There is nothing strange about you

“There is nothing strange about you. There is just a lot of strange things you have to put up with” (Al Sharpton)

Plain Weird

How can you prove to someone that you are not a “weirdo” when they are convinced that you are? I argue that it is impossible to do so just as it is impossible to prove that you are not a racist, a homophobe, or suffer from some kind of mental illness. Any kind of arguing against this accusation is likely to only fuel the suspicion that you in fact are what you seem to be. What all these accusations have in common is that they are insults intended to convey that someone objects to all or aspects of who you are and/or what you do or don’t do. Insults use constructs that can easily be applied to virtually anybody you are trying to attack (e.g. “you are crazy”, “you are mental ill”) and hardly ever factual things that could be easily disproved (Can you imagine someone trying to insult someone by saying “you have diabetes!” or “you have cancer!”?). Psychiatric diagnoses are nothing more than state sanctioned insults intended to stigmatise people who do not fit into the dominant mental health ideology.