Category: Rants

I owe my upbringing to the taxpayer.

Both of my parents owe essentially their entire lifetime of earnings to the taxpayer. With only brief exceptions, my mother has spent her entire working life as what used to be called a secretary for several different public school districts, and my father is entering his 30th year as, at various times, a prosecutor, elected official, and judge in a county in the southwest Chicago suburbs.

Accordingly, most of their friends are similarly employed.
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Some of dad's friends are people I have known (and vice-versa) since 1980, which is impressive since I didn't master the art of speaking until mid-1981. As these people have watched me grow from a baby to a 34 year old adult of considerable facial hair and minimal life accomplishments, I've watched them transition from young adults to…well, seniors on the verge of retirement.

Like most people who work for the government for their entire lives, their ability to retire relies on a public pension. Those pensions will provide them in most cases with something that approximates their working salary plus health care benefits. One of the great ironies in my mind as I began becoming politically aware was how much some of these people could bitch about taxes when every penny they earned and would continue to earn was someone else's tax dollar. And now that states are in austerity overdrive – Illinois being more strapped for cash than most – some of them are all aboard the "It's all the fault of the public unions and their goddamn retirement benefits."

As I became an adult (of sorts) I became bolder about questioning this sort of logic. And I came to believe, having had this conversation numerous times over the years, that the explanation is quite simple: individuals believe that they deserve the benefits they'll get (usually because they Worked Very Hard or Worked Their Whole Life for them) while the horde-like Others do not. And no matter what they do – double-dipping, etc. – they've earned what's coming to them. It's all those other people who haven't.

At a previous public university, I worked with a textbook public pension double-dipper. She "retired" at 52 having put in the 30 years of service necessary to draw her pension, then she continued to work in a different university position that would eventually give her a second pension (and currently gave her a state salary on top of the pension).
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Of course she was the office's resident Teabagger, and her laziness was such that I wondered if the EPA would re-classify her as some sort of lumber. And that's one of the most amazing things about being among those employed by the government – occasionally you run into these examples who scam the system in every way possible, do no actual work, and manage to piss and moan about taxes, the gub'mint, and the usual right-wing nonsense. Their pension(s) is different because they worked very hard for it, meaning they were physically present for the mandated amount of time on most days.

It turns out that double-dipping is for pussies, though, and triple-dipping is where it's at – at least according to John Cornyn. He's being paid his Senate salary in addition to three different State/county pensions totaling $66,000 annually from previous positions held in Texas. What's amazing is how much he receives for how briefly he worked – $6000 every year for the rest of his life for four years on a county court. $48,000/yr for six years on the State Supreme Court. And so on.

So, just to recap, a teacher or postal worker who puts in 30 years is greedy and entitled, but the John Cornyns of the world spends five fuckin' minutes on a county court and gets $6000 in the mail every year until death. I wish there was a more complex psychological explanation to offer here beyond simple hypocrisy and the belief – in the face of mountains of contradictory evidence – that "Everyone is lazy except me." Based on my experience throughout my career and indeed throughout my life, the excuses are rarely more complex than that.

Isn't it funny how new prisons open just after the factories and the public schools close? It must be that efficiency and responsiveness that the free market priesthood is always boasting about.

Isn't it funny how state governments and the Sacred Taxpayer balk at spending $5000 per public school student per year but don't balk at the $75,000+ per year that it costs to incarcerate one person? The free market encourages such forward-thinking investment.

The city of Philadelphia is closing 23 public schools to save money while breaking ground on a new $400 million jail and prison complex. Honestly, the reporting on this story has been disappointing. By focusing on the school closure-vs-jail opening dichotomy, it sets up the weakest possible argument. With falling enrollments (no doubt due in part to previous cycles of budget slashing) it is not hard to construct a logical argument for school closures. If these buildings are at 40% enrollment, it makes some sense for the school district to consolidate.

The real problem, which doesn't make nearly as sexy or ire-provoking of a headline, is what is happening to the schools that will remain open. The closed buildings are the least of Philadelphia students' and teachers' problems. The schools that remain open are now operating with budgets that have been cut to the bone.

Pink slips were recently sent to 19 percent of the school-based work force, including all 127 assistant principals, 646 teachers and more than 1,200 aides. Principals are contemplating opening in September with larger classes but no one to answer phones, keep order on the playground, coach sports, check out library books or send transcripts for seniors applying to college.

