ZUBY: on Twitter - "If you're confused by why victim mentality is so attractive:
1/ It provides a permanent alibi for personal failures
2/ It attracts attention
3/ It generates sympathy
4/ It acts as a 'social currency' with likeminded people
5/ It disguises negative traits & actions as virtues
In short, victim mentality allows one to play life on 'easy mode' by never taking accountability or responsibility. You can even be resentful and cruel towards others, and 'justify' it. In the long term, this mentality loses though. It limits joy, relationships & contentedness."
Addendum: Plus, free stuff
The Victims’ Race - "14-year-old Hannah Smith of Leicestershire, England, took her own life. She had been receiving cruel messages on the social networking site Ask.fm for months, and her parents concluded that cyberbullying was the main cause of her suicide. But then evidence emerged that the hatred Hannah had been receiving came from … herself—98 percent of the messages were posted from the IP address of the computer she was using. This tragic event inspired a research project by Sameer Hinduja and colleagues at the Cyberbullying Research Center in Florida. Their analysis of around 5,500 teenagers produced some surprising results: “We knew we had to study this empirically,” Hinduja remarked, “and I was stunned to discover that about 1-in-20 middle- and high-school-age students have bullied themselves online. This finding was totally unexpected, even though I’ve been studying cyberbullying for almost 15 years.”... If teenagers are prepared to harm themselves in cyberspace to attain the status of victim, it should not be especially surprising that some adults do so in the real world. In the most notorious example of this behaviour, actor Jussie Smollett told police he had been the victim of a racist and homophobic attack... This was not an isolated incident. In his book Hate Crime Hoax, political scientist Wilfred Reilly analysed 346 alleged hate crimes and found that fewer than a third were genuine. He provides detailed descriptions of almost a hundred high-profile cases that never actually happened, most of which were supposed to have taken place on university campuses. Reilly concludes that, contrary to popular belief, we are not experiencing an epidemic of hate crimes, but an epidemic of hate crime hoaxes perpetrated by people searching for public attention and sympathy. Nor is it only hate crimes that are the subject of hoaxes and false accusations. A meta-analysis conducted by Australian scholars Claire E. Ferguson and John M. Malouff in 2015 revealed that as many as 5.2 percent of all reported rape cases are false. The authors note, however, that their analysis only accounts for accusations that were disproven in the course of investigations—many others were never confirmed or were withdrawn for reasons unknown. The advantages of victimhood are by no means unique to 21st-century millennials and Generation Z-ers, bored with life and addicted to social media. Indeed, they are not unique to humans... In the past, adopting the mantle of victimhood was usually a situational strategy—apart from professional beggars, people tended to avoid being permanently identified as a victim. But in modern culture, victimhood is increasingly becoming an attractive life choice. In his prescient 1992 book, A Nation of Victims: The Decay of the American Character, journalist Charles Sykes estimated that if all groups who claimed to be victimised or discriminated against were added together, they would constitute almost 400 percent of the US population... those who were hitherto socially privileged become morally suspect as responsible for the harm done to victims... today that culture of dignity has been replaced by a victim culture, which combines aspects of the cultures of honour and dignity. Those who are part of the victim culture insist upon respect, and are extremely sensitive to its violation. Insults are not trivial matters, and even if they are small and unintentional, they can cause serious conflict. As in a culture of dignity, people generally refrain from violent retribution in favour of intervention by some authority or third party. The cultural patterns described determine social hierarchy and status. Brave, strong, and violent people, not their victims, were at the top of the culture of honour. Today, we are witnessing the reversal of that order—the position of victim now ensures privileged status in the social hierarchy and guarantees relative impunity. It is unsurprising that in such a culture people compete to belong to disadvantaged groups... Medical services report that “phoney” sick leave is being granted when mental disorders are offered as the reason for an inability to work. In some countries, it is now the fourth leading cause of incapacity for work. Such exemptions are difficult to diagnose with certainty and do not force patients to stay at home and lie in bed. They are also easy to obtain, because doctors fear the possible consequences of scepticism. But does this kind of sensitivity help those who are really suffering from serious mental illness? In the race for compassion, they may soon have to first convince those jaded by charlatans that they are not also frauds. An even more serious consequence of victim culture is the appropriation of suffering by politicians and professional groups who aspire to the title of aggrieved and discriminated representatives. This is a clever development of the trick employed by maggots described earlier—politicians “borrow” whole groups of victims to win voters’ support, and then forget about the interests of those victims immediately after the election... psychotherapy creates victims and then offers to treat them... The victims of alleged sexual abuse have become multitudinous... if you don’t fit into any of these roles, you can always be a victim of workplace bullying, social isolation, or discrimination on the basis of race or gender. Alternatively, it may turn out that you are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder because someone close to you has died, or you have had to spend two weeks at home in quarantine. You can even compare your experiences to the suffering of Holocaust survivors—many patients do this, encouraged by therapists, as documented in Judith Herman’s book Trauma and Recovery. An effect of the mass manufacture of victims is the accompanying manufacture of abusers... The fact that so many victims today can count on interest and support is probably also due to economic factors. In the Western world, this enables access to goods unprecedented in history. We can simply better afford to take care of them. But in helping them, we must remember that in the race of victims there will be losers, including those wrongly accused of being victimizers, and those who will be denounced as false victims who need help most. The latter usually do not have the strength or the ability to jump in the queue for help."
