Innocuous things that make you irrationally angry (a list thread)

how? is there a secret? i would seriously love to know this :(

watching something on TV that you're only half-interested in usually does the trick

I can give you this, and the secret to complete inner peace, for $5 plus postage and handling for my pamphlet.

Also, did you know that if you have "pee anxiety" at a urinal, you can do math problems in your head and you'll start whizzing immediately. I wanted to share this but don't know where to post it.

how? is there a secret? i would seriously love to know this :(

― lex pretend

My "secret" is that it's an incredible relief to lie down and not have nagging pains in my feet, my back, tension in my neck, not have to maintain my posture anymore, stuff like that. My sleeping position gives me the only pure physical relaxation in my entire day. And relaxation puts me to sleep almost immediately.

Was actually thinking over this weekend that if I could have one superpower it would probably be the ability to sleep or stay awake at will. I have real trouble sleeping when I know I *have to* (e.g. if I need to get up early next morning) yet find it impossible to not feel that dozing-off feeling in a meeting where I cannot keep my eyes open with all the strength I can muster.

if you feel drowsey YOU ARE SECONDS AWAY FROM SLEEP! schlaffen sie!

IMO unless you are having sex there really isn't a good reason to be awake at 4am. Put down the bottle! Or maybe do your drugs earlier in the day for Christ's sake.

It seems like people do this a lot until they reach like 19 or 20.

Among my peers, seems to be an early-20s phenom. Actual age doesn't matter because there are plenty of people who still wish they were 22 and treat their body like it.

this is not irrational, but my perpetual offense at this sort of idiocy is. why do i read the internet? http://human-stupidity.com/stupid-dogma/racial-differences-intelligence/race-differences-in-intelligence-how-i-changed-my-mind

what exactly did you find idiotic about that article

The category entitled "Orientals" to start with...

The real question is, is it possible to write about this in any way without being accused of idiocy/ignorance/racism without just saying "these studies are all crap and we shouldn't discuss them"

The thing is that those studies are all crap and we shouldn't discuss them.

what exactly did you find idiotic about that article

Posts very much in character.

yeah thats the kind of response I figured from this place

Please tell us what you took away from the article.

"this place"

How about "these studies are generally dismissed due to their irrelevance in policy-making and their inability to create prescriptivist policy, or do really anything other than engender intolerance and backward thinking"

Like, how are you going to walk away from reading something like that? Deal more carefully with your Asian coworker because he might be outsmarting you? Be more descriptive to your black friends because they might not get what you mean?

Please tell us what you took away from the article.

That sounds like a good idea! I was just thinking about how much I'd love to be misquoted and piled on right now

Were you thinking about that when you made your original "tell me what you think is idiotic" post?

I think you're confusing "misquoted" with "quotes taken out of the context that I see them in, but no one else does, because I know I'm not biased."

btw as far as I can tell this "human-stupidity" site is just a big clusterfuck of documenting stupid, bizarre, or violent things that people do to the exclusion of all else. Why the hell do that unless you're trying to spend all your time pointing fingers?

How about "these studies are generally dismissed due to their irrelevance in policy-making and their inability to create prescriptivist policy, or do really anything other than engender intolerance and backward thinking"

You're right, but I'm not sure how many studies really are revelant in policy-making. I don't think we necessarily have to worry about something like this becoming "dangerous" because as a country we're not really moving in that direction.

Like, how are you going to walk away from reading something like that? Deal more carefully with your Asian coworker because he might be outsmarting you? Be more descriptive to your black friends because they might not get what you mean?

Well I definitely didn't walk away from it thinking "this guy is a racist idiot for even considering this" and in general I really dislike that attitude, I felt like he did his due diligence but I'm not exactly drawing any conclusions off of it, you know? I mean we have determined decades ago that IQ is not really a good indicator of anything.

How about "this guy is kind of a racist for presenting this in the context of a site called human-stupidity that also has an article titled 'Get a lawyer before courting: 34 precautions before risking sex with a woman'"? There are some contexts where going into certain conversations is never a good idea.

I have some level of confidence that as a whole the US isn't moving in a more discriminatory direction, but there have to be a lot of levels of distinction and clarification if you try to go anywhere near claiming a group of individuals is in some way different from others. If you really think that racism, sexism, or homophobia aren't still issues, I think we have at least a few people around here who could testify otherwise!