Ignore the buildings. This is the real issue. Remove everything that offers the remote possibility of keeping kids (especially in crappy neighborhoods) out of trouble – sports, clubs, music, art, etc. Then cut the staff to the point where teachers won't be able to pay attention to any individual student. Then continue to cut corporate tax rates, cry "budget deficit!", and start the cycle all over again.

So what's the overarching agenda here? Pushing people out of the city and into the suburbs? That doesn't exactly help the local tax base if the Philly school board chases residents away. Funneling more kids into charter and private schools? Conservatives have a hard-on for them, and the shittier they can make the public schools the better private/charter schools will seem by comparison. And for the students who can't afford / get into non-public schools and whose parents can't afford to move into the suburbs? Is the plan simply to use the remaining schools as hollow shells serving no purpose other than to house the children at state expense until they can be shifted to juvenile facilities, adult prison, public housing, and so on?

Yeah. Yeah, pretty much. That's the only possible outcome here when schools are stripped of everything except the light fixtures, one principal, and some teachers. We don't need a crystal ball to see how this is going to turn out.

I knew it would happen at some point. Though he has gotten a firm "meh" from me from the moment he emerged as a presidential candidate, I am finally proud of Barack Obama.

Obama was concluding remarks about his Affordable Health Care Act during an address in Northern California Friday morning when he fielded a single question about the NSA and the recently disclosed domestic spying programs.

"I think it's important to recognize that you can’t have 100 per cent security and also then have 100 per cent privacy and zero inconvenience," the president told the crowd while delivering several minutes of unscripted remarks about the NSA.

This.

I suspect Obama will suffer as a result of this approach, but it is about time that someone spoke to the American public like an adult.
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Of course the politically expedient thing to do is to indulge the juvenile fantasies of the electorate, the ones where they get lots of things from the government but don't have to pay for them and where they are kept safe from every potential threat with no limitations on their rights and liberties. You know what kind of person expects to get everything they want at no cost? Children. Bratty teenagers. Spoiled college kids. I have great respect for anyone willing to tell the public, "Look, make up your goddamn minds. You want us to prevent terrorism by the most aggressive means available.
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Well, this is the cost. If anyone has a better idea of how to stay on top of every potential terrorist activity on the planet we'd love to hear it.
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"

Freshman-level political science courses teach students that rights and security sit at opposite ends of a see-saw. To increase one necessarily does something to decrease the other. We simply cannot have it both ways. But we have a political system that gives individual elected officials an incentive to tell us we can. There is nothing to gain by telling voters, "You were howling about terrorism and we passed a law giving the president sweeping powers to fight it. We had chances to repeal that law (or let it expire) and the right-wing media crapped itself at the thought of 'weakening' our response to terrorist threats. This infringement of your privacy is the result of that law." There's everything to gain from voting for the Patriot Act and then stoking their braying outrage over The Gub'mint listenin' in on mah phone calls.

What I'm saying here is not a defense of these surveillance programs. It is a simple statement of fact.
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We cannot have the best of every possible world. If you place the most value on privacy and individual rights, then you'd best accept the fact that terrorism will be more difficult to stop. If you value security more highly, realize that the pursuit of security will involve some limitations on privacy. Majorities of Americans support the NSA's actions and almost 2/3 agree that privacy is secondary to combating terrorism. That it is popular does not make it right, but it does mean that our elected officials are going to err on the side of security ten times out of ten. It's not like Americans really believe in rights anyway.

But more on that tomorrow.

Last week the Supreme Court decided, based on the majority's appeal to reasonableness, that police can collect a DNA sample from people when they are placed under arrest. Scalia and three liberals formed the dissent, a strange set of bedfellows if ever there was one. Your libertarian-leaning friends are no doubt up in arms about "DNA databases" and the police state. To a great extent, hyperbolic language like that obscures the real problem with this decision.

In the majority opinion, Anthony Kennedy says:

DNA identification of arrestees is a reasonable search that can be considered part of a routine booking procedure. Taking and analyzing a cheek swab of the arrestee's DNA is, like fingerprinting and photographing, a legitimate police booking procedure that is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment.

Here is why that analogy is inapplicable and intellectually dishonest.

Fingerprinting and photographing are done for the purpose of identification. They're standard police procedure to ensure that your are Joe Blow rather than John Doe. They are not used retroactively to charge you with unsolved crimes. Contrary to what Hollywood portrays, useful fingerprint evidence is rare in criminal cases; the police don't get your picture and prints and then say, "Let's see what else we can charge this guy with." With a DNA sample, they will indeed have the ability to compare to a database of DNA evidence collected in previous cases – solved or unsolved. If you bleed all over the door handle during a home invasion in 2013 and get arrested five years later for drunk driving, the DNA evidence you provide at the time of arrest could be used with relative ease to tie you to the earlier home invasion.

