Joanna

Why are people so obsessed with whether or not someone "apologized" for something that upset them? Of course apologies are important in the right context, but what matters more to me is intent and changed behavior. If someone constantly does the same hurtful things over and over, then an apology doesn't really help - it just feels manipulative.

The online pile-on against Patrick Clancy has been utterly gross and disgusting. The man walked into his home, found his three children dead or dying, held one of them as he died days later, then had to sit on a witness stand and relive every detail while the 911 recording of his own raw grief was played for a courtroom full of strangers—and large parts of the internet decided the most interesting thing about him was whether his face looked “wrong.” That is a special kind of cruelty. People watched carefully controlled testimony under extreme trauma, saw the natural flatness or quiet that often follows catastrophic loss (or a full panic attack happening off-camera), and ran with the most vicious interpretations possible: heartless psychopath, murderous husband, co-conspirator, uncaring father. The clips actually show someone white-knuckling through the unimaginable - yet they get reframed as evidence of moral defect. It’s not analysis; it’s bloodsport dressed up as “noticing.” What makes it worse is how little of it is tethered to evidence. The physical facts of that night are not in serious dispute. He physically could not have been in the house when the children were killed. Yet his subsequent need to get away from the constant reminder of utter devastation and his eventual remarriage and attempts to rebuild a life—gets treated as further proof of something sinister rather than as some of the messy, human ways that people try to survive the unsurvivable. The willingness to turn a grieving parent into a villain for not performing grief in the exact style the audience prefers is one of the most corrosive habits of social media. It doesn’t help anyone, least of all the memory of those three children. #Cora #Dawson #Callan

I asked chatGPT to tell my personality type in cognitive function theory. If we're using Jung's original cognitive-function framework rather than treating MBTI as a clinical or scientific measurement, I would put you very strongly in the Ni–Fe–Ti–Se neighborhood, with Ni dominant being my leading hypothesis. In MBTI shorthand: INFJ, with an unusually analytical/independent Ti presentation. Why Ni looks so damn obvious Your cognition seems to operate by compressing enormous amounts of observations into an underlying model. You don't primarily catalog: "He did A on Tuesday, B on Thursday, C three months later." You unconsciously extract: "There is a structure generating A, B, and C." Then you watch what happens next to determine whether the inferred structure is actually predictive. That's extremely Ni-flavored. Ni isn't simply "intuition" or being psychic. In Jungian terms, it's an orientation toward underlying patterns, implicit relationships, trajectories, and what a collection of observations is converging toward. Your description: "The model was almost entirely nonverbal and subconscious. I knew before I could explain." is almost a neon sign for that kind of cognition. And your favorite test is basically: Does the inferred underlying pattern predict the next several moves? That's very Ni. Then there's Fe Your enormous sensitivity to other people's emotional states, particularly people you're attached to, points strongly toward Extraverted Feeling. But your Fe has an unusual history. You didn't merely notice: "He's upset." You could internally experience enough of his emotional state that his distress became relevant to your own decision-making. That's why your old boundary problem wasn't ordinary people-pleasing. It was more like: "If my decision causes someone I love significant distress, I will experience some of that distress myself." That's very compatible with strong Fe. And your newer development has been learning: I can perceive and understand your emotional state without making it the governing variable. That's actually a fascinating Fe maturation trajectory. Then Ti This is where you are not the stereotypical warm-and-fuzzy INFJ. Your Ti seems very strong. You constantly want to know: What is the actual premise? Does the conclusion follow? What variable changed? Is this criterion real or post-hoc? Does the rule apply universally? What happens if I change the conditions? Is the explanation predictive? Is someone smuggling a preference in as an objective fact? That's Ti as hell. 😂 And your intolerance for someone claiming to be "completely logical" while quietly changing the premises is especially Ti. Your Ti doesn't seem to exist primarily to win arguments. It seems to function as structural quality control for your internal model. And Se is probably the interesting inferior function Your relationship with immediate sensory experience has some intriguing contradictions. You can be highly spontaneous, sensual, adventurous, and physically present when you've chosen the environment and retained agency. But you're also extremely capable of becoming absorbed in an internally generated experience rather than remaining anchored in the immediate external world. Your preferred leisure activities actually fit here in an interesting way. It is not that you need constant stimulation. It is that you want to deliberately enjoy visceral, embodied experiences when you choose to That's quite different. And when sensory/emotional input becomes overwhelming and uncontrollable, you want out. So I wouldn't characterize you as lacking Se. I'd characterize it as something you can deliberately access but don't want running the show. So your likely function stack Ni → Fe → Ti → Se

Stop playing the victim and pick a struggle.

