A thing you can do against this is clearly and consistently labelling which opinions and statements are yours and which are from other sources you bring up for context. A large part of the original miscommunication seems to be that you repeat r/fatlogic talking points without making it clear you do not believe them, or agree with them. If someone posts an opinion statement online without saying 'this is what so-and-so thinks/says, can we discuss this' or similar most people will assume it's your own opinion. Both of these statements come across as callous at best and DARVO (Deny, Attack and Reverse Victim and Offender)-esque victim blaming at worst. I'm very sorry that you have trouble communicating your statements, but frankly if we were all 'a bunch of hair-triggered extremists' people wouldn't be still trying to patiently engage with you and no one would attempt to trouble shoot. Your messages have been alarming and hurtful a lot. I understand you did not mean them to be so? In that case apologizing for hurt you have caused, even if you didn't realize it at the time, especially if unintentional, is what is usually considered an important step to communicate that you are not in fact hurting people on purpose. Name-calling against yourself OR others is hardly productive. In general assuming people will be capable of forming their own opinions is not unreasonable, but you are unfortunately very lacking in the context and tools most people have for this. This is not entirely your fault, but gaining these tools and contexts is something only you can do. You may want to stay away from publicly engaging in discussion involving potentially fraught topics in general unless you are prepared for people who have investment in these topics or are personally affected to be cross with you for repeating harmful statements. You cannot ask people to do research and discussion and finding opinions for you unless you are prepared to pay them as research assistants/teachers/lecturers. To be blunt, people have a lot better things to do than perform a monkey dance for your amusement. There is a middle ground between 'barge in with halfbaked opinions absorbed from questionable sources' and 'complete isolation forever'. You can in fact listen and do your best to politely ask question if you do not understand something. This is how most people learn to form opinions.
Stripping away misunderstandings will help a lot. (Jump down to the asterix and then come back here.) A little bit of a tangent, but I glanced at the tumblr thread and they were talking about having the right amount of brambles. I was hurt by not standing up for myself at all, and now I think I might have overadjusted a bit. It would help if people wouldn't treat me like a target. (the asterix) For this and it goes for everyone. Make sure we're on the same page before starting a long argument. It does no good to take my position and then tell me I'm bad, in fact you might convince me that the position you want me to take is wrong. It might help to also make part of the argument, see how I respond to the point, and then follow-up. For long posts, I get lost halfway through making responses and it looks like I didn't read half of it. This is particularly bad when the entire argument is based on a flawed premise. I'll try to make responses to sections of articles as I see points instead of trying to make sense of the whole thing.
This part makes sense and is helpful. I learn by experience and observation, which is why I wanted a discussion where I could see how it was being handled before I jumped in and turned it into an attack-fest. People who have investment in those topics have already researched for themselves, and it's possible that they like talking about it. If I label "hey I saw this, what do you guys think" better, would that keep people from shooting the messenger?
Those are very reasonable accommodations to ask for, thank you very much! So to be clear - are my posts generally too long? I can shorten them if you need me too. That's a really valuable insight to have into how you're reacting to things. When I'm very, very upset, I have trouble with the same thing because of one of my conditions, where I can react in an over the top way to something pretty mundane. There's a thing I do when I'm trying to track the reaction back to its true source, where I just ask myself why I'm feeling that way and give an honest answer in return. For example, if I stub my toe and then feel absolutely awful, this is how it'd go for me: Q: Why do I feel so bad? A: Because I was so clumsy. Q: Why did I bump into that thing? A: Because I wasn't looking where I was going? Q: Why wasn't I looking where I was going? A: Because I had a sudden pain in my joints. Q: Why do I feel bad about having pain in my joints? A: Because I feel bad about being disabled. Q: Why do I feel bad about being disabled right now? A: Because I wanted to do something today and my disability prevented me from doing it. Once I've tracked things back to their source, I can address the root of my problem. So in my example, I might be able to do the activity later, or ask for help achieving my goal. This is useful for all sorts of things aside from figuring out the real cause of your distress, you can use it to challenge thoughts you know are toxic or catastrophizing.
