Wishing a very barbara-pit on the entire “troubled teens” industry

  • Feinsteins_Ghost [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 month ago

    Back in the mid nineties I went to a in-patient outward bound type wilderness based rehabilitation facility. It no longer exists, and aside from some paper records likely in filing boxes in someone’s garage, yellowing away, there really is nothing to tie my IRL identity to this place.

    It was called Wilderness Treatment Center, in a small town in northwest Montana, close to Idaho/Canada, population less than 1000.

    I was unfortunate enough to be sent there during December. I boarded a plane in south Texas where it was almost 80, and ended up in a place where it was single digits F. My days consisted of being woken up at 430-500 every morning for ‘rock crew’. Being on the rock crew meant you took draw knives/spokeshaves and shaved down tree bark from felled trees until sunrise. The trees we shaved were turned into furniture by others. I fed cattle in a blizzard and got frostnip on my nose, and fingers. I got coerced into spending three weeks backpacking thru the woods in and around Glacier National Park. I ended up being evacuated early because I got frostbite on three of my toes. My punishment for being sent back early? More rock crews and interaction ‘stricts’ (couldn’t talk to others and others were told to not interact with me). I was forced to walk thru nipple deep snow, pulling fallen trees. I got stood outside on a tree stump on my cabin porch in my shorts and a T-shirt for telling the cook his food sucked. While it was snowing. I was isolated multiple times for a week at a time because I spoke up about my aftercare plan which included being shipped to a halfway house in Lousyanna for a year or more. I was ignored by people who were supposed to be helping me to break an addiction that has followed me my entire life. I had trusts violated. They withheld letters I sent to my family. They withheld letters my family sent. They starved me when I balked.

    Fuck you Mike, Ernie, Preston, and Mary. I still think about you pieces of shit every now and then. I hope every single one of you die miserable and alone in the throes of a bad crack addiction.

    Outward Bound and its ilk do more harm than good. But I did get to see Going to The Sun Road so who can even say if it’s bad or not.

      • TheLepidopterists [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        1 month ago

        Listened to it when it came out, it was excellent, if a hard listen. It’s definitely where I’d point anyone who listens to podcasts and is interested in learning about this topic.

    • miz [any, any]@hexbear.net
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      1 month ago

      BtB is usually better on purely domestic stuff I hear, I don’t know personally but I would imagine Fedvans still makes terrible jokes that reveal the emptiness inside him

      • TyMan210 [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        1 month ago

        It’s been probably a couple of years now, I stopped in the middle of an episode after Robert or the guest or someone (I don’t really remember at this point lol) went on an apropos of nothing rant against China, and I haven’t listened since. It had been getting on my nerves for a while, but that was the last straw for me. Something about an “anarchist” who makes their living entirely off of corporate sponsorships, enough that they stopped being a journalist and moved into a “compound” (his word, iirc), never sat right with me anyway.

        • BelieveRevolt [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          1 month ago

          Being an ”anarchist” and being anti-AES and anti-”authoritarian” in a way that aligns perfectly with US state department positions. Many such cases, but Fedvans just has more money and fame plus actually worked with the CIA.

  • TheLepidopterists [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 month ago

    If anyone here hasn’t listened to it, the “The Game” series from TrueAnon is a harrowing tour through this industry and its origins. Brace went to one of these and the series gets pretty emotional.

  • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 month ago

    “Normalcy” is one of the most murderously insidious brainworms of Burgerlanders and they will have their own children killed for the sake of it.

  • bunnygirl [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    1 month ago

    I’m not USAmerican so I didn’t know about these places until fairly recently

    Someone on Hexbear posted a link to this comic a while back which is both really good and really harrowing: (CW all kinds of abuse) https://elan.school/

    Honestly I read most of it in the span of a day and I spent most of that day crying my eyes out, it’s just all so so cruel

    Idk it’s late at night and I had some other rambling thoughts but I’m just going to summarise them with death to America and let’s make sure the future’s better

  • GrouchyGrouse [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 month ago

    These “institutions” are the inevitable result of that sprouts from the seed of “what if it was possible to severely punish children to fix them and we also used them to make additional money while doing it.” That’s why they always involve shit like making the teens do unpaid work that feeds some kind of industry.

    Fuck anyone that enables or participates in these systems. Real pieces of shit.

  • aaaaaaadjsf [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    1 month ago

    While I never went to one of these camps, I did spend the entirety of high school at an English style all boys boarding school on a scholarship, with the uniforms, strict rules, boarding houses and day houses, gender segregation, initiation rituals and all. The kind of school that people like British politicians and Elon Musk attended. Trust me, it’s not like Harry Potter. Okay maybe it was a little bit like that, but you get the point.

      • Huldra [they/them, it/its]@hexbear.net
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        1 month ago

        It’s easy to agree in principle, but various traditions as well as the logic of the system of capitalism weigh extremely heavily on us, so intergenerational abuse like this keeps surviving if left alone.

      • aaaaaaadjsf [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        1 month ago

        Not even going to talk about the “culture” and “socialisation” around woman teachers at these boys only boarding schools. Honestly half of those teachers need a visit from libertarian-alert. That is all I will say for now.