Remember my dad spilling strong acid ruining the living room which I later found out was intended for my mom.
To this day I can’t help but cringe when people equate middle eastern issues to western issues. This shit is not even the same planet - the whole region is like a century behind at least despite all the money and development and is fundamentally a failed culture.
I’m sorry you experienced that moose, it’s rough. Would you mind explaining how it’s a failed culture?
Thanks it sucked but we made through and the world is all that brighter now!
As for my view on middle-east culture - it might appear like I’m being mean or reductionist with this view but since Quran is literal “word of god” and not interpreted text like in every other religion it has developed this culture that is incapable of growth or nuance since the very base layer is unquestionable obedience. It’s a fundamentally broken world model that cannot be redeemed without an absolute revolution that has to come from within the community but you can probably clearly see the catch 22 here that makes it not possible. Thus a failed culture with no clear path to growth.
That makes perfect sense thanks for explaining! How come it’s not interpretatable surely that’s debatable?
Because it’s believed to be “literal word of god” revealed to Muhammad by an angel word-by-word. Since Allah is perfect and all knowing his word is considered to be flawless and eternal and not open to interpretation or doubt. The theological argument is that imperfect human reasoning will lead to misguidance and thus corrupt the religion so only literal interpretation is acceptable.
So it’s like a constitution that cannot be amended but it’s from over 2 millennia ago when most people didn’t even know how to read or write. It’s a dead end.
Ahhhhh I see thanks for explaining
what ultimately happened with your dad? is your mom ok
Mom and I left and she’s doing well now but no idea about dad or anyone from that side of family. Though, I’ve heard that karma caught up with everyone eventually.
My mom ran into one of the dads friends who arranged the acid a few years back and it turns out he got almost fully blinded in an accident of his own and flipped his personality 180° and started doing charity work. It kinda goes against this pop culture idea of bullies being fixed by “understanding and love” when in reality it’s usually a catastrophe like this that really sorts them.
People on here would probably think my parents are evil but I just think they are from a different generation. There’s only so much adaptation a human brain can do in a lifetime and at some point your views will be set in stone if you’ve been alive since the 1950s.
why
I suppose it’s related to my view of memory. Like I subscribe to the view that you have a fixed amount of memory when you become conscious at 2-3 years old and then you just cram more years into that set amount of memory each passing year. At a certain point your capacity to take in new information and hold it in your brain diminishes so I hold them to a different standard to someone who is not aged 70+.
Edit: A good example of this is my partner has an immediate family with a lot of neurodivergent traits. My partner was basically their carer while she was growing up. We’ve been dating since 2011, our families have started to mix more in the past 5 years. Parents have been alive for 75 years so that’s like 1/15th of their memory taken up with this information. It’s only recently that they have really cottoned on to how disabled my wife’s family is. Something needs to be immediate and persistent for an extended period of time to sink in for older folks.
None of this is universally true. The answer to the posts questions, for you is literally that you haven’t yet. You’re still in the excuse making stage and might be actually be perpetuating the behaviors.
You wouldn’t judge a 35 year old and a 75 year old by different standards when it comes to being informed about current societal attitudes?
Edit: Also like, what is the standard for evil? That’s become relevant to the conversation now. I don’t know if this is a US specific thing but I was spuriously saying a lot of people on here would seemingly consider them evil for being right-wing by today’s standards. I was jokingly alluding to that because it’s preposterous to call someone “evil” for having right of centre views.
I feel like you are on the route to a good concept, but you haven’t quite made it there yet.
I believe over the next seven to ten years you will continue to refine this concept until it is actually a good concept and something that you can share proudly with people, But right now it’s not well thought out enough, or cohesive enough to stand on its own.
The brain does not fill up with information. It has more than enough storage for a 120 year human lifespan.
Rather, people tend to rely on their previously acquired information because there’s no novelty attached to refining your previously acquired information, and by default, human minds are novelty-seeking devices.
Another thing is that there’s the possibility that the use of psychedelics can restore the novelty effect, Which would not erase previously acquired information, but rather put a new tint on them.
I imagine that we as a society would be much happier if we had a process where we could do something like that on a regular basis, every five to seven years or so just to reset our minds inside of a structured ceremonial system, Just to help prevent us from becoming too bored, our neurons too tarnished, our minds too inured with ennui, to enjoy life.
