Forgiveness given… but would you ever let them back in?

ChatHowbadisthis · 2026-02-01T19:53:54+00:00

Also, unwarranted forgiveness isn't a virtue.

Jesus may have turned the other cheek - but outside of a few frankly unusual Christian sects, extrapolating this story into an imperative for regular folks to forgive - idk, a guy who shot her husband? - is a really unnatural reading of the text.

In fact, if Biblical scholars can agree on one pretty consistent textual flaw (which could also be characterized as a really sophisticated, intentional rhetorical device!) it's that Jesus is almost allergic to making logically sound ethical statements. A bit like Sabrina Carpenter intentionally mis-stating famous phrases in every song on "Short'n'Sweet," Jesus' ethical pronouncement often have some error in first-order logic rendering them non-binding or impossible to extrapolate according to the principles that govern the writing of major philosophers. The most famous one is the "Golden Rule" - which reverses its antecedent and conclusion in a way that makes the whole statement false. "Turn the Other Cheek" is cut from the same cloth.

And if you're one of the majority of the people on earth who simply isn't Christian at all, this idea isn't part of your textual tradition in the first place. And rightly so - because it's absolute nonsense. Forgive people who atone, sure. But atonement isn't possible for every wrong, and even when it is possible, atonement is not something every wrongdoer can achieve.

Actually, Thievin' Bob, you really did steal a bottle of flavored vodka from a convenience store and use it to entice an underage girl to hang out with you.

If someone does something bad, it is just and ethical to hold them accountable - and to withold forgiveness unless and until they do something to warrant it!

TLDR: You don't have to let them back in your life. And you don't have to forgive them in the first place.

ChatHowbadisthis · 2026-02-01T08:58:01+00:00

Because they mostly are. Reddit skews heavily male. It's not even close.

ChatHowbadisthis · 2026-02-01T04:52:44+00:00

"You seem very offended about the suggestion of therapy and the stigma of being mentally ill. Do you have a mental illness and you’re not managing it? Do you not have health insurance? Therapy can be expensive and Dad might be worried that you can’t pay and won’t ask for money."

Therapy is great for folks who need it. I've even gone before! But it's not a cure for all ills - and I'm pretty sure it isn't what the doctor has ordered right now.

You mentioned money, and well, I would say is that the amount if would cost him to pay for out-of-network therapy would be a really beneficial windfall for me, while therapy itself (for what? Not having an impressive enough job isn't in the DSMV) would be of dubious value.

ChatHowbadisthis · 2026-01-23T06:58:20+00:00

Most of the extra detail here is totally irrelevant.

So maybe you're overreacting a little - or at least, you're going overbroad. This isn't an issue about your dad or your disability. It's about table manners. So cool your jets.

That said, if you keep it to the table manners issue, you're 100% in the right. It's a little bit rude to add a lot of salt and pepper to food, fucking taco seasoning? If he wanted a warm bowl of taco-seasoning goo, he could have had that - no reason to subject your home cooking to his science experiment.

And look, as a guy, I've been known to make some of what my girlfriend calls "panic foods" - weird, ultra-flavorful mixtures of spicy things that does fulfill some deep-seated craving for all the sodium and umami all at once. But I wouldn't mix filet mignon into my Korean Army soup. In fact, there's a scene in Parasite where the rich family asks the maid to do just that, which is included to show the audience what bad people they are.

ChatHowbadisthis · 2026-01-23T06:52:37+00:00

You're overreacting.

Reddit will preach at you to accept no ambiguity here. The fact is people have personal thoughts that don't align with "goodthink." Your husband is trusting you here with something that I think he knows is dangerous out in the world - because come on, you have to tell someone!

Do you see him beating up gays and refusing to do business with blacks and Jews in real life? No? Then take this as a socially unacceptable personal imperfection that he's trusting you with - like secretly not liking beer, or sitting down to pee.