The 2% of rape cases are false myth is busted yet again
Krug, Carrillo, Dolezal: Social Munchausen Syndrome - The Atlantic - "One of the oddest aspects of the saga was that Krug’s assumed identity was so stereotypical as to be borderline unconvincing: She wore hoop earrings, crop tops, and “tight, tight cheetah pants” to class, and spoke with an exaggerated accent. She also took funding from a program designed for marginalized scholars. According to Gisela Fosado of Duke University Press, the publisher of Krug’s academic book, her scholarship “may not have ever existed without the funding that was inseparable from her two decades of lies.” And yet—the work was well regarded. The white, Jewish Jessica Krug could have had an academic career. What she would not have had was moral authority. Perhaps the strangest aspect of the case, however, is that it is not unique. In fact, Krug’s admission was prompted by scholars in the field discussing the case of H. G. Carrillo, who was also a professor at GW. After he died from COVID-19 in April, Carrillo’s family came forward to correct the initial tributes: The author of Loosing My Espanish was not, as he had always presented himself, a member of the Cuban diaspora, but a Black man born in Detroit. His birth name was Herman Glenn Carroll. This was news to everyone, including his husband. Those who had nursed suspicions for years about colleagues and acquaintances soon brought other cases to light. Over the holiday season, the self-presentation of Hilaria Baldwin—the wife of the actor Alec, with whom she has five “Baldwinitos”—was questioned. Baldwin, who had long presented herself as nebulously Hispanic, admitted that she was born Hillary Lynn Hayward-Thomas to white, English-speaking Bostonian parents who have since retired to Spain. Before that came the academics Kelly Kean Sharp and CV Vitolo-Haddad, the attorney Natasha Lycia Ora Bannan, and the activist Satchuel Cole. All were white, but were assumed to be minorities in their professional and personal lives. The best-known example of all is Rachel Dolezal, who now goes by Nkechi Amare Diallo. The superficial similarities among all of these cases are striking: mostly women, all educated and professionally successful, all working in fields engaged with questions of oppression and marginalization. And in all of these cases, somewhere along the line, empathy tipped into appropriation. It was not enough to feel the pain of marginalized groups; they had to be part of them, too... A patient would arrive at a hospital with an acute illness, but no cause could be found. The presence of a large number of abdominal scars, from investigative surgery, was one clue to physicians that they were in the presence of a faker. But otherwise, such patients usually managed to string along their doctors for days or weeks; it took, Asher wrote, a “bold” emergency-room doctor to refuse them admission... Munchausen syndrome is now known as “factitious disorder,” and has spawned a series of spin-offs... “Reverse passing,” also called “blackfishing” or “race-shifting,” seems intriguingly common in university humanities departments and leftist activist spaces, where many subscribe to the worldview outlined by Robin DiAngelo in her best-selling book White Fragility... As an outsider, it’s easy to empathize with whatever pain drives fakers to rewrite their history, particularly because the cost is commonly cutting their family and childhood friends out of their life. But people closer to these hoaxers, and closer to the pain they cause, tend to have a less forgiving view... As for how the hoaxers get away with it, there is a strong taboo in liberal circles against questioning anyone’s identity, or their experiences of trauma. Doing so is taken to be the same as questioning all trauma... Trans activism has a taboo on “deadnaming”... This act, motivated by kindness and respect, has the unintended consequence of impeding efforts to check court records or high-school yearbooks, and making it harder to compare successive versions of a person’s life story... “I think we’re missing the vast majority of Munchausen-by-internet cases,” he said. “Because in the vast majority of cases, the deceptions are successful.”"
