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I would agree with that. For me, a lot of the fight is mental. I'm on meds now, but when I was more regularly going to therapy it ended up that the fear of the fear was what was setting me off, so someone talking about it like that removes some of the teeth of the problem for me. Obviously, if my problem was more severe, I doubt that would work and it would probably piss me off quite a bit.

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12 hours ago, therealdougiejones said:

I think maybe it's something about the levity with which he talks about stuff like that gets under my skin

 

I'm going to repeat myself and say that this is one of the things that bugs me too.  I don't necessarily mind what he says (although some of it can be real problematic in context), it's just the "I don't get what the big deal is" attitude that gets to me.  As though because he was able to do it anyone and everyone should have no trouble with it either.  Or that because it's not an issue in his life it's not something worth thinking about and shouldn't be a problem for anyone else either.  Again, I don't think he actually means it that way but that's how it comes across, at least to me.

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13 hours ago, Dewar said:

I would agree with that. For me, a lot of the fight is mental. I'm on meds now, but when I was more regularly going to therapy it ended up that the fear of the fear was what was setting me off, so someone talking about it like that removes some of the teeth of the problem for me. Obviously, if my problem was more severe, I doubt that would work and it would probably piss me off quite a bit.

 

Yeah, I know his tone can be a little off putting but I appreciate the open nature and candor Alex and Dan have had with their person struggles with Anxiety and Depression, it's actually made accepting my own easier and giving me the strength to talk about it to family, friends, etc. I think it has actually kind of helped remove some of the stigma for me weirdly enough. 

 

I think SAM has hit the nail on the head of my own feelings on the situation in his previous posts.

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3 hours ago, SecretAsianMan said:

 

I'm going to repeat myself and say that this is one of the things that bugs me too.  I don't necessarily mind what he says (although some of it can be real problematic in context), it's just the "I don't get what the big deal is" attitude that gets to me.  As though because he was able to do it anyone and everyone should have no trouble with it either.  Or that because it's not an issue in his life it's not something worth thinking about and shouldn't be a problem for anyone else either.  Again, I don't think he actually means it that way but that's how it comes across, at least to me.

 

Sure. Well, I guess if anxiety is his only thing his happy-go-lucky attitude isn't really surprising. For those of us with a fun little cocktail of mental health problems though the picture looks very different. I'm an unusually grumpy person so things like that rub me the wrong way. All that being said I like Dan Ryckert in an overall way, I feel like his instincts and what's in his heart is to be a good and kind person and all. Don't get me wrong!

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i'm certainly not going to weigh in on this one, and i don't know if the references will make sense if you are not a regular listener, but this clip from the beastcast a couple weeks ago basically killed me, i could not breathe, etc.

 

 

 

 

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Haha.. amazing! I don't listen to the GB podcasts, so thanks for sharing.

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8 hours ago, kickstandcarp said:

i'm certainly not going to weigh in on this one, and i don't know if the references will make sense if you are not a regular listener, but this clip from the beastcast a couple weeks ago basically killed me, i could not breathe, etc.

 

 

 

 

 

That's the improv bit I was referring to in one of my earlier posts.  It legitimately took me a while to realize it was Dan and had me laughing so hard I nearly crashed my car.

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1 hour ago, Badfinger said:

It is with a heavy heart that I must announce dan ryckert is at it again.

 

This time it's about Walmart.

 

Man, meet the New Dan - same as the Old Dan.

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Oh man, I forgot all about the Walmart stuff. The pendulum just keeps shifting directions!

 

Has he ever done an about face on his fascist cop worship? 

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I worked at a Wal-mart for about a year and a half, doing pretty much every kind of job there was to do in that place. Employees are abused, exploited, and mistreated in awful ways. One Co-Manager had a problem with disabled people, so he moved an overnight stocker who only had one functioning arm from Stationary to Chemicals department. That's the difference between the heaviest product to stock (paper, pens, art supplies) to the absolute heaviest (extremely heavy cases with huge bottles of detergent and bleach). This was used as an excuse to suddenly fire him for "slow performance". He even bragged to another manager that he did this just to have an excuse to fire the guy cause he didn't wanna look at him. Nothing was done about that. Another employee who was injured after getting hit by a customer's car in the parking lot got refused his workers comp (couldn't afford to pursue legal recourse of course) for no valid reason, and then they ran the camera tapes to find a time at 9pm or so when he briefly checked his phone while standing to greet at the garden center. Fired him for that. 

