I hate the word ‘Consumer’ or I mockingly call it ‘CONSOOMER’. Because that’s to imply everyone in the world is just cattle, but with wallets. We’re no longer customers. We’re consumers now. And a consumer’s purpose is to consume shit, whatever is put out there. Got money? Shut up and consume, it’s what corporate interests and capitalism itself thrive on. Consume and consume.
Influencer. Plain and simple. I hate when i hear it on tv, when someone calls themselve like that ugh.
I use it as a derogatory term. Content creator is for the people who create content that is imo valuable. Influencers I use for the type of person who makes content to sell as space.
Content is another one of those words. If you make youtube vidoes, the stuff you make isn’t just some generic random “content” goo. It’s videos, right?
A lot of the time they also have a podcast, instagram, and/or live stream to Twitch, often to the same audience. So “content” is the catch-all for all the output together.
It’s a bit clunky but for whatever reason it’s the term which has stuck around.
I still hate it.
We already had a generic catch all word for creating in all of those mediums, and it’s called “media,” so it wasn’t even necessary to re-label it content.
What if we started calling these people Independent Media Producers or IMPs for… oh wait no.
Imperial Military Personnel.
add a G word in front and were cooking
Well, they could be considered Global, Independent… or perhaps Generally Independent… and so on.
Not all videos have actual “content” tho. Reaction videos for example are just videos another person created while the uploader shoves their face into the camera and grimaces a bit. Or compilations, which are just a lazy no-effort way to bulk-repost stuff other people made. Or these bullshit “X movie in full length” videos that are 2+ hours of just displaying a download link.
I would not call these people “content creators” IMHO, even tho they do, in fact, create and upload videos.
(This is just my personal opinion tho, nothing “official” in any way)
I call them leeches.
I think pure reactions evolved from shock emotion videos ( See Barbara encounter a Reaper Leviathan for the first time ) which is a shitpost version of punking videos.
I appreciate some informed take videos, such as a chef watching The Menu and sharing inside knowledge.
reaction videos along with influencers are some of the most idiocracy-themed crap that humanity managed to come up with
can’t wait for the inevitable ‘ow my balls’ streams so we can all watch and 'bate
sounds genuinely more interesting than sssniperwolf saying “OH MY GOD” to yet another stream of tiktoks
Agreed. The best way to describe my feelings towards the terms “content” and “consumer” and especially “contäent consumption” is that it sounds… decadent and sad. Is that really all you feel? The movies you watch, art you experience and videos you watch, they’re nothing more than ““content”” to be ““consumed””, to temporarily distract you until the next bit of “content”? Nothing more?
When you put it that way, it sounds even more revolting.
content comes from the same work-production space that copy does (as in written prose, not as in Xerox). It’s stuff that is regarded as product for consumers
This is shop talk that shouldn’t be used out in public, but we have the internet now so it leaked and is part of the common parlance. Sadly, it does belie the perception of content as product, rather than art or otherwise the result of a creative, generative process. And it does belie the view of viewers as money cattle that have to be coerced into buying, strangely independent of the workforce they don’t pay enough to be able to buy and enjoy their own products.
There was an OSPod (Overly Sarcastic Productions), and Blue mentioned how they’re content creators, not influencers. Red then corrected him that the correct term is artist.
If there is an artistic part to the content the sure. If someone is reporting news I’d say it’s more akin to a journalist for example. Or a comedy show I might call a performer or comedian. But sure I know content creators who make set as well. Good point.
I think “content creator” is almost as bad. It’s so nonspecific and assembly-line sounding.
I see content creator as a developer of social media content, especially video shorts like on YouTube and TikTok.
There’s some intersection with developers of short form movies and television, but it’s definitely its own field and they know each other and mostly respect each other… and miss Lindsay Ellis.
I find it quite useful as warning that you’ll now hear about the opinion of a moron which you can safely ignore.
I call them freelance advertisers.
Yeah the whole influencer thing came too late. We have curators (people who find cool stuff and rave about it) and then critics (people who look at multiple offerings in the same category and give a measured take on each, sometimes comparing and contrasting).
But for most mechandise the most accessible voices are the ones who are bought by marketing departments and are obligated to give positive reviews. Curators now push the stuff they were paid to push. Critics are paid to give positive reviews, so to the viewers and readers, we can’t expect a fair assessment.
