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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • So here’s what we do: we start a TikTok challenge. “Nickname November” or something like that, where you use a different name every day of the month for maximum confusion. Get a couple classes doing it, especially if there are any trans kids in the school, and you can see how far you can stress the system.

    For the schools that require physical signatures, that’ll piss people off right quick. For the ones that just use an automated email and call it a day, toss in a twist: have each student loudly announce their new name at the start of every class, AA style. Heck, get the school announcer in on it. “Chess club on Wednesday has been cancelled, and Squidward Jones is now going by Jackie McJackson Johnstone.”

    They want a ridiculous law to be followed? Okay, here you go.




  • Women can be sexist and nonwhite people can be racist: being a member of a marginalized group unfortunately doesn’t inherently keep someone from perpetuating the discrimination against said group. It’s absolutely true that a lot of, and definitely the majority, of homophobic people are straight, but a lot of the terror-based homophobia stems from projection.







  • If they were just odd they’d have a lot more success because you kind of have to be odd to be good at CS.

    It’s more the rapey, incely, tendency to see women as a different and incoherent species that has the women in CS either walking around with their hackles raised all the time or quietly slipping out the back door.


  • The anti-intellectualism, conspiracy prone tendency, and dependence upon self-published stuff that can’t make real arguments suggests to me that he’s not a very smart guy, and I’ll bet, deep down, he knows that. And that can be true even if he’s wildly intelligent in one area.

    My guess is that he wants to feel in control and in the know, and masks his fear that he’s not with crap like this. It’s been bubbling for a while, but it got nastier because of his divorce, so he’s reaching for anything that makes it not his fault permanently.

    No fact, argument, or intervention is going to hit home, both because this is emotion based and because it’s been going on for years. If you walk out of a good session with him and think you’ve made a dent, he’ll soothe his angry and confused mind by falling right back into his unhealthy habits, because they make him feel better.

    The most you can do isn’t to oppose, but to provide alternatives. He’s listening to these things in his car and getting mad all the time? Find some audiobooks on safe topics he likes and let him borrow them, and ask him follow up questions to engage him. He always reads some drivel right when he gets home from work? Tell him that you’ve started doing a fitness challenge and you want to see which of the two of you can walk more steps in a month. If he brings up a topic that’s going to be a problem, sigh or make a face and change the subject; ask about his kids. Talk up therapy and introduce it as a normal, healthy thing that has helped you or others out. The goal is to help him find peace and happiness and connection outside of his obsessions so he starts to rely on them less until he no longer needs to hate others in order to be happy as he is.

    The biggest issue is commitment and time. It can take far, far more effort to deprogram someone than for they to get hooked, and ideally it’d be a family or community aid sort of thing, because it’s a huge undertaking for one person.