Can we please retire the use of “Stockholm Syndrome” to describe people who are consenting to their own imprisonment/exploitation?
The term was made up by a police psychologist, concerning a woman he never met, to smear her because she criticized the reckless, callous, dangerous way in which the cops and state handled the situation in which she was a hostage.
#StockholmSyndrome and the lady burned by McDonald’s coffee are two cases in which the underlying facts were twisted by pop culture to arrive at different conclusions and moral lessons.
Two men kept the children chained up in the basement. The Monster liked to use his fists. The Monster's Keeper liked to use candy.
...Do we need to debate which one is "worse"?
No. Hell no.
That's a meaningless, awful, despicable, gutwrenching question with no real answer, and there's no point wasting the time or energy-- much less sanity-- contemplating it. Just typing it made me queasy.
Both are kidnappers and rapists. Both are monsters. There is no "lesser" evil here. What matters is stopping them BOTH, and getting the kids OUT of that damned basement. Period.
...I've been asked if I have permission to relate this story.
Yes. I do.
Not only that, but my friend brought it up himself, while I was ranting about the plutocratic duopoly's game of Good Cop / Bad Cop. I repeat: it was during a political discussion that I learned about this chapter of my friend's past, when HE volunteered the comparison.
It is not a comparison made lightly.
I'm going to keep saying it: voting in fear is not democracy. It's a hostage situation.
Billions of lives are at stake. Climate change is already hammering us like the fist of an angry god. More than half a century has already been squandered while we politely wait for incremental change and the monsters in charge spend our last best chances at a habitable future betting instead on round after round of musical deck chairs. The Nobel prize was awarded to a deranged economist who calls 3C global temperature increase "optimal"-- even though that's halfway to the opposite of an ice age. The world will be unrecognizable. The scale of the destruction and suffering that's coming-- that has already started-- is unimaginable. The people who got us into this mess are not going to save us.
All our rulers care about is jockeying for power, competing with each other for money and control to see who secures the best bunkers and yachts and private armies while the world burns. They will say anything to shut us up, and toss us only just enough scraps to keep us pacified and complacent-- they've already written us off for dead, and they're already looting our corpses. They'll go on promising incremental change, promising they'll send help, while they crank the gilded doors on the bunker shut and lock it behind them. They'll smile and wave and give us a reassuring thumbs-up while we burn.
We think Democrats and Republicans are enemies. They fight over us the same way predators fight over the entrails of their prey. Just because one hyena brushes their teeth more often and has better breath than another, doesn't mean we should crawl obligingly into their jaws looking for salvation. The enemy of our enemy is just another enemy-- but they'll spend a lot of time and effort assuring us our only real hope is to curry their favor.
The "good" cop smiles and promises to protect us from the bad cop-- IF we behave. This does not make the "good" cop good. It does not make him our friend. It does not make giving him what he wants a good idea. They may not get along, they may not like each other much, but they collect their paychecks from the same banks, vote to fund the same war machine, sip the same champagne and nibble the same caviar while riding the same yachts and the same private jets to the same sex islands, and ALL OF THEM MUST BE STOPPED.
The right fist punches, until being strangled by the left fist feels like a blessed relief. The bad cop softens us up so we'll capitulate to the good cop. Both of them are laughing at us.
We are prisoners, trapped and brainwashed and exploited.
Some of us have come to identify with our oppressors, fawning on them for survival.
Like trusting, desperate children, we are too frightened to face the fact that BOTH of our parents are abusive. It's far easier to blame our siblings for misbehaving.
Don't you DARE say anything bad about Momma. She's the one who wipes our tears and tells us she loves us (before locking us back in the basement). Vote blue no matter who, kids, or else we get the orange hose again. This basement is the only world we can ever hope to know, so we have to be good and make the best of it. Don't talk back.
I hate to break it to you, but Momma is part of the problem. Momma is not going to do anything real to put a stop to the violence in this house.
This house which, by the way, is flooding AND on fire.
We don't have time for this shit. We have to stop this nightmare and get out of this trap.
Our captors will not help us.
....Not even the "nice" one who smiles and promises candy.
Genuinely want the best for all the mutuals moving to Bluesky — at least they have a birdsite exit strategy! — but everytime I see it, the expression 'madness is doing the same thing and expecting a different result' bounces around my brain like a pinball
@djlink will this finally be the last straw, though?
I’d like to think so but I’ve watched #Twitter folks get kicked in the face over and over yet refuse to abandon the platform. It’s a bizarre combination of #SunkCostFallacy and #StockholmSyndrome
#TIL that #StockholmSyndrome was invented by #police and a bad psychologist to discredit a female hostage who didn't trust the cops after they did nothing to protect the captive employees during a bank heist.
Her "crime" was trying to negotiate with the criminals to protect her own life, while the police and the state preferred having dead hostages over closing any deal with the thieves.
The spectacular bank robbery that gave rise to the myth of Stockholm syndrome.
When hostages sympathise with their captors, there is talk of Stockholm syndrome. The term, coined 50 years ago during a bank robbery that led to a 131-hour hostage drama, is now viewed critically.
@yaohsi I find it funny that said take is from a literal #BlueSky user which means they are at the very least having serious #StockholmSyndrome because they've learned jack shite from the entire #Enshittification developments...
The entire city of #Yellowknife is being evacuated. This is unprecedented and terrifying.
And thousands of citizens aren’t aware because Meta continues to block news in the country.
This is what happens when citizens are convinced to use an American multinational corporation as their community’s primary communications channel — a corporation that couldn’t give two shits about anything except its “fiduciary duty” to shareholders.
@JustinLachance I mean you literally get people who whine about #Microsoft's shitty #DarkPattern and how they force people to make a value-removing account with them but apparently #TechIlliterates rather accept more and harder abuse than even trying out something that doesn't trample their #HumanRights instead.
Not going to lie it is kind of infuriating watching in real time furries and big name artists alike bandwagon onto Bluesky without even giving this platform a chance.
Seeing a fraction of artists here than on Bluesky it really puts into perspective that furries as a whole needs more maturing as a community for working together. If most popular artists flocked over here than I could only assume the rest would follow.
Celebrities, lawmakers, brands and everyday social media users are flocking to Meta’s freshly minted app Threads to connect with their followers, including many bird app refugees tired of the drama surrounding Elmo’s raucous oversight of that platform since acquiring it last year.
People on Twitter: "Please! Give us a social media app that isn't centrally owned by sociopath Patrick Bateman from American Psycho! It's time for change!"
[Threads, owned by HAL from 2001 & the psychopathic killer robot from Logan's Run, launches]
Same people on Twitter: "Yay! God bless Threads!" #threads#twitter
"Mastodon, for example, is an ad-free, non-profit social network, making it unattractive to advertisers, explains the Mannheim-based expert."
It shows how messed up our society is that this "expert" talks about the attractiveness to advertisers, but not how not having advertising is attractive to users...
People who migrate to #Threads and #Bluesky are the same people who would have wandered into an ambush and have been picked off by sabertooth cats back in our hunter-gather days.
@sesivany@pavel quite opposite here - all grandparents would like to desperately babysit our kid but my wife doesn't want to and then complaints she has no time for her... #stockholmsyndrome
One of the funniest things that have happened on #Bluesky this week is that some people are upset there's no "main character" to dunk on, so they're going back to Twitter.