“The Jews are behind the simultaneous hypersexualization and sexual segregation of fertile teenagers from the wider male population,” incel declares

@ Surplus,

I don’t usually weigh on in this kind of thing, but…well, I recognize myself in your comments here, so I wanted to speak up.

I’ve also got a tendency to take things very personally (for me it usually manifests as thinking people are angry with me when there’s no evidence to suggest that). I don’t say this to make it all about me, but just to say that this kind of thing:

There’s nothing in my recent choices that I can think of where this kick to my face would be a legitimate consequence, in particular.

is hurting you. I used to do this to myself; I still do sometimes, and it SUCKS.

I don’t really have any specific steps or easy solutions for you to help you get through this sense that you are being personally attacked. For one, every person’s situation is different; for another, I’ve seen you shoot down advice in the past. However, I will say that ultimately the only way any human gets through anything is to build community. By that I mean to give as well as to take.

You have a community here on WHTM. I’ve read your comments, and the responses to them, for a while now on this site. I feel like everyone here likes you and has lots of time for you.

The thing that gets me through my feelings of the world being out to get me is reminding myself that there exist actual people who like me, and, crucially, to help and to be there for others in whatever way I can. It doesn’t have to be big ways; there’s a saying that even a smile is charity. I’m not trying to give you any pat answers, but…well, you sound like you’re in pain, and I wanted to say that I see it, I acknowledge that it feels very real to you even if the specifics don’t resonate with me, and I get the sense that the folks here wish you well. And you also have lots to offer. I hope that helps, even if only a little.

@ kupo and dallilama,

That sounds like a lot of pain for very little gain! What would the surgery involve?

@ Dalillama,

Otherwise they go in and shave away bits of bone or cartilage that look like being in the way, or sometimes cut apart soft tissue* adhesions**.

Aaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!

Whew. Yup, sounds nasty. I guess if it was SERIOUSLY impacting your quality of life it’d be worth a go, but if not, ouch.

I was selected to be a bone marrow donor once. They explained the alternative procedures to me.

“We can either do stem cells or bone marrow donation. With stem cells the side affects include nausea, vomiting, tiredness, bleeding from the mouth, and diarrhoea.”

“Ooh, what are the side effects of the other one?”

“We drill a hole in your hip”

@Alan

When “drilling a hole in your hip” seems like the more preferable side effect of a procedure… O_o;;;

@Alan

I’d probably have done general myself. I’m not sure what diamorphine would do, but given that with me and vicodin there’s a fine line between not feeling pain and puking my guts out (found out the hard way) I think I’d rather not be awake for the Black n’ Decker noises.

Not gonna lie, I’m a little jealous of folks who can handle opiate pain killers.

I’m don’t have gastrointestinal problems; my brain just flips out because I know I’m not sleep deprived, but it’s acting like I’m sleep deprived, and I may have some control issues. Painkillers = crying mess + panic. Not fun times.

On oral opiate painkillers, my limited experience is that they weren’t much impressive, or maybe dosing was too low. I wasn’t in too much pain anyway, so didn’t bother to ask for more.

However, the mild constipation side effect was very welcome especially during my two hospital stays, when toilet use & personal hygiene was somewhat impractical for assorted reasons. I have IBS that normally makes my pooping annoyingly frequent and difficult to clean, especially if I’m not microdosing on Imodium.

@GSS noob
Oh, if only a nerve block was literal and not just a targeted injection of regular local anaesthetics. They tried to give me one when I was in hospital with the tip of my thumb off, and I had to argue with them for the better part of a half hour to get them to quit trying to numb the digit and start trying to stanch the bleeding before I went back into shock.

@GSS-ex-noob:

When that happens to me, I say “darn it” and look online for when my show is going to be on next, or stream it if it isn’t scheduled again. It’s just TV.

It’s not that, so much as that the listing said that the show was on, and then something yanked it away from me literally at the second it was scheduled to start airing. Think “Lucy yanking away the football”. That’s a dick move, any way you slice it. And I disagree with anyone who suggests that I somehow deserved it.

(Is the use of the phrase “dick move” misandrist???)

@Bookworm in hijab:

I acknowledge that it feels very real to you even if the specifics don’t resonate with me, and I get the sense that the folks here wish you well.

The Kupo post directly above yours would seem to contradict that.

And you also have lots to offer.

That’s not the message I get from pretty much any other source than a proper subset of the people posting here.

