h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Sorry if it felt like I was snipping at you Amy. I know I'm insecure, I just never realised my stuttering may be a symptom of that insecurity.

Who's fault is it then?

I blame the teletubbies, personally. Evil little buggers.

You don't say so? I never saw the things. Maybe i ought to, keep an eye on 'em.

oh cripes yes they're evil!

I'd just like to qualify my statement again, by being sad and quoting myself:
"this CAN lead to such things as". No absolutes, just possibilities.

I would say that insecurity could lead to stuttering mainly if you're already insecure about your communication skills, or think that people might not actually want to hear what you have to say.

Hence the qualifier "may" in my sentence (my, we're doing a lot of qualifying here today, aren't we? )

"Have a little compassion"

I do! Just not for people who play the victim 24/7. I have had a pretty awful life so far, but I don't go around demanding special treatment for it, or attention either. I am also incredibly insecure, with my own little set of phobias. Again, I don't go acting like I am being persecuted just because of it.

Anton LaVey had a certain phrase for those types of people : psychic vampires. They suck on society until it's dry. I hate them.

One of my friends when I was in the Navy was a black guy who had a persecution complex because of his race. Many was the time I'd be sitting next to him in the berthing compartment listening to him describe how whitey took away his other options, so he had to join whitey's navy and get stuck in the military lifestyle, with other whiteys pushing him around and yelling at him for stupid things all day long. He wasn't angry when he talked about it, but he was quite earnest.

It was high comedy. There I was, white as a sheet (I never got enough sun on deployment... didn't even SEE it), sitting in the same smelly berthing compartment he was, wearing the same number of chevrons he was (he had more time in rate, though, so he outranked me), answerable to the same anal-retentive bastards he was, there for the same reasons that he was. He never appreciated the irony.

What was the comedy sketch show where they had a Jerry Springer/Oprah parody along the lines of:
"I hate my parents because they gave me a normal happy childhood and now I don't have anyone to blame for my problems"?

Slightly more seriously, it can be hard for someone to dig themself out of the hole of blaming their lack of success on some particular thing that other people are discriminating them for. If someone tries the confidence-building path, there's a risk they'll just think they are wonderful and deserve success, and so it must be the fault of *them* if they don't get it.

In one way, I suppose what people need is a sense of perspective (if they really are useless at something they want to be recognised for, maybe someone should make them understand that), yet if their destiny is to be towards the bottom of the heap, maybe too much reality could be hard to handle.

If someone really *has* had a bum deal from life (whether in the genetic lottery or later on), some righteous or faux-righteous anger at their situation might be good for them as long as they don't end up going postal, or sharing their pain with me too often.