The Old Hack

I personally am convinced that a huge majority of all psychiatrists go "quack, quack, quack" and fly south for the winter.

That worked. I have now sent a little something Mrs. Prof's way. Incidentally, as a fellow cat lover (which my wife is, too) I highly approve of and admire her work!

There are cultures where it is quite common to greet close friends by kissing them on the cheek, or even both cheeks. I would be a little startled to learn that every single person in these cultures proved to be homosexual.

Seriously. I can arrange both of those for you without attendant food poisoning and physical injury. I'd rather prefer that to the risk of losing you as a poster even temporarily.

Such as a lot of psychiatrists.

Hrm. Can't decide at the moment. So I'll just go to now.

Maybe she can give Mr. Verres a headache which eventually causes a fully grown, armed and armoured goddess to spring forth from his brow.

The problem is that in the case of both movies, you are spending about two hours of your life that you will never get back. I would rather invest my time in less painful ways.

Not necessarily. She could just turn into a six feet tall squirrel.

You'd think she had an exclamation point hovering above her head if she were.

In Denmark we have mental 'health' institutions where patients will be kept immobilised and/or heavily drugged for weeks or months on end because it makes them easier to deal with. The patients' actual health, mental or physical, is at best a tertiary consideration if it even rates at all. Part of the problem is lack of funding. In my personal opinion the principal difference between these places and a medieval bedlam is that in the more 'modern' version, the floors are kept cleaner.

For me the two of them are like asking which you prefer, food poisoning or falling down the stairs. I'd really rather avoid both.

No trouble accessing it, but it isn't set to allow third party sellers access to your address, it seems. Could you fix that, please?

Damien was dumber than a sack of rocks and solved all his problems with his power and his near indestructibility. He killed Guyur without even knowing that he that way also killed a source of eggs for his hoped-for seyunolu army. It is also obvious that he did not even bother to properly read the lab records on Grace and her cousins. If he would, it would not have come as a surprise to him YEARS LATER that oops, maybe he should have left Guyur alive.

Again, as CritterKeeper has stated, please tell us if there is anything we can do. Even if it is just an Amazon wish list or something like it where we can purchase sympathy gifts or something. If we can lighten the burden a little for you, we will be glad to.

I really do not blame you. It sounds nightmarish. As always, we are keeping you in our thoughts. Our best wishes, and give our regards to Mrs. Prof.

I disagree. Character development is important and should never be ignored. As to Elliot not leaping heroically into action to save another person, remember that it is hard to keep someone else from drowning if you are having trouble staying afloat yourself. I confidently expect Elliot to go to work on that post as soon as she has recovered her equilibrium, but she needs to find it first.

What you say about sexual harassment, as I understand it, holds true for all forms of abuse be they sexual, physical, mental or social. It is all about demonstrating power and asserting dominance outside the usual contests among equals or nearly equals. A game of football is also about asserting dominance when all is said and done. So is a boxing match. So is a debate. The difference is: in the realm of abuse, one side is a predator. It is engaging in what it confidently expects to be an unfair match in order to assert dominance over its victim. Also, this is always done either outside the public eye or disguised in a manner so the public is fooled into not seeing what is really going on. In most if not all such cases the abuser also harms the victim, often forcing them into a state where they can only passively accept the abuse. Having clarified that, I agree unreservedly with your premise: That sex, 'race', gender, religion, age, disability, poverty and so forth are at the heart of the power issue, not the other way around. Now to your earlier question: why is racial dysphoria not discussed as much? First, let me freely admit: I completely misunderstood your question and as a result my first answer arrived in a form somewhere between the irrelevant and the absurd. I have in the meantime taken the time to look up racial dysphoria and read a bit about it, which I hope will help a little. Having said so, I confess I am at a loss to give a satisfactory answer. The obvious answer is that racial dysphoria as a concept has yet to be broadly accepted. It is in a similar limbo state as transsexuality itself was a quarter century ago and many refuse to accept it or believe there are different explanations. For example, blaming internalised racism against one's own race by stating it creates a desire to be a more privileged race, which might hold some water if it affected a large majority or even a significant minority in that way. Of course, the problem with this sort of 'explanation' is that any explanation which employs a premise like 'Obviously it is caused by' or 'Everybody knows that' is not much of an explanation at all. Which includes my initial 'obvious' answer. Possibly a better reply would be "If we take the discussion up, perhaps it will stop being a problem." That is, after all, what various oppressed groups do when they make themselves visible -- they make it impossible for society to simply ignore and silence them to death. Oh, and being myself the child of a divorce where the mother was unfit to hold custody but received it anyway, I know precisely what you mean. *sigh*

Interesting hypothesis. If it turns out to be correct or even related to this, give yourself an entire roll of Oreos!

'Essential' may be too strong. Possibly 'important' or 'highly important.' I am not sure. But I suspect you have the gist of it.

I strongly suggest that you take the entire topic to the Off Topic forum and start a new thread there. Please phrase your concerns as clearly and politely as you can and I at least will do my best to answer.

So do I, but I can't find the reference. It may be in some of the first EGS:NP story strips including Salty Crackers.

I would strongly urge you to tread cautiously on these topics. Systemic racism and oppression comprise a wholly separate set of issues. Gender dysphoria deals with biological factual differences. It is aggravated by social issues but is not actually caused by them. Racism, on the other hand, is a purely social issue. The difference between male and female is quite noticeable when it comes to hormones, biological mechanisms and the like. Not quite so much when dealing with the differences between, say, a male with low skin melanin content and a male with a higher skin melanin content. Of course, society applies oppression in an even-handed manner not caring about biological differences at all, only about how much each individual diverges from what is considered socially acceptable. Societies have existed and do exist where gender roles are far more flexible than they are in modern Western society. For society, your true crime is not what you actually are but how much you have dared to deviate from its norms.

Hasn't stopped certain courts. Wikipedia claims that the longest sentence given in the US was 30.000 years, six counts of five thousand years each. Then again, another man was sentenced to a mere twenty thousand seven hundred and fifty years, appealed and had his sentence reduced by five hundred years.

Believe me, that is an unmitigated blessing.