I'm so sorry to hear about your mother. She sounds like my mother's mother. A kind of crazy you just can't put into words. She would say vile, vicious things to keep my mom dependent on her (not unlike accusing a beloved uncle to keep you from forging outside relationships). She was an awful human being.

Good for you! Take good care of yourself and be proud. It's a hard first step, but you made it and that's what matters.

I sometimes think we need a new set of words (for addict), because there really is a vast difference between someone who has selected an unhealthy coping mechanism and someone who will break into their mom's house and steal her heirloom jewelry in order to get high.

I think you've illustrated Johnston's point perfectly. There are more kinds of addicts out there and there are plenty of addicts who are not selfish, they just aren't the ones talking. The selfish ones are helped greatly by AA (which is a very vocal group). It's the ones who are quietly going about their lives,…

I totally get where you're coming from. Watching people perpetuate the pain they themselves experienced is just so difficult. When my sister got pregnant at 19 and decided to keep the baby even though that meant consigning the child to a very tumultuous life (she was in and out of institutions from age 14 onward), I…

There's a lot of anger at AA out there because a lot of us have been damaged by AA. Either by losing family members to the cultish behavior or personally by the adherents or that they need something else but 12-steppers have completely overtaken all recovery options.

Of course not, because then you would be hindering their sobriety! And Bill W knows, nothing is more important than their sobriety! AA allows selfish people to keep being selfish. There are exceptions of course, but many of them are prime examples of "piece of shit at the center of the universe" syndrome.

I completely agree with you. I think there are some people who have a physiological reaction to alcohol, and those folks really do have an issue that is somewhat disease-like. For those people, like Bill W himself, AA probably great for them. But for most? You're right, they drink/use to deal with pain. Deal with the…

True, but they're few and far between. And it's nearly impossible to find a rehab facility that's not entrenched in 12-step. I live in a major city and its been very hard to get any real non-12-step help.

It makes me so sad because I hate to think of all the people who have nowhere to turn because AA doesn't help them.

Yeah, 12-step programs have totally derailed the conversation regarding addiction treatment. I'm pretty sure they'll be seen as the "apply two leaches and call me in the morning" approach to addiction in another hundred years. I'm glad people are finally studying it with, ya know, actual scientific methods.

Completely agree.

My point was that the reason it became an international issue is because Westerners didn't look at it through a wider lense. It got picked up because 'Ah Hitler' + the assumption that it was an extremely controversial act as opposed to kids doing crap research and just using Google Image Search without looking any…

I'm not saying they didn't screw up. Truly, I'm not. It's shitty that they did it but I'm not outraged or offended because of the context. If a bunch of Ukranian Freshman had done this I would be appalled. I just don't think this indicates any malice or anti-Semitism. Just plain old shoddy scholarship.

I totally agree that they would know all about the Pacific Theater, I just don't think they would know much about Hitler. It's called a world war, but it was really two different wars happening at the same time. Japan and Germany agreed to leave eachother alone, that was the extent of their alliance. The European…

Fair enough. This conversation has become so much larger than what I first thought about. I don't understand why we let Germans govern themselves after the Third Reich, so I'm certainly not going to fight this battle. I figured that a group of kids deserved the benefit of the doubt. That was it.

I know I totally asked for it, but it messes with my head that I'm defending kids for being dumb over Hitler when I'm someone who rips the Denial crowd to shreds at every opportunity. I really wish they'd researched more.

You were right, I always try to be nice or at the very least constructive. So with that in mind I ask you to read the Jezebel post again. It states that the students who gave the salute were mimicking the banner and the students who made it were freshmen sending off the seniors.

And if that was what they did I would agree with you. They made a banner. Do I wish they'd researched more? Absolutely. But it's the ignorance they display that makes me inclined to not judge. I dedicated four years of my academic career to studying Europe in the WWII period, I promise I don't take this lightly. I…

Well, he wasn't elected, but apart from that I agree with you. But that's a lot of nuance for most folks and it would make current international relationships ... tricky.