What you’re saying here is that my perception of what she was saying made the difference in how I reacted, yes? Isn’t that like…human nature? Everything we do, think, see, everything we experience is colored by our own perception, there’s no escaping it. If you want to argue perspectives, by all means, but calling me out on having a perspective seems a bit fuckered up to me.
I’ve stated more than once why she bothers me.
No, I don’t think it’s an exaggeration. You may be perceiving small bits of my personality, and you may be correct, but those small bits fit into a much larger picture, and you don’t know what that larger picture is or how the small bits fit into it. We can argue about those bits, sure, but you’ve got no measure of me as a person just because you know a detail or two. It’s like building a puzzle without seeing the picture on the box - you pick up one piece that has some leaves on it, so you assume it’s a picture of a forest, when actually it’s a waterfall with a few trees around it.
No, I don’t claim to have a full picture of anyone, which is why I tend to be straightforward when calling people out when they’re diplaying facets of their personalities that I have issues with.
Great. So, you have “no idea” of anyone.
And if you still claim to notice the facet of bigot in someone, I can notice facets of you, which you wanted to deny.
I guess you just have an issue being associated with “victim”, somehow, which I didn’t do.
I was thinking about the possibility of you having “victim mentality”, which is common.
That’s a leap. What I had said was the the small pieces of me you are observing here don’t give you enough information about me to know who I am, and also that nobody can ever truly have all the bits of anyone. That’s not to say you could never collect enough bits to have an idea of who someone is. There are many people in my life that I know so well, if you were to present them with a situation and ask them how they would handle it, I’d probably be able to tell you what they would do before they said anything. I’ve actually played a game like that with some friends of mine, where everyone was given a scenario and had to (silently) pick how they’d most likely respond, and then the person who was “it” had to guess what everyone else would say. The only time I got one wrong was when my friend Jamie got pissed off at me that I knew him so well and decided to answer contrarily just to fuck it up. That’s an example of having enough bits of information about people to have an idea of who they are, but that in no way implies that I know everything about them.
I do have a problem with that, because I did allow myself to be a victim for a really long time. I went through some bad shit, I was a “victim,” and it destroyed my fucking life. I came to a point where that was no longer acceptable to me, and so I changed my mindset. I’ve fought really fucking hard to be a functional person and achieve the small bits of success I have today, and the credit for all of that goes exactly where it belongs – to me, myself, and I. This has made me a stronger person on the whole. I’m nobody’s victim, I take responsibility for myself and the things that happen in my life.
If you say it was a “leap”, can you see that what you said was a leap, too?
And I felt that you had an issue with “victim” by reading your first response in this thread, which you confirmed.
So, obviously, I can notice facets of you, at least sometime, and what you said (that I have no idea, and so on) wasn’t accurate.
You tried to justify correctness of words (“no idea”, etc) by bringing the story of “picture”, but you didn’t stick to that story, either.
If you were victimized in the past and you made great effort to get out of the situation, I’m glad for you and I do understand the way you reacted (and your reasoning being affected by emotional thinking, somewhat).
And the emotional reaction of this type can be greatly reduced, if you take time and observe what’s going on in your emotion.
I say so because I don’t think you are really enjoying when you are reacting this way.
I mean, I don’t think it was a pleasure for you to call Maia a bigot and to come to this thread and express your emotion (rather than solid reasoning).
Expressing frustration/anger/whatever isn’t a bad thing.
But having negative emotion is unpleasant by definition, and it’s not necessary to have them.
And many of negative emotion are caused by small things which looks bigger for some reason.
We don’t have to experience them if we know what is magnifying small things and see that the picture is very relative, and we are so stupid.
What I’m getting out of what you said is that you seem to think you understand my reactions better than I do, and you’re suggesting that I try to not let myself feel negative emotions when I have them
Because the things I said don’t contradict one another, so yes, I did stick by what I said. Your “insight” that I was bothered by you using the word victim when describing me probably comes from the fact that I pretty much said that from the get-go, so what knowledge did you derive about me that I didn’t blatantly allow you to see, exactly?
To me, the idea that you can see small pieces of a person and still have no idea of who they are until you see more, makes perfect sense. What do you think you know about me that I haven’t told you or freely shown you? I don’t know where you get this idea that I said you couldn’t notice any facets of my personality. What I said was, you don’t have enough information to make a complete picture.
But why would that be see as bigotry? I think it all comes down to intention and one’s mental and emotional attitude.
If it is the intention of those people to deliberately snub and rule other people out of their lives because they feel like they are so much more and the other people are so much less then they - then I would view that as bigotry.
