Continuing the discussion from A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far a-gay: Star Wars gets first official LGBT character:
It is no longer off topic here. Have fun, everyone.
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Whatās annoying is that it wasnāt off topic in the first place, until a few people started informing me of I should be aware of what I was āreally sayingā.
I feel like I need to take the effort to stomp out the burning bag of doggy doo which gets dropped in the room. then the same people complain that it stinks up their conversation.
One coincidence I have noticed is that this is nearly every time in topics which pertain to sex or gender.
Sex/Gender: 80%
Politics: 20%
Science: 0%
Technology: 0%
Art: 0%
Soā¦ I would be interested to know why those are the topics where somebody often jumps down my throat. Itās not like I make irrelevant comments or troll people, it seems like they just dislike my opinions and so prefer to nudge me out of the conversation. Which seems unfair, as those topics are often relevant to me.
Iāll bite.
I do not think you troll, and I think your opinions come from a sincere place, but for me personally I canāt figure out what that place is.
I have kinda figured out @Medievalist, @jlw, @falcor, @jlw, @milliefink, @miasm, @othermichel, etc, but I guess I donāt get what your angle is.
And that doesnāt mean you even need to have an angle. But I guess I find your rhetoric seeming to come from a viewpoint that isnāt well articulated. That doesnāt mean you are wrong, its just often I donāt understand.
To be fair I think I do the exact same thing. :). And I want to keep you (and me) around.
This is the quintessential element behind non-,echo chamber conversations. And when a person is on the receiving side it can hurt. A lot.
But donāt give up. Either you teach someone or someone teaches you. And it usually.takes years to figure out.
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You double figured me out! I guess I am an open book.
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Wait a minute, whatās with all the French talk?!?! Dammit, japhroaig, you invoked othermichel, OtherMichaelās Mirror Universe twin!
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I donāt know if it was intentional, but that was a IRL spit take.
Some day my wife will Photoshop me with such abs .
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You are her irl romance hero, you do not need Abs.
Buns of steel? We can all use.
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Power drama. Nothing more complicated. Sex and politics are power issues.
Some people share.
Some other people punch down and kiss up.
To some folks, any disagreement is a status fight. if they donāt win, then youāve taken them down a peg. Even if itās just liking a different brand of beer, or getting to a parking spot first, and especially if -they- started it.
But when sex and politics come up, thatās personal, and monkey brains do three things well: masturbate, hoard bananas, and throw shit. All of those I bet were on display in these threads?
Itās hard for evolved humans to remember. But that behavior is just ape behavior. Scratch your face off type of stuff. At least itās not hindbrain behavior. But people run by the hindbrainā¦ I donāt see them online much. Usually out at the bar.
Oh, and I have you figured out. Not that it matters, but youāre one of my faves.
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I think your comments have an unfortunate tendency to come across as dismissing entire discussions and everyone who is having them. I believe that you think of that as challenging assumptions, thinking critically and ouside the box and so on.
The problem is that often the message people take away from that is disrespect for their problems, for concepts that have meaning in their world and for their opinions. It is as if you went out of your way to destroy common ground. And I am not just talking about opposing specific arguments or specific sides of an issue.
Your insistence that so many social contructs are overrated and everything would be so much easier if we just left them behind is probably the most obvious example. At the very least often that argument is simply too fundamental to make much sense in the discussion of specific real world problems.
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Phooey, I could do all three at the same time, with both hands behind my back! And thatās just before breakfastā¦
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Oh? 
Oh! 
Oh. 
Oh. 
What am I doing here again?
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Emoting, apparently.
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@popobawa4u, I think this sums up my view as well. I think, whether you mean to or not, you can come off as dismissive (and Iād guess, maybe given the medium, we all do at one time or another).
I think this is especially true.
But much like @japhroaig and @AcerPlatanoides, I think you are coming from a place of sincerity, even if I often disagree with you on some of the general broader issues.
Last, I hope Iāve never made you feel alienated or attacked, even if itās clear we donāt always see things from the same perspectives, I do think you are a good egg! Iād hope you tell me if you felt I was doing something to actively hurt your feelingsā¦ because thatās never my intent.
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i often ask myself the same question. and have i mentioned i am an ill informed idiot, so never trust what i say? (ha, recursive humor :D). and iāll see myself out before i make a bigger fool of myself.
