When you have power and privilege over someone else, you don't always know the harm you're doing at the time People will lie to you and hide their feelings to keep things going smooth even when you're doing something 99% of observers would agree is objectively fucked up
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Like okay I'm gonna go there David Bowie's famous scandal where he had sex with a 14-year-old and 15-year-old girl The two girls in question -- now women in their 60s -- adamantly deny that what happened was rape or abuse, they say Bowie was an awesome guy who treated them well
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That's as may be They are, as adults, entitled to their own memories and their own account of events But even if everything they say is completely true... all that means is that Bowie took a wildly dangerous risk and "got away with it" That doesn't make it at all okay
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This is what they call the "problem of moral luck" -- "no harm, no foul" is a shitty way to judge morality
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If I get drunk and throw a Molotov cocktali at someone's house and burn it down and the homeowner says "Hey, good news! This place was an unsellable dump and now I can collect on the insurance! You did me a favor!" it doesn't mean I did something morally acceptable
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You can't go around fucking throwing Molotov cocktails at people's houses and just hope that maybe they all belong to people who actually want their houses burned down
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You can't go around taking advantage of kids for sexual pleasure and hope they all grow up to still say they had a great time and nothing bad happened till the day they die The evidence that it doesn't usually work out that way is far too common to claim you weren't aware of it
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And no, this isn't as extreme as having sex with a child, okay, I'm deliberately using the most extreme possible example But that's the general response to adults arguing that you're demanding they "coddle" kids and act "too careful" with them You HAVE to be careful
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Maybe all the adults who argue that they were spanked regularly as kids and "turned out fine" are telling the truth (I don't see much evidence that they turned out all that great, but whatever) So what if you're fine Plenty of people AREN'T fine
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"I, personally, turned out fine" is not an argument for anything It's pure mindless narcissism "Well I don't ever wear a seatbelt and I've never died in a wreck" "I didn't get my shots and I never got measles" "I don't wear a mask and I've never tested positive for COVID-19"
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I mean, shit, look, if you and your spouse have these weird little challenges with each other where you don't eat until you've finished solving some kind of puzzle, whatever You're adults, that's your kink or whatever you wanna call it, you know the risks (RACK, as they say)
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If *two kids* do this with each other, I think it's the kind of thing where an adult, reasonably, should step in and say "Hey this is unhealthy" Fuck if I do this to *myself* I think most normal people would say it's your parents' job to remind you that it's unhealthy
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I mean shit that was literally me Left to my own devices I could easily play the same video game for 14 hours in a row with no breaks until I physically pass out Or spend that time arguing online, or frantically writing some essay, or going down a rabbit hole reading links
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(I was gonna try to make this less of a 21st-century digital boy thing by saying "reading a book" but let's be real there's no single book that would take me 14 hours to read straight through And that's a humblebrag)
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And you know what, it was my mom and dad's job to say "Hey, Arthur, you've been doing this a long time without a break, you need to take care of your body, come down and eat dinner"
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(I wish they had done this with a better understanding of ADHD as a form of neurodivergence and not a character flaw called "absent-mindedness", but they still did it and I appreciate them doing it)
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This is the exact opposite of that It's him forcing the objectively unhealthy behavior on someone who clearly *does not want to do it* and *didn't have the idea to do it* Like, Christ Would you be okay with a dad going "You're too sober, kid, you should join me in drinking"
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However badly I may treat my body now, as an adult, I would be pissed at a grownup in my past who *forced* his own maladaptive and unhealthy coping mechanisms onto me through some weird projection
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His original thread says that he personally feels like he's failed at "perseverance" in the past, that he's projecting this onto his daughter so she'll succeed where he failed, and she knows this and appreciates it Okay, I'm willing to believe all that It's still fucked up
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Of course I get what he means I'm the stereotypical guy who won't ask for directions either I know what it means to declare some meaningless task a matter of "honor" because you're running through all your life's past failures and you can't bear to fail one more time right now
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The angel on your shoulder is going "Jesus Christ Arthur you don't know what you're doing, you're wasting your time on this, this old laptop is a lost cause, just buy a new one" And the devil is going "Oh you're gonna GIVE UP, like you give up on everything, because you're WEAK"
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"It's not even that much money, you needed a new computer anyway, you can afford it, and most importantly YOU'RE CLEARLY NOT GOING TO FIX IT EITHER WAY" "Just like you couldn't GRADUATE on time, just like you couldn't get a JOB, just like you couldn't fix your RELATIONSHIPS"
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"This has nothing to do with that! If you did miraculously fix it it wouldn't go back and fix any of those things either! Stop connecting things that aren't connected!" "Don't you come at me with therapy talk, that's what they tell LOSERS to make them feel better about LOSING"
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"Well okay, Arthur, if you insist on spending your whole weekend on this stupid project can you at least get some sleep and come back to it fresh? You're clearly not going to fix it in your current state" "NO That would mean I DESERVE to sleep, and losers don't DESERVE comfort"
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It is, I think, not because I don't understand this kind of impulse but because I think I do, that I am so angry about him deliberately choosing to take this baggage he's carrying and dump it on a nine-year-old girl who doesn't have it yet
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Just like I, myself, fully admit I was terrified of having kids because I did not want to take this baggage and dump it on a brand-new human soul, or take the chance of doing it by accident Just like I'm still really fucking pissed that when I was nine I had it dumped on me
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God you know what this reminds me of Amy Chua, author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, and "Asian-American icon"
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Just to prove this is "equal-opportunity" shit I am angry at this guy because he's a white guy and because he presented his story with a certain white-guy insouciance, like he doesn't even realize it's controversial But I hated Amy Chua's book more
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I mean this was just a Twitter thread, that he tried to drop on the Internet as a cute funny innocent story Chua wrote a whole-ass book about this shit as this defiant self-righteous manifesto And she invested it with all this model minority Sturm und Drang
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"This is how I HAD to raise my kids! I can't AFFORD to coddle them like those smug lazy white parents can! This is the only way I could give them the TOOLS to survive! This is the SECRET OF IMMIGRANTS' SUCCESS and what makes us BETTER PEOPLE" (her later book The Triple Package)
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That's like my whole fucking childhood in manifesto form God I was so mad She was, literally, the author of all my misery
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