I think that bigotry comes from an illusion of grandeur which comes from low self-esteem. It also comes from a real lack of self-awareness and from fear (the fear of seeing ourselves as we truly are, just silly humans with all of our imperfections and weaknesses) and from a lack of seeing our inter-connectedness. And unfortunately, we have to see others as being less in order to see ourselves as being more. Where does that stem from?
I don’t know - I guess bigotry might flow out of an evolutionary imperative - like birds of a feather flocking together - though I do notice that though birds of different species do not necessarily fly together, at least I do not think that I’ve noticed that, they are more and more flocking together and eating together. We can certainly learn a lot from them, can’t we? I wonder if the birds notice the difference in their own feathers as opposed to those of others and revel in them?
What is really most unfortunate though I think is what we lose when we judge others as being beneath us and are incapable of being with others. We lose a greater picture of our own selves.
That’s in your imagination. I didn’t say I understood your reaction BETTER than you do.
Although it is possible that we may notice a facet or two of someone which the person did not notice by her/himself, it doesn’t make the understanding of the person BETTER.
So, I don’t think you need to wonder/worry about it.
When we write, we are exposing a lot about ourselves, knowingly or not.
I mean, what we say/write all comes from our own feeling and thinking that we are always revealing about ourselves, even when we are talking about someone else, something else.
What makes you believe that I’m talking about “picture” and not facets?
Did I say something about it?
I think you are trying to deny all or most of what I said based on the wrong idea/imagination that somehow I’m claiming to know everything about you.
Arcturus Descending, we’re learning a lot form such forms of integration, that’s in part why I’m speaking of these issues. I’ve learned integration, or to be more accurate, I never had to unlearn segregation, because of the good examples of integration I’ve always seen. Now I’m furthering that by speaking of this forms of segregation that is so rarely spoken of. They’re intentions definitely could be a large part of the argument, people in the context I spoken of are virtually never considered bigots, I think they fit the criteria, but I wouldn’t expect one writing a dictionary to accept my definition. Being that they aren’t usually considered bigots it would seem that I would have to show their intentions before labeling them, but I just keep in mind that the standard for calling people bigots for other types of bigotry are much lower.
As I grew up I learned early on that almost anything that set you apart from those around you would lead them to give you problems. I knew that one could get in trouble for causing others problems. If one were to call someone names there would usually be the same consequences for them whether they were calling someone names that might take serious offence at them or not, but no one labeled them bad.
At the same time I was being taught that one who discriminated or called names to someone based on race or disability was actually a bad person. I don’t remember seeing much of this, but it was hammered in our heads to treat people of all races and people with disabilities equally. Relatively there was much less talk of toleration people that were different in other ways, such as one with health problems that aren’t bad enough to make them considered disabled, or one just looked, dressed or acted different for reasons outside of racial characteristics. There certainly was some talk about those types of discrimination and intolerance, but maybe one tenth as much and it wasn’t called discrimination or intolerance and the people who did it weren’t labeled bad.
So at first I didn’t notice the hypocrisy of all that. But, over time I did. I realized that people who were different or disadvantaged in one way were given little help or protection by society, while others were given much. I didn’t mind that one would get in much trouble and socially ostracized for causing problems for one with a disability, what bothered me was the issue with race, because the disadvantages that may come with being of various races was far from consistent.
Maybe I was happier growing up than most people in the world and maybe I was even in the top fifty percent of happiest Americans, but ninety percent of the people around me seemed much happier than me. They knew how to dress, they knew how to be social and make friends, and they didn’t look strange. People of different races my look different to each other in ways, but they never seemed strange to me or anyone around me. But, people agreed that I looked strange. So some of the minorities around me had less money than me, but many of them had more, all in all minorities or not like I said ninety percent of people just seemed happier. So people of all races would cause me problems and the consequences if any would only be from adults if at all. But, if one were to cause someone of any race other than “white” problems specifically for their race, they would be ostracized by the other children and sever consequences by the adults.
So that was my personal experience but this hypocrisy in dealing with discrimination has and does go on all over the country. It’s certainly far from the most pressing issues in the country, and I was always taught to shut up and quit complaining because life’s not supposed to be fair. Well I can tentatively humor that argument, but if it’s true, then same thing could be said to any person or groups that speak of discrimination. If one wants to live by the rule that’s life’s competitive and no one deserves any advantages because of difficulties they face that are beyond their control then fine. But, that’s not the country I live in. People born or who faced disadvantages in certain ways get help and protection while others don’t. So why must help and protection be based on stereotypical classifications such as race, when help and protection should simply be given to those who are the most disadvantaged in general. So perhaps this different approach to explaining the injustices I’ speaking of can help you better understand why I think the term bigotry is misused.