When victimhood is fetishised, you'll get more of it. And while with Munchausen Syndrome there is no tangible benefit, pretending to be a "minority" certainly does
With Munchausen Syndrome and identity faking, being female is a "risk factor". This certainly can help explain long covid and similar issues too
Meme - Willow Fernsby-Joy: "Could we please get a TW for the word f*ther? I'm asexual."
Robert Boyd Mayberry: "...I can't tell if you're actually serious, which frightens me."
Willow Fernsby-Joy: "why would I joke about something like this"
Robert Boyd Mayberry: "I am not going to trigger warning "father" just because you don't like hearing the word "father". I am a father, and that's reality. You can not like it all you want, but I'm not going to censor my relationship to my children for your nonsense."
Power matters: The role of power and morality needs in competitive victimhood among advantaged and disadvantaged groups - "Competitive victimhood denotes group members’ efforts to establish that their ingroup has suffered greater injustice than an adversarial outgroup. Previous research in contexts of structural inequality has stressed the role of the need to defend the ingroup's moral identity, rather than the need for power, in leading advantaged and disadvantaged group members to engage in competitive victimhood. Focusing on the structural inequality between Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel (Study 1) and Israeli women and men (Study 2), we found that across all groups and contexts, power needs predicted competitive victimhood. Also, the need to protect the ingroup's moral reputation (i.e., defensive moral needs) positively predicted competitive victimhood, whereas among advantaged group members, the need to protect the ingroup's moral essence negatively predicted competitive victimhood. Finally, exploratory analyses revealed that competitive victimhood correlated, positively for advantaged and negatively for disadvantaged group members, with support for policies securing realistic and symbolic resources for the disadvantaged group. Theoretical and practical implications of these results, which are consistent with the logic of the needs-based model of reconciliation, are discussed."
Intersectionality is trash and the Victim Olympics are real
Meme - Calvin: "THis BAD GRADE IS LOWERING MY SELF-ESTEEM !"
Miss Wormwood "THEN YOU SHOULD WORK HARDER SO YOU DON'T GET BAD GRADES"
Calvin: "YOUR DENIAL OF MY VICTIMHOOD IS LOWERING MY SELF-ESTEEM"
3 decades later this is reality
Meme - wow thanks i'm cured: "Ohhhhh why didn't I think of that"
"Idk who needs to hear this, but you're not overwhelmed. You are lazy and unorganized. Wake up earlier. Get an agenda book. Create a routine. Create boundaries (say no). Stick to your schedule. Write down AND adhere to your deadlines. You are standing in your own way."
Leftists don't want to solve problems. They want to be victims
Students warned tragedy may be too ‘triggering’ - "Tragedy may be too “triggering” for modern students, academics have warned. The dramatic art form has entranced audiences from Ancient Greece to the Shakespearean stage, but has now been deemed potentially upsetting by staff at the University of Derby. Students embarking on a literature module covering tragedy, including celebrated examples like Hamlet and King Lear, are warned that the genre is “obsessed… with suffering” and could prove “triggering”... Professor Frank Furedi, an education expert at the University of Kent, criticised the broad trigger warning and said that tragedy is meant to cause upset. “In order to draw a reader or an audience into the drama, tragedy is meant to provoke emotional upheaval and cause upset,” he said. “If they fail to provoke strong emotions then a tragedy is anything but tragic. There is no such thing as a safe tragedy and students who wish to study this literary form have to live with it. “A trigger warning is merely a banal way of saying beware of engaging with this wonderful art form. The real tragedy is the use of trigger warnings for grown-up students who are about to encounter their first taste of Euripides.”"
