Playing the victim

Before someone else says it - who decides what a valid concern is? Well public opinion obviously. Debate does NOT stop when the concern is dismissed as trivial.

Now political lobbyists and special interest groups are another story all together. That system is patently corrupt.

It could also be that maybe people feel like they don't have the experience to back up their point when faced with someone who has experience with whatever's being debated.

What context is this in anyway?

If I personally say, "Listen, you don't understand, I had this happen to me so I do" it's almost always not to stop discussion. It's because I read/heard some horrible misconception or some insensitive bullshit comment was made and I am trying to clear things up (some times I'm more calm than others). Very rarely do I use "I actually lived this" as a way to END discussion* but I will admit that sometimes I am reticient to point out that I have done XYZ because I know people take it that way.

* The only time I conciously do this is when I am "debating" or "discussing" with a self-pitying moron who is either talking up their problem or didn't actually have it happen to them but are boohooing about it unreasonably anyhow - if there's one thing I can't stand, it's people who victimise themselves to look cool or get more attention when they haven't had anything happen directly to them. I think that if you haven't had something happen, you should be bleeding happy as a little clam, and not whining and crying about how the world can't go on because something that has nothing to do with you exists.

Well I think you answered your own question earlier in your post, Kerry. I think a common assumption for what makes a "reliable" witness includes a level of objectivity that's hard to accomplish when you're a participant in the event being debated.

I don't think there's a problem with that per se; the real problem here seems to me to be the fragmented relativism it produces: if 1000 voices all insist on the authenticity of their experience/knowledge, it's hard to find the ground for debate and resolution.

Plus, British people do confessional-victim stuff so badly. At least on Rikki Lake and Jery Springer they're PASSIONATE (if also bonkers and usually wrong); here we seem to specialise in sulks and grumbling.

(anyone else here as boringly social theory academic as me might want to try find the answer in Habermas; damned if I'm going to read him).

Also, if bad things happen to you or if you are stigmatised for some arbitrary reason, you owe it to yourself not to strike the victim pose. Because sure as anything, you strike the pose long enough and you will be both a victim of societal attitudes and your own as well.

Is pity really so attractive that people are willing to waste their lives for it?

this is v. interesting to me and i wd like to think about it without being insensitive in the bullying thread.

some people i know just seem to be so set in this mind set, every conversation you have with them become's a litany of shit that's happened to them. and not just in a "glass half-empty" way. i feel like i know or have observed dudes whose sole strategy for getting interest from the opposite sex revolves around being as pitiful as poss.

is this a case of the wonderful tapestry of human nature or any attention is better than none or a learned strategy for getting yr own way or sometimes a quite vicious aggression all passived away?

the latter two is not an uncommon mix

hell, latter three tbh

ps hi mum

(playing the victim now, so i am)

this new style is like tangled spagetti!

:( to darragh

i guess there's a kind of obviously aggressive victimhood that we see thru, or learn to see thru. but does our society - in its official forms, work and the law and such, see every complaint as justified now if it can be proved? is it desirable to try and promote the "right" to never have yr feelings hurt?

There's a question lurking in that original question about validation and how badly we crave it, regardless of whether the source is toxic to us or not.

in the sense that pity gives our suffering meaning?

restraining myself from scare-quoting half the words in every sentence

in the sense that pity gives our suffering meaning?

In the sense that not only does the pity give our suffering meaning, but the pity also gives a sense of validation as a person that was denied to us at the time of the original bullying. If you aren't receiving positive feedback from other sources, it becomes learned behavior to go to making yourself into a victim to boost your self-esteem, possibly at the expense of putting time and energy into pursuits that would give you self-esteem boosts via other people's recognition of your accomplishments.

I'm not sure if there's a way to talk about this without coming across all "pull yrself up by your bootstraps", sadly.

bring in law & society and the conversation turns a little imo.

many xps there

xxp

that's ok in this thread tho, why i moved the conversation over.

my elephant in the room is a feeling that determinism makes it all moot, but you have to ignore that possibility to think about this stuff. having said that, i do question what it is that makes some people able to pull themselves up and others not. we often blame people for not having bootstrap pulling skills but maybe the truth is that some do and some don't and you can't necessarily develop them thru training and effort?

