Let’s review
Well, I guess I can’t say I haven’t heard that anymore, lol
She voted for it when it was determined to be the Bush administration’s response to 9/11.
I don’t want to defend her for it, but lets not pretend that is in any way equivalent to the Project for a New American Century’s implementation of their master plan.
You tell me that if the Democrats were in power they would have gone into Iraq after 9/11. Go on. I dare you.
I’m sure it’s a complete coincidence that his campaign is spending an equal amount on supporting his businesses and giving money to family members as it is on his ad campaign. cough scam cough
No false equivalency. All I’m saying is lumping people together in a singular group and judging them is prejudiced.[quote=“robulus, post:218, topic:85956”]
So you concede you couldn’t back anything Trump says,
[/quote]
I’m no Trump fan, so don’t back his ideas.
Lambast Trump all you like, pick apart his ideas, only try to do it without prejudiced insults to half the electorate. That only serves to bolster and entrench.
FTFY[quote=“robulus, post:218, topic:85956”]
you were just introducing a new, random idea to the discussion
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See above re. prejudice.[quote=“robulus, post:218, topic:85956”]
that makes it a little challenging to keep up, right?
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Only if you’re slow on the uptake.[quote=“robulus, post:218, topic:85956”]
OK, so no doubt I’m reading this wrong, but I think you just called me racist
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Correct. You’re reading it wrong. I called you prejudiced, not racist. Subtle difference.
Don’t live your life by presumptions.[quote=“robulus, post:218, topic:85956”]
It’s not a baseless prejudice to ascribe these characeristics to them.
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Only if you go purely on presumption.
No, it’s an incorrect comment. We wanted to leave the EU, not the UK.
The only ones? Are you sure about that? Sounds like another prejudiced ‘lumping-together’ to me.
True, it’s not. Often you get to choose between a good and a bad choice. Here you’re left with two bad choices. Divisiveness is not what’s needed right now.
@nungesser
Exactly. Nuance.
And there are many other sorts besides.
The whole thing is a way to funnel the public’s money to himself and people he knows. Renting out his own property to the campaign, charging his campaign for the use of his plane, etc.
And if elected you expect him to suddenly pay more attention to the country instead of himself? Sorry - doesn’t work that way. Bloomberg stepped away from his company almost completely to run NYC.
And charging the Secret Service $1.6 million to fly on his plane. That’s a handy way to make some pocket change.
I’m trying to see a point here that’s solid enough to respond to, but it’s pretty much all snark. You are repeating the same things over and over, and they aren’t getting any truer.
For someone advocating the respectful exchange of ideas, you’re being quite the dick.
I stand by what I’ve said and I’m not seeing much hope of a productive outcome from our discussion. Probably best to leave it here.
[quote=“nungesser, post:221, topic:85956, full:true”]
While the people who we see showing up at his rallies and shouting HANG THE BITCH and waving guns around and talking about shooting Muslims are the loudest, most visible Trump voters, I also know other sorts:
• gay theater professionals in New York who think he’s entertaining and are ignorant about his policies[/quote]
People who recklessly fail at the minimal duty required of an adult in a democracy, and do so in an actively destructive way.
[quote=“nungesser, post:221, topic:85956, full:true”]
• otherwise-liberal ex-military family members who hate his racist, bigoted policies but still support him because they think Hillary will ruin the US military[/quote]
People who prioritise their paranoid delusions (when has Clinton shown the slightest hint of being anything other than a traditional US militarist?) ahead of the civil rights of their fellow citizens and the victims of the atrocities that Trump has promised to order the US military to undertake.
You may have just out-cyniced me. What I ascribe to greed and malice, you ascribe to pure destructive idiocy.
Oh, I speak not of the people that vote Republican. Saying that those individuals have done nothing good would be wildly inaccurate! I mostly speak of the party as a whole. Even there, I actually can think of positive things that have come from Republican politicians … Nixon both established the US EPA and ended the draft. Of course I’ll further note that these actions were 40+ years ago.
Anyway, I do find it funny that you think I don’t know any individual Republican voters. I’ve got plenty of relatives that fall into that camp (especially having grown up in one of the most conservative areas of the US.) Thanks, I have had BBQ with them, even slept in their houses. I try to not hold them personally responsible for the horrible disaster the people they vote into office have brought to my country, but then again I also avoid the most vocal of them and actively avoid discussing politics with the rest. (I can only ignore so much complicity.)
Well, you just talked trash about a bunch of my actual family members and friends, people whom I disagree with their politics but like as people, saying that they’re delusional and paranoid without knowing them personally. I wasn’t inventing people, I was actually speaking of my family members.
