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How do you deal with such people?
13 years ago
I've been friended by a guy on Facebook two weeks ago that I've met in a political group there, and he's also a writer for a nationwide daily calling itself Left-wing. Because I'm a television, video & camera student, he promised to get me a two-to-three weeks job to shoot a number of podium debates hosted by this one atheist organization that he'd just become a member of. Mimimum tariff for two professionals (one camera operator and one sound operator) would be circa 350 Euros per day, but I offered them as low as only 600 all-in-all for the both of us, but they turned us down because they were only okay with 100 Euros for two people and two-to-three weeks work.
Even before they turned us down, this negotiator guy from Facebook invited me over to the home of this one actress who used to be in Fassbinder movies decades ago. We were 6 people, that was her, him, me, a friend of his, and her landlord. The only people talking the whole night long were him and her, and the others were just silent, watching, only whispering to me when I asked them something.
I soon realized why it was that way. The actress and this Facebook guy were pretty much giving an ad-lib performance feigned to look like a casual chit-chat that didn't tolerate any foreign input. Once or twice she'd turn to me to ask me a question, but before I could even finish a single sentence, she immediately yelled at me how stupid and wrong I was, so she'd only been looking for a stock character to ask a rhethorical question that she'd histrionically answer herself.
When I tried to give my own input during the first part, all that happened was the Facebook guy glancing over briefly to hiss at me how I had no idea what I was talking about. I didn't mind *HIM* so much though because he seemed much less aggressive than she did. So after maybe half an hour I was starting to realize what was going on and tried to just sit back and enjoy the show like the others.
Until they started vehemently defending this one recent poem that's made a lot of press over here, about alls Jews being mass murderers, the new Nazi Fascists annihilating the Arab nations, and that Israel would be deliberately planning a nuclear Holocaust of the Iranian people "because they are just like the Nazis". That's when I couldn't hold back anymore and tried to talk some sense into them about the Arab-Israeli conflict and that it's the Irani government that's currently developing the bomb in order to "wipe Israel off the map" as Ahamdinejad, puppet to the mullahs, has repeatedly uttered.
What happened first was that the actress turned on her laptop and yellingly read out to me this one small printpaper pamphlet from 2001 about "the American Inteligence Agencies having found no evidence about Iran having the bomb so far", and then she played a video interview of the poem's writer where he said stuff such as that "it's the duty especially of us Germans to prevent another Holocaust as the Jews are planning right now" and how he's totally flabbergasted and outraged the "partly servile, partly propagandistic political correctness" of everybody critizing him for saying so.
After that, I told them that they didn't let me know anything that could convince me, and compared the poem's writer to another writer who's recently flirted with extremist right-wing ideologies by forging statistics, reviving biological and genetical racism about "the typical racial attributes of Jews and Arabs", calling the latter inhuman, incorrigible, and intellectually inferior monsters "because of their genes", and who'd also claimed afterwards he had no idea how much of a stir of "political correctness" he'd cause with that.
Both the actress and the Facebook guy only responded by calling me "an immature, puerile little boy" for "such a stupid comparison", and after that, I didn't speak up anymore during the night, only later promising the Facebook guy to mail him a discussion thread on the Arab-Israeli conflict where I'd adressed all the topics brought up by the poem writer.
Towards the end of the night, the Facebook guy, sitting next to me on the couch, was pretty much groping my crotch for 10 seconds (which I pretended to ignore) when he gave me a DVD with a pierced male nipple on the cover, telling me to watch it and tell him what I thought about it.
Part of my tolerance and compliance was due to the fact that the Facebook guy had promised me "more filming jobs" beside the one that we'd be turned down on by his atheist organization.
But after they'd turned us down for that first job, the Facebook guy started texting me on Facebook and calling me on the phone for hours, day and night, to "teach" me endlessly, for hours and hours, about how he thinks that the Catholic church is evil incarnate and the Pope being the anti-Christ or something. I felt like being constantly recruited and shouted at by some Scientology cult member.
So yeah, I thought, I myself am all for separation of church and state, I'll play your game, as long as you'll get me more jobs. So at first I tried going in-between his hours and hours of rants, "Yeah, burning witches and all that, I'll give ya that was pretty bad...but wouldn't you agree that other religions can be pretty fierce as well, I mean, like, Sharia and all that, and that there's also many secular ideologies that can be pretty intolerant?"
