#snap work requirements

[kp777]

Progressives Condemn Biden-GOP Debt Ceiling Deal as 'Cruel and Shortsighted'

By Jake Johnson

Common Dreams

May 28, 2023

Update:

The text of the legislation, titled the , is now available here.

Earlier:

Progressive economists and advocates warned that the tentative debt ceiling agreement reached Saturday by the White House and Republican leaders would needlessly gash nutrition aid, rental assistance, education programs, and more—all while making it easier for the wealthy to avoid taxes.

The deal, which now must win the support of both chambers of Congress, reportedly includes two years of caps on non-military federal spending, sparing a Pentagon budget replete with staggering waste and abuse.

The Associated Pressreported that the deal "would hold spending flat for 2024 and increase it by 1% for 2025," not keeping pace with inflation.

The agreement would also impose new work requirements on some recipients of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) while scaling back recently approved IRS funding, a gift to rich tax cheats.

In exchange for the spending cuts and work requirements, Republican leaders have agreed to lift the debt ceiling until January 1, 2025—a tradeoff that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) is pitching as a victory to his caucus, which includes far-right members who have demanded more aggressive austerity.

President Joe Biden, for his part, called the deal "a compromise, which means not everyone gets what they want."

"After inflation eats its share, flat funding will result in fewer households accessing rental assistance, fewer kids in Head Start, and fewer services for seniors."

Lindsay Owens, executive director of the Groundwork Collaborative, said in a statement Saturday night that "this is a punishing deal made worse only by the fact that there was no reason for President Biden to negotiate with Speaker McCarthy over whether or not the United States government should pay its bills," alluding to the president's executive authority.

"After inflation eats its share, flat funding will result in fewer households accessing rental assistance, fewer kids in Head Start, and fewer services for seniors," said Owens. "The deal represents the worst of conservative budget ideology; it cuts investments in workers and families, adds onerous and wasteful new hurdles for families in need of support, and protects the wealthiest Americans and biggest corporations from paying their fair share in taxes."

The agreement comes days before the U.S. is, according to the Treasury Department, set to run out of money to pay its obligations, imperiling Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid payments and potentially hurling the entire global economy into chaos.

House Republicans have leveraged those alarming possibilities to secure painful federal spending cuts and aid program changes that could leave more people hungry, sick, and unable to afford housing, critics said.

"For no real reason at all, hungry people are set to lose food while tax cheats get a free pass," wrote Angela Hanks, chief of programs at Demos.

While legislative text has not yet been released, the deal would reportedly impose work requirements on adult SNAP recipients without dependents up to the age of 54, increasing the current age limit of 49. Policy analysts and anti-hunger activists have long decried SNAP time limits and work requirements as immoral and ineffective at boosting employment. (Most adult SNAP recipients already work.)

"The SNAP changes are nominally extending work requirements to ages 50 to 54. In reality, especially as the new rule is implemented, this is just an indiscriminate cull of a bunch of 50- to 54-year-olds from SNAP who won't realize there are new forms they need to fill out," said Matt Bruenig, founder of the People's Policy Project.

Diane Yentel, president and CEO of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, wrote on Twitter that the agreement is "cruel and shortsighted," pointing to the work requirements and real-term cuts to rental assistance "during an already worsening homelessness crisis."

"House Rs held our nation's lowest-income people hostage in exchange for lifting the debt ceiling," Yentel continued. "The debt ceiling 'deal' could lead to tens of thousands of families losing rental assistance... Expanding ineffective work requirements and putting time limits on food assistance adds salt to the wound, further harming some of the lowest-income and most marginalized people in our country."

Read more.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Casey Wexler and Reed McMaster at MMFA:

Right-wing media have spent over a decade attacking and calling for cuts to vital food assistance programs, with particular focus on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (commonly known as “food stamps”) as well as free school lunch programs. Now, Project 2025 — an extreme right-wing initiative organized by The Heritage Foundation to provide policy and personnel to the next Republican presidential administration — proposes  fulfilling their wish of cutting off hundreds of thousands of Americans from vital food assistance.

