r/fatlogic derail

There's a pattern in your speech that's come up a couple of times before, where it seems like you introduce deliberate ambiguity into the conversation. Like here, it's about 'you won't change my mind about approaching fat people on the street', where the correct conclusion is 'I already think approaching fat people on the street is bad, so you aren't going to change my mind.'

If the conversation stays on track, that point may get addressed directly, like here, with the post about walking and minding your own business. But like UnknownQuantity said, when people are reading the conversation as it happens, and the posts are separated, it really confuses the conversation. And again, that's assuming good faith. This could have been a whole GOTCHA thing where you wanted people to assume the worst so you could correct them.

You've talked about being frustrated with unclear communication a number of times, but this habit is only making this conversation more unclear. This is a forum with a heavily autistic population. Playing games with misdirection and being deliberately confusing is going to go land flat. And what good is it for? Who are you sharing the gotcha with? You could have cut this off earlier by just saying 'you don't need to convince me to leave people on the street alone because I already believe they should be left in peace'. You don't need to bait people into assuming the worst just so you can be smug and 'well ACTUALLY--' them.

And if you weren't hoping to make people assume the worst, then.... the conversation wasn't shaped for anything much better than that. You've got people upset at you, it's difficult to get a handle on what you, personally believe, and you don't seem to parse a lot of words that are said to you. When people try to make a point about how stress and pressure makes weight loss extra difficult, your response is about how 'I guess that guy who chugged multiple two-liters a day was just fine then', and people don't feel like you're engaged with what they're saying. Then when you jump to something as openly provocative as telling them they won't change your mind, a number of readers are absolutely going to assume you're defending your right to harass people on the street. You're placing yourself in opposition, saying argumentative things, they're not going to take that as a sign of AGREEMENT. The best outcome you're going to get is people getting annoyed that you're trying to set up bait for a gotcha.

And if the gotcha wasn't intended at all (which I have serious doubts about but I'm trying to cover my bases), consider again how statements that you mean to be innocuous frequently end up making people upset with you. I'm not going to do a full dissection when I don't really think that was the situation in this case, but consider why someone reading this would immediately react with hostility and suspicion, and then consider that if you want to settle into any community, anywhere, having a communication style that makes it so easy to pick fights is not going to make your life easier.

 

Yeah, I know that but
1) By doing that you're not actually agreeing with me. You're making up points that look bad so that I have to fall over myself correcting you, which is really manipulative and why I only responded to the first senescent you said. Because fuck that noise.
2) I don't want you to lie and never said I did. Implying that I do want you to lie is just rude. This isn't a trick to finding the right words to say, this is me trying to get you to understand that what your saying is harmful. If you disagree, then I guess you disagree. You could just say that.
3) It's disingenuous as fuck and it makes people not want to respond to you in good faith because you're just going to twist their words around at them. Isn't that something you complained about other people doing to you?

Uh-huh. No one is going to laugh. That's just going to make people angry at you. And make people believe that there's no point in trying to talk to you because you're just going to twist their words around until you're arguing with yourself. No one wants to bother with that. That kind of "game" is part of why people have mostly stopped trying to argue with you in good faith.

Also turning something into a game instead of engaging with the words that are said just tells people that you don't actually care about the topic at hand or the participants.

So if you're going to consistently do that, then tell me why people should continue to converse with you and care about what you have to say? Why should we continue to argue in good faith (meaning that we're assuming that everyone here is not just trolling), when it seems like all you are doing is trolling?

I don't really think that you're trolling, but when you play games like this, it makes it seem like you are.

Also, it'd be cool if you could respond to the entirety of my posts, and most of my posts. I think this is the most you've engaged with me since you joined Kintsugi, so I do appreciate that. It does frequently seem like you just skip to responding to the angry posts instead of the posts where people are actually trying to talk to you.

Edit - I really should stop posting and /then/ looking for typos... (aka typo edits)

 

Okay, so, Greallan, one of the concerns I've had is that you frequently behave in sort of narcissistic ways. You appear to have no modelling of other people as distinct entities with their own agency or goals unless those goals involve you, mostly hurting you. So you'll decide that people are doing things to hurt you without any particular justification, but you don't have any other ideas about what they might want, or why people might engage in conversation at all. And "lie to agree with you" is a really good example of this. You appear not to be aware that other people might be interested in communicating, which becomes impossible if you will just arbitrarily start lying about things. If people can't tell which things they've successfully communicated, or convinced you of, they can't communicate, and no wonder you're having such a hard time reaching successful communication.