@Athol Magarac, I do believe you when you say you lose track of the full contents of the longer posts while you're trying to reply, and that it frustrates you as well as the people you're replying to. Edit: annnnd this post got long, whoops. Part of this problem is going to persist no matter what when you're discussing complicated issues like race or health, because short replies are tricky when the topic is that large. You might have noticed that like, in your ITA thread, replies tend to be much shorter, which is partly because the topic is much narrower. But there are some other small, quick things you might be able to do to help mitigate the issue. 1. Your user title. Rather than 'I prefer blunt communication', perhaps 'I prefer brief communication', or 'I prefer brief, blunt communication.' A little thing, but people will have the opportunity to see it directly 2. Like Ivy said, labeling when you're communicating an opinion you don't hold yourself, whether it's you explaining what other people have said, or if you're being sarcastic. It can be hard to differentiate those asides from what you yourself believe, and tends to lead to confused tangents where everyone gets frustrated. Maybe something like putting (not my opinion) at the beginning of a paragraph or sentence would help. 3. Perhaps labeling when you have a tangent or story that you think is relevant to communicate, but that you don't really want replies on. That's... a lot more vague, and I'm not sure how easy it would be to put into practice. But you do tell a lot of anecdotes, and when people respond to those and the rest of your posts, things get very long very quickly. Like the last point, maybe placing (no replies needed) at the beginning of the paragraph. 4. Making an effort to keep your own posts short. This is the hardest one, and it's not mandatory or anything, but I think this and Ivy's point will help you the most. I tend to be very long-winded, so I know this is hard, but if you're losing the thread of longer replies, shorter posts on your end will lead to (on the average) shorter replies. I don't know what the most comfortable way for you to do that would be, whether it's cropping out personal stories, or doing less communication of [other people's ideas that you disagree with] and focusing on your own beliefs, or something else. Like I said, I don't know the best way to do this, and I'm not good at it myself, but I think it would help.
"Hey I saw this, what do you guys think" will definitely work better, but you'll also need to make an effort to keep value judgments out of what you say when you present it. A flat statement like that will be fairly safe, but including more opinion-flavored things will always carry some risk. Sometimes that risk is minor, sometimes it isn't, but that's hard to gauge without doing that observation first. Additionally, posting to existing threads rather than creating your own will give you a safer position to observe from. Being OP of a thread will generally mean that people will come in expecting you to have opinions and expecting you to participate. There's no rules or anything, but it's what they'll expect. That being said, there aren't many threads active completely dedicated to more fraught topics like racism, etc. It's easy for those threads to spiral into arguments that are upsetting for lots of the people involved, and most folks aren't usually looking for that kind of thing. People discuss the heavier stuff sometimes, but not regularly.
Yes, but be careful. It would be a good idea to check anything you see for slurs, obvious attacks, or otherwise very clearly bigoted content first. If you really want to get opinions on that sort of content, putting it under a spoiler tag - I can't remember if you've used that feature before, I can explain if you don't know how - marked with an appropriate tw(trigger warning) marker. That's a small bit of consideration and care which will go a lot way to helping signal that you're not looking to upset people, along with the label you mentioned. edited to add: damn spock that was fast x33
I'm glad I could help! This is very difficult of course, and sadly a kind of foreign experience for me as a listening/reading learning type, so I'm not sure I can help. In general I think it will at least cover the base of people accidentally attributing opinions to you that you don't hold, and keep things a little less pointed? fake edit: These are both excellent points that are probably a lot more helpful than me x3
I think it might not be the wordcount that is a problem, but how many different ideas are introduced. You also saw what I could just skim over for the idea. If you're going over the same idea twice, it still just gives me one thing to respond to. I think it also might be the number of people and how fast the responses get, like when your questions were flooded out. Can everyone keep the flow down? I'll check back, but I have work to do.
I'm not sure what you mean. It's pretty much all right there. I'm glad that you're working out ways to talk to people, that's good.
What I meant about not tasting food is that the standard American diet is generally fried/fatty things, plenty of cheese, a lot of things are oversalted or have sugar where it has little business being unless you go through the effort of cooking from scratch, and many people eat substandard vegetables that haven't been cooked properly which would make them taste awful unless they're drenched in sauce. There are "unhealthy" options in Japan, but also convenient options that don't seem so bad unless my information is faulty, and the trying of vegetables as part of the culture probably helps with people liking them and having them be better quality.