It’s certainly not the message I got when, diploma fresh in hand in an in-demand field, I emailed out résumés to various companies allegedly hiring in that field and never heard anything back. Not one interview, not so much as a single “we regret to inform you…” letter, nothing. I might as well have emailed them all directly to Saggitarius A* for all that there’s any evidence they ever even got read by a human.

And it’s not actually hard to see why. In a world of cutthroat competition there will always be a better qualified candidate, with probability one, especially if you’re a fresh graduate and there are out-of-work people with ten or twenty years of industry experience angling for the same job. They took away all the entry-level jobs. Nobody fresh out of school has anything to contribute, according to corporate HR managers as a collective. Nor does anybody who’s been unemployed the whole time since then. Nobody of my generation can seemingly get anything but McJobs unless they’re a downright prodigy or they have connections.

It’s also not the message I get when authority figures, big businesses, and the like capriciously screw with me for no obvious reason and then are totally unreachable and unaccountable to any sort of feedback from mere peons like their customers.

It’s also not the message I get when everything from Instacart to the entertainment industry to the supposedly-universal health care system of Ontario tells me that I’m not in an expensive enough zipcode to qualify for personhood — please move to a suburb or the downtown of a large city and pay $2000 or more a month in rent or mortgage payments if you want any services from us going forward. Otherwise, no deliveries, doctor, or new entertainment for you, except for emergency care and a dwindling set of “traditional” broadcast TV shows that we randomly yank and rearrange from our schedules without warning at a whim so you can’t rely on them. (Instacart actually went so far as to literally claim that my postal code was not “a valid Canadian postal code” at all, apparently because it wasn’t an expensive enough one. The others are less explicit, but say the same thing between the proverbial lines.)

It’s also not the message I get when the following ludicrous sequence of events happens in a Facebook group:

