I hate to say it, but this essentially sums up my experiences (and frustrations) in trying to talk with Trump supporters.
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Yeah, thatās about the size of it. In these parts, the wearers of MAGA ball caps are still quite content. Their boy is doing exactly what they want - heās shaking things up. If some people whoāve been hard-working tax-payers for years get deported, or some workers are exposed to more on-the-job hazards, or people lose health coverage, or refugees are arbitrarily returned to danger, thatās fine with the MAGA crowd, and is a natural part of shaking things up.
One might ask: How does appointing Wall Street insiders fit in with shake things up and drain the swamp?
MAGA Answer: Trump has the best people. If the best person for the job is a Wall Street insider, thatās fine.
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You know what Iāve found pisses them off in a really satisfying way?
Ask them what they like about tRump. String them along and pretend to agree for awhile. Then give them a minor example of how tRump is just doing what they said Hillary would, and while theyāre trying to respond just casually drop:
āHey man, you sound like a cuck. Like, reeeeeeaally a cuck.ā
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Sums up my experiences.
āHe outrightbsaid grabbi women by the pussy.ā
āSo?ā
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I think a lot of this thread is related to this: people are rationalising, not rational. We like to think that we are governed by truth, logic, justice and equality, but we can be very tribal in our employment of these things. One of the problems is when we think itās only the other side that does this. Iām not claiming equivalence of scale in terms of cognitive dissonance (since there is none), but it is a pretty fundamental way that people work. The longer we try to see it as merely a war of ideas
The right way is simple. Go to the people you need to convinceāthe ones who arenāt willing to resort to any dirty trickāand say ālook, these people are liars. Everything they say, and everything they do, is a lie.ā Ignore the liars themselves; youāll have better luck getting blood from a stone. Go to the people who retain a shred of humanity, make your case, and pray that there are enough of them left to tilt the balance.
I think in general this is what needs to happen. Flaming Trump supporters wonāt do any good at all (I guess flaming could work as an adjective or a verb here). I think the best hope is to build something positive that people can identify with, even if they did vote for Trump. Actively listen to each other as people before looking at things like political identification and address basic psychological needs that we share as human beings: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Emotions, perceptions and fears do matter, even if they are irrational ā or rather, they matter in part because they are non-rational and influence human behaviour. This wonāt change everything at all, but showing that we can identify with each other and pursue these needs together is important.
I thought this was an interesting look at one part of the Trump phenomenon: a group that is generally considered to be firmly in the ādeplorablesā basket. While they are still privileged in comparison with many people, a downwardly mobile young middle class with high unemployment has historically been a great breeding ground for authoritarianism. Itās easy enough to argue that Trump is at least as bad as Clinton in every area, but she wasnāt good enough for many people to abandon nihilism either. According to them, society is absurd and meaningless, Trump is just showing everyone that truth. Itās a complete mess, but itās what weāve got to work from.
For the sake of fairness (and since hearing peopleās own descriptions of the situation can be revealing, even if you disagree with their perspective), hereās a response from a channer:
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I think one area where we can try to use conservativeās own logic is in issues like Black Lives Matter. āActually, all lives matter.ā āOK then, so you want to fight for anyone whose life is threatened. We stand together for each other. This means that you canāt look at black people losing their lives and say that itās a problem for the black community to sort out. You canāt look at refugees or illegal immigrants and say that their lives arenāt our problem; their lives should be defended with as much enthusiasm as anyone elseās. If you reject identity politics as a matter of principle, you should reject Blue Lives Matter too. If you do support Blue Lives Matter, you should also support Black Lives Matter, because those lives are much more threatened. Even if you donāt agree that black people have it worse than others, you could support the movement because black peopleās lives are a subcategory of all lives, and also because highlighting threats against them will have positive effects on other groups. Whatās more, unless we only care about whether people live or die, we should also care about their well-being, access to healthcare, safety and other issues.ā
The same goes for pro-life or many conservative responses to liberal calls to support people. People will disagree on certain points, but you donāt get to ask people to care about you when you donāt care for them and when they are the ones being threatened more than you. If you believe that compassion is due to everyone and other people are too focused on their group, you should prove it by supporting others with no strings attached, and only then do you have any credibility to talk about an overly narrow focus. Where people claim to be governed by a laudable principle (e.g. not supporting abortion because life is so important to them), itās important that they demonstrate this convincingly in areas that are less controversial ā like supporting the well-being of the women who they think should bear the brunt of the cost of their principles. Some people do actually care about life and do try to follow these principles, so the difference should be relatively minor among the many things we can agree on. I think this could be more productive than arguing about opinions that quickly become marks of association with a particular group. It doesnāt matter whether you think pro-life or All Lives Matter are misogynistic, racist, wrong or whatever; what matters more is whether people are following it consistently everywhere, and showing that this is actually the motivation behind their actions (rather than misogyny or racism). Take semantics out of it and donāt let them hide behind it.