Not that this is a new phenomenon, but these roles had long been generally known as corrupted and biased before anyone called themselves an influencer, so I suspect the role is closer to Only Fans accounts that sell small amounts of lover / partner engagement to lonely people. Influncers are non-premium OF with ads and no nudity.
Before the internet critics were in magazines or on tv, paid for by advertising some of the products they review
It has always been so
Absolutely. I remember a lecture in th 80s that described junketeering. A photograhy reviewer would get invited to Tokyo for the review of a new Cannon $500+ lens (in '80s dollars!) includiing a week of sightseeing and fancy meals and would get to keep the lens! You can bet, given a choice of raving about the lens and getting to go next year, or offering a measurd opinion and risking getting uninvited, they would choose the former.
Post internet, even casual hobbyists know about press junkets and scoop rackets, so when the AAA wizard game gets 9.5/10 on gamespot, it no longer means anything. (Novices and grandparents buying computer games for their grandkids will still believe the reviews, though.)
I follow a car YouTube channel “Auto Expert John Cadogan”, he’s now an independent commenter in the car space, but he used to work for a car magazine and car tv show.
He talks about the junkets and really enjoys telling his viewers how bad the brands he used to have to support are. I think he’s on YouTube because he has the money and time and misses being on TV, he’s clearly not paid by any of the car companies
Knowing how it works you see it in online reviews - a 3d printer guy when reviewing never says anything bad about any of the brands that send him early release new printers, because they’ll stop supplying him if he doesn’t praise their new machine
I think in most cases, you can replace it with advertiser as that’s usually what it is…
When I first heard the term it was on that Black Mirror episode about the star ratings affecting people’s real lives, and I thought it was just an appropriately creepy and dystopian term made up for the creepy dystopian show. Then I learned it’s what those people actually called themselves and it’s so gross.
If your job title literally means “I convince people to want stuff I have” you probably need to get in the sea.
It is an oddly accurate term tho, only except that everyone with 50 followers calls themselves that.
I guess it is rather a mirror to society than anything else, that influencing opinions is a job - also think politics, marketing, lawyers, religions… Pretty weird society we have, if you think about it.
Also I can’t remember the right term, someone help me out - but isn’t the proper term for most news something like “opinion making”?
I wish we had a good term. “Content Creator” is meaningless and allows vapid instagram and tiktok people to slip in. Film maker has some serious connotations with Hollywood and movies that will give people the wrong idea. Media creator kinda works, but it isn’t specific to what type of media. YouTuber is strongly coupled to a corporation, so that sucks. Memeist? Video maker?
social media personality
Exactly, how do people get ‘influenced’ anyways? I think it says something about people following them and thinking them ‘influencers’ are nice and likeable people. They often ignore other’s privacy and aura.
negatively
Refering to women as “females” is always a massive red flag for me, it really gets under my skin.
I can’t stand people who call women bitches or hoes. Maybe it’s cultural and I’m just too old.
It’s a very small group of people who do that
unfortunately too common where I am from.
🇺🇲🇺🇸
just gotta call everyone bitches and hoes, so it’s not sexist!
Pro tip: in general, never refer to a group of people by an adjective: eg, the females, the gays, the blacks, etc. That doesn’t mean it’s always socially wrong, but there’s usually a better way.
Yep. It was cringey when Zimos would call his workers bitches in Saints Row, The Third though it’s not the only sign that Volition failed to do adequate homework regarding sex work.
Yeah, sometimes my lyrics are sexist. But you lovely bitches and hoes should know I’m trying to correct this.
pls no quoting song lyrics on lemmy
I know, when did “woman” become so problematic?
Woman is not problematic in my experience, and there’s a cute bit about that in Clueless:
Street slang is an increasingly valid form of expression. Most of the feminine pronouns do have mocking but not necessarily misogynistic undertone —Murray
Part of the problem is that our society is trying more than ever to include trans folk (and yes the pushback is extreme, to the point of being genocidal) and this means recognizing that not all women fit into neat categories that we might expect of a stereotypical heathy specimen. It’s less about some women being AMAB hence some women don’t have periods. Plenty of women didnt have periods (or had atypical periods) long before we included trans women, but then we were able to pretend otherwise when making generalizations.
