Annotated 46-24
FB: If nothing else, this arena will kill anyone’s childish belief in the Tooth Fairy.
Bonus points to John (under Flo’s direction) for making Harky look extra scary here. This scene needed a spectacular show of force *and* personality from him, and the page delivers. For better or for worse, Harky and Penk have “compartmentalized” their problems with each other to the point where they’re all spilling out in the fight.
Harky’s point about “Those who see us as less than dogs” resonates even more with me today than it did at the time. You can’t expect an honorable deal from a people with ingrained contempt for you as part of their culture. Compromise with such a group is usually a sucker’s game. Of course, Harky can’t imagine any humans who see trolls differently, despite his having met a couple. Or perhaps it’s safer to say that he won’t imagine it. After his own betrayal, he vowed, “Never again.”
I had forgotten that Flo started dating someone regularly not too long before this page was published. I won’t say too much about the girlfriend represented in the alt text because I don’t know what’s private about her and what isn’t, but I will say she made our last year on Guilded Age livelier and I wish her well.
“We will decide this here, in the arena! Not with words!”
And so they proceeded to hold a debate in the middle of their fight. How can they even hear clearly enough to argue, through the drumbeats and multiple jaw-rattling headshots?
Anime rule, you’re attacks carry more weight with exposition.
We’re just gonna move past the literal calls for murder you were making yesterday then? Like, just ignore that you were openly advocating for extrajudicial killings both in the annotations and the comment section?
Just pretending that wasn’t a thing that happened and moving on?
The conversation is still there and ongoing.
Yeah, I think it’s safe to move on. That wasn’t a call to action, it was a scream of frustration. A call to action usually involves dates and times and promises it will be wild.
The others who have responded to you here and in yesterday’s discussion have spoken well for me. I agree with them. I have no more to say about it just now.
lol nice one steel. I just wanted to bring up the concept of violence and how it’s understood. it’s violent to suggest murder. is it also violent to deny someone life-saving medical care? how about a safe place to live in? in this way the powerful exert violence upon others constantly. I don’t think some (obviously exaggerated) death threats were uncalled for.
“You can’t expect an honorable deal from a people with ingrained contempt for you as part of their culture.”
See the funny thing is, from where I’m sitting on the other side… I see a whole lotta contempt here, and it’s not flowing the direction you claim. Certainly I’ve never called you a threat to be eliminated, nor fantasized about going Vlad on you. Not even hypothetically.
I get it, you really hate the orange man, and those of us who have ever agreed with things he says are evil by association. But maybe get outside the bubble and find out what some of us are really like when not approached with this kind of snarling hatred. Find out what some of us actually want out of life, in our own words, thanks, not those of a media who’s reporting is filtered through the same vitriol you have shown, nor those of a man best described as a showman. You’ve been ranting about caricatures, not the real, normal people who just happen to disagree with you.
If you ever want to just talk a bit, without all the heat and drama (especially the sort naturally injected by worrying about public perception), you’ve got my email. I’m always happy to reach across and try to get a real conversation going. This reduction of political debate to “they are evil” is of no use to anyone.
One of the things people happen to disagree with me on is my right to exist as myself, so I’m not inclined to give Trump supporters.much benefit of.the.doubt. As a trans woman, people absolutely *do* consider me a threat to be eliminated and they do fantasize about gong Vlad on me. I believe that you really are just a regular person with regular desires, but there absolutely *is* contempt flowing in my direction. I will not engage in political debate with those who consider my very existence up for debate.
I’m confused – you’re unwilling to talk to Aeonise because *others* are throwing contempt your way? But despite Aeonise a regular person, you’re content to lump them into the same boat?
How is anyone supposed to get to any level of understanding with you under those contradictory terms?
bro, if we’re gonna disagree on basic facts underlying this (such as “the republican party is actively hostile to trans people, and seeks to strip them of basic human rights”), then any conversation will be talking past each other. you can say it’s not a big deal to you, but you can’t claim complete ignorance of what you support..? here aeonise is “a regular person [who doesn’t feel very strongly about individual rights for all]”, and that’s worrying enough to not give much trust to. are you still confused?