 

At Wal-Mart if you get two "strikes" you get frozen. Meaning you can't qualify for a raise (which is paltry anyway) or promotion for an entire year. My first strike was for using the bathroom three times on a single 9 hour shift. I came to work with diarrhea that day. My second strike was for refusing to unload frozen trucks because I didn't have non-slip shoes on. Taking pallets off the ramp of a frozen food truck is extremely dangerous even WITH non-slip soles, and I'm pretty sure it's some kind of workplace safety violation for them to even ask me. They regularly promote people without ever giving a raise or an on paper promotion. The way it works is they fire the department manager of some department then have a regular sales floor employee cover ALL of the responsibilities for that department manager without ever paying them what a department manager is supposed to make or changing their title. The unloading crew is on a much higher payscale too than floor employees. So sometimes they'll have a floor employee do unloading for several weeks to a month or more but at the same payscale and never being officially labeled as an unloader or given a raise. Not to mention all the creepy stuff like the Wall of Union Hate in the breakroom. Just a whole wall plastered with the FACES and NAMES of local union leaders and labor activists and tons and tons of anti-union slander. Literally I remember one piece saying that unions are just JEALOUS of wal-mart and their amazing profits and happy employees. If you work mornings you are forced to chant and sing with all the other employees, praising your store, and if you don't you can absolutely be written up for not being enthusiastic enough in your performance.

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Every time I'm starting to come around and think Dan is becoming a better person, a huge bummer like this week's Beastcast happens and I'm back to actively hating him.

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I don't think it's that he doesn't know that's the problem. Ignorance is a temporary and solvable state that we're all in about many things. It's that, when confronted with the fact that Wal-Mart isn't universally adored, and counselled by his friends and colleagues that if he looked into it even just a tiny amount he would see why, he said that he would rather continue to enjoy its low prices guilt free than find out anything that might change his opinion of the company.
 

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He sounds like most human beings! If I told you guys what happens to the animals that you get meat, eggs, and milk from, let alone the workers in those slaughterhouses, you'd probably hurl...

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37 minutes ago, TychoCelchuuu said:

He sounds like most human beings! If I told you guys what happens to the animals that you get meat, eggs, and milk from, let alone the workers in those slaughterhouses, you'd probably hurl...

 

Yay, bringing the bad energy from the old Veganism thread over to the Giant Bomb thread. It's the best of both worlds!

 

Seriously, though, there's no ethical consumption under capitalism, for any of us, but not wanting even to know about the conditions of the workers with whom you interact face-to-face every time you go to Walmart is a particularly conspicuous failure of empathy to me to me to me.

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22 minutes ago, Gormongous said:

Yay, bringing the bad energy from the old Veganism thread over to the Giant Bomb thread. It's the best of both worlds!

 

I think the bad energy might be inside you? I don't think anything in my tone was particularly toxic.

 

For what it's worth, Zeusthecat, in the veganism thread, was one of the few people who said my posts didn't come across as evil and assholeish and so on. Since you're someone who has been accused of being an asshole in this thread by Zeusthecat, who I'm pretty sure doesn't just label everyone an asshole for no reason (because he gave me a pass!) it might help reflecting on the sorts of things that can cause someone to see the other person as an asshole. So for instance could it be that you think I brought negative energy not because I in fact did, but rather because you disagree with me? Could Zeusthecat think you brought negative energy to this thread not because you in fact did, but rather because he disagrees with you?

 

Maybe we're all just decent people and nobody is an asshole, and when you accuse me of being an asshole you're really just trying to hide from yourself the fact that you disagree but don't have any good reasons to disagree, just like when Zeusthecat calls you an asshole he's really just trying to hide from himself the fact that he disagrees but doesn't have any good reason to disagree.

 

22 minutes ago, Gormongous said:

Seriously, though, there's no ethical consumption under capitalism, for any of us, but not wanting even to know about the conditions of the workers with whom you interact face-to-face every time you go to Walmart is a particularly conspicuous failure of empathy to me to me to me.

But presumably it's not a particularly conspicuous failure of empathy to Dan to Dan to Dan, so I don't really see the issue? Why am I supposed to privilege your view over Dan's view here? What reason could you give me that wouldn't also be a reason for privileging my view over your view (and Dan's view, for that matter, seeing as I'm sure he eats meat)?

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If we're now in the business of merging threads and creating new ones maybe we should just slot in the veganism thread here and be done with it.