• Someone posts a post, which FB glitches up in some manner for unknown reasons.
• I get a notification about that post. Not just once, but at least ten or so repeated popups notifying me about the same post. Evidently FB’s algorithms think I will be very interested in this particular post. Not one to argue with those algorithms I attempt to view it.
• The group loads, but instead of a “from notifications” section with the post in question followed by a “new activity” section with the rest of the group’s contents, there’s just the “new activity” section, with that heading duplicated with just a blank line or two between the copies. No sign of the post at issue, though perhaps if I scrolled down for half an hour or so I might eventually happen across it that way.
• A second attempt produces similar results, though without the odd duplication of the “new activity” header. So does attempting a right click “open in new tab”. The latter results in a new tab where Facebook’s notification menu won’t open fully, producing a very blurry and faded unusable menu that remains that way indefinitely, as well as lacking a “from notifications” section.
• The polite thing to do, obviously, is to let the post’s author know that something went wrong. Certainly if one of my own posts was not showing up for other people I’d want to know about it and fix or re-post it. And it’s not always obvious to a poster that something has gone wrong. The post may look normal to them, but show “attachment unavailable” or similarly for other people, if it embeds an image with different (narrower) permissions than the post’s own, for example. This is a common enough occurrence on Facebook that there are memes about it there. And if that can happen, it’s certainly not beyond the pale that a post might glitch in other ways for other people while appearing normally to its own author, and they would never know there was a problem if nobody notified them, at least not until it had been there a while without getting any likes or comments.
• So, I posted a note in the group tagging the author of the misbehaving post to let them know that their recent contribution to the group was not showing up properly. Problem is, Facebook ate the post. It didn’t give an error message, but neither did the post appear the way they normally do immediately after the “posting…” thingy disappears. I refreshed the page, nothing; I looked at my activity log, and there was no evidence there that I’d even made the attempt. Definitely something glitchy going on in that group then! I don’t know if this is the same thing that happened to the post I got a notification about, but can’t rule it out.
• Needless to say, the next thing I tried was simply reposting the same note, as maybe its instant disappearance was just a one-off. Nope. The second attempt likewise just vanished into the air.
• So, I found another post and added an “OT, but…” comment on that post, tagging the author of the original glitched post, and alerting them to the glitch. That comment appeared to post successfully, but by now I was extremely distrustful of Facebook, particularly in that particular group, doing what it was supposed to do. I reloaded the page and the comment was gone! It had not actually been saved to the server, apparently, just inserted into the DOM at the client side.
• Stranger than that, upon that reload none of the posts in the group had a comment input form anymore, just a note claiming that a moderator had turned off commenting for that post. On every post.
• Out of options (short of sending someone I don’t know, even as an online acquaintance, a friend request so I could DM them about their glitched post), I DMed the group’s mod to alert them to the strange goings-on and the fact that the last glitch had disabled commenting throughout the group they moderate (and that glitch was blaming them for doing so!) … and after hours, there was no reply. During that time, indicators let me know that the mod had spent some time online and had read my message. Now we get to the “are my contributions valued?” relevant part: this moderator definitely had read my message … and chose to completely ignore it.
• I inquired after the lack of a response, and actually got a kind of response this time: the moderator, without saying a word, disabled my posting privileges in the affected group (or rather, re-enabled everyone else’s); the message changed from saying a moderator had turned off commenting for each individual post to saying a moderator had turned off my ability to comment or to post top-level posts.
• I sent another DM pointing out that this constituted a childish way of handling the situation and saying that it was important that the poster of the original glitched post find out that something had gone wrong as early as possible, as it was more likely they would remember what post it was and be able to redo or find-and-fix it if it was fresher in their memory. I also pointed out that, as near as I could tell, the mod was acting intentionally to obstruct me from doing the polite thing and letting another user know about a problem that they might otherwise not know about, and asking why they would do something so blatantly antisocial, and then went to bed.
• The next morning there was still no response, though the new messages had been read sometime during the night. So I resorted to taking a screenshot and posting it publicly on my own wall, redacting everything irrelevant from the screenshot and pointing out that this was the consequence of their refusal to communicate with me, or let me communicate with the user whose post they needed to know had gotten glitched.
• This garnered a response, in the form of a voice message — clearly a passive-aggressive move intended to obstruct any further use of screenshots to publicly expose their behavior. In this voice message, I was berated for “wasting the moderator’s time” and more or less told to shut up, and I was also accused of “inappropriate thread hijacking” in posting my third attempt at that note as a comment on an existing post. In the process basically admitting that they had actively censored that comment.
• My response (a normal text DM) pointed out, of course, that the moderator wasted their own time — they chose to proactively butt into my attempts to notify a third party about a problem affecting one of their posts to the group, so they had some chutzpah accusing me of wasting their time when in fact they had wasted my time (by then, at least a cumulative half-hour of it) by not simply sitting on the sidelines. I pointed out that had they not interfered, the third, at least, of my attempts to contact the other user would have succeeded, they would have repaired or redone their affected posting (ideally) and thanked me for the heads-up, and its purpose having been served I’d have then deleted my note to them myself to de-clutter the group, and everyone would have carried on happily. So the only person responsible for wasting both my time and theirs was themselves. As for the “inappropriate thread hijacking”, I pointed out that that was an inevitable consequence of circumstances beyond my control: if FB hadn’t eaten both my attempts to make a separate, top-level post to do the notification, I’d have never posted it into a comment on an otherwise-unrelated post in the first place. So either FB was responsible, or they were, yet again, in the event that it was something they had done that had caused FB to eat those posts. (Though that is unlikely; the posts didn’t appear normally but vanish after some non-zero elapsed time, unlike the comment — if it was the moderator’s meddling, it would have to have been by setting up an automated filter, and probably I’d have then received an error message on the attempt … and they’d have had to have known in advance that all of this was going to happen and proactively set up a filter just to catch my attempt to alert the other user. Which would mean the mod had caused the original glitch with the other user’s post as well, and that the entire thing was an elaborate and intentional prank on two of the group’s users. This would, of course, constitute a massive dick move and proof of unfitness to be a group mod, but it’s also an improbable conspiracy theory.)
• Those DMs have been seen as well, as of this afternoon, but have apparently been ignored (though my posting privileges in the group were restored eventually).
• After all of this ridiculous hoop-jumping and rigmarole, the original poster of the malfunctioning post that precipitated this entire chain of events still has not been successfully notified that their post got glitched, unless the mod notified them, which I doubt given that it would be inconsistent with their otherwise dickish and obstructive behavior.

