concern trolls | The Overeducated Housewife

A few days ago, I wrote a post about a piece I read in the Irish Times. My post about the fat shamed woman who dared to share her story is spawning a few related entries by yours truly. This may not be the last time I mention that particular post, but I feel compelled to write again, so here goes…

In my original post, titled “Be careful, now. Nobody is “too fat” for a knuckle sandwich,” I wrote about my reactions to the original Irish Times piece written by Róisín Ingle. Ingle had gone to a celebratory luncheon and dared to inquire about a cheese plate. One of her companions very publicly yelled at Ingle not to order cheese, because she thought Ingle was “too fat” to be allowed to peacefully eat it. She even had the gall to say, “No cheese for you!” like some kind of cheese shaming Nazi.

I read some of the Facebook comments about that story. I wrote about one of the worst Facebook commenters in my original post. There was another commenter who was almost as bad as “Mel O’Brien”, Russian troll extraordinaire (see the original post for more on that). The other commenter, name of Pamela, was leaving nasty comments for people who expressed empathy for Róisín Ingle.

Pamela seemed to me like, quite frankly, a raving bitch. She responded with bile toward people who weren’t agreeing with her anti-fat stance. I noticed that she left a scathing response for a commenter who took issue with the “cheese shaming” old bat in Ingle’s story.

She wrote:

“I don’t care what anybody thinks of my body or my Gouda consumption.”

Good for you. Let’s see how empowered you feel when you get diabetes or chronic heart disease.

I noticed her comments toward those who disagreed with her were quite acid. I didn’t tag her in my response, which was “Life is 100 percent fatal.”

Days later, Pamela responded to me. She tagged me, writing “Inane comment.”

I “laughed” at her and wrote, “No, it’s the truth. Everybody dies at some point.”

She came back at me immediately.

Pamela: No shit. Would you rather die at 60 or 65 after years of debilitating ill health, or live a full and active life well into your 80s?

I was tempted to write about how my friend, Matt, suddenly died in 2021 at age 58. I’ve mentioned him before, but here’s a reminder for those who have either forgotten or missed those previous posts.

Matt was a healthy man who should have had another twenty years or so. In the wee hours of the morning on the date of his death, he had just left the company of friends and family. They were celebrating his 58th birthday. I’m sure he had no idea that, on his way walking home, he was going to get hit by a car traveling at a high rate of speed, and then be left so grievously injured that he would die.

I truly hope that before his meeting with a speeding black Rolls Royce, Matt ate plenty of birthday cake. I hope he ate and drank with much gusto with his dear friends and loved ones at that last birthday celebration. Those people who were with him to celebrate his last circle around the sun are now, like me, only left with memories of him. Skipping the cheese certainly wouldn’t have saved him on the day he died.

But, not wanting to write Matt’s story, I decided to take a more measured approach. Below was my response to Pamela.

Maybe if you ate more Gouda, you would be a more pleasant person. Just a thought.

As for when I’d prefer to die, I am ready to go whenever the time comes. Sometimes death comes even when a person does everything right. Shit happens.

I hoped that would be the end of it, but she came back hours later… like a bad case of genital herpes.

Pamela: Wow, I didn’t think you could surpass the stupidity of your previous comment but you keep outdoing yourself. “Whenever the time comes”, as if your lifestyle has no influence in how long you live and it’s all just a matter of fate. Antediluvian head-in-the-sand nonsense.

I probably should have just blocked her, but I couldn’t resist leaving a parting shot. She obviously has the personality of steel wool, and requires harsher treatment than the genteel niceties one usually reserves for Sunday afternoons. So, I responded thusly…

Me: Wow, you really are a very nasty person, aren’t you? Why would I want to hang around this Earth when insulting and rude people like you are in it? If there’s a choice between eating what I want to with my friends and dying young, I would take that over living longer and having to be around miserable old bitches like you. Now kindly fuck off and leave me alone, please. 😉

Seriously, though. I don’t have children or grandchildren, so why would I want to live until I’m in my 80s? I’ve seen what happens to the elderly. My husband is almost eight years older than I am, so he may be the one who goes first. Pamela doesn’t know a thing about me, but she’s calling my comments stupid and inane, and swearing at me. Is this really supposed to be an appeal to live healthier, or just a really disgruntled person showing her ass to a perfect stranger?

One never knows what the future holds. I know my friend Matt intended to live a long time. It didn’t work out that way for him. I’m not saying you shouldn’t watch your weight or exercise moderation when it comes to eating and drinking, but sometimes Gouda is good for the soul. No matter what, it’s never appropriate to publicly humiliate people who are simply hoping to enjoy themselves with their friends and family.

I don’t know about you, but my own life keeps me pretty busy. I don’t need to mind other people’s business. I’ve got plenty of my own to tend. I don’t know what other people are dealing with in life, so why would I begrudge them that simple pleasure? Especially when I’m not a doctor?

Anyway… Pamela can have my Gouda. It’s not something that brings me joy. Bill just proposed having a Martini. I think I’ll join him. Don’t mind if I do.

As they say in Ireland, “Sláinte!”