Project 2025 calls for sweeping cuts to the food stamp program, which would eliminate food assistance for some Americans and slash the purchasing power of families

Project 2025’s play book, Mandate for Leadership, calls for reimplementing work requirements for food stamps, which it estimates could put 688,000 adults at risk of losing food assistance. Project 2025 claims that these work requirements would be “fairly limited” but admits that the policy will deny some Americans food assistance. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’ analysis of Project 2025, “These requirements are premised on the false assumption that people who receive SNAP do not work and must be compelled to do so — an assumption rooted in a host of unfounded prejudices based on race, gender, disability status, and class. Rigorous studies have shown that the current work requirement policy is ineffective at increasing employment. Instead, it takes food assistance away from people with very low incomes and increases food insecurity and hardship.” [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023; Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 9/3/24]

Project 2025 seeks to remove automatic qualification for SNAP if an individual receives benefits from another government program or broad-based categorical eligibility. The authors of Mandate for Leadership are trying to end automatic eligibility for SNAP for those who receive other benefits because, they claim, “‘benefit’ is defined so broadly that it includes simply receiving distributed pamphlets and 1–800 numbers. This definition, with its low threshold to trigger a ‘benefit,’ allows individuals to bypass eligibility limits—particularly the asset requirement.” But a major benefit of broad-based categorical eligibility, according to CBPP, is helping families through the “benefit cliff,” when a family’s income rises just above the SNAP limit. Broad-based categorical eligibility allows states to ignore the threshold and phase out SNAP benefits gradually as income increases. It also lets families keep higher levels of allowed assets, which allows them to “avoid debt, weather unexpected financial disruptions, and better prepare to support themselves in retirement.” [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023; Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, 7/30/19]

Project 2025 attacks recent increases to the Thrifty Food Plan, which estimates the cost of a healthy diet, saying the Biden administration “may have skirted regulations and congressional authority to increase the overall cost of the program.” The Biden administration raised the budget of SNAP when it found higher costs in maintaining a healthy diet, which Project 2025 called “a dramatic overreach.” Mandate says the Thrifty Food Plan has previously been based on just inflation, which was proposed in the latest federal farm bill. According to the Urban Institute, “In effect, the proposed changes would reduce SNAP benefits’ purchasing power over time, exacerbating the current SNAP benefits gap.” [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023; Newsweek, 4/23/24; Urban Institute, 3/18/24;]

Project 2025 seeks to close the “heat-and-eat loophole” that allows states to issue larger amounts of food stamp benefits. Food stamps are issued based on income minus certain deductions, and beneficiaries of the Low-Income Heat and Energy Assistance Program receive a large deduction even if, according to Project 2025, their LIHEAP benefits are as low as $1 (in reality, as of 2014, LIHEAP benefits have to be $20 or more). LIHEAP helps households pay utility costs, and beneficiaries of the program can maximize their SNAP benefits on top of receiving utility assistance. The program was created because low-income households have a tendency to go without food due to high energy costs. Therefore eliminating this “loophole” entirely will create the food insecurity it was implemented to prevent. [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023; Food Research and Action Center, 3/16/21; LIHEAP Clearinghouse, 2/21/24]

Project 2025's plans for food assistance are diabolical, as its agenda includes reinstation of broad-based categorical eligibility and the Low-Income Heat and Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP).

[odinsblog]

THE FISCAL RESPONSIBILITY ACT (FRA), which passed the House yesterday, makes several changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, sometimes known as food stamps). The changes would deliver Republicans a long-sought policy goal to extend one of the program’s two work requirements, which will now be imposed on older, able-bodied, childless adults aged 50 to 54. But President Biden is selling his caucus on the idea that he actually outfoxed Republicans on the deal, by pointing to exemptions from this work requirement granted to three vulnerable populations: homeless individuals, veterans, and young people recently out of foster care.

On Tuesday, the Congressional Budget Office sided with Biden’s version of the argument. CBO estimates that the deal on the whole would actually raise SNAP participation by 78,000, leading to a slight increase (about $2.1 billion over ten years) in spending. This has triggered gloating by Democratic partisans, who believe the right-wing effort to deny food to impoverished people has been neutralized.

In the near term, the CBO score may cause more upheaval among Republicans intent on slashing funding on social programs. But it’s also a misleading evaluation of how SNAP is administered, according to anti-hunger organizations that handle outreach to the program’s users.

