Share Your Stories of Real-Life Threadshitting

[RivkahChaya]

@gnoitall

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.

@t-bonham@scc.net

Like others have said, it’s best to just avoid people like that.

I like the term “convershitting.” Second, I will confess to convershitting on a particular person I knew in college, which is a place where you don’t always have the luxury of avoiding people who live in your dorm, or are in your department.

This woman would try to turn whatever the topic of conversation was into how much something sucked for her. I got so sick of her doing this, that I started responding with things like “Wow, the AIDS orphans in Africa have nothing on you.”

Just as an example, she had a mild loss in of ear, normal hearing in the other. She had a hearing aid, but the loss was so mild, she’d forget the aid a lot, and you couldn’t pick up from her speech that she had a hearing loss. However, the way she told it, she was the MOST disabled person in the world. She’d been denied social security disability, and vocational rehabilitation, because her hearing loss didn’t qualify her as disabled, and her grades were as good as anyone’s, in spite of the fact that she went to class without her hearing aid most of the time. But, she complained incessantly about having to pay for hearing aid batteries, which are not very expensive, and she hardly used anyway. But any time anyone complained about paying for anything, or just mentioned prices-- even the price of something going down-- she was likely to bring the subject of the batteries up, and how her medical insurance ought to cover them.

That’s just a single example. Everything was a contest. If you forgot your watch today, well, hers was broken. Mention a class, and she’d complain about her schedule, or one of her professors. To hear her tell it, nothing ever went right for her. But she was from an upper middle class, white, Protestant family, in America, which automatically makes her better off than most of the world. I couldn’t help myself. I had to point that out to her from time to time.

I am not like that with most people. Generally I am full of sympathy. But when someone was near tears because her cat was dying, and Complain-o interrupts with how she couldn’t have a cat because her stepbrother (or something) was allergic, I seriously wanted to punch her. Actually, I wanted to say “With your luck, it just would have gotten hit by a car.”

So yeah, my name is Rivkah Chaya, and I convershit.

[gnoitall]

@RivkahChaya

That’s just a single example. Everything was a contest. If you forgot your watch today, well, hers was broken. Mention a class, and she’d complain about her schedule, or one of her professors.

Dear $DIETY, I hate toppers. Hate hate hate them. The only redeeming value that type of defective human has is making mass murderers look good.

That said, the Dilbert rendition is pretty damn funny. It’s true: comedy is something terrible happening to someone else.

[dracoi]

When people learn that I do taxes for a living, they frequently use that as an invitation to complain about how the government isn’t spending their money in the right way. “Oh, you prepare taxes. I can’t believe the government pays for Planned Parenthood!” or “You prepare taxes? Isn’t it ridiculous that we don’t tax carbon emissions?” And it’s kind of amazing because some people are more prone to do this than others, but it really is a very large number who do it.

Damnit! There goes another Christmas party spent listening to your political platform.

Seriously, folks, I only prepare the returns. Setting policy and budgets is a different job. I don’t care how they spend it, or what they tax, or whether it encourages your goals for society. There are rules. I help you follow them. If you want to change anything, go complain to the idiot you sent to Congress.

[BeeGee]

It’s tough when you work around one of those. I can ALWAYS think of a good retort, but at work, it’s best to leave that unsaid. My solution is to lean my head to one side, squint one eye, raise the other eyebrow and look at them like they’re absolutely batshit insane. Then walk off without saying a word. It frustrates the hell out of my local shitter. She can’t complain that I’m rude to my supervisor or talk about me to other people because I don’t say anything.

“That BeeGee is such a bitch.”
“What did she do?”
“She looked at me funny.”

[Me_Billy]

@dracoi

When people learn that I do taxes for a living, they frequently use that as an invitation to complain about how the government isn’t spending their money in the right way. “Oh, you prepare taxes. I can’t believe the government pays for Planned Parenthood!” or “You prepare taxes? Isn’t it ridiculous that we don’t tax carbon emissions?” And it’s kind of amazing because some people are more prone to do this than others, but it really is a very large number who do it…

I’ve met those types of people! They are the same people who will see someone reading something, say a Caucasian person reading a book on Saudi Arabia, then say “You people should leave this country if you don’t like it here!”

Or see someone reading a newspaper story on AIDS and then not want to sit next to the person, etc.

Highly intelligent!

[Gatopescado]

I do this to stupid people when the really deserve it.