I honestly don’t know, Mindysan. Chip away at the monolith, one person at a time? I have to believe some of them are salvageable, or I’ll die bitter and angry about the whole damn world.
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You can’t die bitter. Never die bitter.
Die open wide.
Then you will understand the bitterness.
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[quote=“turtlecrk, post:192, topic:95529, full:true”]
Well, it has only been a month. Almost all of the Republicans I know are not on the same side as the neo-nazis, transphobes, bombers etc.[/quote]
It’s not like it was a secret what Trump was all about, and his voters were shocked when he started acting like a fascist dick as soon as he was in office. That’s what his entire campaign was based on. Nobody “accidentally” voted in an incompetent, inexperienced blowhard who supports racist, sexist, abhorrent policies. That’s exactly what they were promised and exactly what they turned out in droves to make sure they got. And frankly, I’m sick of people inventing this alternate reality where Trump somehow deviously tricked lots of decent, hardworking oafs into inadvertently supporting neo-Nazis when all they wanted was jobs. They knew exactly what they were doing, and however nice they may be to you personally, the Republicans you know who voted for Trump are willingly, even gladly supporting the destruction of the United States and the rights and even the lives of everyone who doesn’t belong to their race, religion and gender. They’re fucking monsters. DEAL WITH IT.
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I expect to see them protesting this, if they are truly like you say they are.
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Yeah. I went along with @turtlecrk’s narrative for quite awhile, because I wanted to believe people were tricked because they were gullible and stupid, instead of just ugly and hateful intentionally.
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Not that I have any love for the current President, (or his policies), but this sounds like a bit of a sour grapes generalization to me. Plenty of folks voted for Trump (or abstained entirely…in my case) because the Democratic party simply had nothing better to offer. As such, lumping everyone who didn’t tow the Democratic line together as “racists, mysogonists, knuckle-dragging rednecks” would be disinegnous.
Why is Hillary Clinton as bad or worse than Trump to you? Because on any issue Trump’s campaign promises were more extreme, except for Trump’s promise he would personally bring white America their jobs back through Reganism.
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Thank you for your thoughtful, sincere response. I am a Hungarian-German-Half-Jew whose Grandparents were pretty much the only ones to survive the Holocaust among their family.
I have given a lot of thought to the question of why and how atrocities like the Holocaust can happen in seemingly civilised societies.
And I now think the silent majority is the key. Emboldening them, stopping the normalisation of “evil” the insidious dehumanisation and “othering” of sections of the community is how we can protect the more vulnerable and less powerful. Hannah Arendt explored these ideas in depth. She should be read and studied by everyone in the Western World.
Opposition happens in small tiny steps, by not accepting unacceptable rules.
Just another thing. I kind of knew, theoretically in an intellectual way the truth of this. But the past six months have provided another window of how subtle and at times imperceptible those changes / those processes of normalisations are.
I live in London as a middle class German citizen. Definitely, wouldn’t consider us marginalised or powerless. Yet, since Brexit, things have happened: e.g. I am weary of speaking German in public (which i have never previously been), I am conscious of the lack of understanding Brits have about our uncertain legal status as EU citizens… all of this has meant that the normalisation of marginalisation is no longer merely a theory for me but also a reality.
Of course nothing we currently experience comes even close to anything my family faced in the Holocaust. But it has helped me to understand how these processes of normalisation happen. On the one hand the targets get used to it and adapt and as your expectations shift you are more willing to put up and shut up. And on the other those in power are emboldened by the putting up and shutting up and target the vulnerable with increasing callousness. This is very real currently in the UK where EU citizens are being put into detention (with questionable legality) because they can’t prove that they can support themselves.
All this to say that people like you are key and that [the indivisible ] (http://boingboing.net/2017/02/22/angry-constituents-are-saving.html) give me hope for the future of US democracy.
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I don’t think anyone is saying that about people who voted Green or Socialist. I didn’t like Hillary and preferred Bernie even though I am well to the left of him, but any political position Trump holds I seem to believe the exact opposite.
