What are the worst misconceptions you know of?
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Do you wear a bowler hat?vrbtny said:
Do you have a cockney accent?
Do you sit in a large leather armchair in front of a fireplace smoking a pipe?
If so I bow to your Britishness sir *tips hat* pip pip cheerio.
Ive been here about 2 years. When I talk about these misconceptions I'm definitely not speaking about the individual level, but rather the demographic level. In my 2 years I've met tons of people who have had these misconceptions. They definitely do vanish when you've known someone a long time, but I am still constantly running into students who are surprised that I or my colleagues do not conform to their preconceived notion of "foreigner".Toriver said:
Oh and in an earlier post I mentioned that for a year I had weekly dinners with a family that never gave me chopsticks to eat with, assuming I could not use them. Even after I repeatedly told them I could. I wasn't offended or anything, I thought it was funny, but it shows that if these ideas are ingrained enough, sometimes they don't vanish even when presented with direct evidence showing them not to be true.
But once again, the best part of these misconceptions is (as I'm sure you've noticed), that they never seem to spawn out of anger or hatred of other cultures, but rather an effort to be culturally sensitive, so it's hard to be offended or get angry. Mostly I just find it funny!
Actually, Pedophilia does not have to be sexual. Popular misconception, but Philia only means an Obsession with a part of the world without a reason to. Pedophilia can be Artistic, Cultural, Scientific etc. and of course the MUCH rarer sexual obsession with children.LegendaryGamer0 said:
Abraham Lincoln ended slavery with the Emancipation Proclamation.
That document only freed about 50,000 slaves when it was published and did not include those under Union control.
In fact, Lincoln got in a lot of trouble with a man named Horace Greeley, who was an abolitionist that campaigned fiercely for Lincoln's presidency. Lincoln stated that if slavery were in tact or abolished, he would be for whichever would help the Union. Mr. Greeley wrote some scathing editorials about him after that.
That document only freed about 50,000 slaves when it was published and did not include those under Union control.
In fact, Lincoln got in a lot of trouble with a man named Horace Greeley, who was an abolitionist that campaigned fiercely for Lincoln's presidency. Lincoln stated that if slavery were in tact or abolished, he would be for whichever would help the Union. Mr. Greeley wrote some scathing editorials about him after that.
That something which causes an addiction is "addicting".... NNNNNNGGGGGHHHHHH
OK that's just a pedantic pet peeve, but there's a perfectly servicable word that's been in use for that forever already, and it ends I-V-E.
Also:
Speed apparently kills. News to me, regularly hitting quite high speeds on my daily commute, but only ever having been subject to low speed accidents. Slow areas and traffic congestion are where the complicated, dangerous manoeuvres tend to happen.
Unchecked impatience and uncontrolled or inappropriate speed, now those are killers. And drink. Have you ever accidentally tried driving whilst more inebriated than you realised? It's disturbingly hard, if you take any pride in your skill behind the wheel. Which says something about those who _choose_ to do it.
And on the subject of Britishness: That all Brits have awful teeth (no, we have fairly normal teeth... we have effective dentistry but aren't all saddled with hollywood levels of vanity), speak cockney or RP, are either posh or poverty-stricken, and have no concept of decent cooking or any worthwhile native cuisine. I could cook you a week of wholesome, tasty, trad british dishes, and plenty new style ones besides*, come off it.
* might be a fair old bit of foreign influence in those, but if Masterchef is any guide, the core values will shine through. It's amazing how many of their entries boil down to "white fish, fried potato, adulterated peas"
OK that's just a pedantic pet peeve, but there's a perfectly servicable word that's been in use for that forever already, and it ends I-V-E.
Also:
Speed apparently kills. News to me, regularly hitting quite high speeds on my daily commute, but only ever having been subject to low speed accidents. Slow areas and traffic congestion are where the complicated, dangerous manoeuvres tend to happen.
Unchecked impatience and uncontrolled or inappropriate speed, now those are killers. And drink. Have you ever accidentally tried driving whilst more inebriated than you realised? It's disturbingly hard, if you take any pride in your skill behind the wheel. Which says something about those who _choose_ to do it.
