This hits kinda close to home, because it took me two decades to realize how many fleas I had from my dad for "you win arguments by saying how much more you know than them and steamrolling them with everything you can think to say about the issue to prove your superior knowledge, and if they keep arguing, just reach farther for more steamroller fuel."
Marshlighting anecdata: my mom did that to me. I've had minor hoarding problems my entire life, and my mom would sometimes try to deal with my tendency to collect bits of trash by going into my room when I wasn't there, packing stuff up into a box, and sticking it in the attic. Her thought process was that if I noticed and asked for it back, she'd get it out and give it back. The problem was that she never told me she did this until years after she started doing it. So for years, if I couldn't find something I knew I owned, I usually assumed I'd somehow lost it elsewhere in my room and spent hours digging through my stuff. If I couldn't find it I usually assumed my sibling had taken it because sometimes that happened. And when I occasionally did try to ask my mom if she'd seen the thing she'd usually brush me off, because she didn't remember what was in the boxes in the attic. Needless to say, this did not alleviate my hoarding problems at all.
I do feel like by trying to draw an intentional/unintentional line, that becomes a bit problematic... Like, one of my friends has a shit memory, but whatever, I try to be calm about disagreeing because I know she's not trying to invalidate me. She still wants me to talk to her and have my own thoughts and stuff, and she isn't trying to control me. My parents were gaslighty - and I doubt that they sat down and seriously thought about how to make me crazy and doubt my own words, but they sure capitalised on that. They did want to control my thoughts - again, maybe not in those precise words would they have thought it, but it was fundamentally what they wanted. And they did not want disagreement or independent thought or really anything except just agreeing with what they said about everything, even if it contradicted what they'd said or done a week ago. So I think there is a line somewhere, but I don't think it's 'did they intentionally set out to gaslight me'. Maybe more along the lines of 'are the results of gaslighting something they want'?
Yeah, and there's definitely some other cases that seem like they should be gaslighting that the "are they deliberately lying" heuristic throws out. Like people who habitually reality-edit to the point that they end up believing the stuff they make up.
Re: this: I was on a bus just yesterday with some jerkbag who was not only taking up two seats, but had spread his knees so wide that he had blocked half the aisle, so everyone trying to get to the empty seats farther back in the bus had to squeeze past his knee. There is basically no way to characterize that except a total lack of consideration for other people's needs.
antis vs. larries sounds different than the normal antis vs. shippers thing, since larry is an one direction ship and some of the shippers believe it is An Actual Real Life thing. so the issues are probably different, and probably not that connected to the antis we know and hate.
Larry shippers (portmanteau of Louis and Harry) are the ones who came up with the fake baby conspiracy and have been pretty well noted for being super invasive of the band's privacy, usually while decrying the 'homophobic' producers for covering up the obvious love between the two band members. One of whom might actually literally irl have a girlfriend and baby. If it's come up recently, it probably has something to do with a (potentially Netflix exclusive) new show that's been pitched about a I-can't-believe-it's-not-One-Direction fan who writes Larry fanfic with the serial numbers filed off. The show's creators are pretty open about basing it off of the Larry phenomenon, and if it weren't specifically about a highly controversial RPF segment of fandom I might even be interested, but if there's been a surge in Larry hate in the anti tags, that'll be why.
when people ask what i'm thinking i often say "nothing" because most of the time but especially when im alone i don't think in words, so for the sake of conversation "nothing" is easier than putting the ol' thoughts-to-words translator to work. also sometimes im thinking about something inappropriate to the situation or something i just don't want to discuss with the person there
generally when i say i'm thinking about nothing, i'm thinking about like 100 somethings but none of them are anything that anybody would really care about. nothing is just the easy way out answer.
Same. I'm probably writing an entire fanfic in my head or something, but no one's going to be interested in that, so I just say "nothing" to get out of it. :P
Wrt the modest dress and whether or not it affects street harassment: depending on how you define modest, I can say that it's more likely to get you street harassed, and I have been followed by a group of men talking about what they'd do to me if they got me alone twice: once in a knee-length skirt and slightly risque shirt, and once in a pair of jeans and jacket that covered me from chin to fingertips. Both times it was a threat of sexual violence. Both times it was apparent that my manner of dress meant nothing, except that it was feminine in nature. When I dress masculine and get read as male from a distance, this doesn't happen. When I'm read as female, no matter how much I cover up, it does. That seems to be the causal relationship in my experience. (For purposes of definition, I am saying "modest" means "covered from wrist to neck, and from neck to ankle, with loose-fitting clothes that aren't sports wear" because of my experiences with specifically Mormon norms of dressing. I'm not sure how other people define it, but I think it's noteworthy that "goth" and "lolita" can both be modest modes of dress that are considered immodest by virtue of being extravagant, as can tracksuits which still get nasty comments from dudes in my experience.) edit: Tweaked wording for clarity. Also given the number of stories I've seen from cis men who present masculine but happen to have long hair that get street harassed, I'm relatively certain that while certain modes of dress may increase the frequency of harassment, I think that certain body shapes are going to be forced into that position without fail also, regardless of how much (or how little) they cover up.