Aeonise openly admitted to being blind to the contempt the republican party has for me and people like me. They don’t see it – they only see the contempt towards the republican party. I could be charitable and assume that they meant they didn’t see the contempt in this specific instance, but they went on to insist that T was ranting about caricatures. God, I fucking wish they were cariacatures, that Greg Abbot wasn’t actively trying to ban gender affirming treatment for trans people (two of my closest friends live in Texas, we’re working on gettting them out of there). I wish that was just a product of the liberal bubble. But it’s not. It’s real. I can’t have any real conversation with Aeonise or any other republican that doesn’t begin and end with “Please denounce the large swaths of your party that want me stripped of my human rights or worse. If you won’t, I have to assume you’re complicit at the very least.”
You asked how people are supposed to get a level of understanding with me. The answer is that it is less of a priorty for me to convey any sort of understanding then it is to stay safe. I have no way of knowing if any given republican is a ‘regular person’ or not. I don’t know for sure that Aeonise is, even. And I can’t afford benefit of the doubt under the circumstances.
I believe you that there is contempt against you and people like you. I think that’s 100% real.
I’m also seeing you and owen lumping Aeonise in with “the republican party,” and then expecting Aeonise to denounce them as a precondition to conversation.
And I’m saying – can we start out by not presuming anything about individuals based on prejudices against groups? Seems to me that’s a problem in both cases.
So how about this – I denounce people who harbor prejudice against trans people. I support people who want to engage in meaningful, constructive dialog with trans people about their rights. But as a precondition to me having such discussions with anyone, they have to demonstrate something for me, too. They have to denounce prejudice based on group identity, itself. They have to say “I hold nothing against anyone based on any group they claim to belong to or that I see them as belonging to.” They’re allowed to totally hold any given person in whatever degree of contempt they like, but it has to be based on *that person’s* words/actions/behavior.
Statements like “the republican party is actively hostile to trans people, and seeks to strip them of basic human rights” falls into the same problematic-thinking-and-speech bucket as “white people are actively hostile to black people, and seek to strip them of basic human rights.” Do you agree?
Ah but we all know about you guys! You are actually good people! You don’t dream about the eradication of certain groups of people, nor spend your days machinating how to turn America into a fascistic theocracy, no. You want only objectively good stuff, a good place to live, a feeling of safety, a healthy, happy community with the like-minded, and many other nice things for you and yours.
So when a guy comes that it’s…. let’s say “a bit approachable”?… “rather uncouth”?… “unfortunately opinonated”?… “a bit of a buffon, if we’re honest”? buuut he’s the only likely candidate to win in the party that promises you the things that you want… well can you be blamed for voting for him? Yeah, he may be bit of a racist, but c’mon, nobody is perfect. (Or maybe he’s not even a racist! leftists call “racist” everybody and to your knowledge, your candidate has never owned slaves or bashed a person of color to death, right?)
Besides! The party that promises the super nice things that you want, has warned you that if the other party wins, trillions of immigrants will be let inside the country and together with Muslims, gays and satanists they will impose communism in America and decree forced abortions and change of sex to every child! Under those circumstances, casting your vote for someone who publicly has entertained autocratic ideas and who actually incited a coup, is nothing to be ashamed of. It doesn’t make you a racist or evil! It makes you a patriot and a hero!
We know you all well.
No, you don’t. That sounds like a cartoonish caricature.
Why not try asking some honest questions to start? Why no particular curiosity for the individual; why the prejudicial assumptions of group identity?
Tsk, who knew I daily speak with “cartoonish caricatures”? And honestly, I don’t see anything “cartoonish” about what I described: simple, good people who want simple, objectively good things but are either blind or apathetic at the ways how their choices affect people who are not them and also naively believe people who manipulate their desires for a good life against them.
If you don’t think this describes a good amount of the voting population, you may have a bit of blindness yourself, I am sorry to say.
That said, you’re right about assumptions made about individuals. You’ll have to forgive me but after the last few years of interacting with people daily on social media in good faith, I have come to learn patterns of argumentation that betray patterns of thought. The indignant “you don’t know me, I’m a good person” is a very common type for which my patience has run out. If you vote for nakedly evil people, you are, at best, a poorly informed simpleton or at worst secretly in agreement with those evil people.
Either way, that brand of “goodness” is not only useless to fix anything but the arrogant self-righteousness on top of it all hits a nerve in me. People like that don’t need the tiresome, self-validating discourse they demand of us. They need to be made to see what their actions are actually causing in the world. If they’re actually good people, that should give them pause.
But, like, are you sure you yourself pass your own standard?
What happens if you find out all about the harm your own actions are actually causing in the world?