I am currently in dog crap hell. For once, Arran isn’t the culprit. About a half hour ago, Noyzi came to me and put his head in my lap, a sign that he wanted to go outside. I let him go out while I checked on the progress of the laundry in the dryer. When I came back, Noyzi was still outside, distracted from taking care of his business. I waited a few more minutes before finally shooing him inside. It’s really cold outside, and I saw a pile of crap in the yard. I figured Noyzi was done.

After a few minutes at my computer, I realized I needed to visit the loo myself. I was wearing slippers when I felt that awful sensation, and the aroma assaulted my olfactory bulb. Noyzi had left a large pile of crap right at the door to my office. And because he never has accidents in the house, I was not expecting it. I cleaned up what I thought was all of it, cringing as the smell wafted into my office. I got up again and my bare foot found the one turd I hadn’t seen. It was cold and squishy, and since I had smashed it, the smell got worse. I started yelling out swear words as Noyzi slunk away, guiltily.

He really is a good dog. We’ve had him since October 2020, and I can count on one hand the number of times he’s had an accident in the house. Arran, on the other hand, has never been 100 percent accurate about housetraining. Arran, however, has the experience and good sense to know to do it downstairs, where I won’t immediately discover it, and will smell it long before I step in it.

I think the smell of dog shit has finally dissipated. My slippers are getting a wash. Now I’m ready to write about an article I saw in The Irish Times yesterday. Actually, now that I think about it, the fact that I started this post with an anecdote about dog shit seems especially appropriate. To me, a lot of cheese smells like shit. I don’t like most cheeses. Most of the ones I will eat must be melted first. But a lot of people do love to eat cheese. Sometimes, they’ll eat it in lieu of dessert.

Irish Times writer Róisín Ingle published a piece yesterday about a horrifying incident she experienced at a restaurant. Ingle explains that she’s been “judged” for her weight all of her life. She’s developed admiration for the singer, Lizzo, a Black, zaftig, flute playing wonder, who has become an inspiration for many people, including those who struggle with obesity. One day, a Lizzo t-shirt showed up in the mail. Ingle wondered if maybe she’d ordered it late at night after drinking too much wine. Later, a friend clarified that she’d sent the t-shirt as a way of boosting Ingle’s spirits.

Ingle writes: I put my Lizzo T-shirt on to watch her win Record of the Year at the Grammys over the weekend. She sang her self-love anthem Special surrounded by a gospel choir. “Fame is pretty new but I’ve been used to people judging me/That’s why I move the way I move and why I’m so in love with me.”

Ingle continues…

Lizzo moves through the world in her body with no apologies. The classically trained flautist has been playing the same tune for years, telling fans they should love themselves, celebrate their talents and reject societal expectations. She started to become a sort of mentor to me when she talked about her fitness regime a few years ago around the time I had started to exercise regularly for the first time in my life. “It may come as a surprise to some of y’all, that I’m not working out to have your ideal body type. I’m working out to have my ideal body type. And you know what type that is? None of your f**king business.”

As someone who has also been harassed about my weight, I am highly inclined to agree. Fat shamers and concern trolls can just fuck right off. And that’s exactly how I felt as Ingle wrote about what happened to her when she was celebrating at a restaurant with her mother and, evidently, some other people who didn’t know or care about her.

Ingle writes: It was a jolly occasion, a gathering of fun, clever people. We were choosing what to order and I was musing aloud about whether to have dessert. I don’t have much of a sweet tooth so I asked the waiter whether I could have a bit of cheese instead. He was about to answer but a woman at the table intervened.

Uh oh… this doesn’t sound good at all! And it wasn’t. According to Ingle, the woman roared, “No, you mustn’t have cheese! You are too fat for cheese! No cheese for you!”

Ingle sat there and “took in” what had just transpired. The woman apparently realized that she’d shocked and offended her target, as Ingle writes that she’d “insisted she was coming from a ‘good’ place”. The fat shaming concern troll explained that she was “worried” about Ingle’s health as she aged. Evidently, the fat shamer had been overweight all her life, and felt she must warn the writer of the doom that awaited her if she ate cheese during a celebratory lunch with her mother.

Ingle handled the interaction better than I probably would have. She wrote that in the past, she might have left the table, gone to the toilets to cry, starved herself for a couple of days, or engaged in some combination of those actions. But this time, she simply responded calmly to the woman, saying “what she had said was unnecessary. I told her that she didn’t know what might be going on for the person she was cheese-shaming. I pointed out that the psychological stress caused by her comments could be far worse for a person than a few slices of Brie. I told her that ultimately, my body, other people’s bodies, were none of her fecking business.”

And then, to my surprise, Ingle wrote She said nothing for a few moments. “I’d never thought of it quite like that,” she said. She had done this kind of thing before, she told me. I don’t think she’ll do it again.

This response from Ingle, while very mature, is not very satisfying to me. I can’t stand concern trolls. I don’t believe for a minute that people who make rude comments about other people’s bodies care at all about them. They certainly don’t care about the psychological damage they do to people who are struggling with their body image. Telling someone they are “too fat for cheese”, especially in front of a crowd, will do nothing but ruin the person’s day and give them bad memories.