And on the subject of Britishness: That all Brits have awful teeth (no, we have fairly normal teeth... we have effective dentistry but aren't all saddled with hollywood levels of vanity), speak cockney or RP, are either posh or poverty-stricken, and have no concept of decent cooking or any worthwhile native cuisine. I could cook you a week of wholesome, tasty, trad british dishes, and plenty new style ones besides*, come off it.
* might be a fair old bit of foreign influence in those, but if Masterchef is any guide, the core values will shine through. It's amazing how many of their entries boil down to "white fish, fried potato, adulterated peas"
Offically its and offshoot of punk. Mine comes from the music and my personality. I have a morbid sense of humor and mindset. But I can get hyper and perky. I have always though differently than most people. My First crush as a child was Jareth in Labyrinth! My mom got me reading Stephen King and watching horror and sci-fi as a youngster.Dr Snakeman said:I'm going to second this request. If it isn't just a superficial fashion choice/attitude combo, then what is it?x-machina said:I assume your a goth, so could you please tell me what it means to be a goth? If it doesn't have anything to do with being depressed or dressing a certain way. What is a goth to you?AmayaOnnaOtaku said:No I am not evil, I am not a satanist, I don't wear black all the time, I am not always depressed
Edit: That came off a bit passive aggressive didnt it? Apologies
Someone who likes the darker side of things. They usually listen to death metal and goth music, such as Dismember and Bauhaus. Marilyn Manson is NOT goth. He's just...weird. Real goths are not depressing and suicidal like the posers you see at Hot Topic. Goths are fun to be around and aren't afraid to laugh at themselves every so often. They don't worship Satan and aren't evil despite what some ignorant people might say. Goths don't all dress alike either. They like to create their own unique style. Goths are also very intelligent and creative. A lot of them are writers and artists. Goths DON'T envy the popular people. They are what they are because it makes them happy. Goths would rather stay who they are and be among the so called "freaks" than be like everyone else and be popular. They understand that there are more important things in life than popularity, and usually succeed in life while the popular ones don't become much of anything.
Actually I have met (in person) various hardcore athiests that treat it like a religion, and seen others in debates on TV.moretimethansense said:
Their attitude is that there can't be a God, there's can't be a soul, there can't be life after death, religious/spiritual people are deluded dumbasses, so-and-so's opinion on a political matter can't be trusted because they go to Church or temple or something. And these hardcore atheists make it their mission to convert people to being athiests, missionaries that pay for advertisments to discredit religion, or ask for parents not to baptise their children. That sort of thing. They also tend to resort to strawman arguments.
Here's a long rant on the subject of why absolute 100% certaintity that there is no God or soul etc is itself a form of faith. For many it will be TL;DR.
LONG RANT BEGINS
Many atheists will make a point of telling anyone religious or spiritual that they must be deluded to believe that there is some kind of soul, or life after death, or that there is any God or supernatural force. Because there's no physical evidence, nobody has seen a soul, and the Bible/Koran/Tora/etc were written by men. But prior to the 20th century there was no physical evidence for atoms and the concept was poo-pood on by most scientists. And in medieval times the idea of diseases etc being caused by "humours" in the body was pretty plausible given their lack of knowledge of germs. And all matter contained four elements, stuff burned because you were releasing the fire trapped inside it. Science marches on, new things are discovered all the time, so acting as if 95% of everything has been explained by science is a bit shortsighted, given there are quotes of people saying that sort of thing about two hundred years ago.
The Big Bang is a pretty good explanation for the creation of the universe, and since it is comletely different to Genesis and other religious creation myths, clearly no need for God or a "creation" any more, right? But the the Big Bang was apparently created out of nothing. The cop-out is to say that time itself was created in the Big Bang... well that's nice, but if you are going to have the entire cosmos exploding out of an infinitesemal point, that just explains what the early state of matter and time was, it doesn't explain where it came from, or why it exploded. Stephen Hawking proposed that time might be circular, and the universe ends in a big crunch which is also the big bang...but then you've got an Ontological Paradox where the future causes the past, like a time traveller giving himself the plans for a time machine and nobody truly inventing it in the first place. A "chicken or the egg" scenario. The idea that "God or some other supernatural force created the Big Bang and the universe" seems no less plausible than the universe created itself throuhg time travel or the entire universe popped out existance due to a quantum fluctuation in a timeless void.