So what?, most people say. Collecting DNA evidence will lead to convictions of guilty people in unsolved crimes. Good. But here's the real problem: this decision is, in essence, the end of the need for a search warrant. Let me explain.

You're suspected of a homicide. They neither have enough evidence to arrest you nor enough probable cause to get a judge to sign off on a search warrant. The police want to search your home to collect both physical and DNA evidence against you. But they can't.

Except now they don't have to. What they do instead, per this decision, is continue to keep you under surveillance as a suspect. They follow you around and wait for you to commit the most minor offense that will enable them to place you under arrest, even if they have no hope of convicting you. They collect DNA samples at the time of arrest and use that to connect you to the crime to which they couldn't otherwise connect you.

You're still not concerned, right? Because once again we're tying guilty people to crimes they committed. The problem is, law enforcement collectively has a strong incentive to collect as many individual DNA samples as possible. It is in their best interest to arrest, fingerprint, and DNA sample as many people as it can, both to resolve old unsolved cases and to provide them with a larger pool of suspects for future cases. I'm not saying that the FBI and police will be playing a game of "Find the arrestable offense" from now on. If they're smart, though, that's exactly what they'll do.

The problem here – ethically, not legally – is not that DNA evidence can be used to connect offenders to all of their past crimes. The problem is that in order for law enforcement to maximize the utility of DNA as a crime-solving tool, they need (theoretically) a sample from everyone. And there's one great way to get that, in the words of the majority opinion.

tl;dr = It is in the interest of the police to arrest you for something minor now to collect evidence that may tie you to a more serious crime in the future, as well as unsolved crimes from the past. Goodbye search warrants. You had a good 230+ year run.

As I do not smoke marijuana, one thing it took me a long, long time to realize as an adult is that a significant portion of the population is high, like, all the goddamn time. Everybody is aware, at least vaguely, that if you drug tested a random college classroom or a restaurant kitchen, pretty much everyone would fail. But it goes beyond the lazy stereotypes. I know personally people like doctors, lawyers, elected officials, teachers, architects, and accountants (in addition to the waiters, musicians, bartenders, comedians, and people of leisure) for whom not being high is an extreme rarity. In the broadest sense, I am acquainted with hundreds of users – and probably more people who I don't realize are users.

This bothers me not at all, since I give zero shits about whether people smoke weed. What does strike me as odd, though, is that for all the (predominantly white) people I know who use regularly, I know very few people who get arrested for anything drug related. Perhaps that is because, despite surveys showing that nearly identical percentages of black and white Americans use marijuana, new data shows that blacks are 400% more likely to get arrested for marijuana-related offenses. You're shocked, I know.

Notice that this does not say blacks are four times as likely to use marijuana, or be in possession of it, or sell it, or anything of the sort. They are four times more likely to be arrested and charged. The reason, I submit, is that the entire point of the War on Drugs is to put black males in prison. This isn't a bug; it's a feature.

In practical terms, there isn't one reason why this happens. There are many. Police patrol more in black neighborhoods. They pull over more black drivers. They conduct more vehicles searches of black drivers during traffic stops. There is more drug enforcement (locker searches, etc) in predominantly black schools. Once arrested, blacks are more likely to be convicted and to receive harsher sentences for the same crimes. And, as the linked article emphasizes, performance metrics based on quantity encourage police to target simple offenses like possession.

A few weeks ago, a judge in an Illinois county near St. Louis died of a cocaine overdose on a hunting trip with other judges. This is a perfect snapshot of the relationship among drugs, the American public, and law enforcement. Tons of people use drugs across all socioeconomic levels, and the laws exist to punish…well, poor blacks and Latinos, basically. The image of a couple of judges who probably sentence people on drug-related crimes regularly sitting around and doing blow in a cabin in the woods speaks for itself. See, the laws are for Those People, not for Us. Statistically, the police don't seem to mind too much if judges and lawyers get high. Or kids in expensive private high schools (You know those drug dogs they parade around the "bad" schools? I'd love to see what they'd find when marched past the lockers of Northern Virginia's various academies and Country Day schools). Or college kids. Or people who live in nice houses in the suburbs. Or basically anyone, with the exception of black people and particularly young black males. Sure, the dumbass white kids from the suburbs can spend all of mom and dad's money on blow and bad acid and expensive weed for four years in college, but if there's weed to be found in the crappy black neighborhood they'll move heaven and Earth to find it. Ethan might be selling his mom's Vicodin out of their 4000 square-foot home in Barrington, but the crime is Curtis selling dimebags behind the convenience store.