Trigger warnings will kill the university - "universities across the UK have been removing the requirement, and in some cases the option, to study certain books because of their supposedly distressing content. The University of Sussex, for example, has removed August Strindberg’s play, Miss Julie, from a literature module because it ‘contains discussion of suicide’. On that principle pretty much all romantic literature from Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther onwards would have to go – after all, in the 19th century, you could barely move for tales of consumptive young men blowing their brains out over unrequited love. Students at Wrexham Glyndwr University, on a module dedicated to ‘mentoring’, are being given the option to skip a book called Mentoring, because it includes ‘“humour” that is not inclusive of people who are trans or nonbinary’. The offending joke is a passage asking: ‘Should mentors combine the best of male and female characteristics (psychologically rather than physically, one assumes)?’ Not quite Bill Hicks in his prime. But nor is it a grave threat to anybody’s welfare. Similarly, on Nottingham Trent’s French course, a French language module has removed a requirement to study satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. It says the magazine contains ‘racist, sexist, bigoted, Islamophobic satirical… cartoons with strong language’. Other universities have slapped trigger warnings on Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro (‘trivialised role and abuse of female characters’), Austen’s Mansfield Park (‘poverty, classism, sexism, mistreatment in a domestic context’), and – in a masterstroke of dark comedy – Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (‘contains explicit material which you may find offensive or upsetting’). Proponents of trigger warnings say it can be useful for vulnerable students to be warned about specific distressing episodes in a text. But in practice, that’s not how trigger warnings are being used. Instead, they act as warnings to students not to touch the texts at all – and they sometimes act as a prelude to texts being made optional or removed from courses altogether. What possible ‘trauma’ does it spare anyone to be told that Mozart’s great opera trivialises its female characters in some unspecified way, or that Austen’s great novel involves some mysterious form of ‘sexism’? Worse still, if students learn to expect trigger warnings of this sort they will start to complain when they don’t get them. And universities’ fear of students complaining will no doubt prompt faculties to go through everything on every reading list, trying to find texts featuring ‘mistreatment in a domestic context’, ‘explicit material’ and so on, before slapping trigger warnings on them for no discernible benefit. Removing ‘distressing’ works from a syllabus is even worse than giving them a trigger warning. It actually subverts the whole point of education. It amounts, in many cases, to making a political rather than an intellectual judgement about what teaching material to use – a judgement that a work is ‘bigoted’, ‘Islamophobic’ or ‘transphobic’. This is to judge material not on its own intellectual merits, but on the extent to which it conforms to the dominant worldview on campuses today. One way around much of this would be to ask students before they start university whether they accept the risk of being shocked, disturbed or offended by course content. If not, they are free to withdraw from the university at any point. Universities would then have no need to withdraw or put trigger warnings on course material. After all, every student would have been warned. Universities need to start conveying this message to prospective students: at university, you will hear or read things that you may find offensive, shocking and disturbing. And this is not a problem. It is an inevitable part of grown-up life in a democracy. The sooner young people get used to it, the better."
I remember being told in university that if we didn't encounter anything that shocked us, we were not getting an education
Trigger warning slapped on ‘emotionally challenging’ Peter Pan by university in Scotland - "Aberdeen University has put the JM Barrie book on a list of titles that may leave adults needing help or support after reading them. Peter Pan’s adventures in Neverland were given the warning because the content can be ‘emotionally challenging’ and advises students they should seek help if they feel unable to cope with themes within the book. It says the book contains “odd perspectives on gender, but no objectionable material”. Other books on the university’s list are The Railway Children and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe."
Meme - Q'ori Goerdt: "Could you please add a CW for Al art?"
Roberto Guevara: "I mean that is literally what the post says."
Q'ori Goerdt: "Right, which is why I asked for a CW.
3 Trigger and content warnings are required for sensitive content. If a fellow member asks you for one, you must add it to the top of your post. Comments will be shut off until they are added."