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Both those links suck. The first what sounds like an old man thinking /b/ is the driving force of 4chan, while the second is a /pol/ poster who put some pasta they keep around to ārefuteā points by claiming how diverse they are.
The chans just get a lot of traffic for being a famous seedy corner of the internet with a lot of free porn and weird stuff. People stay for the hobby boards, and some of the tens of thousands of users become addicts and wander into the more deplorable boards. /tv/ and /v/ and the like are heavily influenced by /pol/ while /co/ is still toxic but is more like what users claim all of 4chan is like. A huge part of the people that post there want /pol/ removed, but /pol/ remains as an extremely popular board with dedicated users, and a third group thinks the response from /pol/ users with /pol/ removed would be worse than keep /pol/ around. When moot left the first perposal bumped constantly to the new owner was to remove politically incorrect from the site entirely, and /pol/ responded by streaming into hobby and porn boards to be racist shitheads that claim without getting their way this would be the new normal.
So no, 4chan isnāt a homogenous place. However, it is packed to the brim with Nazis, people that have not realized they are Nazis yet, people that are ājokingā they are Nazis, and people who are cool with Nazis if it means no abortion and/or they get to keep their guns and have lower taxes.
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Just as an FYI, the US .mil is strongest in large part because the US spends on upkeep of .mil to a greater degree than anyone else. Really itās just like factories or IT or any other operations & logistics centered group, upkeep to stay still is expensive and getting better even more so.
You can say on general principle that having the worlds strongest.mil isnāt what you want, but as phrased itās questionable as to your intention.
Okay, I think itās unnecessary for the US to spend more on its military than the next five biggest spenders combined.
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Just a copy and paste of a thing going around The Facebook, not my handiwork.
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I think Iāve hit on an idea that could work. Itās clear from all the research that Iāve been doing that one thing that unites a lot of Trump voters is this belief that he is stickinā it to the man. So what if we start talking about what a sellout Trump is - not to the rich assholes on his cabinet, but to The Man, to Beltway Culture?
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Attacking the idea of POTUS Trump to his supporters is going to get them to dig in their heels.
I think that he understands that the more opposition that there is to him the stronger he appears to his supporters. There are people I know who seem like they could flip but itās unclear how to get to them. One is my accountant, who I know from my temple. Yeah, she is Jewish. I feel like there is some way to connect to her Jewish values.
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Duteronomy 24:17-22
17"You shall not pervert the justice due an alien or an orphan, nor take a widow's garment in pledge. 18"But you shall remember that you were a slave in Egypt, and that the LORD your God redeemed you from there; therefore I am commanding you to do this thing. 19"When you reap your harvest in your field and have forgotten a sheaf in the field, you shall not go back to get it; it shall be for the alien, for the orphan, and for the widow, in order that the LORD your God may bless you in all the work of your hands20"When you beat your olive tree, you shall not go over the boughs again; it shall be for the alien, for the orphan, and for the widow. 21"When you gather the grapes of your vineyard, you shall not go over it again; it shall be for the alien, for the orphan, and for the widow. 22"You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt; therefore I am commanding you to do this thing
Thatās OT right, so itās safe to assume itās in the Torah?
As far as I can tell, itās saying that you need to be kind to foreigners, to treat the alien, the fatherless and the widow well enough that they can get by. That itās an obligation, commanded by your god. To not do so is a sin, for the Jews are to remember that they were once slaves in egypt.
And here we are with tRump actively attempting to turn the downtrodden and destitute into enemies. Surely heās an agent of the adversary?
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Yes and itās also in Gleanings, these same instructions to leave food for the poor.
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I hope itās relevantā¦
It was the first thing that came to my mind when considering tRump vs the bible. He literally seems to be anti-humanitarian for the sake of engaging the cruelest instincts of comfortable people.
The old testament is a very mixed bag in relation to whether the Jews are supposed to follow rather despotic leaders or resist them, but thereās many good ideas about charity and acceptance of the alien in your land to find there.
Honestly though, I think jesus is much more easily interpreted at a humanitarian figure.
tRump doesnāt give a single fuck about human wellbeing and itās so obvious you have to literally ignore everything he says and does. He doesnāt care about america or people in general, so why should a good person ever support him without being tricked into it, much less a good Jew?
Iām not a Jew. Not even close. So let me know if Iām overstepping here, but I was raised fundie, and have a pretty thorough education in the old laws, and jesusās stories. At least from an evangelical point of view. Then later a closer reading from my current atheist point of view.
