OK, ZPG: Let's get a room. I'm paying.

The BBQ Pit
21

So tolerance is dependant upon being in the majority. So long as what you think and who you are is within the limits set by “most people” then you are deserving of tolerance but if you are outside of those constraints you deserve to be bashed and the more people that do it the better.

I don’t think offering a handshake is tantamount to rape either. So you know how I’d deal with her? If I offered my hand and she refused without comment I’d think it was strange and go about my business. If she said “that’s like trying to rape me.” I’d be taken aback and would avoid her in the future.

I sure as hell wouldn’t get together in a huge group and abuse her, repeatedly, incessantly.

I’m not talking pedophiles or puppy-killers here. I’m talking harmless people who think differently than you do. I think ZPG Zealot is 100% wrong and I can’t even begin to get how she views the world. But beating on her for having and expressing ideas - even ones that YOU consider bizarre - is not tolerant. It isn’t even decent.

Would you like to take a guess how many people have a world view that you’d consider bizarre? Tons. Entire cultures and religions. Tolerance is not tolerant when harmless people with dissenting harmless ideas (where is the harm in her belief? Who has she hurt?) are beaten on (verbally or physically) for not conforming to your world view.

I think it is bizarre to believe that rocks and trees have spirits. Does that mean I have the right to have a go at the people who do believe that? Do I get to bring a bunch of other people so it is a communal thing?

Tolerant-unless-I-fundamentally-disagree-with-you is not tolerant.

22

I guess I can understand why you take this so personally.

23

Point of order: Roma do not have honor killings (or when it happens it is condoned as being a horrible and unjust reaction), but plenty of other cultures we come in contact with do. I do volunteer work with women for whom this is a real danger and should not be taken lightly in interactions with them. Spousal abuse is a problem in the United States that far to many people ignore or worse dismiss with platitudes of “Oh, they should tell the men not to do that.” That doesn’t help the women who need to feel safe above all else before any real change can happen.

24

I’m sure you are trying to make a point of some sort. Could you expand on it a little? Like enough for it to be discernable.

25

Oh please, I tolerate far more things than most people have too. I don’t expect people to adhere to Roma cultural standards (well unless they are Roma and expect me to interact with them according to traditions involving community social welfare). I do expect them to respect my right to body sovereignty and personal dignity. If I am supposed to remain silent when they do things that are considered by me to be immoral (like adoption) or quite rude (references to pregnancy or menstruation among people of the opposite sex), I expect them to not do so with aspects of my culture they don’t share.

26

OP speaking. Look, everyone: Please, calm down. I know we’re in the pit, but I didn’t want to start another pile-on. I most certainly don’t want to pick on Roma culture. I have zero problems with Roma culture (although I don’t know much about it). I don’t even want to criticize **ZPG **in this thread, particularly. As I said, I think a lot of this may be down to a misunderstanding.

If someone belongs to a minority culture and/or holds unusual opinions, what do I care? I come from a small country (and still live in one), so in some ways, whenever I’m visiting the US (or, for that matter, participating on a message board where most posters are American) I’m from a minority culture. I also hold certain opinions that the majority might find a bit odd. My posting history is my cite.

However, I am *aware *of those things about myself, because they would be downright impossible not to notice.

The thing is, what I am observing about **ZPG **is this: In ZPG’s world, her opinions and cultural quirks are not restricted to the minority, and they are not considered unusual. They are commonplace in mainstream American society. To her, we’re the strange outliers, and she simply finds it baffling how we are trying to push our marginal beliefs onto everyone in the country.

Let me quote **ZPG **from the “polite things” thread:

Note “the accepted etiquette in a culture” and “many people don’t bother to do things the right way according to their own culture” (we here must seem like that to her).

Note: hundreds if not thousands of times in my life and rather normal.

Note: every social circle, and you guys here on the Dope and it really surprises me.

Doesn’t this, and other posts/threads by **ZPG **make a lot more sense, and come across much more benign, if we assume that she lives in a version of the USA where the majority culture is notably different from the one we’re living in, in our version?

I have seen **ZPG **been accused of trying to push her views onto others. I don’t think that’s fair. I think her posts only make sense if she lives in a world where her views, at least to a large extent, are already shared by the majority of others.

And now I’m super curious and eager to learn more about that world.