Well also, most of the time successful bootstrap ppl are really, really fucking good at some particular thing that gives their boots an extra bounce. Kind of by definition, it's going to be easier for an exceptional person to overcome a terrible circumstance than it will be for an average person.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness

in terms of dealing with soi-disant victims from an official/govt perspective, it's obv a v difficult balance and the power dynamic is already so weighted in your favour that anything that pushes or attempts to push it further that way, well you tend to view as opportunism- because it's very difficult to define a line of authority/co-operation/whatever when a person wants to play helplessness or weakness as a trump card, said the cynical bureaucrat

Usually utterly cold callousness is not only the most effective route, it's also the least personally compromising/exhausting.

but i mean power dynamics, people do so much subconsciously that it's hard to even know where something can be defined as nature or actual 'behaviour' and abbs otm

i feel like i know or have observed dudes whose sole strategy for getting interest from the opposite sex revolves around being as pitiful as poss.
pretty shitty tactic, does anyone go for that? i just find endless negativity draining.

is this a case of the wonderful tapestry of human nature or any attention is better than none or a learned strategy for getting yr own way or sometimes a quite vicious aggression all passived away?
ime, anyone who is persistently like this (ie not just having a good whinge the odd time like we all do) is using it for purposes of emotional manipulation, consciously or not.

i was on the tennis team at my high school and had a match against dude who was a real miserablist player, like http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/8a/Arresteddevelopmentsnoopy.gif after every shot he fucked up and i felt pretty bad for him, i spent the whole match encouraging him after every shitty play and "see? i suck!" he uttered.

there are pro tennis players like that so he shouldn't feel too badly

Kind of by definition, it's going to be easier for an exceptional person to overcome a terrible circumstance than it will be for an average person.

i think exceptional person vs average person is kind of an elephant of its own, not just here. (when people talk about how to ensure bright kids who grow up in poverty can fulfil their potential, i always think...it's the DUMB kids who grow up in poverty you should be worrying about.)

xp

where's a gif of that guy who smashed up 4 of his racquets last week?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7kS68T6ptA

ah here we go

i think exceptional person vs average person is kind of an elephant of its own, not just here. (when people talk about how to ensure bright kids who grow up in poverty can fulfil their potential, i always think...it's the DUMB kids who grow up in poverty you should be worrying about.)

That depends, really; if you want to be heartless about it, if you have to deal with a desperate person pushed into criminal activity due to circumstance, would you rather that person be really smart?

XPs https://wikis.uit.tufts.edu/confluence/display/ReadingInfiniteJest/Eric+Clipperton

It sucks that we aren't considering all the kids born in poverty

^^^ this is the real issue IMO

i always worry about the bright kids who grow up in the suburbs, they're the ones with the rape vans and the bodies in the crawlspace.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxU9y-Rwbjk

I thought McMansions didn't really have any crawlspaces anymore.

i always worry about the bright kids who grow up in the suburbs, they're the ones with the rape vans and the bodies in the crawlspace.

haha that's pretty OTM too

I think it was Bush I who was making a big deal about small town values as part of his campaign and how awesome they were and I was all "You mean, small town values that lead to things like kids killing their friends in the middle of parties, rampant drug abuse, insularity, racism and an unhealthy embrace of parochial closed-mindedness? Those small town values?"

learned strategy

Sometimes I wonder whether I'd be a better-adjusted person now if K. Cobain hadn't made self-pity cool* at the same time as puberty and changing schools hurled me into a new looks-centric peer group where my previous ways of getting (more or less) positive attention failed, also at the same time as my mum was severely ill, thus showing me the power of the sympathy vote and setting up learned helplessness for life

(* NB was not actually cool, what was actually cool was being Kurt fuckin' Cobain, but this part was lost on 12y/o me)

Sorry, you didn't want a personal emocdote, did you? Eh.

(* NB was not actually cool, what was actually cool was being Kurt fuckin' Cobain, but this part was lost on 12y/o me)

lol

ILX welcomes personal emocdotes iirc :)

it's pronounced emock-ditties fyi

his earlier plays were better