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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   25232 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 30, 2023

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your issues are not lefty mental health...seeing all your dreams disappear...one of the most emasculating things

I don't have a lot of love for the left's frames around mental health and therapy, but this point is just silly. Or rather would be better if you just stopped wtih the real issue of providing monetarily. Are you suggesting that 'seeing your dreams disappear' is somehow a real issue, separate from and contrasted with 'mental health' concerns. Same re: feelings of emasculation. You undermine yourself by begging the conclusion.

I suspect the 'lefty' who advocates therapy very much agrees that lost dreams and feeling emasculated are real issues, and would understand them to be the exact 'mental health' issues you are suggesting aren't invovled.

It does seem like the root issue is not a business failing, but the feeling of inadequacy. A person with a strong frame doesn't update his own self worth downward for something so minor as a business failing.

That said, does "lefty therapy" ever fix these issues?

Maybe they get half way there. A therapist might help a person to realize that it is his own feelings of unworthiness, not a business failing, which is the true source of his suffering.

But then a modal therapist would seem to encourage this same patient to wallow in that sense of unworthiness every week, rather than take the steps to overcome it and, therefore, no longer have need of therapy.

That said, does "lefty therapy" ever fix these issues?

I'm mean, I am generally skeptical, though I am unfamiliar enough with something as grave as suicide that I don't want to throw support or detraction around flippanly.

That is however, not my point. slider is free to dismiss therapy as ineffective. I was noting his framing of the percieved issue to be addressed was essentially a Russell's conjugation:

Your mental health issues

My real issues of feeling inadequate and emasculated and socially maligned.

Yeah, I mean, I don't like the whole "toxic masculinity" concept when it is used as a motte-and-bailey*, but if a man hypothetically (not saying this man necessarily did) killed himself because he could not provide for his family and felt emasculated, it would be textbook example of what some leftists mean when they say "toxic masculinity hurts men as well as women".

*The bailey: "men suck!". The motte: "we want to address toxic masculinity because doing so would help men as well as women!".

It’s an especially stupid reason to commit suicide because it’s still possible to provide for your family if your business fails - you can still get an ordinary job, or do consulting work, drive an Uber, whatever it takes. The only sure way to be unable to provide is to be dead, so what does killing yourself accomplish? Your spouse now has to shoulder the entire burden on their own.

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