27

ZPG, does this sound at all plausible to you? Do you (in general) find us, on the Dope, strange and not at all representative of the world around you? Again, I don’t mean Roma culture. I specifically mean the modern US as a whole.

28

[QUOTE=Captain Amazing;]
… and has werewolf and vampire mythologies.
[/QUOTE]

??? I don’t think I’ve ever seen her post anything about werewolves or vampires?

29

Since I think I was the first to mention those: Actually, I may be misremembering. It was ZPG’s grandparents, apparently, who believed in vampires. Maybe I’m just wrong about the werewolves…

My apologies.

And, again, just to be clear: I’m not criticizing a belief in vampires. Vampire-believing is fine, whatever. Or not believing in vampires is fine, also whatever. Just making an observation here.

30

Did you really intend to use the word “condoned?” 'Cos ISTM that “condemned” would fit the assertion better.

Also, how did things work out with your nephew?

31

You’re here!

Now is a perfect time to settle the charges that you’re deliberately trolling, implying that shaking a woman’s hand = rape has anything to do with Roma culture.

It doesn’t and you know that. You can’t back that up, either.

32

I know I am new here, but all that seemed like quite a brutal “apology”.

33

Well, what bothered me in this case was specifically that I was talking about someone behind their back. I have no problems telling people things to their face, positive or negative, as long as they have a chance to respond. I honestly simply wasn’t thinking when I posted in the “odd posters” thread. In my defense, it took on a format that I’ve never seen before on the Dope: People were discussing other posters and posting links, but when someone showed up to offer a different version (ZPG, specifically), they got shut down for being “off topic”. That is, indeed, bullying. I didn’t completely realize what kind of thread I was in, and therefore I was being a bully, which I apologize for. And maybe talking about people behind their backs isn’t a great premise for a thread.

I have come to realize, in light of this, that my behavior on this board may, at times, amount to bullying, to an extent I wasn’t aware of. I will need to look into that.

Hence a new thread: Not to continue the bullying, but to avoid the situation where we talked about someone in a private room, and then shut them out from the room. It was a (probably awkward) attempt to open the door to the room again.

Also, I didn’t even want to make fun of ZPG, really. I understand now that I came across as doing so, but I just wanted to share something I found funny. I quite like ZPG. “Comedy gold batshittery” may not sound like a compliment, though, and I realize that in hindsight. I should have left off the “batshittery” part.

However, if someone is being an asshole, and everyone tells them that they’re an asshole, I don’t consider that bullying, necessarily. It can be, but maybe that person just really is an asshole.

Then again, maybe they’re not. I have noticed a lot of hostility in threads involving ZPG. My tentative contention is that much of the hostility stems from a misunderstanding. We are making assumptions (understandable ones, I might add) about the world **ZPG **lives in, but they are mistaken. Similarly, she is making assumptions about ours, and she is also mistaken. Because of this, both sides are reading unreasonableness, strangeness and pigheadedness from the other side.

However: What if the problem is that the two sides are basing their opinions and assumptions on different sets of facts? It’s like having an argument about the sky, where one person lives on a planet where the sky is blue, and the other on one where it is pink. As long as both sides *know *that they live on different planets, there is no problem. Then, we can share our experiences of what colors the sky can have.

However, if we don’t know that we’re on different planets, or even know that other planets exist, the other person might seem crazy, stubborn or hostile when they discuss the color of the sky. I would imagine that such a situation might resemble what we have with ZPG.

If the two sides suddenly realize that they are, in fact, talking about different planets, with different-colored skies, much of the hostility would suddenly evaporate. Then they could laugh it off, and instead share interesting facts about their different worlds.

Maybe I’m completely wrong about the different worlds thing. Maybe it’s not a matter of ontology, but something completely different. (Maybe **ZPG **is nuts, or everyone on the Dope is nuts. The latter isn’t impossible, I’ve seen nuttiness here before.) However, it does, at least to me, offer a possible reading of ZPG’s quite interesting posts that may shed some new light and avoid the hostility I’m seeing.

34

Bravo.

