They've got us so scared of a HIPAA here, I can't imagine calling somebody calling the police on that. The billing people may get different on-line training.
Doesn't the IRS agree not to refer undocumented workers to INS (or DHS, whatever), so as to encourage tax compliance without fear of deportation? I'm glad we can trust the tax man more than doctors.
As a practical matter, I understand that paying taxes with a fake SSN means you contribute to SS but can't collect it. Which means baby boomers can afford to go to Florida or Arizona in the winter and complain about how everybody speaks Spanish.
If I were immigrants' rights activists in the area, I would be picketing that fucker night and day, and I would be writing the medical board. I would also be doing everything I could to encourage people to boycott that clinic. It's gross dereliction of medical duty and at least around here, most doctors would gnaw off a forearm before they'd shop someone to immigration like that.
It amazes me this type of effort to discourage undocumented immigrants from getting medical care comes from the same brand of stupid that freaks out over the danger of Mexicans bringing diseases from across the border.
If there is a picket, I think they'd better laminate the signs.
Also, people are such morons - do they really think that "undocumented" people have, like, two heads and fangs or something, or are in some material way different from other people? I know that calling people undocumented is miles better than calling them illegal, but not only is "undocumented" picking up the same pejorative sense as "illegal" anyway, but I hate how it becomes the first category in how people talk about others. No one calls me a "documented" person, even though I have documents.
You would think that none of these people had ever met an immigrant. I'm sure that a big percentage of the people I see in my neighborhood every day are undocumented or have relatives who are, and yet it's not as though they're branded on the forehead or something.
Ignorant, stupid, un-selfaware, resentment-ridden, mean-spirited, emotionally lazy (because no one with an ounce of self-control would let themselves be so ridden by resentment)....just awful people with no childhood training of any worth, or they wouldn't be so uncharitable.
4: One hopes (and the story allows for the possibility) that this was some loose cannon within the practice, and not a deliberate policy.
But yeah, too bad. In the other thread there's some discussion of the unfairness of public shaming. Sorry, this medical practice needs to get this shit under control, and other medical practices need to understand that this can't happen.
It's strange. A couple of years ago, I felt like the US was moving towards, if not decriminalization, very targeted enforcement. Undocumented immigrants could effectively get driver's licenses and would not be subjected to document checks while going about their business. Of course, southern border states are always more zealous, but I wonder whether this is a random event or a sign of bad things to come.
Maybe the norther border states are getting more zealous. Walker wants to built a fence on the border with Canada.
You would think that none of these people had ever met an immigrant.
This is backwards. They see tons of Latino people and think that they're all undocumented, instead of realizing that most of them are born here, and many are from families that have lived in Texas for generations.
8: Well, if they're a loose cannon, fire them and make that fact known.
II [how do I even make that pause thing]
God, I am so sick of people being shitty and self-deluding. This particular story....well, I have a friend who is stuck in functionally abusive relationship, and it's the same dynamic on the part of the dominant partner, the same smuggery about trapping a vulnerable person and patting yourself on the back that you're doing the right thing. (It's a relationship where the official narrative is that my friend is very, very bad indeed and needs constant correction and to watch their words, and it's all justified with this absurd PC nonsense; my friend is terrified (plausibly!) that if she leaves or is noncompliant in some way, the dominant party will tell their entire social circle that my friend is abusive and bad and so on, and of course "always believe the survivor" means that this may well work. I will speak up, of course, but I don't know most of the people in the situation and so I won't have a lot of traction. The dominant partner has my friend actually thinking that she's the bad one. Piety and sanctimony and a lot of fucking nonsense. It's like a bad joke - this is all based on some really stupid left ideas about "comfort" and "safe space" that basically mean that if my friend uses the wrong phrasing when, for example, apologizing for the fight that happened back in fucking November, she is making the dominant partner feel "unsafe".
Anyway, I am particularly angry at this business of hurting the vulnerable and patting yourself on the back for it.
I> [play?]
[how do I even make that pause thing]
On a keyboard, it's on the same key with the reversed back-slash. On a phone, who knows.
Yes to 5 and to what Frowner said. This is outrageous. What kind of HIPAA penalties can they incur? Is there any enforcement mechanism for this?
12.2 That sucks and I feel very much for your friend. I was very much in her place in a very dysfunctional relationship on top of having serious depression. It's a gaslighting scenario and the 'healthy' partner will be almost sure to make the most of their leverage in it to continue the power play. I could say more but I will say this, a fight in November? Almost a year ago? Fuck that. If you are sincere in your apology and the apology was accepted then end of story. If it's part of a larger ongoing pattern then things may be different (and I'm almost sure that's how the 'survivor' partner will be playing it) but enough is enough.
Still, it's unclear what will ultimately happen because of Borrego's immigration status. She and her husband have a child who was born in the United States, which would make legal permanent resident status possible, Guajardo says.
Anchor baby!
