•  CoderKat   ( @CoderKat@lemm.ee ) 
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      11 months ago

      In particular, women are more likely to be viewed as “bitchy”, “bossy”, etc for doing the exact same thing that a man could do without being considered as such.

      So it’s not just women speaking up, but also that there’s a gender imbalance in how that speaking up can be viewed.

      •  Piers   ( @Piers@beehaw.org ) 
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        511 months ago

        That can go either direction though. Sometimes the women are being unfairly judged for reasonable behaviour a man wouldn’t be challenged for. Sometimes the women are being judged for unreasonable behaviour that a man would be unfairly unchallenged for.

    •  CoderKat   ( @CoderKat@lemm.ee ) 
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      711 months ago

      I think the big deciding factor is how they’re approaching the questions and what the questions are. Like, if someone is “just asking questions” where the questions just so happen to be a common bad faith talking point, yeah, I’m gonna assume they’re also acting in bad faith.

      Eg, leading questions are a particularly common example here. The amount of lean towards their already-decided viewpoint can vary. They might word their question to be convinced away from their viewpoint as the default (“why isn’t the moon landing fake?”), or maybe they’ll provide a statement that obviously gives more weight to their side (“the government is so untrustworthy, so how can we trust the moon landing was real?”).

      But often, they even do word the questions in a perfectly valid way, because they’re not trying to get an answer. They’re not gonna be convinced and they’re trying to get an answer. What they want to do is make someone else mistake being stumped for “this person might be right”. Eg, if someone asks you “is the moon landing real?” and you don’t actually know how to prove that it’s real, that can make you think that perhaps it wasn’t real. After all, you can’t explain how it is. But that’s a fallacy. You not being able to explain it has nothing to do with whether or not it’s real. Asking questions is cheap and easy. It takes no time investment compared to answering or understanding an answer. That makes it effective for planting seeds of doubt. And of course, people should think critically, but many folks aren’t going to or aren’t don’t have the time. So they’ll retain this low effort seed of doubt and that’s it.

      Plus of course, searching for these questions, especially leading ones, can get you to fall into conspiracy theory or alt right echo chambers, which will have the leading question included in multiple times and technically is a better match from a pure SEO point of view. Search engines do try and train themselves against the common leading questions, but they often have to do that explicitly. This is actually an area where search engines like DuckDuckGo do worse at. You’re more likely to have a leading question in the top results because, again, it really is the most accurate match for that question. Should search engines direct you to the correct results or should they direct you to the results that are most accurate for what you searched for? Nobody really agrees and it’ll be criticized either way (personally, I think that correctness is far more important because otherwise the search engines propagates misinformation).

      • I usually find the best argument against “is the moon landing fake” or equivalent stuff to be the fact that the Soviet Union stated it was real, when they would have benefited a lot more from denying it and/or proving it to be fake. When your enemy supports your argument then it’s more probable that it’s true.

  • Being bluntly honest. People who are neurodivergent can struggle with being “politely dishonest” and can tell you what they think in a very blunt manner without meaning to offend.

    Not engaging in small talk. Again, people who are neurodivergent tend to prefer talking about things that fascinate them and can have a hard time understanding the point of talking about just whatever.

    Struggling with being on time, struggling to focus on someone or something, struggling with eye contact. In general, neurodivergent traits tend to be seen as “asshole behavior” because they are abnormal and don’t conform to society. People who aren’t normal tend to be viewed as assholes because how dare they inconvenience me by being different.

    Source: personal experience as well as listening to the experiences of others. I’ve been hit with all these things at least once and accused of being an asshole, aloof, and/or self-centered.

    • I find that struggling to be on time is fine, actually not being on time is disrespectful of my time. In modern society we have so many options available to make sure we can keep on time. Set up alarms, time how long it takes you to get dressed and out the door, time how long it takes you to get somewhere, set alarms to keep you on time based on what you’ve actually measured, not what one “feels” is enough time.

      Personally I’m more often than not 5+ minutes early; I can always wait a little more before I go in or something, it’s often harder to “just get there faster”.

      BTW; if someone is late because of something outside their control that’s fine; just make sure to inform me ASAP.

      • I think the core trait to look out for is willingness to work around personal issues. With time that might be an openness about your problems, at the very least. Maybe aiming for half an hour earlier, communicating status often and early. Fucking up is human, but not trying your best not to fuck up is a dick move.

