Nepenthe

Nepenthe , 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago) to news in Rate of suicide in the U.S. peaks among older men, a hard demographic to reach

Imagine any of this rhetoric was used for issues like black women and their sky high mortality rate during childbirth, lack of attention towards Asian hate crimes, ignoring of natives women murders, or police brutality towards black men. That we have other things to deal with so it’s all on them to fix it.

Historically speaking, it is.

I think ideally, waiting around for The Correct Group to fix a known problem is insane and pointless as fuck. And you're right, both on paper and with a morality any non-sociopathic 2nd grader should be able to manage.

I also think there's a substantial bitterness among women that does deserve to be there. We've been left to fix every problem we have more or less by ourselves, and had to pay dearly for every inch of it. I say, as we visibly stand here losing ground again.

Women weren't allowed to vote? Couldn't serve in the army? Hold jobs? We protested til we could.

We had no public bathrooms, forcibly leasing us to a set vicinity from our own home? We made two associations about it, men destroyed a model bathroom by driving a cab through it, and the idea only finally took hold because of cholera.

Couldn't divorce? We murdered abusive husbands we couldn't escape and continued lobbying. Same with controlling our own money.

Couldn't wear pants? We wore them anyway, often in the face of sustained verbal and physical abuse, until men just got used to us wearing different clothing.

Every women's scholarship was left behind by a woman who didn't get a scholarship, found success anyway, and left a ladder for others who needed it. Men aren't doing this nearly as often for reasons I don't understand.

The first battered women's shelters in Japan? Started by women. Australia, Germany, Italy? The UK and the US? All women. The first in the US was a random storefront with an apartment in the back that a handful of women repurposed. It was initially run entirely on donations they got from selling crafts. The police didn't appreciate it and rarely if ever lifted a hand except to show a dangerous amount of indifference to threats.

On its face, it's venomous to see a problem and tell someone to just deal with it themselves. In reality, we have done all of this ourselves, always with significant pushback.

This is where we are when the other half of the planet swears up and down they can't do exactly the thing that we did. Yes, you can. If you need shelters, so did we and we opened them. We were forced to stand up for ourselves if we wanted anything fixed, and we did so.

Now, whenever this comes up, men want us to fix their problems for them too. Especially egregious since a lot of times, they're the ones society takes at all seriously. They're the ones with the funding, not that that was ever a valid excuse for us. We can barely get y'all to treat us like fellow humans if we stick y'all in prison for it and even that isn't helping, but your work is still being laid at our feet.

Every time we so much as suggest men compliment and support each other, they snap straight to whining and explaining it would really feel better if it came from women and what if someone thinks they're gay. THEN BE GAY.

I don't think I can begin to describe how frustrating that is, and the kind of bitter anger that it breeds. Nothing is stopping you.

I'll admit, as dismissive as it looks, part of me was reading the head comment and going, "so why don't you just....start a group? There's clearly a niche, surely they aren't the only one in that entire state going through this."

We care. Sometimes brutally. It's not like we can't relate to what that's like, you know? But you're not, as a class, less capable than we were. It isn't whether we morally should, it's the constant allegation that men's problems MUST belong to us and no one else. Along with also our problems, also usually courtesy of the same men.

This was never the kind of thread to be writing shit like this. Certainly not suicide, I have a military buddy who's the last one standing out of his entire squad, that all committed suicide, and he won't goddamn go to therapy.

But the experience, as always, of begging men to do anything at all to fix any issue they are having is. Maddening.

Nepenthe , 6 months ago to news in Municipalities ordered to strip Palestinian children of Belgian nationality

Are you suggesting that Belgium may counter-rule that any adult stepping foot in their borders automatically loses Jordanian nationality, in direct opposition to the latter country's own internationally recognized laws and to the immediate detriment of Belgium?

.....Sure, that might as well happen. Nothing else makes any sense on this goddamn planet.

