U.S. Politics

docsilence said:
. I sometimes feel silly posting about my growing NECA collection one minute and about the latest abomination in the real world here.
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There's a lot you guys said I agreed with so I'm just liking, but with what you said, doc, I think it was Saturday or Sunday, but one day I don't think I engaged in toy talk here at all and pretty much stuck to this thread even when just lurking. That was entirely my mood, but this week I've obviously been all over and yeah.. a little surreal jumping between fretting over what the marines may do here and expressing excitement over special forces representation in the Joe Classified Legacy subline.
 
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Ru1977 said:
There's a lot you guys said I agreed with so I'm just liking, but with what you said, doc, I think it was Saturday or Sunday, but one day I don't think I engaged in toy talk here at all and pretty much stuck to this thread even when just lurking. That was entirely my mood, but this week I've obviously been all over and yeah.. a little surreal jumping between fretting over what the marines may do here and expressing excitement over special forces representation in the Joe Classified Legacy subline.
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It felt very surreal to be in this thread or on bluesky watching the world burn and then writing funny dialogue for Hawk in a post over in the Joes forum. But I mean, if we don't find SOMETHING to vent our anxiety we'll all explode. The only time I wasn't stressed out this morning was BSing about body horror over in the MOTU Origins thread.
 
I don’t envy anyone who feels stuck tolerating MAGA people in their circle.

I realize I have massive privilege living in Los Angeles (although it doesn’t really feel like the right now . . . ) and having Kennedy-Democrat parents who are boomers but not Trumpers, but I’ve done the full-tilt cutoff of any MAGA-leaning or -apologizing folks. I think it’s way easier for me than most, since these days I travel in mental-health circles, theatre/artist circles, and, well, geek circles. And since I literally wear my personal weirdness externally in the form of lots of goth clothes, the MAGAts usually know to stay away from *me*.
That said: I’m not comfortable “not knowing” where folks in my life stand. My wife will tell you that I get *really* suspicious of folks who won’t openly denounce MAGA, and for anyone who ever voted MAGA I *do* need to hear them say, out loud, some version of “I fucked up, I made a huge mistake, I want to make amends” before I will trust them or even want to be in a room with them again.
I’m aggressively interested in diversity in my circles, and I don’t really know anyone who is “like me” so everyone in my life is coming from some place or perspective that I’m not. I’m the anti-theist agnostic who WANTS to hang with religious folks and share ideas, I WANT to hear what my more conservative friends have to say about things, I straight-up love having my worldview challenged and broken and remade. I suppose I always had a hard lline against bullies, bigots, Nazis, white supremacists, yadda yadda, but especially when it came to Nazi fascism and such, that felt like a theoretical line. Like I was never *actually* gonna run across the KKK, right? I wasn’t *actually* gonna mix it up with neo-Nazis, or far-right cultists, or or or . . . but then, a few years ago, that line stopped being theoretical, and I felt like I had to make a choice, so I did. And I had the privilege to stick to it. And here we are.
But yeah, ultimately I’m in the “never forgive, never forget” camp. I just know too much about the human mind and human social dynamics to be anything but hardline here. And I do think that is very sad, but I’ll tell you what: I don’t miss a single one of those people I’ve cut out. Not one. They’re sick, and it’s not my job to force them to realize they need to get better. I will help anyone who asks, though. I had really good clinical success this week repairing father/daughter bond between a young trans adult and her increasingly-less-transphobic dad. It DOES work, if you work it.
 
Yeah, I can only imagine what I'd be going through mentally if I was in MAGA country. I live in a sanctuary city, work for a different sanctuary city, in a state that is actively suing the administration, work in the creative/arts community, and often joke that I didn't have a straight male friend until I was 35, so I'm in a better spot than most.

I'm also, white, male, heavily tattooed, shaved head, ex-boxer with a Boston accent, so I'm like the embedded insurgent - the shit people will say in front of me BLOWS MY MIND. But also being a white, male, shaved-headed, ex-boxer provides me enormous privilege to be the one to say "why do you think that's funny" if someone drops an immigrant joke in front of me. "Explain it to me like I'm a five year old, why is that funny to you, because it's not to me."