14: Yeah, this is not a fighty person; it was a one-time thing. If it was a deal-breaker, then it should have led to a break-up, not this perpetual return to how awful and boundary-violating, etc, it was. (And honestly, while it was a bad fight, I think that for most people it would not really have been That Bad; it certainly wouldn't have had me rushing to break up, if it went as described). It's a high-stress relationship for a variety of reasons, and honestly, I think that a non-abusive partner might still have some sincere frustrations about the relationship, but the way the whole thing gets narrated drives me up the wall. Especially because it's enormously financially, medically and socially unequal, with my friend having very few resources and the partner an unusually large amount, and my friend faces a lot of discrimination/microaggressions/bad stuff around here, which the partner does not and never will.
It's the narrative - that anything my friend does needs to be interpreted through this Cultural Revolution-style framework, where her choice of words during an intense conversation need to be subject to a lot of scrutiny, and when she chooses the wrong words she has to apologize, but then the apology has an error in it, etc etc. Now that I think about it, I surmise that the dominant partner may be using the tiny picky stuff to avoid dealing with the large inequalities in the relationship. It gets treated as though the reality of the relationship is the two of them trying to obey some kind of weird advice culture rubric about "boundaries" and "comfort" and "support", when the reality of the relationship is that one of them has no insurance, no full time work and health problems, plus being a a survivor of violent trauma and facing material discrimination, while the other has a great job, faces little discrimination, has good health, has a supportive family, etc. It's not permitted to say that my friend is worse off, or that my friend's really difficult circumstances place her under a lot of stress that's just blatantly doing a number on her head.
I think a reversed back-slash is just a slash.
It was, until the guy from Guns N' Roses took it over. Don't mess with the trademark lawyers of a guy in a band that uses "N'" as a way to mark out a some very common words for their own use.
12, 16: You know somebody in a relationship with Fre/ddie de/Boer?
I think a reversed back-slash is just a slash.
Reversed back-slash's just another word for nothing left to slash.
Well, if they're a loose cannon, fire them and make that fact known.
An entertaining example of inadvertent analogy clash. My inner Bernard Woolley is jumping up and down.
21: Well, firing a loose cannon would be one way to render it less dangerous, right? It would still be sliding around the deck, I guess, so perhaps one has to just throw the damn thing overboard.
16: Is he famous for that kind of thing in his personal life, or is it just his blog? That would explain so much, although dominant partner would have to be really good at disguise.
Jesus Christ that story is fucked up. What the hell was that clinic thinking!? "This ID looks like it might be fake even though this person is already a patient of ours we better call the sheriff and have her arrested"? I have a lot of trouble imagining that "Hey sheriff - I know you don't have a warrant or anything and we have no reason to suspect this person might be a harm to themselves or others but just so you know they're a patient here at the clinic and we think they might be using a false ID so come on down to publicly arrest them" is allowed under HIPAA
I hope the clinic gets shut down and everyone working there ends up out of work. The ones who weren't involved, except in the "seemingly were fine with people who would do that and didn't intervene at any point in the apparently pretty long time between when she gave them the ID and the police arrested her" aren't as culpable, sure, but if they're remotely decent people they'd already be looking around for a new clinic to work at.
Situation in 16.1 way too familiar to me for comfort (and so glad to be very long past all that). 16.2 a lot less so.
Are they married? What kind of legal options to obtain support would she have available to her if she left? Because it looks like she needs to get out as soon and as safely as she's able to for her own survival's sake.
22.2: I'm just extrapolating from reading his blog. The keen, theatrical sense of victimization you describe seemed familiar -- and doubly so given that it was deployed in such a way as to victimize someone else.
24: No, they're not married. I don't want to go into all the gory details, but it's the kind of messy situation typical of a certain type of bohemia. My friend should really be on disability, but she had an uncertain mailing address for a while, missed a document and her lawyers dropped her, and she hasn't had the emotional energy to start the process again. And of course, it's a giant clusterfuck just to try to get on disability. As it is, she has a little part time employment when she's physically well enough, but not enough to make rent, even on a room in a group house unless she were really lucky. So she's living in a sort of semi-converted outbuilding (that she paid to semi-convert) owned by dominant partner.
I think that even if it were a healthy relationship, it would be wending to its close, but the complicating factors are just making everything into a giant disaster. My friend doesn't have a very large social network, either, so she doesn't have a lot of options for places to stay. She's stayed with us for short periods, and I think I'm going to talk to my housemates to see if she can stay longer, but our house and the available space are far from ideal for her and really don't work as a permanent solution.
In fairness to the dominant partner, this is not and never has been a violent situation, and I am absolutely, bet-the-farm confident that the dominant partner would never use physical violence. It reminds me a bit of the Japanese Red Army, in a way, where there's this absolutely unrealistic set of beliefs about right and wrong and morality that everyone buys into and gets enforced, only in this case it's "you were telling me about this serious problem you really, materially experienced today, but you're clearly telling me about it to manipulate me into feeling sorry for you and doing what you want, because Everyone Knows that Your Type Of Person does that, and you described your feelings using the wrong word, and that makes me feel invalidated, and you're always trying to invalidate me because Your Type Of Person Has Bad Boundaries, and I can extrapolate from this thing that you said about your own illness that you are being ableist, which is also very bad, even though I myself am not disabled".
