Narcissism vs Sadism in a Nutshell
I recently did a post trying to outline my thoughts on the difference between narcissism and sadism. This is more of the same.
So one or more people in gatekeeping or influential positions was likely a sadist ACTIVELY sabotaging my work in Aberdeen in a cutting your nose off to spite your face way.
The Main Street America program suggests you create a style guide for your town. I had unproven community development ideas and was trying to both test them to check what worked and also establish proof of concept.
So when they consistently didn't want to in any way pay me but were clearly and obviously stealing my ideas when I published stuff online, I created a free language template to copy and paste to make it easy to adopt my style guide. In other words I said "Okay, you LIKE my ideas and are HAPPY to use them, but you don't want to pay me. Fine. Here, use my ideas without pay and with my permission to use them without pay. And the only thing you have to do is credit me and link back to my work to promote it."
Unlike other stuff that got ripped off same day -- often within minutes of publication -- no, they didn't copy and paste that onto their website. EVER.
While I still lived there, I published some ideas for addressing homelessness and "coincidentally" within 72 hours the homeless situation in the downtown area where I lived dramatically improved and never got that bad again. That includes these two pieces:
It's common practice for homeless programs to have a donor-facing website that tells visitors "We do wonderful things for the community. Please give money or donate goods or volunteer." and have minimal client-facing information online because it's an attractive nuisance to publish that information on the WORLD wide web where any homeless loser with a phone or library card can read it and go shopping for the best place to get a free ride.
So typically they provide paper handouts to the homeless in person on the ground. And that's unlikely to change.
And the second post above is about policing policy which is also not something you would typically advertise. You write up the new policy and retrain your people and you are extremely unlikely to post information on the local police department website announcing your pilot program.
So there's nothing particularly suspicious or eyebrow raising about using those ideas to benefit Aberdeen in a way that denies me credit because it would actually be kind of weird to publicize those things and I had stopped attending local meetings, so they could pretend it's my fault for trying to avoid their abusive shit that I'm getting no credit or reputation enhancement.
But I also published ideas for economic development like wanting a Chipotle and Panda Express downtown. Those are big chains that own all their locations and don't do franchises and I'm the highest ranked woman on Hacker News and it's not unreasonable to think they likely read my work and looked into opening a location in Aberdeen and probably locals sabotaged those efforts.
Why? Because you can't hide it if Chipotle or Panda Express open in town. Even if the ENTIRE town is colluding in a conspiracy to shaft me and the local paper won't run the story, Chipotle and Panda Express will list the location on their websites and it will show up on Google maps.
And then I would have evidence my ideas work and are being used, so please hire me! I do good work!
People have trouble telling apart narcissists and sadists because both are basically selfish assholes who hurt other people.
The difference in a nutshell is sadists hurt other people intentionally -- that's the goal of the crap they do -- and narcissists hurt people incidental to just getting whatever they want.
The behavior of the people nominally doing community development work in Aberdeen, Washington suggests personal gain is very much secondary to sadistic funsies and intentionally SHAFTING me and the town.
Narcissists are just trying to meet their needs and kind of oblivious to the impact they have on other people. They are basically selfish and greedy.
If you offer a narcissist a deal that does good things for them and also does good things for you, they don't care if your life improves. They hurt people the worst when it's a situation where there's not enough to go around and either they can get theirs and not contemplate who really needs it more or fall on their sword for your benefit and, wow, why would they do that???? That's crazy!
Sadists are people pursuing a GOAL of intentionally hurting other people and secondarily also grabbing whatever unearned benefits for personal gain they can lazily and incidentally snap up, in part because it's a sick burn to benefit from hurting you.
The fact that gatekeepers in Aberdeen, Washington who were apparently psycho nutcase obsessed with me and stalking me only improved the town in cases where they could also shaft me and left so much money on the table if there was no means to avoid shafting me suggests that one or more people in controlling positions are sadists and the goal was shafting me.
Narcissists can be taught enlightened self interest and rehabilitated. They can get tired of being "spanked" by the system. They can decide it's not worth the downside or be clued about what's in it for them to handle it differently.
Sadists cannot be rehabilitated. They just like hurting people and will persist in hurting people no matter how you change the rules, try to meet them halfway etc.
To rehabilitate a sadist you would first need to invent a cure for sadism. I'm not aware of anyone having any such thing.