And yet despite all that privilege, I do spend part of each day wondering when they're going to disappear the head of the department I work for in the city. And I know despite it being a sanctuary city, there are people in it DYING to get at their neighbors and watch them get dragged off. But those guys were really quiet when the city was on national news for an abduction.
 
AceofKnaves said:
I realize I have massive privilege living in Los Angeles (although it doesn’t really feel like the right now . . . ) and having Kennedy-Democrat parents who are boomers but not Trumpers
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uqTjbTS.gif

Are... we secret brothers or something?
AceofKnaves said:
Nazis, white supremacists
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I went to a pretty diverse high school in San Diego and of the couple hundred or so in my graduating class, the only ones who genuinely scared me were two skinheads. They'd been in my circle of friends in freshman year but eventually went their own way and were getting more and more Columbinish until they said the wrong thing to a group of African American students and got stomped for the entire lunch break. Cops came, they got steel plates in their heads and jaws wired shut etc, and left the school, then it was just regular hormone nonsense until graduation.

I guess I'm always hoping for a grown up version of that now.
AceofKnaves said:
I had really good clinical success this week repairing father/daughter bond between a young trans adult and her increasingly-less-transphobic dad. It DOES work, if you work it.
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That is fucking awesome!!!!!
 
docsilence said:
I'm also, white, male, heavily tattooed, shaved head, ex-boxer with a Boston accent, so I'm like the embedded insurgent - the shit people will say in front of me BLOWS MY MIND.
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I'm a few of those things too, but not the cool ones... but yeah, people will say things in front of me as well, but I usually just let people talk. Which means they go on at length. Having difficulty cutting people off is my cross to bear.
 
Heheh. I had fun at my first rehearsal for a regional stage show I’m working on that has a ton of child actors: as is my habit, I wore something aggressively LGBTQIA+ positive, in this case a shirt with letters in colors of the trans flag that say “YOU WILL HAVE TO GO THROUGH ME”. One of the moms of the kids said, I think semi-jokingly, “well that’s a scary shirt!” I clapped back: “only if you’re a transphobe!”, let all my teeth show in a big grin, and went back to what I was doing.
 
Something I find particularly hilarious is that people will feel very comfortable talking to me about how much they don't like immigrants and wish Canada was FOR CANADIANS. In my day-to-day life I'm fairly unassuming because of my work -- black shirts, black pants, black work boots. I've got long hair but that's not super uncommon to the point where it triggers any alarm bells for anyone. I swear a lot and just generally strike people as your typical white, straight, construction guy. So people will talk to me like I'm just any other white.. CANADIAN guy.

Telling them 'I'm actually an immigrant' turns the whole world upside-down, because they almost invariably respond with 'well, you know what I mean.' I do know what they mean. They mean I'm not brown. That is what they mean. I'm an 'acceptable' immigrant because I look and talk mostly like they do and they're comfortable assuming, by my appearance, that I agree with them on most topics even though I don't.
The best is when I get to say 'I don't, actually, know what you mean?' and just play dumb and force them to dig deeper into trying to talk around their own racism without just saying 'I hate Indians.'

The sadder part of the story is how many of them are actually very comfortable saying 'I hate Indians.'
 
Northern Ireland had some riots over immigrants yesterday. Sidenote, when I was in Belfast, a man at a gas station thought I was from Dublin, and in Dublin a man on the bus thought I was from Canada.
 
Ru1977 said:
Northern Ireland had some riots over immigrants yesterday. Sidenote, when I was in Belfast, a man at a gas station thought I was from Dublin, and in Dublin a man on the bus thought I was from Canada.
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Lol. No one ever guesses I'm from the US, even though I don't have any kind of Canadian accent that they can identify, in part because people don't see me as rude and ignorant enough to be from the US. Much as Americans tend to hate it, there really is a bias out in the world about what an American has to be like.
So if you're not getting pegged as an American - I guess it's because you're not enough of an asshole?
 
Agreed! The guy on the bus said it was a compliment and I said, "Oh, I know!" Traveling while American was something I was a little concerned about.
 
AceofKnaves said:
I don’t envy anyone who feels stuck tolerating MAGA people in their circle.

