Friendly advice

This is perhaps the worst advice column I’ve ever read, not that I read many.  Nevertheless, this is horrible to the point of being truly disgusting.  The indispensable Julian Sanchez has a good take on it:

Via Spencer and Lindsay Beyerstein, apparently Double-X has hired some kind of sociopath as a “friendship advice” columnist. And by “sociopath,” I mean the sort of person who thinks that it’s too much to ask that putative friends (a) not ditch another friend who mysteriously vanishes in a state of obvious distress on a night out, and (b) actually go to pick her up at the hospital when she calls to let them know she’s been roofied—which, unless there’s some fad for using incapacitating drugs as random pranks that escaped my radar, tends to be a prelude to sexual assault. Because “there are limits to friendship”.  Friendship?  Jesus, that’s the minimum I’d do for someone I barely knew in a situation like that. Hell, it’s the minimum I’d do for someone who’d taken some drugs on purpose in an attack of poor judgment. It’s what any remotely decent, adequately socialized person would do.  How on earth could you hire someone to whom this isn’t just gobsmackingly obvious to write an advice column about friendship?

Or, as Amy Benfer puts it – Come the fuck on.

Seriously, if I got a phone call from someone I really, really disliked at 4AM in the morning, and it sounded like they had been drugged, and were in the hospital, and needed someone to come pick them up, I’d go get them.  I mean, even if this was someone who I actively avoided on a regular basis.  If this were a friend of ten years?  Is it even a question?

Well, from the comments, it looks as though there’s now a petition to remove Lucinda Rosenfeld from her advice column.  I have to say, please don’t.  You can’t make this stuff up.