      • I tried that. I’ve tried alarms, I’ve tried timing myself, none of it works for me. I’m at the point where the steps I try to take to be on time are actually detrimental to my mental health. It’s why I’ve kinda given up on actually trying to be on time. It’s not that I don’t have respect for you, it’s that I need to have respect for myself. I was putting so much stress on myself that I wasn’t able to enjoy anything anymore. I was disconnecting myself from others because I was afraid of the fact that I couldn’t be on time and how they’d react to it. I legitimately, truly, cannot help it.

        I get the feeling from your response that you’re not going to be happy and you’re going to tell me that I’m just lazy, or that I’m irresponsible or inconsiderate. I’m very used to it. Sorry.

        • Why would I bother with calling you lazy or irresponsible or inconsiderate? If you were someone I knew I just wouldn’t invite you to stuff after the first few times you don’t show up on time. Whether people don’t mean to be inconsiderate when showing up late doesn’t matter to me, it’s still not respecting my time and I simply don’t want to deal with that after a few times. But you are just a random person on the internet whose being on time or not does not affect me at all. But I don’t actually believe that you cannot help it at all. Doesn’t mean I’m going to argue about it, that’s your cross to bear and has no effect on me.

          The solution for you might be to have all/most social stuff at your place so you don’t have to deal with getting somewhere at a specific time.

    • I think it’s important to bear in mind that some of those things are what neurotypical folks, I guess you could call them, use to convey interest or disinterest. Eye contact is a way to express interest, and helps to show one is intently listening to the speaker. Conversely, frequently glancing away is kind of the body language equivalent of giving short “uh huh” type answers when one is trying to disengage from a conversation.

      My point isn’t that you should feel bad about struggling with these nuances; I just think it’s worth mentioning that some of those negative reactions you may have experienced just has to do with expectations in body language. It’s not that someone who’s neurodivergent is being an asshole, it’s just that they’re sending out signals we’re otherwise used to interpreting as disinterest, and that is (often) off-putting.

      Again, it’s not something to feel bad about, it’s just communicating on different wavelengths so-to-speak. Sort of like a language/culture difference.

      • I would agree with you except that I’ve seen people try to clarify that they’re autistic, or ADHD, or bipolar, etc, and explain that it causes them to act in that manner and sometimes, no matter how hard they try, they can’t surpress it or “act normal”; only to be told overwhelmingly by the people in the room/thread that they’re an asshole and selfish for not trying hard enough.

        I do understand that some of those things are used as visual indicators for people to determine how the other is feeling about the current conversation, and maybe it’s way more important to people than I realize; but there are way too many people who will tell you that if you can’t alter your behavior to be normal, then you’re an asshole.

    • Yeah, i can relate. Yesterday i empathized with people doing moral wrong stuff, saying that i can understand their logic. And than was acused that it would be my logic. That irrate me the whole night, but in the end it just was my brutal honesty and a lack of black and white thinking.

      But yeah, it hurts when people missread that. I hope you doing good :)

    • Reminds of a post a few days ago, that described how people think you’re condescending and sit on a high horse, just because you use some fancy words here and there.

      Meanwhile I’m just trying to describe something with as much detail as possible, because it’s important to convey exactly what I mean.

      • I find treading the line between people thinking I’m talking down to them vs them thinking I’m pretentiously trying to seem smarter than them exhausting. It’s a stupid game where I try really hard not to unintentiont piss people off and they get offended and resentful anyway because I dared to try to communicate with them but failed to perfectly thread the needle of how to speak to them on a level they are comfortable with.

          •  Piers   ( @Piers@beehaw.org ) 
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            11 months ago

            Sadly I find that the people who I most often come into conflict about this with are the ones who have unknowingly curated their social world to only people with very similar brains to themselves by being an intolerable jerk to those who don’t (I suspect their discomfort with someone being “smarter” than them stems from projecting their own feelings and behaviour towards those “dumber” than them) but due to external circumstances of life we are forced to try our best to get along. The fact that they make that unecesarily difficult doesn’t change that I still need to do my best to do so. Meanwhile, anyone I don’t need to get along with who acts that way tends to very quickly pick up on the message to suck my nuts and fuck off. For those who I must get along with I try very hard not to try to clarify things for them unless it seems either quite important that they have a better understanding or that it would be very easy and non-comtraversial to do so. I still usually try to give them plenty of time to figure it out themselves, then try to give them the least amount of prompting possible. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

            Meanwhile I’ll still happily ask for their help if there’s something that exceeds my capabilities but not theirs. It’s just a shame that intelligence (whatever that really means) is somehow seen as more important an indicator of someone’s worth than most other random traits like height, coordination etc.

