By David Futrelle
A couple of days ago, ProPublica reporter Jessica Huseman tweeted out some advice on a hitherto unacknowledged peril of dating for (at least mostly) straight women in our digital age: when the seemingly normal dude you’re having coffee with suddenly, and for seemingly no reason, brings up Bitcoin.
While there were many Tweeters who seconded this advice, some of them mentioning their own Bitcoin date nightmares, not everyone who replied to Huseman agreed with what seems to me to be her eminently sensible dating advice.
“Is [the] goal to screen out passionate men working on one of the most important technologies of the next generation,” asked one fellow.
Er, yes?
“#Bitcoin bros deserve better, and by the time she realises this he’ll be unattainable for her,” warned another.
There were even some women standing up for the Bitbros — one of them going so far as to write an entire article about it for Bitcoinist, a website that seems to be devoted to constantly mentioning Bitcoin in any and all circumstances.
Christina Comben, whose articles for the site generally sport headlines like “TOP 5 CHEAPEST COUNTRIES TO MINE BITCOIN” and “3 REASONS WHY BITFINEX LEO TOKEN HAS FLOPPED” decided she needed to reassure the men in her audience that some ladies actually like cryptocurrency and the bros who talk about it on first dates.
After acknowledging that the Bitcoin community is pretty much a sausagefest — with only 5% of those in the business being female, according to one source — she plaintively assured the fellas that “NOT ALL WOMEN DISLIKE BITCOIN.”
“Don’t worry guys,” she wrote,
if bitcoin is your thing, it isn’t completely game over. Some women actually said they quite like it.
Her evidence? A handful of crypto-gals replying to Huseman on Twitter.
Comben then delved into the enigma that is Jessica Huseman: Woman Who Doesn’t Care to Hear About Bitcoin. “[A]lthough she seems to hate Bitcoin,” Combed wrote, seemingly baffled by Huseman’s existence, “she appears to be an extremely intelligent lady.”
Huseman, for her part, was considerably more delighted by Comban’s article than she is by cryptodudes on dates.
She now quotes the bit about being “an extremely intelligent lady” in her Twitter bio.
Send tips to dfutrelle at gmail dot com.
We Hunted the Mammoth relies entirely on readers like you for its survival. If you appreciate our work, please send a few bucks our way! Thanks!
@Rhuu
Same. I was going to demonstrate that Surplus is not alone in suffering health awfulness and seemingly insurmountable barriers to getting help by describing my experiences just this past year, to show that no, the things that they are having so much difficulty with are not “easily done by everybody else,” but… what’s the point?
Based on their consistent past behavior, they’ll just reject my example because it doesn’t fit with the narrative of the Ultimate Victim being deliberately targeted by An Adversary so that their life the The Hardest Life There Is, So Much Worse Than Everybody Else’s, and respond to any hep with vicious attacks because that help is a a Magic Button That Makes Everything Right.
I get that your life sucks, Surplus. Lots of people’s lives suck. It is NOT because some mysterious Adversary is conspiring against them, nor is there “a button to press” to Make Things Better that everyone else knows about but is hiding from you. Things just suck.
I’m sorry you’re having medical issues, @Allandrel. I hope it gets easier for you to do whatever it is you have to do.
@David – thank you for freeing my comment.
William Goldman, The Princess Bride
Surplus, your failure is expecting everything to be easy and to come to you with no effort on your part. That just isn’t how things are. It’s hard for everyone. It’s even harder for poorer people. I’m sorry you got the shit end of that deal but you’re neither alone in that nor the worst off, and it’s incredibly insulting to everyone when you try to tell them their pain, their luck, and their circumstances are simple and easy and your situation is beyond comparison. So many people have so much worse health issues than chronic leg cramps and they also have to deal with things like medication shortages. Your luck is not uniquely shitty.
Also, stop being abusive to people. Tone argument is absolutely not a license to abuse people and fuck you for acting like the victim when people speak out against your abusive behavior.
There is a superficial resemblance between tone arguments and some of the pushback Surplus is seeing here because the arguments that we are making are what tone arguments pretend to be in order to seem reasonable while sneaking in a nasty message. We are saying, “Treat people with respect.” Tone arguments are like, “Ooh, me, too! I also just want you to treat people with respect!” But they’re using a different definition of respect. Their definition requires that you behave deferentially to supposedly “polite” people even if those people are harming you. That is obviously not acceptable.
In contrast, when we say “Treat people with respect,” we mean don’t treat people like they exist to serve you. Demanding that people here solve all your problems for you and becoming angry with them when they fail to do so is entitled and selfish, no matter what tone it is delivered in.
@Kupo:
No.
I am merely expecting this to be as easy as it was on Nov. 17, 2018, and to require no more effort from me as it did then (which wasn’t zero).
I am therefore expecting something that is clearly inside of the realm of physical possibility because it has happened before. My expectations are demonstrably eminently reasonable and you cannot therefore argue that my expectations are in any way incorrect.
