See, my parents may have not done much for me but they did teach me how to recognize ooginess.
No, I said ‘vibes’. Specifically.
Zosfia’s story about feeling unease about a person in the library gives a good example. The guys behavior pattern was that of a person ‘casing the joint’ so to speak. It is about recognizing that behavior pattern and realizing that it is a red flag. It is about being aware of your environment and ‘little’ things. But these little things are what are I like to call ‘facts’.
Vibes are not about facts. Vibes is taking a look at a person and ‘sensing something about them’. OH and sure, you’re going to tell me that one time when that person did something, but you’re not going to recall all the times you felt something and you were wrong, because you forget those. The failure rate of ‘vibes’ and intution is huge. People are lousy at judging themselves. Here’s an article on just that. http://judson.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/30/wanted-intelligent-aliens-for-a-research-project/index.html?ref=opinion For every ‘gut decision’ you make that works, there are 100s that are failures.
The author of the book claims in his ad that America is becoming more violent, this, while violent crime rates have been falling, and at levels of the ‘good old days’. He is either lying to sell his book, or he is ignorant of the facts. Why should I read this book again.
So tell me, should the OP have followed her intution and leveled a charge of sexual perversion at the photographer? Ran him out of there? Should she pull her daughter off the team so she isn’t kidnapped by this perv? Is she a bad parent because she didn’t? Why was her instict, such a reliable tool according to the book and you, wrong in this case?
Right, because that’s exactly what I suggested. “Get confrontational,” I said. “Accuse them of being a pervert,” I said. “It’ll go well, I promise.”
No, you go up to other people in the stands and introduce yourself and make friends. It’s called being part of a community. Or, if you like, a village. If you sit in the stands and “observe” all by your lonesome, are you more or less effective at keeping an eye on a crowd of thousands than a coalition of parents working together?
I do not understand the fear today of meeting one’s neighbors. “Oh no, we can’t talk to our neighbors, or the parents of our child’s schoolmates, because they might be strange people with perverted designs!” No: that’s exactly why you should make friends with your neighbors, so you know they’re not.
When I worked Security for a small college, there was an issue with a man who frequented college volleyball games of various colleges in town. He’d been trespassed from the U of MN over something related. Can’t remember exactly what, but I believe it had to do with attempting to contact players after the fact. He was also a registered sex offender, which was the big mark against him. We were given his photo and told to look for him, escort him off campus and call the police to inform them that he’d been on campus at an event.
That being said, I get mighty angry at this whole “Man = Pedophile” crap. People need to keep their damage to themselves and I’m damned tired of having to deal with other people’s damage. Just take a look at all the women teachers that are being busted for having sex with their students lately. Should we now believe that ALL females are pedophiles and cannot be trusted around children? Should we now believe that every child is in mortal peril at the hands of it’s own mother?
Honestly, if you have issues with the uniforms, address THAT ISSUE with the school and stop making it be about “perverts with cameras”.
No, because she was overreacting to a null tell, which is exactly what the book warns you against. The guy wasn’t doing anything that was actually suspicious. Her “instinct”, meaning the collection of facts that her brain is putting together beneath the surface, is crap because she’s letting noise overwhelm the actual signals she should be looking for.
No, because she was overreacting to a null tell, which is exactly what the book warns you against. The guy wasn’t doing anything that was actually suspicious. Her “instinct”, meaning the collection of facts that her brain is putting together beneath the surface, is crap because she’s letting noise overwhelm the actual signals she should be looking for.
Considering that your very first piece of advice in this thread was to take the offender’s picture, you’ve got a lot of nerve making me out to be the overreactive asshole here. Your first two posts were about confronting and scaring away the weirdos. But now you’re “all about making friends and living in a village” and tossing out some strawman about “fear of neighbors” which has absolutely nothing to do with anything I said.
Please note; when you don’t have a clue what you’re talking about it is best to just shut the hell up.
I agree with this and even sven’s answer in both this thread and the thread linked to at the beginning; it’s more important for children to have a happy, loving home where they understand the difference between “this person is behaving in ways that signal they’re dangerous” and “this person visually fits a ‘dangerous’ stereotype I’ve come up with and thus I should treat them as if they’re a pervert” behavior; preferably, they should act on the former and not the latter.
I played volleyball in middle and high school (graduated in 2002), and we started wearing the spandex shorts once we got past the early “have fun and learn some new skills” level of the sport. It was easier to have them on, as there’s less to worry about, you don’t get cold as fast if you’ve stopped moving for more than a couple of minutes, and there really wasn’t any worry about people watching seeing something inappropriate unless the shorts fabric were too thin. (We had one year of uniforms where the shorts were really, really thin fabric, and if the wearer had a smaller size than needed, you could see the patterns of the underwear if it were, say, a plaid or other high contrast patterns and they were bent over. The solution was to just make sure we were wearing the right size. There wasn’t hysteria among parents over whether there’d be a pedophile looking at our shorts.) We never had issues with “perverts” coming to the games and tournaments, and we did have some photographic coverage of the major games in the newspaper. During that time period, I had more problems with unwanted attention from men when I was out and about with my family in jeans and t-shirts than when I was playing sports, where I didn’t get any unwanted attention from people outside of my age group.
I really think a lot of the OP’s discomfort with this situation is more to do with her daughter’s adolescence and the realization that her daughter either is or is becoming a sexual being rather than any real fear of perversion among the crowd. A lot of parents can’t handle the idea of their kids actually doing adult things, and this seems to be something that a lot of parents are more open with, but in the form of “my poor helpless child might be attacked because of [_____]”.
I for one am appalled at these websites selling candid teen photos. When I was a teenage boy, I got all my candid photos for free on Usenet. What is the world coming to?