I have lots to offer? Not according to any of these various sources. And before you argue that these are isolated incidents, they are not. There is a pervasive pattern my whole life where very few people seem to do much more than tolerate me. Things I post to FB publicly get single digit likes, while I see plenty of other people’s posts getting dozens and even hundreds. I get small amounts of praise or notice for contributions here and there, to be sure, but generally from a minority of the people in a place, while the rest largely ignore me and some act as though I am a nuisance they would like to get rid of. In most places there’s one or two people who seem to view me as valuable … as entertainment through pranks and other antisocial behavior directed at me. In no places has any authority figure ever taken my side if I’ve escalated to them regarding such behavior. There’s always some group that goes out of its way to try to make me feel unwelcome, and in online environments there’s almost always a moderator who does dickish and abusive things to me capriciously from time to time. No authority figure ever takes the time to listen to my side of anything, no matter how reasonable I have been and how unreasonable the other side demonstrably is — the vast majority of authority figures consider that in any dispute between me and any other person I am automatically the one in the wrong, facts be damned. In most places I’m invisible unless I make an overt fuss, and then I’m treated as a nuisance. People then behave as if I myself am the problem, rather than whatever problem I am trying to call attention to. The clear message is that I am a child in pre-modern times who should be “seen and not heard” in any situation short of the house being on fire. My needs, modest though they are, are unimportant. It’s far more important that I not bother anybody else by ever reminding them that I have any needs, or problems. I must do everything and solve every problem myself, and wholly by myself. I can never take a day off, even if I’m sick or something, and have something done for me on that day. If I take a day off, then nothing gets done on that day. No one else will feed the cat, or replenish my own pantry, or get showered and dressed and take the rent check down the hall to the office on the first of the month. No one will step in, even if it’s literally their job to do so, to slap down a bully who is harassing me; I must somehow deal with the bully completely on my own, with almost no resources of any sort. And so on, and so forth. Beyond the most basic, most impersonally transactional things (rent, utilities, such highly scripted rituals as exchanging coins for an object at a shop), I get almost no recognition even of my existence as a human being from all but a very narrow sliver of the population, a percent or two at most. No one talks to me. No one has time for me. I have an actual conversation of some sort maybe once or twice a month. I am almost an unperson. I’m guessing that would change if I actually had money, but then I’d also have people trying to take advantage of me to get at that money, and even less ability to trust anyone without being hurt. Not that I have much ability even now. Not when groups have pretended to include me, only to then ditch me after a while (leaving me stranded in an unfamiliar part of the city I was in at the time, natch). Not when I’ve had someone friend me on Facebook, respond positively to several things I posted or showed them, and then abruptly I start getting “the message failed to send” and when I attempt to go to their profile page and leave a note on their wall saying that something’s gone wrong with the DM session and I didn’t mean to be rude and ignore them, I discover that their profile is gone and apparently they deleted their FB account entirely and vanished into the night … without any indication of acrimony or trouble at all literally five minutes earlier. About as large a percentage of people deliberately dick around with me as the fraction who seem to see me as an actual person. Maybe one or two in a hundred.

You’d think I might be expressing skepticism of your claim that I have something to offer, but no, actually, I’m not. I do think I have something to offer. I just have no faith that anyone else much will agree, or even care. The world has come to a consensus decision to reject me, with proportionately as few people dissenting from that consensus as the Green Party has seats in Parliament. So, not enough to carry any motion. Not enough to even get anything of significance to the floor, or to get enough air time in Question Period to have even the tiniest bit of influence over anything important.

Thanks, though, for being one of those few dissenters.

@ Lumipuna,

I had to take oral knock-you-out-drugs when I had my wisdom teeth out. Somehow they hit me so hard that not only was I unconscious for the surgery, I was unconscious/semi-conscious for the better part of the next three days.

The other side effect is that I seem to have permanently lost my taste for chocolate pudding, which I rate as a far worse consequence than the effects of the medication.

@Dalillama: I must have gotten the extra-fancy deluxe nerve block, because I literally couldn’t feel anything there for 24 hours. It was by the anesthesiologist, who presumably knew her stuff more than ER docs. I was already out by the time it happened. Which, on one hand was great, but on the other hand when it wore off — YEOW! Then the opioids were needful. And I didn’t mind not having to poop for a couple days, because it hurt.

They do permanent nerve blocks sometimes, killing it when nothing else works. But they try long-lasting temporary ones first.

@Policy: Versed is a hell of a drug. I had a colonoscopy on that and presumably there was pain, but I don’t remember it. Just getting something in my IV and then waking up in recovery.

Facebook sucks unless you are a big company. I’m still in touch with people on a mailing list we set up back around 1991. There are no ads, no conspiracy theorists, and nobody I don’t like. Billions of people have perfectly good lives without it.

My husband has it, and the only reason he gets likes at all is that he comes from a big family and they’re contractually obligated. My family’s down to 2, and the other one doesn’t have a computer. We *talk on the phone* for about an hour a week — I finally got him to get a flip phone last year.