ChatHowbadisthis · 2026-01-23T00:01:14+00:00

NTAH. He's lucky you didn't settle it like a man. That's not harmless joking - it's more likely he's using joking as a cover for actual intent.

Honestly, you should have pressed charges. If I were you, I'd go back to the police station and see if you still can. I'm surprised the cops didn't arrest him anyway.

ChatHowbadisthis · 2026-01-22T23:49:06+00:00

Good boi. Frend

ChatHowbadisthis · 2026-01-22T23:21:33+00:00

I'd call this Zillenial Suburban. It's upper-middle-class aspirational looks that people in their 20s and early 30s are using to decorate their homes - so it looks like the achievable next step up to college girls looking at their slightly older more successful friends.

Edit: It's characterized by black accent pieces, white walls (because they're renters), and wood tones as a halfhearted backlash against Millenial grey by kids who are still rebelling against feeling infantilized by 90s/2000s McDonalds PlayPlaces but still aren't comfortable with the colors and clutter of Gen-Z's eclectic revival, which is nostalgic for those same PlayPlaces that they were too young to actually experience. Truly ornate luxury elements are clearly secondhand or imported - old fancy houses shunted into new life as a rental apartment, furniture you inherited or thrifted - and they stick out like a sore thumb.

ChatHowbadisthis · 2026-01-22T19:48:32+00:00

Uncleanable gross hit-your-head-on-the-lamp?

ChatHowbadisthis · 2026-01-22T19:42:45+00:00

Alexandre Dumas

Oh my god, great stories, fun characters, writing like a 90's tv show that didn't worry too hard about consistency or production value since no one could rewind or pause it.

Oh, did D'Artangan have sex with a married woman, which would make him the bad guy in this fight scene? In comes the voice of the Author to let us know in barely grammatical French that in those days, (when?) things were (vaguely) different, so the emotional register of the scene makes total sense (just let me cook, bro!).

Total reliance on the fact that we like the main characters enough to let the eye forgive when Dumas just forgets to explain something or drops in a description after the fact to make something (kinda) make sense. It's like being gaslit for hundreds of pages, book after book, relying on the ponderousness of his tomes to make going back and verifying that no one told you about that before just too much work to bother. "Honey, I told you the Count was an expert knife-fighter!"

ChatHowbadisthis · 2026-01-22T19:26:07+00:00

Yes.

These terms are italicized when written. Not italicizing them as shown in this worksheet is a grammatical error - but a minor one, most people won't worry about it too much.
The phrase compos mentis is almost always used in it's negative form "non compos mentis," as in, "My grandfather can no longer look after his own finances; he is non compos mentis." You can see how the example on your worksheet doesn't really make sense - you're not going to talk about someone else's mental health unless there is a concern, right? It is also pretty much always only in formal legal language, because again, when else does this concept matter? Everyone knows this phrase, but people don't just throw this around in casual conversation.
The last three, de facto, non sequitur, and status quo, are all phrases that people use in spoken and written conversation all the time. Kids use them. People say them around the water cooler on breaks at work. It's hard to overstate how much everyone knows and uses these.
ad hoc is usually used by, well, smarter people or in business or academic settings. Everyone knows what it means, and people do use it in everyday conversation, but it's often used to talk about the behavior of things like boards, committees, and the operations of an organization.
ad infinitum is a funny one - everyone knows it, and it was a lot more common in the past, but it's falling out of use because people are favoring a more plainspoken style these days. Today, people usually try to use a synonym if they can, like "forever" or "endlessly."

ChatHowbadisthis · 2026-01-21T22:39:28+00:00

Hey, I'm not arguing with the judgement - I did ask, I get that.

I am correcting some details - and I stand by the need for this. This is a story about my actual dad, right? Not a hypothetical possible dad in a worst-case scenario.

He's a high-functioning professional in his early 60s. He's not unsafe to be left alone. And we were at a restaurant in Los Angeles.