Even when I go flat, people tend to assume the worst. "This exists" turns into "this is bad" or "this happens most of the time" ... which is kinda something that's on them, especially if they go more into that assumption during attempts at correction. With lack of threads already dedicated... hmm. Maybe there could be an official ghost account? https://kintsugi.seebs.net/threads/report-confidentiality-split-from-another-thread.7358/ started with a mod taking ownership of the thread as ablative armor. I completely lost anything in the racism thread because they were attacking me for not even knowing where the line was instead of trying to show me where the line was. My conclusion is that only racists acknowledge that race exist. I am intending to talk about something in the TERF thread, so maybe I will learn something that could be applied elsewhere. Yeah, I know how to use the spoiler tag code-wise. Not so much for when it's appropriate.
If you're getting assumptions of bad faith now, a lot of that is because you've already done a lot to set off alarm bells, and that's not going to just disappear. Like I said, anything is a risk. Trying to examine what people react badly to in your words will help you find what things parse to them as more judgmental or biased. A split thread is a special case, and afaik that's the only time even for those cases that a mod has done that. A thread might get locked or moved, but in most cases, the OP started the thread deliberately, even if the conversation went places they didn't like. OP didn't intend/want to start that thread (it was split off by a different mod), and I stepped in afterwards to mitigate distress. It's not something that will typically come up. If you want to learn by observing, and you want people to stop taking your posts in bad faith, odds are low that this will be a constructive move. You can still try to have the conversation, but you'll be going into a pretty touchy area without taking time for independent observation, and reigniting things in that touchy area right after reigniting things in a different touchy area. It's still allowed, but I think you'll be sabotaging yourself from the start.
Rather than go into too much of the other things there, I just want to point out here that it's like... mh. Think of it like a bike helmet. Will you absolutely always 100% need one when you get on a bike? Well you're probably only going to REALLY NEED IT if you're in an accident, or falling off the bike. Is it definitely better to wear it everytime oyu get on a bike anyways? Yes, because the pain of not-wearing-a-helmet-when-you-fall-off is a lot worse than the mild annoyance of wearing a helmet despite not needing it that time. So say you are talking about something that you're not sure is bad enough for a content warning? It's probably better to err on the side of caution and put it behind a spoiler with like cw: [insert keywords] in the description, rather than risk upsetting people, bc most people will be understanding that even if they get mildly annoyed by having to click a spoiler tag, someone else will be thankful their day wasn't ruined. Things that are usually spoilered and tagged for in most online spaces I frequent are: drug mentions (outside of dedicated threads) suicide/suicidal ideation self harm animal injury violence sex/nsfw content (outside of dedicated, 18+ threads) big pictures that make the mobile interface unusable gifs (bc a lot of us are photosensitive or easily upset/distracted by moving images or rapid flashing) slurs weight discussions and anythign involving calorie restriction (outside of dedicated threads) This is not an exhaustive list, just the things I can think of off the top of my head
Well I finally found a story of crab-bucketing outside of a hate group. https://www.reddit.com/r/loseit/comments/9p5y69/how_do_you_respond_to_oh_come_on/ Most of the stories I find on loseit are the family trying to sabotage weight-loss. But most of the people here seem to be anti-diet, so whatever.
... That's really just politeness. It's not going to ruin your weight loss goals or anything. Also, the comments are pretty cultish IMO. Like, "why does it matter to you what I eat?" maybe because you're literally starving yourself? Because yes, 1200 calories a day is starving yourself, and there's no way anything called the "warrior diet" is remotely healthy. Personally, I'm on a paleo diet. I eat whatever I can with no particular set times and a focus on carbs and fat for energy.
That sure is a story of a single asshole, being a bit obnoxious. I don't see this being in any way related to body positivity movements supposedly being 'corrupted', because it lacks any connection to the body positivity movement. That sure is an assumption you have there. I would personally say most people here are against dysfunctional dieting.
... Wait, this person is supposed to be in maintenance with that caloric intake? How do they work while being in a fucking coma?
I am not sure if I'm understanding 'crab bucketing' correctly. Is this a reference to the person who does indulge in over-eating/eating sweets/etc attempting to cajole the dieting person into doing the same?
So who is gonna tell these people that, say, gladiators had bulking up meal plans not unlike professional athletes today? So you know, eating a SHITLOAD of calories to maintain an incredibly active lifestyle?
