One that comes to mind for me: “Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” is not always true. Maybe even only half the time! Are there any phrases you tend to hear and shake your head at?
“History repeats itself” or “history doesn’t repeat itself, but rhymes”. If that were the case then it would be pretty easy to predict the future.
The reality is humans have evolved to try to find patterns in a given system. It’s what made us really good hunters and excellent tool builders.
“Whatever is worth doing, is worth doing well.”
Most things I do, most of what we all do, we do *well enough *. Ain’t nobody got time for doing every bloody thing to perfection.
“Boys will be boys”
How about you teach your kid how to behave and respect others so they don’t grow up to be an entitled asshole.
“Make America Great Again” 😂🤣
The only democracy in the region
Hey, what happened when the wrong people started winning elections in Iraq when we set up democracy there?
“That’s TOTALLY DIFFERENT”
It’s been a millenium since I’ve heard it, as I no longer qualify as young.
But
“You’ll understand when you’re older”
I’m older.
I’m thirty.
The only thing I “understand” is that all the rules are arbitrary as all fuck, society was made up by idiots with giant sticks up their arses, and everyone should go fuck themselves.
The only “progress” I made is that I stopped hating myself for “failing at society” and started hating society for failing so many people.
“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”
No. What doesn’t kill you creates trauma.
Well, no, the trauma is the event itself. The reaction to it is post-traumatic stress. If that stress gets in the way of your day-to-day functioning, then it could be called PTSD (but there’s like pages and pages of diagnostic criteria too).
“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results.”
This is literally not the definition of insanity.
“It is what it is”
No it isn’t
Oh my god this sentence is used whenever I try to take the conversation to a slightly “deeper” level i hate it
That is definitely a thing.
A thought-terminating cliché (also known as a semantic stop-sign, a thought-stopper, bumper sticker logic, or cliché thinking) is a form of loaded language, often passing as folk wisdom, intended to end an argument and quell cognitive dissonance.
“Trust me.”
Most of the time those two words can be correctly replaced with “I believe you to be an irrational eager to swallow any crap smeared on its filthy snout.”
(People who deserve your trust typically don’t evoke it.)
“Quick question” just means you want a quick answer
I use this, and I struggle a little to disengage when the person I ask interprets it as “help me figure out how to solve this” when they don’t actually have the “short answer”.
I think there is rarely a short answer despite what the question implies
Yeah, that’s fair, especially in software work.
When you forget what you were about to say:
“Must not have been important”
How in the ever-living fuck could anybody come to that conclusion?
Not important to them, very important to you.
“Autistic people lack empathy”
Wierd how the fact that a group of people don’t see the world as you do makes then somehow inferior and deficient, huh?
Autistic people do have significantly reduced cognitive empathy. That’s literally part of being on the spectrum. Some will have better cognitive empathy than others. If a person is not capable of reading the emotion that an NT is projecting, then their reactions are going to appear to lack affective empathy as well.
Your closing sentence hints at the root of the misunderstanding here. It also fails to strengthen your initial claim at all. This study’s Lay summary sets it out perfectly.
Many autistic individuals report feelings of excessive empathy, yet their experience is not reflected by most of the current literature, typically suggesting that autism is characterized by intact emotional and reduced cognitive empathy. To fill this gap, we looked at both ends of the imbalance between these components, termed empathic disequilibrium. We show that, like empathy, empathic disequilibrium is related to autism diagnosis and traits, and thus may provide a more nuanced understanding of empathy and its link with autism.
Autistic folks don’t always exhibit the socially defined traits of autism. Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence, right? So while your [claim] [double-down] [pre-emptive concession] [claim] ends with a claim that’s reasonable it is also fundamentally disconnected from the initial claim (which is, at best, half-true). Social and non-social traits are additional dimensions on a complex spectrum. Defining autism only by its more visible / stigmatized traits perpetuates the false equivocations of abnormal with disordered and disordered with diseased.
Sent with love ❤️
life is beautiful.
no, it’s not. it’s an ugly, parasitic process that accelerates resource consumption merely for its own pointless existence. the heat death of the universe will come all that faster only because of the presence of life.
and, for sure, humankind is the pinnacle of this selfish and greedy outcome of biological evolution.
And to what would not having life accomplish? What is the point of not having life? How is there beauty in the lack of life when only things that have life even have a concept of beauty? Your viewpoint requires you to believe in some type of inherent value that doesn’t exist.
Life is beautiful. That it even managed to exist, let alone evolve is fascinating, wonderous, fantastical. That certain species mucked things up isn’t life’s fault.
Not a fan of “it is what it is”. It’s called a thought-terminating cliche. It often means “I’m tired of talking about this, do it my way” when my boss says it.
I’ve always liked it. I guess it depends who is saying it because when my old boss said it, it meant more like, “this is the situation we’re in, let’s not waste time arguing about why it is the situation and let’s just focus on dealing with it and going forward”
Yeah it can have wildly different meanings depending on the circumstances in which it’s said. It can be “well we can’t change it, may as well get on with life” all the way to “well this discussion is not gonna change anything, let’s get on with fixing it”. Very similar, but polar opposite sentiments.
Those sentiments seem identical to me.
First one is saying there’s no point fixing anything, just get over it. Second one saying fixing it might suck, let’s fix it anyway.
Very, very different…
Oh? They both read to me as “We can’t change the past, only the future”.
Oedipus begs to differ.
Interesting. I use it to indicate I may not like a situation, but I have to play the have I was dealt to the best of my ability, and sometimes… Well to quote lyrics, “got to know when to hold cem, know when to fold 'em, know when to walk away, know when to run.”
