91 points

Cruelty towards those who are relatively weaker or indeed defenceless - children, the elderly, partners, animals.

Abusing service / customer-facing staff fits in to this as well and is at once particularly revealing and particularly damning. Next time you’re out and about with friends or a love interest watch how they treat (or talk about) e.g. the person at a ticket booth or the person waiting on tables - if they’re nasty to them (or about them), imagine what they might be like behind closed doors (and how they might treat you one day).

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15 points

Abusing service / customer-facing staff fits in to this as well and is at once particularly revealing and particularly damning.

Whenever a customer is rude to me I just remember that they’re probably compensating for how terrible their own lives are. If it was actually an issue on my part then one of my coworkers would’ve told me by now. Makes it way easier to move on with my day.

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2 points

Im sorry that you have to deal with shitty customers. I always make sure to smile to the service/customer facing staff and be as polite as possible

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1 point

I’m in and out and I always say thank you when I’m done, since I personally like it when customers get out of my store as soon as possible.

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51 points
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Being perfectly fine not knowing something and not caring to get answers aka willful ignorance.

Why don’t you want to know?!!! How is it that the thought proceding “I don’t know” is not immediately “but I want to find out”?! We can’t know everything but we have so many answers at our fingertips. As if you don’t want to absorb as much of it as you can?!

It immediately makes me think that the person I am speaking to is not worth my time. Chances are, the more they’re willfully ignorant about, the more likely they’ll also not care about how their actions affect others. Major red flag for me.

Edit: I should’ve mentioned I was thinking of particular types of situations where the person has the mentality of “oh man, I don’t know, it’d be cool to know that” and proceeds to not do anything about it or when they are regurgitating something they heard on foxnews with such blind conviction without bothering to look into it further

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33 points

I understand the sentiment, but there are things not worth knowing. I don’t care who was drafted in 1987 by the San Diego NFL team. I don’t care about the extras who appear in the 1957 film Witness for the Prosecution. I don’t care what you had for breakfast. My point is, I think your issue is less about curiosity, but of values. People who don’t value the things you care about, or worse, don’t even value the things they purport to care about.

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8 points

You’re right. Sorry, I should’ve mentioned I was thinking of particular types of situations where the person has the mentality of “oh man, I don’t know, it’d be cool to know that” and proceeds to not do anything about it.

Or like you say, having strong convictions about something but not having done the reading themselves. I don’t mind listening to opposing opinions if they actually believe them and didn’t just regugitate something they heard on foxnews.

I think in most cases, curiosity is what drove human development to such heights. And to just stop it at “oh yeah, I dunno hey” takes a very particular type of person… A type of person I just can’t understand!

Thanks for pointing that out though, I hadn’t quite fully figured out how to articulate what I was trying to say!

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1 point

particular types of situations where the person has the mentality of “oh man, I don’t know, it’d be cool to know that” and proceeds to not do anything about it

My effort in any given day is limited, and gone are the days of high school/college where I would just stay up all night because I found some random rabbit hole of trivia I wanted to know more about. Like yeah, there’s plenty of things I would gladly download to my brain given an instantaneous button to do so, but a much smaller list of things I actually consider worth the effort, even if I’m interested

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17 points
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Deleted by creator
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6 points

They’re satisfied with the picture of the world in their heads, and looking into things might prove it wrong and then they’d need to go through the effort of changing it, and that’s a hassle, so they don’t. And then you do, and make them do work, which is annoying.

It’s why “don’t shoot the messenger” needs to be a proverb instead of just common sense.

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2 points

something like this? https://www.reddit.com/r/chemistry/comments/v1yaca/my_friend_thinks_rain_isnt_water/

“called out for fact checking” if you need to get outta there blink twice

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6 points

It depends on what the subject is. Learning things requires energy, which we don’t have an unlimited supply of. If you ask me a question about, say, Hotwheels toys, I’m gonna tell you I don’t know the answer, and I do not care nearly enough about Hotwheels to put time and effort into researching anything other than surface-level facts about them. This type of ignorance is fine by me, I’d rather deal with a person who knows they don’t know anything about a subject and doesn’t care about it than someone who knows little yet cares deeply about it.