Wasnāt 100% sure what you were saying but I guess it can seem like Iām trolling sometimes but that is only because I always do. Kinda. Not really.
I do flip into ultra-contrary mode at the drop of a hat but good faith communication can be had!
I guess Iām always hopeful that someone will have actually figured out exactly what it is that Iām doing. Iād sure like to know.
Of course, I am cognisant of the fact that dialectics are theoretically possible and something to be strived for but find that most of the time is spent, sort of, nudging the other person and intimating ādid you see thatā, until you are satisfied they did see that and have basically the same understanding as you of the situation.
The fact that āopinionā of the state of the environment clutters up so much of the bandwidth of communication seems to be employed most often by some people to twist reality into serving the pre-conditioned phantasy of conflict in their lives.
And it is there, alas, that I can be most often found employing the base pursuits of sarcasm and contrariety.
But I had not thought of you as one of those people.
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Thereās another aspect of this, Popo. (Can I use the common nickname for your given name?)
Sometimes folks (none on this thread, heaven forfend) just want to have the last word with you and then have a full stop. Probably not āpersonalā (although obviously it is to you), as much as it is the nature of the beast.
ETA: because Mr. V started the topic, it appears as his quote instead of Mr. bawa4Uās
Very tactfully put! XD Yes, I sometimes think I am doing this, but I am not going out of my way to, itās just how I think. I noticed from a very young age that many (if not most) people try to have their understanding of situations - especially social situations - match those of other people. My approach has always been to encourage people to think about situations in as many different ways as possible; the more different, the better. Because this is how we increase the pool of perspectives and possible courses of action for the future.
I never disrespect peopleās problems, but I am often unenthusiastic with their solutions. Especially when I suspect they are avoiding fundamental causes of what they profess their problem to be. This can appear as me approaching situations from a completely different domain, such as scientific solution to a social problem, or an artistic solution to a scientific problem. This approach can yield viable options while avoiding the risk of being too close to the problem and thus considering options which tend to be too similar.
As for common ground, I see this (surprise!) rather differently than do most people. What I think is really common between people is methodology. You can apply a scientific method to any sort of problem, or a technique of mixing paint no matter what your subject is. If it works in reality, it will work no matter who uses it. Much of the game of oppression and power struggle strives to obfuscate this, conditioning people to suppose that only special, anointed people have certain abilities. When people get sucked into this they tend to look for commonality in superficial areas, such as personal values and identity. Personal values are valuable to the individual, but I think they donāt translate very well in dealing with others. And identity I think is an impractical diversion in even the best case.
So, what seems to happen then is that people speak for me instead of allowing themselves to think āthe unthinkableā. For example, people often stereotype what I say to imply that social constructs are not real, that money and government are stupid fictions. But what I really say, and I try to be explicit about, is a DIY approach. That social constructs we find and people try to rope us into are not any more ārealā than those you or I can choose to make ourselves, within our own social lives. I can accept that some donāt agree with this, but it boggles me how instead most people interpret me saying this to mean something else entirely. When people seem to deeply misunderstand me I can get caught up in a challenge of trying to be clear, because clarity and communication are sort-of insecurities of mine. Sometimes it seems that people are absolutely determined to misinterpret what I say, but then decry any response from me as self-important nonsense. My methods do fail me when people are determined to make things personal.
My problem with this rejection of such ideas is that people seldom consider whether or not the approach might work, or try doing it. Often what I recommend people try doing is analogous to what other people did to create the problem in the first place, so I tend to see this as confirmation that it can indeed work. Itās much easier for me to respect if somebody tells me: āWell, I made my own currency, and it was rubbish. Hereās whyā¦ā versus āThatās stupid, nobody makes currencies, they just happen by themselves. GFYS.ā Sometimes I think of freakishly original, untested ideas which nobody has ever done, but I tend to keep those to myself. Most of these āoutside the boxā ideas I see as the difference between playing a game with others where the rules are designed to be unfair, and hoping/expecting the game to suddenly work differently - and simply getting together with people to play a different game with more equitable rules instead. IMO it would be maladaptive to hope ābusiness as usualā will ever work differently when most people do the same things as ever. Real autonomy and agency seem to lie in breaking the ācaptive audienceā paradigm.
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