Are Fox News hosts or guests human? It’s something I found myself wondering, and not for the first time, while watching a recent clip from Laura Ingraham’s terrible show in which she and guest Raymond Arroyo mulled over superstar gymnast Simone Biles’ decision to drop out of a number of events at the Olympics because she couldn’t get her head in the game.
Arroyo started off almost reasonably:
Laura, I have a slightly schizophrenic reaction to all of this. Look, on the one hand, I get it. She had a bad performance. She was lost midair in a flip. She probably feared breaking her neck or permanently injuring herself.
And that’s no hyperbole; continuing on without proper mental focus could easily have caused the sort of catastrophic injury that would have ended her career. You’d think that the legitimate fear of literally breaking her neck or something equally severe would be enough of a justification for her to drop out of whatever events she felt could be a risk to her health.
But then Arroyo went on to bring up the sexual abuse that Biles experienced at the hands of former team doctor and current convicted sex offender Larry Nassar. Arroyo started out seeming sympathetic:
There is also the traumatic sex abuse that she endured at the hands of that evil Dr. Nassar.
Then he takes a turn for the worse:
But the time to work through all of that was before the Olympic trials, not during the Olympic Games. You’re part of a team now. And if you can physically perform, your job is to get into that headspace where you can overcome your fears and your jitters, and stick the landing.
Fuck you, Raymond Arroyo, you smug condescending piece of shit.
Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.
H/T — Thanks to Newshounds.us for covering this segment from Fox News’ The Ingraham’s Angle.
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Oh, HELLS TO THE NO.
Telling a patient – any patient – that they can get over [fillintheblank] if they just try harder? It doesn’t WORK that way.
Not to mention, where the bloody hell did they get the idea that her past history of being abused contributed to her case of the twisties?
Drowning these people in sewage would ensure that the shit stayed INSIDE them for once.
We really shouldn’t be surprised that Fox News contributors think “I am at risk of performing this task poorly in a way that could cause harm” is not a valid reason to decline to do something.
No. The ‘time to work through all of that’ is whenever, and if, Simone Biles feels able to work through it – and in whatever way she and her support team/therapist (if she has one, and I certainly hope she does and it’s rock solid) deem helpful to her. NOT on anyone else’s idea of a convenient-for-everyone-else schedule. NOT with calculated boundaries and limits. And certainly not on the prescription of of a pair of television chatterboxes-cum-culture critics.
This kind of exploitative concern trolling, resifting through someone else’s trauma for ‘explanations’ of why they don’t do what someone else wants them to do, is also abuse. Raymond Arroyo, whoever the hell he is, needs to STFU and stop being proprietary about anyone else’s life, pain, and decisions. Biles doesn’t owe him, or any of the public hungering after her performances, a damned thing. And as @Victorious Parasol points out, presuming that her recent performance difficulties are linked to past abuse is a profoundly flawed premise. Biles’ decisions about her body and mind, the limits of what she will risk putting them through, are hers to make every single moment, whether she’s got a case of the twisties or has been abused in the past or simply feels like shit. She’s an autonomous human being, not the public’s wind-up doll placed on stage merely to amaze us.
Oh? So a little therapy fixes things like sexual abuse and stuff in a week or something? I need me some of that shit. *rolls eyes so hard I’m looking at the inside of my skull*
Funny how the right wing pundits aren’t going after what’s his face, the white male tennis player who threw his racket, stormed off the court and quit. At least Simone stayed on the floor and cheered everyone (not just her fellow Americans) on.
Anyway, if there’s anyone who still thinks it’s weak to not do gymnastics your instincts are telling you isn’t safe, go Google Elena Mukhina, the Soviet Gymnast who was coerced to do a skill on floor she didn’t feel safe doing while recovering from an injury. She broke her neck, which is exactly what she feared and predicted, and while she survived it in the short term, she died young from complications of that injury.
You’re supposed to deny everything and go in for substance abuse, that’s the proper repressed fascist way of coping!
Simone Biles is the BEST GYMNAST IN THE WORLD. She has 36 medals, four gymnastic skills named after her, and has performed with kidney stones and broken toes. Her critics, not so much. I doubt this smug asshole could even do a cartwheel, let alone qualify for the Olympics. Sometimes I wonder if her Biles’s critics wanted to see her injure or kill herself by performing when her head wasn’t in the game. That’s how they sound sometimes.
This is the absolute epitome of the Dunning-Kruger effect of going: “I have no fucking idea what I’m talking about, but I’m going to say it anyways and expect people to agree with me!” What a fucking dumb as a fence post take.
