The cry of the snowflake
That one weird trick of saying something self-involved and ridiculous, and then answering all questions with variations on “Why would you ask that?”
“Overeducated.” Really? Any evidence for that? I’d have said under.
He asked in response to your absurd tweet!
Because you’re not over-educated. You come across as quite under-educated and incurious.
Your tweet implies it.
This game is stupid, let’s play something else.
Later…
“Objective statement of fact”???
She’s like Brendan O’Neill turned inside out…which is funny because Brendan O’Neill is also like Brendan O’Neill turned inside out.
I am anxious, precarious, chronically ill, and a cat owner – does that make me part of the special crowd, or do you have to have all of them? I don’t plan to indulge in rainbow-colored hair; I grew up a long time ago and don’t need that particular means of showing “who I am”. A lot of people call me overeducated, because it took me a long time to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up so I have more degrees than most would say I need (and probably is more than I need, if I had been given the opportunity to develop myself outside the gender stereotyped world in which I grew up so I could have some idea what I wanted to be).
Look at me, everybody! I’m special! I matter! I need rights!
Wait. You mean, everybody has something that puts them in some “group” of people other people don’t understand? Wow. Who would have guessed.
iknklast: Well, that’s the crux, isn’t it? Their method for determining that they’re special makes everyone special, and to paraphrase The Incredibles, “And when everyone’s special, no one will be.” Thus they are locked in a self-negating arms race for special supremacy against themselves, one in which victory is impossible but escalation isn’t. (Of course, that’s also true of trying to become the opposite gender, highlighting the incoherent insanity of transition as treatment for dysmorphia/dysphoria.)
“Pay attention to us!”
“Why? What makes you so damned special?”
“Leave us the fuck alone!”
O.o
Well sure, the *us* team is always victimized by and therefore superior to the *them* team. That *us* flag always needs waving, and where better to wave it than the majestic rolling landscape of twitter? :P
Well, twiliter, Twitter made Trump president, maybe it can make them special?
The “and/or”s coupled with the lack of commas kind of confuses things, though. The latter suggests that one must have all of those traits to belong to the special group, but the former suggests that at least some are optional. The limiting case would be that only one such trait is needed to belong, in which case it would seem that almost everyone is a member.
She really needs an editor.
I’m half those things, and I reject the forced teaming. If she’s speaking only of the concatenation of all those traits, then she’s wrong because there are very few of them; if she’s speaking of all the people who share some of those traits, she’s wrong because we’re not all with her.
And I would no sooner pretend my daughter was really my son than I would pretend my cat could be my dog.
Ikn @1 Using the word overeducated out of context, or as a stand alone term, is meaningless. It’s like overqualified, another bullshit word. Most people are educated beyond what is necessary for specific situations, and are qualified for activities or jobs that they aren’t engaged in. — Now there are people who lack reasoning ability, open mindedness, or common sense who have also acheived a high level of formal education, but this isn’t overeducated, it’s the opposite. For a recent example, people like Jason Stanley, who is obviously highly educated but also closed minded and bound by ideology. People who reach a high level of education and stop learning because they think they know everything are not overeducated, they are impertinent and pompous. More like not educated enough, or functionally miseducated. I usually hear the word used by people who feel threatened by intelligent or knowledgable people. Laurie Penny appears to love baiting people on twitter with words she is only able to use for effect, yet ironically, not effectively.
I think her real complaint isn’t that members of the club she’s created don’t matter as much as everyone else, but that she’s getting pushback on her feeling that they (and by extension she) should matter more. To her, this feels like oppression. The denial of her claims to special knowledge and status on the basis of her “membership” in the Elect is proof that she’s no better than everyone else and she doesn’t like it. Her claims are there to be believed, not debated. Her “theyness” and “queerness” are not offered up for discussion but for the rest of us to wonder and marvel at. She wants to leverage her Uniqueness into attention and deference. Without the hairdye and claims to non-binariness, she’s got a lot less reason to be listened to. Maybe even less reason to be listened to, because it returns her to the place of a plain, ordinary, ignorable, un-cool, un-capitalized woman, just like the ones she’s so desperate to denigrate and distinguish herself from. “I’m not one of THEM!” Without her Special Status, her soapbox gets a lot shorter, and her megaphone no longer powers up. Left with only the worth of her ideas and the quality of her writing, she would be left unnoticed, unread, unheeded. And that’s just too much like everyone else than she wants to be.
But my dog makes a sound in the morning when he’s ready to go out that sounds exactly like a meow. So I might be able to pretend my dog is my cat…except…he barks incessantly, and one meow does not a cat make.
Exactly. There are 15 items in that absurd list and they’re all or almost all compliments to herself. “Chronically ill” may be an exception, but then again in combination with the other 14 it makes her sound plucky and determined because she soldiers on anyway. Anxious? Yes, definitely a compliment – more sensitive than most people. Precarious? Yes: braver than most people. Rootless? Yes, you know, cosmopolitan, ramblin ramblin ramblin, interesting, not like you drones with your houses and roots and secure jobs.
15 self-compliments in one tweet. She’s bold, if nothing else.
Perhaps it’s in the pressing phrasing. One thing I like to highlight about academics in the Critical Theory-derived fields is that they actually do say what they mean. Maybe the same is true for Twitter narcissists.
She says, “And we matter, just as much as anyone else.” The normal way to read this is something like, “Being these things doesn’t make us less worthy of moral consideration.” That isn’t actually the literal meaning, though. Taken literally, it means that she matters at least as much as anyone you could possibly point to. That is, there’s no one who matters more than she does, no one who’s more important, because that would be someone she doesn’t matter as much as.
So, as I said: narcissists.
Also, whenever I see “and/or”, I can’t help but read it as, “I don’t know how conjunctions work.”
Pressing? Y U do dis, phone?
What was it supposed to be?
“”
That is, I typed “phrasing” and got “pressing phrasing”. Because … um … uh … you see … Look at the silly monkey!
Heh.