My concern is if we go with that standard – none of us pass it, and so then we all throw up our hands and decide that, since none of us is perfect, there is no point in ever thinking of ourselves as good enough because it’s impossible.
I’m saying go the opposite way. I’m saying assume any given individual is trying to do better *even if* they’re a poorly informed simpleton. Continue assuming so until you can confirm, based on behavior, that they’re actually someone to be opposed and condemned. Applaud people who make an honest effort at bridging divides and trying to have meaningful discourse.
Handwaving them all away as though you already know everything there is to know about them, and that there’s no point in trying to talk to them or treat them charitably *is the exact same mistake that racists, transphobes, and other bigots keep making*.
In your
complete agreement, one addition:
Doing the “right” thing and not assuming bad faith in some cases can require a lot of patience and restraint. That’s not something anyone can muster all the time. If I notice I can’t (but manage to retain control of my impulses), I try to make myself either abstain from the discussion or write a short comment that takes a position but tries not to judge the other person, and leave.
You know, I get it. I get it because I was once you. I was a registered Republican myself for much of my adult life. I came to political awareness in the 90s, and was disgusted with the hypocrisy of the “feminist” party going on about “unequal power” in sexual harassment, yet blaming a college-age intern for “seducing” a president. I still support many conservative principles: suspicion of “the government will save you” policies; a related preference for diversified power over centralized; support for systems that account for human nature, rather than those that assume perfect people not only exist but will never lose control of the situation to the more fallible; preservation of the rule of law; a healthy caution toward changing things and a desire to make even necessary changes slowly and with careful consideration; and a morality resembling (if not necessarily openly based on) the tenants lauded by Jesus Christ.
So I remember being annoyed that some people thought me evil for my political stances, and I sometimes felt like I was made to choose between voicing my thoughts and keeping the peace. And I was unimpressed by the Crying Wolf But For Fascism throughout the Bush 43 administration (who I voted for, both times).
But the thing about feeling unheard is that you will latch onto ANYONE who claims to hear you, and sometimes that person is a con artist (or a cult leader). And the thing about the boy who cried wolf is that, eventually, the wolf came. So I will happily speak to you, but as one trying to convince you that you are in the middle of being conned, as someone oblivious to the wolf that’s eating your family right now.
I did not vote for Trump, because I could see even in 2016 that he was a hot mess and I knew letting him be even a figurehead leader for four years (which is what I expected) would be destructive to the brand of the GOP for a generation. Still, I had expected the rest of the Rs to put the brakes on anything he did that was actively damaging to the nation, or to conservative values. But they didn’t. To the contrary, with rare exceptions (who were immediately labeled RINOs for the audacity of being morally consistent), the party leadership fell in behind “whatever Trump wants.”
Which is a problem, because Trump doesn’t want, or believe in, the conservative values I listed above. President Trump alone can save us, President Trump alone can fix it. President Trump is to be our sole leader, and all others shall follow his lead. President Trump is guided by God Himself (have you seen some of the artwork out there?) and places others in power whose only qualification is having the name “Trump.” President Trump is always to be an exception to the rules. Trump changes things on a whim, sometimes just so he can put his name on it, and trusts his gut over anything an advisor or expert can tell him. President Trump ABSOLUTELY does not believe in using what God has granted him to serve others, or that he should love his neighbor as he loves himself.
(That reaching across the aisle you want? Donald Trump doesn’t believe in that either. Donald Trump doesn’t even pay lip-service to it; anyone who disagrees with him is “weak” at best, if not an outright enemy. And in saying so publically, he further convinces those who support him to take the same approach. If you want less contempt in the world, you should be FURIOUS with him.)
What DOES Donald Trump believe in? Look at his words and you’ll see he believes only in Donald Trump. He believes he is The Only One Who Can Fix It, that No One Has Ever Done Things Better Than Him. He believes that he is praised by all, to the point of making grown men weep with joy (always backstage though, where no one else witnesses it), except by losers who are in turn unfit for his blessings. He believes he’s an eternal winner… and any time he doesn’t win, it’s obviously because someone else sabotaged him. And he believes that anyone who points out his flaws, or even his lack of omnipotence (like his inability to summon more people to his inauguration than a history-making first black president in the middle of a city that voted 92% for him) is a liar and an enemy of the people.
And that, combined with general Republican hesitance to put the brakes on anything Trump did, slowly eroded everything the Republicans claimed to stand for over the next four years, until they had forgotten everything I supported them for.
