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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   3294 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 17, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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Has anyone discovered a way to let it be openly known that you don’t agree with the group problematizing social norm, while still being accepted into the group

This is literally impossible. Not going to happen. If they are into culture where you know what your running club members think about current politics, and on top of that that they belong to a totalitarizing purity-obsessed ideology, you are not going to change their minds. You can either suck it up and learn to make a mysterious face if you don't feel comfortable openly lying, or you find another group to run with. There wouldn't be "just running" with them.

If you can't find any group that is not infected, the only advice I can have for you is to move. There's a lot of life outside of woke clusters, and a lot of very nice, interesting and different people. You are not going to change the culture but you can choose which culture you're part of.

I think this may be a bit fatalistic. Most people are averse to conflict and being perceieved as rude, at least when you're phsyically occupying the same space. I've found that simply speaking confidently and (most importantly) not defensively is usually enough to remind everyone that they are, in fact, in mixed company and need to behave like it. A lot of people in these places have literally never spoken to someone who disagrees with them before, and being confronted with a friendly, personable avatar of "the enemy" tends to break their brains and immediately turn you into "one of the good ones" to avoid the cognitive dissonance. The trick is to not get angry and cause them to entrench themselves in defense. You want them to be the asshole who makes things awkward and political, not you.

Obviously this doesn't have a 100% success rate. There are a lot of truly intolerant people out there, but they're the minority. Most people just want to hang out and participate in their hobbies. Standing up to the loudest bullies with a smile on your face is usually enough to force the whole group to moderate its tone.

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