I have a better solution. I have a few notorious conservative relatives and I stopped listening to their absolute bullshit garbage years ago. Nobody needs to hear them out. That shit can just stay inside their heads.
One time I got into my dad’s truck and he had Rush Limbaugh blaring. Without skipping one beat, I exclaimed in front of everyone present, “What the fuck is this shit?!?” He turned it off immediately. Fight fire with fire. This listening nicely crap is lonnnnnnng gone, dude. You’re stuck in 1992.
I guess it’s good to know that you care more about the feelings of people who aren’t oppressed but feel oppressed by allowing other human beings to be treated humanly than you care about the actual oppressed?
There are real human beings suffering. You should decide who you stand with, those who are suffering or those who think they are suffering because they don’t like others who aren’t like them.
These are people who misperceive equality as oppression, and seek to oppress minorities to make themselves feel better. Just because we can understand the mechanisms of their grievance based psychology doesn’t mean that they should be appeased.
Their idea of compromise is for us to meet them halfway while they do nothing of the sort. Compromising with fascists is how you get fascism.
Joe Biden won, and we need to act like it and not tip toe around the hurt feelings of the people who not only don’t care whether they hurt us but actually enjoy doing so.
You do realise that all the effort you just put into backing up your claim that people who voted for a right-wing populist demagogue did so intelligently, thoughtfully, and based on valid attitudes demonstrated precisely the opposite of your contention, right?
Thank you for taking the time to respond. In terms of the “valid” conservative attitudes…I think you kind of explained yourself right out of that position. Or as Sr. Montoya put it:
Well, if we weren’t so busy trying to bring down western civilization and the white man by checks notes asking for greater equity in society then they wouldn’t have to vote for a fascist hell bent of destroying any progress made over the past few decades, would they? Why can’t we just accept that god made us inferior!!! /s
I was watching a clip from Some More News. That talks about the measurable costs of maintaining these beliefs, and it brings up what should be the modern parable for the damage these people are doing to themselves. The attacks against safety nets and public goods are almost always centered around bigotry loosely framed as actually being about socialism or individualism or bootstraps or whatever. But in the end what they do is make their own lives harder while continuing to blame the others for directly impacting their lives.
That’s why the story Heather McGhee tells of the Oak Park Pool in Montgomery, AL is so important. A public park that was an important part of the community, serving as a popular meeting place for social and political groups was created by public funding. When courts ruled that the whites-only pool had to allow black people to use it to, the decision supported by the locals was to drain the pool and destroy this important pillar of the community - all in the name of banning the other from getting access to it.
And, in my opinion, if you asked the people that supported draining the pool the once loved they would say that it was the Black people that ruined their community and destroyed the pool. Not their own actions - just like modern conservatives are saying marxist MS-13 gangs are kidnapping children to be used by Democrat pederasts is why we need zero tolerance laws that put their own family in jail for minor drug crimes.
I don’t think you understand this. They are going to vote Republican despite the fact that Republicans hurt gay people and racialized groups because they don’t really care about that. They are blaming other people for that vote.
It’s the same as an abuser saying “I only hit you because you make me angry.”
It’s the same as a kidnapper saying “I only killed them because you didn’t pay the ransom.”
It’s the same as my six year old saying they won’t brush their teeth because I’m bothering them to brush their teeth.
People who don’t want to take responsibility for actions they chose to take blame other people for making them do it. No one made them do it. They need to grow the fuck up.
This is unfortunately the case for all modern societal problems. Humans solved the easy stuff already. The hard stuff are all collective action problems with concentrated costs and diffuse benefits that people have difficulty seeing. Climate change is a perfect example. One person can drive their SUV for 50 years and never perceive the damage done by that. It’s easy to deny the problem. Any one person can go to their grave smug that they were right about this whole thing being a lie. Meanwhile their grandkids get a Category 5 hurricane seven times a year and apex predators in nature are now fictional.
I think the only hope we have is instilling trust in science. Science is the tool that gives us a horizon of truth further than one human lifetime. Nothing else does. If people don’t understand science and why it is the only way we know what’s really true, we’ll never solve these problems.
I respect everyone who has tried to explain to you why this is nonsense. But honestly, we’ve been hearing this exact same disingenuous victim blaming garbage for years now. Every sensible response has already been written, and at this point I think can simply be quoted. Here, have some of mine, and stop already.
Hey look, one of those are already in response to you! Guess you only pseudoread too.
And that is exactly why the Right is so intent on destroying the educational system. Why Texas outlawed teaching of critical thinking skills. Why evangelicals cry about how universities “indoctrinate” their children into heathen beliefs like evolution and social responsibility. What I do not understand is why there is not more outcry on the Left defending those institutions!
That demonization of science as “elitism” has been so effective that people interpreted a trivial public health measure that would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives (masks) as “tyranny”. It hurts my brain to think about it.
It makes me long in some ways for the “go go science” days of Apollo, the birth of processed food, and the plastics industry. A lot of bad things came from that, of course, but at least everyone was gung ho about the power of science to solve the problems we face.