"NO WAY!", he'd yell at me during his long phone calls way past 2 at night, "It's all lies you're parroting! You just can't handle the truth!" His main motivation seemed to be the homophobic stance of the Church, which made him totally romanticize and idolize the ancients (while I tried to tell him several times on Facebook in response to his glorifications that all that Greek Eros had been about was pre-pubescent boys, and that the standard Roman response towards same-sex activities among male freeborns was the death penalty according to Lex scantinia, but he kept ignoring both or linked me to some Roman political libel attacks and satires on "the immorality and corruption of men"), and it made him even go so far as to proclaim the "tolerance of Islam" in regard to it just because in Arab countries, males can be dancers.
Plus, after I'd agreed to him that it was pretty mean on behalf of the Church to burn gays, he started sending me all those full-frontal nudity pix of guys via Facebook without ever asking if it was okay, in order to "show you we're still friends even though you're talking all this humbug". I didn't dare telling him that I'm not into guys, because of his constant fits he was having already just from me trying to reply to his rants on Christianity.
When I'd also sent him the promised link to the rather smart debate on the Arab-Israeli conflict, together with another to a large number of newspapers that had started making *EXACTLY* the same comparison between the two writers that I'd made before any of the papers did, it considerably turned his passive-aggressiveness up a notch, although he never mentioned the event or debated any of the links (probably for good reason, I'd bet).
After a few days and nights of constant bombardment both via phone and on Facebook, I told him that I just don't *CARE* who's right, just as long as he'd stop pestering me with the whole Christianity issue.
He went, "Oh, silly little boy...you're just not *LISTENING*! You *NEVER* listen and you'll never learn, just like you never listened and never learned when we were visiting my *WONDERFULL* actress friend! You're so twisted and in denial about Christianity! That's why you're trying to change the subject, because I caught you out, you have no idea what you're talking about! I can't be the first having to tell you all these *FACTS* about Christianity and how evil it is, because you're just too stupid to get it by yourself when everybody does! I'm a wise old man and I shall teach you out of my selfless compassion, and I shall be your direly needed therapist from Christianity, you sick, sick little boy!"
I mean WTF? Imagine it, a 50yo talking like that to a 29yo, or to anybody, for that matter! I was already at a point when I couldn't sleep at night even when he wasn't talking at me due to his constant belittling, patronizing, insulting. Because I didn't dare telling him on the phone, I then sent him a msg on Facebook, telling him in two bare-facts sentences that often those are the best representation of all the dogmatic, self-righteous intolerance of religion who have suffered most at the hand of religion themselves (as he'd told me he'd been born into Christianity), and that I was feeling like being recruited into Scientology or any other cult religion, restricting myself to not sound as gleefully patronizing and insulting as he constantly was to me.
A few hours passed, then he replied with a return msg saying, "You are so full of yourself that you don't need a wise teacher like me! You are worshipping yourself as your own idol! I shall now leave you all alone with your confused ignorance that all you little kids are suffering from nowadays!"
But still a few hours later, he came back and IM'd me on Facebook, first with the line, "Weren't you the stupid brat who cried me a river about some sects? ;)"
I ignored that first IM. Then he IM'd me a long sermon about how he felt like "a genius classical musician" whenever "talking" to me, and that I'd be a "hooligan" who'd "always be disturbing his beautiful opera-house performance by bellowing rude, naughty chants".
That did it. I replied in IM that I refused to talk to him any further about the religion he had been born into, that I don't talk to fanatics about religion, and that he should stop acting like a spoiled child for lashing out at me for not telling him what he wanted to hear. I hit ENTER and immediately closed Facebook, being close to tears.
About 6 hours later, I dared going back to Facebook because I had to check a group there. What I found was a raging long IM by him ALL IN CAPS, full of typos, and with so!!!!!! many exclamation marks. I didn't bother to read more than the first and last sentence. The first started, "I DNT BLNG 2 ANY RELIGION YU SWINE...", and the last one was, "I WSH YU STAY AWY FRM M3, YU SCK; SICK PYSOCHPTH!" Friendship status was removed.