Which leads us to the post-2020 election period. And even if Trump had truly been the greatest leader the world had ever seen up to that point, even if he had brought forth an utopian age, and even if all but the true believers had treated him utterly unfairly throughout his time in office, I would consider what happened after the election utterly disqualifying. Because Donald Trump believes in his heart that he can only lose if someone else cheats, no matter the evidence. And democracy itself cannot survive if one side flat out refuses to accept the outcome, to the point of endorsing terrorism in a desparate attempt to stay in power.
The contempt he built on his side overflowed, and now Pence, his own Vice President, deserved death… for refusing to do the same thing Al Gore refused to do for his OWN benefit 20 years earlier, with much better evidence on his side (you think he couldn’t have convinced us there were 600 Bush fraudulent votes in all of Florida?) In that moment, I realized that the Democratic leadership, when it truly mattered, when the survival of the nation was at stake, would stand for what was right, even when it meant giving power to George W. Bush. In the days that followed, as only a small percentage of the Republican leadership had the will to say “Trump should never again be president for what he did”, I realized that my own (now former) party would not do the same if it meant losing the power they got from Trump by association.
So, my ultimate issue with anyone still supportive of Trump is that they, unlike myself, do not appear to consider “attempting to destroy the entire system” to be a dealbreaker.
Conservative principles are not evil. But support of Trump, as of January 6, IS support of (or at least concession to) evil, and I see no moral response but to oppose him, and to make sure he is never permitted power again. If you’re okay with it, I question whether you grasp the magnitude of what he’s already done, whether you realize how likely he is to try again if he faces no consequences, or whether you understand that’s he’s made himself an existential threat to the nation we both love, all for the sake of his own pride.
If you are truly open to discussing this further, here or elsewhere, I welcome it (though you forgot to include your email address). Outside of Trump, we may well agree on many points! But my focus will be to convince you that Trump is not a cry of “Wolf” but the real thing. Because until you see that, everything else is irrelevant, because if he is even ALLOWED to run again I fear a repeat of January 6 will either succeed or end in a bloodbath.
I could not have said any of this any better. Thank you for taking the time, this is a marvelous comment. I hope we hear more like this from voices like yours.
I was mildly flattered, and then I saw your responses to everyone else here. Respectfully, if you think my words are fine while you dismiss everyone else’s, you’ve missed my point. So let me summarize: If you still support Trump, after everything that’s happened, you are either deliberately hostile to everything I love, or a “useful idiot” that will permit him to keep destroying our nation.
If you still support Trump, I hope you are the latter, because it means you might still be convinced otherwise. And I will try to do so. But I am only able to do so because, despite my rage toward Trump, I have not been directly harmed by him or his followers. Some people here HAVE, and their anger is righteous, and it’s not fair to demand they absolve you for your connection to that and be friends when you aren’t doing anything to earn it. You don’t like that they hate Trump’s followers as a group for that? Then YOU be the one to reach out and prove that good ones exist.
I got out early, and I’m STILL going to do my best to atone for what support I gave to the conditions that LED to a President Trump. (And for various things I used to support that, once I stopped assuming the Rs were being honest about their desire for anything other than power, I discovered through research were not as good to support as I thought.) What have YOU done to atone?
If those are the only two possibilities in your mind, if you cannot even envision honest, informed disagreement with your views, your claim to welcome discussion is a lie. You don’t want to discuss or understand. You want to defeat and convince. You’re viewing others like the conquistadores of old looking on the new world, seeing savages instead of human beings, savages in need of conversion by any means to your obviously and flawlessly superior worldview.
No, having been harmed does not entitle anyone to assign guilt by association, not if you want any hope of a functioning society*. Besides, it’s absurd how you seem to think the harm only goes one way. Two of my close friends have each had their life ruined by people squarely in your camp, and my own mother died after the well-fanned flames of panic prevented her from getting treatment she needed for months. Is our anger righteous? Are we justified in hating you? Because I don’t want to hate anyone other than those directly responsible, even if part of me feels I should paint all of you with the same brush. I don’t want to live with that corrosive vitriol in my heart. And I don’t want anyone else to, either, because it’s only going to hurt more.
*And before the obvious rebuttal, I’m talking even about a world which you manage to purge of all evil dissenters. The most strident crusaders are often targets of the next crusade.