I realize I have massive privilege living in Los Angeles (although it doesn’t really feel like the right now . . . ) and having Kennedy-Democrat parents who are boomers but not Trumpers, but I’ve done the full-tilt cutoff of any MAGA-leaning or -apologizing folks. I think it’s way easier for me than most, since these days I travel in mental-health circles, theatre/artist circles, and, well, geek circles. And since I literally wear my personal weirdness externally in the form of lots of goth clothes, the MAGAts usually know to stay away from *me*.
That said: I’m not comfortable “not knowing” where folks in my life stand. My wife will tell you that I get *really* suspicious of folks who won’t openly denounce MAGA, and for anyone who ever voted MAGA I *do* need to hear them say, out loud, some version of “I fucked up, I made a huge mistake, I want to make amends” before I will trust them or even want to be in a room with them again.
I’m aggressively interested in diversity in my circles, and I don’t really know anyone who is “like me” so everyone in my life is coming from some place or perspective that I’m not. I’m the anti-theist agnostic who WANTS to hang with religious folks and share ideas, I WANT to hear what my more conservative friends have to say about things, I straight-up love having my worldview challenged and broken and remade. I suppose I always had a hard lline against bullies, bigots, Nazis, white supremacists, yadda yadda, but especially when it came to Nazi fascism and such, that felt like a theoretical line. Like I was never *actually* gonna run across the KKK, right? I wasn’t *actually* gonna mix it up with neo-Nazis, or far-right cultists, or or or . . . but then, a few years ago, that line stopped being theoretical, and I felt like I had to make a choice, so I did. And I had the privilege to stick to it. And here we are.
But yeah, ultimately I’m in the “never forgive, never forget” camp. I just know too much about the human mind and human social dynamics to be anything but hardline here. And I do think that is very sad, but I’ll tell you what: I don’t miss a single one of those people I’ve cut out. Not one. They’re sick, and it’s not my job to force them to realize they need to get better. I will help anyone who asks, though. I had really good clinical success this week repairing father/daughter bond between a young trans adult and her increasingly-less-transphobic dad. It DOES work, if you work it.
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Those are basically the circles I surround myself with anymore as well- mental health, theater/artists, geek, and LGBT. I think the problem is that it's begun to permeate those circles as well. Even where I am in NY, which supposedly is (or was) a pretty progressive area, I've noticed more and more MAGA related things lately. While I was out the other day, I saw a "Veterans for Trump 2028" sign in a window. So I'm like you- while I may have been able to adopt a "don't ask, don't tell" mindset before, now I need to know. If only because I, and many of the people I care about, are some sort of minority themselves- gay, trans, immigrants, etc., and if you don't think that I or someone I care about deserves rights and freedom and happiness, then you're not someone I care to know, plain and simple. Especially because of the aforementioned mental health issues; mine is at an all-time low of late, and God knows I overthink things as-is. I don't need to drive myself crazy wondering if you view me as a human being or not.

To your other point- my Mom is pretty outwardly expressive as well. She wasn't really allowed to express herself like she wanted to when married to my dad, so in her 50's and 60's she went back to the goth/punk aesthetic that she loves so much. She's a stick of a woman with a cane, but over 25 tatoos, piercings all over, tripp pants, heavy eyeliner, chains, the whole shebang. I don't think there's been a single time she's traveled in the last 20 years or so where she wasn't "randomly selected" for additional screening at an airport. All bias aside, she's one of the coolest, kindest, most accepting people you'll ever meet (her name is Kat, and all the folks with rough home lives she's "adopted" over the years as her surrogate kids refer to her as "Mama Kat"). But because she chooses to dress a certain way, she's always judged on a surface level. Which is a good metaphor for what's going on, really- the people they tell you to fear, the ones who are outwardly different or scary, are the ones who are often the most accepting, while the ones you can supposedly "trust"- the cops, the priests, the politicians, because they look like you, are the ones with the knives behind their backs.
 
Ru1977 said:
Northern Ireland had some riots over immigrants yesterday. Sidenote, when I was in Belfast, a man at a gas station thought I was from Dublin, and in Dublin a man on the bus thought I was from Canada.
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Room full of Corkmen one night:
Wait, you're American?
What did you think I was?
One guy: Canadian
Another guy: English with a shite accent
Third guy: Fuckin Welsh
First guy: Don't ye go insulting the man, he's quiet, not Welsh

(Actual conversation, btw, before I became known as "Mary's quiet fake American boyfriend.")
 
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