So, yeah...how would you deal with a person like this when it's happening to you? To be frank, I'm still kinda worried about him or something. But most of what he did happened on the phone (smart enough to leave no trace to any outside people?), and he was plastering his own Facebook page with the same male nudity shots that he'd sent to me without Facebook ever complaining. And, well...I don't like dealing with legal matters.
Even before they turned us down, this negotiator guy from Facebook invited me over to the home of this one actress who used to be in Fassbinder movies decades ago. We were 6 people, that was her, him, me, a friend of his, and her landlord. The only people talking the whole night long were him and her, and the others were just silent, watching, only whispering to me when I asked them something.
I soon realized why it was that way. The actress and this Facebook guy were pretty much giving an ad-lib performance feigned to look like a casual chit-chat that didn't tolerate any foreign input. Once or twice she'd turn to me to ask me a question, but before I could even finish a single sentence, she immediately yelled at me how stupid and wrong I was, so she'd only been looking for a stock character to ask a rhethorical question that she'd histrionically answer herself.
When I tried to give my own input during the first part, all that happened was the Facebook guy glancing over briefly to hiss at me how I had no idea what I was talking about. I didn't mind *HIM* so much though because he seemed much less aggressive than she did. So after maybe half an hour I was starting to realize what was going on and tried to just sit back and enjoy the show like the others.
Until they started vehemently defending this one recent poem that's made a lot of press over here, about alls Jews being mass murderers, the new Nazi Fascists annihilating the Arab nations, and that Israel would be deliberately planning a nuclear Holocaust of the Iranian people "because they are just like the Nazis". That's when I couldn't hold back anymore and tried to talk some sense into them about the Arab-Israeli conflict and that it's the Irani government that's currently developing the bomb in order to "wipe Israel off the map" as Ahamdinejad, puppet to the mullahs, has repeatedly uttered.
What happened first was that the actress turned on her laptop and yellingly read out to me this one small printpaper pamphlet from 2001 about "the American Inteligence Agencies having found no evidence about Iran having the bomb so far", and then she played a video interview of the poem's writer where he said stuff such as that "it's the duty especially of us Germans to prevent another Holocaust as the Jews are planning right now" and how he's totally flabbergasted and outraged the "partly servile, partly propagandistic political correctness" of everybody critizing him for saying so.
After that, I told them that they didn't let me know anything that could convince me, and compared the poem's writer to another writer who's recently flirted with extremist right-wing ideologies by forging statistics, reviving biological and genetical racism about "the typical racial attributes of Jews and Arabs", calling the latter inhuman, incorrigible, and intellectually inferior monsters "because of their genes", and who'd also claimed afterwards he had no idea how much of a stir of "political correctness" he'd cause with that.
Both the actress and the Facebook guy only responded by calling me "an immature, puerile little boy" for "such a stupid comparison", and after that, I didn't speak up anymore during the night, only later promising the Facebook guy to mail him a discussion thread on the Arab-Israeli conflict where I'd adressed all the topics brought up by the poem writer.
Towards the end of the night, the Facebook guy, sitting next to me on the couch, was pretty much groping my crotch for 10 seconds (which I pretended to ignore) when he gave me a DVD with a pierced male nipple on the cover, telling me to watch it and tell him what I thought about it.
Part of my tolerance and compliance was due to the fact that the Facebook guy had promised me "more filming jobs" beside the one that we'd be turned down on by his atheist organization.
But after they'd turned us down for that first job, the Facebook guy started texting me on Facebook and calling me on the phone for hours, day and night, to "teach" me endlessly, for hours and hours, about how he thinks that the Catholic church is evil incarnate and the Pope being the anti-Christ or something. I felt like being constantly recruited and shouted at by some Scientology cult member.
So yeah, I thought, I myself am all for separation of church and state, I'll play your game, as long as you'll get me more jobs. So at first I tried going in-between his hours and hours of rants, "Yeah, burning witches and all that, I'll give ya that was pretty bad...but wouldn't you agree that other religions can be pretty fierce as well, I mean, like, Sharia and all that, and that there's also many secular ideologies that can be pretty intolerant?"
