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Always Adblock's avatar

"If you assault someone while psychotic our elite culture may find it in its heart to forgive you. If you say a racial slur - and people in institutions using slurs is A Thing - they definitely won’t. What is the basic moral architecture that could by turns treat mental health as everything and nothing, that tells the rich and famous that their mental health is the most important thing in the whole wide world, but which dismisses the possibility that people that violate that laws of their new catechism could be in need of some of that same compassion, that same equanimity?"

A very pertinent question, and one that the guardians of the culture will never ask. To use their own language against them, they have a place of enormous privilege, where they can wear as a holy aegis the garb of Tragic Heroic Mental Illness when it suits, and cast it aside like rags the microsecond it actually presents a challenge or a nuance or - horror of horrors! - having to wrestle with something that makes a journalist say "yikes."

The Twitterati's commitment to mental health is Monsanto's commitment to a clean environment and Amazon's commitment to worker's rights. It's a simpering, cartoonish grotesquerie which diminishes everyone involved. It's the human experience reduced to enough characters to fit in a Twitter bio, nestled between pronouns and @TheAtlantic.

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Brad's avatar

There are few writers who actually make their readers better people, but you're definitely one of them, Freddie.

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