So I want to move on from the whole Pax Dickinson thing, but I feel I would be remiss to do so without first mentioning a remarkable post on Roosh’s Return of King blog with the seemingly innocuous title Pax Dickinson And The Culture Of Tolerance. Written by a Roosh forum regular who goes by the name scorpion (nice), the post is ostensibly a critique of alleged “cultural Marxists” whom, he charges, “claim to be tolerant of everything [yet] are … intolerant of traditional masculine behavior … .”
But his post is in fact a plea for intolerance so over the top that, save for some manosphere-specific jargon, and its focus on “feminists, white knights, manginas, fat acceptance activists and homosexuals” rather than, you know, Jews, it might as well have come straight from the pages of Hitler’s Mein Kampf.
I know, I know. Godwin. But just read this shit. Scorpion accuses the “politically correct internet hit squad” of
encouraging and mainstreaming the most bizarre and marginal human behaviors in a perverse quest to prove themselves the most tolerant of all their peers. …
What this is, really, is the elevation of the deranged and deformed along with the simultaneous tearing down of the strong and traditional. They are threatened by the sight of a masculine, red pill man like Pax Dickinson who unapologetically speaks his mind without fear of offending anyone. … Every time they see him they are acutely conscious of their own inferiority, so they conspire to end him. It’s like a gang of angry, deformed and diseased street cripples overcoming a confident and successful alpha male.
Yeah, not so much.
It’s here that Scorpion really begins to channel old Mr. Hitler.
These people don’t understand that by tolerating every type of degenerate behavior, they are destroying the culture. Imagine what would happen if your immune system suddenly became tolerant of everything. Within days or weeks your body would become host to dozens of infections and viruses, and you would quickly die. That’s exactly what these people are doing to our culture. … And so the body of the West has become filled with disease.
That. my friends, is Fascism.
Naturally, Scorpion predicts that these nasty “cultural Marxists” will get what’s coming to them in the end:
A backlash against these people is starting to build. … Within a few decades will come a rebirth of more traditional values, and these cultural Marxist social justice warriors will become nothing more than a relic of an ignominious era in our history. … Our descendents will be unable to comprehend how such an absurd ideology was able to take root in society. It will be as incomprehensible and perverse to them as the idea of suddenly chopping off their own body parts (which is fittingly a practice esteemed by the social justice warriors under the guise of “transgenderism”).
Is there some sort of new requirement that every article on Return of Kings contain transphobia?
These fools think they have found the one true god, but in reality they are simply a cult of death and decay. They are the patron saints of the sick and the twisted, the degenerate and the deformed. … It’s too late to save the West as we currently know it; but like a Phoenix, a new Western culture will rise from the ashes, a culture with traditional values and a healthy immune system to protect itself against degenerate cultural scum. And it won’t soon tolerate these worshippers of tolerance.
Yes, that’s right, a gang of Don Juan wannabes on an internet forum, united around a skeezy sex tourist and self-professed date rapist, have managed to convince themselves that they are the last bastions of traditional morality in a world gone wrong.
In the wake of Roosh’s viciously racist attacks on the critics of Dickinson, and his publishing of what is essentially a fascist tantrum, I think it’s fair to say that he has thrown his lot in entirely with the racist right wing of the manosphere, alongside such other charming fellows as Heartiste and Jack Donovan and Matt Forney. Indeed, in some ways he’s even outdoing them in the hate department. (Donovan in particular is a lot more affable about his racism.)
It’s a weird choice on Roosh’s part, because the hardest-core white supremacists out there have made very clear that they don’t see him as one of them. Because he’s of Persian descent, and therefore, in their minds, not really white. Indeed, several years back, one regular on the notorious Stormfront forums posted a “warning to Estonian women” that
[a] really nasty sex tourist from America (of Middle Eastern descent) has arrived in Tartu, Estonia. He came from Latvia after staying there a month or two. His goal is to lure into sex as many Estonian women as possible, especially very young girls. His name is Daryush Valizedeh, nickname – Roosh, and he is a pick up artist who believes women should be treated “like garbage”. This includes beautiful, young white women of Baltic and Nordic descent.
