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blunder [he/him] @ blunder @hexbear.net
Posts
4
Comments
189
Joined
6 mo. ago

  • we don't do bigotry in this house

    This would just be the start of a bitter argument with my folks... no way I would be allowed to call their speech bigotry (accurately) without some huge defensive rant about "I would never treat them any differently face to face", as if being two-faced is a virtue

  • I'm right there with you comrade

    When my parents came down to visit last, my mom was in my house for all of 5 minutes before she decided to make a dumb joke about the saw blades on the river at the TX border because "dumb Mexicans". Then she asked my then 6 year old son if he had a girlfriend.

    What do you do in these scenarios? I would seriously consider kicking them out; I have to fly to visit my parents and have changed my flights and left early because of comments like this. But I'm curious how others handle it.

  • CW boomer mind poison

    My ma is a fundamentalist Christian Zionist. She just sent me a video about why she thinks Gaza has it coming, and it's a Jordan Peterson interview. Since her religious radicalization she has also said homophobic and transphobic things to me, though I cannot tell if she is getting these from the computer or her church.

    My father cannot use a computer but has Fox News playing in his home at all hours of the day. By sheer coincidence, he wants all "the illegals" deported and asks me about crime in my neighborhood constantly, telling me (without ever having stepped foot here) that it is "out of control".

    Sometimes, in the very short time frame before I am enraged, I try to teach them media literacy and how to scrutinize WHY a source is saying what it is saying. They both basically just believe that whatever is said on the TV or the internet must be capital-T True. Because they are both so fucking stubborn and opposed to learning, this often devolves into a shouting match.

    I try to move the conversation away from this-or-that source and just prompt them to imagine themselves living the life of, e.g., an undocumented immigrant or a bombed Gazan child. But they think they know better than those people, and that if they would just follow the "right" channels (that they heard exist on TV and have never investigated further), they would not be in their situation in the first place.

    It is this fundamental lack of human empathy which makes me truly, deeply detest my parents, and which makes my visits to them shorter, and our phone calls less frequent.

    They have both made remarks to me along the lines of, "our family bond should exist beyond our political ideologies." But I have no place in my life for people without human empathy, whose idea of casual conversation is to bay for the blood of brown people.

    My partner is of a nationality that my father loudly wishes for deportation, and if we get married (I really hope so bc we really love each other!) I am strongly considering not inviting him or his family. Maybe seeing a normal family of this nationality would be eye-opening to him, but my partner's family is not an educational tool for an old man who has had his entire life to consider things differently.

    Anyway, that's why I like this website and my community and my friends, because I don't feel like every expression of human empathy is a trigger for fucking ideological combat.

    P.S.: This is an impulse I will never understand, to hear one thing about one topic and suddenly claim to understand it, and reduce all conversation and counter-argument down back to the one thing you heard one time. For people with very little intellectual curiosity and interest in being challenged, they are very argumentative and sure-footed; I have never heard either one of them say, "I don't know enough about that topic," let alone, "why do you/others feel that way?"

  • I love writing and I get great joy from well written work, and if I find typos or errors in a book I'm very put off by them.

    This, on the other hand, is a shitposting website. Anyone who shows linguistic pretentiousness while being one click away from fucking PPB is a nerd and should be bullied. Also not everyone's first language is English and not everyone has had the opportunity to study it to the same level.

    First rule of knowing something: it doesn't make you better than people who don't!

    Also language is flexible and constantly evolving. If the listener understands the speaker, the language was correct.

    (anyone watch Simon Roper's videos on YouTube? Dude studies linguistics of English from all periods of history, but he's so chill about it)

  • Yeah sounds familiar. Some of the talking points that come out I'm like, where did you get this from? It's wild to me how faithfully people will parrot a talking point from somewhere else without doing any investigation at all. I ask her why she thinks

    is so vehemently hated by its neighbor countries and she's like, "um, I dunno."