# Bad things that people like to brag about
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bad-things-that-people-like-to-brag-about/977031
**Category:** In My Humble Opinion
**Created:** [December 24, 2022, 5:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bad-things-that-people-like-to-brag-about/977031 "2022-12-24T05:32:45Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 3
### Author:  [@Jackmannii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jackmannii)
#### Post date: [December 26, 2022, 4:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bad-things-that-people-like-to-brag-about/977031/41 "2022-12-26T16:49:12Z")
“The U.S. city with the most unpredictable weather is Rapid City, South Dakota.”
I always hear “Rapid City, South Dakota” in the incredulous tones of Cary Grant’s character in _North by Northwest_.
When calibrated for winter and early spring (or for precipitation in general), the Houston area deserves a higher unpredictability rating. During the five years I lived there, I quickly learned that while late spring to early fall heat and humidity were a given, there otherwise was no “average” weather, just a wild vacillation between extremes.
Tom Lehrer bragged about his erstwhile home in “Dixie”:
_Won’t ya come back home to Alabammy_
_Back to the arms of my dear ol’ Mammy,_
_Her cookin’s lousy and her hands are clammy,_
_But what the hell, it’s home._
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### Author:  [@pulykamell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pulykamell)
#### Post date: [December 26, 2022, 6:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bad-things-that-people-like-to-brag-about/977031/42 "2022-12-26T18:15:47Z")
> [@Velocity](#):
>
> For sure, that, too. Buffalo-ers bragging about how many feet of snow, etc.
Yep. I remember my wife (from Buffalo) looking at me when I was like “holy shit, we’re getting like two feet of snow this weekend!” a few years ago (2015, 20-odd inches officially and fifth-largest snowfall in Chicago history) and acting like “oh, that’s just another Wednesday in January for us. Wake me when we get real snow.” Not her words, but her attitude. I mean, fair enough – they got like 4 feet of lake effect yesterday or the day before.
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### Author:  [@carrps](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/carrps)
#### Post date: [December 26, 2022, 6:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bad-things-that-people-like-to-brag-about/977031/43 "2022-12-26T18:28:04Z")
> [@Wallaby](#):
>
> He also had a No 1 hit in Finland with _ **Purple People Eater** _.
I can remember that song from when I was a really little kid, like 5 or 6. I thought Sheb Wooley recorded it. Was his the cover or was it Cryer’s?
Just looked it up. Cryer’s was the cover.
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### Author:  [@ChockFullOfHeadyGoodness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ChockFullOfHeadyGoodness)
#### Post date: [December 26, 2022, 6:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bad-things-that-people-like-to-brag-about/977031/44 "2022-12-26T18:40:11Z")
> [@dougrb](#):
>
> A friend in high school would always brag about “how high he was” after smoking a joint.
In college a guy on my floor was prepping his bong when he glanced at the calendar. “It’s June 1?? DUDE!! I got high every single day in May!!!”
Years later I heard from a mutual friend he dropped out after 7 years. Reminded me of the Animal House line.
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### Author:  [@enipla](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/enipla)
#### Post date: [December 26, 2022, 7:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bad-things-that-people-like-to-brag-about/977031/45 "2022-12-26T19:09:44Z")
I guess I’m sort of guilty of this. But will leave it at that as it would be ‘bragging’. I do try to make sure it’s relevant to the discussion.
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### Author:  [@Moriarty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Moriarty)
#### Post date: [December 26, 2022, 7:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bad-things-that-people-like-to-brag-about/977031/46 "2022-12-26T19:44:26Z")
> [@ChockFullOfHeadyGoodness](#):
>
> > [@dougrb](#):
> >
> > A friend in high school would always brag about “how high he was” after smoking a joint.
>
> In college a guy on my floor was prepping his bong when he glanced at the calendar. “It’s June 1?? DUDE!! I got high every single day in May!!!”
I’ve been in rehab groups, where a bunch of drunks/druggies can easily go from lamenting the depth of their addiction (“I couldn’t imagine getting off drugs”) to bragging about how extreme their use got (“I could buy an 8 ball and need another one the next night. As soon as my dealer got in more, he’d call me because he knew I was up for it. I would deposit my check and immediately take $500 in cash and then not sleep for 3 days”)
I’ve heard the same amongst victims of abuse. Sometimes their recollections get lurid, almost like war stories. I’ve heard people talk about depraved conduct, from people who were just awful towards them, and there’s almost perceived some level of pride in having done it and survived. I don’t know if there’s some survivor instinct at play, but it does seem to be some way of responding to, or coping with, being victimized.
