“Yesterday, Robin Williams died by suicide. I can’t know why, in that moment, he felt that ending his life was the only door, but the version of the story that sounds realest to me — and to many other people — is that his depression killed him. Since this news came out, the internet has been a sorrowful but beautiful place to be. I spent hours last night and this morning scrolling through Facebook and Twitter and feeling connected to a tremendous and temporary community, united by our love and grief for this man we didn’t know. And scattered among those, with really astonishing frequency, were the expressions of regret that so inevitably follow newsworthy suicides, variations on themes: “If only he’d known how loved he was,” “If only he’d reached out for help,” “If only he’d known he wasn’t alone.”
Historically, when I’ve seen these waves of platitudes cresting on social media, I’ve felt angry. This morning, though, I didn’t. I felt truly, genuinely confused. Why didn’t these people understand that you can’t just will depression away? It’s not something solved by “reaching out” or “knowing that people love you”; depression is not, in point of fact, you at all, but a malicious program that’s taken up residence in your brain that runs alongside your you-ness, and turns your brain into a zero-sum landgrab between malware and firmware. Not only does the depression chip away at your energy and focus and clarity, but what you do retain is so exhausted from the nonstop defense of its resources that at times you just want to give in, give up, sink all the way into the warm, quiet darkness.”
Not Everyone Feels This Way — The Archipelago — Medium (via brutereason)
me being who I am, the first thing that happens to me watching this is I feel bad for the person who posted the original message on the unidentified Christian forum - the actress here really conveys how this might be rooted in real anxiety, real pain, real concern by a mother for her child. I’m a dad and a survivor: parents’ concerns for their children’s well-being will never not move me. next, I do some progressive worrying about how just relentlessly clowning on the devout isn’t really helpful, and is easy, and isn’t really a good expression of one’s own presumably-more-advanced ideological station
but then I divest myself of my own baggage and remember that this is a post by a person who is worried that her five-year-old son’s kindness to a classmate might be a “gateway to fornication“ and I say to myself, it’s good to have concerns, one should remain aware of one’s own biases and try to see things from all perspectives, but it’s right and just to laugh about this while praying ardently for the day that five-year-old turns 18 and gets the hell out of that house
this weekend batia and i reached the conclusion that both elementary and sleepy hollow are successful for the same reason, in that they are essentially the same show: a white man with a UK-ish accent, who is debilitatingly challenged in normal human social ability for some reason, is partnered…
I’m sure I’m not the first person to twig on this, but do you remember the piece that finally got respectable white supremacist John Derbyshire fired from the National Review?
Verbose, racist story short, Derb wrote a handbook of advice to his kids on how to deal with black people (you can find it in it’s entirety here, if you were feeling too charitable about some portions of humanity today). I’d like to highlight this gem:
(10h) Do not act the Good Samaritan to blacks in apparent distress, e.g., on the highway.
This advice gets people killed. John Derbyshire still makes a living writing, the man who killed Renisha McBride is still free, and every day, we construct universes where black people are a dangerous monolith. This is where sunset towns and stop and frisk come from. But look again at the specific “rule” I quoted. That’s the kernel of the entire thing, to me. It’s a piece of advice that says that this entire group is so fucking dangerous that your normal human instincts to do something should be actively suppressed. There’s no way to have a society where this particular myth is active that’s also worthwhile to live in for all its participants. What Derbyshire and his fellow-travelers want is irreconcilable with a living democracy. Sometimes, it looks like they’re winning.