Now how do I get back to how things were on that date, w.r.t. the leg-cramp issue?
Remembering that a) it is physically possible, since it already happened once, and b) it is also my right as a citizen of a country that does have universal health care. Which makes withholding this from me a violation of my rights.
The world doesn’t have the right to yank this medication away from me and then demand extra of me before it will give it back, whether that extra be extra money, or that I learn some sort of additional social skills (and maybe even magically become neurotypical), or whatever. Indeed, it doing so constitutes extortion, which is a crime in my jurisdiction and likely in yours as well.
I am asking how to have my rights as a Canadian citizen enforced against whoever OR whatever it might be that is presently in the act of violating those rights by committing extortion and, in roughly 20 days if this situation is not resolved by then, torture.
I do not see how I can make a more forceful and compelling argument that it is a moral obligation of someone to make this right. If the argument I have made is somehow still insufficient … well, it can’t be, can it? This can’t be allowed to happen to me because I. Have. Done. Nothing. Wrong!
Perhaps it’s time for an ultimatum. World, you will restore my access to this medication, or supply some other one that is effective against those cramps, within 20 days or I will jump off a fucking overpass and refuse to participate in ANY of this bullshit anymore. I refuse to live subjected to random intervals of torture on the say-so of some shadowy fucking cabal somewhere, when it’s entirely physically possible for me to be spared it. So if I cannot get back to some semblance of normal with regard to medication then I refuse to live, period.
Either way, you-collective won’t get to have your jollies watching me clutch my leg and writhe in agony. That is not going to be an option for you-collective. So you-collective can give up on that outcome RIGHT now. And since you-collective aren’t going to be getting what you-collective wanted anyway, you-collective might as well cease expending however much time, money, and effort you-collective are expending on systematically obstructing me from getting my goddamn medication, mightn’t you-collective? So just stop it. You-collective have already lost. Either everyone loses, or just you-collective lose, but you-collective definitely lose. So you-collective may as well just give up.
P.S. Why the hell is everyone else in an allegedly-progressive space apparently in consensus that I should knuckle under to something that is clearly illegitimate???
Surplus,
Between the paranoia and now the threats of self harm, I think you are experiencing issues beyond what we are capable of assisting with. I hope you make use of these resources.
https://www.crisisservicescanada.ca/en/
And anyone else who knows more or better crisis resources for Canada, feel free to add them too.
It’s you. YOU have to make this right. YOU have to put in the same effort as everyone else affected by this recall and ask politely at the pharmacist how you can get more and/or when they are expecting to receive more.
The pharmacist might not know, because the manufacturer might not be keeping them informed or the distributor might not be able to give exact times or numbers for which locations will receive how much and on which dates. DO NOT yell at the pharmacist if that’s the case. It’s not their fault.
You want it to be Nov. 17, 2018 so you don’t have to put in the same effort as everyone else (iow: you want it to be the exact same effort it was back then even though circumstances beyond your control and the pharmacy’s control have changed). That’s simply not possible.
Life is not fair. Sometimes a task will require a different amount of effort one day than it does another day. That’s just how the world works. You can’t change that. We can’t change that. You being verbally abusive to us certainly won’t change that. The only thing that YOU have control over is how you act in response to these situations. Your current approach is not working. It’s harming you and everyone who tries to help you. That’s the thing in your control. Take control of it.
I’m not saying that flippantly. It’s not an easy thing to learn to react well to setbacks. It’s not an easy thing to make that extra phone call. It’s not an easy thing to learn to control your anger. But it’s the only thing that will fix this problem for you. You need to put in that work. No one else can do that work for you.
@Surplus
Yeah, I agree with WWTH, this level of distress and agitation is beyond the scale of something that strangers on the internet will be able to help you with.
Please avail yourself of the mental health resources that you need. This website may also be helpful:
https://www.connexontario.ca/
We’re not asking you to knuckle under. We are trying to steer you towards the options that you do have to hopefully correct your situation (magically turning the clock back to 2018 is not one of those) and advising you on how to better interact with people who are attempting to assist you.
For anyone who is interested in cryptocurrency, for dating purposes or otherwise, there’s been some guidance on the (English) legal implications of same, published today.
https://35z8e83m1ih83drye280o9d1-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/6.6056_JO_Cryptocurrencies_Statement_FINAL_WEB_111119-1.pdf
OK. Then please just tell me, step by step, exactly what work I must do.
1. _______________
2. _______________
3. _______________
…
N. Take pill out of bottle and a swig of water and swallow ’em.
2221201918 days left in which for me to complete whatever tasks you set me, by the way.This site has got to be satire right? Or just Poe’s law confirmed??
Drink some more soy, feminist bros. Lol. Be good citizens. Read CNN, Wapo, et c. Whatever you do, don’t think – that’s something Nazis do.
Are you implying that it will Kupo’s fault if commit suicide? That’s actually abusive. Not ok at all.
Surplus to Requirements, you need to get yourself into some sort of mental healthcare NOW. No one here can help you.
