A chilly, distant demeanor. Is it an asshole that hates you, or is it an introvert that just wants to go home?
Honestly I’m an extrovert that gets lost in thought sometimes. I have the meanest looking resting removed face when I am. But I’m as gentle as a butterfly and always up for a good conversation if anyone approaches.
For anyone interested, it’s the infamous slur filter. I didn’t know that it replaced things with removed though, I thought it meant “distant” or some such 😆
Closely related is someone who’s just a bit to the point with their responses. I don’t mean the “I’m just saying” people; those people are assholes. I mean stuff like when someone skips the pleasantries and dives right into their question or comment. Instead of saying “hi”, they’ll dive right into saying “I have an issue with X”. Or when they see something wrong when reviewing your work, they’ll just outright say “this isn’t right” without trying to sugarcoat it.
Personally, I like when people do that, particularly from people I know have good intentions. I don’t want to waste time doing some “hi, how are you / I’m good, yourself?” sort of handshake when someone has a question for me. And reviews are a constant, daily thing in my job (software dev), so I don’t want time wasting flowery language in review comments, nor do I want to waste time typing such up myself.
“I’m just asking questions.” Could be a child, could be a moon-landing conspiracy person.
Could be someone who’s genuinely trying to understand someone’s viewpoint, but it reveals inconsistencies in the other person’s logic, so they get irritated.
Ever since getting into arguments with strangers online stopped being fun for me, I try to be extremely polite to people when I’m asking a probably confrontational question.
On the internet, a good amount of time people asking questions in comments sections are often just trying to show others how much they know about something in the most passive aggressively way possible, so it better to always be extra clear that you’re trying to engage on a healthy discussion.
Eh, if it’s coming from an adult who should know better, I wouldn’t say it’s being misinterpreted as a sign of being an asshole.
I think the big deciding factor is how they’re approaching the questions and what the questions are. Like, if someone is “just asking questions” where the questions just so happen to be a common bad faith talking point, yeah, I’m gonna assume they’re also acting in bad faith.
Eg, leading questions are a particularly common example here. The amount of lean towards their already-decided viewpoint can vary. They might word their question to be convinced away from their viewpoint as the default (“why isn’t the moon landing fake?”), or maybe they’ll provide a statement that obviously gives more weight to their side (“the government is so untrustworthy, so how can we trust the moon landing was real?”).
But often, they even do word the questions in a perfectly valid way, because they’re not trying to get an answer. They’re not gonna be convinced and they’re trying to get an answer. What they want to do is make someone else mistake being stumped for “this person might be right”. Eg, if someone asks you “is the moon landing real?” and you don’t actually know how to prove that it’s real, that can make you think that perhaps it wasn’t real. After all, you can’t explain how it is. But that’s a fallacy. You not being able to explain it has nothing to do with whether or not it’s real. Asking questions is cheap and easy. It takes no time investment compared to answering or understanding an answer. That makes it effective for planting seeds of doubt. And of course, people should think critically, but many folks aren’t going to or aren’t don’t have the time. So they’ll retain this low effort seed of doubt and that’s it.
Plus of course, searching for these questions, especially leading ones, can get you to fall into conspiracy theory or alt right echo chambers, which will have the leading question included in multiple times and technically is a better match from a pure SEO point of view. Search engines do try and train themselves against the common leading questions, but they often have to do that explicitly. This is actually an area where search engines like DuckDuckGo do worse at. You’re more likely to have a leading question in the top results because, again, it really is the most accurate match for that question. Should search engines direct you to the correct results or should they direct you to the results that are most accurate for what you searched for? Nobody really agrees and it’ll be criticized either way (personally, I think that correctness is far more important because otherwise the search engines propagates misinformation).
I usually find the best argument against “is the moon landing fake” or equivalent stuff to be the fact that the Soviet Union stated it was real, when they would have benefited a lot more from denying it and/or proving it to be fake. When your enemy supports your argument then it’s more probable that it’s true.
Not being a conversational person.
I don’t do small talk very well and I very quickly run put of things to say to someone I don’t know so I don’t like to just talk rubbish with someone, I prefer to remain quiet and get on with what I am doing.
I don’t mean that the person isn’t worth talking to or I don’t like them, if they need something from me or have a question then I’ll galdly answer or help them, but almost everyone takes it as a slight against them when i dont want to engage in idle chit chat and assume I’m an arsehole when I’m really not trying to be.
listen, as someone who needs to be social but isnt, it is ok to let there be awkward silences. it is ok.
it isn’t your job to be entertaining. conversation is a 2 way road.
contribute, motherfucker
No. You’re not mandated to listen me ramble about free will, artificial intelligence or simulation theory and I’m not mandated to listen your thoughts about the weather or see pictures of your child.
Conversation is a two way road so when you notice that it’s only flowing to one direction then take the hint and move on.
Parking in a handicapped parking spot and having no visible disability.
It’s bizarre to me how many people assume that disabilities must be visible. And not just visible, but that it has to be glaringly visible.
You’d think that it’d be well known that visibilities might not be obvious, but nope.
I have an invisible, part-time disability. I used to have a wheelchair and a handicapped hang tag, but I got rid of the tag because it wasn’t worth getting hassled everywhere I parked. Thankfully, the medication is helping and I haven’t needed the wheelchair in a very long time, but that doesn’t mean I won’t need it tomorrow.
It’s like people want any excuse to be a righteous jackass.
What about parking diagonally across two or three disabled parking spots?
Women speaking up and demanding to be heard.
In particular, women are more likely to be viewed as “bitchy”, “bossy”, etc for doing the exact same thing that a man could do without being considered as such.
So it’s not just women speaking up, but also that there’s a gender imbalance in how that speaking up can be viewed.