The Stormfronters tracked him as he made his way around Eastern Europe; one suggested he was not only not white but that he was literally part Neanderthal.
Roosh and the neo-Nazis: sounds like a match made in heaven.
@katz
I can’t tell exactly what you’re saying (which I blame on the morning). The think if you’re saying something idk for example ‘people with a lot of isms’ you mean every word that ends with ism? Sorry if this makes 0 sense, morning brain.
I think that generally, people with mental illness have a more nuanced view on meds, while mentally healthy people often fall into one of two groups:
1. Medication is BAD! It’s totally possible to draw a sharp line between “symptoms” and “underlying causes”, and whereas therapy treats underlying causes, medication only treats symptoms! Also, medication gives you side-effects and turn you into a zombie, whereas therapy can’t possibly be bad for you. Therefore therapy is GOOD while medication is BAD.
Also, only schizophrenia and a few select other mental conditions are real mental illnesses. The rest is just big pharma making up illness-names for completely normal states of being in order to sell more evil meds.
2. Medication is GREAT! Science has proven that the underlying cause of all mental illnesses is not a bad childhood like silly Freud thought but too much or too little of some brain chemical. Therefore, all mental illnesses ought to be handled by taking a medication that restores the balance of brain chemicals back to normal. This is completely analogous to someone with type 1 diabetes taking insulin, because the brain is totes no more complicated a system than metabolism. There’s also a sharp and in no way socially constructed line between people with mental illness or some neuropsychiatric condition and “normal” people. “Normal” people have a normal balance of brain chemicals, whereas the balance in people with mental illness or some neuropsychiatric condition is off – although the right medication will make them “normal”.
(A colleague of mine pointed out that 2 is fairly similar to humorism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humorism , and I think he’s spot on there.)
Also, only schizophrenia and a few select other mental conditions are real mental illnesses. The rest is just big pharma making up illness-names for completely normal states of being in order to sell more evil meds.
Even those of us with the Big Name Diagnoses (like schizophrenia and it’s clusters of “schizo-fill-in-the-blank”) can have people telling us to “just deal with it” “can you see that makes no sense” etc. I do feel normal emotions get pathologized, ironically as much by the “positive thinking” law of attraction New Agers as by the experts sometimes,since that’s another topic of discussion here. And I do have questions when I see a pill like Abilify, say, that has an inset saying it’s for treating symptoms of schizophrenia, bipolar, and psychosis, but I turn on the tv and see a commercial for it as though it’s to take the edge off for someone having a bad day, or feeling a little shy at the party. I find that strange.
I’m sorry to hear you’ve dealt with that kind of shit, Jennydevildoll. I have a schizo-fill-in-the-blank disorder myself (probably closest to schizo-affective, although my doctors have never found it necessary to find an exact label, since it’s the symptoms and not the label you treat anyway). I’ve always felt that people accept me as having a “real” mental illness. A friend of mine on the other hand who has serious depression (her doctors are now seriously considering ECT) get that kind of shit all the time – oh, we all feel a little down time to time, just find something fun to do and it will cheer you up and so on.
I also think there’s a tendency to a) pathologize more and more conditions, and b) for Big Pharma to market new drugs fairly aggressively, both by trying to have them prescribed for all kinds of states and by glossing over side effects.
There are real objective differences between people. But it’s always on a sliding scale. There are no sharp lines between, for instance, depressed people and slightly melancholic people. We decide where to draw the line, and that decision is affected by all kinds of factors. I think there’s a tendency to draw the line more and more generously, which individualizes problems that perhaps ought to be seen as social, and pathologizes bad feelings that perhaps ought to be seen as completely normal. All meds have side-effects; you don’t mess around with something as complicated as the brain without causing all kinds of effects. So the decision to take meds should be one carefully made, where you weigh the risks against the benefits. It shouldn’t just be like “oh you’re feeling blue, that’s depression, here, have some SSRI”, but I think that as a society we’re moving in that direction.
