Heart-full Perhaps, But Not Clueful

[akirlu]

I Am A Bad Person. This is established.

But say you were someone who ruthlessly cut off and eliminated from your life every single person who held you accountable for past crimes (yes, theft and embezlement are crimes), and virtually everyone who even knew about them. Would you say that the fact that the people remaining in your life held you in esteem was solely because of said remaining people's wisdom, goodness, and trustworthiness...or might it also owe something to their ignorance of your character in toto, and possibly their unwillingness to hold you accountable for things you had done to other people? See, I'm kinda thinking the latter. I'm also thinking that someone who does this and then says "I'm so wonderful because All My Friends Wuv Me So," is dishonest or deluded or both.

Comments

[wild-patience.livejournal.com]

Hmm, it sounds like there's a story behind this post!

I really just wanted to add that I saw a sticker on a car the other day. It was Jessica Rabbit from the Roger Rabbit movie. She was saying, "I'm not bad. I just drive that way." I liked that a lot.

[brithistorian.livejournal.com]

ACK! I just suddenly realized that someone I know in LJ is someone I know of from somewhere else. Ouch!

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

No, no, that was my previous post. :)

Yeah, ouch indeed.

[brithistorian.livejournal.com]

Exactly. I'm still in the process of dealing with this discovery and trying to figure out how to react from here.

[bella-peligrosa.livejournal.com]

I'm also thinking that someone who does this and then says "I'm so wonderful because All My Friends Wuv Me So," is dishonest or deluded or both.

Both, likely. They aren't looking at themselves and holding themselves accountable. So what if others have tried to hold them accountable, the fact is that they are unwilling to look at themselves in the mirror. People like that would prefer to surround themselves only with the people who will tell them what they want to hear, rather than the truth (the more valuable commodity in my book).

[athenais.livejournal.com]

Which is, of course, why they reduce their circle of friends so ruthlessly and regularly. Otherwise, they'd be forced to think about uncomfortable reality.

[laurel]

I'm pretty sure I know who you're talking about and it all just makes me sad. (And concerned for a once dear friend who I still care about who is involved with the person in question).

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

She seems to get away with alot based on nobody warning anybody else of her past behavior, and by cycling almost entirely through friends and lovers so there are very few continuities with her past. The first time I said anything publicly, I got a private earful of other bad behavior on her part, both in money-handling and in her treatment of friends and lovers generally. I don't know if there's any useful or effective way to give people a heads up about her patterns of behavior, but if facts will help, I could probably give your friend names of people to talk to.

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

I have a great deal of sympathy for people who find themselves short of money, in charge of money on trust, and steal as a result of it; I've seen this happen so often now in different contexts. But I still look for a clear sense of repentance and a willingness in principle to both engage with the creditors and look for ways to repay -- for all I understand that actual repayment might be almost impossible for all sorts of reasons. And I have no idea of the details of this particular case.

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

I should probably add that constantly reminding people of the mistakes they've made and aren't sorting out is a bit like harping on at your friends to give up smoking. It's not that the person doesn't know perfectly well that what they're doing is wrong, so it's not entirely clear what bringing it up again is intended to achieve.

[thatwordgrrl.livejournal.com]

Actually, in some cases, they genuinely *don't* see what they are doing as wrong.

The first step is the ability to exmaine one's own life. Some people are just fundamentally incapable of doing so.

[kate-schaefer.livejournal.com]

I don't know what Ulrika intends to achieve by it; I know something I'd like to see achieved by it, which is that other people should be on their guard. I don't mean that I think that this person (since we're being coy here and not using the name) should be isolated and shunned by the new friends, but I don't want the new friends, some of whom are people very dear to me indeed, to get too close to this person without being aware that under pressure, this person has embezzled.

And then I think, well, that particular pressure was pretty high indeed. How would I have behaved? Differently, I hope, but I don't know.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Yes, the pressure was pretty high indeed. But if others are to be believed, her response was of a piece with her responses when there wasn't that pressure. I started out with a great deal of sympathy and patience, but in the face of her current, Golly-Ain't-I-Neat dance right after pulling a really shitty stunt on a mutual friend, I'm pretty far out of sympathy, and patience.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

I don't think that "constantly reminding people of the mistakes they've made" applies in this case. The person in question doesn't read my LJ (ephatically and histrionically doesn't read my LJ, in fact). As far as I'm aware, she's had public reminders of the problem exactly twice, and those two reminders have produced the only actual payments she's made since the first one. When she was treated with patience, understanding, gentleness, defenses against her detractors, and only the most circumspect hopes of her living up to her promises, the result was lies, renewed promises, and silence.