Trump is doing exactly what we very vocally warned he would do. Willful ignorance is never an excuse.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing
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Can you please not? Using “retarded” as an insult is itself an insult to the developmentally disabled, and dehumanizes them. I’m aware that insults are dehumanizing by their very nature, and you may well intend to dehumanize the subjects of your insults, but you must be cautious that some of that unpersonning does not reflect back on who you are comparing the subject of your insult to.
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I’ve politely asked opponents of protections for transgender students–and transgender people in general–why this is such an urgent issue, what threat is now posed by transgender people. I’ve asked what informs their view and whether they know or have talked to any transgender people. All I’ve gotten in return is a lot of angry insults and non-answers that rely on God, vague references to biology, and “common sense”.
I’ve made a good faith effort to understand their point of view. If they expect me to “find common ground” with them they’re gonna have to make some effort of their own.
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Changed it to “idiot”. That’s as far as I’ll go, because, frankly, as a class they act as idiots.
…and they are other. They really are.
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Is that “large %” 80%? That means only 12.4 million people definitely want to torture and kill people like me, and there are 49.6 million who probably don’t.
That sure is comforting.
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I would like the government to step in and do something about murder, abuse and torture. But what if the criminal law against murder was doing little or nothing to prevent murders and was causing more deaths than it prevented? What if in our rush to punish murder we were putting innocent people in prison? What if those people we were putting in prison were part of an identifiable subgroup that has been traditionally oppressed?
I’d want them to get rid of the criminal law against murder because it’s bad. I’d say, “I know people talk about murder being bad, but this looks a lot like it’s just an excuse for bigotry.”
If someone really thinks abortion is murder then I probably can’t argue with that value they have (though as orthers have pointed out, that value is a pretty recent political invention). But I can sure be mad at them for trying to put women in prison for 20 years for having miscarriages. There will never be a criminal law against abortion that will do more good than harm even if we assess abortion at “as bad as murder”.
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(post withdrawn by author, will be automatically deleted in 24 hours unless flagged)
Everybody deserves respect by virtue of being a person.
Your sanctinmony is part of the problem, its completely unproductive and only leads to calcification of positions.
Let’s reframe this:
Imagine you were talking to a black man.
Imagine his anger as he spoke of his hatred of those who not only despise him but actively discriminate against him.
Now tell him that his anger is part of the problem.
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First, deciding to proclaim from on high that everyone didn’t read an article because they’re not taking the intended message mostly indicated you didn’t read the comments, not that the commenters didn’t read the article.
Second, the problem is that when I did read that I wanted to punch most of those racist, immature, ignorant, hate mongering cretins in the face as they repeatedly callously insulted me, my friends, some of my family, and many, many millions of vulnerable, hurting people in America. Seriously, those fucks are insulting the majority of Americans and American ideals in their own words - not a great sympathy building exercise. I actually do better humanizing the generic idea of Trump supporters by imagining some vague abstraction of people left behind by “the system” than hearing the actual horrible, racist, despicable, and absolutely moronic things those actual idiots say.
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May I suggest you read the comments here again? Because it’s been addressed in detail, in fact several times, as one person after another repeated this same dismissive thing.
I think it’s pretty telling that all the voices insisting we need to listen and understand more plainly can’t be bothered to listen and understand what we’ve been saying. Maybe one of them can tell me, exactly how do imagine we will be able to persuade Trump supporters of anything, when apparently even you won’t bother to consider our point of view?
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Let me get this right.
I tell people that Trump will cause harm to people like me.
They don’t listen to me and elect him.
Trump starts harming people like me.
I say I don’t want to talk to the people who voted for Trump, from a well founded belief that they will also cause me harm.
And I’m the one who is hating?
Fuck off with your sanctimonious concern trolling. I’ve had enough of this bullshit.
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Don’t derail because you don’t agree with other’s opinions of reading the same thing.
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