Suggestion: Stop trying to outsmart and manipulate people. You're bad at it, in exactly the way that would be typical for a narcissist. You keep doing short-term things to try to Make People Like You or Make People Be Happy, but you're treating it as a purely magical ritual where if you just picked the right words, people would be happy. You keep asserting things that strongly imply that you think that the problem is not what you say, but exclusively how you phrased it. But that's not true at all! The problem is that your beliefs about the world appear to be almost entirely a festering pool of toxicity, blame, and contempt, whether for yourself or others. It's not how you phrase this that causes the problem, really. It's that you think that "lie to agree with you" is a thing people would do in conversation. It's not! That's a thing that would be appropriate if fascists with guns were trying to interrogate you. It's not a thing that has any place in interactions between people who have relatively comparable power in a situation and are not actively trying to kill you or other people.

The problem here isn't that you're missing arcane subtleties of communication. It's that you are consistently cruel to people, and that you make it clear that anything you say that sounds less bad might just be a lie offered because you feel like it will advance your cause right now.

It sounds like you're very unhappy, and you want people to treat you differently, and you don't really understand why people are hostile. The answer is, you are not acting in a way which affords them any other viable alternatives. If you want to have healthy interactions with people, you're going to need to start, not by trying to figure out how to superficially adopt the form of a kinder person, but by actually changing your priorities in how you interact with people. And you're going to need to do it for a fairly long time before people start trusting you, because you've made it so clear that you will say things that look like that in the hopes of getting people to stop being mad, without any actual sincerity or intent to change.

 

Something that has been brought up a few times is that there are ways to admit fault that are flavored like 'I guess I'm just the worst person in the world, I guess I'm just subhuman garbage', etc., which are likely to go over very badly and be taken as attempts at manipulation. Those over the top self-directed negative statements will be read as a cue for listeners to jump in and offer comfort that 'no no no, you aren't the WORST, you're fine!'

So either they disagree with the negative statements and offer you reassurance, or they ignore those declarations and tacitly accept them as they continue focusing on the meat of the conversation. It's an unwinnable position, where they don't have a good option. But most people will probably choose to ignore what they read as a manipulation tactic and continue the conversation itself. If that comes across to you as them rubbing your face in the issue, consider how the tone of your response boxed them into that position, and why they'll be frustrated and more reluctant to drop the point than they were before.

 

When you've tried to say you were wrong about things in other places, you FREQUENTLY jump to hyperbolic statements about how you're the literal worst. I'm not talking about the first post of this thread necessarily, but that the times you try to admit fault are really not reading that way from the outside.

And as far as the first post in this thread, it's really, really not clear that you think this is a BAD habit, or that there's anything wrong with it at all. Given the following conversation, it honestly still reads to me like you're defending the whole mocking fee-fees thing as reasonable and unobjectionable. This ties back into the posts from last night, where frequently you take unclear positions and sometimes you take misleading positions, and it makes trying to communicate with you a very frustrating experience.

 

I think you are misunderstanding the purpose of post moderation. We are not expressing an opinion on whether you're a good person or a bad person when we make moderation decisions. We're trying to keep possibly-unintentional things from causing rapidly-escalating flame wars. You've said things that suggest that you are unaware of many of the things at which people take offense, and other things suggesting you're doing it on purpose for various reasons, and I have no idea what the motivation is, but also I don't need to know. If you put something in a post which I am highly confident will result in escalation of conflict, it makes sense to bounce the post and explain the concern to you so you can decide whether to try to rephrase the thing, or just not say it, or argue that it's absolutely intentional and you do want to hurt people's feelings, or whatever else. You get to decide what kind of person you want to be; we're just trying to make sure that the escalation of conflict is at least slowed down a bit.

I think this is very close to the exact opposite of the concerns I've seen people raising. Phrases like "lying to agree with you" sound very much like trying to change things only superficially to avoid people being mad, rather than trying to address the actual problems.

 

@Greallan I'm sorry for losing my patience with you last night and making you feel yelled at.

I was not trying to yell, just bluntly explain.

I wasn't as nice about it as I could have been, though.