Comment by soulofmischief

Comment by soulofmischief 2 days ago

Yes. I was homeless from 16 to 22. Both of my parents were drug addicts, in and out of jail/prison. I don't speak to anyone in my family, because they side with my extremely abusive grandfather, who raised me and frequently savagely beat me for not sharing his extremist Christian values. Until very recently, I had an extremely thin social support network.

I was awarded a full-ride scholarship to multiple state institutions after high school due to high test scores, but a vindictive teacher illegally altered my grade last-minute because I stood up to her for my peers, and disqualified me from being eligible. I was still 17, attending high school on my own, homeless, and had no parents to push back, and no money for summer remedial courses.

I couldn't apply for government aid because my mother was committing tax fraud by claiming me as a dependent despite not providing me a home or resources, and refused to help. There was no economic opportunity in my rural town and I didn't have a car, so I proceeded to struggle for years, scraping by, risking my freedom, while I rounded out my skill set to become employable in tech despite not attending college.

I've gone much longer than a day feeling hungry. Feeling starving. Feeling my muscles eat themselves and my face and jaw tighten from lack of nutrients. Friends in high school used to make fun of me for looking emaciated. I was a vulture, eating anything I could find, frequently stealing food to make up for an insatiable appetite. Now I have the opposite problem because of metabolism changes after years of malnutrition, and sometimes struggle with stress-related eating disorders.

I'm going to do you the favor and not make such asinine implications about your own background.

overfeed 2 days ago

> I was a vulture, eating anything I could find, frequently stealing food to make up for an insatiable appetite.

Now I'm even more confused because you experienced this first hand but can't imagine how someone can engage in practices that have nothing to.do with personal values to keep their families fed and sheltered.

> I'm going to do you the favor and not make such asinine implications about your own background.

Weren't you just shaming someone whose personal beliefs and background you don't know just 2 comments upstream?

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soulofmischief 2 days ago

Can you point out when I shamed them?
I asked them a question and presented my own perspective and motivations for asking the question. They followed up, and I have responded. I see nothing wrong with discussing socioeconomics on Hacker News. Maybe instead of being negative, making insinuations and accusing me of shaming someone, you could just provide your own perspective, which I'd be happy to engage with.
> Now I'm even more confused because you experienced this first hand but can't imagine how someone can engage in practices that have nothing to.do with personal values to keep their families fed and sheltered.
Principles are principles. I live and die by them. I'm not perfect, but it's the thing I try to maintain that separates me from those who have contributed to the suffering in my life. I don't expect everyone to understand this.
I'm not religious, but I do have a patron saint, Joan of Arc. She was burned at the stake at 17 for refusing to bow to the Church. I haven't been killed for my beliefs, but there were definitely times I feared that I would be. I have suffered immense abuse for standing by my principles, when most would have caved.
I'm not asking anyone else here to hold to my standards, but I do have my own standards and the nature of growth involves finding chances to challenge them.

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- jrflowers a day ago
  
  >Can you point out when I shamed them?
  Probably the part where someone who was not talking to you mentioned a product that some people use and you responded with a 200 word mini essay about your conscience and feelings about consumerism. Nobody asked you about your principles nor was the discussion even remotely related to that.
  The thread about the widget that generates Instagram posts from websites is a bizarre place to share, unprompted, that you have lived in abject poverty but also somehow never worked a job that didn’t meet your rigorous ethical standards. Like, cool man. That’s super weird and most people that have lived in poverty haven’t had that experience, so the only thing you’re communicating is your moral superiority. Which again, is both weird by itself and weird in the thread about the thing that generates Instagram posts from a website.
  Edit: To be clear, I am not insinuating that your post was meant to shame the person you responded to, I am flat-out stating that your post was obviously intended to shame the person you responded to. Any argument to the contrary could only consist of you demanding that other people read the words that you wrote and selectively assign different meanings to them until it makes you look good.
  
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  mfru a day ago
  
  "I read the words you said in the worst possible way" is not the logical statement you want it to be
  "also you are weird, like so weird, like look at how weird you are" is kinda just rude, seems really weird to reprimand someone for a fantasy you summoned
  
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  soulofmischief a day ago
  
  This is a very ironic comment, given that nobody asked you to butt into this conversation. Since you're fixating on projecting, being negative and making unfounded accusations, I'm going to ignore your comments and continue my conversation with awillen.
  
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  wholinator2 13 hours ago
  
  Damn man, i feel really bad for you. You're doing the exact thing you're criticizing and not even realizing it. To a calm observer with no skin in the game it really looks like you're completely detached from any ability to hold a calm conversation about things that might bother you. You have the freedom to ignore people you find "weird". Frankly i think it's pretty "weird" to be on this forum acting so juvenile. I don't know if your goal was to be so obtuse as to intentionally provoke others, and you should really think about that.
  It seems to me like there's people in here that have knowingly dedicated their lives to enriching themselves at the obvious and explicit cost of others. And some subset of those people are in denial about it. And some subset of those people don't have the emotional intelligence to confront a reality that contains people that actually are true and vitruous as they tell themselves they are. But hey, those are my assumptions based on only what I've seen in this thread and I'm willing to be incredibly wrong on this. I hope you have a nice Thanksgiving
  
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  jrflowers 6 hours ago
  
  Sorry I don’t want to be presumptive, are you trying to say that:
  in this one instance you took “what you said was weird and that’s why you got the response that you did” as being an attack on a person’s character,
  or are you saying that
  categorically, pointing out that “what you said was weird and that’s why you got the response that you did” is always an attack on somebody’s character?
  Like I’m trying to figure out if you’re sharing that you misunderstood a single post or that you categorically don’t understand an entire realm of communication.
  
  Reply View | 0 replies