if rapists -- even serial and malicious rapists -- are inherently broken and unfixable then that means it's possible to be broken and unfixable. which i dont want to believe. (not really an anecdote but in an effort not to clog the askbox i think this thread works?)
Re forgiving , I've also always known forgiving and letting go as being separate things, which made american news super weird like "I forgive the school shooter that killed my child", ???????????? But it makes more sense if "forgiving" means "letting go". So uh thanks seebs for the explanation?
It sounded to me like the person who sent in the first ask might have been in one of those mandatory-forgiveness cultures where you're supposed to pretend nothing happened and be best friends with someone who hurt you, too.
I mean, I don't think I've personally seen forgiving to mean pretending the thing didn't happen, but, like, at least being open to reconciliation with the person, so, like, I don't think someone here would be like, "you should forgive the person", but maybe "you should let go", because the first would probs be messed up? This is probably just a difference in wording xd
In my vocabulary, "forgive" has usually seemed to imply being open to reconciliation, too. So, e.g., it feels weird to say I "forgave" the people who bullied me in middle school, because I never want to interact with them again and still think their behavior was awful, I just don't waste time or energy caring about it any more.
i don't have a concrete definition of "forgive" for myself because i guess i... let things go pretty easily, maybe? also it's pretty rare for anyone to do something to me that is bad enough that i feel like forgiveness would even be an option. and a lot of the time it's like the thing already happened, there's nothing to be done about it, i just want to move on and not be bothered about it anymore. my mother uses "forgive" the way people use "to forgive a debt," so... it's like if someone does something really bad to you, usually some kind of restitution is in order, and "forgiving" is saying they don't have to make that restitution. but that doesn't mean you have to be all buddy-buddy with the person, it just means that they don't owe you for whatever they did anymore. i like that definition.
This is pretty much my personal use of forgiveness as well. With some people it can be really positive, like we've worked it out emotionally and I don't expect anything from them anymore because it's fixed. In other cases... I've let it go, and I don't expect anything from them anymore, including acceptable behavior and (hopefully) further interaction. I've described it more than once with a direct comparison to the debt meaning: I can make a loan, and later forgive it, but forgiving it does not mean I'm obliged to loan that person money ever again. The same goes for my trust and emotional energy.
WELL I AM NOT AN EXPERT IN LANGUAGES BY ANY MEANS BUT I AM A REPOSITORY FOR TRANSFORMER FACTS SO I think that the written language drift in Transformers (especially with respect to Old Cybertronian) can be pretty easily explained as drifting cultures. Given that in many continuities, Autobots and Decepticons had divergent home cities for their powerbases, it isn't unreasonable to think that many of these cities would have their own dialect and culture (and we know that in IDW, there are accents for different home cities) which could manifest in a unified Autobot or Decepticon culture with it's own language. Consider the case of German vs Finnish vs Spanish vs English: all three sharing roots in their written language that nonetheless leaves them with wildly different word constructions and in some cases, added or dropped letters. And that's not counting things like evolving gang signs and symbology, where certain ways of writing letters would be a means of signaling affiliation which could eventually drift into its own form of writing language. Or hey! Cursive vs printed English. If you taught one group of people only cursive for three centuries and one group only printed lettering, I imagine they'd end up with some pretty interesting divergences (and in some cases, probably people who can't read the other group's alphabet!) (Also I guess it depends on what you mean by "quickly", because IDW-verse Autobot/Decepticon war had 4 millions years to go crazy with, with long stretches of time post-Cybertronian destruction which involved minimal contact with the other side. By that standard, the fall of the Roman Empire was practically nothing, and certainly no reason for all these silly Europeans to start hacking up some new languages for no goddamn reason.) I mean, the meta reason is "because it's easier to make a 26 letter cipher than a conlang and also it looks really cool in the flashbacks in our comics" but that's not nearly as fun of an answer.
