Forums » Smalltalk » Welp, that's me on mute...

Anyone else feel like they should just not talk to anyone because anything being said is in some way shape of from "insulting"? I sure do.

I used to, but I grew out of it.

It is more a matter of balancing how well you know the person and what they are comfortable with. Me being German, the whole pc culture is a mystery to me, and so is being overly nice but in general, mature convo partners do still exist - and not having to tiptoe as much definitely made me leave behind non adult partners for good.

It is just more natural for me to politely say what I mean instead of writing three paragraphs of verbatum to avoid hurting feelings.

That does not mean that you should go out of your way to get on people's nerves. In the end it just boils down to respect and how you show it.

You know, I somehow question calling folks who expect human decency and respecting their cultures non-adults or not mature. Frankly, no idea what the fear mongering against 'PC culture' had to do with this conversation.

OP, I'm sorry that you've been having this experience. Believe me, I've been there. Sometimes, it really takes taking a step back and trying to figure out what the common thread of offence was. There may be something you can improve (believe me, we can all improve on something). It may just be the wrong crowd for you. I really wish you the best, and hope that your introspection gives bountiful results.

While I believe you misunderstood what I wrote by some margin of error, that is indeed where our and societies opinions differ. Before I go any further, at least for me PC culture is the attempt to avoid hurting anyone's feelings and respecting each and every possible aspect of society to the highest degree. That, of course, means that all minorities come into account just as much as the majority, causing a big ball of confusion that is very much part of the issue. People suddenly voice their offense for themselves and others a lot more. I don't mind it in particular but you cannot deny that there is a correlation.
It is not fear-mongering but it, as much as any other ideology can be taken too far and that is what one really has to be afraid of.

Like I said before, going out of your way to offend and hurt people is a bad thing. We can all agree on that but shutting down conversation because of a misstep is not a mark of maturity by any means. The correct call, in my opinion, is to work out something together - and that begins by hearing out both sides before coming to a consensus. What I am seeing more and more is the pressing towards one extreme without wanting to even concede in the slightest. This goes for both sides of the discussion and it worries me to no end.
Having human decency and respect is very much an indicator of maturity, regardless of age. This was true back when and even more today. While it is naturally not true in every case, I find that as one ages, a certain level of maturity is also reached. You are free to correct me on that of course but from anecdotal experience, adults do not mind filtering their opinion as much towards each other as they do to younger people. It is something people do instinctively and it is a good thing but that does not mean it does not exist because it very much does.

All I can say right now is, keep potentially problematic topics between friends or people that explicitly would like to talk about that. It is a bit easier online since many people on the RPR put up a list of things on their profile. That makes the dance a whole lot easier.

Anyway, I don't want to start a huge discussion and simply wanted to give my two cents on the matter even though it got a little longer. Just do you and slowly get back into the groove, really. If you need someone to talk to, feel free to write me.

I think I understand your point. I'm Dutch, and live very close to Germany. I see this attitude in most people in my country too. I also think that this line of thinking comes from not having experienced the things that make it necessary for PC exist in the first place, or not recognizing those experiences as being harmful just because you're too far distanced from the problem. (Or, in other words, we're privileged in many ways.)

PC really just means treating people with basic human respect and dignity, and that includes listening to them when they say "Hey, this is harmful, please don't do it again because I don't like being hurt." -- remembering that just because it isn't harmful to you, it doesn't mean it's also harmless to them. This is really important because who you are and where you come from and what you look like can mean you experience the world in an entirely different way, whether you asked for it or not! This does not mean you have to put up with that message being delivered in a veil of abusive behavior, which I also see happening. Just because I'm discriminated against for being fat doesn't mean I get to be abusive towards skinny people for example. That doesn't mean I'm any less discriminated against by people and medical professionals though, and just because I behave poorly in response doesn't mean the discrimination is somehow less valid.

Basically, your support for basic human respect and dignity shouldn't be reliant on whether or not some individuals or smaller groups have treated you poorly or made unfair demands. You should be for basic human respect and dignity regardless.