Most of the time, when we talk about women, there still is no need to exclude trans women and generalities that don’t apply while including trans women probably fail when we don’t include trans women.
Gals and ladies are my go-to
If someone uses female as a noun instead of an adjective, there’s an 80% chance they’re a serial killer, and a 100% chance they’re an incel.
Socially, female seems to be a distancing term, if someone feels it’s not their position to discuss women. To me female is biological discriptor used when discussing non-humans (e.g. a female antelope) and Ive gotten in the habit of talking about a woman firefighter or a woman conductor to avoid female, I think because it is largely associated now with the alt-right between incels and alpha-males.
To me female is biological discriptor used when discussing non-humans (e.g. a female antelope)
Also, it’s an adjective (e.g. a female antelope), not a noun (ex. look at these females)
Unless it’s said by Martin in Friday Night Dinner then for some reason it’s hilarious
Unfortunately, It’s become necessary sometimes when discussing sex vs. gender. Since woman is now a catch-all for anyone who wants to be defined as such, if you need to differentiate biological women from non-biological women, female is the only single-word usage available.
Or you could just say “cis woman”
Wouldn’t it need to be “cis women and trans men” to capture all biological females?
Or AFAB which is what most people use.
Too much room for confusion with ACAB.
Oh yeah true
Or we could say female when describing females. Seems like a pragmatic approach.
“It usually gets under my skin.”
CRAWWWLINGGG IN MY SKINNNNNNN
“Customer” in a healthcare setting.
Well at least health care hasn’t started using the word consumer yet!
Oh it has.
Consumer = customer stuck on treadwheel.
People have been called this in the cosmetic and otherwise elective space for a very long time.
Because that’s what they are.
I haven’t seen that in healthcare settings yet. Just curious what context it was in specifically.
They avoid using that term and instead use “patient” but these are patients of money extracting procedures regardless.
service user
Thanks, I hate that, as well
“Customer” in an unemployment agency setting. Before you call a person customer, treat them like one.
When someone describes themselves as an ‘entrepeneur’, particularly when they say that in their dating profile, I immediately assume they’re just a grade A wanker.
I’ve always wondered what that means. Did they start an LLC and do nothing with it? Fall for a pyramid scheme? Write phishing emails?
Usually when someone owns a business, it’s a point of pride and part of their sense of self. “I run a restaurant” or “I’m a patternmaker” or something. As an accountant myself, I find I use this gif way too much:
Yeah you’re pretty much dead on. If they were doing something even remotely interesting they would say that without being vague.
“I run an Amazon dropship reseller service for cheap pots and planters” is kinda dumb but you are running an actual business. the only way saying you’re an entrepreneur is cool is if you are selling something so sophisticated no one will have any clue what the fuck it is… and even then you’d elaborate a little.
The silence on the matter speaks volumes.
Yeah well I’m a businessman
That’s because they don’t want to actually do something, they just want to do business. It’s an empty phrase that means anything that roughly looks like it’s making money without any effort.
entrepeneur = unemployed procrastinator with a trust fund
Either that or a Ponzi scheme victim
Two words but… human resources.
We ran out of humans to burn, can you check the freezer if we have any left from last winter? Otherwise I have to drive to the farm and get some fresh ones.
A company I used to work for thought it would be smart to rebrand Human Resources to “Human Capital Management” as if they really wanted no misunderstandings about how the company viewed it’s workers.
Yuck.
I once worked for a robot-themed startup which, in its earliest days, named all their job titles with that theme. So you could work there as a “research bot,” “finance bot,” “shipping bot,” “operations bot,” etc.
It was cutesy at the start, but gloomier and more dreadful every time you thought about it. Thankfully that practice didn’t last long before titles were quietly standardized to human ones.
In Germany, it’s actually not uncommon to refer to Humankapital.
It’s supposed to imply resources for the humans in the company as opposed to corporate resources.
I’m sure that’s what they’re implying.
It’s supposed to imply exactly what it says, resources for the company that are human
It implies interchangeability also, which is one of the reasons it’s shit
I work in an Agile team, and in meetings with management one of the ways you can tell they don’t understand agile is when they talk about the resources available between several teams - as if counting the test staff tells you how good a set of teams are at testing
HR never works for you, they’re solely to protect the company.
Human Recycling.
“Try Hard.”
