I’ve lived in Japan—in and near Tokyo—for four decades, and on the trips I’ve made to Seoul I’ve enjoyed observing similarities and differences between the two cities. One of the differences was uniformed soldiers riding the subway in Seoul, something I’ve never seen in Tokyo. Another was what looked like emergency supplies stored on subway platforms; I’m guessing they were there in case the subways had to be used as bomb shelters. (I can’t read Korean, so I might have misidentified the items or their purpose.)
Postwar Japan has done a lot of preparation for natural disasters but has had essentially no civil defense measures against military threats. That might be changing, though. Just a couple of weeks ago, for the first time, the city of Tokyo designated 105 subway stations as emergency evacuation sites in case of missile attacks [1, in Japanese]. This was prompted not only by the continued threat from North Korea but also by what has been happening in Ukraine.
Disaster preparedness is different from feeling threatened. Visiting Seoul rubs off differently than actually living there. For instance, seeing military men on the subway is nothing out of the ordinary to Koreans because military service is compulsory. To outsiders, it may evoke images of heightened threat or militarism. To insiders, it's "oh hey, it's some young men."
I am tempted to speculate that the average Japanese civilian is more worried about the threat of North Korea than the average Korean civilian.
I was mostly thinking of a much more severe war cycle like WW1 or WW2 which have been out of most living people's memory at this point and so don't drive the culture as much any more. Before that it was constant bloodletting. We truly live in unprecedented times.
As a Korean I can tell you we mostly don’t care about their threats day to day. Their missiles don’t even make our news cycle sometimes. But we did care when they were more brazen (like sending specialists to assassinate our president) and now anti-communism is one of driving ideologies of our society, for better or worse. Calling someone “socialist” can be an insult :p
I didn't get that from day to day life, but you'd probably feel it in things like mandatory military service, and the fact that escalators going down to subway stations were deeper than normal.
No favourites, really. To me they're "just transport" and cars bore me to tears, but the most comfortable drive I can recall was a Honda (model long since forgotten).
The insults aren't necessary and aren't a good fit here:
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
That is the whole point of DST, although many people seem not to realize it. It allows us to wake up around sunrise all year long, which is our bodies' natural tendency.
Another thing nobody seems to realize is that we've already tried this experiment once before, and it was an utter failure. Quoting Wikipedia:
Permanent DST in the US was briefly enacted by President Nixon in 1974, in response to the 1973 oil crisis. The proposal was initially supported by an estimated 79% of the public; that support dropped to 42% after its first winter, owing to the harshness of dark winter mornings that permanent DST creates. An estimated six school children were also killed by motorists due to the new law. The new permanent DST law was retracted within the year.
I worked for Bill for about a year at GV. He was one of the friendliest managers I've ever met at Google.
I randomly met Dave Drummond once at a coffee shop in Sausalito (I didn't know who he was at the time... he just commented on my Google shirt), and he gave me an inexplicably uncomfortable feeling.
I think it is a bad idea to say this about him without providing a concrete example on how he made you uncomfortable. I'm sure I have accidentally made someone uncomfortable before. Does that make me a bad person? I hope not.
Of course it doesn't make you a bad person. In fact, there's a good chance you're a good person, and if you have accidentally made someone uncomfortable, it was through something they could easily put their finger on; you said something, you reminded them of something, etc.
This doesn't sound like it's that. He does, after all, call it 'inexplicable'; literally unable to be interpreted or expanded upon. It was a 'gut' feeling, a combination of all the things you pick up quickly and instinctively, the summation of which is discomfort.
That _also_ doesn't mean the guy is bad, or that it's necessarily fairly representative of him. Just that he gave the OP a feeling of discomfort.
It is totally unreasonable to go around commenting on third parties giving off creepy vibes of no consequence based on no evidence. Not to be too personal because a comment isn't the measure of a commentator but kcanini is basically saying nothing with as much negative allusion as can be put into a comment. It is a comment with no consequences, no relevant context, no observations and no argument.
Gut feelings are often surprisingly accurate, sometimes we all pick things up a lot earlier than our consciousness cottons on. But that is no standard to hold in public discourse. There are a bunch of people who give off creepy vibes who are great and a bunch of people who give off positive vibes who are creepy. Binning people like that should ideally be done with evidence or at the very least an argument to give the comment some substance.
We've figured out that good looking people are not more upstanding than ugly people. Truly the next step is to avoid comments like that. Truth is no defence for a comment like that; a comment that says nothing is automatically truthful but also meaningless.
> Gut feelings are often surprisingly accurate, sometimes we all pick things up a lot earlier than our consciousness cottons on. ... We've figured out that good looking people are not more upstanding than ugly people.
There, see the difference? You said it yourself - as it turns out, being good looking vs. ugly is not meaningful evidence as to whether you're going to treat others fairly. Being actively disdainful of others to the extent that you're giving off huge "creeper" vibes (perhaps unwittingly, perhaps intentionally!) can be evidence of sorts - at least in a very loose, "more likely than not" sense.
Of course, this is not to say that it should be considered anywhere close to OK to spread wild rumors about "the creeper vibes that this creepy guy gave me once", or anything like that - just think about how open this would be to abuse! But OP wasn't doing that, at all. He/she was seeking to confirm the assessment that others had already, independently come up with, and that can be a very good thing.
Drummond is black. I'm not one for political correctness, but there is pretty conclusive evidence that a lot of non-blacks people think black people give off creepy vibes. The in-group favoritism bias is a very real thing and it is very reasonable that it manifests as a vague unsubstantiated feeling.