Surplus, part of the work you need to put in is either figuring out your own steps to solve the problem, or asking someone who can /actually/ help you.
We’re strangers on the internet. We don’t know the specifics of your situation. We don’t know all the options that may be available for you. We are (very likely) not experts in navigating challenges with medication distribution and access.
Frankly, given how you have reacted to literally all the other advice that you have received on this blog, I’m surprised that you are still expecting us to be able to give you step-by-step instructions on how to fix your problem. (Well, not really. You’re clearly fishing for advice that you can rip apart and shit on to make yourself feel better.) We’re all clearly out of touch and incompetent in your eyes. You need to get help from someone else. From professionals. Use the resources you have available to you and get some mental health assistance.
This?is how I feel also. A little bit it seems that you (surplus) dont really want us to help, but only just want to tell us our attempts to help are bad or harmful or stupid so that you can feel better or realse stress or something and it’s just not nice for us to interact with that. It feels abusive and hurtful. We cant help you, you said that again and again in many different ways but people are still trying but at this point I dont think many can continue. It is clear you are suffering but it’s not fair to take it out on people who are trying their best. There is not much people in a comment thread can do but so many of the people here tried the best they can do in this format.
A wild troll sighting!
@colum cille
What good ideas! Don’t mind if I do.
I’ve watched conservatives enough to know that they are the non thinking ones. If conservatives could think, they wouldn’t be such tremendous hypocrites.
Right, we Mammotheers do no thinking. That’s too difficult. Now, Nazis — they’re known for their thinking.
What a disappointingly content-free troll post. First, astonishment that people could believe what we seem to believe, but with no explanation for why the troll finds those beliefs so unreasonable or even what specific beliefs they’re referencing. Then, of course, the classic right-wing preoccupation with what milks or milk-like substances other people drink. (They have strong and deeply felt Milk Opinions.)
Finally, we have a dichotomy created between people who read the news and people who “think.” I guess real thinkers do their thinking without the interfering influence of actually knowing what’s going on in the world, according to our new friend colum. But again, we don’t get to know what the thinkers actually think, just that we are definitely, definitely wrong. About something. (Bitcoin?)
The people who think are called Nazis, either to mock us for supposedly calling everyone a Nazi or because colum actually does think Nazis are good. This post is so without actual content that I can’t even tell if colum is pro-Nazi.
Overall, a scant 2/10. Come back, colum, and take some actual positions so I can make fun of you for them.
@Viscaria
Also, strong meat opinions. You can tell it’s not kosher because they express both of these in the same posts sometimes.
Well, if you accept their backwards logic, it does make a certain sort of sense. They think people like Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro are thinkers, and those guys are fully disconnected from reality. Therefore, a fan might associate following the real world news with not thinking.
I don’t know why I put “think” in quotes like that (it probably made sense at one point and then I changed the sentence) and my edit window is now closed. I am in a hell of my own making.
@Naglfar
I laughed ?
Something I should say about the “Are you saying you like Nazis, or are you saying that we call everyone Nazis?” thing is that of course actual Nazis deliberately use that ambiguity as a recruiting tactic. On the one hand, they tell would-be recruits that the left just calls *everyone* Nazis to normalize the viewpoints they espouse while the recruit still thinks that obviously actual Nazis are a bad thing. At the same time, they are encouraging people a little farther along into thinking that Nazis are okay, actually.
@Viscaria
Deliberate ambiguity is a popular alt right tactic for other things as well. Remember that leaked Daily Stormer style guide that said that “the uninitiated should not be able to tell if we are joking”? Plausible deniability and ambiguity allow them to get away with saying these things by claiming that it’s “just to be edgy” when really they genuinely believe these things.
Surplus, get help.
Here is a listing of Ottawa crisis lines.
Here is one with a distress line/crisis line you can phone.
Here’s some information from the Ottawa Hospital.
No one can help you here, we are strangers on the internet. You counting down the days until you’re out of your medicine does no good. Talk to someone who can help.
Your steps are basically:
1) Stop putting all of this on us. This is abusive. You threatening suicide unless we magically fix all your problems is abusive.
2) Look at some of the links people have given you, for help.
3) CALL ONE OF THEM. GET HELP.
re: troll – weaksauce, friend. Visc was really nice with her 2/10 rating, I feel. I give you a rotten banana for a score. Too far gone to be used, even in banana bread.
@Rhuu
Bananas at all are too high praise. The troll doesn’t even respond, so in my book the best they can get is moldy strawberry.
What? The Nazi troll, colum cille, gets points? And food?
If it were up to me — and it’s a damned shame that it’s not — I’d put this commenter in troll jail. Colum cille can spend a long, long time there, thinking about his (yeah, I’m betting that “his” is the correct pronoun) opinions and beliefs and desire to foist his hatred on others. Not to mention his crimes against original expression. And grammar. And even spacing between words. Okay, fine, yeah, the troll can have food while in troll jail.
My cat sometimes questions whether I have the “temperament” to be an ambassador.