You don’t work through sex abuse trauma assholes, you just learn to live with it and sometimes it still creeps up on you and makes you cry.
Only sort of on topic, Laura Ingraham also had Alan Dershowitz on recently. The topic was basically “Biden and his goons are being really mean by trying to force people to get vaccinated”. The Dersh claimed that Covid is worse that smallpox, and that he has a right to take a plane with only vaccinated people on board. Laura was basically like, I wasn’t expecting that, WTF is wrong with you. Then they argued over each other for a bit before Laura cut off his video feed.
For those unfamiliar, Dershowitz was one of those “respectable” people who was pretty consistently wrong about everything, but lost that (rather superficial) respectability once people found he had connections to Jeffrey Epstein.
Your ‘headspace’ is a part of being able to physically perform, you cretin.
But that fear, based upon the fact that she couldn’t locate her body in space while performing, is but a trivial matter to Raymond Arroyo, a big cheese for the Eternal Word Television Network, which features round-the-clock Roman Catholic programming.
Biles’s “twisties” may or may not have anything to do with the abuse, but my best guess is that like bereavement, the pain from abuse bursts out at irregular times, and often spectacularly inconvenient ones. Certainly not to a schedule chosen by a Faux News pundit.
“Are Fox News hosts or guests human?”
Evidently not. It is lucky for them though that the consequences for fucking up don’t include broken bones or even possibly death, otherwise there wouldn’t be a Fox News anymore by now.
More generell because that is stuff that people should get:
Trauma is generell somethink that is hard to overcome. Learning to live with it, to function is somethink the only success posible.
Here Simone Biles did realise she had a problem during Olympia (as far as I know). The problem is dangerous enough that it dropping out shouldn’t have been a controversal act. It was the responsible way. From what I know Olympia is a highlight for many athlets, but that danger is not worth it.Unfortanatly we can’t choose when we get problems. We have to deal with them, when they happen.
@Mexican Hot Chocolate: I thought about that, too – that Biles’ critics would have loved to see her injure herself, or worse. And, had that happened, they would’ve been all “Why did she choose to compete? Why didn’t she take time off and deal with her issues?”
hhhhhh.
I had a reply about how we treat trauma and emotional hurt, but all of that’s been blendered into a rage-froth as I’ve written it. So, yeah. No. This suited bollard is babbling about how an olympic athlete should ‘lete as if he’s a fucking cross-armed customer complaining to the manager. No thought in his empty dome, the words are just the whistling of wind rushing past his gaping cranium. Exactly the same as so many dudes out there, feeling like he’s got the place to opine on things he knows nothing about and openly denigrates.
David said it best (as you always do, David): Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.
I notice that no one is mentioning that the judges had been handicapping the points they gave her. They admitted it. Shaving off points. The excuse was that she was so good that they were afraid someone trying to copy her would get hurt. They made it clear they would continue to do it. She didn’t want her teammates to suffer because of this. Not saying that was the only reason, but it was part of it.
Imagine working the way that woman has worked and when you get to the Olympics the fucking judges openly cheat you. Think that might cause some emotional distress?
Simone is exceptional, of course. But a part of what makes her exceptional is that she is a grown-ass woman and not a 14 year old girl. She has the muscles of an adult woman. She’s trained those muscles to a peak of performance that no one has achieved before. Certainly not those little girls (no fault to them, they haven’t finished growing up yet).
Imagine if they let those little girls grow up before they can do the whole world-class athlete thing. Spend those years honing your skills, participating in age-ranked competition. If they did that, some of those little girls could have a bit of an actual life while training. You know, just a tiny bit.
All world-class athletes have to give up some parts of “normal” life to get to that level. Most of them don’t have to make the decision to do that before they are 10 years old. Only women’s gymnastics. I wonder why that is?
This is how mean-spirited people enjoy the olympics, through complaining and belittling. If bitterness and jealousy were olympic events, they could compete.
THey are humans. Only humans can be that stupid, cruel, or both.
How absolutely vile!
Well, they’re constantly performing their own jobs poorly and in a way that regularly causes harm, so…. it checks out.
Not like a Fox News “personality” would know anything about being the best in the world, or bowing out gracefully when you know you’re in over your head.
Semi-OT, for the thread at least.
Pastor Rick Wiles is creating a ‘safe place’ on the Web for straight white Christian men where they can be as God intended men to be without persecution from the ‘pagan’ world they live in.
https://www.advocate.com/news/2021/7/29/anti-lgbtq-preacher-creates-godtribe-social-straight-white-men
*facepalm*