That’s one reason that the 2) people are wrong.
And it does scare me a bit how enthusiastically new meds are received. Like Abilify, which is supposedly SO free of side effects compared to old neuroleptika like Haldol (which I take). I do think there’s something inherently positive about there being many different kinds of meds for the same conditions, since different people react so differently to them, and I know at least one person who went from seriously suffering from her schizophrenia to to feeling fine and working a full-time job thanks to Abilify. BUT it’s scary how so many people are like “oh, Haldol and the other old meds had so many side-effects, the list of side-effects you get on the package is like a mile long, but these new meds have far fewer side-effects!” because obviously, with a new med you haven’t had time to discover all the side-effects yet. So, seriously, no need to be all enthusiastic about a supposed lack of serious side-effects until a new med has been around for a decade or so.
So the 2) people are really wrong about a lot of things – BUT I also hate it when people moralize over meds and go on about how meds are ALL EVIL, when the reality is that some of us really do require meds to be able to work and live normal grown-up lives rather than just staring at the wall talking to ourselves.
I’m talking about the aggressively anti-intellectual crowd: They’ll say something like “humanism and communism and socialism and all those other isms!” like all these words are totally just the same thing.
@katz
Wow. I’ve never heard that one before, but it sounds unintentionally hilarious. (though probably actually frustrating if you’re talking to someone but my mood is shot and weird right now.)
Also, Re: meds (I’m just blabbering or whatever.) but my meds have been not working
at all as far as I can tellvery well recently, and I can suddenly see how I used to get in so many fights with my family. My mood’s fucking shot, and a couple days ago I started getting all panicky and ansty and angry and upset about my dad canceling our sort-of plans (miscommunication yay). So…idk rambling? But I’m very…off w/o my meds/ when they aren’t working well. I’m amazed I actually managed to stay in school as long as I did before I got my meds.okay sorry if I derailed this and made it all about me, just ignore the last part of that if that’s the case.
Our sixteen year old son has discontinued his psych meds, at his own request. We (parents, psychiatrist and therapist) are giving him this opportunity to try and function without them. So far, there hasn’t been much observable change. It’s fortunate that our schedule allows us to be home much of the time. It has been a challenging time, but we didn’t become parents because we thought it was the soft option.
About mental illness, I wonder if it makes sense to talk about having tendencies toward various illnesses without necessarily being diagnosable/”pathological”/actually sick?
In genetics, they talk about how people who are carriers for some genetic disorders are not completely unaffected–like carriers for sickle-cell anemia, who are not sick but do tend to be more anemic than non-carriers (as well as being resistant to malaria. I’ve heard that called “sickle-cell trait” before.
Would it make sense to say that some people have anxiety or depression “trait”, where they are more melancholy or stressed than others but not to the extent of being sick? Obviously, people could go back and forth between the categories, but (AFAIK) I have never actually had a diagnosed condition, but I did attend counseling for anxiety where the therapist never officially diagnosed me to my face (I have no idea what is on my paperwork) and I think I do tend to be more tightly wound than other people. I always expect to be criticized at work, for example.
The reason I mentioned this is that some people have been talking about creeping pathologizing, and making a space for people to have “basic settings” that tend toward illness without being illness might allow people to get whatever help they need without being… um… over-helped? I really think the counseling I got helped a lot, and I have never had as much stress as I did then (it was coming off of high school… which might have had something to do with it).
In that vein (sorry about all the comments) I know someone who recently had a rough personal and career set back and was given meds to deal with that… and I don’t know how I feel about that. I wasn’t there to see how well she was coping but there is nothing wrong with feeling sad about that stuff. On the other hand, if the drugs help, even if you aren’t “sick”, I don’t think you should suffer.
@wordsp1nner: I agree! It’s tricky because sometimes sadness is homeostatic: like, your mind’s way of telling you that you need to make a change, and numbing that is only going to prevent you making the necessary changes. But on the other hand, if you’re already making the changes/can’t change your circumstances, sometimes what’s wrong with looking to the normal human condition with a view to alleviating it, with meds or otherwise?