Semantics. It’s common knowledge that “vibes” as used by MissMossie is American English slang for “intuition.” To claim otherwise is to be disingenuous.
Both Zsofia and I have addressed this multiple times already, including in my very first post, and repeating myself from there.
Agreed. Whether wearing a burqa or nothing at all, if you go out into a public space you are consenting to other people seeing you dressed that way. Because it is a public space, other people will be there, and most of them have functioning eyes. If you take issue with people seeing your child dressed in a certain way, then that’s an issue you need to take up with your child. Stay in a private place if you don’t want to be seen.
If someone were following girls into the bathroom to take pictures, you’d have a point (“you” meaning Blank Slate, not Acid Lamp… that was unclear) – in a bathroom you have a reasonable expectation of privacy, and it’s at this point where this person has crossed the line to actually doing something that’s threatening. But in public? Meh. Don’t dress that way if you can’t tolerate being seen dressed that way.
Is there any chance the photographers were teachers? I’m a 7th grade teacher, and just yesterday I went to the volleyball game because two of my students were on the team. I took pictures of them playing to display in class and to later give to the students to keep, just like I did for the football team the night before, just like I will for the basketball players when their season starts, and so on. I try to display lots of photos of my students in class - they seem to like it 
That’s hardly surprising. Why don’t you get her an approved uniform?
This is your fist post about it.
The phrase ‘having a sense’ is implying ‘magic’. That is different from seeing a pattern of behavior, (collecting facts) that indicates danger. I’m sensing a threat is a completly different from saying "This street light is out, and there aren’t any other people around, it may be dangerous for me to take this shortcut, I’ll take the long way home to be safer.
There have been many tests about ‘prey animals’ ability to purely sense danger. In one study, people would walk around a block. A researcher would sometimes watch the person intensely as they did so. People had no ability to sense when they were being watched. Now animals will use their senses and ‘hear’ or ‘smell’ a predator. But your use of the word sense does not mean doing that. It means sensing as in psychic ability.
And since you say that ‘vibes’ = intuition you could have said.
Vibes are not BS. You want to equate the two terms. Fine.
Now why don’t you address the fact that Mr de Becker lies to sell his book. He runs a company that sells security. The way to sell security is to make someone feel insecure. When you make people think that danger is lurking behind every corner, then you get moms seeing photographers at their daughters school volleyball game and thinking ‘pervert’.
This is bad.
IMHO Mr. de Becker is making the world a worse place to live. Sure he tells you, now that you’ve bought his book, that you will see the actual danger around you and not little stuff that you don’t need to worry about. You’ve joined his club of “smart” people. You have the Gift, and now for only $9.99 I can have the Gift too? No thank you.
Sigh. No, it doesn’t, especially when I explicitly said I wasn’t referring to magic in the same damn sentence. You can decide that it means “magic” if you want, but you already know that’s not what I meant, so telling me that I’m talking about magic when I’m not is pretty pointless. And argumentative for the sake of being argumentative, apparently.
We’re actually both talking about the exact same thing here, from what I can tell. I don’t know why you’re arguing with me.
Why is “having a sense” different from seeing patterns? I have a very good sense of what makes good fine-art photography. But if I’m sorting through 300 photos I’m thinking “this one is good, this one is not.” I’m NOT creating mental checklists of everything that is good and not good about each one. I could articulate, in detail, what’s good and what isn’t about every single photo, but it would take forever, so I use my “gut” which is just another way of saying I trust my ability to see the details and synthesize the pattern as a whole.
Same with sensing danger. If there’s a guy approaching me, and he’s sending up red flags, I’m not going to take the time to make checklists and articulate to myself or anyone else why, exactly, he gives me a creepy vibe. By the time I do that, he’s already caught up to me and potentially attempting to hurt me, so I trust in my ability to observe this guy and take in his behavior as a whole, so I can get the frak out of there before he gets anywhere near me.
I can certainly deconstruct it and create the checklists later, if I felt like it, and it may even be a useful exercise to understand, intellectually as well as instinctively, how it works. But when in imminent danger being able to respond almost instantaneously has a much better chance of keeping me alive and well than sitting there for several seconds while I process what all these observations, put together, mean as a whole. That’s the point. Our brains are able to perceive the pattern and it’s meaning in an instant. That’s what intuition is.
Uhm, why not, especially given that’s exactly how I was using it?
You might mean that, but I don’t, and I have said so. Repeatedly. You know, that part where I said “there’s nothing magic about it.”
You keep putting words in my mouth and then developing arguments around things I never said, even things where I was very explicit in what I meant. Why?
In context I think it was perfectly clear what I was doing. Why would I suddenly bring up “intuition” in a “vibes” conversation if I weren’t equating the two? That makes no sense.
<much snip about the book>
Look, we’ve both been saying you’re not in much position to judge the book if you haven’t read it. You could even check it out from a library if you don’t want to pay for it. Somehow you got the idea that it’s about making people paranoid and screwing up their intuition such that everything looks dangerous. Both Zsofia and I have told you that it doesn’t, and that actually it does just the opposite. Given that we’ve read the book, and you haven’t, we might know more about that than you, but you know, believe whatever you want.
It may or may not have been marketed badly, I don’t know, I didn’t buy it because I read an advert. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an advert for it. I bought it because it was recommended to me by someone who’d read it. The quality of the marketing really says nothing about the quality of the book, though. Lots of products are marketed badly, lots are marketed well. It’s only a reflection of how smart or dumb the marketing guys were.
Zsofia has explained, through her creepy guy at the library example, how the book deconstructs intuition to demonstrate that it’s about observing multiple details and synthesizing the pattern. You even agreed with her. I honestly have no idea why you’re still arguing when you’re agreeing with the key points of what the book says.