Tamsin_Bailey:
If your “defence” or JAQ-ing about fascism, racism and all those other well-trodden paths to being a dick, sounds like the above, don’t be surprised if it ends up here.
A couple of examples. First, the one from user @Manko_E_Ponymous that I assume inspired this topic:
Having acquired a Rural Racist Grampa-in-Law by marriage, I’d like to encourage y’all to try to dig a little deeper with this than just sneering mockery. If you have values you cherish, and which represent the consensus in your community, and you see the handful of loved ones your family sends to higher education come back rejecting those values, your first thought is NOT going to be “Well, some stranger must have proven our values invalid,” it’s going to be, “People I don’t know or understand are opposed to my values and corrupting my kids.” The prevailing liberal idea that “All educated people know and agree on better, smarted things than uneducated people do, so if your beliefs clash with our institution’s dogma, they must be wrong” is just as myopic and irrational.
Contempt is not persuasive, and it will heal none of what this nation needs to heal. If you’re not even trying to empathize with or understand rural Americans, you’re not part of any solution - you’re just embodying and reinforcing their stereotype of high-falutin’, snobbish, overeducated liberals.
Second, a classic from now-banned user @slide :
There is very little room for changing people’s minds about abortion morality. But ruling that out leaves brute political power as the only lever to get justice. Liberals end up mirroring the corrupt GOP as hating, winning and pwning take priority over liberal values like compassion and belief in redemption.
I guess I am unique in that I grew up seeing both sides of this; I had a parent who worked as a social worker for Catholic Charities despite being pro-choice and not Christian. Our heathen family’s livelihood came from the salary that the Catholic church paid to take care of unloved children. There are many mainstream Christians who actually do walk their talk in terms of valuing lives of kids as much as fetuses. Of course there are many who don’t walk their talk as well, and just want to take the easy route of supporting coercion.
I also come from a background informed by Nonviolent Communication (NVC): the idea that behind the good/bad and right/evil dichotomies we are all the same: simply trying to meet our needs. The main need that uterus-coercives are trying to meet is that of caring for others. Of course the strategies they use don’t actually meet that need. So the goal from an NVC perspective is to help them develop better strategies for meeting that need for caring for others.
Even if it doesn’t feel like it in this moment, this is actually happening as we speak among those who are persuadable. Every day the base of the religious right decreases as more and more people leave, realizing that their church doesn’t deliver the caring that was promised.
Reinforcing the reality that the left is about warm caring not shrill coercion, and that there is a place where we can ALL come together, is the way.
Notice the common threads of false equivalency and victim-blaming progressives and liberals for criticising and mocking those who are calling for their elimination.
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