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3 points

And with how easy it is to look things up, it could just take moments.

There’s a lot of people who are actively avoiding being wrong though - they know they’ll be wrong, so they never want to look into anything.

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2 points

There’s also people who are willfully ignorant about things that are too taxing for their mental health, such as the war in Ukraine. Some people think it’s very important that everyone knows the details on what is happening, but it might do more personal damage than good on individual who is already struggling with stress, depression, anxiety etc.

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3 points

The only time when willful ignorance is bad, in my book, is

A: They’re being willfully ignorant about an essential skill that they need in order to make everyone’s day go smoother

B: They’re willfully ignorant about something but somehow still give as much of a shit about it as experts on the topic. These people are the worst.

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42 points
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Cutting others off excessively. It’s normal when you’re in a large enough group for there to be some overlap, but some people do it constantly and are only interested in hearing themselves speak. Makes being around them impossible since I often have trouble speaking up anyways.

Edit: I took instantly to mean on first meeting them, so I may have interpreted the question wrong lol

Edit2: I also should’ve been a bit more careful with my words, as this kind of behavior can be attributed to an anxiety response and isn’t always done out of apathy. I really apologize if I offended anyone by overgeneralizing.

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15 points
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The behavior often indicates they are not very balanced in general and are over expressing themselves kinda like a coping mechanism. If they realize that it is happening, they are probably quite uncomfortable with it too.

I didn’t have issues with stuff like this before I was disabled. After spending most of the last 10 years in near total isolation, I have a hard time shutting up any time anyone is willing to talk with me IRL. The worst part is that I’m usually trying my best to mask my level of pain and I go down hill fast. By the end of an average casual conversation I’m down to half the wit needed to end the conversation gracefully, and my graceful half has already left.

After watching how people dealt with covid isolation, I think I have handled it pretty well. Now I have a lot more empathy for people dealing with this kind of social anxiety. It’s still annoying as hell, even when I am the one doing it, but understanding the condition helps blunt my angst.

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Hey, that’s fair. I hadn’t considered that in casting this net I could be catching people who are quite anxious and speaking to fill the silence. Admittedly I am saying this with a handful of specific people I’ve met in mind, and in their particular cases it was more reflective of their narcissistic tendencies than any sort of anxious response, but I realize in retrospect that it can also be coping behavior. I hope I didn’t offend either way, and I’ll keep this in mind in the future.

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12 points

I used to do this to everyone, all the goddamned time. Then I got diagnosed with ADHD and I become a lot more self-aware of my behaviors.

I worked so fucking hard to learn ways to get ahead of or sidestep my urges. Now when other people do it around me it irritates me way, way more than it ever did before.

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4 points

I am very self aware of this when talking with my friends so I just keep mind notes when I get overwhelmed with ideas.

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I do think it’s really okay to speak up there’s something you want to say! I really must stress that I only think its problematic if no one else can actually converse because of them and it’s a chronic thing.

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2 points

To extend on this, I know some people who actually speak louder precisely when they do this. It’s hard for me to say whether its intentional on their part, but it certainly feels that way - and a bit malicious too. Kind of like “What I have to say is more important than what you were going to say”. That aggravates me because at that point it stops feeling like an accidental cut off which like you mentioned, can happen naturally on occasion.

These days when people start doing this, I just completely stop talking and no longer further contribute to the conversation.

Of course, when I try to carefully bring this up to said people (just in case it isn’t intended) I’m made out to be the bad guy which I really don’t understand.

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1 point

A big part of this can be the family people grew up in. I have a few friends who interrupt constantly because that’s just how their family has conversations.

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38 points
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Capitalist rent-seeking. Feeling entitled to make a profit off doing nothing except buying a resource other people need, because you already have enough money to do this. Maybe “despise a person beyond belief” is a bit strong, but I hate that people do this, and I hate that it’s condoned and even admired in capitalist societies.