It’s the dumbest of all insults. You seriously are gonna talk shit about someone who is doing well at the game because they are actively trying to achieve victory? And that’s the best you can come up with? Get the fuck outta here with that.
I don’t think it refers to effort level alone. It’s about doing obnoxious, unfun things to get marginal (at best) advantages.
For example, the only game I really still play multiplayer is Madden. If I hold a dude to 4th and 15 and they go for it, I know damn well it’s going to be a boring shitshow of a game until they rage quit. They’re going to turn it over on downs because that’s not a convertible play, I’m going to get an easy touchdown, they’re going to be even more stupidly aggressive on the next possession because now they’re behind, and it’s going to be a blowout where I’m just waiting for them to quit because there’s no way they’re going to play it out for a whole game.
That’s a try hard. Someone just winning and making intelligent gambles isn’t.
I don’t think it refers to effort level alone. It’s about doing obnoxious, unfun things to get marginal (at best) advantages.
Nearly every time I’ve seen someone using the term, it’s against someone who isn’t even talking and just playing the game better than the dude who cried “try hard.”
It’s only more recently I’ve seen a trend of younger gamers giving it this other definition, which I’ve never actually seen used in a game session.
It’s been a thing forever (well over a decade). You’re playing a casual pickup basketball game and one dude is diving on the ground for loose balls near other people’s legs and playing really grabby defense? People will notice and say shit.
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Devs use it in the software industry to describe the people who work excess hours and weekends to try and impress somebody, when it was unnecessary. And all it does is make normal people look bad for just doing a reasonably regular amount of work. If you’re going above and beyond all the time, that’s no longer going above and beyond, you’ve just pushed out the goal post for what is normal
I got called a try hard in tft recently. It seemed so moronic especially at a silver elo because I’m just playing to have fun not be min maxing
At the same time they’re saying “I’m not a try hard. I could beat them any time I want but I choose not to”. GTFOH loser
“Nerd” is used similarly for kids who do well in school.
I’ve lost count on how many times I got called “Try Hard” and “Sweat”…I kill one guy what, twice in CoD?
I’m too damn casual for today’s high competition games. How tf can I be a try hard when I’m either playing against AI or jam single player RPGs?
I was also once playing Leauge practicing skillshots. I was in the zone and hitting everything with great tempo and out of nowhere comes a sore loser, “try hard.” Bruh, do you know what having fun looks like?? Lol I took it as an unintended compliment 💅
They are talking shit because the try hard was probably an asshole.
Lmao what? Have you ever played games online? The recipient of the trashtalk isn’t “probably” an asshole. People talk shit unprompted especially when they get killed by a better player.
Also everyone who is worse than me is a casual and everyone better is a try hard.
NPC when referring to other people. It does nothing but dehumanize them.
That is the point of calling someone an NPC.
I think the implication is that the person is thoughtlessly following an ideology, in the same way most people using the term are.
Isn’t the whole point to dehumanise them?
They’re calling them a “none playable character” after all.
Not only the humans, we have feelings too!
We? Who’s we? 😳
Me and my fellow NPC’s
Isn’t the point to claim someone is not thinking for themselves and is just going with whatever is popular at the moment? Like he has no real agency?
I am not sure if this is a joke or not, so I won’t upvote nor downvote lol
I do this, and it is because I consider some people as soulless entities purely put here to stir up drama for this terrible reality show we all live in.
‘Female’, when it’s used in a non-clinical or technical context to describe a human woman. Everyone has a slip here or there, right, so, broad stroke take incoming, but, generally speaking, I’ve never met or talked with anyone who reliably refers to women as ‘females’ who actually respects them. It’s a word you’d use to refer to a complete person only if you see them first and foremost as some kind of specimen, and it reaks to me of poor socialization, unhealthy relationship with that sex, or simply low class.
I always reflexively imagine a Ferengi from Star Trek going “feee-male”
100%, it’s always some basement dwelling dude that uses female.
Femoïd
Femoïd? Feed me!
Definitely, at least in the modern day. I was surprised to see Jane Austen do it a few times in Pride and Prejudice but I don’t think it had quite the same connotation back then 😆
i always associated this word with documentaries about animals 😁
Calling customers, “guests”. A customer is someone with a business relationship with someone/something else. They’re exchanging money for goods and services and have a right to expect certain value for their money.