Depression caused by events in your life–especially events that could change later, like career setbacks–can be really frustrating. Because, logically, it seems like you should be sad because a bad thing happened, and treating the depression feels wrong because you’re treating the symptom, not the cause. It’s very easy to be like “I don’t need therapy/medication, I just need to get a job.”
Which might be true. But the thing is that you can’t just make yourself get a job. So if you can get treatment for your depression, then, well, better to address the problem you have some control over rather than do nothing at all.
wordsp1nner – As I understand it, a lot of mental diagnoses describe traits that almost everyone has to some extent – they just don’t become a disorder until they’re severe enough to interfere with your life. That’s why a lot of DSM diagnoses include something like “causes significant distress or dysfunction” (not the exact quote) as one of the criteria.
But yeah, that’s a pretty subjective line to draw. I don’t know how I feel about the over-pathologizing issue, really. I’m wary about dismissing people who really need help with an “Oh, back in my day that wasn’t even considered a mental illness” type reaction. But I’m also wary of treating human variation like a set of diseases.
I really just don’t know.
These people don’t understand that by tolerating every type of degenerate behavior, they are destroying the culture.
Here I thought what this idjit was upset by wasn’t our tolerating, “any” behavior, but rather our intolerance of behaviors like Dickinson’s.
It totally makes sense to talk about mental illness that way, particularly since there’s no schizo gene and no depression gene and so on (there are probably genes associated with various diseases, I think they’re identified in some cases such as schizophrenia, but there’s not a gene which is “the schizo gene” and cause you to become schizo etc). Pretty much every mental condition is something which occurs in healthy humans too, but taken to an extreme – and what counts or doesn’t count as “extreme” will depend on a lot of societal factors.
Ozy once wrote at zir blog, when zie was still active, that zie doesn’t feel comfortable telling someone who wants help that “you’re not ill enough to qualify, so you ought to just suck it up”. I agree, and that’s why it’s bad to just go “back in my day being like you are didn’t count as an illness” as if that in itself would be a valid argument against treatment. Also, as Katz said, if you’re depressed because of factors in your life that you can’t control, then there’s nothing wrong with doing what you can do to feel better.
What IS problematic with increased pathologization is
a) if people don’t actually weigh the cons against the pros when it comes to taking meds, but just assume that “since I qualify for a diagnosis I ought to take meds”, and
b) if it’s not even considered on a political level that maybe we ought to do something about society if a large portion of the population needs SSRI to be able to work, or do something about schools if a large portion of the students needs stimulants to be able to study and so on – if it’s just assumed that a diagnosis means that people’s brains are malfunctioning for 100 % genetic and non-political reasons.
I don’t know how to do the quoting thing, so I’m just gonna copy and paste what Dvarghundspossen said:
‘b) if it’s not even considered on a political level that maybe we ought to do something about society if a large portion of the population needs SSRI to be able to work, or do something about schools if a large portion of the students needs stimulants to be able to study and so on – if it’s just assumed that a diagnosis means that people’s brains are malfunctioning for 100 % genetic and non-political reasons.’
THIS, a thousand times this. I think we live in a very mentally pathogenic society: we’re living in isolated little boxes and we’re totally status-obsessed, and there’s some evo psych work on how depression, as a ‘cut-your-losses-and-stop-trying’ strategy, followed by anxiety, as a ‘seek-safety-in-the-protection-of-the-new-regime’ strategy, can follow from a loss of status.
The problem with people saying that “depression is a healthy reaction to an unhealthy society” is not that they point to society as a cause of people’s problems, but that they suggest that people ought not to seek treatment but just suck it up, and also that a depressed person is healthier than a non-depressed person. Which just doesn’t make sense. No matter how fucked-up our society is, obviously a person who feels good and function without therapy and meds is healthier than a person who needs treatment to function.