Around the time my kids were graduating from highschool, she always made it seem like being a mom was this monumental task that no reasonable person could ever do well, just unbearably difficult so to cope you’d need to scream at and emotionally abuse your children or you’d never survive. There are two modes of mothering, ignoring your child or screaming at your child. My mom kept me fairly isolated and wouldn’t drive me anywhere despite living in along distance to nothing but other houses mostly filled with older couples so I never really got to see how “normal” families work or how other kids interacted with their parents, if I ever did manage to get an invite to a new friends house or an after school activity was forbidden from participating. Raising kids though, wow, such an incredible eye opener to just how easy kids are to love, how easy it is to raise children when you’re a sane and consistent parent. Motherhood isn’t inherently a screaming match between you and a child who never asked to be there that you hate because of their mere existence. Sure not everyone is cut out to be a mom, of course, but to present abuse as both normal and justified is evil. I don’t care how bad she had it as a kid, she was obligated to protect me from that just like I was obligated to protect my kids from the things she did to me. She was an early childhood education teacher and I’ve come to realize it’s because anyone over the age of ~4 is too much of a human being for her to handle, she only wants completely subservient, physically small children around because she can dominate them and any other social interaction that she’s not dominating the other person is intolerable to her. She’s a pathetic person truly
It took a long time for me. I knew they did mean things but when you are raised like that it seems normal. The real breaking point is when I realized my mother was abusing my autistic son the same way she had me. They both died last year and I didn’t go to either funeral. My dad would often get in my face and scream at me while my mother would destroy anything I loved. If she gave me a present in a few years it would be gone. She would have and would be “saving it” for me. I have nothing from my childhood. I don’t have my class ring ‘she bought’ because I would just lose it was always the excuse. My dad was little different. I had a heart attack and got behind on my house payments. My dad ‘helped’ me out buy taking over the loan. When I signed both him and the POS bank guy told me it was just them adding him to the loan but it was them cutting me out. I could go on and on but the first sentence is your answer. I would like to add they were physically abusive up until I was fourteen. At that point I was absurdly strong for my age due to being my dads ‘slow gaited mule’ in his scrap business. He never passed up a chance to tell me I wasn’t good enough. I just wish I would have realized how badly they feared me after I picked something up that few could and put it in the back of a truck. I did this because he was having a full meltdown and I was scared of him.
When I got to know my gf’s mom and realized I didn’t have massive levels of stress and anxiety around her like I do with my mom.
i started realizing more and more that my father’s jokes were racist. then i started noticing that his normal speech and interactions were racist.
i was brought up with this racism as a norm, so it took me a long time to realize we were a racist family (longer than i would like to admit).
then after a realizing how racist we were, i put two and two together… my father is a police officer.
Bro that twist. Hahaha
A twist would be something unexpected
Bruh…
I knew they were shitty to me and my brother, but rationalized most of it as being the product of a different culture and time. What really sealed the deal was finding out how shitty they were being to my elderly frail grandmother who was living with them. They made her last years on this Earth so miserable. I have lost all respect for them, I will never forgive them, and I’m glad to be hundreds of km away from them.
Dad’s always been a selfish shit of a person. Growing up with it, it was just how he was so I sort of accepted it, or was conditioned to it. Drug dealer, spouse beater, thief, bully, tantrum thrower, no sense of patience, road rager. About two years ago he finally wanted to get on the internet, which can be a struggle for older novices. He had kept his head in the sand about it his entire life. But while at his place helping setup the laptop, pc and router I’d organised to get him started he had a full blown tantrum for about 15minutes because I wasn’t explaining everything to him, eg what dns is, not beginner stuff.
I’ve done about ten years jiu-jitsu. I could see he wanted to have a bigger tantrum but realised that I was a grown man who could take him in an altercation. Mind you he’s a coward, he can’t fight and always relied on his size 6’10" to intimidate people rather than any skill.
Growing up he encouraged me to be a thief, bully, drug dealer and welfare leech. It took me some time to work out I didn’t want those things for myself. Fuck that guy. Haven’t spoken to him in a few years now. Looking forward to a call from the authorities that he’s passed, I expect through his own hubris.
6’ 10? The guy is fucking huge
Literally a giant cunt of a man.
On bright side, more cells equals to higher likelihood for cancer!
Mixed merits for that side of the family, they mostly live into their 90s.
I also got some tallness, even though I’m the family midget at 6’2".
My father worked as an environmental engineer for an oil company cleaning up oil spills and messes. He wanted a certain quality of life, so we only ever lived in southern or messed up states. Texas, Missouri and 7 years in Utah. Going to elementary school with the racist bigot Mormons was hell. Long story short he is a Neo-Liberal Boomer that helped the oil industry with his efficiency and diligence cover up issues and increase profits. A money hawk and penny-pincher, who wouldn’t move to blue states because of higher prices, believing in American Exceptionalism, and has zero regrets working for a company that helped destroy the world. I admit he’s not the worst by a long shot. But I would have preferred being broke and poor in another country and him not working for mankind’s enemies.
