Category Archives: Social Commentary

The New Trauma

Thoughts on “microaggressions” and “trigger warnings.”

My sympathy for your suffering, whether that suffering was real or imaginary, ended when you demanded I change my life to avoid bringing up your bad memories. You don’t seem to have figured this out, but there is no “I must never be reminded of a negative experience” expectation in any culture anywhere on earth.

If your psyche is so fragile you fall apart when someone inadvertently reminds you of “trauma”, especially if that trauma consisted of you overreacting to a self-interpreted racial slur, you need therapy. You belong on a psychiatrist’s couch, not in college dictating what the rest of society can’t do, say or think. Get your own head right before you start trying to run other people’s lives. If you expect everyone around you to cater to your neurosis, forever, you’re what I’d call a “failure at life”. And you’re doomed to perpetual disappointment.

Good thing people aren’t putting themselves into hopeless levels of undischargeable debt to get so “educated.”

Oh, wait.

[Update a while later]

This seems related, somehow: Advice for shy, male nerds:

[Update Monday morning]

Here is a guy who will never get laid:

Obviously, Parton must have been really hurt, perhaps even more hurt than when people ask him to say “Cool Whip.” But because he’s a really sensitive guy, he did not “blame her one bit” for not understanding.

In fact, he said her calloused response made him realize that he might have committed a microaggression against another person at some time in his life without even realizing he was doing it!

“I am afraid because microaggressions aren’t harmless — there’s research to show that they cause anxiety and binge drinking among the minority students who are targeted,” he writes.

I’ve got a better solution to binge drinking. Lower the drinking age.

Crazy Democrats

GQ can’t find any, but Kyle Smith has no problem:

[Sanders] said the VA provides “very high quality health care, period” and that the shocking scandals surrounding it were traceable to “a concerted effort to undermine the VA” led by the “Koch Brothers and others, who want to radically change the nature of society.” So that’s why the Koches are funding all those hospitals! It’s really a roundabout way of making the VA look bad.

Yes, that’s it.

And how could he miss this guy?

U.S. Rep. David Wu’s behavior grew so erratic in the final weeks before his re-election last November that the Oregon Democrat’s closest political advisers staged two of what some of them termed “interventions” to urge him to seek psychiatric help, WW has learned.

Though I guess he hasn’t been in the news lately.