Also, we are apparently in a world where "nonconsensual touch" is "putting your hand on your alleged partner's shoulder as you bid them goodbye", and we all know that touching someone nonconsensually is abusive and one is justified in being afraid of an abusive partner, so therefore my friend is a bad person and frightening, but oh, we aren't breaking up or anything, etc etc. It's just a fucking head trip. I stress that "putting your hand on your partner's shoulder" is all that is at issue here.
Dominant partner is someone I normally like, and seeing things unfold like this is a head trip in itself.
28: Up to this detail it all seemed too vague for me to get a handle on it -- after that detail it sounds too insane for me to fathom.
Sometimes you just have to put somebody down before they become all parody. The jury will go easy. Just tape stuff.
29: Yeah, to regular people. And it's all like that. Stuff that most people would totally write off as "oh, my partner had a bad day" or "I'm going to tell my partner that this turn of phrase really irritates me now that they've used it multiple times" or "my partner is in physical pain and under tremendous stress, so I am going to prioritize their needs and indeed expect them to be focused on themselves and not on me", but that gets turned into "you aren't supporting me because you said "I'm sorry you feel sad" instead of "I'm sorry I made you feel sad" and that triggered me"". I just don't even understand any of this anymore, and I feel like they both really, really need to be apart - the best possible interpretation is that they bring out bad patterns in each other.
And these are adults, not teens on tumblr, too.
Wow. The answer to this is probably not, because you would have already, but are you in a relationship with the dominant partner where you can ask what on earth is going on and get a straight answer?
It might make more sense than I figured at first. I think you could explain all the facts if you posit the following:
1) DP is having an affair and wants out.
2) DP cares enough to not want NDP to be without means of support.
3) DP has taken a master class in passive aggression.
4) DP lives in one of those leftier-than-thou milieus that people on the internet talk about but that I never actually see.
I've thought about it...I think it may come to that, but unfortunately [reasons] lead me to believe that what I'm going to get is "no, I sincerely believe that any unrequested touch is nonconsensual and that nonconsensual touch is abuse, and therefore I am being abused, and that my partner is using their relative social marginalization to try to manipulate me when they tell me about bad things that are happening".
I think dominant partner really does believe all this stuff very sincerely. It would be a lot simpler if this were just cynical abuse tactics.
I think part of this is that dominant partner is genuinely overwhelmed by some of the issues facing my friend. Dominant partner really needs a therapist, I think, to help process their feelings about the crisis stuff in the relationship. And/or to break off the relationship because it's overwhelming. My friend has a lot of serious life stuff going on right now through no fault of her own, stuff that would put a strain on any relationship. But I think dominant partner believes that they can find some kind of weird new age code of manners and speech that will render all of this very real, very material stuff into something that can just be put to one side of the relationship.
34: I think it's mostly 2 and 4, unfortunately. I'm hoping that we can house my friend for a while and maybe if they're just no-contact for a couple of months, some return to reasonable behavior may happen.
Or that. But assuming an affair is always a good first guess.
Re: why, I'd bet it's sort of an unconscious thing. Know how some people think their problems are (always) bigger, more immediate, more deserving of attention? That's a type I know and understand. The trait runs from whiny and self-centered to abusive and cruel. I think this is that personality wrapped in a particular vocabulary. At any rate, if I were being very generous, I'd think something about the pairing brings out the worst in the dominant partner. At worst, selfish gaslighting asshole.
27 As I know you well know there doesn't have to be any violence for it to be an extremely abusive situation and that's what this sounds like to a T.
gaslighting asshole
Even most cattle don't produce enough gas to provide a stead light source.
I'm like 70%-80% certain that my tendency to turn serious discussions into jokes about farting hasn't affect my own relationships.
It's difficult to get my head around this whole thing, because I keep thinking "but what if there's a side of the story that I'm not getting", even though I have no reason to believe that my friend is anything but scrupulously truthful. And I know that my friend is an intense person going through a lot of difficult stuff, and I can see how it might be difficult to date her, so then I think "but what if...." But everything she tells me about the way dominant partner narrates the relationship just seems absolutely looney tunes, especially the insistence that my friend is manipulative, which just isn't true at all.
So much of this stuff is dominant partner basically saying "I felt uncomfortable and/or I felt bad about leaving you because you were upset/sick, and those things are you trying to manipulate or detain me" when it's really dominant partner's feelings and wishes. It's like what the right says about trigger warnings, where the dominant partner feels upset and that means that whatever is upsetting has to be stopped at once.
I'm sorry to vent here so much; my usual housemate-for-venting-and-strategizing is away right now and I'm at a bit of a loss.