Jonathan Bradley: Campus safe-space culture is a threat to the very fabric of our society - "The University of Glasgow hit peak woke when it recently announced that it will be urging professors to avoid using the phrase “trigger warning.” Professors have been advised to stop saying “trigger warning” before sensitive content is talked about because it could be too triggering for their thin-skinned students. Instead, they’ve been asked to say “content advisory” prior to speaking about sensitive matters, in order to ensure U of G remains “a safe space.”... A group of current and former students at Ryerson University’s School of Journalism caused an internal revolt in March, releasing an open letter that claimed the school had “contributed to an unsafe learning environment” because they were subjected to words and opinions they disapproved of... for the past year, community members at Wilfrid Laurier University have called for professors David Haskell and William McNally to be fired for the crime of being conservative. Haskell and McNally have been vocal defenders of freedom of expression at Laurier, which the woke mob sees as unacceptable. People might hope this safe-space culture would stop at the doors of universities, but it has extended into the work world, as well. This idea of not wanting to offend people contributed to the resignation of Bari Weiss, an opinion writer and editor at the New York Times, in 2020. Weiss said she was annoyed with how stories that didn’t “explicitly promote progressive causes” needed to have every detail scrutinized before being published. Employees at Penguin Random House Canada proclaimed in November that they were offended when it was announced that the company would be publishing “Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life” by Jordan Peterson. The employees said the book should not be published by Penguin because they did not want Peterson’s views to be platformed. Universities should be safe spaces from assault and bodily harm, but not from ideas and opinions people might find offensive. The harmfulness of safe-space culture was explored at length in the 2018 book, “The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure,” by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. The authors said they wrote the book because they observed that students were pathologizing words and ideas as dangerous and violent, which they found illogical. This change started to occur around 2013 or 2014, and became more widespread from 2015 to 2017. In the book, Lukianoff and Haidt argue that safe-space culture does not work because it relies on three great untruths: what does not kill you makes you weaker; always trust your feelings; and life is a battle between good and evil people. These untruths contradict modern psychological research and ancient philosophical wisdom, and serve to hurt people who embrace them. Indeed, the authors found that embracing these untruths has led to increased depression, anxiety and suicides among students. In other words, what was supposed to help students has left them unprepared to deal with stressors and challenges, which leads to increased suffering. Lukianoff and Haidt argue students need stressors and challenges in order to learn, adapt and grow. But universities consistently do the opposite, teaching students that they are candles that can easily be extinguished, instead of fires that thrive when faced with adversity. Trigger warnings, in particular, often have the opposite effect of what they are intended to. A 2018 study out of Harvard University suggested that trigger warnings intensify the stigma associated with trauma, as they serve to enforce the idea that trauma is central to people’s identities. The study went on to explain that trigger warnings are terrible for people who have never experienced trauma, as they can lead to people thinking that they are not resilient and may lead them to think that they are vulnerable to developing mental illnesses. Using trigger warnings communicates to students that words can be harmful. After all, trigger warnings serve as threat-confirmations. This inclination to see threats where they do not exist is associated with an increased risk of developing post-traumatic stress disorder... many conservatives are now afraid to say what they really think. A recent study from the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology found that 58 per cent of right-wing professors in Canada claim their university is a hostile climate for their views. It also found that 45 per cent of Canadian academics say they would discriminate against a colleague who supports former U.S. president Donald Trump, that 17 per cent would discriminate against a right-leaning grant bid and 11 per cent would be more critical of a right-leaning paper submission. The study went on to claim that 34 per cent of “somewhat right” grad students and 62 per cent of “very right” grad students in North America and the United Kingdom believe sharing their views would make their lives difficult. As a result, right-wing grad students end up being less inclined to pursue academic careers, as conservatives are made to feel like they have to shut up or face consequences. Given all of the evidence that safe-space culture does not work, I find it confusing why so many students and professors support it. I presented this evidence to various people throughout my academic career at Ryerson, but faculty and students consistently ignored the facts presented to them. I recall one instance where I recommended a journalism professor read “The Coddling of the American Mind” to understand why safe-space culture does not work, and he said he would never pick it up. There are plenty of basic steps universities can take to stop this craziness: adopt a free speech policy based on the “Chicago statement“; stop using the word “unsafe” except when it pertains to matters of physical safety; and remove their radical diversity, inclusion and equity offices and instead encourage unity among faculty and students. These solutions might be unpopular, but they are the right moves. Former British prime minister Winston Churchill said that, “A state of society where men may not speak their minds cannot endure long.” People should be free to speak their minds on university campuses without being punished. If freedom of expression remains a touchy subject on university campuses, the prospects of having a functioning democracy are minimal."