            As a profoundly clumsy person I’ve never felt I was being personally insulted by someone else being dexterous for example.

      • I have a friend that’s always late, like literally always. I tried to put myself in his shoes because he’s got 2 small kids and that should be extremely exhausting, but I don’t think he even tries anymore.

        • I’m perpetually late. Trying to arrive on time to things I don’t occupies so much of my head. I try to build in buffer time for emergencies. And every single time I’m still late. I don’t even have two kids. If your friend is anything like me, arriving late fills him with guilt every single time, and the two kids are factors of chaos in planning that simply cannot ever be fully accounted for

          •  Aosih   ( @Aosih@lemm.ee ) 
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            11 months ago

            Reframe the way you think. Stop trying to arrive on time, and just commit to arriving early. I’ve easily arrived an hour early to appointments and just lounged around on reddit or read a book. I’d rather waste an hour of my time, than 15 minutes of a friend’s (if you have an appointment with a group, multiply time you are late by # of people).

            This is what we mean when we say people who are constantly late don’t care about wasting other people’s time. Even if they don’t intend it, they are still choosing to prioritise themselves over others.

            • I’m ADHD, I literally have to start preparing to leave an hour and half before I need to go in order to be on time to somewhere 15min away, and I’m still sometimes 10-15min late. Why? I have no sense of time, and I have been told that this is not something that I can fix. When I get focused on something, I no longer experience the passage of time. If I’m not focused on something, I can’t get anything done.

              I can’t control this.

              I’ve been told I shouldn’t feel bad about it because I can’t help it.

              I feel horrible for it anyway.

              • Would aggressive alarms be of any help to make sure you can get unfocused from the thing you’re focused on and moving to the “getting to the right place” part? I’ve “forgotten the time” when it’s just me setting a time for me to do something, but when I need to be somewhere for/with others I make sure to set my alarms earlier and more of them to keep myself from having “just enough time”. And I have to make sure I actually respect the alarms, I’ve made the error of thinking “I have 5 more minutes before I need to leave” so I just start leaving when the alarm goes off now.

                I don’t know your exact situation, so this may not be of any help, but it may help someone, somewhere.

  • I turn the question around… people who are clearly liars, deceivers… politicians and businessmen that people line up to vote for with their money or public votes. You really wonder what people think an “asshole” is when you see the kind of politicians that get massive support in a population - to a point people have their photograph on the wall of their workplace or home, put stickers on their cars, etc. to support people that are clearly monstrous. A lot of people do not seem to like to study the crowds of Europe 1930’s terrible leaders and just how many lined up to cheer on such persons.

    The scientists a person believes also is a huge indicator of who they consider to be an ‘asshole’. Just passively listening to people who support denial of climate change, denial of microscopic germs and virus, etc. The enthusiasm that followers to non-factual science seem to be very high, and they draw crowds in ways that fact-based science does not seem to do.

    •  nzodd   ( @nzodd@beehaw.org ) 
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      11 months ago

      When you make up fake science out of whole cloth, it’s easy to make up something to that accords with people’s biases. Actual truth is simply less likely to fall into that category, and more likely to be uncomfortably inconvenient or terrifying. There’s nothing fun about global warming, deadly pandemics, nor microplastic pollution.

      Fake news never makes demands on its target audience. Sometimes it says “you are the victim”, or “those people are the problem”, or at the very least, “this is fine.” But it never says “if we don’t get our shit together we and our children face a dismal future.” Instead it always appeals to the greedy and the lazy amongst us.

          • I do not think more than 0.5% of humanity demonstrates self-awareness or an ability to openly discuss media-consumption bias.

            I think people fall in love with dead persons so easily that they will sell out all of living/alive humanity for a storybook.


            “Finnegans Wake is the greatest guidebook to media study ever fashioned by man.” - Marshall McLuhan, Newsweek Magazine, page 56, February 28, 1966.

            I have never done LSD or any other illegal drugs, but I have read FInnegans Wake: www.LazyWake.com

  • Not agreeing to false logic (say, out of pressure to be polite or non-confrontational), especially when the next step would be doing something based on that logic. People sincerely don’t understand why deceiving you once like this won’t work another time and think it makes you an asshole.

  • I am often thought of as an asshole because I am not much of a smiler and much of my politeness is perfunctory. I am somewhat reclusive and a loner by nature. I find my time at work having to mask exhausting and overstimulating. That much said, once people get to know me they generally discover that I am passionate and care deeply for people who are suffering or experience discrimination and will fight for them.