"Fuck you!" foreign country forcibly claims you as a citizen Wait, I think I just reinvented colonization

Nepenthe , 6 months ago to lemmyshitpost in I'm now concerned about the billions I flushed in my teen years...

Only people I like, which is none of them

Nepenthe , 6 months ago to news in Rate of suicide in the U.S. peaks among older men, a hard demographic to reach

It's not especially surprising to hear. Women are raised their whole lives to play emotional support with everyone.

Which is also why all their friends invariably turn into unrequited love: they're just treating their guy friend identically to how they treat their women friends, but the guy's never received the basic decency of consideration unless it was romantic.

But men are trained to problem solve whatever they can't stuff down and ignore, aren't they? And from what I've heard, hanging out generally prohibits anything emotionally heavy?

They're logically in the same position you are. I would find it hard to believe at least one person among them doesn't relate. It would make more sense to me to wonder if they just...have no idea how to be supportive. A distressing number of grown men can't even put a name to their feelings beyond "sad" and "pissed off."

What do they do if you just..tell them you feel like that? A friend who doesn't care to address what you're going through or to rectify that kind of relationship disconnect when it's brought up isn't really a friend. Maybe an acquaintance at best.

Nepenthe , 6 months ago to news in Rate of suicide in the U.S. peaks among older men, a hard demographic to reach

Fantastic. That had to be so painful for the rest of the party to watch.

May I also have a D&D story and/or perhaps a picture of some woodworking about which you are proud? Or one which you have at least failed at hard enough to be funny?

I love listening to people talk about their hobbies. I may not understand a third of it, but the passionate energy someone gets when they're all excited is contagious

Nepenthe , 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago) to lemmyshitpost in I'm now concerned about the billions I flushed in my teen years...

Originally it was, with a more guilt-trippy headline, but like with most propaganda people like this come up with, I fail to see the problem.

Imagine your parents giving you the chance to be born and grow up in actual Heaven, having never been at the mercy of...gestures vaguely at everything....and that's supposed to be bad parenting.

That's apparently the evil option. The good parenting option is the one with all the murder and starvation and the constant risk of sin and therefore hell. You're giving your child the opportunity to go to hell if you have it here, instead of just automatically sending it to heaven like you could.

I want the best for my child.

Nepenthe , 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago) to news in Municipalities ordered to strip Palestinian children of Belgian nationality

Which seems to be what they're taking advantage of here. Palestinians currently fall under Jordan's nationality laws, which dictate that

Individuals born to a Jordanian father are automatically Jordanian nationals at birth regardless of birthplace. The status is not transferrable by descent to children of Jordanian mothers unless the fathers are stateless or their nationalities are unknown. For nationality purposes, Palestinian fathers are never recognized as stateless whether they hold citizenship of any state or not.

From my limited understanding, purely because they are the children of Palestinian refugees, Belgium can't make them stateless.

Nepenthe , 6 months ago to news in Municipalities ordered to strip Palestinian children of Belgian nationality

Well. That will teach me not to scroll before reading the article. Thought everyone was real chill about strip searching Belgian kids for some reason.

What the fuck, by the way. What are they even trying to accomplish aside from A Racism? The kid's parents being refugees, they still retain indefinite residency with an option for citizenship down the line.

The child itself would be growing up there for at least a few years and could do the same once they hit adulthood. They're still able to reunite with family like the Foreigners' Office is complaining about.

I could see closing a loophole for anchor babies even if I don't entirely approve of such, but this is brazenly, solely Palestinians?

Nepenthe , 6 months ago to asklemmy in what is a skill you wish you had, and why?

Ok. Mini-rant because I can't contain myself atm. Do you wanna know a badly-kept secret? I've been making art on and off for 29 years. My ass wishes I could draw too. A ton of artists wish they could draw.

Talent will only give you a leg up, and mainly just at the beginning. The rest, all of us have to struggle for and I'm quite sure very few of us appreciate having to do so. And no matter how good they get, there is always something they have no idea how to do yet or they have some idol whose style they envy more than their own. Or they're the type that only hates what they make because they're the one who made it.