My title suggests that I might be inclined toward violence if someone did this to me. Rest assured, I probably would not have given the woman a knuckle sandwich. She wouldn’t have been worth going to jail over. But you can bet that I would make her think twice about ever making a comment like that to me again. That’s if I ever again allowed her to be in my presence after that incident.

I generally get a kick out of the comments from Irish readers. Sure enough, they didn’t disappoint. I even added one of my own.

I think I would tell the cheese shaming buttinski that her health is far more at risk by butting into other people’s business than it is to eat all the cheese she could ever want for the rest of her life. She might just be trading her cheese habit for a knuckle sandwich.

However, I couldn’t help but notice one guy, name of Mel O’Brien from Cork, who left some very rude comments. He left so many of them that I felt compelled to check out his Facebook profile. Mr. O’Brien has just fifteen friends, and has made a lot of his comments public. I guess his fat shaming didn’t go over well with some readers…

Mel wrote several comments like the ones above. At first, I just thought he was a fucking jerk. Now, I think he’s crazy. Behold…

I’ve been suspended from FACEBOOK, again, with no way of responding to this bullshit. So all I say to FB and the person or persons who complained about some comment I made, is FUCK OFF!

I kept scrolling and saw lots of pro Russia posts, along with conspiracy theories about the COVID vaccines. Obviously, Mel doesn’t play with a full deck. Yet some people still want to be friends with him. Here’s what he posted a couple of days ago.

Just to make things clear: I’m on FB to keep in touch with people who are already my friends. I’m not looking for new friends, and most of the friend requests I’ve received in the past couple of years have been men masquerading as women. I don’t want to be friends with anyone from the LGBT crowd, since I’m offended by this “pride” nonsense. What do they have to be proud about? So please don’t send me a friends request unless we know each other from the past. Thanks.

Below is a post from January 1, 2023…

I’m a bit pissed off today, January 1, because I post videos that I believe to be important, but last year virtually no one watched any of them. Too busy getting their jabs, I guess.

Another reason I’m annoyed is YouTube ending the suspension of my comments, due to some comment I made “may offend” community guidelines. They never told me which comment “may offend” someone. An evil bunch, probably members of the mentally-ill LGBT crowd. I’ve received several warnings, and a threat of removing my site in 2022. So much for freedom of expressing my beliefs

Facebook also doesn’t like my comments, and I’ve been suspended a couple of times last year. More evil people.

I was permanently banned from Twitter in 2019, but they had the gall to email me last year informing me that my ban had ended. Needless to say, I won’t be going back to their garbage.

THE ONLY TWO PEOPLE I KNOW WHO GOT JABS BOTH DIED LAST YEAR SUDDENLY OF HEART ATTACKS. COINCIDENCE, EH? SCAMDEMIC.

This planet is controlled by the forces of evil, which control is made easier by compliant sheeple who believe anything they’re told, forgetting the lesson of the WMD.

THINGS ARE GETTING WORSE, NOT BETTER.

It’s sad and scary that there are so many people in the world who feel so entitled to share their ugliness with everyone. And then when they get called out for it, they continue to be ugly. Not only is Mr. O’Brien a fat shamer; he’s also a homophobe.

I generally enjoy The Irish Times. I think the journalism is excellent and often very entertaining. I also enjoy reading comments from the Irish, who are often hilariously witty. On the other hand, I’ve noticed that quite a few of them admire Donald Trump, promote conspiracy theories and other stupid nonsense, and opine about things about which they apparently know little. It occurs to me that the last time I was in Ireland, I saw a Confederate Battle Flag. It was a sticker on the back of a taxi cab. And now that I think about it, quite a lot of American Trump supporters are people with ancestral backgrounds like mine. 😉

Anyway, good on Róisín Ingle for responding diplomatically to the fat shamer who tried to deprive her of Gouda. I used to care a lot more about what people thought of my body, too. I think I got over that when I realized how short life really is.

In 2021, a former Peace Corps colleague of mine celebrated his birthday with friends and family. Then, as he was walking home, he got hit by a car and was left for dead. Sadly, he did die of his injuries, and at just 58 years of age. He was a bright, vibrant person who touched many people over his lifetime. I don’t think he had a weight problem when he passed. In fact, I like to think that he was happy when he left this world… having just spent his last hours with people he loved, celebrating his birthday, rather than languishing from a chronic illness for months on end.

I think of my old friend, and realize that while it’s always a good and wise thing to take care of your health, it’s also a good and wise thing to enjoy your life. Because now, more than ever, you just never know when your life will end. So I say, eat the cheese if you want it. Tell the fat shamers like Mel O’Brien to fuck right off. Try not to give anyone a knuckle sandwich, though… unless they really, really deserve one. 😉 In the case of the fat shaming idiot Ingle encountered at her lunch celebration, I would not have faulted her…

Incidentally, as I was writing this, we got a delivery of Dutch cheeses. I don’t eat much cheese, so it’s mostly for Bill, who loves cheese. I’m sure he will be delighted to try them later…

The Overeducated Housewife

Just another boring blog about a boring housewife…

Tag Archives: concern trolls

Sometimes a little Gouda is “good-a” for the soul…