These organizations question many of the theoretical assumptions made by CBO in scoring the food aid provisions, which fail to take into account the reality of implementing these new policies. They instead argue that the work requirements on older Americans will lead to the largest restrictions on SNAP since welfare reform in 1996, while the exemptions fail to account for long-standing barriers to including disadvantaged populations in SNAP. Without additional funding for the withered administrative capacity at state and local agencies, many of these groups will likely not be able to participate.

"We have far more certainty about what the impacts will be of the punitive measure in the bill than we do about the potential exemptions," said Ellen Vollinger, the SNAP program director at the Food Research and Action Center.

The able-bodied work requirement creates a time limit for nutrition assistance of a maximum of three months over a three-year period for those who do not qualify. Research has shown that this policy is a crude tool that mostly kicks people off SNAP rather than promoting greater labor market participation.

In other words, SNAP is not designed to be a jobs program.

(continue reading)

[fuckyeahmarxismleninism]

By Stephen Millies

Using the so-called debt limit as a club, congressional leaders are pushing for more attacks on the poor. Don’t expect Joe Biden to fight back. Only the people can stop Congress from cutting food stamps and other needed social programs. The AFL-CIO needs to call a new Solidarity Day to fight these vicious cutbacks.

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

Progressive economists and advocates warned that the tentative debt ceiling agreement reached Saturday by the White House and Republican leaders would needlessly gash nutrition aid, rental assistance, education programs, and more—all while making it easier for the wealthy to avoid taxes.

The deal, which now must win the support of both chambers of Congress, reportedly includes two years of caps on non-military federal spending, sparing a Pentagon budget replete with staggering waste and abuse.

The Associated Press reported that the deal "would hold spending flat for 2024 and increase it by 1% for 2025," not keeping pace with inflation.

The agreement would also impose new work requirements on some recipients of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) while scaling back recently approved IRS funding, a gift to rich tax cheats.

In exchange for the spending cuts and work requirements, Republican leaders have agreed to lift the debt ceiling until January 1, 2025—a tradeoff that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) is pitching as a victory to his caucus, which includes far-right members who have demanded more aggressive austerity.

President Joe Biden, for his part, called the deal "a compromise, which means not everyone gets what they want."

Lindsay Owens, executive director of the Groundwork Collaborative, said in a statement Saturday night that "this is a punishing deal made worse only by the fact that there was no reason for President Biden to negotiate with Speaker McCarthy over whether or not the United States government should pay its bills," alluding to the President's executive authority.

"After inflation eats its share, flat funding will result in fewer households accessing rental assistance, fewer kids in Head Start, and fewer services for seniors," said Owens. "The deal represents the worst of conservative budget ideology; it cuts investments in workers and families, adds onerous and wasteful new hurdles for families in need of support, and protects the wealthiest Americans and biggest corporations from paying their fair share in taxes."

The agreement comes days before the U.S. is, according to the Treasury Department, set to run out of money to pay its obligations, imperiling Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid payments and potentially hurling the entire global economy into chaos.

House Republicans have leveraged those alarming possibilities to secure painful federal spending cuts and aid program changes that could leave more people hungry, sick, and unable to afford housing, critics said.

"For no real reason at all, hungry people are set to lose food while tax cheats get a free pass," wrote Angela Hanks, chief of programs at Demos.

While legislative text has not yet been released, the deal would reportedly impose work requirements on adult SNAP recipients without dependents up to the age of 54, increasing the current age limit of 49. Policy analysts and anti-hunger activists have long decried SNAP time limits and work requirements as cruel and ineffective at boosting employment. (Most adult SNAP recipients already work.)

"The SNAP changes are nominally extending work requirements to ages 50 to 54. In reality, especially as the new rule is implemented, this is just an indiscriminate cull of a bunch of 50- to 54-year-olds from SNAP who won't realize there are new forms they need to fill out," said Matt Bruenig, founder of the People's Policy Project.

Diane Yentel, president and CEO of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, wrote on Twitter that the agreement is "cruel and shortsighted," pointing to the work requirements and real-term cuts to rental assistance "during an already worsening homelessness crisis."

"House Rs held our nation's lowest-income people hostage in exchange for lifting the debt ceiling," Yentel continued. "The debt ceiling 'deal' could lead to tens of thousands of families losing rental assistance... Expanding ineffective work requirements and putting time limits on food assistance adds salt to the wound, further harming some of the lowest-income and most marginalized people in our country."