But the part where they point to society as a cause of people’s problems can still be accurate. We would probably have some cases of mental illness even in a complete utopia, but not necessarily the vast amounts we have today.
RE: wordsp1nner
I know someone who recently had a rough personal and career set back and was given meds to deal with that… and I don’t know how I feel about that.
Enh, I was put on antidepressants during a period where I had lost my job, my health, my family, and in a few months, I knew I would lose my home. Oh, and there was no end to any of those situations in sight, for at least a year.
Depression and suicidality seemed a pretty reasonable response… but I couldn’t die yet, so meds it was. Sure, at times I railed about how I was being treated as the sick one, when it felt more like the world was against me, but the fact was, the world wasn’t changing for me, so if I had to pharmaceutically change myself, so be it.
re Neanderthals. We don’t really know why they faded away as an independent species of hominid. They inhabited a wide range of habitat (both sub-glacial, and temperate, and seem to have had a moderately wide set of lifestyles (the areas in/around Iran where they have been found were pretty mild for weather).
Something changed that they didn’t manage to adapt to/outcompete somethig, and they stopped being a distinct species, though it seems they weren’t incapable of fertile cross-breeding with H. sap.
Cassandra: I know that a lot of rock stars are a bit lacking in the shampooing-and-combing department, but I’m fairly sure most of them don’t carry either clubs or fleas.
One of the interesting things about people is how non-sedentary we have always been, and how fleas are strong evidence of it. We don’t have any. There are other fleas which will prey on us (often to their greater detriment than ours, cat fleas can’t use our blood to make eggs), but there aren’t any fleas specific to humans. Fleas have a complex lifecycle, which requires their hosts to stick around. Their larval form lives in the ground, eating organic material (some, e.g. cat, can find enough in carpets to get by). Then they pupate. The pupa only hatch out when a host animal lies on them for enough time to warm them up.
People haven’t been spending enough time in one place to have any adapt to us, or we have been smart enough to interrupt the cycle. There is a story about de Anza, and how Las Pulgas, came to get its name. The Ohlone would burn down their houses every spring, because they had become infested with vermin (bed bugs, dog fleas, etc). De Anza’s group went into some, in the time between the new one’s being built, and the old ones being destroyed, and all the hungry insects attacked them.
Fucking fleas with their fucking bites and their fucking getting everywhere!
Dog brought in fleas. Now we all have flea bites AND cat anger consequences for having to treat her too.
And when I say the dog brought in fleas, I mean three weeks ago, with everyone telling my father that the dog was chewing himself alive cuz fleas, and my father insisting it wasn’t fleas. Dumb ass takes slightly less dumb ass to the vet and LO AND BEHOLD HE HAS FLEAS!
Best part? I absolutely will not allow any spray chemicals because of the fish. Treat the furry ones and wait for them to die off. (Pecunium, as I don’t let the furry ones in here, I have like one bite and am not worried about bringing you fleas, though I suppose you can treat me like a cat and give me a flea bath if you really want [that sounds far dirtier than I mean it too huh?])
Argenti – or you could wear a flea collar. 😛
I used to live in a house with a cat that had fleas. Thankfully, we slept in a loft bed, and the cat lacked the ability to climb ladders, thereby saving our bedding from a nasty fate.
However, we DID get bitten quite a bit ourself, since the cat ADORED humanity. Which normally is good… unless they have fleas. I finally solved the problem by keeping the flea medicine on hand. Turns out that the very sight of it would make the cat turn tail and flee at high speed.
Hey, look, I found a pic of Roosh doing his nightclub dance!
The creativity level of neanderthals is a somewhat testable hypothesis. If they were great at inventing and coming up with new ideas but bad at following rules and copying other people, then all their tools and artifacts would look radically different from each other: Each individual would be impatient and want to come up with their own style of spearhead or whatever rather than patiently watching an older person demonstrate how they’re made.
However, we actually see very little variation among Neanderthal tools. So there isn’t much to support the idea that they were wildly overcreative and innovative.