I'm not saying that they aren't issues, hell I could testify that myself as I recently nearly had my jaw broken over some dumb racist shit. I think that not everything needs to be looked at in the world of subtext and nagl or whatever. For the record I hadn't really looked at the site itself or even the URL, but at the same time I'm one of those guys that'll say that not everything on Cracked is misleading garbage even if a lot of it is.

p.s. that article was presented to me as valid contrapuntal material for a paper i'm writing...!

frogbs you are not even real, i just don't...

I mean, I hope you at least tried to refute it!

I think that not everything needs to be looked at in the world of subtext and nagl or whatever.

Respectfully, though, it does, because "subtext" is the reason people actually do and say things. The "text", the surface reasons or rhetoric of most things, as they are publicly presented, is likely to be at best manipulative, and at worst, an outright lie.

Also that writer's racism and idiocy isn't even in the subtext, it's right there in the body text. And this post is rapidly becoming a Buffy quote.

Sorry re disagreement in number, I get writing and forget to go back and edit. You know what I mean.

I'm honestly and genuinely surprised whenever frogbs pops up with another one of these ridiculous statements, if only because I can't believe he hasn't gotten 51 yet.

frogbs you are not even real

text or subtext?

xxxp I feel like in many cases "analyze the subtext" is more a way of saying "can we make this guy look bad (and make myself look good)" because it's very easy and common to look for things that aren't there. Obviously this article is a bit different. I take it you don't believe him when he says he doesn't want to prove anything about blacks being inferior.

I'm honestly and genuinely surprised whenever frogbs pops up with another one of these ridiculous statements, if only because I can't believe he hasn't gotten 51 yet.

which ridiculous statement?

If you're talking about anything other than trying to figure out how to teach or reach specific audiences, then yes, bringing up sociological issues on a "humans are stupid"-style blog is going to be demeaning someone. And if the topic is race, you're demeaning them on the topic of race, which is racist. Not "racialist" which is a distinction that some sociologists try to make, but straight-up racist.

Maybe you can't just straight up ignore the context in this case, I don't know. I didn't really see the URL or anything at the time. Obviously someone's going to get offended by this even it is true. For the record I do think the research is flawed, though I can buy the idea that the guy wasn't really trying to put anyone down. I mean somewhere in there, there may be a valid point about how different races have different structures in their brains and therefore may learn differently.

We can study all sorts of physical characteristics here, if someone wrote a paper arguing that Asian people were shorter than black people, I'm sure some people would see that as demeaning as well

mh please stop feeding the troll

yessir

- People who take no notice of the website an article is hosted on. Even if it's a Reuters one or something, at least try to send me a link on Google News or something, not batshitcrazynews or something

Speaking of dodgy web sites...

Bad social media thread etiquette, part 3481447. You're commenting on a friend's page in a thread and another of their friends, apropos of nothing, asserts the BBC is biased (this is a thread of Americans BTW). When you ask for an example, the person DMs you with links to camera.org (extremely butthurt pro-Israel site web-designed by Homer Simpson or similar in 1996 by the looks of things) instead of SHARING WITH THE CLASS. Am I alone in finding this a bit devious?

I think you may have found a crazy! Step away slowly.

it's weird, for sure

I'd never heard of that site before! Seems like AIPAC on steroids TBH. My feeling is that the person (who is otherwise OK, this was a real surprise) was too chickenshit to post these particular bias examples out where all of us could comment on them or LOL at her for trying to start an I/P controversy.

BBC is pretty pro-British public media iirc

so the longhand for my post about racial differences is: i am writing a paper on a thing to do with adoption, and race (very tangentially), and i'm trying to cross-check my sources and find some counterpoints for a particular flight of my argument. my editor, who is kind of a [REDACTED] raved about a website she'd read that made a 'logical argument' for racial differences using adoption studies –– and provided me with the link upthread. i was all 'uhh' and she was 'no, no, there might be something there' and so i devoted 20 minutes to reading – and considering - the outright crap in the article. i don't think she really ... read it? got it? either way, i'm afraid to submit my work now.

The article is logical if you take the research at face value, which obviously you can't do for a variety of reasons. Re-reading it makes it look worse than it did the first time, still I'm wondering if it's even possible to write about a topic like this unless you take care to make it incredibly PC

frogbs, you realize "politically correct" is a weasel-word phrase that's mostly used to denigrate people who are doing well-intentioned things, right? It's usually deployed in the context of "oh, is that not what I'm supposed to be saying now, I don't know how to make this 'politically correct'"