Again, you operate from a worldview in which you are definitively right and righteous. You clearly don’t see people like me as worthy of actual dialogue. We’re just sinners to be castigated and converted to your holy righteousness. So no, I have no interest in speaking further with you.
My email was not public because I know full well how the anger and contempt I see here turns into actions that you have just tried to justify, and I know that conversations in the public square are ill-suited to actual understanding when you’re worried about what the audience may think. But it is available to the subject of my previous address if they wish to retrieve it, and my offer stands to them.
Unlike you, I neither expect nor desire to change anyone’s beliefs about the world. I just want there to be a little less useless hate in the world, and the only way to get there is for people to have honest discussion and understand that maybe both sides have some good reasons, maybe some of them are even the same reasons and just led to different conclusions, and maybe disagreement even on deeply fundamental things doesn’t make either side evil or even wrong.
“If those are the only two possibilities in your mind, if you cannot even envision honest, informed disagreement with your views, your claim to welcome discussion is a lie.”
Alright then. You claim there is a third possibility. Let’s hear it. Give me your honest reasons why you still consider Trump worthy of power.
Honestly, I’ll be very surprised if they respond, but I hope they do. I’m curious as well about this third alternative.
Additional thoughts after I’ve had time to sleep on it:
1) From your reaction, it sounds like you’ve never heard the term “useful idiot.” It’s a political term, and it refers to what a con artist politician (originally Lenin; in this case Trump) thinks of those who support him in the expectation that they’ll get something he either will not or CANNOT provide them. I do not MYSELF consider you an idiot — I still have family who I love but who support Trump, and they are not idiots either — but I DO consider you someone who has been taken in by a con artist who DOES think you an idiot, and I hope for your escape. But in hindsight, “idiot” was a sensitive word to use among conservatives even with that context (I have been considered an “idiot” many times myself), and I apologize.
2) You’re probably right that I cannot imagine “honest, informed disagreement” with the view I am focused on: whether someone who tries to overthrow our system of government through terrorism should ever be allowed power. I am absolutely open to discussing the finer points of any number of policies, and even on whether your treatment due to past association with Trump has been remotely fair. But if I were not allowed to say “some things are just wrong” even on that big point, if all “righteousness” were out of bounds, then you are telling me I never should have been a Republican in the first place, because “they have the better ethics” was a belief I had that drew me to them in the first place.
3) And you SHOULD already be on my side on #2, because if you want honest discussion, without contempt, responding to the question of “who won the election” with “the armed mob says it was me, so it was me” is plainly not going to accomplish this! There is no “reasonable discussion” that can be had against a group chanting “HANG MIKE PENCE!” as they break into the building where Mike Pence is located. There is no rational or practical way to treat the other side, at least in that moment, as anything other than a hostile invading force. I WANT to understand how you reconcile the two views, and so I again ask you how you do so. But you’re right that I can’t, at this moment, imagine how that would work.
If, after hearing that, you still want to talk, any mod may provide my email address to you (and mods, if you are unable to do this for some reason, let me know and I will make it public myself).
»Two of my close friends have each had their life ruined by people squarely in your camp, and my own mother died after the well-fanned flames of panic prevented her from getting treatment she needed for months.«
So … people being ruined by medical costs because health care is primarily a moneymaking exercise in the US, or people being denied necessary treatment because they can’t pay, or because that treatment is an abortion — those are stories I’ve heard plenty.
But the thing is: How would anything Trump has ever done or even promised to do (lock her up, grab ’em by the pussy, build a wall, storm the capitol, boast about shit, deceive the public about the private profits he makes from his presidency… ) … how is any of the Republican policy going to improve that? As far as I can tell, they’ve always been in favour of making these things worse.
Hell, Mitt Romney managed to turn Medicare into a watered-down version of what he himself had set up as a governor, and still called it socialism.
So: If your making such claims, you need to substantiate them. Right now, they make no sense to me.
I say this as someone who is sitting an ocean away from the US, and thinking that the Democrats would be fairly far over on the right (with some more moderate and sensible members, a bunch of people who just play the game of whatever) if they were a party where I live, and the Republicans would be that very very scary far-right party whose only goal is to seize power and end democracy, who will gladly use anything that upsets you and direct your anger towards refugees, immigrants, women, the weak, the poor, the environment, foreigners … whatever.
In other words: I can totally get that Democrat politics are not especially great these days. But I don’t see how Republican politics are not much worse in pretty much any regard. You guys seriously need to get away from that stupid binary system of politics.