The White House and Republican leaders also reportedly agreed to some permitting reforms that climate groups have slammed as a boon for the fossil fuel industry. According to The New York Times, the agreement "includes measures meant to speed environmental reviews of certain energy projects," though the scope of the changes is not yet clear.

And while the deal doesn't appear to include a repeal of Biden's student debt cancellation plan—which is currently before the U.S. Supreme Court—it does contain a provision that would cement the end of the student loan repayment pause, drawing fury from debt relief campaigners.

The deal must now get through Congress, a difficult task given likely opposition from progressive lawmakers who oppose attacks on aid programs and Republicans who want steeper cuts.

As the Times reported, "Lawmakers in the House Freedom Caucus were privately pillorying the deal on Saturday night, and the Congressional Progressive Caucus had already begun to fume about it even before negotiators finalized the agreement."

Amy Hanauer, executive director of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, said Sunday that "it's a relief to see that congressional leaders and the President have come to an agreement to raise the debt limit and avert an economic disaster."

"But by instituting work requirements for critical assistance programs and rescinding important funding to crack down on wealthy tax cheats, this deal will rig the economy even more in favor of the most well-off Americans while failing to fix the real structural problems that led to the current debt crisis in the first place," said Hanauer. "The deal avoids the elephant in the room: it includes no new revenues even though tax cuts of the past few decades were a primary driver of deficit growth."

"And next up, many Republican lawmakers want to double down on tax cuts by pushing through many more tax cuts that would most help wealthy families and corporations," Hanauer added. "They should do the opposite."

[rexcaliburechoes]

diamant, the horrors chamber, and why he’s just so fun to mess with // the diamant-sertation series

i’d talked a little about this before on twitter about diamant angst and if i’m doing alright (i’m fine just biochemistry major go brrrr) and i just remembered this:

and i wanted to think about this for a little bit. i’m going to try and not retread old ground, but that’s kind of impossible if i want to break him in a realistic way.

but i was mostly thinking about how easy it is to destabilise him. i might be woobifying him too much, but i swear, i’ve been through this rigamarole before with a variety of characters. i’ve hurt characters over and over and over again, testing their limits, watching them bend and potentially break, and diamant has keeled over the fastest. it’s kind of funny in a bit of a twisted way.

but i mean it: why does he bend to easily compared to others?

i think it’s because he Refuses to experience The Horrors, and so when something encroaches on that tenuously stretched self control, he simply cannot deal with anything new, so he shuts down. you’d think he’d have a fight response to new stressors (he is of brodia; if you can’t fight, then what kind of brodian are you?) but i think he’s gone past that point. he’s dealing with enough already as it is, just One More Thing just will set him off. he’s tired, overwhelmed, and bottles everything up because He Should Be Able To Deal With It.

there’s definitely an allegory of being undiagnosed neurodivergent in here somewhere but we don’t have time to unpack all that.

but since diamant is so easily burnt out (which, haha, funny fire trauma go brr), he’s just an easy target to picking at all of his weaknesses and flaws. diamonds have very predictable cutting planes, and if manage to hit one just right, the entire crystal will shatter.

[lrdvyke]

there's a particular itch that i wanna attempt and it's to write out vyke's story ( brief tho since lack of information especially in the great rune department lol, so like novella ... ) and have it be from arriving to the end. and i jus hmmmmmmmmmmmmm

[divinekangaroo]

This is the bullshit about starting work again, I come home and continue with rubbish like planning plot processes and prioritisation matrixes and production programs and the like, instead of, you know, writing.

[todayisafridaynight]

i solemnly swear not to write a fic with a similar premise as one ive done in the past but also i like it when people slow dance.....

[vulpinesaint]

what if i cried over having to take this stupid fucking rhetoric class again

[psychoticwillgraham]

very tempted to write blaine being an utterly unhinged maniac for my halloween horror bingo fics

[wainswright]

This is a guy trying to start a cult when he was around 20 (apparently he tried again in HP after losing all converts in LOTR but I haven’t read that far, putting here for notes.)

https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/19GpMh506PQNBB4qeTdASHirmJ2YwzElEjHoOSLiYtLc

Putting this informally because I’ve come to dislike a lurid approach, I think “cult” is a specific word related to a specific approach and idea, and is otherwise not specific enough to describe more formalized/organized for lack of a better word consistent recognition of abuses within high-control groups (a little more specific a term) or the concepts behind extremist political movements or small abusive groups or even, at some stretch, abusive corporate practices present in corporate towns.