A guest is something else entirely. A guest has no implicit right to expect a certain any particular level or quality of services. They are dependent on the magnamity of the “host”.
Calling a customer a “guest” robs them of status.
This one’s interesting, because it hails from a time when there was more of a cultural underpinning to the term - companies had a cultural obligation to at least keep up a facade of taking care of their customers, and calling customers guests was explicitly meant to convey a sense of safety and comfort.
It has the exact opposite effect now, because the customer’s interests are often in direct opposition to those of the company. The company thinks it owns you, and no longer cares what you think about it.
I think of it this way.
The urban legend I grew up with was that one time a kid wasn’t satisfied with their Hershey Bar, so they wrote Mr. Hershey and got a personal replay. Didn’t matter if it was true, it reflected the idea that somewhere there was an actual person behind the brands we used everyday.
Today’s kids know that there’s nothing behind a name like ‘Hershey’ except bean counters and ad men.
Don’t forget the chocolate-flavored food grade wax.
I haven’t eaten a Hersey bar in decades.
“woke” when meaning everything that doesn’t align with ones fascist beliefs.
“woke” is just a catchall for “things I don’t understand and don’t like, and thus have hate towards”
When I hear someone mention “woke” with derision, they are typically railing against things that represent people of color. I de facto assume someone is trying to thinly veil their racism.
When I hear someone mention “woke”, I stop listening to them. I am not equipped to respond to the deluge of racist, bigoted, climate-denialist, etc. bullshit that’s about to come out of their mouths.
Conversely, “woke” within the New Age movement, which is where I first heard it. Idk if it was confined to the FB groups I was lurking in back in the day, but they felt so enlightened and elite. If they only knew how deluded and cringy they seemed to outsiders. There were some odd misunderstandings when I read and used the term again in other social medias.
I hate the word “home” in a real estate context. You do not buy a home. You buy a house and make it a home by living there with your family.
Similarly, “houselessness” is a dumb euphemism because what homeless people lack is literally a home, not just a house.
except that you can have a home without having a house, so “houselessness” would be more accurate with that logic
I guess that’s true, though the biggest problem homeless people have is typically lacking a home. It feels a little off to me to describe someone who feels at home living itinerantly as homeless.
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Excellent points.
I love the phrase “This is not a crack house, it’s a crack HOME”
I agree that a house is not a home, but what do you tell people when you’re buying a “house” but it could actually be a condo or a townhouse? When I say house, people assume I’m talking about a single-family house with a yard, driveway, etc. Is there a better word to encompass different property types that can become your home?
“Stupid” or “smart” or “IQ”. Take your pick.
Intellectual capacity is a social darwinist fantasy.
That includes insults that go along the lines of, “Trump supporters can’t read.”
[Aside: I dislike Trump supporters, mind you. But if they couldn’t read (especially reading Breitbart, or the Epoch Times, or the text part to Russia-funded propaganda memes) that would actually be an improvement right now. Lower cognition would be an improvement if it were real.]
Anyways my reasons are as follows: I’ve tutored quite a few people, and never found one actually incapable of learning a particular concept.
I have, on the other hand, found a large number who were underconfident about their ability, citing their “low” intelligence specifically. And unlike their intellectual capacity, this belief in IQ was actually limiting. And harmful.
I have also encountered people (outside of my tutoring) who thought their “intelligence” was a source of superiority over the masses.
They were not superior people. Their vocabulary – which people often use as a misguided proxy for intelligence – was offputting because they often used words they had clearly never heard used in context. Indicating these words were added to their lexicon unorganically, pulled from a dictionary or thesaurus rather than an adventure novel, highlighting a strange set of priorities that always made these people suspicious to me.
Every time someone calls me smart, I tend to suspect they’re trying to scam me.
Every time someone calls me stupid, I shrug because they clearly haven’t met all of the people who call me smart.
But in all cases, they are invoking the idea that some people are just capable of more, and others are just capable of less. It’s social darwinism, like I said.
And I find it disgusting.
If you want my respect, never appeal to social darwinism in my presence.
I agree that people throw terms like smart/intelligent around incorrectly, and often try to “sound smart”, and I cringe at those things too.
…but you’re also asserting that intellectual capacity doesn’t exist and that is incorrect, or at least incomplete.