Looking at the “well-fanned flames of panic” line, I’m guessing the intended implication is: you all stopped my mother from getting treatment for something REAL by pretending Covid-19 exists. It cannot be denied that if you want downplaying of Covid-19, looking to ex-President Trump will serve you a great deal better than looking to any Democrat.
I was trying to get an actual argument out of Aeonise, rather than substituting in my own suspicions, which wouldn’t make them look very smart.
I’ve been around people who think me a nutjob, more than once, and the “you probably believe that …” line is a safe way to make sure you never learn what drives the other person.
Asking for solid arguments, rather than hints at the existence of arguments, on the other hand, sometimes results in a meaningful exchange (at the end of which you might still have very broad disagreement, but at least you know something you didn’t before) and sometimes in trolls disappearing.
I don’t support Trump. Where did I leave any impression that I might? That guy sucks and is one of the worst embarrassments in our country’s history. He’s never gotten, and won’t ever get, my vote.
What I will say is – I think *a lot* of the people who voted for him, if they knew what things would look like on Jan 7 2021, would also say “fuck that guy.” (But I also hope they wouldn’t have then voted for Hillary, either. She sucked too. I digress.)
I see a lot of anger *that should certainly go towards Trump, the guy* getting directed at *Trump supporters* or *the republican party* and that’s when I want to call timeout. Because, and I think this is the point of your post – they’re the people *we all most need to reach, right now*. If we want to *actually heal damage* and make things better.
As for atonement, yikes. Part of my point is that anything that implies that people who voted for him, or people who put R on their voter registration, need to atone or feel SUPER GUILTY seems like a bad plan. That seems guaranteed to make a lot of potentially useful allies feel like “we” can’t stand “them (plural)” and want “them (plural)” to feel bad. That’s getting us no-fucking-where in this country.
What I *am* trying to do to make things better is start conversations between supposed enemies. Push back on bad ideas and blind prejudices. Restore hope in the idea that decent people, treating each other respectfully, can hammer out a productive consensus. Wish me luck?
Well said, and thank you.
I get a big headache when someone says they voted for Bush Jr., as I was sitting across the ocean and thinking that surely nobody would elect that idiot … but I’ve been in my share of things that I now find hard to explain, and what you say here makes complete sense to me, so … I’d love to know what you think happened there.
Unfortunately, this comment section is not the best place for that :(
(T — you have my e-mail address. be happy for you to pass it on to FlyingFish if they don’t mind)
Also:
»Donald Trump believes in his heart that he can only lose if someone else cheats«
That’s a classical pattern that I seem to observer in a number of places. I think the reason he believes that is because he’s trying to cheat whenever he can, because he believes cheating was part of the game. So he believes if someone else wins it’s because they did just that. He’s accusing everyone else of whatever he himself is doing. If it works, he’ll look better, and if he gets caught at least some people will believe than “everyone is cheating all the time anyway”, thus making him look less corrupt, at least to those who don’t want to recognize that he’s rotten to the core.
Same thing happened in Poland, where a new government replaced all the public broadcasting executives and tried to replace some members of the constitutional court. One defense was that’s just what previous governments did, too (according to their own previous allegations against the previous government…)
I don’t mind saying in public why I voted for GWB (though I am also fine with the mods trading our email addresses to discuss things further). There were several reasons, all of them coming together, and I’m probably forgetting a few more:
1) The aforementioned skepticism of the Democrats and their stated goals after their hypocrisy with Clinton, which was still fresh in memory at the time.
2) What I now recognize was an unfair mental connection of Gore’s ethical standards to Clinton’s.
3) The aforementioned preference for conservative principles that appeared to be much better represented by the Rs than the Ds.
4) A youthful “innocence” about the world, and the privilege to be unharmed by the status quo, that made me unable to recognize where change WAS needed — why mess with a system that, to me, seemed to be working fine?
5) My parents voted R, and my parents appeared to be highly ethical as well as loving; surely they weren’t wrong? (My parents also both abandoned the Rs over the course of the Trump years, likewise unable to reconcile their sense of ethics with what Trump was either transforming the party into or revealing it as always having been.)
