Gives her no right to harm people and animals. And from what we know she had one of the best experiences in foster care..fuck her. I give her no room or sympathy.
Of course it doesn't give her that right but I wasn't talking about her being a shit girlfriend or a shit pet owner. I was discussing how it may be somewhat irrational to have expected AL to have immediately recovered enough in foster care to have the presence of mind and capability of saving money or taking full advantage of resources made available to her.
While you're right about people in general, I think most of us have little or no sympathy for her because of her decisions now as an adult. She supposedly has plenty of money, has all the time in the world, has a girlfriend that's along for the ride and willing to do apparently whatever Amber wants, she acknowledges several serious issues and has been told/warned about several others... And she does nothing but shit on people.
It's one thing if you don't know you have problems, or you know but you can't afford help. Neither of those apply to her. She could at least try to improve her life but she'd rather cling to being a victim. That's why I can't stand her.
We all have problems, y'know? A lot of us probably dealt with abuse or addiction or mental illness. They're all absurdly common. Most people, in my experience, at least make an effort to have a better life as adults.
My comment was not an exoneration of who she is now. We can all agree her life is a shit show and she has some resources now to correct it. But do you really think that it's absurdly common to be born to two addicts who have both gone to prison at some point, suffer neglect or abuse so badly you are removed from the home permanently, with none of your extended family willing or able to take care of you? Mental illness, abuse and addiction themselves may be common but Amber's specific set of circumstances are not common. They were pretty extreme and even the brightest, most self-aware person will have trouble having a normal life, even with therapy, after such an upbringing.
And while people who have terrible starts can have better lives, that is a notion that is relative. From AL's perspective, she is leading a better life than her parents. She overshops and gorges daily but she's not strung out on drugs or alcohol. She's a lesbian who is too fat to get pregnant but she also can say she hasn't had any children whom she later lost custody of. Her friends are not addicts, she technically has a job and owns a car, and she can also say she supports her girlfriend financially. We can see things as they are - she's an addict in her own right, she neglects her pets and runs roughshod over people, her "friends" all seem to dislike her, she puts in little effort in her videos, her car is begging for the merciful release of death and she encouraged Becky to quit her job so she could have someone to take care of her. But by the metrics of the childhood that very directly led to her maladaptive coping mechanisms - she was over 200 pounds by age 10 so her eating issues started when she was very, very young - she's doing better than her parents. With that particular mindset, does she genuinely understand how fucked she is? I still don't think she fully understands how sick she is and how bad things are about to get for her.
Admitting that most people who suffer the sort of extremity Amber did as a kid have trouble living normal lives doesn't give Amber a free pass to behave without honor or self-control. If we find out that a man who beats his family was raised by a father who beat him, we may understand how he came to engage in such behaviors, but we still condemn his actions and hold him accountable. AL needs to engage in some hard self-work and she needs to do it asap, but it's irrational to expect her to have been able to engage in long term planning in foster care before she even made it to high school.
ETA: Just to be clear - I don't have a lot of sympathy for Amber, and am not recommending that anyone should. Once a person makes a false rape accusation, it's hard to cut them any future slack.