Military seems to be a separate concept that has to be approached differently for scale, commonality, and mixing with bureaucracy and greater political system classification.

But for these small, convenient to try to finagle over the internet ‘cult’ affairs, there are a few consistent factors that lead to harm that look pretty noticeable.

This is also informal in rigor, because I’m reading a blog post and bloggin.

1. Vague mythos. Weakest, more like a style or use of mythos in response to specific questions/in relation to behavior. It more represents a path to future harm than guaranteeing harm in itself and would require extremely specific analysis not put here. It is not only possible, but common for people to attend small isolated camps to improve a skill. However, these camps are usually acknowledged by wider society and have a proven track record of success, (ideally) competent teachers with records of knowledgeable cogent skill and success, and an understandable and specific road map to specific kinds of knowledge or skill. To skip to the heuristic, if someone reflexively and seriously answers they are “saving the world” in response to someone completely trusting them to teach erstwhile esoteric knowledge, this is so vague it’s more a requirement of belief in faith than a guarantee of a specific skill. (Not that pseudo science babble is better, but that’s a different analysis.) It’s pretty odd. I’m sure anything sufficiently unmeasurable or elastic with vibes based interpretation like spiritual power or inherent intuition of correctness is also rife with potential promise of idealism/persistent vagueness that can get people invested with a very low chance of actual practical use (its kind of like saying think good thoughts for success), if not necessarily abusive or guaranteeing abuse. It does flag as scam, unintentional or not, to me.

It’s another thing to explicitly try experimental approaches to something, I guess? If the idea is a hook, then “being special, intelligent, a secret elite agent for good,” is universally appealing. But it’s more of an induction to a society than a specific skill guarantee. It’s certainly possible someone might rediscover the benefits of emotional regulation as questionably conveyed by aspiring cult leader, even if this is not necessarily exclusive to the brand. Suggesting 24/7 strictly monitored changes in cognition are also somewhat suspect under most circumstances, belying the fact learning anything new requires some amount of blind trust, at least in more novel-to-a-person areas. (sometimes heuristics such as confidence and looks aren’t accurate. discussion later.) But concern kicks in more when paired with the following-

2. Control. (totalitarian.) Mounting pressure (“that somehow just happens”) to cut off all friends unrelated to the brand, teaching people to repeat alienating rhetoric to people not into the brand, being the sole source of food and shelter and money and positive attention and then intermittently using this to pressure and threaten the inductee, no matter the aspiring cult leader’s seeming “awareness” of this pressure- also, they are always suffering some looming crisis that can only be solved by total subservience that can’t have independent conclusions or analysis. (By this I mean there’s actual ways a prophecy can be proven wrong or changed in any detail or way. expand later.) Prophet-coded. (Life after death is sufficiently vague. A fear of death, fomo, hope for legacy, fame, money, respect, honor- always in style, let’s say.) A need for emotional reliance from inductees, which can just be equivalent to close friendship, with the harmful part being the consistent abuse of trust, emotional abuse, creating a distorted picture of reality and probable eventual financial demands where it essentially just becomes a grift of fake promises and emotional investment by spinning a story and periodically rattling the inductee’s cage for continued crisis support while there is no actual crisis except the refusal to acknowledge there is some endpoint to lying where apparently all the person wants is social (and even excessively monetary) acknowledgement for being gods specialist little guy and war hero without the any of the work required for how similar accolades could be earned irl. Which is common enough, except for all the charity scams and physical or emotional abuse or years stolen from others that seem common to this sort of grift. I suppose the tell would be a weirdly constant state of stress that doesn’t quite match up with real world ups and downs, ever. Thinking of youtuber cult incidents, a miasma of suicidal doom of being the only people who know why there’s no hope and people should just kill themselves and this retroactively justifies [whatever a lot of people seem consistently mad about] seems a pretty common unifying theme. I don’t think this is a logical conclusion unless whoever was declaring it is god. That’s another thing, disavowing knowledge or responsibility or harm reduction when clearly taking up a position of authoritative leadership and ducking behind fervent defenders. On one hand, nobody likes facing criticism or the consequences of their mistakes, unintentional or not. On the other hand, guess what the disqualification is to get someone out of a position of authority? Proven abuses of power. (well, complicated, but in terms of usual base reasoning.) In certain formal situations termed functional this is enforced legally, if not so much on the lands of forum when just chatter. (Just remembered the apology video phenomenon. Makeup youtube analysis sometime eh.)