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18 minutes ago, TychoCelchuuu said:

But presumably it's not a particularly conspicuous failure of empathy to Dan to Dan to Dan, so I don't really see the issue? Why am I supposed to privilege your view over Dan's view here? What reason could you give me that wouldn't also be a reason for privileging my view over your view (and Dan's view, for that matter, seeing as I'm sure he eats meat)?

 

Again, because I never see the cow I eat face to face, or the miner in a conflict region whence the materials for my phone and computer come, or the political conditions under which most of those materials are made into components, or the sweatshop worker who's paid thirty cents to make my shirt, or the migrant farmhand who suffers deprivation and wage theft for me to get my fruit, or the people driven off their land so that the grains in my bread could be farmed more efficiently, or the millions of insects killed so that grain comes pest-free, or the rainforest that's slashed and burned for ten thousand different reasons... but I do see the Walmart employee working under conditions like therealdougiejones described, every time I walk into Walmart. They have greeters right there, front and center, to show you the face of Walmart's often-captive workforce. It's part of their corporate strategy and it's inescapable, unless you make a concerted effort to sneak past it.

 

If you're saying that you can't understand why someone ignoring an injustice right in front of them is more worrisome than them ignoring an injustice that capitalism has worked hard to make invisible to them, then... I don't know. Maybe you understand less about human nature than you think you do?

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12 minutes ago, Gormongous said:

If you're saying that you can't understand why someone ignoring an injustice right in front of them is more worrisome than them ignoring an injustice that capitalism has worked hard to make invisible to them, then... I don't know. Maybe you understand less about human nature than you think you do?

That's one hypothesis! Another is that I don't think human nature = good. So for instance it might be natural for humans to think "out of sight, out of mind," and thus Dan's reaction to Wal-Mart greeters is more unnatural than your reaction to cows, but I don't think that makes Dan worse than you. We might think that it's better to be unnatural than it is to be inconsistent, for instance, and Dan scores pretty well on consistency, it sounds like. At the very least I'd have to hear more about why human nature is a good standard before I sign up for something like "Dan's unnatural and thus a worse person than you." I'm inclined simply to reject claims like that.

 

Perhaps the claim isn't about human nature but rather about something more specific: "Dan has less empathy than me, so he's bad." Notice though that I could do the same thing to you ("Gormongous has less empathy than I do"), but presumably you'd find that objectionable, perhaps because it's natural to have empathy for people you see but not for animals you don't. And that just brings us back to the claim that human nature is a good standard for judging people, which again I am simply inclined to reject. Human nature sucks! I don't care if someone fails to measure up to that standard. I'd rather fail a thousand times at the human nature test and pass the moral behavior test once, than fail the moral behavior test once and pass the human nature test a thousand times.

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The new Kingdom Hearts series seems like it could be cool.

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21 minutes ago, TychoCelchuuu said:

That's one hypothesis! Another is that I don't think human nature = good. So for instance it might be natural for humans to think "out of sight, out of mind," and thus Dan's reaction to Wal-Mart greeters is more unnatural than your reaction to cows, but I don't think that makes Dan worse than you. We might think that it's better to be unnatural than it is to be inconsistent, for instance, and Dan scores pretty well on consistency, it sounds like. At the very least I'd have to hear more about why human nature is a good standard before I sign up for something like "Dan's unnatural and thus a worse person than you." I'm inclined simply to reject claims like that.

 

Perhaps the claim isn't about human nature but rather about something more specific: "Dan has less empathy than me, so he's bad." Notice though that I could do the same thing to you ("Gormongous has less empathy than I do"), but presumably you'd find that objectionable, perhaps because it's natural to have empathy for people you see but not for animals you don't. And that just brings us back to the claim that human nature is a good standard for judging people, which again I am simply inclined to reject. Human nature sucks! I don't care if someone fails to measure up to that standard. I'd rather fail a thousand times at the human nature test and pass the moral behavior test once, than fail the moral behavior test once and pass the human nature test a thousand times.

 

Why the fuck does everyone have such a raging hard-on for equating criticism of Dan's words and actions with him being a "bad person" and, by implication, the critic being a good person? Did I miss a memo or something?

 

And by "human nature" I meant the way that human beings process and face moral challenges. I'm not invoking the naturalistic fallacy or anything here. Again, if you see it as morally and naturally equivalent to ignore a beating happening right in front of you and to ignore a beating happening somewhere far away from you... well, I don't think we agree, and you're probably very busy anyway, dealing with the water crises spurred by modern industrialized agriculture, the human and ecological damage of conflict minerals in the eastern Congo, and ten billion other instances of suffering worldwide because apparently proximity has no bearing on the ethical intensity of issues to you.

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