What pisses me off about this is he self-pityingly describes the "callout post" from @chrysopoetics as sending a chill down his spine and spiking his cortisol
"Am I back in college? Is it all happening again? Am I about to be 'canceled'? Will I lose everything and die alone?"
-
-
And he has the motherfucking GALL to compare this to someone having one of the most blatantly physical things a person can do to someone else done to them Christ How do you even start to engage without screaming
Show this thread -
Kate Manne went viral among the popular press for coining the term "himpathy" for this kind of shit The Scotts are like walking talking posting flesh-and-blood avatars of "himpathy" If she knew who they are she could've given it a different name, like "bescottedness"
Show this thread -
Look Yeah I get that if you really sit down and open a vein you can write not just 20,000 words but 200,000 or two million about all your trauma I could do it too If you gave everyone the tools to do so, EVERYONE could do it
Show this thread -
Everyone has an infinite amount of performance of pain in them if you give them the tools and the motivation to express it It reproduces itself as naturally and instinctively as expressions of triumph and joy Lacan, the discourse of the hysteric, look it up
Show this thread -
At the end of the day, SO THE FUCK WHAT A "rationalist" should understand that all this performance and self-pity and poetry doesn't somehow let you skip the question of WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED I don't care what you FEEL happened, what DID happen
Show this thread -
And you cannot judge pain by the VISIBILITY of pain (as shown in studies that show that with actual doctors evaluating actual physical pain in a clinical setting, the pain of Black people is literally invisible)
Show this thread -
You cannot judge the depth or reality of pain by whether it produced a great work of fucking literature (or even a hacky but popular work of literature like "Untitled" is) That's not determined by anything but the writer's access to education and a well-connected audience
Show this thread -
That's how we ended up with half the history of Western literature being wealthy aristocratic men going around punching down at everyone they see, then writing beautiful poetry whining about their chronically sore knuckles
Show this thread -
And Scott absolutely will not stop with this shit He is absolutely shameless about his endless amounts of empathy for whomever the fuck he naturally feels like empathizing with, and then just deleting the experiences of everyone else from his awareness like he never saw them
Show this thread -
(IIRC this is what happened the time one of his commenters diagnosed him with schizoid personality disorder, this deeply inappropriate reaction to a patient he described where he gets actively angry that "This person's story makes NO SENSE to me, I don't GET IT")
Show this thread -
I wish I'd saved more receipts from the old days on Scott's blog because they were all over the fucking place 2013/14 Scott, before he really got famous, was much more forthright about his "controversial" takes
Show this thread -
He tried to play the "himpathy" card for *Donald Sterling*, the Clippers owner who was forced by NBA rules to sell his team for being blatantly racist "And I'm sure just because he's a wealthy white man means it's okay for him to lose everything over a private conversation?"
Show this thread -
YES He didn't "lose everything", he got paid MILLIONS OF DOLLARS to get him to retire from a job he was TERRIBLE AT
Show this thread -
A job that has only two responsibilities -- be the public face of the team and make good business decisions -- that he still had after DECADES of being the universally reviled face of the worst-performing team in the NBA
Show this thread -
I'm just remembering all this shit now, and I don't care enough to trawl through archives for receipts, so you can take this as "Arthur making shit up about Scott" if you want and fuck off Did you know he did a post back in the day arguing at length there's no rape culture?
Show this thread -
"Rape is actually treated with far more seriousness than other crimes in our culture You say victim-blaming is a barrier to reporting rape, but my buddy got his bike stolen last year and EVERYONE blamed him for not securing it well enough and NOBODY stood up for him"
Show this thread -
HE SAID THIS ON A PUBLIC POST AND PEOPLE PRAISED HIM FOR IT
Show this thread -
He and his fans think he's a fucking genius because he just DOESN'T THINK ABOUT SHIT that any fucking dumbass on the street KNOWS YOU HAVE TO THINK ABOUT "You just compared being raped to having your bike stolen" "Well that's not relevant to the logic of the analogy"
Show this thread -
"High-decoupling" The two Scotts were OBSESSED with finding other shit to compare rape to, so they could get out of the fucking obvious and intuitive conclusion that women getting raped way more than men means women objectively have it worse than men
Show this thread -
"Isn't it symmetrical, that people fucking you when you don't want them to fuck you is how women are harmed by patriarchy, and people NOT fucking you when you DO want them to fuck you is how men are harmed by it" How do you not punch yourself in the face as soon as you say this
Show this thread -
Scott Aaronson, with his trademark lack of self-awareness, posted his thing comparing incels to beggars dying for lack of food and people being unwilling to give them bread in public But like everything else this is an opinion the other Scott shares, at great length
Show this thread -
Did you know that back in the day before he started Slatestarcodex, Scott Siskind wrote an LJ post about how he "finally understood how women feel about dating" after he'd been on a trip to India? Because women are the equivalent of wealthy Americans and men are beggars?
Show this thread -
Saying that as soon as he walked out of the airport he was surrounded by filthy poors demanding to sell him stuff, do simple tasks for him, show him around, angrily claiming he owed them a dollar just for making eye contact with them And he felt violated and scared
Show this thread -
"Wow, these people really really want to get their hands on American currency I'm worried some of them might actually get desperate enough to jump me for it This must be how a hot girl feels when she rolls up to the club and the creeps all swarm on her hoping to touch a boob"
Show this thread -
It's the kind of thing that sounds very empathetic and insightful if you're part of his target audience of privileged dorks who are proud of what dumb "decoupling" shitheads they are
Show this thread -
It only makes sense if you focus COMPLETELY on how his own EXPERIENCE of being a wealthy tourist FEELS to him like being a hot girl LOOKS to him And didn't expend a single watt of brainpower on how the poor beggars or the hot girl's life actually feels most of the time
Show this thread -
That no, not knowing how you're going to pay rent or buy food and water or keep your children safe is NOT, AT ALL, like a lonely techbro's desire to have a girlfriend and get laid except in the barest, most primitive sense that both things are "strong human desires"
Show this thread -
And that no, being sexually attractive IS NOT the same as having monetary wealth, or like having any kind of asset separate from your body and your person that you actually can give to somebody else
Show this thread -
If Scott had, rather than performatively exercising his empathy muscles during his "What I did on my vacation" essay, read a fucking book There have been reams of poetry and literature, both popular and highfalutin, about exactly this
Show this thread -
"If there were a way to give him what he hungrily seeks when I see his eyes meet mine, if there were a way to fill that void inside him so that he could know peace, so I could know peace But it cannot be done It is like trying to empty the sea"
Show this thread - Show replies
New conversation -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.