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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   2120 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for October 9, 2024

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

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Why is my urge to troll so overwhelming sometimes?

I live in an extremely leftist town and though I consider myself politically moderate, I want nothing more than to research conversation topics that would destroy the lefties with facts and logic.

Example: leftists love land acknowledgements and talk of giving land back is immediate applause lights in any get together. While researching burn facts about the native peoples of this area, I learned that they practiced chattel slavery!!!!!!

The amount of glee this filled me with was ridiculous. I cannot wait for the next time I'm at a party and can let the local lefties whip themselves up nice and puffy over their reverence for the native peoples and then drop this bomb.

I don't believe this is leftism per se driving me crazy. I would also almost certainly feel this urge if I lived in the Deep South and was surrounded by Christians.

My waifu thinks this is cute and not too unattractive, so that's fine, but she still cautions me about burning my social standing in a place that's lefty out the wazoo and having our family relegated to being one of those low class Trump people.

It's so tempting though. Argh!

I empathise with you greatly. Having to live in a society that values politeness over truth does me irreparable pyschic damage on a daily basis. At my old job, I stuck headphones in and turned on loud rock music whenever the conversation strayed to politics.

Ultimately, you have to ask yourself what you personally want to get out of bringing up counterarguments. It is supremely unlikely that anyone in your circle will change their mind or even internalise your point of few past a few hours. They likely won't remember what you said, only that you disagreed and marked yourself as an outsider.

I don't think anyone could have ended up posting here without being a reflexive contrarian by nature. When I was younger, if you told me that the sky was blue I would pull out a physics book and start arguing with you about Rayleigh scattering and about the arbitrary definition of colors with respect to wavelengths of light. At a certain point it just becomes an inconvenience when you get nerdsniped by every offhand remark that people around you make and find yourself looking up rebuttals in the wee hours of the night.

Land acknowledgements are, of course, stupid, and it's fine to tell people that you think that, but I find the idea of waiting around hoping someone gives you an excuse to verbally destroy them vaguely distasteful, in the same way I would the idea of, for instance, an MMA fighter who went through life hoping someone tries to mug him so he has a reason to beat them up.

Low trait agreeability.

I've worked on some high-and-tight outfits and get fed up with their Mickey Mouse bullshit, worked with some chillers and get fed up with the slackness and lack of respect for tradition, sometimes going both directions on exactly the same issue. Is what it is at this point, I guess.

I’m not sure this is trolling so much as contrarianism. Trolling might be something like ‘we acknowledge the bravery of our ancestors, who brought civilization to this land then in the grips of native savagery’.

Alternatively castigate the effect of civilization on the natives. Without the white man and his guns and his medicines, the noble indian would have been free to practice their natural culture of torture, slavery and mass murder, except without paved roads or medicine so every brave who gets his knee grazed by an arrow dies on the trek back home, just as mother nature intended.

It's just a natural urge for some people; it's also not really trolling in the traditional sense imo, since all you do is point out some particularly egregious ways in which their thinking is wrong, even if it may be in a socially aggressive way. Here in germany, we call the kind of person who can't help but point out wrong statements no matter the relevance nor the unwiseness of antagonizing the talker "Besserwisser" (literally "betterknower"). Both me and my wife are like that, which can make family life sometimes difficult.

Also, in most regions, the alleged "natives" had displaced, up to and including full genocide, a different group that lived there before. The entire concept is just ridiculous.

Also, in most regions, the alleged "natives" had displaced, up to and including full genocide, a different group that lived there before. The entire concept is just ridiculous.

Likely true but impossible to prove to a motivated reasoner. No witnesses, no written record - the perfect crime.

You can see that new populations have replaced existing populations in archeological DNA.

The manner or method of replacement is likely lost.

There are examples of it happening near the time of Western contact and the historical record: the Moriori in Polynesia, or the Lakota pushing the Cheyenne out of the Black Hills circa 1776. I'm sure there are other examples I'm not thinking of, but they tend to get swept under the rug because they don't fit nearly in, I suppose, the narrative.

Don't you know that those tribes were displaced by other tribes who had contact with Westerners and used Guns?

Hello paleskins, you have fire sticks? we want some. oh you will let us have them? we have no food or tools you can use. how about these shitheads we have hated for eternity? with an advance payment of some guns we will give you triple our normal number of slaves!

Wait, shit, are we talking about first nations or congo?

atrocities only started once the Europeans dropped by, with their fancy systems of written language, and wrote things down

kind of did the native peoples a favor, enshrining them forever as the "first" nations rather than the "second to most recent nation"

Here in germany, we call the kind of person who can't help but point out wrong statements no matter the relevance nor the unwiseness of antagonizing the talker "Besserwisser" (literally "betterknower"). Both me and my wife are like that, which can make family life sometimes difficult.

In France this is a Monsieur Je-Sais-Tout, here in Quebec we call a Ti-Joe Connaissant.

Also, in most regions, the alleged "natives" had displaced, up to and including full genocide, a different group that lived there before. The entire concept is just ridiculous.

To begin with, is there specific date at which we should start feeling bad about history happening the way history always has? I can buy arguments for "within living memory" but that's not what's being applied here.

In France this is a Monsieur Je-Sais-Tout, here in Quebec we call a Ti-Joe Connaissant.

I chuckled audibly, thank you.

I burned a whole rack of GPUs for about a minute having it explain to me why this was funny and it failed

enjoy your inside joke, chums!

Literally translated, they just mean mister know-it-all or Little Joe...savant? Knower-of-things? Not sure there's a good translation in English.

French in France is typically viewed as more precise, uptight and grammatically correct, whereas Quebecois is (unfairly) seen almost like a pidgin or 'lower-class' French. Like how someone with a 'cut-glass' British accent might look down on Americans from Alabama or speaking AAVE.

'Monsieur je-sais-tout' sounds very proper, whereas Ti-Joe is a contraction of petit-Joe, maybe the equivalent of saying 'mister know-it-all' versus 'lil Bob smartass.'

The american equivalent would probably be a "Smart Alec" or "Smart Aleck"

Wiseacre or wisenheimer

To begin with, is there specific date at which we should start feeling bad about history happening the way history always has?

Somewhere after 1453, but before 1521, all people achieved their rightful and proper places on this Earth.

What about all these Native Americans that kept displacing each other after 1521? Should we acknowledge them as invaders and colonizers?

The sentiment is that those Native Americans were more like each other than Europeans and Natives were like each other, and the internal affairs of Natives are, quite literally, different than an invasion from beyond the sea.

I don't find that a very compelling argument, I must say. Murdering people to take their stuff is equally bad no matter who is murdering whom.

Don't you understand, they were murdering in good faith!

It's a joke. Columbus and the Spaniards are evil for conquering the Americas, but that was a single lifetime after the Muslims conquered Anatolia, and nobody is calling for a return of Constantinople to the Christians. It's all who-whom.

I'll leave it there because this isn't the culture war thread.

nobody is calling for a return of Constantinople to the Christians

I honestly wouldn't say nobody. There are plenty of people larping as crusaders. Just mostly they aren't taken too seriously.

I knew it was a joke, I am just not fun at parties.

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