As to what bringing it up here is intended to achieve, well, it is timed in such a way as to likely be quite close to a post of hers on any Friends view that carries us both, so that those who know us both and don't know what's up with her behavior can at least be put on their guard. She recently pulled a nasty emotional stunt on a mutual friend, and she's borrowed large sums from friends outside the precipitating crisis and not repaid them, either, so when she's busy burbling about how she must be wonderful because all her friends say so, it seems worthwhile that those friends (insofar as I can) be warned that that can change in an eyeblink, through no fault of theirs.

[thatwordgrrl.livejournal.com]

This eerily parallels the situation rivka and I were talking about re: APC.

And even spookier? The two people in question somewhat run in the same circles and know each other.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

And even spookier? The two people in question somewhat run in the same circles and know each other.

Ah. Oh, right. I think. I am now starting to recall hazy details on the APC thing (though I hadn't connected it with APC, and had forgotten the other principal was Rivka). Yes, I guess they do know each other, don't they?

Geez, I'm beginning to wonder when one hits the point of making a broad public announcement, in the style that TNH finally did with Gary Farber and his pattern of abusing the hospitality of anyone who helped him. At what point is there an obligation to warn the public at large, or at least one's community?

[thatwordgrrl.livejournal.com]

Honestly?

I let events unfold.

Eventually, people who believed me did so. Those who didn't? Well, no great loss say I.

However, I shall say that when the wrongdoing involves finances (and particularly finances that people have donated to what they perceived as a worthy cause/worthy person), it becomes far harder to take the position of FuckIt.

For many people, you can steal their trust and they'll forgive you.

Steal from their wallet, however...

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

Well, all that seems reasonable. And I don't know about the recent 'really shitty stunt', either; only previous stuff.

Another actual payment

[kate-schaefer.livejournal.com]

Perhaps she doesn't read your LJ, but it does look like someone does.

[jophan.livejournal.com]

Intressant. Det är så mycket jag inte vet om folk. Kommer du till Glasgow?

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Nej, tyvärr.

[surliminal.livejournal.com]

I don't know the story but this rings true. There are some people who systematically only surround themself with mirrors of their own self percieved virtues. I don't tend to have tinme for such people.

[thatwordgrrl.livejournal.com]

Some people just know how to use glamour very, very well.

And the truly sad thing is that if they hold onto that glamour long enough and hard enough, eventually, there is nothing left BUT the glamour.

[cluefairy-j.livejournal.com]

Latter. Selectiveness at work here. Deluded. Dishonest. Both.

Anyone I know?

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

No, prolly not anyone you know. Non-overlapping segments of fandom.

Priavacy, Friendship strategic extremes

[magicdragon2.livejournal.com]

As I posted on Making Light (July 18, 2005, 03:01 PM), the “I also feared she would judge my life and find it wanting” thread (Olens fire blogging nanny, boast about it in NY Times):

The issue of privacy being dead, for better or worse, was taken one way by my Historically-sophisticated unreconstructed Mondale Democrat friend Dave Brin in The Transparent Society.

There's also the issue of defamation laws and copyright laws, which affect what one can say in public, differing from country to country....

I also agree with Patrick here on the essential nature of Trust in fellow human beings. The two extreme strategies are (1) paranoia: trust NOBODY, keep your systems secure, but at the cost of having few friends; (2) trust EVERYBODY until they violate that trust, which will give you less security, but many more friends, some of whom are statistically likely to stab you in the back.

Where one lives between those two extremes has been somewhat shifted by blogging but, I think, not very much.

[jerrykaufman.livejournal.com]

Can you tell I've barely read LJ for a month? I heard about this post from ceilog, I think. I had to dig back through the lj you refer to, to find the post that rubbed you up the wrong way.

I don't know about the more recent stuff people are referring to. I also don't know why she did what she did, what pressures she was under. (I know that a lot of truly ugly stuff has happened in her family over the past few years, but my sense of chronology is off - I thought the bulk of it happened after she was in her position of Trust.)

I just know that I couldn't remain friends with her without seriously bending my own sense of Right and Wrong, but still have hope that someday we can be friends again at some level, as long as she continues to repay the funds. But I'd be much more hopeful if she took a twelve-steop-like approach. You know, understanding why other people would be hurt or angry, apologizing to those who you've hurt, etc.

For various reasons, including my feeling that without understanding what happened, I can neither defend nor condemn her, I haven't said much publically. And now there's the added possibility that people might think I Speak For T/A/F/F the Trust in Question.

But I know no one ever looks back at old posts to see if anything new's been added except the poster yourself and me the commentator. So this is just like a private letter (he said disingenuously).

Anyway, my failure to keep up on LJ is why you haven't heard from me on this subject until now.