35

I would, because its a stupid belief to have and irrational, equating incidental, common, and innocent contact with sexual violence. That kind of belief harms kids by over-focusing on the shame aspect of sex, and belittles actual victims of sexual violence by either downplaying their suffering to a handshake, or elevating a handshake to their suffering. And before you ask, yes, I’m fully capable and qualified to make an objective decision about this. If you want to trot out the old moral relativism stance where nobody can objectively say anything and all views are respected, you either confirm my beliefs or attack your own, that’s why purely shouting moral relativism isn’t going to win you any arguments

36

So in that other thread, I got so irritated at ZPG that I let my snide nature get the better of me, and Asimovian correctly called me out on it. I tried expressing my problems with ZPG’s claims more civilly over there, but just in case it’s the content and not merely the form of my objections that’s incivil, I’m moving it over here:

ZPG, you’ve described a social circle in which people drop entire friendships over an instance of saying “Congratulations” to a bride, and in which people use the single word “Congratulations” to cast aspersions on a woman’s sexual purity, and in which this word breaks up marriages because the groom’s family considers it evidence of sexual impurity.

I strongly believe you are inaccurately representing your social circle, for a variety of reasons. First, such a social circle would be well-known in the United States, due to its wide variance from mainstream culture–yet there are no other instances of these particular customs anywhere on the Internet, even in places where poor behavior often surfaces (if I’m wrong here, a cite, preferably a few cites, would be greatly appreciated). If these social customs existed, they would turn up.

Second, you bring these social circles and their customs up in order to defend your own assertions; they could hardly be better-tailored to provide evidence to support the claim that your assertions are mainstream. I am unaware of any previous time you’ve discussed a marriage ended by the word “congratulations,” even though this would be a remarkable event.

Third, anyone wishing to condemn a woman’s sexual purity has much more efficient means at their disposal, even more efficient passive-aggressive means, and it is implausible that they would adopt a word that’s so commonly used in a sincere fashion, without adding something extra to make their condemnation clear.

If I discovered that someone in my social circle were representing my own behavior so inaccurately, casting me in such a poor light as you’re casting those in your social circle, I would be livid. I would consider it a serious betrayal.

37

I’m of two minds with respect to ZPG’s accounts of self-conduct.

  1. It’s all an affectation; a fantasy that takes place in her own mind, not IRL.
  • or -
  1. She’s part of a real, but very marginal community, that enjoys playing out these fantasies and rituals as part of some need to belong to and express a unique, almost cult-like, identity.

It’s not so unusual if you think about it. Branch Davidians, Jonestown and Westboro Baptists are just a few extreme examples of sub-cultures that create their own rules and rituals.

I don’t think ZPG is that far gone. But she does appear to enjoy creating and living according to her own set of rules of social conduct.

38

Yes, that was meant to be condemned (spell check isn’t perfect).

The fact that I took all the information I had about the sexually explicit phone pictures (which were restorable despite my angry fit of damage to the phone) to the police, FIRST was the single largest factor in why my nephew didn’t get expelled from school or charged with a crime. Not mention I did not have trouble because that damn phone was in my name. Luckily he may have been telling the truth about never taking nude photos of himself (or his parts) and sending them to the girl. Or at least we (as in our family, the school, the police and probably the private detectives the girls family hired) could never find any incriminating photos of him. So we are consider that our miracle for a few decades. Nephew got banned by his father and me from having a cell phone until he can display proper maturity about it or he is living on his own and supporting himself without our help. He also got married which I wasn’t in favor of, but was the lesser of evils in the situation. His wife is a nice Roma girl that was delighted to marry into a family where getting an education is valued. She had freaking 4.0 her freshman year and takes about Law School or an MBA!

39

What I don’t know of is any cult that universalizes their experience. Davidians, Jonestownians, Westoborons all build their identity on how different they are from their neighbors. ZPG suggests that everyone knows that congratulating a bride will ruin the marriage.

If she’s not actively insane, and probably even if she is, she’s bullshitting us six ways to Sunday.

40

The truth is sexual violence is often dismissed as incidental, common, and innocent contact. The kind of belief that harms kids is that their bodies are not their own property and that in order to be polite they must allow people to touch without their consent. Touching someone without their permission or especially against their will is sexual violence. And if really horrifies me that some people refuse to acknowledge this. With the attitude that such can be dismissed as incidental, common and innocent it’s no wonder sexual predation on children and date rape are such a problem and so many rapes go unreported.