3. Memory editing. After some thought, thought I should throw this in. Research in court evidence history, psychology, and what I know of scientology point to the fact that people can form false memories. When we first recount an event, this will probably be the most accurate representation. With heavy pressure, prompting, and a kind of forced retelling, people can come to believe something is true that is completely and proven with DNA evidence to be untrue, from the face of the person who raped them to the fact there was an argument or tone at all. There appears to be nuance to this in that it’s more applicable to blurry details (?) or trust in someone’s word or representation when in a state of initial disarray and stress that affects someone forming the memory more. (The reason people are not shown police line ups right after a traumatic event, they can imprint on one of the faces even when it is false.) This is not to discount sometimes you genuinely remember things wrong, but I think this is very uncommon, and it is more common that you may have just misread intent and remember the interpretation. (? needs more research, sorry. For example, I don’t know much about hallucinations but I believe there are emotional states when they can be aggravated?) I am under the impression leaders of cults use this phenomenon to try to gaslight inductees that things progressed or happened that did not strictly happen, and I would imagine discourage any questioning of this with accusations of lack of integrity, belief, things important to the inductee’s identity, and general character. The warning signs of this would be a complete obsession with some impossible standard of feelings, perhaps, or periods of constant emotional breakdowns caused by oddly common “personality/memory editing” sessions.

I don’t doubt that this specific nugget can be packaged with more harmless and common venting with friends or seeking opinions or analysis of past behavior with friends, but maybe a warning sign here is that just having emotional reactions in themselves isn’t a bad thing, and if someone is constantly telling you the feeling in itself “shouldn’t be happening,” this is either ignorant or a fishy attempt at control. Having emotional reactions is just a fact, usually a logical response to something and a personal thing besides, the action you take in response to an emotional response can also be reasoned out without constant insults about your inherent inner character. Some emotional reactions are not even that “inherent” or permanent. Also, people are logical in that empirical evidence such as notes written down in the moment, video recordings, photos, or previous cool headed personal analysis can help refresh your memories to confirm what did or did not happen.

Intersecting topic: this comes up with dementia patients in the hospital. False memory is not in itself harmful. And in cases of hallucinations, a belief is genuine, and there is no overarching purpose to insisting it is false. Ah well, this depends on specifics. Situations differ when a false belief would be a basis to harm someone else or spread mass disinformation. Difficult to phrase, will try again later.

In addition, something like a job performance review shouldn’t be literally demanding your loyalty and enthusiasm, though I imagine this is common. Especially in smaller places of employment where people have a go getter attitude! Not necessarily nefarious in base concept, gets historically bad if systemized. Appeal to a higher up is good for being promoted by that higher up, a lack of impairment is a universal privilege, but I don’t believe there’s real jobs (exceptions for working with very specific sensitive situations, maybe, or ideologically based partnership) that can justify requiring a specific kneejerk emotional reaction/personality more than competence at a specific task. Basic ability to be sociable aside, (i genuinely think think this is a skill more than inherent anything, while easier for some people more than others,) which is also generally helpful.

All of this does not deny the existence of suppressed memories from trauma, witness testimony gathered under standards and in aggregate or specific, contentious friendships, vague yoga summer camps, or jointly paid rent friend groups where everyone is into a similar ideological goal, although the last one might cause a different subset of interpersonal issues, it is not necessarily abusive. (this is why im meh on the word cult, it doesn’t describe dynamics but tries to characterize a more nebulous social “thing.” the jim jones cult was explicitly based off of a religion. i’m also fairly sure the use of cult as an identifying word was championed by news headlines, which often are based off of vibes that excite the imagination, which isn’t always useful for more specific analysis where consistent judgments and accuracy are essential.) (I also think it’s inherently confusing while pushing a supernatural definition- people say cults are bad referring to the abuse, not the “state of mind of feeling belief in a cause” I mean it’s a problem when the methodology seemingly necessitates abuse, ptsd, false beliefs enforced by various means to “disincentivize” having different beliefs. things like that.)