And I don’t think it’s at all cynical to think that a whole bunch of people in this country are themselves cynical about politics and are thinking of voting for someone they’ve known primarily as an entertaining celebrity on TV for the past 30 years. Why does that make me someone who “ascribes to destructive idiocy”? What a horrible, rude thing to say. I am not one of those people. I think a lot of good can come from a positive, progressive leader, and hope for change and progress, and certainly hope for collaboration and compromise to actually get things done.
No, all the snark is coming from you. My simple message is ‘don’t judge people as a group’. That’s prejudiced.
It’s you who’s doing backflips trying to justify your prejudice.[quote=“robulus, post:230, topic:85956”]
I’m not seeing much hope of a productive outcome from our discussion. Probably best to leave it here.
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Nor I. Quite.
Actually, my point was that pretty much everyone has republican friends or family. Dissing them as a whole is not the way to go.
Just to expand on my earlier comment, so that people don’t think I’m a cynical, destructive idiot: voting based on image rather than politics is by no means something new.
A whole lot of Americans simply don’t care about politics. It’s all noise and yelling and lies to them, so they tune it out and just go on with their lives and jobs and families, and when it comes time to vote, they choose based on what they see. Just look at the JFK/Nixon televised debate: viewers saw a handsome, young, Presidential looking guy debating a hunched-over sweaty troll, and Nixon lost.
I think that at least some of Trump’s poll numbers come from people who hate politics, but know Trump as a celebrity, the guy with his own board game and TV show (and vodka, and steaks, etc etc), or maybe they heard him crack a joke on a talk show, and think he’d be fun to have as President for awhile. It takes a lot of active ignorance to feel that way, agreed.
You do realize that there are liberal thinking folks in the “flyover states”? To my mind this divisive labeling is the major issue. I know very, very few truly conservative and truly liberal folks and they are, to a person, packed to the gills with bullshit. However, the vast majority of people I know are reasonable, thoughtful and intelligent people who, it seems, only feel compelled to label themselves as one or the other so as not to be grouped into the “wrong” category.
I abhor Trump and truly believe that he doesn’t really have any sort of plan for guidance and because of his apparent inability to percieve complexity, coupled with a belief in top-down authority, will lead directly to Mussolini-style fascism within a few short years (assuming he holds office that long, which is doubtful for many reasons). However, to categorize his supporters in such stark terms devalues their needs and perceptions (which, yeah, tend to skew racist, xenophobic and jingoistic) and only further fanaticises them.
Also, I don’t mean to take the piss out of you, Mike, but this entire thread and social compartmentalizing (and especially the OP). A modality to which I, myself, am highly prone.
This is your definition of “abuse”?
Absolutely. The Golden Girls should never be foisted on anyone.
No, they aren’t. I mean, sure, they know how to act politely in public and they’re chummy to anyone who agrees with their racism, sexism, classism, and general xenophobia, but they’re not “nice people”. It’s generally kept under wraps when out in situations where they encounter people who would judge them for those ‘qualities’, but it’s always there, lurking below the surface. And who they vote for is only one of the many manifestations of that hidden bigotry.
I can give you a quick little example, which I think is useful because it’s not the sort of situation most people would think of. My daughter had a party at my dad’s home in rural Indiana, inviting a large number of friends. Friends of my dad were worried for him, because they knew the group would be a bunch of south side Chicago teenagers (translation: there would be black kids in attendance). They called in a favor and had the local chief of police and a couple of his guys – in uniform – at the party. As a result, a local guy in his 20s nearly died. Why? Because he was having a heroin overdose a few miles away and by the time the police got the message and left our party, they nearly missed the window of opportunity for administering Narcan. Now, I don’t fault the police in this instance: they were doing a favor for a mutual friend. (In fact, they came back afterward and pointed out that they didn’t see any reason for them to be at our party, so was it OK if they left?) But why was my dad’s friend so certain that a bunch of south-siders were going to be the number one danger in the community that day?
Oh yes, that whole family is quite polite when we get together. So nice. And of course they’re voting for Trump.
Can you see what you’ve just done? You’ve related a personal anecdote about someone who may be racist, and you’re then extrapolating that to the entire base (several million) of Trump supporters and colouring them with the same brush.
It’s pretty much what I’ve been arguing against the entire thread.
Maybe tell your dad to get nicer friends?
My point is that the nice people who vote for Trump are doing so because they LIKE his racism/sexism/classism/xenophobia.
These particular friends are much nicer than my family. Who are all voting for Trump too.
And guess what? I’m not a liberal. And I’m from flyover country. The problem is, the people who choose to support – actually vote for – someone who is the literal embodiment of Hitler are not conservative, do not have good values, and are in fact dangerous to this country and the world.
I wouldn’t feel this way if they were voting for, say, Romney. I don’t feel this way toward the many well-known career Republicans who are stating “do NOT vote for this man”. It’s not party affiliation that’s the problem. By definition, if you are voting for Trump, you are voting against humanity. That’s not nice.