6) I thought the “idiot” impression people had of GWB was horribly unfair; I saw him as a down-to-earth individual with a Texan accent, nothing less. Like I noted above in talking to Aeonise, aspersions against the intelligence of both Christians and Republicans was already a common thing and something that I, personally, dismissed out of hand. Also, the man HAD been a governor for six years and Texas seemed fine with how he was handling things (he was re-elected by a wide margin). And I figured that if he DIDN’T understand a situation, he’d have some of the smartest people in the nation as advisors to fill him in. (This turned out not to work so well with GWB because his selected advisors weren’t all that great. This didn’t work at ALL with Trump because Trump responded to contrary advice by calling the advisor a weak loser on Twitter and then doing whatever he felt like.)
Thanks for that — I’d always wondered… So what was your reaction to GWB’s “with us or against us” speech? The whole “you either do whatever I say or you’re my mortal enemy” angle struck me as pretty totalitarian, and extremely naïve black/white painting of geopolitics.
I suspect that many US-Americans might not have noticed it as much as I did, since it was also more or less aimed at Germany, who refused to go to war against Iraq, on the basis of obviously-fabricated evidence…
I suspect that depending on where you got your news, that angle might have been harder to see than on my end, but surely some of it must have been visible to you?
I mean, even in the UK, they had a public protest of 1 million(!) people in front of the parliament, still went through, and some investigation found in 2015 or so that yes, the evidence had been entirely fabricated, and one million people saw through the lie, it was all over the news, but Tony Blair kept going, meaning he was either complicit or horribly incompetent. his finding had approximately no consequences for anyone (so I do understand T’s upset at subpoenas…)
See, if someone elects an obvious sociopath who wants to build walls, calls refugees a danger, denies climate change, lies as a default, bends the rules whenever he believes it helps, enriches himself no matter what, and incites a revolt when his attempt to ignore the results of presidential elections fails … it’s _really really hard to see what there could be about such a person that I could call “good”.
The best I can do is hope that they’re all somehow deluded or mislead.
…which is actually … I know a person who I hold in reasonably high regard, who has lately started spouting very very inhumane stuff (not related to US politics!), and any discussion we’ve had since then led, sooner or later, to some failure of getting that person to show *anything* that qualifies as compassion for regular people, or an understanding of how a democracy is supposed to work, despite living in one for over 40 years.
I have no idea what the fuck is going on but this is bullshit, and … I don’t know, I have no words, and I don’t get it, any of it. It’s like people are standing up and fighting for the right of batshit crazy egomaniacs to rule as they please. I’ve read a thing or two about the late-stage Roman empire, and the parallels are scary.
I am honestly mystified by the level of mental disconnect that leads to a supporter of Trump–the man whose campaign hinged on “lock her up!” and who actively incited a violent uprising when he lost the second election, including his goons trying to murder the Vice-President–finding moral high ground in, “Certainly I’ve never called you a threat to be eliminated, nor fantasized about going Vlad on you. Not even hypothetically.”
No offense, but I really don’t have the time. I mean, I barely had time to compose this reply.
Others are doing most of the heavy lifting for me in terms of what I’d reply, anyway, but I will speak to having done my homework and interacting with actual humans. I live in the South. I have a lot of Southern relatives whom I love, whom I see and talk to on a semi-regular basis, some of whom I know are Trump voters, some of whom I strongly suspect are. One of my closest friends was vocally for Trump until relatively recently.
How do I reconcile all that? There’s a lot of compartmentalizing, sometimes. There’s a recognition of the power of unchecked propaganda. I reserve my hatred for the con men, not the marks.
I do think that most ordinary folk are as you describe—any given morning, they probably want an Egg McMuffin, a nice hot shower, or basic financial peace of mind, not genocide or terrorist dictatorship. So I find it interesting that you see me talking about “the self-identified enemies of democracy, the people with contempt for you as part of their culture”—and feel like I’m calling you out, personally. Like, I never used terms like “conservative” or “Trump voter.” So either the language I did use applies to you and the people you’re picturing me talking to, or it doesn’t. Either way, I don’t have much more to say on the matter.
Surprising absolutely nobody, you had no responses to any of the challenges raised to your post. It’s always “not all conservatives!!” with people like you but when given scrutiny, you either back off or end up revealing that yes, you are very much like the conservatives other people are talking about.
Based on the teeth-as-health-meter metric, Harky’s bunches here achieved almost nothing but Penk’s single punch did a lot.
I wonder if Harky is already weakened a lot, losing his drive, or maybe even pulling his punches? Or should we ascribe this to Tectonicus’ blessing?