I should rephrase this later, but- it appears the downsides to putting people in a constant state of isolated escalated stakes over tiny signals, or under stress/pressure via lies on hairpin fractures may lead to intentionally aggravated suggestible states of mind from distress, erratic behavior, emotional or physical abuse accepted and dealt out thoughtlessly to surroundings, and make murder look like a reasonable and logical decision when in an ordinary circumstance it would not. If it does not go that far, a constant regret and persisting negative reaction at the mistreatment. Salesman put people in a state of panic to narrow their options and inhibit their calm judgement, but an aspiring cult leader doing this long term to people who trust them in a position of authority goes beyond we-live-in-a-society manipulative and into ‘ruining people’s lives’ and ‘justifiably getting sued for assault or blackmail or fraud.’

[binders-and-beanies]

New obstacle in getting insured: they are demanding 2 months worth of premiums, due the day of what is supposed to be my first covered doctors visit. Only way to pay is thru a website that I’m not able to sign into on any device, or by check which I don’t have, or have a way to get, nor would a check get there on time. They’re claiming they’ll cancel my insurance if I don’t pay it on time, and I’m learning about this 9 days in advance. Literally every couple days I learn of a new way that I may lose my insurance I never had.

Not to mention at said appointment I have to get a doctor I’ve never met to do paperwork to prove I’m the exact right medium amount of disabled for this insurance. Paperwork she Already Did. And if they decide it’s not sufficient, which they Already Did, hence her having to do it again, they can cancel my insurance and/or add 50 more steps.

So I may have gone thru all this for months Just to go to the appointment that gets me denied again. And the “coverage” for that one appointment alone costs $82 minimum + the various costs of getting to this point in the process. In conclusion fuck yourself and die if you think getting government insurance is easy

[serkonans]

some cat owners are fucking ridiculous

[alchemiclee]

as a fellow introvert; we are social creatures. introverts who purposefully see no one for months on end are usually just in a cycle where its been so long since they’ve hung out that it’s too intimidating for them to do anymore. i 100% feel tired after hanging out with my friends but i DO also feel happy and refreshed! tl;dr - you’re super normal lol. try to reach out to a couple people just to chat this week <3

thanks for reaching out I really appreciate it❤️ but I have to rant a bit. I allow you to ignore it!

I wish to not be a social creature because going too long without having a friend to talk to or not having someone to talk with almost daily feels bad and it's so hard to have a friend when I need one D:

i've been reaching out to people for the last few weeks or so but they don't reach back. try playing games with people but they play with their other friends or dont feel like playing. invite people to hang out but they say maybe and never give an answer or don't respond.

I don't want to bother my closest friends in our group chat too much in our group chat but the chat is mostly me sending messages with no response and even couple times saying I need a friend when I was having bad days but they didn't want to chat and I dont want to force anyone to entertain my lonely depressed ass. (especially when all I really needed was to talk about the new star rail stuff to distract me but I don't think they've finished it yet so I don't want to spoil) they live together so they always have to socialize and probably make each other tired without needing to add me to it.

so i've also been trying to reach out to new people, like joining twitch chats again for the first time in years. but that never goes well and doesn't satisfy my social needs. too many people talking at once and being the new person no one cares about and all....getting to know a new is very exhausting. but it's so hard to just be able to skip all that getting to know each other stuff jump straight into talking about a thing we both like (in this case it's star rail and cosplay and maybe art) I don't have enough already-known people to reach out to and i'm too tired to do the small talk dance until it's appropriate to jump into special interest territory. being autistic is so exhausting. I with to be one of those rare autistics I sometimes hear about that have 0 interest in social interaction at all

so as you can see, i'm trying. so hard. to the point I'm exhausting myself. it's been too much work for no payoff and makes things feel worse when the outcome isn't what I need and its constant reaching with no one grabbing my hand back. so I keep making annoying tumblr posts about it. i'm so sorry to anyone that reads my nonsense 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭 this is a normal thing with me but it's usually kept to my other blog that's reserved for more serious posts like this but I tried posting here as a way to "reach out" and see if it invites any friendly friends or something but I don't think i'm doing it right...

(but I am going to a con tomorrow with someone I haven't talked to in like 2 years. but we don't have anything in common anymore so theres not much to talk about. he's the only person who responded to me after trying to reach out for like a month but I fear it will only exhaust me being around too many people and not help this gross need to have a deeper connecting socialization D:)