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

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'"

If he didn't MEAN anything racist by it, it wouldn't have any of the specific hallmarks that it DOES have. The racism is an outcome of the author's preconceptions, not an accident or a mis-reading because the author didn't disavow racist ideas frequently enough.

xp - I don't really like it as a denigrating term, but obviously "well-intentioned" doesn't necessarily mean "correct", and sometimes I do feel like it's such an easy guise to hide behind and try to shoot down people from afar. But alas, it IS valid because I've seen several times how people can dismiss arguments and insult whoever's making them based on arguments that really are nothing more than some form of "you're politically incorrect and therefore an idiot", regardless of how reliable or sound their data is. Now that allows authors like this one to say things like "people will deny this research based on the simple fact that it's un-PC" instead of putting the argument on, you know, whether his research is valid at all.

xp - He's saying that he doesn't have preconceptions, do you think he's lying? Are you saying that not dismissing the idea offhand makes one a racist?

Countenancing the idea of inherent intelligence capacity defined by race/ethnicity is definitionally racist!

Everyone has preconceptions, denying that they do is the first sign of someone who is completely lying their head off.

Yeah, I thought the idea itself wasn't a very bright one, but ultimately I had to re-read it again to really understand what is meant there when there really isn't a conclusion drawn. Presenting the "facts" as they are definitely looks racist on the abstract and I do wonder if he ever really thought about adding a bit about IQ and what it really measures. We don't really have any problem saying that certain races are susceptible to certain diseases or whatever so I don't think it's wrong to suggest our brains may be different, though citing IQ definitely seems off the more I think about it, since "intelligence" isn't really something we can measure.

you can find "research" for just about any point you're trying to prove. most hard sociological research doesn't actually say much of anything! the distance between indicators/correlation and cause/effect is almost always gigantic. making big general claims about things like intelligence from studies that try to measure intelligence in nearly-always-wanting ways is ridiculous. making cause-and-effect claims without addressing the huge list of outside influences at very obviously at play is just a sad joke. there is absolutely no valid conclusion anyone can draw from this study. the only valid thing you can say about the study is to repeat the exact terms and process of the study itself.

political correctness is basically reverse racism imo, it operates with the same dualities in the same frame but tries to reverse the imbalance. i think it is a real phenomenon. it is a tacky, on-the-surface way for politicians and other white people to send signals that they are sympathetic and understanding of racial issues.

but much more than that it has been constructed by actual racists who use studies to "prove" their racist points as an imaginary accusation made by imaginary people in order to make it seem as though their truth is being obscured by rhetoric. as a narrative, it is complete bullshit. underneath the twin appeal to hard science and politically correct boogeymen is a desire to justify the reactionary impulse humans feel when confronted with cultures that are different from theirs. i.e. racism.

See, I think that this wikipedia quote is on point:

The New Left later re-appropriated the term political correctness as satirical self-criticism; per Debra Shultz: "Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the New Left, feminists, and progressives . . . used their term politically correct ironically, as a guard against their own orthodoxy in social change efforts"

The term is basically a self-satirizing warning to make sure that social issues are intelligently addressed rather than overreaching or conforming to some sort of exaggerated norm. The right repurposed this by appropriating it and then applying it with wide strokes: instead of being a caution, it was applied to many valid attempts to be culturally conscious.

So now we have this mishmash where people in the center-to-right think that there's this conceptual stalking horse that they have to watch for and acknowledge in order to keep the conversation civil. Just saying "well, it might not be politically correct, but.." is a red herring because it's basically saying "I have no clue whether I'm about to offend people."

And then there's the version Matt just mentioned in his last paragraph, where people act like they're going to be called racists no matter what because they don't want to follow the imaginary rules of straw men.

My bastard CTO keeps booking meetings at lunchtime. That and the PAs' ceaseless wittering is really getting my back up this morning.

luchtime meetings, so fucking rude. one strategy: block-book all yr lunchtimes in outlook as busy.

Might have to start doing that.

Particularly because the cunt keeps doing this and then half the time his previous meeting overruns and then the lunchtime meeting overruns and it's 2:30 before I even get a sandwich. As seems to be happening now. It's past 12:30 and where the fuck is he?

At lunch, prob.

anybody who views the Bell Curve as good for anything but emergency rolling papers = not worth your time

what would yr work say if, in place of your lunch hour, you just took off an hour early? would - often did - give up the entire concept of a lunch hour to fuck off early

I do that, or get in late and then take a short lunch to leave around the right time, but then I really get angry at myself because I need that 45 minute to hour break in the middle of the day to stay sane and actually be productive most of the time.

That's not an option here, if you work through lunch you work through lunch, it doesn't affect leaving time.

ambulances in the ambulance station outside my flat that park there with their engines running for like hours on end! literally!

We're expected to be available to clients throughout the working day, which means we can't come in late or leave early (except in exceptional circumstances, it's not a prison camp). I don't often give up my lunch hour, though.