Kill 'em with bluegrass?
Love didn’t destroy the Nazi’s.
Love didn’t stop the KKK or public lynching.
Love didn’t ever stop a mass shooting.
I disagree with the idea that some kind of empathy will swing them over to rationality.
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I think it’s abusive to expect rationality from the irrational.
but I think we can influence them away from hate, as long as we’ve moved away from it ourselves, first, right brother?
I want to stop the war, you seem to want to win it. Careful you don’t strike the match. Different strokes.
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Self fulfilling prophecy? There will always be someone somewhere who call them a fool, therefore justifying (in their own head) their decision to vote against their own interests.
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In a tabletop rpg test my friend developed my weapon was a reinforced banjo with spikes welded to it, it worked pretty well (he statted it up as a spiked club.)
Of course a guitar would’ve been slightly more appropriate
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The banjo was a kind response to his angrier friends guitar.
Also, pretty sure guitars, as it is with saxophones, do axe damage.
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That it was, your banjo just reminded me of my character’s killer banjo, which then jumped me to Woody.
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Right. That would be the gaslighting part. And just because someone is living common-law doesn’t mean they don’t believe in commitment.
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Magnateism eh? How the fuck does that work?
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Doesn’t justify being an asshole, though.
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I disagree with the idea that some kind of empathy will swing them over to rationality.
Just because you understand someone does not mean you have to have empathy for them. Its a matter of choosing tactics that produce the desired result rather than tactics that make us feel good / justified / righteous. We don’t have the luxury of putting our personal feelings ahead of our goals
Here’s an article on the topic that distinguishes between compassion and empathy (I know they sound like the same thing, I thought that too until I read a previous article by the same author).
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[…] the proper role of empathy (understanding how fragile masculinity makes life miserable for men and women) and sympathy (not letting people off the hook for being cruel, sociopathic jerks)
This is crap. You want to know the proper role of empathy and sympathy? Understanding everyone, thir motivations, their circumstances, in the project of perfecting the world. That’s it. That’s all of it. No ‘justice’ no ‘there have to be consequences’ none of it.
That doesn’t mean you accept people while they are hurting others. That doesn’t mean you don’t oppose and fight people if you have to. It does mean that the ultimate goal is that the fighting stops with the ultimate goal of reconciliation. Oh, sure, you can keep people ‘on the hook‘ and go right up there and join Trump trying to make himself feel better by humiliating Mexico with his border wall and everyone who made a ‘touch on crime‘ political career sliding to victory on people’s sense of superiority over the ‘truly bad folks’ who deserved it.
Leave retribution and ‘there must be punishment’ to the conservatives. It’s their issue. It’s a plain fact that the left has made mistakes that have caused this issue, like the split between gender issues, racial issues, and economic issues or the decision to write off a huge portion of the country as not being bothered with. Does that mean that these folks haven’t done incredibly hurtful things and ruined other people’s lives? Not at all. It does mean that the left should behave more intelligently, clean up its act, figure out how to better reach young, white peple hurt by the Great Recession, and create a better alternative than going around being horrible.
This is no particular argument that people on the left should go around feeling guilty either, that would be stupid.
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The left has been close to non-existent in government for the last 35 years. Stop looking out of that Overton Window and look at the wider picture.
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And, crucially, they need someone else to be seen to lose. That’s the bit of the equation that I think is the really toxic part. Once you see everything as a zero-sum game, then there’s really no way back.
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This is where the message of simplistic Libertarianism overlaps with so many other right-wing pathologies: they’ve been trained to believe that no transaction is truly satisfactory unless the other party is getting screwed over. One side effect of this attitude is that they often screw themselves over, too.
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[quote]Perhaps you were not badly and regularly abused as a child?
Makes total sense to me. I wouldn’t piss on my own brother if he were on fire today, but there was a time in my life when I might have instead lit myself on fire just to level the playing field between us.[/quote]
I’m just trying to hold my urine until he’s in his grave.
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The reaction to the “basket of deplorables” line always sounds like this to me:
Hillary: Half of Trump supporters are assholes.
Trump supporter: Hillary just called me an asshole!
(Hillary was right, but it was still a stupid thing to say.)
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She should have asked Dennis Skinner for advice.
Skinner: “Half the Tory Members opposite are crooks”
Speaker: “The honourable member MUST withdraw that remark”
Skinner: “OK, half the Tories are not crooks”
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Note for @doctorow : pic credits should reference the popular newspaper “Corriere della Sera”, one “r” in sera, which basically translates as “The Evening Post” and appears in the photo.
“Corriere della Serra” translates to “The Greenhouse Post”. Unless you are subtly insinuating that most of its journalists should really embrace a more suitable career in farming (a suggestion that would receive wide approval in Italy, I’m sure), it’s a glaring typo.
EDIT: for bonus trivia, I thought I’d mention some of the most common Italian wordplays around that newspaper:
Corriere della Sega (The Wankers’ Post, this is hands-down -eh- the most common one)
Barbiere della Sera (The Evening Barber, which for a time was an actual blog dedicated to gossip between journalists)
Corriere della Setta (The Sect Post, the sect being the handful of Italian industrialists who conditioned the life of the nation; the newspaper is traditionally conservative)
Pompiere della Sera (The Evening Firefighter, this was popular in the '70s when street riots were very common)
Coglione della Sera (The Evening Testicle; this is very vulgar but still pretty common)
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The article mentions that, stating that he’s just adding a new category of voters to the two already-known and well-understood ones. I think the one you mention is basically the first:
- Generally older people who naively believe Trump will “make America great again”, that is to say, return it to its 1950s ideal evoked by both Trump and Clinton.
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Yeah. It’s a great article for examining the origins of the nihilistic young men of the alt right. It’s a horrible article for examining the nature of Trump’s victory, because it buys into the bankrupt (but stupidly popular among journalists) notion that Trump supporters are lower class, exonomically precarious people.
Au contrare, trump won on the basis of older, financially secure white people who voted for him, and on the basis of russian and FBI meddling to increase Clinton’s already pretty high negatives and drive down her turnout.
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