IonAddis

IonAddis, 1 year ago

Because you have to lead by example. For very new communities, that means one person carrying the new content on their back, until other people decide to chip in.

That you consider it “spam” suggests to me that maybe you weren’t around when the internet was small, and never saw a small message board still in its new/growth phase, and are conflating a single member or mod carrying the content on their back with the karma-farmers that pop up on the better-established forums.

IonAddis, 1 year ago

Well. If we’re being analytical here, and bringing support to our posts, you could take a glance at my post history. I have a temper sometimes so you could even cherry-pick me being a big meanie to someone else or something.

“Thinking only of myself” is not something people usually levy at me though. I do think a lot about other people and humanity in general, and my post history generally supports that.

But I did find your original post ridiculous, and many of your responses in this thread to me and other people are basically just you being a dick because you got mad.

IonAddis, 1 year ago

I don’t feel pride for past hard stuff I’ve made it through, not really. But I am grateful for the things I learned from the hard experiences.

I think the event that was most “useful” to me, and that I learned the most from, was running away from home when I was 16. It led to an immediate bettering of my situation.

I will caveat and say I was lucky in that my crappy family had a relatively upper-middle-class wealthy city gentrify around us, and I got to reap the reward of that well-funded support system because the foster system in my county was well-funded and capable. I hear that this is not necessarily the case in poorer communities, and people in other areas can end up in more of an “out of the frying pan, into the fire” situation. I definitely made a jump out of the frying pan onto the relatively clean and stable counter.

But going from a situation where I was a minor and without money or access to things I needed to survive, to a situation where I had a job and could use MY money on whatever I wanted (including a living situation that was safe) was far superior than relying on abusive people to feed and shelter me.

It’s always funny to me when people hearken back to their teenage years when “everything was provided for them” and they could just do school and have fun without any worries. I never experienced that. A job and bills was a step UP from my previous situation where every bite of food I ate was flavored with fear and every blanket I fell asleep under had the potential to be ripped off of me while I slept if some adult decided they were mad at me for some petty, cruel reason.

IonAddis, 1 year ago

I know of two couples that dabble in it to some extent. One as far as I know is unicorn-hunting, because their rules for it suggest a 3rd member genuinely capturing someone’s heart would lead to relationship implosion of epic proportions, and I suspect that couple isn’t mature or stable enough to be doing what they’re doing without leaving people open for hurt. Not that I have any say in it, lol. But I feel sorry for any thirds that interact with them thinking there’s even a chance of them being an equal partner.

The other couple has much better communication skills, and claim they’re poly, but as far as I can tell from the outside “poly” has happened as an attempt to save the marriage. Maybe they’ll make it work, but I’ve watched them make some dumb mistakes, and the wife has jealous behaviors when women interact with the husband and a history of bending to his needs before her own so I think even if she says they’re poly she might have talked herself into it as a way to attend to him.

I think healthy poly is possible–but it requires extremely mature individuals with exceptional communication skills, and that’s rare even in monogamous couples.

IonAddis, 1 year ago

If you hit up abuse survivors subs, you’ll come across the technique of “grey rocking”, and what it’s used for. If you honestly, truly want to understand why privacy is important, take a few months (yes, I do mean months–learning isn’t accomplished by a pithy two-sentence quip), and read the stories of abuse survivors. Pretty much all of them will have examples of how people in their lives used their knowledge of them to harm them in some way.

Basically, there are malevolent people out there, abusive people, who can and will take ANY info about you, and twist it around until it’s a weapon to be used. It doesn’t really matter what the info is–there’s ways to twist anything.

I was an A and B student in high school that never got into trouble, or did drugs, or got knocked up (I was pretty much the teacher’s pet because I didn’t need help and also didn’t get bored and act up, so I was an “easy” student) and somehow my uncle, who had unresolved trauma of his own and disliked I didn’t crown him “daddy” the first month I came to live with him, found reasons to permanently ground me for most of 3 years. (I mention school because I used it as a touchstone to figure out if there really was a reason to demonize me at home…I figured if the teachers weren’t constantly handing out detentions to me, and seemed to think I was a decent kid, then it must be home that was wrong.)

The most effective technique to deal with people weaponizing info about you on you is to cut off their source of information. This is something abuse survivors have generally found. When you live with unreasonable people, finding something that WORKS (outside of pie-in-the-sky ideals) is important.

Withholding info is pragmatic and helps blunt the effect of the attacks. When living in an abusive home, “grey rocking” means you give little to no information about your daily life to the abuser, and it’s called “grey rocking” because you act as interesting as a rock. (Even then, they’ll use that shutting off of the wellspring of info as evidence that you’re “abusing them with your silence” or something. But at least they won’t learn of your promotion at work and use that to beg you for money, or learn that you like some pop song and decide out of thin air it means you’re a slut that just got knocked up, or that you’re doing drugs, or that…blah blah blah.)

But the same people who are abusive in private homes also have jobs, are even in government. Those people don’t exist in just one sphere, they exist in others, with the same mindset that causes them to treat their “loved ones” poorly.

They’re not going to just give up their shitty ways. I mean, even if you haven’t had shitty partners or parents, you’ve probably run into those people in school or at work as bad managers. The people who, if they had surveillance info on you, would absolutely use it on you if they had the least bit of reason to.

And the way of dealing with them, pragmatically, remains the same, whether it’s abusive people in your family or abusive people who are managers or in government. You strangle their source of information. They can still lie about you (and often will), but it’s harder to make up plausible lies that other people will swallow if they don’t have enough information on you to get a good angle for it.