Considering the kind of sources Trump and many of his followers get their information, itās hard to know what positive message wonāt make supporters dig in their heels. I mean, short of giving him free rein and letting him screw up the country so badly that even the alternative news canāt hide it. One idea would be to make it clear that both the Republicans and the Democrats have let their supporters down, being open about the failings of people like Obama, acknowledging the good that conservatives do and so on. Basically taking off the party hats and approaching people as fellow humans, and finding ways of pointing out Trumpās flaws that donāt involve gloating over or shaming voters.
I live with three people who have consistently been Republican voters; my wife voted Clinton and encouraged others to do the same (which was a big thing ā sheās never voted for a pro-choice candidate before, and we had a number of discussions about the ethics of doing this), while my FIL voted Trump. My MIL wonāt say, and I havenāt asked her (aside from the fact that itās probably wise whoever she picked, the right to a secret ballot should be respected). I do know that sheās been very critical of Trump from the start though. The main sticking points with my FIL and some other Evangelical Republicans have been:
- Abortion (obviously)
- They see Mike Pence as a good pick and a moderating force to Trump
- They want a conservative majority in the Supreme Court
- Their focus on āreligious libertyā, since they feel railroaded into positively supporting particular ethical stances, not just tolerating them
- Different narratives about Obamaās legacy
- Particularly with people like my FIL, their ānewsā sources are so out there that weāre not dealing with the same picture of reality. Heās a nice guy, but easily led and he has a lot of hours of listening to Rush Limbaugh and watching Fox News under his belt.
I think itās good to remember that in online discussions, there is often at least an order of magnitude more people reading than the ones you see actively liking and commenting. Convincing individuals is not the primary aim.
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MI think getting people to be rational about their reading of the Bible is not a winning plan ;-). Iām getting ready to go to my weekly Torah study. It is a fascinating book but sometimes I wonder why it is so important to our culture as there is a lot of strange stuff in there - a time before laws, when things were done on a handshake (or touching the genitals), when gods were tethered to a plot of land. Iām currently in Exodus and the storytelling is so good but the inconsistencies make me scratch my head (āwait, I thought we killed all the beasts in the Last plague?ā). Itās definitely a book that has spiritual truth but logical truth, no.
My rabbi trained with the scholar who translated the text we read, and if I were just to dive right in and do a straight up reading without guidance, there is so much Iād get wrong because the customs of that time were so different. A lot of it does not apply to our own lives easily. I enjoy the friendship of our group and understanding better the stories that have shaped our culture, but itās rare that I read any portion that I feel applies to my own life.
Maybe the New Testament is different, but I worry why people feel itās important to follow the Bibleās teachings. Itās not that clear, for one thing, and rules for a tribal culture for another.
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āJewish valuesā is a really slippery thing, totally different at the secular/Reform end to at the Orthodox/Charedi end. We even have very different ways of understanding the Torah which is almost the only common thing across the spectrum. See right below for example
OK first of all even there is a commandment here, its not open ended. Also it has to be understood in context and in the context of similar laws. While it looks entirely like a moral imperative, it is mainly civil law thing.
Also youāve picked a Christian translation which is rather different in ways that change meaning. See here instead for Deut24. The āshow Rashiā includes the commentary of one of the most authoritative Rabbis for plain text meaning. Example:
17You shall not pervert the judgment of a stranger or an orphan, and you shall not take a widowās garment as security [for a loan] .
Rashi on 17
You shall not pervert the judgment of a stranger or an orphan: And concerning a wealthy person, [meaning anyone, not necessarily poor], one has already been warned, āYou shall not pervert justiceā (Deut. 16:19). However, [Scripture] repeats this prohibition here in reference to the poor man to [make one] transgress two negative commandments [for perverting the justice due a poor man]. Since it is easier to pervert the judgment of a poor man than that of a rich man, [Scripture] admonishes and then repeats [the admonition].
and you shall not take a widowās garment as security [for a loan]: not at the time of the loan, [but when the debtor has defaulted].
I wont quote all that passage, you can see for yourself. Point being that any knowledgeable Jew isnt going to respond to that
Sadly you probably learned it all wrong if you learned in a Christian context.
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I think we can certainly agree there for different reasons.
In anycase, thank you for the context and insight.
Itās kind of funny, I was taught that the entirety of the bible was the inerrant word of god, and that it is obvious what it means. Reason being: if god is perfect then he couldnāt make a book thatās hard to understand or misinterpretable in any way.
I think thatās one of the reasons why literal readings and fundamentalism are so prevalent in middle america. Oneās uneducated interpretation is exactly as valid and ātrueā as any seminarian or scholarās.
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