My parents are pretty good people other than being die hard conservatives. I understand there might be irony in that statement. Their real problem is they are just not politically educated and think repubs are the lesser of 2 evils. They have never been trumpers though…
One of my brothers adopted a baby from Guatemala. He was a beautiful baby that grew up into a good man. He is 20 this year.
I knew that my mother and by extension my father were bigoted. She had made numerous comments while I was growing up that revealed that aspect of her. With that said, I had never seen her act upon it though. During a phone conversation with her we were talking about my new nephew and she stated: “He’ll never be a real grandchild.” When I asked why, she flatly stated because he was Latino. To me that was the point that I lost all respect for her. My Dad was a massive enabler as well.
She also showed a strong preference for those children/ grandchildren that looked like her. Brown hair with brown eyes.
She died in 2011 the week that the tsunami hit Japan. My life became a lot better after that. Dad died last year and I did not even go to his funeral.
My brother was adopted and my grandmother was similarly biased against him, asking my mom if we got any money from the state for taking care of him. Like, no, he’s her son! There wasn’t even the excuse of racism–my brother is blond-haired and blue-eyed. He just wasn’t her blood.
Eventually she started liking him as dementia kicked in and she forget his origin. Still messed him up.
I’m glad your nephew didn’t have to deal with her for all that long, though it sounds like it was already long enough.
I will never understand why people who feel this way would adopt or take in kids from places or cultures they feel so negatively towards
They voted for an orange hellscape and consume CCP/MAGA propaganda; after them proving themselves to be incapable of solving aspergers/ADHD and isolating themselves from the rest of the school community.
I was bemoaning the lack of action on global warming, and how all of civilization was at risk if we didn’t take action now, and my boomer mom replied,
“Why should I care? I’ll be dead by then!” 😞
Did you ask your Mom whether she has any kids who might still be around?
my mother, also a boomer, had the exact same response when we got onto the conversation of electric vehicles (she wanted to buy a new car; i recommended electric).
i didnt really know how to respond. i still dont understand why one would want to leave the world worse than how they found it.
conservatives will assume that your empathy for others is fake, that it must have been brainwashed into you. basically they think you’re an idiot. sorry
Messy story, I’ll do my best to lay it out in a reasonable way:
For my mom and stepdad, it was the kidnapping tied with lifetime of neglect and abuse.
And I call it kidnapping because that’s what it was, even though there wasn’t really a good law against it, because basically they moved, they did not tell my dad or my dad’s side of the family where they had moved to, or leave any contact information.
From the time I was 6 until I was 13 and I went behind my back and tracked down my grandmother, I had no contact with that side of my family.
Then my mom had the gall to go after my dad for unpaid child support during the seven years where he could not track me down or locate me and spent countless sleepless nights worrying about me, wondering where I was.
As for my dad, he was actually a pretty decent person, but he was also very much a Disney dad. I did not get an awful lot of interaction with him in my childhood, (thanks to said kidnapping), but even once we reconnected when I was a teenager his job and my mom made it so that he basically didn’t see me but maybe once a year, if that, until I was an adult.
Despite my hatred of my mother, once I was an adult I had cut her off and hadn’t seen her for four or five years and my dad said, you only get one mother. I’d really appreciate it if you still spent time with her and saw her.
So I put my hatred to the side and tried to reconnect with my mom, which wasn’t good, but was manageable until my dad died from Covid, and my mom sent me a slew of angry text messages over why my younger half sister, her bastard daughter, whom she conceived by cheating on my father, which was the impetus for their divorce in the first place, wasn’t included in my father’s memorial page which was made by my stepmom who had been my stepmom for like 30 years.
I cussed her the fuck out and I haven’t talked to her since.
I blocked her ability to text message me, because I don’t want to fucking talk to her, so she has gone out of her way to get new phone numbers, to occasionally message me and send me TikToks about how she doesn’t know what to say to me (apparently, she’s never heard of the concept of an apology or admitting you’re wrong when your actions have hurt somebody), and to send me Amazon gift cards for my birthday when I don’t fucking shop at Amazon because they’re a shit tier company.
When I heard my father decrying racism as wrong - and then turning right around in the very next sentence to say that homosexuals and trans people deserve god’s wrath.
