When my ostensibly intelligent sister-in-law revealed last year that she not only still supported President Bush, but firmly believed that ultimately, history would exonerate him as our greatest president.
:eek:
I eventually reached up and closed my mouth by lifting my jaw and said, “I think we really need to change the subject.”
Wow.
:smack:
LOL! Come on- if I were a racist skinhead & was planning to attack a predominantly black high school, especially if it was an inner-city one, I’d definitely be concerned about armed resistance. It might be the one rational thought in an already effed-up plan.
We had a rep called Daina (Day-na). At the end of the month I was paying out the commissions and hers didn’t seem to be enough. There was another rep called Diana (Dy-anna) in the books who was doing quite well, but I’d never heard of her. Who’s this Diana I asked. Oh - says the input clerk - that’s Daina - I can’t get my head around the spelling Daina so … ???
“Okay, guys, we’ve planned this thing down to the colors of our shoelaces… Now let’s stop and think for a minute.”
Someone at work told me that even gay couples have a “male” and a “female” partner. I think she meant “masculine” and “feminine” and I could not wrap my mind around it.
I once heard a Planned Parenthood protestor tell someone in all seriousness “Every woman regrets having an abortion and no woman regrets having her child adopted.” My mouth just fell open.
I was having a discussion on another forum about some animal abuse issue, maybe the marine puppy throwing video. I was in the uncomfortable position of defending the puppy murderer against people who thought that, you know, it was perfectly reasonable to demand that he be thrown off a cliff as well. I kept trying to figure out if they were just exaggerating their own outrage, so I was chipping down to the root of the problem. That’s when I asked point blank of one of the people I was arguing with: “If your dog and my daughter were in a car sinking in a lake, which one would you save?”
And I was told, point blank, that he would save his dog. Because, you know, it was HIS dog, and he didn’t know my daughter from Adam.
I died a little bit that day.
Wow. Just… wow. The fact that you did not, at that moment, strike her is a testament to your restraint.
The conversation that I just had with my project manager left me a bit speechless. I won’t repeat the whole thing here, but this was a real gem: “If you work on that project for 2-3 days per month, that’s an entire week out of every month. If you add that up over the course of a year, that’s more than 50% of your time!”
That actually used to be part of the standard psychological explanation for homosexuality. There was even a belief that you weren’t really gay if you didn’t “act the woman” in the encounter.
That’s been debunked decades ago, but I’m not surprised the belief still might be hanging around.
A friend of ours said something similar. Her daughter was allergic to dogs. When asked if she was going to get rid of her dogs, she said no, because she had them longer than the baby.
Hey, there’s at least one person on the SDMB who would sacrifice the entire population of Australia to save just his kid.
And they vigorously (attempted) to defend their position when they were Pitted, and a couple other people even agreed with them!
Humanity can be pretty screwed up.
Actually, I think i understand the rational behind that sort of thinking (or at least the newsradio one).
The it’s a “matter of sex” thing is setting up basically the idea of male and female (basically the pitcher and the catcher- see above with the homosexuality explanation). This person may just be trying to explain that they view dogs as “male”- because dogs, including some females, have a tendency to hump things, and I’ve not really seen that behavior in cats. So perhaps that’s why all cats are females, as the caller has always observed various dogs humping other animals such as cats, but she’s not seen it the other way around.
So therefore all dogs to her are the “males” in sex (the act that is), and the cats are all the “females” when it comes to sex.
But I’m probably over thinking it.
Background: I’ve been friends with one woman for a long time. This woman is really one of the smartest people I know regarding a lot of things (she’s got an excellent business sense, is great at reading people, good at evaluating situations, practical things like that). When it comes to other things, particularly regarding health and the body…not so much.
So one night we were talking about Scientology and its various beliefs/teachings, like mistrust of psychiatry. She says that, while she disagrees with their methods, she thinks that Scientologists “are kind of right about that stuff”.
Ok.
She goes on to say that most of the pharmacology industry is a big scam, and how pills either don’t make a difference or end up making people’s problems worse. Well, that’s a little weird, but plenty of people are weird about the idea of pills. That wasn’t the crazy thing. She goes on to say…
“I think that people can solve their problems if they really want to.”
:dubious: She can’t be saying what I think she’s saying, can she?
I prod her a little bit. “So…people who have depression and schizophrenia can cure themselves…if they really want to.”
“All that stuff is in people’s heads. Those people could get better if they really tried hard.”
:eek: I keep going. “So what about people with high blood pressure, and asthma, and cancer? Can they cure themselves too?”
Lo and behold, she says yes. “Those people can help themselves if they want to. People have that power within themselves, if they want to use it. It just depends how badly you want it.”
I honestly can’t believe that this is coming from the mouth of an otherwise sensible, sane person. I tell her that’s insulting to…just about everyone.
Then she gets angry at me. Oh yes. “Well, it’s true. If you don’t believe it, you’re just blind.”
Truly one of the weirder conversations I’ve ever had.
When I was a teen and my mom told me she was pregnant, apparently I said “what makes you think you can afford to have another kid?” 17 years later, my mom told me “you’re right, we couldn’t afford another kid”.
Although there is not a great prevalence of 50s style roles (breadwinner and housewife), there is still a surprising (and exasperating to me) preponderance of segregation with regards to sexual position (“tops” and “bottoms”). :smack:
Actually, I thought I had an answer or two to this question until I read that thread. And then the full horror of what it actually means to be ‘human’ hit me like a two tonne truck. As a wise man once said, the human race is a bad, BAD species.
Someone on another board I frequent is spreading outrageous lies about her health. Normally I wouldn’t care about it. I don’t know this person in real life and it doesn’t affect me. But recently this person started claiming she had cancer and went into great detail about treatments including implantation of radioactive material, chemo, etc.
Then after a few weeks (yep, just a few weeks, that’s how long it takes to do all that treatment :rolleyes:), she blithely stated that the biopsy said that the tumors were benign all along. Guess all those treatments were for nothing! Better safe than sorry!
The thing is, this person knows that I spent most of last year taking care of my mom who was dying of cancer. Every single treatment she claimed to have had, my mom had. She never said one word of sympathy to me the entire year.
Awesome response!
I happen to say that myself, but it’s a comment on respective species’ collective personality and temperament, not the mechanics of reproduction.
Durned edit window timeout.
An aunt of mine once stated that whales aren’t animals, because they’re mammals.