A popular one nowdays is that it was caused by the collison of two membranes - effectively, two other universes, and there is an infinite number of these universes and this multiverse exists for ever. but of course that requires that M-theory (string theory) be correct, and is only a theory at the moment. And by that I mena truly theoretical, with pretty much no physical evidence, just a nice thought experiment of how particles and spacetime works.
In the 19th century, for a while it seemed like science could explain everything, that we had a clockwork universe. Evolution seemed to have answered everything about lie, and laws of gravbity and motions and electromagnetism explained the forces of nature, nice and tidy. Nowdays scientists talk about string theory and M-theory and theorise that there might be 22 dimensions, which is a bit problematic given that we can only observe three or four dimensions of the universe.
And we've got quantum theory where the very structure of matter is uncertain and ruled by probabilities. And serious scientists seriously believe that there might be an infinite number of parallel univserses and an infinite number of copies of ourselves. That doesn't seem like the most simple "Occham's Razor" explanation for how the universe works, but it explains the oddities of quantum physics, and how come light behaves like both a particle and a wave, and it also explains away time travel paradoxes (some black hole/wormehole theories suggest time travel might be possible), so lots of physicists believe in parallel universes. Basically because it makes the maths work. But if the theory is correct, then is is physically impossible to travel or interact with a parallel universe in a way that would demonstrate its existance, and so it is a theory that can never be proven. I guess the scientists just have to have faith in it!
And some scientists believe that space isn't curved enough for a finite universe so the universe is infintie after all, and if it is infinite then there are infinite stars, and infinite planets, and since infinity is infinite then some of those planets are exact duplicates of earth, so there's an infinite number of dupliates of the Earth, within our own infinite universe.
So the universe has infinite copies of us, and there's an infinite number of universes. We're talking an infinity of infinities, and yet we don't have the physical evidence for even one infinity of anything.
This sort of wild guessing as to how the unvierse works seems no more different to the wild guessing that atheists claim caused humans to invent religion.
The idea of a superantural being creating everything and controlling things and deciding stuff and an afterlife might seem far-fetched... but I find an infinite number of parallel universe clones even more far-fetched. I look forward to someone using it as an argument in court... "Why did you murder this man?" "I had no choice in the matter. It is just my bad luck that I happen to be in the universe where I killed him. In the universe next door I chose not to kill him, but with every choice the universe splits into two, and so this is the one where I chose to kill him. But look on the bright side, there's billions and billions of universes where that guy is still alive!"
String theory, parallel universes, an infinite cosmos, the unvierse being 90% invisible dark energy and dark matter, what happens in the singularity at the centre of a black hole (they now think every galaxy has a supermassive black hole at the centre, so its not a trivial question). To me the unvierse seems to be getting more and more theoretical and scientists choose an "ideology" of how the universe works and then try to find some proof for it.
I wouldn't be surprised if in the year 3000 scientists discover some strange fundamental particles and reaslise that stuff like Ghostbusters or Final Fantasy VII is true, that the soul exists and it is made of actual matter or energy or quantum fluctuations or something. And then our cities get powered by the souls of orphaned children.
END RANT
^ this also <<< oops, written when the explanation of goths had just appeared
The (very few) goths I actually know are some of the most fun and secretly positive people in my sphere of friends & acquaintances. They just express themselves with a darker - yet often more flamboyant - aspect. And like to listen to noisy but interesting industrial type music.
The (very few) goths I actually know are some of the most fun and secretly positive people in my sphere of friends & acquaintances. They just express themselves with a darker - yet often more flamboyant - aspect. And like to listen to noisy but interesting industrial type music.
lol its funny because one om my best friends is a high school dropout and fairly uneducated and an automotive mechanic apprentice, but i still agree with youimperialreign said:
