Wanting your radioactive material back is cringe and angrily yelling about it is mean.
"sir, im an federal officer in the department of energy and my buddy right here is from the bureau of counterterrorism. you are required by law to give the uranium 235 back and you've been resisting so you will be treated as a terrorist"
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You're both the worst. Both of you make things awkward and uncomfortable for everyone else hanging out just trying to have a good time. Both of you bring down the vibes, and both of you need to leave. No, I don't care whose "worse". You both suck. Please leave.
Being mean often doesn't bring down the vibe, especially if the vibe is exclusionary and chauvinistic. If the vibe is southern pride and racism, being mean to black people helps the vibe. Sometimes the vibe sucks, so bringing it down makes the world a better place. I don't feel sorry for ruining fun had at the expense of others.
Please explain to me how someone e.g. publicly professing their love of anime directly negatively impacts anyone
Cringe is relative. Almost any topic can negatively impact others in certain contexts, but presentation is also a key part of harmful cringe. It can offend people who have bad experiences with the topic, or it can derail the conversation and make it difficult for others to voice their opinion. If someone brings up their love for anime without it relating to the discussion, it shows that they aren't considerate of other people.
Autistic info dumps are a prime example of this. It isn't that we mean to ignore the feelings of others, it's that we have trouble recognizing when to stop. However, I have killed many great conversations because of my cringe rants, especially when I was younger.
Autistic info dumps are a prime example of this. It isn't that we mean to ignore the feelings of others, it's that we have trouble recognizing when to stop. However, I have killed many great conversations because of my cringe rants, especially when I was younger.
That's not "cringe" though. That's just a lack of social awareness.
Let's be careful not to confuse the fact that autistic people have trouble knowing when it's appropriate to inject something into a conversation with the content of what they inject. It's all too easy for someone to conclude that anime itself is bad, or that everyone who likes it is bad, because the people who tend to like talking about it don't know when it's appropriate to do so. This conflation, I believe, is the driving force behind cringe culture. I've seen this happen far too many times to far too many subjects, including most if not all of my own special interests.
Saying that autistic people lacking social awareness is bad is completely uncontroversial. Attempting to correct this by labelling it "cringe", and, intentionally or not, them it's their interests that are the problem, is not only wrong but harmful.
Cringe exists to reinforce norms. The "funny" part of jokes are so often normative, that I suspect it's integral to comedy. Comedy seems to always make a statement about how things ought to be, enforcing social norms and spreading views. Cringe is the most ugly version of it because it's most clearly about social norms and attitudes. We find things "cringe" because of social norms.
When I saw trans people and crossdressers in media, they were portrayed as something cringe worthy, disgusting, and sometimes dangerous. Those people were villainous and gross in ways I already understood as disgusting. They were dirty morally and physically, while "normal" people were clean and benevolent. Same with other marginalized groups. You cringe at disgusting things, and we were conditioned to cringe at minorities. This wasn't done consciously most of the time as they were just repeating what was learned.
I avoid cringe comedy, and only use cringe humor for actually immoral behavior. Anime itself isn't cringe, only the creepy and harmful parts of it. Furries aren't cringe, only the ones that abuse animals. Unless the thing is inherently bad for its own sake, I think it shouldn't be cringe. Different or unfamiliar things shouldn't be cringe unless they're actually bad, and bad things that are familiar should be cringed at more.
I very much agree, but I believe an important part of drawing this distinction is not using the word "cringe", since, as I said, that makes it easy for people who don't care to draw that distinction to hear you say "men who are upset that they can't find a real life woman who actually looks like an anime girl are cringe", completely miss the point, and respond with "yeah, i know. anime is so cringe. can you believe there are people who naruto run in the halls at my school? their growth has been stunted." One of these things is genuinely damaging to both that incel and every woman he will ever interact with, and the other is behavior deviant from the norm that people are put off by, which at absolute worst will result in the anime enjoyer running into something or someone because they weren't looking where they were going.
Since the word "cringe" is already very widely associated with the second thing, I think our efforts to fight cringe culture in its current form will be much better spent finding a new word to refer to the first thing and popularizing that than trying to change the meaning of the word "cringe" to be both much stricter and much more serious, both since I believe changing the meaning of a word as prevalent as "cringe" would require more community effort than reclaiming an actual slur, and since people hearing you explain that calling something cringe should mean it's actually damaging would be all too eager to assume you meant that Naruto running in the halls was actually harmful.
That's a fair point. It is more wise to destigmatize cringe itself than make us only cringe at actually bad things. Personally, I feel bad about cringing at harmless things that make people happy. The issue is more about viewing cringe as morally bad instead of aesthetically bad. Not all normative assertions are moral, and people often try to justify aesthetic judgments with moral judgments. The, "I can't dislike something unless it's morally bad," mentality.
Yeah no fuck off, I can think of contexts where someone can be mean or cringe or both and yet be faultless.
If your somewhere where being "cringe" or "mean" is socially-acceptable, then I guess sure you've managed to find the loophole. Congratulations.
If you do something in a social situation that can be considered cringe, rude, mean, or offputting, then contextually speaking the action would be considered inappropriate to the social situation as a whole, or in today's Layman's Terms you'd be "awkward af", and people would likely not want to "chill" with you. Depending on where this social situation is occuring they may ask you to leave, or force you to leave.
But I don't really want to debate social ethics and moral philosophy with you as it's tedious and frankly annoying, especially in regards to something so minor. Sooooo yeah no fuck off.
