I’m calling it “threadshitting” because I can’t think of the term for this in the real word, if there even is one-- when you’re talking about something and someone makes a nasty, dismissive comment about it with the intent to derail the conversation.
I know someone who is a master of real-life threadshitting. One time I was debating what, if anything, I should do about some grading unfairness in one of my classes. He said I didn’t know what real suffering was and I should go work in a homeless shelter. Another time, I was talking about a recent harrowing experience when one of my beloved childhood pets got very sick. He said that all the money spent on vet bills could have gone to save starving orphans in Africa. I could go on, but this is more or less representative of his modus operandi. (I generally avoid him at this point, for obvious reasons.)
Have you ever encountered someone like this? If so, how do you deal with it?
I dated someone like this for 8 years (shame on me) and the only solution was to break up with him (because, sadly, I don’t have the technology to nuke him from orbit). All kidding aside, unless a person is in the position to fire you or has a weapon, call them on it. I find some people don’t even realize how they come across. You’ll either expand someone’s awareness about themselves or let them know you aren’t going to take anymore of their nonsense. Win / Win.
My friend posted a video of himself and his wife playing a duet for “Baby It’s Cold Outside” during a performance of the community band they are in together.
Someone commented on the video something like “Normally I consider this the ‘Christmas Rape Song’ but this isn’t too bad.”
The commenter is known as quite a Debbie Downer. That was her “best” yet tho.
In informal logic-and-rhetoric contexts, it’s often called the “Fallacy of relative privation”. Also known as “First world problems”… dismissing a concern because it’s arguably trivial compared to off-topic “real problems”. Your examples are very close to the specific spirit of the “not-as-bad-as” fallacy:
The comparison to a completely irrelevant (albeit arguably more severe) problem manifested somewhere completely different from you is a clear indicator. Hell, the second example conforms precisely to the “First world problem” form: your “first world” problem of a sick pet is compared unfairly to an irrelevant problem of orphans in a third-word continent.
It’s a long-established form of trollery. I’d avoid that loser at any cost.
I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that this person is not themselves a beacon of selfless charity and good works, else they wouldn’t be gracing us with their daily presence. Instead they would be carrying on the works of Mother Theresa in Kolkata. No? Hm, didn’t think so.
Next time they say something like this ask them how many AIDS sufferers have they given a sponge bath to today, because that is exactly the same number of f*cks you give about their shitty comments.
I once told a coworker about how I’d spent $100 on medical tests for my cat. She blurted out that was “stupid” and “wasteful” and “If you need a cat I’ve got plenty on the farm.”
Like others have said, it’s best to just avoid people like that.
I also tend to avoid self-absorbed people who whine on and on about their poor grades on a test, or their experiences with long-dead pets. Try not to be one of those people. Otherwise people might ‘threadshit’ into your conversation to try to move them onto a more interesting topic than ‘you’.
(I don’t know you enough to know if this iss you. Just trying to consider both sides.)
Ha, no, I’m not like that. The grade situation came up because the professor in question sent me an actual e-mail saying that he was giving me a B out of spite even though my work was good enough for an A, and so there was a legitimate question of whether or not to bring the e-mail to the attention of the deans. And I didn’t even bring up the issue of the pet-- he did.
Re: what WOOKINPANUB said, I have tried bringing it to his attention, and he just doubles down on the idea that he is the champion of all that is good and holy and my failure to recognize it marks me as a bad person. As I said, I avoid this guy when at all possible.
Ex-BIL was visiting one day, as was a friend, and I was talking about my brother’s hassles with his ex-employer, who’d fired him for bringing in a doctor’s certificate about his heart problem. BIL butted in to the conversation to say he disagreed with unfair dismissal laws, and as such he’d be going to court to testify against my brother, if it went that far. It wasn’t that he thought my brother’s complaint was unfounded - it was simply that he didn’t believe we should have unfair dismissal laws. Friend and I were dumbfounded.
Found an old photo of my brother (again!) with a former local celebrity in a box of stuff, posted it on Facebook and tagged the celeb. Sparked an animated conversation with my friends who remembered him and I was enjoying the banter until MIL joined in. She didn’t know the guy (she’s not from around these parts and his fame was well over before she moved here), but she just started sinking the boot: insulted his hair, his face, his clothing, homophobic slurs, the works. Everyone else stopped posting in embarrassment. The celeb never said a word, but he untagged himself. Awkward.
This happened some fifteen years ago; but still rankles with me a little. It involved a woman with whom I worked, and for long, quite liked – though she was more than a bit of an “I love me, who do you love?” person – very high opinion of herself and her overall excellence.
We shared something of a fondness for fairly trashy fiction, including some mystery novels. A propos of same: one day – just for conversation’s sake-- I mentioned a preference which I had, for one mystery author’s female detective, over another’s – finding the former a more appealing and less abrasive personality, than the latter. My colleague’s response was approximately, “I think that’s pretty sad on your part – thinking that much, in those terms, about what are only fictitious characters. Maybe you should get a life.”
This turned my feelings toward this woman, to dislike, for as long as we continued to work together – and subsequently, on the rare occasions on which I think about her. Perhaps such sentiments on my part about non-existent people, do make me “sad” – but in my perception: when you work together with another person, and are by those circumstances forced into continuing proximity with them, maybe for years – if you’re not a supercilious narcissist, you make a considerable effort to get along with them, and try to stay quiet about things of theirs, which annoy you – maybe especially, just inconsequential “throwaway” stuff.
On a place like the Dope, it can be a different situation with different conventions, and people accept that: if somebody comes out with something which one thinks idiotic, one may and perhaps will resort to the BBQ Pit, and “go against them with all guns blazing” over same.
“You know what, the next time you say something like that, I’m going to shit in your mouth. Because it’ll be indistinguishable from the stuff that comes out of it.”
Of course, sometimes for this to work, you have to at least convincingly pretend to attempt to follow through on the threat the next time. I do not recommend actually following through with the threat. With any luck, he’ll start avoiding you before that really becomes a problem.
No, no one believes me after the fifth or sixth time I say something like this, even though I have had people say that they thought I might actually be serious with them. By the time they’ve heard those sorts of things several times and haven’t left, we’re friends.
For the purposes of this thread, would you define “talking through, mocking and disparaging your SO’s choice of TV shows or movies” as Real-Life Threadshitting? If so, then this happens to me on a daily basis.
