You

[nomadologist]

Ha ha ha.

"WASP" refers solely to a white anglo-saxon protestant of AMERICAN origin, not an original member of a confederation of West Germanic-speaking tribes. if you want to be pedantic, Mr. Tea was WAY off.

 

[nomadologist]

That's funny, because my family would ridicule melodramtic behaviour as well, but in a totally calm, rational manner. Any sort of moaning or screaming was ignored or got the response "don't be so bloody soft". I remember falling over and scraping my knee at about age six and had blood pouring everywhere, I ran to show my my mum, crying my eyes out. She just shrugged it off and told me to stop being a baby. Any sort of emotional complaint was met with "wait until you get some real problems".

I think this is good way to raise kids, teach them the value of stoicism.

that's a terrible way to raise children. children until a certain age need to feel "safe" and emotionally nurtured.

also, we weren't ridiculed for being melodramatic--mostly for thinking you were going to be "somebody" or if you tried to be proud of anything good you did, etc.

 

[swears]

But I did feel safe because it was generally a safe, easy going enviroment. Too many kids are raised to think they're the centre of the universe. I had a little sister and a much younger brother that had to be raised by working parents with limited time and space in the house, I couldn't be doted on constantly.

 

[nomadologist]

wait till you have kids and you replicate that kind of shit.. you'll feel a million dollars!

seriously though, your moms must have been pretty depressed at the time to do something so wreckless.. i got a friend, nigel, in manchester (whalley range) with crazy italian parents - he lived in fear around the house.. he reckoned his dad was an arms dealer or something - had no real job to speak of yet plenty of disposable cash and an automatic rifle hidden in the house.. nigel is a bit of an eccentric - loves ninjitsu.. practices in the park, diving around obstacles in full ninja uniform! bless him.. he got me into kung fu flicks like the Lone Wolf saga (shogun assassin), Ninja Hunter etc.

my mom was always depressed. she slept nearly 13 hours a day. her father died trying to get out of the mob when she was 12 or so, and he was the only one who shielded her from her emotionally abusive danish mom (whose own alcoholic schizophrenic father used to come home at 3AM and wake up his children just so he could beat on them). i don't blame her at all for being down all the time--she never really beat me, which was hard for her, i'm sure. i am pretty afraid to have kids based on being afraid that the cycle of violence will continue.

 

[Mr. Tea]

Too many kids are raised to think they're the centre of the universe.

Too fucking right.

 

[nomadologist]

Too fucking right.

i notice this among my uncles with their kids--their wives center their entire lives around the kids, take them to soccer AND ballet AND jazz AND piano AND little league, then they spoil them rotten in any other way imagineable.

when i was a kid, you were lucky if you got a bigwheel and a popsicle

 

[Guybrush]

What about people you hate? Do any of you have any enemies? People that you just out and out detest, and that you actually WANT not to like you? I remember in high school there were definitely one or two arrogant rich little assholes that I actively antagonized. I'm not sure what that says about me...

Given hate’s symbiotic relationship with your internal goings ons, how it merely voices an unease within, I always take great care in analysing the empirical grounds for my feeling it. You should always be incredulous of the judiciousness of you inner moral compass, but exponentially so the stronger the feeling is. As a tentative rule of thumb: the stronger the feeling, the less rational the grounding, the more the reason for some soul-searching. From personal experience, there are days when I have feelings that can only be described as hateful towards someone like Stalin, but at my most upbeat, these feelings are nigh on impossible to conjure. This, to me, reveals hate’s fickle character, and how it’s intrinsically linked to your own psychological well-being. Most of the people to whom I have felt something akin to hate have turned out to be pretty decent folks eventually, so these days I interpret any sign of my feeling hate solely as an invitation to self-scrutinising. So ... I don’t hate — mostly.

This is a bit gratuitous, perhaps, but I love this Orwell passage, and I think it has some bearing on this discussion:

Later, there were further humiliations. Another S.S. officer, a large
brawny man, was ordered to strip to the waist and show the blood group
number tattooed on his under-arm; another was forced to explain to us how
he had lied about being a member of the S.S. and attempted to pass
himself off as an ordinary soldier of the Wehrmacht. I wondered whether
the Jew was getting any real kick out of this new-found power that he was
exercising. I concluded that he wasn't really enjoying it, and that he
was merely--like a man in a brothel, or a boy smoking his first cigar,
or a tourist traipsing round a picture gallery--TELLING himself that he
was enjoying it, and behaving as he had planned to behave in the days he
was helpless.

It is absurd to blame any German or Austrian Jew for getting his own back
on the Nazis. Heaven knows what scores this particular man may have had
to wipe out; very likely his whole family had been murdered; and after
all, even a wanton kick to a prisoner is a very tiny thing compared with
the outrages committed by the Hitler régime. But what this scene, and
much else that I saw in Germany, brought home to me was that the whole
idea of revenge and punishment is a childish daydream. Properly speaking,
there is no such thing as revenge. Revenge is an act which you want to
commit when you are powerless and because you are powerless: as soon as
the sense of impotence is removed, the desire evaporates also.

From Revenge Is Sour

 

[nomadologist]

of course--usually when you hate someone you're only hating something about them that represents/mirrors something similar about you that you hate in yourself (consciously or not)

 

[barry_abs]

how does that explain my hate of racism? (given i have mixed race kids - i.e. am not racist.)

