There's different types of weird. There's uncle bad touch weird, and there's I like to collect insects and stage little lectures for my dogs on my day off weird. Different weirds.
The vast majority of people don't care, the little that cares already know how weird you are.
Embrace your weirdness, worry a bit less and have more fun.
It won't happen overnight, but everytime you catch feeling bad because your think you are weird, just own it. It already happened at that moment, nothing you can do about it right now.
You will feel a lot less insecure as time goes on, you might not even care at one point.
"Honey, you know you shouldn't ta~" she stops as her eyes find the source of her daughter's confusion.
"Mommy?" the girl asks, uncertainty in her tone.
"D-d-don't make eye contact, honey. I'm uh sure he has his..." she stops, mouth agape for a moment before recovering, "...and now he's screaming at that garbage bin. We're gonna go! Come on, honey!"
in the distance
"I FEEL SO FREE FROM THE SHACKLES AND CONFINES OF THIS ONCE JAIL OF CULTURAL IGNORANCE! THIS BIN! THIS GARBAGE BIN REPRESENTS THE OLD WAYS. THE TRASH WAYS. I HAVE ACCEPTED MY WEIRDNESS. MY ECCENTRICITIES ARE OPEN TO ALL!"
Phegan was never heard from again after this moment.
I completely disagree. I don't think the nerd being bullied for liking anime is "bad weird", nor do I think the creep who doesn't care when people call him out for staring at women is "good weird"
The people who see "weirdness" as being bad are the "bad weird."
The anime kid hates being bullied, but he doesn't see non-conformity as a negative. It's not the label of weird, but the negative sentiment behind it that hurts.
The white supremacist who sees diversity as an evil doesn't mind people saying he hates black people. What he hates (aside from minorities) is being identified as an "other" through the weird label.
It's a cultural node, social norm, expectation blah blah. What it comes down to is perception. We all belong to different groups. Many of these groups overlap. Sometimes we have niche interests that don't quite align with the others. As you draw circles intersecting circles and push people into these groups, the further a circle is from another, the more likely there will be a form of conflict.
This perception is linked to expectation through a lack of understanding. In some cases all of this is caused by fear, which is hidden behind anger. Ignorance creates this diversity of opinion and as those circles, or nodes in sociology, grow, the reinforcement of an idea grows with it. Adjacent nodes receive some of this growth until eventually something happens and a new node is formed creating a niche platform.
Some comparisons below:
A mechanic may not like computers. A computer person may like cars. A car person may not be a mechanic. A person who drives a car may not be either a car person, computer person, or mechanic. Yet a person who likes to play video games on a PC may not be a computer person and still likes playing games about cars. While a car person might still enjoy anime despite that being perceived more as on the computer side of culture.
See how all of these find a way to interlap? The "weirdness" shows up when groups are formed that fall outside of these interactions, and yes, entire connected groups can then become niche and isolated. A certain National Socialist German Workers' Party is a fantastic and horrible example of how perceptions can shift and niche opinions grow, pulling adjacent groups with them, and eventually splitting, often done by linking distant, loosely linked threads and yanking them to form a strangled web of bullshit.
Not sure I exactly agree. It's more like if you or your friends are able to call yourselves weird, you're probably alright. If "weird" is what you hurl as an insult constantly at anyone you don't understand, you probably suck.
One day I called a co-worker weird. Simply cus the dude was acting odd.
A whole thing broke out where he was extremely insulted at the remark and wanted to never talk to me again until I went farther than I should have to apologize.
Thinking about it till this day... Dude that's just fucking weird.
Yeah, it's a ...weird... word. Can be playful, a term of endearment, a reality check, or a horrible insult. And it depends completely on the context. And some people maybe just have trauma from being bullied and called weird all the time as kids. I'm guessing maybe that dude had experienced something like that.
Did it ever occur to you that some people spend a lifetime being labeled as weird, or any other variation of "different," in ways that suggest or directly say they are wrong in societal view?
Especially some neurodivergent might just be fucking tired of it.
For many people, including me, part of recovering from that abuse is accepting that you're significantly different compared to the average person. If you're ND and can't accept that, you might be masking and that can be really harmful.
That being said, there's still a difference between being called "different" or "weird", and if the latter is being hurled at you with malice by friends, they might not really be your friends...
"Weird" is just a synonym for out of the ordinary (though one often meant as an insult) and being out of the ordinary isn't quite the insult that "normies" (in the sense of "close to the norm") think it is: being a great genius is weird, being a top Olympic athlete is weird, being amongst the most exceptional people in a profession is weird.
Absolutely, the other end of the scale is also deemed weird and one can hardly claim that being, say, way below average intelligence is a good characteristic to have.
The point being that merely being out of the norm isn't by itself a bad thing.
Wow, I thought weird had already been reappropriated by us oddballs. From reading through this thread, it seems like that's not the case. So I just wanna say, keep on keeping on fellow weirdos. Keep life weird
It's a fixation because it definitely seems to be working, at least so far. And in my personal opinion it's working for three reasons:
It makes the average voter actually stop and think. The problem is that at this point most of the real, meaningful criticisms you can make of Trump sound overblown, or like old news. Calling him a fascist and would-be dictator is true, but it sounds alarmist. They treat it as hyperbole, not something to take seriously. Calling him a rapist just gets treated as "Throw it on the pile." Like, at this point, what powerful male figures aren't? There were a whole bunch of sexual assault allegations that came up against Joe Biden in 2020, for example. Corrupt? "Every politician is corrupt" they'll say. But weird? Weird cuts through all that, because they can judge it for themselves. People have a usable metric for weird. And weird is contagious. If you vote for a corrupt politician that doesn't make you corrupt, it just reflects the broken nature of the system. But if you vote for a weird politician, doesn't that mean you're weird too? Weird gives people pause. They step back, actually look at the behaviour they're seeing, and for at least some people (remember, elections are won and lost on very small margins; you're looking for hit rates of a few percent on any attack) they have that little lightbulb moment, like "Yeah, this is weird isn't it?" It's an appeal to the deeply puritan deeply conformist sensibilities that the average American has grown up firmly rooted in. That stuff has a powerful hold on people.
It really, really upsets right wingers, because their entire worldview is built around bullying, attacking, and ultimately destroying anything that deviates from their idea of "Normal". To us, being weird is whatever. Maybe it's even cool. To them, it's an existential threat. If they're not the norm, then everything about their worldview crumbles. This, in turn, creates a feedback loop. The more they get upset about it, the more weird they act, and the more the average person sees that behavior and thinks "Really? These guys want to run the country?" Trump being a total freak about Kamala's racial identity is a great example of this. It'll play well with hardcore racists, but to a lot of people it's more likely to come across as desperately out of touch. Like, what the fuck does it matter to the price of gas if Kamala is Black or Indian? What does that have to do with my healthcare bills, or my job security?
Being "gentle" is exactly why it's so effective. There's a perceived dignity in standing strong in the face of a relentless assault. Weathering a storm of vicious attacks makes you look powerful. But when Republicans absolutely fall apart at this most gentle of insults, it has exactly the opposite effect. It shows how pathetically fragile they are. They've called us weirdos and freaks for decades, and we wore it with pride. But they are utterly incapable of doing the same. It's the best parts of the high road and the low road all in one.
Is it really, really stupid that this is what works? Yes, absolutely. But you fight the war you're in, not the one you want to be in.
Weathering a storm of vicious attacks makes you look powerful. But when Republicans absolutely fall apart at this most gentle of insults, it has exactly the opposite effect. It shows how pathetically fragile they are.
Republicans are the biggest snowflakes there ever was.
Theres good cnts and bad cnts too , mostly there's the somewhat more neutral daft c*nts.
words are wierd.
It's like sometimes the meaning changes in different contexts.
I'd say UK can be either way, but it'd be mostly affectionate between friends,
but most always offensive to a stranger.
I'd say 'daft cunt', or 'stupid cunt' , 'cheeky cunt' said to the face is much more likely to be genial mockery.
'useless cunt' is probably mildy offensive but could be either way.
'fucking cunt', or any of the above with the word fucking in there - more likely to be offence intended.
and generally you'd not say it to a stranger unless you're - varies regionally and by dialect of course.
and as for 'posh cunt', 'tory cunt', 'bluenose cunt' . . . pretty much, offence intended.
Julian Cope has a story about his song, "cunts can fuck off" where he was helped out by a rural Irish Farmer who told him "hop on the back ya cunt" .
Of course that might just be the Gaelic word for "Englishman".
In my experience, the act of calling people weird quite often says a lot more about the person saying it than the person being discussed. It's not a good look; it is an ugly thing to do.
I read the room, I know how it is trying to be used, and it only reinforces the fact that most people kinda suck. I refuse to respect it.
I want campaigns based on policy, facts, and results. Not name calling & "feelings".
This is basically Democrat strategy; it requires no might or skill of any kind: a retarded kid throws a bucket of pig's blood onto a brilliant white shag carpet, points & screams about how dirty it is, and the Republicans scramble to clean up the mess. Wasting time, money, and effort on a mess that will never truly be clean again. Kind of like writing out a logical argument on this rabidly liberal platform, to have it downvoted & sometimes deleted. One side takes 5 seconds, ruins everything, very "effective". The other takes hours. Effectiveness...hit & miss. On its face, there is no way to win against the one throwing pig's blood on the white shag carpet.
But now the Democrats face Trump. Trump, at his best, doesn't really care if he's dirty or not. So that particular Democrat strategy is rendered ineffective. Lately he's wasted time addressing allegations, AKA, "cleaning up the mess". I want to see more debates on specific policies.
Ultimately, we'll see which side wins come November. Or perhaps there will be another assassination attempt. ¯\(°_o)/¯ It's hard to say. I am inclined to think they're going to kill him. I've said that for probably the past year.
I've been trying to make sense of the whole "weird" campaign, but concluded that it's actually just confusing and I'm not really sure what they are trying for.