This. This is what institutionalized racism is. It is a system that is designed from stem to stern to do one thing as efficiently and as thoroughly as possible: arrest and incarcerate poor people in general and the dark-skinned ones in particular. From the police officer on the street to the judge in the highest courtroom, the entire system operates under the wink-and-nudge understanding that some people can break the drug laws with relative impunity while others must be assessed their Strikes as rapidly as possible and incarcerated for as long as the law permits.

Many years ago I went to court for a traffic ticket. The courtroom was full, and the Offenders consisted of me, a handful of Hispanic men, and about 75 black people. The area in which the offense happened was predominantly white. I told the judge that I wouldn't ask for special treatment despite apparently being the only white person in the county to commit a moving violation that month. He didn't laugh.

There are some people I truly love living in Houston, Texas. I've been there a few times and generally enjoyed myself. But let's not kid ourselves; unless your idea of a well laid-out metropolis with a high quality of life is Phoenix or Tulsa, Houston is a clusterfuck.
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To be outdoors in Houston in August is like breathing soup or living in the anal cavity of a giant mammal. It is necessary to drive everywhere – which I'm sure has no bearing on Houston being the fattest city in the country. The public transportation "system" is a joke and good luck trying to meet your needs on foot. The city center is a concrete splatter surrounded and pierced by one highway after another. It sprawls mightily in every direction with nothing to constrain it and with no rhyme or reason (much like Phoenix, Las Vegas, Southern California, etc). Much of the city is seedy, impoverished, and crime-ridden despite what the rest of this post is going to talk about. The Astros are fucking horrible.

Houston is a big, hot, sprawling mess. It's also "America's #1 job creator" according to The Atlantic.

The crux of this analysis is that it's really cheap to live in Houston and its location makes it relevant to the energy industry (read: oil and gas). Because it's cheap to live there, employers can set up shop there, pay less than they would have to pay elsewhere, and then make the cost of living argument. Combined with Texas's legendarily "business friendly environment", it's a cheap place.

It's not hard to see why Houston would be adding jobs.

These things don't exist in a vacuum, though. Housing is cheap because land is ample and cheap, hence the epic sprawl. Add more highways to move people between the city and the sprawl to up the ugliness factor. And that business friendly environment isn't free either. Employers are lured there with billions in tax abatements and other handouts from the public till. Accordingly, there's a limited tax base and the population growth has outpaced the ability to provide public services. That's why Houston manages to be "booming" and "affluent" while appearing to residents and visitors alike to be run down and seedy. Come for the great jobs, cheap houses, and public schools you wouldn't send your dog to.

This is supposed to be the template for other cities to follow – be more like the growing, sprawling megaplexes of the Sun Belt. Pay particular attention to Texas and the Southwest. Turn your city into a gargantuan strip mall, hand out money to oil companies (and defense contractors; good lord does Texas love it some defense contractors), actively reject the idea of urban planning as socialist, and tell everyone who lives there to fend for themselves.

We have seen the future, and it sucks.

There is a group of historical figures – Mark Twain, Einstein, Ben Franklin, and Winston Churchill come to mind – to whom so many quotes and anecdotes are attributed that it's difficult to separate the real from the incorrectly sourced from the apocryphal. With Abraham Lincoln, impossible is a better term than difficult. So many pieces of folksy wisdom are attributed to Honest Abe that he would have had to devote hours per day to clever sayings to concoct all of them. One of my favorite supposed-Lincoln anecdotes involves a dispatch he received from one of his generals after a brief engagement with Confederate forces in Kentucky. The telegram reported, "Good news, (name of town) taken, only 12 casualties." Lincoln's supposed reply was, "Not good news for the 12."

As the "official" American military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan continues to wind down, the casualties (U.S. or otherwise) drift even further from public consciousness. The fact that the wars have been ongoing for more than a decade certainly doesn't help, given the attention span of our media and the general public. As of this Memorial Day, the total number of U.S. fatalities in Afghanistan in 2013 is 53. Comparatively – nearly 4500 died in Iraq and 2227 have died so far in Afghanistan – it is tempting to look at this year as good news.
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And it is, in some sense. But it's not good news for those 53, their families, and everyone who knew them.