Van Gogh had a painter friend named Gauguin, and they were both jealous of each other. There is no magical point that one hits where you feel like you're Good Enough. The best you can aim for is the kind of steady improvement you don't even notice happening except on a scale of years, and the confidence to acknowledge those improvements instead of hyper-focusing on every way it isn't what you saw in your head (it never is).

Go get a pencil or your ipad or whatever. Youtube is by far your biggest friend. Go look up videos about how to actually see what's in front of you instead of what your brain insists must logically be there. USE REFERENCE. Trace a photo over and over, then immediately try the same thing freehand -- this one is super useful, because a lot of drawing is also muscle memory. Break things down into simple shapes and then build on those. Use the open space between objects if you need to, to trick yourself into drawing something complex without getting lost in intimidating structural details.

When you've got those down, move onto perspective and composition. Cry a little if you have to, then get back to it. Because now you're able to do whole backgrounds. People? Do tons of deliberately imprecise gesture drawings. Give your OC a terrifying robot head, a pillow for a torso, and springs for limbs. But go get. Your pencil. And be ok with drawing at first like everyone thinks they draw.

Barring that, my second choice is singing.

Nepenthe , 6 months ago to news in Tech CEO Forced Assistant to Sign 'Sex Slave' Contract, and Tormented Her With Sadomasochistic Bondage, Lawsuit Alleges

Unless they were born or raised with empathy, which is an obvious no, nothing bad happens to them if they're terrible. A ton of enjoyable things happen, even.

At that point, you're weighing the opportunity to do whatever you feel like at no consequence against doing what other people tell you to do for none of your own benefit (the only measurement that matters). Technically at a moderate cost to the one reigning themselves in. Under the looming threat of nothing if you do not comply.

I know the question was purely rhetorical and born out of the same frustration that I have. But I wish we'd drop this weird notion the more humanitarian of us seem to default to, like people who do this shit just haven't had the golden rule properly explained to them yet. They know. And they've figured out it's currently a farce.

Nepenthe , 6 months ago to news in Calgary traffic reporter goes viral after response to body shaming comment

If it were always women doing it and predictably always women throwing a fit when abuse were talked about? Yeah. Next question.

Nepenthe , 6 months ago to nottheonion in Woman who threw bowl of food at Chipotle worker sentenced to work 2 months in fast food job

While it is funny, I don't think that the punishment for her in this article will really amount to much. If she had the kind of empathy necessary to relate that experience with what she put others through, she wouldn't have done it in the first place.

Whatever customers like herself that she comes across, I think it's a 50/50 whether she spends her time doing nothing but exacerbating problems and causing regular scenes or siding with "her people" and breaking rules, stealing, etc. out of spite.

Agree with MrShankles it has to be under threat of breaking probation to even work. Ultimately, she needs more reform than just receiving identical abuse in turn.

Nepenthe , 6 months ago to nottheonion in Woman who threw bowl of food at Chipotle worker sentenced to work 2 months in fast food job

No, a burrito to the face is physical abuse. Being verbally and physically abused every day of your job is not how jobs are supposed to work, and viewing things like that as silly small things to be affected by is itself pretty damaging.

If I lean across the counter and punch you in the head, you're allowed to have some kind of feeling about that. Especially in a setting that heavily discourages and may even punish defending yourself, the way retail often does.

Convincing yourself it's fine because the world is cruel keeps the world cruel. More importantly, it keeps you from considering you deserve anything other than cruelty. We need to care about each other.

Nepenthe , 6 months ago to asklemmy in You must pick a point in human history before the 1950s to be spend the rest of your life in. What era and place would you choose?

In that case, I also choose NZ, 802 years ago.

Nepenthe , 6 months ago to aboringdystopia in Nowhere is safe

do any of these corpos ever think

No.