HeckHound [he/him]

I don’t think we’ll ever see eye to eye here, because if I could choose to never have been born then I absolutely would. My life is just been filled with far too much anxiety and misery and disappointment for me to consider the experience worthwhile. If you would rather exist in misery than not exist at all that’s fine, but I don’t feel the same way and don’t appreciate being forced to exist without my consent.

Thanks, I appreciate it. I think one of the hardest things about that job were the times I felt like we were doing the patient more harm than good keeping them alive regardless of their quality of life. I don’t really know how to fix it, but our current systemic priority of keeping the body alive above all else leads to some truly horrific outcomes for some patients.

Tbh I’ve seen some shit as an EMT that makes me inclined to disagree. I saw too many infants just born dying, only being kept alive by machines and fading in and out of consciousness knowing only pain until they slowly die gasping for breath.

Seeing that a few times was one of the main reasons I could no longer believe in a loving God, and I don’t think I can believe that these babies were better off for existing like that instead of never being born at all.

Romney and Liz Cheney are the only significant ones I’m aware of

Disagree. They aren’t inherently attached to either, they just currently support them because they defend the hierarchy they love more than anything.

They’ll ban guns in a heartbeat if they think they’re more of a liability than an asset, just look at Reagan and the Mulford Act. And they’ll turn on the police as soon as it’s convient, just like they did at the Capitol on Jan. 6.

Yeah this is what happened for me, at least. I was working as an EMT and got real burned out during the pandemic and had to quit so I didn’t kill myself. The only reason I was able to do that and survive was because my wife and I both lost a grandparent and we were able to use our inheritance to pay off the last $50,000 on our student loans.

deleted by creator

Well, the Dems did pick someone only about 5% better than Trump so it checks out

Also it doesn’t help that he gets the most badass ending out of all the characters in the comic. He refuses to help cover up the mass murder of innocents and chooses to be executed rather than compromise his morals. Meanwhile Night Owl and Silk Spectre just pathetically accept defeat and retire and Dr. Manhattan tells Ozimandias all his plans are ultimately futile before fucking off into space forever. When I first read Watchmen as a teen I thought Rorschach was the only actual hero in it, mostly because of this scene.

Right!? It was just assumed that if a cop ever wanted to it would be for a good reason, like to strip search us to make sure we weren't hiding weapons or drugs. Because of course that's reasonable, hiding drugs and guns in a kid's underwear is exactly the kind of thing that gangbangers would do! And we all know that cops have the hardest job in the world, so it's ok if they need to do things that make us uncomfortable to keep themselves safe so they can protect us from all the dangerous thugs just itching to invade our home.

It's was basically just fascist thinking applied at the family level: we had to be prepared to give up our rights and autonomy to the Good authority figures because they are the only ones who can protect us from the Bad people who only want chaos and destruction. Fun stuff.

I don’t think this is anything new, or at least from my own experience it at least goes back well into the 90s. Back then if a local restaurant had asked cops to leave like this then not a single person in our church would have been caught dead there.

I was repeatedly taught growing up that enjoying superheroes too much was bad because it distracted from worshipping cops. “Real heroes don’t wear capes” and all that. I was taught never to talk to strangers, unless they were a cop. And never to let an adult see me naked or touch me, unless they were a doctor or a cop. Don’t underestimate how much middle-class America loves their police, it’s the only thing keeping them safe from the homeless and “urban thugs” that they’re terrified of.

Lmao I knew I’d read his name somewhere before:

The 9 Manliest Names in the World

Number 2: Dick Pound

The Name: Um ... we actually aren't quite sure why this one's on the list, to be honest. Dick Pound?

Hmmm. Dick Pound. An intern gave us this one. He insisted it be on the list. "Richard" isn't especially manly, and neither is British currency. Is this a trick? Dick Pound. Dick ... Pound

The Man: We're really drawing a blank on this guy. His Wikipedia page tells us he's a lawyer in the firm Stikeman Elliott and the chairman of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) based in Montreal.

Nope, nothing there (although "Stikeman Elliott" actually isn't too bad.) But, Dick Pound?

Dick?

Pound.

The Only Way It Could Have Been Manlier: Well, since we seem to be out of the loop on this one so we just asked the intern, who suggested adding "Brown" to the end of the name. Then, he said it over and over again, laughing like a hyena.

Yes of course it’s fucking awful. I’m a disabled, mentally ill anarchist, just so you know where I’m coming from here, and I find the idea that the State could simply assign me a mental illness and forcibly institutionalize me if I were to protest against State-sponsored injustice to be deeply dystopian and horrifying.

As for the rest, I’m really not sure what you’re getting at here. Are you trying to say that Alex Jones should be forcibly institutionalized for being mentally ill? Because fuck that, there’s plenty of actual reasons to shut him down without weaponizing the systemic mistreatment of those suffering from a mental crisis.

Well that’s horrifying and dystopian.

To save you from yourself, at least. So they bodged together a solution that would remove the offender from society and prevent him from possibly infecting others.

As a mentally ill person who’s worked as an EMT and seen this mentality put into action, all I can say is fuck you. Mental illness is not fucking infectious, and that kind of rhetoric is obviously designed to justify oppressing the people most in need to help.

I still have difficulty talking to therapists and get panic attacks about being forcibly institutionalized because some cop or burned-out psychologist decided it would be for “my own good”, because I saw it happen to others dozens of times and it horrifies me.

Yeah, that’s why I’m feeling pretty damn hopeless.

I agree somewhat, but in my personal experience they usually love the opportunity to move the conversation away from concrete details of the subject at hand (like the facts of the Rittenhouse case) and onto Biblical interpretation instead. They’re experts at the theological equivalent of pigeon chess, get dopamine from defending Christ online, and think that people giving them shit for it are just getting them eternal rewards in Heaven. Or at least that’s basically how it was for me when I was an young Evangelical chud.

That said, I do think it’s definitely useful when you want a chud to shut up about something and spend all their time writing bullshit about theology instead.

True, but their revolution was to seize and transform the State, which is a very far cry from abolishing it. I can easily imagine revolution occurring in the US in my lifetime, but I’m very pessimistic about it resulting in any kind of abolition of the State.

You’re right that several passages absolutely contradict their beliefs, but I used to be Evangelical and the sort of fundamentalists that support Rittenhouse really aren’t phased by any of this. They just claim the first one is specifically referring to insults and non-threatening violence, and therefore should be responded to with humility and grace, because being slapped is a painful insult and not a dangerous attack. They then point to all the times God tells people to buy swords and kill people to show that obviously God has no problem with murder in “self defense”.

And for the second, they believe that God is all-loving and that He chooses to kill people and torture them for eternity if they don’t literally beg His forgiveness before dying, so they see no conflict in loving someone while murdering them. Or as my parents are fond of saying, “We love you unconditionally, but that doesn’t mean we have to like you.”

Pointing out their hypocrisy and contradictory beliefs is still fun and all, I just don’t want people to think that fundies are unaware of these passages or anything. Christians have been twisting their Scriptures to justify their violence for around 1,500 years now, so simple gotchas like this don’t tend to do much.

I’ll feel hope when we are abolishing the State, which I admit doesn’t seem particularly likely to happen in my lifetime.