What I Block People For & What I Have Infinite Patience For

So, I don’t block people often (partly because I don’t actually read all my responses) but there are some things I have no patience for.

Any version of denying someone else’s reality (mine, or any other person or group of people) I have no patience for. So, anything that sounds like “you’re exaggerating your pain” or “you should just suck it up” is gone. I don’t care what pseudoscience backs it up, what completely rational-sounding argument is there is, it’s gone.

The reason for this is that there is no way for you to know what another person is feeling. There is no way for anyone else to experience the reality of another person, and the heart of oppression — the way we justify the bad things we do to other people to ourselves — is to pretend that “what this other person says they’re feeling isn’t real.” There can be no compromise on this point; what someone else says is their reality, we have to take at face value because we have no other way of knowing it. At least until we have mind machine interfaces. But, until then, we have to believe what people say they are feeling is what they are actually feeling.

I also have infinite patience for anything that sounds like “this is where I hurt.” I don’t care if you’re a rich, straight, white man — if something hurts, I want to hear about it. If someone tells you that something is hurting, I think we must never dismiss this or ignore it. We can say “your pain is real, but I don’t have time to process it with you right now” but we can’t say “your pain is not real.”

Now, where this gets complicated, is people often propose solutions to their feelings. For instance, much sexual abuse I’ve received has been because men jumped the gun and forced themselves on me because they had some pain (loneliness, social rejection, etc.) and they thought being sexual with me would lead to the solution.

Men, the pain you feel is real. The societal disregard for wellbeing of male bodies is horrible, the isolation and stigmatization we impose on young men is unforgivable, and the expectation that men must be the material provider is unfair. However, none of that gives you the right to access my body without permission. You have a right to be angry at how society has treated you. You do not have a right to demand that *I* be the one to fix it.

And, if we want to discuss some traditionally conservative things — immigration policy, women’s role in society, abortion, whatever — I’m game, but the basis of your argument can’t be “someone else is lying about their feelings.” If we say abortion is wrong because it causes mental scarring for the mother, but many women claim not to be mentally scarred after having an abortion, your argument is invalid. You will need to convince me abortion is wrong another way, not by saying “those women just don’t know how scarred they are.”

Finally, I also get sick of how liberals are always accused of being the ones that coddle people. This woman basically had her life ruined because she was taken pretending to shout and giving the middle finger to a sign that said “silence and respect” at veteran’s graveyard. She became so slandered by a bunch of veterans that she was basically unhirable for years. She didn’t even yell, she only pretended to yell. There are certain topics that conservatives get super uptight about as well (any criticism, no matter how valid, of anyone in the police or military gets an immediate immune response that the leftist PC police would envy.) So, conservatives, don’t be acting like the libs are the only ones demanding “coddling, safe spaces.”

Even Trump demanded a safe space for his vice president elect and if *anyone* is not entitled to a safe space, it’s someone who signed up for public office. Getting criticized kind of goes with the job for that one.

So anyway — to summarize, denying someone else’s reality, saying they didn’t feel what they said they feel or saying they should ignore or “suck up” their feelings — that’s something I’m not willing to discuss. Debating the how to mitigate the emotional response someone had? Debating what policy changes should be implemented giving someone is feeling a certain way? That is absolutely fair game. Just becomes someone’s feelings are real and valid doesn’t mean that their proposed course of action is.