Whether or not the war is going well in the larger sense, there is no good news for Spc. Mitchell Daehling, 24, of Dalton, MA. He died on May 14, 2013 in Sanjaray Zhari, Kandahar when an improvised explosive device destroyed the vehicle he occupied with Spc. William Gilbert and Sgt. Jeffrey Baker, both of whom also died. Nothing that has happened in Afghanistan lately counts as good news for Spc. Daehling's widow, parents, siblings, and friends.
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There is no happy ending for them.

I do this annually on Memorial Day, and I always point out that the odds are overwhelmingly against any of us knowing the people whose names make up these casualty reports personally. I do not know Spc. Mitchell Daehling, and you don't either. We know nothing about him – whether he was a great guy or a jerk, whether he was funny or serious, whether he liked Coke or Pepsi. What we do know is that he is no longer alive. His death has an immediate cause that we readily understand – improvised explosives are a common hazard in this war, and he had the misfortune of being near one when it exploded. That should not stop us from remembering the less proximate causes – the political, economic, and social factors that combined to place him in Kandahar Province on May 14, 2013.

Memorial Day should be our annual reminder that the decisions our elected officials make and the knee-jerk reactions among the public have real consequences. The consequence, every time we commit ourselves to go to war, is that people who would otherwise be alive will end up dead.
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The costs of war are abstract for most of us, but very real for Mitchell Daehling and his loved ones.
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We hear a lot of florid talk on Memorial Day about honoring and remembering sacrifices. In my view, we honor their sacrifices best by remembering the chain of events and decisions that led to them.

Recently, Rhode Island and Minnesota brought the number of states in which gay marriage is legal to an even dozen.
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In doing so, they chose not only to thumb their nose at thousands of years of traditional marriage and the Judeo-Christian roots of American society, but they also chose to ignore some alarming evidence from the ten states that legalized gay marriage before them.

Take Maryland, for example. It legalized gay marriage in 2012, effective January 1, 2013.

As we near the end of May, we can see clearly the consequences of that decision. Take a look at these sobering statistics for 2013:

– 94% of straight married couples in Maryland have gotten divorced
– More than 7,000 man-dog marriages have been performed statewide
– In place of the Pledge of Allegiance, Maryland children now begin the school day with a three-minute pulsing techno beat
– Baltimore's Basilica of the Blessed Virgin Mary – the first Roman Catholic Cathedral built in the U.S. – has been converted to a gay bar called The Oil Rig. The rectory is now "Mouthfuls", a discotheque.

Little of the original stained glass has been preserved.
– The CDC has identified a new, more virulent strain of the gay causing locally serious outbreaks in the Baltimore-DC corridor. Initial reports indicate that it may be airborne.
– The Super Bowl Champion Baltimore Ravens are too busy having sex with one another to practice; the upcoming season has been forfeited.

The sad part about these developments is that they were so predictable. Defenders of traditional marriage warned us that by destroying the sanctity of the institution, all marriages would be weakened and made less meaningful. A society that does not respect marriage descends into complete amorality with astonishing speed. Maryland did not heed the warning; how many other states must make the same mistake before we learn?
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One thing I try to impress upon my students in their writing is the under-appreciated value of succinctness. Most teachers give a minimum page requirement for papers; I only give a maximum. I warn them that the world has a short attention span and one does not have the luxury of making a point by rambling on and on about it indefinitely.

Being thorough, in their minds, often equates to saying a lot. Being thorough without saying much is the hardest skill to learn but among the best to have.

This little lesson is hilarious, of course, because I am among the least succinct people on Earth. No one who dumps 500-1000 words per day on the internet should be lecturing others about keeping things short.
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I've made a conscious effort to improve this over the past year – particularly in academic writing, but also here – and there has been some progress. Yet sometimes I just can't find a way to be short and punchy, to deliver the blow without a ton of setup. For the past two weeks I've been working on a post that has turned into goddamn War and Peace regarding the poll in which 29% of respondents, and 44% of Republicans, agreed with the statement, "In the next few years, an armed revolution might be necessary in order to protect our liberties."

It would be easy enough to mock the results or do the usual "Yep, these people exist" hand-wringing, but my actual thoughts on it were complex – something about the undercurrent of authoritarianism, even fascism, that we pretend does not exist in the United States. And the underlying dilemma that the United States, unlike other democracies, has never really learned its lesson about fascism as a society.

Then I found someone who did the work for me, and far better than I was. And it isn't even an Official Writer, it is a commenter from a Charles Pierce post.

30% of every OECD country polls fascist.