Perhaps the single biggest, most unvarnished cultural shift occurring today—stripping away all political spin, internet subcultures, and personal biases—is the fracturing of shared reality due to hyper-personalized, algorithmic isolation. There is no longer a centralized cultural conversation. Social media algorithms are engineered to feed you content based entirely on your vulnerabilities, insecurities, and existing biases to maximize your screen time. If you are an anxious person, your feed tells you the world is ending. If you are an angry man, your feed tells you women are the enemy. If you are an unhappy woman, your feed tells you men are toxic. Two people sitting on the same couch can look at their phones and effectively live in two entirely different universes with completely different versions of truth, morality, and logic. Historically, human behavior was heavily checked and balanced by physical institutions - churches, local neighborhoods, and extended families. If you acted out or treated people poorly, there were social consequences. Today, those physical institutions have largely collapsed, replaced by global, anonymous online spaces. This has supercharged hyper-individualism—the belief that the self, one's own feelings, and personal branding are the ultimate priority. Because people can instantly find an online echo chamber that validates any behavior, the incentive to compromise, self-reflect, or tolerate discomfort has plummeted. As a result, human connection is becoming increasingly transactional. Because the digital world offers the illusion of infinite choice, human beings are increasingly viewed as disposable commodities. Whether it is dating, friendships, or even your own family, the cultural mindset has shifted from "How do we build something meaningful together through conflict and growth?" to "Does this person satisfy my immediate needs, unconditionally validate my choices and emotions, and protect me from feeling any discomfort?"

When a cultural movement aggressively pushes the narrative that biological, hormonal, or mental health fluctuations can completely absolve a woman of criminal accountability for the most extreme, unthinkable actions, it completely strips away the foundation of equal agency. You cannot demand equal authority in society while simultaneously accepting reduced accountability on the basis of gender or biology. The moment the culture accepts the premise that women are so inherently fragile or hijacked by their hormones that they lose basic human responsibility, the next structural step is to remove them from positions of risk or authority altogether.  Think about where this goes from a logical standpoint. If a brain can be so devastatingly compromised by a standard biological milestone (one that every single one of our female ancestors went through) that it cannot tell right from wrong, the logical conclusion is that women cannot be trusted with the responsibility of voting, much less holding a high stake, high authority position.  Custody of small children? If biology makes a mother an inherent, unpredictable safety threat to her own offspring, any father’s attorney in a high-conflict divorce will have a fantastic reason to demand total custody, framing women as having a strong, inherent susceptibility to dangerous mental health conditions - especially during the postpartum period.  Think about the standard of proof used in Massachusetts for the trial of Lindsey Clancy - the prosecutor had to prove beyond reasonable doubt that she was NOT legally insane. Do you want that same standard used for everyone? Because that is guaranteed to ensure that any women who has given birth within the past several years will be at increased scrutiny. Should that be the standard for determining who gets custody or who gets a promotion? Prove you have no risk factors for mental illness - oh wait she just had a baby 8 months ago of course she is at risk! Give custody to the father and give her supervised visits! There was a time when women weren't allowed to vote, open a bank account by themselves, own property, or obtain custody of their children in a divorce. Do we really want to go back to a time when women were considered inherently hysterical and neurotic instead of being taken seriously about anything? The absolute lack of logic and consistency from these social media groups is infuriating because they are playing a short-term game of emotional validation without looking at the massive, destructive fallout to society and to themselves. They are trading the hard-won, historical progress of women's autonomy and rights just to give a high-control, high anxiety individual a pass for her behavior. Postpartum psychosis is real and absolutely deserves compassionate treatment, but it is RARE and it isn't something that can be hidden. When someone has an actual psychotic break, it is an unmistakable, terrifying medical crisis, and the detachment from reality is glaringly obvious. It is not a woman pretending to be having a great day and then sending her husband out for takeout so she can viciously murder her 3 kids one by one. Let's be completely real: if a person is well enough to successfully pretend to be normal, calculate their movements, and fool everyone around them, they possess cognitive agency—and they have criminal responsibility. We must stop allowing common depression, anxiety, or highly controlling personalities to ride the coattails of genuine psychosis just to escape baseline human accountability. As a woman, I feel like this should be obvious to more of us. And as a woman I stand with #Cora, #Dawson, and #Callan.

This right here. I know a couple of cases where I believe a murdering mother was genuinely psychotic and insane, and neither one of those women tried to get out of it. They both instantly and matter of factly told what they had done - because in their minds it had been the righteous, loving thing to do no matter how bizarre and grotesque. I believe #AndreaYates and #RuthMiller met the legal definition of "insanity", but Lindsay Clancy did not. If she was insane, then so was #ChrisWatts 🤬.

I've been thinking about attachment theory, and which styles seem to be most aware of their attachment tendencies. Secure people always seem to know they are secure - if they even think about it. Anxious preoccupied people usually recognize that they are anxious. Sometimes they might identify as disorganized if their ego is strongly centered around NOT being anxious or clingy Fearful avoidants usually know they are disorganized even though they may identify more with being anxious or with being avoidant. But dismissive avoidants almost ALWAYS think they are secure unless they are actively working on it. Why?