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1 point

If there were no homes to rent, where would people who can’t or don’t want to buy live?

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15 points

Let’s imagine there was somehow zero rental market. Imagine there was a law against purchasing a dwelling and then not actually using it as your residence. People still need to live somewhere, so there would be a demand for housing. People would see a profit in meeting that demand, so someone would build and sell housing. Currently, those who can’t afford to buy a home have rental as a cheap alternative. Without that, there would be an open niche for something to meet the need for housing. There would be a market pressure to solve the discrepancy between the price of housing and the available capital of the average person. House prices might be forced down, salaries might be forced up, I don’t know what would happen precisely but there would be a pressure to make it possible for people to live somewhere.

You can see evidence for this in what happened in a lot of major cities. People have been able to use one home that they own as collateral in buying a second, and then use the income from renting it out to pay that off plus a little profit. That leaves them with two properties as collateral and a little cash spare, making it easier to do it again with a more expensive place. Rinse and repeat and you’ve got wealthy landlords buying up all the properties so there’s no need for the people selling those properties to drop prices to where first-time buyers can afford them - the usual dynamics of supply and demand that keep prices in reach of buyers have been disrupted, and the two types of buyer separate into two tiers that get pushed further apart, getting harder and harder for people to jump from the lower tier to the upper. This is how you end up with people paying £1000 in rent while the bank tells them they can’t have a £700-a-month mortgage because they can’t afford it, and that £1000 a month leaves them nothing left over to save up for the £30,000 deposit they’d need anyway. The market pressure that led to this situation are obvious, and reversing those pressures is the most obvious way to fix the situation.

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13 points

I can’t speak for OP but I think in general the idea that “landlords shouldn’t exist” or whatever doesn’t just stop at eliminating rentals. There is more than enough housing in the US to house everyone here (and probably the world? if not, there’s enough resources to build housing for everyone), and it seems unjust to let people be homeless or exploit their need for shelter due to artificial scarcity.

I like to think that most of us could agree that everyone deserves the dignity of having shelter regardless of what luck life has dealt them, even if we can’t immediately agree on how.

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1 point

There is more than enough housing in the US to house everyone here

Only if you assume that the entire country is a single market where specific location is largely irrelevant. The places where a lot of housing is available is usually because it’s not where people want to be. Like I could buy a house on main street in the town where my grandparents grew up for <$100,000. But do I want a small house in bumfuck nowhere that doesn’t have any land attached to it and requires significant upgrades and maintenance due to age? No, not particularly, especially because it would either mean a 2+ hour commute to a nearby major city or an entirely remote job.

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8 points

The abscence of landlords does not preclude the existence of housing. The house would still be there if there wasn’t a landlord attached to it.

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1 point

You’re ignoring apartment blocks and similar high density developments.

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-1 points

Before landlords we all just lived under trees for shelter from the rain. Cooperative housing doesnt and never existed.

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-3 points

No it would just be a piece of land. The landlord bought the Land and built the house, without the landlord, it would be land owned by the government or a realty company.

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37 points

People who are unable to control their anger. Especially if they let it go into shouting and being physical.

I get being angry. We have all felt furious for various reasons. But nothing good will come from throwing a tantrum. Behaving like an unstable manchild will only make me loose my respect for you.

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11 points

One can’t let themselves be defined by what’s done to them, only what they’ve done in response. Those who act like toddlers in response to life’s obstacles should be treated as such, while those who react calmly and constructively are exhibiting virtue, and will probably get further as well.

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2 points

Well put!

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2 points

I tend to find them funny, and entertaining.
When a persons response seems far outside the norm, I know it’s not about me anymore. Then I just try to enjoy the show.
When they calm down, I might ask what it was really all about. Which can be constructive sometimes, or just it’ll just send them into another performance. Either way is a different kind of win.

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1 point

There is an appropriate place and time for healthy expression of anger. That much said, few people consider this.

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