Just to illustrate a point about what we may interpret as innocent can create a huge impact and be harmful to others: diabetes jokes. Most people I know make diabetes jokes. They seem pretty innocent and funny on the surface. We even have entire memes about it.

I'm an autoimmune diabetic. I'm also fat. Jokes that imply 'this food gave me diabetes' coming from people who aren't diabetic contribute to a hugely negative social stigma that I deal with regularly by both people and medical professionals. I was misdiagnosed as a type 2 diabetic on the premise that me being fat is what caused diabetes and no doctor thought to test for antibodies or how much insulin I produced. It was assumed I ate myself into diabetes, basically, and that meant I didn't deserve further investigation for my disease even though you can't really diagnose type 2 without ruling out other types (!). After several years of being labeled prediabetic and then type 2 diabetic, I was finally tested by a diabetic nurse and it turns out that at 26 I was already producing way less insulin than was normal, which indicated autoimmune diabetes along with all my symptoms. If I had continued to be labeled a type 2 diabetic, I would have gotten the wrong care and may have ended up in DKA before I got the insulin I needed (which can kill you).

Diabetes jokes and memes that play into the 'food causes diabetes' and 'being fat causes diabetes' doesn't just affect how non-medical professionals seem me. It also means medical professionals treat me as less because they too end up affected by this viewpoint and have a personal bias that makes them believe I caused my diabetes by overeating. The way diabetes jokes continue to perpetuate myths and half-truths could have killed me if I hadn't had a medical professional who looked past my weight and the stereotypes around diabetes.

There have been people who were misdiagnosed and actually died from diabetes just because many doctors don't recognize diabetes symptoms due to them holding on so strongly to stereotypes.

(Just as a point of reference to further debunk myths here, being fat or eating too much sugar doesn't cause diabetes. It can only add to your risk if you're already at risk for type 2 diabetes. All types of diabetes are very much genetic and we don't actually know what definitely causes the trigger for the disease. Many professionals actually deem being overweight a symptom of being insulin resistant, not a cause for it or diabetes!)

A diabetic I know actually made a video about this very topic about why the jokes are bad, if anyone cares:

https://youtu.be/Mcor4IDI7sI

So what appears like a totally harmless joke that I shouldn't get too upset about, is actually a small part of a larger puzzle that, when put together with everything else, creates a finished puzzle that as a whole contributes to poor treatment of people, unfair and wrong stereotypes, and could lead to death. It turns a very serious disease that requires 24/7 management without a break and can have devastating consequences like blindness, loss of limbs and cardiovascular diseases into a joke. People have told me that I'm just being too sensitive, but all of these people are not diabetic. They don't have to deal with injections every day. They don't have to deal with the potential of dying in your sleep if you get your injection wrong and don't notice while you're in bed.

If you're far removed from a disease like diabetes and don't really understand what's involved, then it becomes easy to dismiss someone who's upset about diabetes jokes. It becomes easy to say they just need to get a thicker skin and learn how to deal with it. As a diabetic who understands diabetes, if I joke about it, I know exactly what I'm joking about. I joke a lot about it with diabetic friends. To us, jokes are a way of coping because we know how terrible this disease is and how difficult it is to live a marginally normal life even when we do everything right. But non-diabetics don't have to cope with diabetes at all. They just get to make jokes about it and not have to pay anything in return. We diabetics end up paying that debt for them by putting up with shitty treatment from even people who should know better, and then they tell us we can't be upset about that because 'it's just a joke'.

Can you understand how a diabetes joke is probably totally harmless to you, but really hurts my ability to get the care and support I need? Can you understand that making a joke about something that doesn't directly affect you can definitely hurt someone else?

I know this was a very diabetes centric post, but you can replace diabetes with most anything else here - other disabilities, other (chronic) illnesses, skin color, religion, sexuality, gender identity etc. - and then it becomes really obvious that what most people call "being overly sensitive and restricting my ability to express myself" is actually just people who directly hurt from what you say, saying "Please stop, this is hurting me and/or others and it can even kill us".