Target security guard slugs female shopper after she demanded $1,000 bill be paid by 'reparations' - "Security staff member Zach Cotter, 28, was caught on camera hitting Karen Ivery, 37, at Target in Blue Ash, Hamilton County, Ohio, in October last year after she grew 'aggressive' with a manager. CCTV footage from the store shows Mr Cotter intervening after an altercation broke out with a manager when Ms Ivery claimed she wanted the store to pay for her purchases in 'reparations'. Mr Cotter claims he was acting in self defense, and told officers after the incident that she 'charged' at him. She was later arrested for Menacing and Disorderly Conduct. A police report seen by Dailymail.com said: 'Ivery was very argumentative and confrontational about the whole incident. She was confrontational with officers on scene and didn't want to explain her actions that evening.'... 'This is my Rosa Parks moment,' she added. A police report from the incident said: 'After watching the video footage we determined that Ivery was the aggressor'."
Of course, she's the victim
Two sociologists detail ‘The Rise of Victimhood Culture’ and how it’s used for social control - "In 2014, Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning, associate professors of sociology at Cal State Los Angeles and West Virginia University, respectively, published a scholarly article titled “Microaggression and Moral Cultures” that detailed the rise of a “victimhood culture.”... In 2015, the two sociologists filed a solicited op-ed to the online magazine TechCrunch titled “Microaggressions and the Moralistic Internet.” The editor they worked with initially praised the column, telling them it would run soon. A month later he told the two professors their column was spiked. From what Campbell and Manning could best determine based on correspondence with the editor, “it sounds as if the staff members found our analysis morally offensive in some way.” These two anecdotes are detailed in Campbell’s and Manning’s co-authored 2018 book “The Rise of Victimhood Culture.” The two sociologists have emerged as experts on the subject, maintaining a blog that is updated regularly on the subject as well as writing op-eds and giving interviews... “You can see many mainstream liberals expressing criticism of microaggression complaints, expansive definitions of trauma, the idea that words are violence, credulity in the face of hate crime hoaxes, and the like,” he said. But most on the Left do not consider accepting victim status demeaning at all... the Left has weaponized their self-perceived plight in order to force conservatives into bowing to their worldview. “It is an increasingly easy way to punish adversaries and gain social status by signalling one’s own virtue. The growth of social media and proliferation of bureaucratic authorities contribute [to] this. So does training by educators and administrators that encourages people take offense and report incidents to authorities”... “Some faculty see political activism as a major part of their occupation and identity. Some see activism and scholarship as one and the same, perhaps because they’re not clear on the distinction between facts and values and are under the impression that their moral and political preferences are matters of fact,” Manning said. “Though I might add that the ideological imbalance is greater among administrators than among faculty, and a lot of student indoctrination stems from the administration.”... “Haidt argues that magnifying small offenses goes against much of the traditional advice from philosophy and religion … he points to statements from the Buddha–‘It is easy to see the faults of others, but difficult to see one’s own faults’– and Jesus–‘Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not see the log in your own eye?’–that caution against obsessing over the minor faults of others.” In his interview with The Fix, Manning said “passing on such wisdom might help at the margins.”... millennials’ and Generation Z’s embrace of victimhood culture may have a grim outlook. “There’s a common criticism along the lines of ‘wait until these kids get into the real world.’ But of course the ‘real world’ is coming to resemble campuses in some respects, as Google and other large corporations increasingly enforce the same kinds of speech codes and so forth”... Calling microaggressions “aggressions,” and suggesting they are a pattern of systemic oppression, is a tool used to gain support and validation from authorities. And in the end, it can be likened to a form of social control"
Meme - Zan @shardsofblue: "Today is a beautiful day to repost this
INTENT IS NOT REQUIRED FOR BIGOTRY
IN FACT WE HAVE TO ACTIVELY DO INTERNAL WORK TO LEARN ABOUT AND AVOID IT"
Grievance mongering never ends. Good faith is never assumed