"NO WAY!", he'd yell at me during his long phone calls way past 2 at night, "It's all lies you're parroting! You just can't handle the truth!" His main motivation seemed to be the homophobic stance of the Church, which made him totally romanticize and idolize the ancients (while I tried to tell him several times on Facebook in response to his glorifications that all that Greek Eros had been about was pre-pubescent boys, and that the standard Roman response towards same-sex activities among male freeborns was the death penalty according to Lex scantinia, but he kept ignoring both or linked me to some Roman political libel attacks and satires on "the immorality and corruption of men"), and it made him even go so far as to proclaim the "tolerance of Islam" in regard to it just because in Arab countries, males can be dancers.
Plus, after I'd agreed to him that it was pretty mean on behalf of the Church to burn gays, he started sending me all those full-frontal nudity pix of guys via Facebook without ever asking if it was okay, in order to "show you we're still friends even though you're talking all this humbug". I didn't dare telling him that I'm not into guys, because of his constant fits he was having already just from me trying to reply to his rants on Christianity.
When I'd also sent him the promised link to the rather smart debate on the Arab-Israeli conflict, together with another to a large number of newspapers that had started making *EXACTLY* the same comparison between the two writers that I'd made before any of the papers did, it considerably turned his passive-aggressiveness up a notch, although he never mentioned the event or debated any of the links (probably for good reason, I'd bet).
After a few days and nights of constant bombardment both via phone and on Facebook, I told him that I just don't *CARE* who's right, just as long as he'd stop pestering me with the whole Christianity issue.
He went, "Oh, silly little boy...you're just not *LISTENING*! You *NEVER* listen and you'll never learn, just like you never listened and never learned when we were visiting my *WONDERFULL* actress friend! You're so twisted and in denial about Christianity! That's why you're trying to change the subject, because I caught you out, you have no idea what you're talking about! I can't be the first having to tell you all these *FACTS* about Christianity and how evil it is, because you're just too stupid to get it by yourself when everybody does! I'm a wise old man and I shall teach you out of my selfless compassion, and I shall be your direly needed therapist from Christianity, you sick, sick little boy!"
I mean WTF? Imagine it, a 50yo talking like that to a 29yo, or to anybody, for that matter! I was already at a point when I couldn't sleep at night even when he wasn't talking at me due to his constant belittling, patronizing, insulting. Because I didn't dare telling him on the phone, I then sent him a msg on Facebook, telling him in two bare-facts sentences that often those are the best representation of all the dogmatic, self-righteous intolerance of religion who have suffered most at the hand of religion themselves (as he'd told me he'd been born into Christianity), and that I was feeling like being recruited into Scientology or any other cult religion, restricting myself to not sound as gleefully patronizing and insulting as he constantly was to me.
A few hours passed, then he replied with a return msg saying, "You are so full of yourself that you don't need a wise teacher like me! You are worshipping yourself as your own idol! I shall now leave you all alone with your confused ignorance that all you little kids are suffering from nowadays!"
But still a few hours later, he came back and IM'd me on Facebook, first with the line, "Weren't you the stupid brat who cried me a river about some sects? ;)"
I ignored that first IM. Then he IM'd me a long sermon about how he felt like "a genius classical musician" whenever "talking" to me, and that I'd be a "hooligan" who'd "always be disturbing his beautiful opera-house performance by bellowing rude, naughty chants".
That did it. I replied in IM that I refused to talk to him any further about the religion he had been born into, that I don't talk to fanatics about religion, and that he should stop acting like a spoiled child for lashing out at me for not telling him what he wanted to hear. I hit ENTER and immediately closed Facebook, being close to tears.
About 6 hours later, I dared going back to Facebook because I had to check a group there. What I found was a raging long IM by him ALL IN CAPS, full of typos, and with so!!!!!! many exclamation marks. I didn't bother to read more than the first and last sentence. The first started, "I DNT BLNG 2 ANY RELIGION YU SWINE...", and the last one was, "I WSH YU STAY AWY FRM M3, YU SCK; SICK PYSOCHPTH!" Friendship status was removed.
So, yeah...how would you deal with a person like this when it's happening to you? To be frank, I'm still kinda worried about him or something. But most of what he did happened on the phone (smart enough to leave no trace to any outside people?), and he was plastering his own Facebook page with the same male nudity shots that he'd sent to me without Facebook ever complaining. And, well...I don't like dealing with legal matters.