–TL;DR– Intelligence is valuable and varies between people but it seems like everyone has the ability to be intelligent given the right conditions. The taboo around intelligence prevents us from getting underperforming kids the help they need.
The important truth is that we don’t fully understand what contributes to intelligence.
We know that motivation is enormously important. The difference between being offered $1 and $10 explains something wild like >10 points on an IQ test. https://www.science.org/content/article/what-does-iq-really-measure
We also know that mental health and emotional state makes a big difference. So everything impacting mental health would contribute. https://bmcpsychology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40359-020-0372-2
These factors alone mean that our intellectual performance can change from moment to moment.
Another important distinction is that there are two kinds of intelligence, fluid and crystalized. Fluid intelligence is our ability to solve moment-to-moment interactions, and new and novel problems. Crystalized intelligence is the ability to take foundational principles that we’ve already been exposed to and use those to solve secondary, abstract, or complex problems. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_and_crystallized_intelligence
That second one is almost entirely based on the types of problems we’ve been exposed to in our lives, meaning that it’s impacted by our previous behavior and our circumstances (which are largely out of our control).
We have no reason to believe that intelligence is some kind of immutable genetic trait that some have and some don’t - in fact that’s largely been debunked as far as I know.
However, the controversial field of behavioral genetics has demonstrated that a large percentage is our personalities and behaviors are impacted by our genetics. This would be an indirect factor. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-human-beast/201509/what-behaviors-do-we-inherit-genes
Where does this leave us?
A person may be more genetically predisposed to being hard working (trait conscientiousness), which may make them more likely to apply themselves to work and education, meaning that they have a higher intellectual capacity. Or, they may just follow instructions without thinking and have a lower intellectual capacity.
A person may experience an event that makes them highly value health, motivating them to become a doctor. Or they may behind afraid of medicine and avoid the subject altogether.
Similarly, a person may be told that they are stupid and that they will never amount to anything. They may believe it and give up, and never apply themselves. Or they may defy it and work harder to prove it untrue.
Your genetics and your circumstances don’t determine what you will be capable of. However, they do have an impact. Ignoring that would be an enormous mistake.
Having two mentally healthy parents in a stable home with many books and many adults that care about you in your community will give you a better chance at scoring higher on IQ tests.
Having a single parent that’s drug addicted and bouncing from home to home with no books and no caring adults in your community gives you a lower chance of scoring higher on IQ tests.
Higher IQ is correlated with a whole bunch of benefits, like having higher income and life expectancy.
The original implementation of IQ was to identify which school children needed intervention to help them succeed. It was never supposed to be an indicator of human value. That we’ve done that to it is a shame. It’s basically the best tool that we have to figure out which kids need the most help.
I haven’t found research that confirms raising IQ improves outcomes. But I have a hard time believing that helping kids learn (if they wanted the help, at least) would hurt their outcomes.
End rant.
Edit: oh, and the belief in intelligence as an immutable genetic trait is only social darwinism if higher intelligence makes people more likely to reproduce, which it doesn’t. That’s the premise behind Idiocracy. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25131282/
Edit: oh, and the belief in intelligence as an immutable genetic trait is only social darwinism if higher intelligence makes people more likely to reproduce, which it doesn’t. That’s the premise behind Idiocracy.
That’s what I thought at first too. But the definition, oddly enough, doesn’t actually mention reproduction.
From Merriam-Webster
social Darwinism noun : an extension of Darwinism to social phenomena specifically : a sociological theory that sociocultural advance is the product of intergroup conflict and competition and the socially elite classes (such as those possessing wealth and power) possess biological superiority in the struggle for existence
It’s most often used to describe Andrew Carnegie’s “Gospel of Wealth” which was all about the superiority of some members of society, and the benefits society would reap by allowing them power over everyone else and over all of society’s resources.
Yo, this is amazing. Yep I was completely wrong about social darwinism. I either made up the definition myself based on my understanding of Darwin, or had someone explain it to me wrong and never questioned it.
Thanks for the correction!
It’s my pleasure. I enjoy these discussions, and you brought a lot to the table.
Calling someone “stupid” or “dumb” is all too common, especially online in places like Reddit and Twitter. I think it is a lazy and vacuous statement, or at best just a way to vent frustration.
It’s much better, and more constructive, to be specific about what you find reprehensible. It could be that they have horrible morals, and calling them stupid is like a shorthand for saying that they are unable to reason through towards a consistent and correct set of moral principles. Or it could be that they have been indoctrinated into nasty world-views, and that their “stupidity” is exhibited as a failure to protect themselves from the indoctrination or escape it. Or they could be deliberately hurtful trolls who say outrageous and inflammatory things to upset others, in which case their “stupid” behavior is most likely an outward-facing reaction to some trauma in their own lives. Or maybe they are just sadistic, which warrants being called out specifically, and not just attributed to stupidity. A lot of anti-intellectual posturing seems to come from some combination of these causes.
Anyway, I feel like being specific about your criticisms not only promotes compassion (which is ultimately most likely to win over those we disagree with) but also prompts you to more thoughtfully reflect on your own positions.
💯
This right here! Specify!
Replace stuff like
“Marjorie Taylor Greene can’t read”
with stuff like
“Marjorie Taylor Greene’s remarks on “globalism” should be alarming to anyone who has encountered the phrase ‘the International Jewry’ as they studied history.”
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Yeah, it’s heartbreaking to see stuff like that.
“human resources”, it dehumanizes the people it manages, comparing them to goods and things, rather than thinking of them as actual people with needs and their own desrires. But nope, they’re just a resource for you to exploit
This is a new interpretation for me. I always read it as resources for humans.
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In all companies. If the company is large enough to have an HR department, it is there to protect the company.
How? They provide no resources to humans and literally manage humans
Sure, that’s the concept, and it’s a problem. But that’s not what the name “Human Resources” means. That’s like saying the office of Veteran Affairs is implying that veterans are themselves affairs. The title is obviously meant to imply resources for humans. It’s a lie, but that’s what those words are supposed to mean. It’s not called “Humans are Resources.”
I wrote about what they actually do, not their name
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I laughed aloud when I first saw that episode of SpongeBob “Selling Out,” where Karl takes over the Krusty Krab and he threatens Squidward with Human Resources. The Human resources guy isn’t a human, nor are any of the employees, yet they have HR anyway. But still, HR guy is scary and another reason the crew lives their work lives in fear. As cheap as Mr. Krabs is as a manager, he always let Squidward and SpongeBob express themselves in their own personalities. Human resources sometimes tries to squash your individuality.
There are companies where the HR Person has been reduced to a regional role.
Now we don’t have to worry about Flavio, in his office upstairs, watching the cameras; we have Demetria, who visits once a month and smells like a Chanel fragrance they haven’t made in a decade.
She visits. She watches. She makes notes.
She watches. People disappear.
Demetria is very concise when she describes when you are no longer an asset.
Demetria has other things to do, and you are getting in the way.
Demetria sounds like she wears a short skirt, and a long jacket.
“Gamer”, despite being a basic description of someone who plays video games often, has always felt wrong to use or be called.
Doesn’t help that it’s only really ever used ironically or to mock someone, and if it’s not that, it’s used to advertise overpriced and mid-tier PC peripherals that could be used as makeshift flashlights.
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Not that RGB lighting is bad, but it always feels like it’s used to justify insane prices for stuff that either doesn’t last that long, or malfunctions often.
I think it’s because “Gamer” make it part of your identity, instead of a hobby or something you do. It’s like when people call me a cyclist, it makes it seem like it’s the only thing I am when in reality I just use a bike to get around.
I knew a physics professor who also did tours reading his poetry internationally. in an interview he was asked if he felt he was a physicist who did poetry or a poet who does physics, and he said when he’s driving he’s a motorist, when he’s walking he’s a pedestrian, when he’s tucking his kids in he’s a father. the idea of an umbrella identity is restrictive and is for other people to put you in a category
If someone calls themself a gamer I know they don’t have much else going on. This is from someone that plays games.
“Junkies”
These are people with addiction. they are people who have a problem. A common problem. And some starting with injuries. And they are vulnerable and taken advantage of the most by the very people making money off of them. People with addiction take the most blame and treated with utmost contempt for the very issue that is caused by the people who create the issue in the first place : Doctors and the pharmaceutical industry.
Addiction is one of the few diseases where people (often) not only think you’re to blame for it, but also deserve no treatment because of that.