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That's just always been the case, for 150 years. In most modern wealthy democracies those people are afraid to express their opinions, because its commonly understood that people who hold those opinions are generally detrimental to the common good. That was the political lesson of WWII.

In the US however they get their own news channels and one-half of the political power, because for some reason around 1980 we all started feeling sorry for the narcissistic fantasists and sentimentalists that call themselves "movement conservatives," who told us they felt bad because they were left out of what they called "the Liberal consensus."

The Liberal consensus was really just an agreement not to let the aforementioned narcissists do what they do best, which is to monopolize the conversation and claim its all about *me* and *my pain* and what about *my people*, which in general prevents us from confronting actual real live reality, like genuinely poor people and genuine disasters like climate change. And we let down our guard, forgetting that these 30% always feel bad, because they really have nothing more to their belief system than a heightened sense of persecution coupled to a heightened sense of their worth. Everything else – their politics, economics, religion, sociology – is an attempt to rationalize those two basic principles: "I oughta be in charge, but my inferiors won't let me."

30 years later people in the media think they're entertaining and sell eyeballs so they give them a seat at the table, and they don't realize the fascists want all the seats and have bad table manners besides. And while the rest of us would like to pay attention to the reality we've ignored since Reagan first pretended he was President, the media and the conversation is dominated by these 30%, who refuse to give up their fantasyland, just as we should have known they would.

While we could pick nits with some of the specifics there, that's exactly what I've been fighting myself over trying to say for a fortnight.
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And this gentleman did it in about 200 words. I have nothing to add. This.

Many years ago I was a mildly active Wikipedian, a hobby I discontinued once I didn't have as much idle stare-at-internet time once I began grad school. Oh, and because most of the other people actively involved were horrible.

That is unfair. I don't honestly think they are terrible people, but something about the anonymity of the internet combined with high opinions of their own intelligence brings out the absolute worst once they gather in the same (electronic) place. These days Wikipedia has taken on a life of its own and has become bigger than anyone could have imagined back in the day. Now, vote-up sites like MetaFilter and, more recently, Reddit are getting the most attention, probably because voting things up and down is quicker and more definitive than endlessly debating things in Wikipedia forums.

One of the most irritating things about these sites is the tendency of the fan bases to be overwhelmingly composed of people like…me. White males with a lot of education. And we're pretty annoying, especially when protected by the anonymity and distance provided by the internet. So people can really be dicks in these forums, and there is plenty of groupthink on display.

Regular readers know that, sometimes to a fault, I am not the type to go around shouting "Sexism!" But my god, these things are sexist. Really obviously. In a way and to an extent that the amount of willful ignorance required to pretend it isn't there is staggering. Another blogger took the time to compile a perfect example for the skeptical.

A male Redditor posted a picture of himself lying in a bed with the comment, "This is me the being dope sick when i quit heroin. 6 months and counting of being clean." The post was up-voted by other users 1150 times, and here are the first five comments, also in order of votes received:

1. Congratulations man. Thats no easy feat. Heroin has taken many a life. Good to see somone beat it
2. "6 months and counting of being clean Datestamp 3/16/11" Was there a relapse in there?
3. I know that look. I’ve made it myself…I am consumed with respect and admiration for you. keep going.
4. Awesome job! I have 4.5 months clean. Just remember: that’s the last time you have to be dopesick. Ever.
5. I don’t know you, but I love you for staying clean. It gives me hope for my brother.

Aww! Look how nice and supportive people can be, even in an environment where people are usually pretty heartless.

More recently, a different, female user posted a picture of herself with the comment: "Been clean from heroin for 2 months and this is me today". After receiving about half as many up-votes as the male's post, here are the top five comments:

1. I've never done heroin, here is a picture of a pair of old shoes.
2. Reddit just upvoted some girl's mirror shot to the front page Holy fuck, guys
3. I've been clean from heroin for 24 years, nobody upvotes my mirror pics.
4. I don't get it. This is just a picture of a person. What is interesting about this picture?
5. 9 outta 10 would bang. With protection.

Go ahead, attempt to explain how this stark difference has nothing to with gender. I could use the giggles.

Here's the kicker. While the second post itself received less than half the up-votes of the first (male) one, the asshole comments on the woman's post received more up-votes (2200+ for the #1 comment) than either the post itself (650) or the first post (1150). So users appeared far more interested in being a dick to the woman for posting a picture of herself (Reddit Law states that this is attention-seeking behavior when women do it) than in either of the posts themselves.

Just another day on the internet. Move along, there's nothing to see here.