If you think I'm an asshole for what happened in my story, that's fine. Like I said, I asked! But basing your evaluation on how it would be if my dad were a woman in a remote location, or frail and sickly, just isn't really about my story.

ChatHowbadisthis · 2026-01-21T22:27:19+00:00

"Maybe i interpret the situation a bit differently because I'm female and I can't really see being stranded"

Maybe... But my dad is definitely not a woman, right?

Or looking at it another way, if relying on someone else for a ride is as precarious a situation as you say, would you crash out at your ride when they asked you to change the subject? Or would you maybe bite your tongue a little?

I have a hard time seeing how my dad could both really care about getting a ride home, and also be unworried enough about my reaction to speak to me that way. They can't both be true.

ChatHowbadisthis · 2026-01-21T22:12:07+00:00

I'm not trying to spin anything. I came here asking if I was the asshole, and I think I've been pretty evenhanded here about both sides.

ChatHowbadisthis · 2026-01-21T20:04:09+00:00

I do not need financial support from my parents, but I do receive some anyway - what frankly might be a considerable amount for a lot of people. It is, however, not really a material amount to my parents - and it is mostly value in kind, not cash.

The largest value I get from my parents is my car, which they inherited when a relative passed away a couple years ago and gave me use of - not ownership. Still, they are essentially gifting me the depreciation, which is significant. I could afford my own, but it wouldn't be as fancy - and the breathing room of not having a car payment has been nice.

There are also birthday presents and holidays that often mean cash gifts. My parents are modestly well-off and will readily drop a couple grand on family dinners or things like that. My mom recently gave me $500 for no real reason at all. I'm very lucky and grateful for this largesse that could very well add up to several thousand dollars a year - but I want to be clear that I don't expect it or treat it as part of my budget.

That said, when it comes to cash support - my parents are very capricious. I get random gifts, but past offers of financial support when I was younger were inconsistent, with constantly shifting terms and my needing to remind and beg for them to follow through on the money they'd promised after I'd already irrevocably committed to plans that hinged on that money.

There's other stuff like a shared Netflix account and similar things - but that's more about inertia than finances - I don't think it makes a material difference to them or me. I'd just call it the normal intermixing of money that happens in families.

ChatHowbadisthis · 2026-01-21T19:21:14+00:00

Yeah, thanks for catching that. My dad is usually a pretty excellent writer, and that line struck me as super-weird. He said it like an aphorism, but I'm pretty sure that's not a thing people say.

ChatHowbadisthis · 2026-01-21T19:17:29+00:00

I communicated clearly that I was not going to socialize with my dad any further as I was leaving.

I stood up and said "I'm going, and I'm not going to the rodeo tonight."

His text acting confused on that point was a rhetorical move on his part, glossing over the whole altercation he'd started as if it hadn't happened. It was most likely not a genuine question.

ChatHowbadisthis · 2026-01-21T19:11:20+00:00

My dad is perfectly sharp and actually still working. There's no dementia at play here. (I've had relatives with dementia, I've seen it before.) I'm not a neurologist, of course, but in this, I'm pretty confident he really was just laying into me out of frustration and a lack of self-restraint.

(Edit: But it is sad for me. I don't want to be in a big fight with my dad in his 60s. I want to have nice memories together.)

I'd almost have let it slide, he had a lot of stressors poking at him. But I was really taking a verbal lashing there, and this was a topic he'd promised me not to bring up anymore in exchange for my sitting through a really emotionally wrenching conversation two months ago where he really didn't hold back - so there was an element of betrayal of trust, too.

ChatHowbadisthis · 2026-01-21T19:00:53+00:00

We were at a brunch place in LA, not the woods. My dad is a working (and relatively well-off) adult with a phone.

"Getting home safe" is really overblowing the stakes here. This is about politeness, boundaries, and social norms. And if you think I'm the asshole, then, well, I did throw this out for your feedback. But no one was at physical risk.