Somebody saying they ran into him at a coffee shop and got what amounts to a feeling of bad vibes is literally not evidence or conformation of anything about the man's character. It is quite likely to be run of the mill background racism. We know nothing about the commentator, nothing about the situation. And it looks like the standard outcome of racism. Even if it isn't the commentator can do a lot better than that with minimal effort. Now if there were any evidence of any kind proffered that would be a different story. You are fabricating some notion of some sort of 'active ... disdain' here that isn't mentioned in the objectionable comment. If they don't mean unsubstantiated they shouldn't be saying unsubstantiated. They should be substantiating their claim.
> but there is pretty conclusive evidence that a lot of non-blacks people think black people give off creepy vibes.
There's pretty conclusive evidence that a lot of people think 'people outside their in-group' give off creepy vibes, yes. It's not a black vs. non-black thing, it's literally that being together with 'familiar' groups of people makes you feel more comfortable than otherwise. And while this can be a source of unwanted 'noise', it can also be quite separate from the more specific feeling about a particular person's attitude. I'm pretty sure that if we asked OP about black males other than this guy, he/she would tell us that no, as a rule, they did not make him/her feel uncomfortable the way he did.
(After all, working at a firm like Google, in this day and age, involves being exposed to people of many diverse backgrounds and being willing to engage with them as peers regardless of how one might initially feel about their group identity. That's a pretty good antidote to ingroup biases!)
I did mention disdain as a possibility because that's perhaps the most common source of those "inexplicable" creeper vibes, and also because OP themselves seems to be drawing a contrast between these and the "friendly" attitude of the person they worked with.
>Being actively disdainful of others to the extent that you're giving off huge "creeper" vibes (perhaps unwittingly, perhaps intentionally!) can be evidence of sorts - at least in a very loose, "more likely than not" sense.
This statement shows a surprising lack of empathy or objectivity or even self-awareness.
Consider that Person A and Person B meet and that Person A gets the creepy vibe from Person B - for no clearly defined reason, it just happens.
Person B increasingly tries to socially interact with Person A and this puts Person A in a tough position because they don't like the creepy vibe that they get from Person B.
Person A continually tries to use social cues to try to deter the interactions from being frequent or even increasing. Person B just doesn't "get the clue", as it were.
It might be unfair or untactful for Person A to use contempt or disdain to get the interactions with Person B to decrease; however, we can probably safely arrive the conclusion that this might be a far more tactful route to use than just calling Person B a creepy cunt to their face, yeah?
The problem with your explicit inference is that Person B never has reason to take pause and consider that it was their creepy vibe that initially caused the situation to occur, much less their continued attempts at increasing interactions that caused it to exacerbate.
If Person B has the "it's never me, it's always them" mentality, then we can presumably arrive that the conclusion that this is ultimately what occurred; however, to arrive at the conclusion that Person A used contempt or disdain against Person B solely because Person A is the creeper entirely detracts and ignores (in a very subjective way) Person A's experience[s] with/around Person B.
Succinctly put: You're ascribing to malice (e.g.: creepiness) where another reason can just easily and just as validly be subjected, without even considering that possibility.
> Person B increasingly tries to socially interact with Person A and this puts Person A in a tough position because they don't like the creepy vibe that they get from Person B.
If Person B is an empathetic, objective, self-aware person (i.e. not a Creepy Guy), they're of course not going to do that, They'll figure out that Person A is acting uncomfortable, for whatever reason, and dial back on the interaction as opposed to trying again and again in the same way. Perhaps they'll try a different "tack" if they feel that engaging with Person A is that important to them, but they'll still be way more careful about it than they otherwise would. Simply because it's the sensible, rational thing to do at that point.
As for Person A, the sensible thing to do would be to walk away from the whole thing well before they even get a chance to be made contemptful or disdainful. If they're unable to do even that then, well, there are ways you can call Person B a creeper to their face in a quite polite, respectful, and even plausibly-deniable way (i.e. Person B gets to save face!) and Person A should probably resort to them. That alone would be enough to break the vicious cycle of contempt.
Quite simply, the symmetry you're pointing at here just doesn't exist - being creeped out by someone is not the same as being a creeper yourself! Not even close.
>Quite simply, the symmetry you're pointing at here just doesn't exist - being creeped-out by someone is not the same as being a creeper yourself! Not even close.
You're being disingenuous in your argument. You're ascribing behaviour with the benefit of hindsight for a particular person (Drummond) and using that as a blanket definition for everyone else in the world that may be rude/disdainful. The equivalence simply doesn't exist and is in no-way emphatically true.
In fact, it's a rather far leap from the charitable position that gave the plausible deniability from the previous statement[s]: "...at least in a very loose, 'more likely than not' sense".
How do you propose to resolve this dichotomy that you're creating? Double-down?
For example, by your definition, wouldn't Gordon Ramsay automatically be a creeper? How about Simon Cowell?
How do you resolve your definition with the dichotomy created by reality demonstrated by their behaviour combined with their lack of being actual creeps (as far as anyone knows)?
The danger with such unqualified sentiments is that there are many things that can make someone uncomfortable. Let me be more plain: David Drummond is (was) the most famous black male executive in tech. I have heard black men voicing frustrations at people being uncomfortable at them for no good reason.
I am not saying that the OP or anyone here is being racist. We need to provide more context to these statements if we are going to say these in public. Otherwise, some groups of people will be at the receiving end of these kind of statements more often than the rest of us.
The majority of human communication is nonverbal. I saw this same kind of commentary about Epstein's "assistants". Humans can read humans to an extent that should impact behavior (but rarely does). Get over it.
That saying's usually not true when you're dealing with employee stock compensation, where you own the shares outright and make enough in cash salary to live on. Ownership is forever (modulo a revolution or other forcible overthrow of the rule of law, in which case you have bigger problems). In the absence of leverage, you can afford to be perfectly rational and have an infinite time horizon.
