#unfortunately i have at least one ex who would do that shit for harassment campaigns so you've gotta be wary right

[lhazaar]

sometimes i feel like i have a lot of online drama and then i remember i've been on this site since 2011 and never had a callout post written about me that wasn't done as part of a bit so i must be doing SOMETHING right

[prorevenge]

My friend's ex-wife gets his family's business shut down and burns their lives to the ground (not what you may think)

Sorry for the somewhat misleading title, but I couldn't resist.

This story isn't about me but two people I'm friends with. We'll call one Rae and one Justin. I'm posting this with Justin's permission, and he'll probably be reading the thread.

Pretty quickly after they moved, they decided to get amicably divorced, since they never wanted to be married anyway. They still lived together for a while, and basically became something between platonic roommates and each other's only family. Over time, they started dating other people. Some partners were scared off by the weird relationship between them, but most got it, and understood that Justin and Rae had basically bonded though mutual trauma. I also met both of them during this time, and we became close friends.

This whole time, both their families and other members of their community were relentlessly harassing them. People were showing up at their house at all hours, and they had reason to believe people were trying to steal their identities over the years, though they'd fortunately both put a freeze on their credit, so nothing ever came of it.

Then Justin had a bad accident. A really bad accident. He was on his bike and a car blew through a stop sign without slowing down and plowed right into him. He had to be rushed to the hospital and landed in the ICU. Rae was his emergency contact, and I was with her and some other friends when she got the call. I immediately drove her to the hospital with a couple of other people, and she was melting down (understandably). The hospital staff wouldn't let us all in when we got there, but they let Rae in. She came out periodically to let us know what was going on. Justin wasn't unconscious, but he was totally out of it and didn't seem to know she was there, probably from the painkillers, but she was convinced he had permanent dehabilitating brain damage and basically the group of us were just soothing her and reassuring her it would be fine. A friend of ours who worked at the hospital as an MRI tech was also stopping by when she could on her breaks and calming down Rae. We'd been there all night and part of the day at this point, and the medical staff was giving us reason to be hopeful.

But things got worse. To this day, no one knows how they found out, but 14 hours after Justin's accident, his parents, uncles, and grandfather showed up. They immediately had all of us removed from the ICU, Rae included. Unfortunately, as his ex-wife, she was no longer his legal next-of-kin and had no rights against his blood family.

At this point, she was absolutely hysterical and inconsolable. She was convinced Justin's family would hurt him. I'm ashamed to say all three of us that were there with her thought she was overreacting. We all knew Rae and Justin had left a fucked-up situation, but it wasn't like his own family would do anything to impede his recovery. She was getting angry with us for trying to calm her down, and tried to explain that according to their religion, she and Justin deserved punishment from God, and only the greatest suffering could prompt repenting and redemption. She said their families embraced this thinking and wanted them to suffer, because it would prove that they did the wrong thing by leaving, and suffering would drive them back to the fold. She said as long as Justin was with his family, he wouldn't be safe.

Our friend who worked for the hospital came and found Rae at that point. She made Rae swear up and down she wouldn't tell anyone she told her this, because she could get in deep trouble for releasing privileged information to someone unauthorized, but she'd caught wind that Justin's parents were aggressively demanding the hospital release him into their care, and they were involving lawyers. The hospital was currently refusing, because Justin wasn't stable enough to leave, but our friend warned Rae that as soon as Justin got to be stable, or the lawyers scared the hospital enough, it's possible the parents would be able to take Justin.

This shocked the rest of us. Realizing his parents were not only willing to remove Justin from the hospital that had saved his life in the condition he was still in, but were actively trying to do it made us really "get" for the first time why Rae was going out of her head with fear.

At this point, Rae snapped into do-or-die mode. Convinced that Justin was about to literally die if she didn't act, she decided she would do everything in her power to start a fire at home so that Justin's family would want to run back to put it out. And this wasn't too hard, because she had a lot of dirt on the whole community she came from. Like a madwoman, she started blowing the whistle all over Justin's family. She called the IRS's fraud hotline and detailed all the ways that the family business was committing tax fraud. She submitted an ATF tip about how that same family business was illegally selling firearms without a license and without following any of the proper protocols, and was knowingly selling guns to convicted felons. She reported one of Justin's uncles for owning several guns as a convicted felon. She also reported Justin's mom's unlicensed day care "business," which was apparently extremely shady, including having over 30 children packed into one house, with Justin's mom as the only adult and many of the childcare duties being farmed out to Justin's 12- and 14-year-old sisters. She called CPS on Justin's uncles and his parents for keeping their children out of school, and for physical abuse in one uncle's case. In all of these reports, she provided extensive details.

She finished her calls and emails, and then she waited. We all waited for several hours, and nothing happened. Then, miraculously, Justin become lucid enough to understand what was going on and make his own decisions, and he kicked his family out again. From there began a slow but steady path to recovery.

In all the relief and excitement to see Justin on the mend, we'd almost forgotten about Rae's campaign of desperation, until a couple of weeks later, when the screaming voicemails started pouring in to both of them. First, the business was being investigated by the IRS, then it was being investigated for illegal firearms dealing. Then the daycare was getting investigated. At first, Rae felt a little guilty, but then she was like, "You know what? No regrets. They would have killed Justin."

From what they've been able piece together in the year and a half since this happened, the business has gone under, and the daycare is shuttered. The uncle is six months into a new five-year prison sentence for firearm possession. CPS investigated, which scared the shit out of the family, but nothing really came of it, which is especially sad in the case of the cousins being physically abused. That said, the parents are now too scared to keep the kids home from school, and with the unlicensed daycare shut down, the mom's not exploiting her daughters' labor anyway, so she has no incentive to keep them home. So Justin's little siblings are at least getting their education.

Justin and Rae are both happy and thriving. Justin unfortunately will never fully recover from the accident. He has some permanent neurological damage that results in tremors. But he's pumped to be alive, he can work a full-time job, he can still be pretty physically active, and as far as I'm concerned, he wins.

TL;DR: Kooky abusive family tries to remove my friend from critical medical care because reasons (??), and his ex-wife hits the panic button that burns their lives to the ground.

(source) story by (/u/Throwawayallaway4)

[solo1y]

My #RepealThe8th: Part II

If you’ve been following my posts on Facebook, or my Twitter, it may seem as though I jumped into this campaign ex nusquam, but this was not my first rodeo. 

On December 18th, 1997 (a Thursday), the University Express in UCC published my regular weekly column, From The Bogs:

Here’s a part of the article, which specifically referred to the C Case, heavily edited to take out the snark, tautologies and irrelevancies:

I’ve decided to put in a few words regarding the recent incident about a young girl who was raped being allowed to go abroad for an abortion, and her father’s manipulation by various Pro-life groups.

For those of you who don’t realise yet, militant pro-life groups are the handmaidens of Satan himself. Their main aim is not to preserve the life of the unborn child, but to cause as much distress as possible to an unfortunate group of young girls who face a very difficult decision. How much more difficult, on an emotional level, is it for a girl to have to go through an abortion only to be told that she is, in fact, a murderer? And how much compassion are these pro-life groups showing by constantly bombarding the media with this message?

There’s nothing wrong with believing in the right to life from the point of conception / two weeks / whatever, as long as you concede the right of other people to have alternative views. I personally believe in the right to life of the unborn child from the start, but by the gods I’ll fight to the death for any girl’s right to do with her body as she sees fit.

It kicked off a massive, six-week shit storm in the letters page between representatives of SPUC and Youth Defence, and a few brave citizens who defended my article.

On July 5th, 2007 (a Thursday) in Clonmel, members of a pro-life group were calling for signatures to persuade the government to render abortion even more illegal.

There were large cardboard stands on the main street, plastered with lies and melodrama and alleged photographs of aborted foetuses in buckets. I regard this sort of thing as manipulative and unacceptable, so I registered my disapproval by making a witty comment about coat hangers.

This did not go down well. A challenge of some sort was issued, and I was forced to stop. An animated discussion led to one of my interlocutor’s friends fetching a nearby garda.

The garda felt that what I was doing constituted harassment. I asked him to turn around, to point out the irony of being chastised for harassment while a large aborted foetus was smiling down at us. He refused, perhaps fearing that I was engineering a distraction wherein I could make good my escape. These details are necessary to understand the following exchange between myself and the garda:

“Turn around.” “No.” “I want you to see something behind you.” (silence) “Seriously. Turn around.” “I will not.”

Eventually I left. Or I was sent away. It doesn’t matter. All that matters was that as soon as I got home, I called the police station and registered a complaint about the group, who I felt must be breaking some sort of obscenity law. The garda I spoke to seemed relieved and told me it would be dealt with immediately. I got the impression that she was waiting by the telephone all day, hoping someone would complain.

On May 9th, 2013 (a Thursday), we were still talking about this. The Irish Times printed a letter I wrote which went like this: 

Sir, – Much of the abortion debate seems to hinge on whether or not a foetus counts as a person. However, for all practical purposes, even the most right-wing abortion opponent regularly admits that a foetus is not a person: pregnant women can’t claim a foetus as a dependent for tax purposes; women who miscarry are not accused of manslaughter; the census doesn’t count foetuses; one refers to “two children and one on the way”, not “three children“; there are no funerals for miscarriages; etc.

Maybe it’s time to put ideology aside and legislate for what we already know to be our shared reality. – Yours, etc.

At the time, the focus was on the personhood of a foetus, which I felt was irrelevant, at least in the case of my reasons for decriminalising abortion. Even in this latest referendum, it seems clear that the No people were voting based on ideology, and the Yes people were voting based on our shared experience of the real world. 

On March 22nd, 2018 (a Thursday), my wife and I saw an ad on Facebook about a meeting for people who wanted to repeal the Eighth Amendment. We decided to go.

Next:  My #RepealThe8th: Part III