 

[nomadologist]

hmmm...i think there's a difference between a healthy feeling of "loathing" something truly evil, and an irrational hatred of someone or something categorically but for no reason relating to reality

 

[east]

of course--usually when you hate someone you're only hating something about them that represents/mirrors something similar about you that you hate in yourself (consciously or not)

That would obviously explain my hatred for popular, witty, good looking, talented people with large bank accounts and trophy wives.

 

[Guybrush]

of course--usually when you hate someone you're only hating something about them that represents/mirrors something similar about you that you hate in yourself (consciously or not)

That would obviously explain my hatred for popular, witty, good looking, talented people with large bank accounts and trophy wives.

First of all, do you actually hate them. Really? With a passion? Because that’s what hate is. We are not talking about the watered down hate that people throw around carelessly but of the original one, the one that mercilessly haunts you at all times. Secondly, your verbatim reading of what has been written is quite ridiculous: hate only represents/mirrors something in yourself — not necessarily something that has anything to do with the object of your hate (e.g. you may hate the rich because of the feelings of inadequacy that they instil in you, or you may hate them for some completely irrational reason that you don’t even know about yourself, etc., etc.).

how does that explain my hate of racism? (given i have mixed race kids - i.e. am not racist.)

Same as above: do you hate racism, or do you hate racism? I think that you can only really hate something if it affects your immediate everyday life. That is to say that I think that most people have an easier time (really) hating their neighbour than hating, say, Idi Amin, or whomever. Hating abstract things ought to be even harder.

Eh, I guess this makes my Stalin example a bit strange. I will have to get back to you on this one.

 

[Mr. Tea]

"WASP" refers solely to a white anglo-saxon protestant of AMERICAN origin, not an original member of a confederation of West Germanic-speaking tribes. if you want to be pedantic, Mr. Tea was WAY off.

Hahaha, obviously I know what it *actually* means, I was just messing about. Jeez, you take the bait every time, don't you?

 

[Mr. Tea]

of course--usually when you hate someone you're only hating something about them that represents/mirrors something similar about you that you hate in yourself (consciously or not)

I think this is just one of those comfortable cliches people come out with that doesn't really stand up to much scrutiny; the old secretly-gay homophobe, etc. Well, maybe it's true some of the time, but I bet most homophobes really are just straight people who, for one reason or another, are prejudiced against gay people.

I would say I have a hatred of aggressive, pushy, arrogant people, and that doesn't imply I am one myself, because I'm certainly not.

 

[zhao]

no no no... y'all have it all confused.

the mirroring thing happens on a personal level. and does not apply to big geo-political hate.

for instance, someone you meet and immediately dislike, for reasons at first difficult to pin point. --- he/she probably reminds you of your self. on a personal level, negative feelings are almost always a result of this mirroring effect. when i look back on my life, and all the people that have really bugged me, annoyed me, and made me angry, almost all remind me of what i dislike in myself.

but hating fascism, hating ignorance, hating homophobia or hating gays, these are big ideological hatreds removed from the immediate self, and does not necessarily have to do with mirroring.

but with that said Mr Tea hating hippies is probably due to the fact that he is one deep down inside

 

[Mr. Tea]

but with that said Mr Tea hating hippies is probably due to the fact that he is one deep down inside

You take that back! I've had TWO BATHS just this month, FFS!

 

[Guybrush]

I’m heart-warmed by the ‘people think that Im a prick’ contingent gaining ground. Not a moment too soon!

 

[Guybrush]

I would say I have a hatred of aggressive, pushy, arrogant people, and that doesn't imply I am one myself, because I'm certainly not.

As I wrote above, nobody has suggested that being the case.

 

[turtles]

hohoho listen if you people are accusing me of secretly being an "arrogant rich little asshole" well, i'm 6'3" so i ain't little

I do agree that often it's when you see something uncomfortably close to yourself that you really start to hate a person, but also sometimes people are just assholes! I heckled the popular kid in highschool who wanted to be a sports announcer, and so would make terrible lame sports commentary over the PA during intramural sports at lunchtime. Surely that's the only reasonable thing to do in such a context? I took great joy in being disliked by him.

 

[turtles]

ok, now I get where the difference is starting, looking at what barry and turtles just said. i was raised by insane italians. you did not DARE let on that you cared about what anyone did or said to you, because from the moment you were born, you were ridiculed day in and day out. if you ever even pretended to take yourself seriously or have ambition, that made it all a million times worse. the emotional extremes i had to live with on a daily basis were pretty scary for a little kid. i remember once my mom throwing a mustard jar and smashing it right next to my head on the wall over like nothing.

that is the why being "sensitive" never really developed. in all my WASPy friends, i see they have that "sensitive" thing...

Yeah this does sort of make sense to me. I have two practicing clinical psychologists for parents, one of whom is a child psychologist, so I probably had the most emotionally well-balanced and supportive upbringing as modern psychology could hope for (i'm not being facetious here, i have a great relationship with my parents). But I can definitely see how growing up in such an environment would instill in me a need to keep up that level of emotional support, given the standards set in my childhood. Maybe expecting the world to continue to give a damn about you as you become an adult is a recipe for getting hurt, or maybe it's keeping me happy...hmmm....