Woo. If you tell me about the magical properties of the food you eat, or why you have to drink pure water, or using a magnet bracelet for elbow pain (unless you use it to hit people over the head who ask you pick things up), I’ll lose respect for you, although maybe I didn’t have much to start with, but that’s about all that happens. If you start down the homeopathy route, or talking to dead people (actually just the part where they talk to you), and all the worst stuff then I just don’t lose respect, I’d rather not have anything to do with you at all.
“I don’t read.”
When I tell a flirting guy I’m married and he asks, “Happily?” Ew ew ew.
The “i don’t read” comment really stands out to me. I work with people who only “read” their facebook feeds. They think videos that have gone viral are “news”. I like these people but now I want to toy with them and feed them whacked out news and see what they say.
Yesterday on facebook one of my closest friends posted that her cat had taken a swipe at her dog and made a cut on him. Someone else replied “did you swat him?” and she replied “yeah, I got in a good smack”.
Knowing that she hits her cat has seriously changed my opinion of her. 
Would you object to the *dog *being harmed? I’m confused.
Cats normally have no idea why you hit them. Connecting the cat’s swipe at the dog to your hit to the cat is not a connection the cat is likely to make. Not going to help the dog.
An ex-co-worker once asked me “You have direct deposit. Why do you look in your pay envelope?”
I squelched my initial reply of “None of your fucking business” and said nothing.
A year after 9/11, my mother calmly said at the dinner table, “I don’t care who we hit, but we better hit somebody.”
A coworker explained to me that he supported torturing Iraqi insurgents because of his deep moral character. This implied that my disgust with torture was caused by a relative deficiency of character.
A female coworker I liked up to that point called someone “A Gandhi” as an insult.
She was late to work. As she sat down next to me she breathlessly said “That stupid Ghandi at 7-11 took forever on the register.” I am thinking what what? Stupid Gandhi is an oxymoron “What are you talking about???” Then she went on to explain “a gandhi” was what she and her friends called men from India and Pakistan* as an INSULT! It took every ounce of restraint I had to not punch her in the face. Upon further questioning by me it was apparent she had NO IDEA WHO GANDHI WAS. At the time she was 50+ years old.
Forever after it sickened me to have to sit near her and to think of the nest of filthy bigots of which she was a member.
*or any dark skinned non-African American man or non-Hispanic man:smack:
This. My marriage of almost 17 years felt apart for various reasons - this was one. And it was a big one. It made me realize that he had changed in ways that were so out of character and bizarre, that continuing our relationship was going to be quite difficult. I had lost respect for him. And the deeper and stranger his belief in these conspiracies became, the further we grew apart. Now, 6 years after our divorce, his life revolves around them. Some make him sound like he’s gone off the deep end. I don’t know what to make of it. How does someone get to that point?
It would help me if you explained that. Cause at the moment I’m thinking that is a wackadoodle reaction to an understandable question.
Someone recently tried explaining to me how, although ‘not all Muslims were terrorists, all terrorists were Muslim’. I asked what religion McVeigh was, to no avail.
The guy I was kind of seeing who mentioned how when a past girlfriend had a broken pelvis, he thought of himself as a stud that he had done that!?! Turns out it was from something else (don’t remember the details) but his reaction was…eew.
It is agreeing with the idea that people should be exceedingly careful to not use language or behave in a way that MIGHT offend a particular group of people.
I’d define it more as, “If the truth is offensive, it must be suppressed.”
When someone tells me what I’m thinking (and they’re incorrect.) If the person were correct, or rather consistently correct, it’d be a different story.
The situations where this arose where inevitably stressful moments and a person projecting thoughts on to me was confounding.
Likely, in day to day interactions, my husband and close friends could accurately extrapolate my possible thoughts. This isn’t what I’d object to although for whatever reason the people I’m close to don’t do this to me or to others.
You forgot the bonus part. The part where you correct them and they tell you are wrong:dubious:
I was halfway through We Took to the Woods by Louise Dickson Rich, and quite liking her, when I got to the part where she has a baby with no difficulty at all, and opines that women who do have difficulty are probably self-centered whiners.
Book met wall. Screw you, Louise.
I had a high school classmate who I respected fairly well: he was smart, got good grades and stayed out of trouble. Then one day at school he mentioned off-hand to a large group of people about all the times he’d been driving drunk, laughing about it the whole time.
This was in 2002 or so; he had no excuse for not knowing better.
I greatly dislike when people are passionate about subjects they know nothing about. When they don’t put any research into their opinions and spout off utter nonsense just to feel as though they’re contributing to a conversation. It makes it even worse if you show them evidence that they’re incorrect, but they refuse to look at it or acknowledge they were wrong.