We do not differ in the slightest when it comes to treatment of people. The only difference is how we justify it, really. Or rather, you should be treating people with respect regardless of having such a reasoning behind it. It is important to note, however, that respect, just like anything else, loses it's value if it is there in abundance. While it may seem sad, it is how humans work in the end. People will inherently respect a person that worked hard to get where they are more than someone that let their circumstances get to themselves and drown in self-pity. Accomplishments garner respect, that is simply how it works. On the other hand, any human being deserves a certain level of respect and that is something I think most people will gladly agree on the whole debate really comes down to how much.

In all honesty, I am very glad that you were diagnosed properly. I myself am in a treatment of an autoimmune issue for two years now and was at risk of dialysis for over half a year (my kidneys were at 20% for over three months, a hospital is a boring place tbh.). Luckily a wild guess of treatment solved the issue so that I can get by with meds but nobody to this day has any clue why my antibodies thought it would be a good idea to wreck my body.

Nonetheless, I understand your point and agree with it. Stigma certainly is harmful to people, even more so than one might think but in the end, a stigma is an overgeneralization and something of a boiled down truth. Doctors do not tell the whole story to a patient, people leave out things while talking or add different things on top. Mouth-to-mouth communication is prone to misinformation as we all know from kindergarten. The main message, however, that being overweight can cause health issues is not entirely false. I am not defending the falsehood but instead of saying that people should stop talking about it, I think using the already existing platform to correct mistakes is a better way than shutting the whole thing down.

On a similar basis, the same is true for humor. Humor, especially dark humor, is a way for humans to deal with situations they deem out of their control. There is a reason it is also called gallows humor after all. Instead of saying don't ever joke about it, have comedians put up fliers or similar things. There are already people doing so but it is a much better way of getting information out if you ask me.

I won't challenge you on the matter of your personal experience with diabetes as I have no knowledge on it. From my personal experience the doctors I had overtested rather than undertested. I don't know if it is a personal anecdote or part of a larger problem (the issue is that positive stories are not spread as much as negative ones, making things seem worse than they are in most cases) but I agree that in your case, things really should not have taken that long and you have my condolences on the matter. I do however understand the doctors to some degree as well and it may not have to be the pure stigma that led to your medical odysee either. The human body is still not understood very well and there are many ways of approaching it from a medical perspective. At the moment doctors do not have the leniency to give every patient the time they need. We simply have too little professionals with an aging populous that only increases the demand for attention. Staff is overworked already and things will only get worse. This is something that needs to change regardless of feelings as it is an objective truth. Will things change, however... now that is the real question to ask... (Honestly the whole aspect of healthcare being a business has many downsides as you probably know.)

I considered PMing you in person to continue this discussion because I don't want to take over this thread, but it seems to be on-topic for the subject the OP mentioned. So I'll post this here, but am very happy to move it to PMs if we want to get more in-depth or it's deemed off-topic after all.

I think we do differ in the treatment of people - I think everyone deserves the same amount of respect and deserves to be valued as much as anyone else no matter their skin color, gender, background or current situation. I don't think we have the right to determine someone who got lucky and is doing well just because they got born into the right family is somehow more valuable than someone who got so overwhelmed by their disadvantage in life that they succumbed to it. I think both people have equal value on the same basic right for respect. They may lose my respect if they prove to be intentionally harmful and don't better themselves, but this is based on their informed actions, not on things they have no control over. And that's only my personal respect for them as a person - as human being, they still deserve basic respect and dignity, even if they're a drug addict, ill or heck, even just plain out lazy and unmotivated. It sounds very toxic to me that some people are somehow deemed less valuable and don't receive the same amount of respect as anyone else because some people decided their personal views don't agree with those people's decisions in life. It's actually the very definition of discrimination, so I'm struggling a little to understand why this is okay. It's not.

Society does a lot of shitty things to a lot of people, that doesn't make it right, and I'm careful to involve 'but this is how people behave' as an argument because of it.

The rest of my post may have been misinterpreted, and I'm sorry if I didn't communicate it clearly. I used my diabetes and how people joke about it as an example of 'You may not think there's any harm in making a <topic> joke, but it harms me and I need you to stop making them' because a common argument against being PC is 'people are just too sensitive and easily insulted these days and make unreasonable demands'.

Whether it's a joke or a statement or opinion doesn't matter, it's important that we acknowledge when (a group of) people says 'Your words/behavior/actions are hurting us, please stop' that we respect this, and don't brush them off just because our perception tells us what we say/do is harmless. We have no right to tell the people directly affected by it that our words and actions, however well intended, don't affect them - we're not living their lives, so we can't possibly know. I will never know what it's like to be a person of color because I'm white, so I won't tell people of color what they can and can't be offended by. A person without diabetes will never know what it's like to deal with diabetes management, so they can't tell me I can't be offended by the jokes. And so on and so forth.

This is not really what I was aiming at in my post, I don't want people to stop talking about certain topics. I want them to stop saying things about those topics that are harmful. Someone saying "You will stop being diabetic if you lose weight" is being harmful and they need to stop saying this because it's harmful, not to stop the discussion on weight in relation to health. There's a huge difference that I would really like to have acknowledged, because being PC is not the same as not being allowed to say anything at all. It's about how you say it and what your intentions and impact are that dictate whether or not something is sensitive or insensitive, and in turn harmless and harmful.

Sure! I love dark humor. But dark humor is for the people who are directly affected by it. It's not for people who aren't suffering from that particular subject. Like I said, my diabetic friends and I make tons of jokes, but we also live this disease 24/7 and we know exactly how horrible it is. So we use humor to cope. But a non-diabetic will never know what it's like to live our lives, and if they make (dark) jokes about diabetes, they're ultimately just making fun of us, not coping with how horrific it is.

That's why people of color get to decide whether they use certain racial slurs or not for themselves, but non-people of color should never use said slurs. I'm fat and I decided that I'm okay with using this as a basic descriptor for myself, but someone else calling me fat is rarely, if ever, used in the same way I use it. Does this difference make sense? If something doesn't directly affect you in one way or another, you really have no right to decide whether or not what you're saying or doing is offensive, because it's never about you.

Regarding your last bit about my diagnosis (which was not the point of my post, but I'll humor you in acknowledgement of your emotional labor), you're right - you can't really make any comment on it because you don't know how my diagnosis happened, or what percent of the behavior I received is due to stigmas or ignorance. And that's the point I'm trying to make here - you're not me, so you don't get to decide how actions and words regarding my situation affect me, and whether they're offensive or not. The same applies to everyone else. I don't get to dictate what is offensive to you anymore than you can for me. I hope that can be acknowledged as what basic human respect and dignity is about among other things.

Hmm... I never said anything was alright or ok. I simply said that it is the way it is right now. One always has to be careful when dealing with deep changes in society. Even things that are meant to be good can backfire quite easily. I am all for treating people well, I understand the movement itself but I feel like most? people do not go out of their way to insult you and some leniency towards unknowing triggers really should be there. Unfortunately, I see that leniency disappear on a daily basis and that seems to be more toxic than anything else. I might be wrong of course.

My whole point is, be careful, really. Things can change for the worse, even if you try your best to do the opposite. Look at the situation in the US right now. The climate has become a lot more toxic in every sense. Hopefully, it calms down in the future but right now it is very tense if you ask me.

About the first part, I was referring to two people staring off with the same opportunities and developing differently through their own means. I didn't communicate that perfectly, I'll admit that.


(edit: Just to clarify. This is mainly coming from me being a German but I am very careful when it comes to populist views such as this thanks to our history. As long as it does not radicalize any further it is fine but it is still a very real possibility and that is the scary part. I hope you can understand my concern on that matter. Plus, there is still the looming threat of climate change over all of our heads and I fear this discussion may shove the matter of our planet past a point of return..)

Don't know if I feel regrettable starting this topic now, or if I should say anything more as this feels a little out of hand to me...

Not quite my intention to have had this turned into some debate about respect/decency to other people and how one should treat others.

Main thing I was asking generally is if anyone just felt the need to just stop talking to someone (or in general) as some like myself just feel that anything, literally anything said is taken offence by others around them. Topics/jokes that don't even come close to lifes more serious issues such as illnesses, mental health, etc. Just... anything at all.

I'm one such person stuck in a position with people online and off where I've grown from being the usually quiet child into a near mute person because of such circumstances. Like from my perspective, I seem to always cause more harm than good without any deliberate intention in doing so. And as such, am often left with little to no redeeming chance to even apologise or ever taken serious again to matter the time that passes since. Effectively being held a grudge for life. Flip over to the other side, everything being said, done or thought of about me or others much like myself, it all becomes a-ok to be as disrespecting as they like. From jokes, dark humour all the way up to actual insults. And what comes out from that?

I'm fully expected to take it on the chin and move along. Or else any attempt to ask someone to stop or to let them know it's offending me becomes the "stop being whiner" treatment.

Hell, people usually get one hell of a major kick out of my unfortunate moments that ether appear to be 10 times funnier than how they would react to anyone else. But if I as much as just crack a smile at a similar situation (I have a nervous laughter moment at times), I might as well have killed a puppy with some of the reactions I get. That's all I was just trying to get at with this topic...

I'm very sorry, 7th-Derp! I misinterpreted your topic then. I'm interested in continuing the discussion with GamerWoona so I'll be PMing him privately instead of continuing here.

Regarding that people take offense at everything you say, did they actually tell you that they're offended by what you're saying? I know I sometimes feel that people are upset because their responses aren't what I expected, but they're not actually upset with me. We can be very good at filling in the blanks when we don't have straight up answers, so if this is something you feel or assume more than are being told straight up, it might be worth inquiring with the people you believe are offended by you and make sure.

This discussion for example is not a bad or negative one. We're just exploring the topic that's being addressed and hearing each other's viewpoints (which is not in keeping with your original subject, which again I'm sorry for derailing your topic with). I'm certainly not upset with GamerWoona and I get the impression he's also interested in both sides being heard and considered. Nothing got out of hand as far as I'm concerned. These discussions can for sure be positive interactions! I feel people can learn a lot from them especially if they're done constructively and with respect. Opposing viewpoints aren't necessarily fighting viewpoints in that sense.

I haven't interacted with you often enough to make any sort of judgment on how you are as a person, but you don't seem like the type who actively offends others. The way you phrase your post gives me the impression you're constantly bracing yourself to be told you're offensive, and that this ends up creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you're constantly on the lookout for an accident because you know one will happen sooner or later, eventually you will see one and 'be proven right', right?

If I had to make a guess here, I'd wager that there is mostly miscommunication happening between you and others. Do you have some more concrete examples of what happens? It's very much possible that this can be solved more easily than you think!

Seems like we hijacked the post. Whoops, but back to the topic, I agree with Sanne here. If you are constantly looking for something you did wrong, you will always find something. Try and slowly get away from that mentality. Most people are not as offended as you might think they are, or maybe even pretend to be so for a moment.

Most of the time such things really come down to phrasing with which you seem to be taking great care so I don't think that is the issue. Maybe it is more a misunderstanding between you and whoever? There are, however, people that have to be touched with silk hands (or is it velvet? Idk, hard to find a proper translation for this) due to past or present experiences and they will react more intensely to things that are problematic to them. In such cases apologize and move on unless they explicitly want to talk about it since most of the time they want to have as little contact with the matter as possible.

7thDerp, I have felt that way before.

I've even felt that I should stay away from group conversations because when I join them it feels like my presence is some kind of poison that details the conversation and ends with everyone looking at their watches, saying they have to be somewhere, and leaving. So, I feel ya, man. I am much better at communicating one-on-one. I don't know about you, but for me, one-on-one conversations seem so much easier.

It seems like you're a sensitive person. You're sensitive to rejection. Like me, it's probably mostly all in your head that people get more offended at you than at other people. I think people like is just don't assert ourselves, so it gets us walked over more, or gets us losing the argument more whereas someone else might argue back/clarify if someone says their joke was offensive, and so win the argument instead of having to "take it on the chin," as you say. I know. Social skills. *Sigh.* But just keep being you. You're good at explaining yourself in writing so keep at it.