Pick your Lemmy instance wisely...

jarfil@lemmy.world to Lemmy Shitpost@lemmy.world – 232 points –
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Had to look up "sea lion." That's something I've seen a lot of, but never knew there was a specific term for.

Yeah, it's sadly ubiquitous. I don't think a day goes by when I don't witness several sea lions in the wild

Tucker "I'm just asking questions" Carlson must be the poster child for them.

I've been running into something adjacent, but doesn't quite fit that description. Basically people use the tactics of Sealioning but the motivation seems to be just reframing the conversation to whatever they wanted to talk about, rather than necessarily pissing you off. It can be just as annoying though.

Yeah, that wouldn't count because they're just being a standard asshole who wants to control the conversation rather than trying to troll with bad faith questions.

Sealioning is an accusation that rests on assuming someone else's intentions. You can't ever know for sure if someone is a sealion, because people aren't mind readers. I usually see sealioning accusations thrown by neurotypicals at autistic people, because they can't read our emotions like they're used to and that freaks them out and they assume hostile intent.

Yes, it could be mistaken for that if a person isn't paying attention. But the difference between acting in good faith and not is usually pretty obvious as it goes on.

Well that's a tremendous amount of faith in your ability to read other people's minds. And given you make no distinction between reading the minds of neurotypicals and autistics, I'd bet good money that you're frequently wrong when you try to read autistic minds. Which would make your actions towards autistic people frequently cruel.

Autistic mind here: Reading yours is giving me a headache. It's like debugging a minecraft mod after patch day. Please reset aggression level to zero and run a malware scan.

Yeah, I'm neurodivergent in a lot of different ways, and every one of them reduces the efficacy of neurotypical empathy. That sensation you're experiencing right now from talking to me is the same way neurotypical people feel when they talk to you. No wonder neurotypicals are so ableist to autistics, talking to us causes them pain. But it's still not right for them to demand we think like them, and it's still not right for you to demand I think like you. What we have to learn is how to coexist together.

And any coexistence we reach isn't going to involve always assuming we can read minds effectively. It's just an unrealistic standard.

Anyway, maybe it wouldn't hurt so much if you weren't trying to read my mind without consent. No means no, but you didn't even ask. No wonder you're in pain, you tried to delve inside my mind and I kicked you back out.