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### Author:  [@Spice\_Weasel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spice_Weasel)
#### Post date: [December 26, 2022, 8:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bad-things-that-people-like-to-brag-about/977031/47 "2022-12-26T20:04:21Z")
> [@Moriarty](#):
>
> I’ve heard the same amongst victims of abuse. Sometimes their recollections get lurid, almost like war stories. I’ve heard people talk about depraved conduct, from people who were just awful towards them, and there’s almost perceived some level of pride in having done it and survived. I don’t know if there’s some survivor instinct at play, but it does seem to be some way of responding to, or coping with, being victimized.
One common characteristic of PTSD is to vacillate from extreme avoidance of anything related to the trauma to obsession with the details. And a lot of people maybe didn’t get the validation from the right person so they seek it everywhere else. I’ve been through it and even occasionally still struggle with it. But it doesn’t make it any less annoying. And I think culturally it has become an unproductive, unhealthy norm. I think many people get stuck in that victimhood frame of mind and they aren’t presented with many alternatives. In a healthy paradigm, recognizing the horror of the abuse would be an early stage of recovery and you’d eventually get somewhere more accepting and not exactly downplaying, but integrating and contextualizing what happened. But I think a lot of people these days get stuck in the early stage.
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### Author:  [@knavette57](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/knavette57)
#### Post date: [December 26, 2022, 8:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bad-things-that-people-like-to-brag-about/977031/48 "2022-12-26T20:19:35Z")
I married into a rough family, (divorced that spouse a long time ago), whose members loved to tell tales of all the ass kicking and drunken brawls they enjoyed. One of the uncles was given the greatest respect for yanking a phone out of the wall of one of their more “high class” relatives (he was drunk, of course.) No one thought he was wrong, after all, those relatives had money and could get it repaired, plus the uncle was certain he sent them a “message”, that they weren’t too good for their roots.
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### Author:  [@DrDeth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrDeth)
#### Post date: [December 26, 2022, 8:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bad-things-that-people-like-to-brag-about/977031/49 "2022-12-26T20:37:56Z")
> [@BeepKillBeep](#):
>
> “I worked 10-16 hours a day for the past 2 years. I worked even when I was sick, and didn’t take a single day’s vacation!”
>
> How is that something to be proud of? I don’t get it. Heck sometimes people brag about this over a lifetime. I’ve seen people be like “I worked 30 years for the same company. I worked when I was sick. I worked at least 10 hour a day. Usually more.”
“And I infected many of my coworkers, who infected their families, forcing them to use all their sick leave!”
People bragging about how painful their tats are.
> [@Stanislaus](#):
>
> There is a lot of social media content that boils down to: My dog is badly trained, ain’t it cute.
>
> No, it is not
Yeah. They made a whole movie out of this. It is really a form of animal abuse.
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### Author:  [@RivkahChaya](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RivkahChaya)
#### Post date: [December 26, 2022, 8:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bad-things-that-people-like-to-brag-about/977031/50 "2022-12-26T20:44:20Z")
OMG! Jews are famous for this. “You think YOU had cancer! Let me tell you about…”
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### Author:  [@RivkahChaya](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RivkahChaya)
#### Post date: [December 26, 2022, 8:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bad-things-that-people-like-to-brag-about/977031/51 "2022-12-26T20:48:55Z")
> [@ChockFullOfHeadyGoodness](#):
>
> Years later I heard from a mutual friend he dropped out after 7 years. Reminded me of the Animal House line.
I know a guy who worked on his dissertation for 17 years. That was the last I heard-- don’t know whether he ever defended.
In a college town, you don’t know people who brag about how long they took to finish their OWN dissertation, but you do get a lot of “I know a guy…”
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### Author:  [@RivkahChaya](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RivkahChaya)
#### Post date: [December 26, 2022, 8:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bad-things-that-people-like-to-brag-about/977031/52 "2022-12-26T20:54:46Z")
> [@Spice\_Weasel](#):
>
> One common characteristic of PTSD is to vacillate from extreme avoidance of anything related to the trauma to obsession with the details.
Wow. That just goes to show how really terrible the Holocaust was. Even with this at work, and the general Jewish cultural tendency to “one-up” someone’s misery, Holocaust victims tended to be very close-lipped about everything.
Even among one another, without others present, they didn’t talk about it much (my cousins and I used to listen at the heating vents). They called it the “Death times,” or the “Great murders,” or the Yiddish equivalent. And rarely talked about it; mainly to say that something was “before” or “after.”
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### Author:  [@Spice\_Weasel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spice_Weasel)
#### Post date: [December 26, 2022, 9:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bad-things-that-people-like-to-brag-about/977031/53 "2022-12-26T21:17:02Z")
I think it can also be influenced by cultural expectations as well. Not too long ago, people in the US never talked about their abuse, they just accepted/perceived it as normal, or in the very least felt that talking about it was worse than disrupting the familial status quo. I think in recent times – and I’m reaching here, but perhaps due to a couple of landmark psychological books on the subject, such as the controversial book _The Courage to Heal_, it pushed the idea of abuse, particularly the abuse of girls, into the forefront of the public consciousness. Which isn’t to say that it’s handled well when it happens… we still have issues as a society with minimizing abuse when it occurs, shaming victims, etc. But at the same time, there are many more people talking openly about childhood abuse (and everything else) than we have ever had before.
But yes, the Holocaust was really, really awful. I don’t know what cultural expectations Jewish people have around sharing trauma in general, or how that informs it, but it’s hard for me to imagine a worse trauma than what survivors endured.
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### Author:  [@Elmer\_J.Fudd](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Elmer_J.Fudd)
#### Post date: [December 26, 2022, 9:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bad-things-that-people-like-to-brag-about/977031/54 "2022-12-26T21:18:45Z")
[ ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLjNzwEULG8)
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### Author:  [@Elmer\_J.Fudd](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Elmer_J.Fudd)
#### Post date: [December 26, 2022, 9:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bad-things-that-people-like-to-brag-about/977031/55 "2022-12-26T21:23:58Z")
> [@Spice\_Weasel](#):
>
> But yes, the Holocaust was really, really awful. I don’t know what cultural expectations Jewish people have around sharing trauma in general, or how that informs it, but it’s hard for me to imagine a worse trauma than what survivors endured.
I met a survivor who related every last horrific detail of his ordeal with the addendum that his faith requires him to “bear witness” to what occurred.
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### Author:  [@Spice\_Weasel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spice_Weasel)
#### Post date: [December 26, 2022, 9:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bad-things-that-people-like-to-brag-about/977031/56 "2022-12-26T21:27:40Z")
I can’t say what other people should do, but I am grateful some people have thought to put down their experiences of the Holocaust (or being children of survivors) such as Viktor Frankl, Elie Wiesel and Art Spiegelman, because I’ve gotten a lot out of learning how people process and come to terms with such trauma. I believe it’s made a positive impact for many people to see those examples.
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### Author:  [@Disinfectus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Disinfectus)
#### Post date: [December 26, 2022, 9:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bad-things-that-people-like-to-brag-about/977031/57 "2022-12-26T21:33:47Z")
> [@Stanislaus](#):
>
> There is a lot of social media content that boils down to: My dog is badly trained, ain’t it cute.
>
> No, it is not
I see the same thing with people’s posts about their kids. “Isn’t it adorable how Timmy tries to ride the family cat?”
No, it really isn’t.
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### Author:  [@RivkahChaya](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RivkahChaya)
#### Post date: [December 26, 2022, 9:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bad-things-that-people-like-to-brag-about/977031/58 "2022-12-26T21:35:15Z")
One of the remarkable things about _MAUS_ is the matter-of-fact way it is told.
That is what is remarkable generally about the Holocaust in conversation. People who can complain for hours about their gout, or the guy who cut them off in traffic, or go on like the coffee bar being out of Splenda is the worst thing in the world, talk about the Holocaust like they are reciting their ABCs.
I wonder if maybe the banter around how awful such-and-such a thing is, that is part of people socializing belongs to us, and if we talked about the Holocaust that way, we’d be “letting it in” to a place it doesn’t deserve to be. Does that make sense? And that’s just my surmise-- I was born in 1967. Old enough to know lots of survivors, but too young to have it touch my own life.
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### Author:  [@RivkahChaya](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RivkahChaya)
#### Post date: [December 26, 2022, 9:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bad-things-that-people-like-to-brag-about/977031/59 "2022-12-26T21:38:19Z")
We once had a retired service dog-- wheelchair, so she was a very big dog-- a Giant Schnauzer. She was also very well-behaved, so in her retirement, we took her to some preschools and Kindergartens to teach kids about dog-safety, and that dogs can have jobs.
When we brought her to one place, a 2-yr-old walked up, pointed to her, and said very seriously to the other kids “NO RIDE!”
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### Author:  [@Spice\_Weasel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spice_Weasel)
#### Post date: [December 26, 2022, 9:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bad-things-that-people-like-to-brag-about/977031/60 "2022-12-26T21:39:01Z")
> [@RivkahChaya](#):
>
> I wonder if maybe the banter around how awful such-and-such a thing is, that is part of people socializing belongs to us, and if we talked about the Holocaust that way, we’d be “letting it in” to a place it doesn’t deserve to be. Does that make sense?
Yes, I do think it makes sense. And maybe a lot of the petty complaining is a kind of sublimated way to address the injustice they were dealt in the Holocaust. They may not be able to articulate that horror but it could lead to a pervasive sense that life is just not fair.
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