, a township that was designated for black people by the Group Areas Act of 1950. It was originally built as a low-cost place for workers to live.
According to a 2011 census, Nomzamo still has a black population of over 90%, revealing that demographics have not changed since 1994 and society is still segregated racially. These racial segregations trace economic lines.
Another photograph taken by Miller features Manenberg. This township was created in 1966 for coloured people after District Six and other areas were declared whites-only regions.
Like Nomzamo, Manenberg mostly retains its pre-democracy demographics thus over 80% of its residents are coloured. Furthermore, housing continues to be a problem and the widespread poverty breeds crimes and gangs.
Questions to ask yourself
Was the TRC a good idea?
Was justice served?
Would South Africa be better off with a tribunal?
Would South Africa be better off with white genocide following the end of apartheid?
Did the TRC do anything good or was it just a show to brush away a bloody past?
To end off, I'd like to post an interview with a jail warden who once jailed political prisoners but now works as a tour guide at Robben Island where Nelson Mandela was held. Do you think he received justice? Hmmmmm...
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