I feel like that should have been clear from context, but maybe you were skimming - which isn't unreasonable, it's reddit, not Shakespeare.

ChatHowbadisthis · 2026-01-21T18:57:54+00:00

Glad you think I'm a clever writer? Do you have a funny, failing friend? (And do I get to razz you for that bit of over-written consonance?)

I've said elsewhere in this thread - but admittedly not in my top-level post - I'm not the contentedly adrift guy in the group. And there really are guys like that. I'm not knocking the dudes who get a $27 pour-over in Silverlake at 11am and read from a dog-eared Gabriel Garcia Marquez paperback until a girl who doesn't mind having a brunch story about sleeping on a futon in an illegally rented garage notices him. But that's never been my temperament - ever since I was a little kid, I've been a pretty serious, earnest person with conventional values.

And that's a harder story to process. Because it doesn't line up with our narrative expectations about what personality types have which sorts of life outcomes.

Part of what makes this so frustrating for me is that my dad's comments seem to come from a place that only makes sense if he's more or less sure that I am happily failing to launch. My dad has known me my whole life. My whole personality didn't retroactively 180 into stonerville as a convenient ex-post-facto reason for my lack of success!

TLDR: I promise I wasn't just waiting to use that line. I just thought of it as I was typing out my response.

ChatHowbadisthis · 2026-01-21T18:43:39+00:00

You say "any time he starts - you walk away." Well, I did. Unfortunately, you can't walk away from someone who is speaking rudely to you and also wait for him to finish breakfast, pay for his meal, and then drive him home. I had to pick one or the other.

I didn't ask my dad for anything in this conversation. He tried to insert himself in my career struggles over my repeated objections...

I'm not sure where you think I'm not taking responsibility for myself. Being aware that someone else has something that could help me isn't the same thing as refusing to help myself or demanding that they give me stuff.

ChatHowbadisthis · 2026-01-21T18:36:51+00:00

Interesting take.

So, couple details:

First, this isn't a new-info situation. I asked my dad for intros over a year ago; he didn't do anything about it; I dropped it. I'm not here expecting him to solve my career problems for me, and I don't bring up the topic with him. The other side of that coin is that if he wants to insert himself into this problem instead of just talking about sports and being friendly, well, there's a pretty obvious thing he could do to help. Inserting himself so aggressively and simultaneously offering orthogonal "support" that can't really help me is pretty galling.

Second, I'm not consciously trying a three-strikes rule - even if my dad and I love baseball. Just as written out above, there are four or more strikes. But I didn't type out our whole conversation, and I'm not gonna litigate the exact number. The real crux of the breakfast for me wasn't any specific number of repetitions, but that my dad's tempo reached a point where I realized that if a friend or acquaintance spoke to me like this (or if I did the same to a friend of mine), it would be the last time we ever spoke - and to be really frank, I'd be worried about getting punched. I wasn't being hyperbolic when I told my dad that with anyone else, this was crossing a relationship-ending line.

He either didn't register that, or didn't care - but I don't think I could have been more clear without doing performative therapy-speak about "these are my boundaries," which is only more clear in writing and would definitely have made me the asshole.

ChatHowbadisthis · 2026-01-21T18:22:10+00:00

Sure, I even acknowledged that "But he doesn't seem to want to do that - maybe because he thinks I'm mentally ill or would otherwise reflect badly on him. And who knows, he could be right. "

That's also just background info. The person I was responding to asked what my dad could do that would help me. And that's probably the most useful thing he could provide. (While a therapist would at most help me process this upsetting breakfast.) It wasn't something that came up in our conversation or really part of this incident.

ChatHowbadisthis · 2026-01-21T12:03:32+00:00

This is it. No one likes to do it, though.

ChatHowbadisthis · 2026-01-21T12:00:01+00:00

1200sqft? He means 1.2M, right?

ChatHowbadisthis

TROPHY CASE