U.S. Politics

TheSameIdiot said:
I considered expatriating during the first Trump administration. I slowly changed my tune. I'm fortunate enough to have traveled overseas extensively over the last four years. The more time you spend in other countries, the more you realize they don't have it all, either. We have a lot of work to do. Gun violence is rampant, people go bankrupt from medical bills, and our cities are car-centric. While the European countries I visited didn't have those issues, they had others. They're as racist and bigoted. They have less social mobility. Some of their governments are so corrupt they'd make Donald Trump blush.

The main thing I realized is that I'm culturally American. Sure, I like English football and foreign cinema, but there's nothing quite like boarding a flight home to the land of the free and the home of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups.

It'd be great to live somewhere like Amsterdam, where I could bike everywhere. It'd also be great to live somewhere like Seattle, fighting like hell to make sure the next generation can bike everywhere.

I don't begrudge anyone for leaving. But I found a place I love and I'm going to fight to make it the best I can.

As they say, they can take it from my cold, dead hands.
Click to expand...
Wait till you find out how much Marvel Legends cost in New Zealand
 
Russia fought, sort of interesting, ... with us in World War II and everybody hates them. And Germany and Japan, they’re fine. You know, someday somebody will explain that," Trump said.
"I like Germany and Japan too but Putin is confused by that, you know. He said we lost 51 million and we were your ally and now everybody hates Russia and they love Germany and Japan. I said let's explain that sometime, okay. It is a strange world," he added.
Click to expand...

Ummm WTF? Did you totally miss the Cold War? He must have bone spurs in his brain too!
Not only that but we were very friendly with Russia afterwards then Putin messed everything up by assassinating his opponents and invading neighboring countries!
 
p-ATGc.gif
 
I'm on another message board, it's actually a paid members only board. Politics is strictly kept to a politics board and a small subset of the members that post regularly in politics is roughly fifteen that lean left and five right. I noticed the right never offers much beyond racist tropes, memes, and retweets from the likes of Gunther Eagleman and Caturd (jfc). Anyways, I kind of wish I stayed out of politics on that board because it gets harder and harder to acknowledge the same person might post something that makes me chuckle on the non-politics side, but will make me want to wash my eyeballs with bleach after reading a post in politics.
 
Yeah, we've hit a state of things where the divide is such that it's hard to look at people the same way in normal conversation once you know where they stand politically. I sometimes feel silly posting about my growing NECA collection one minute and about the latest abomination in the real world here.

I said it waaaaaay upthread (or maybe it was the tariffs thread) that my brother got wildly defensive back in January when he overheard my dad and I talking about what was to come (my dad is near retirement age but not ready to and works for an agency that we knew Trump would target for elimination). I love my brother but I haven't been able to look at him the same way since, because he was so invested in Trump and RFK and even Hegseth, and since that conversation (okay, outright argument) every single thing I told him I was afraid would happen has happened.

I don't think I'll ever fully trust him again until or unless he can just say that okay, this actually is really bad for the country. Because until he does I just assume he's okay with it all. The neighbor behind me had Trump signs out (he was a finance guy, retired at 50, everything going for him) but while he's still friendly to me, he hasn't made eye contact since March. His signs are gone and he's gotten VERY quiet.
 
It's tough, right? One thing I never really want to get into is the mentality that I'd rather not know who someone is just because I want to be able to enjoy some mindless toy conversation or laugh at a stupid pop culture joke. I don't want to do 'death of the artist' for literally every human being around me and treat every comment and interaction as if it exists in a vacuum. Because, even when it sucks sometimes.
As a militant anti-theist, I have Christian friends. As a hardline Leftist that disagrees with basically everything conservatives say even when they're being normal, I have conservative friends (fewer these days).
But none of my Christian friends are Westboro alums. None of my conservative friends are neo-Nazis. I'm very happy to draw certain lines, and not interact with hateful people. But I agree that it can be really jarring in places like this because you can just read past a comment and laugh because that guy is a silly dude, and then find out that he has vile opinions about gay people, or thinks all (specifically-brown) immigrants are criminals. Jarring and disappointing.
 
Yeah, the extremism and hate is the thing. I can argue over spending on road repairs with someone and still be friends. I actually ENJOY, as a non-theist, talking about faith and believe with rational people who actually do believe in something. But the battle lines have been drawn as such that people will openly talk about how much hate they have inside them, or how little they care about other humans, and I can't look past that.

I know that hatred has ALWAYS been there and the openness of it is what changed, but I miss the ignorance of it, when the worst thing I could learn about a friend was they liked the Yankees or actually believed it was possible to be fiscally conservative and socially liberal and vote Republican. Hell, I miss when the politician I hated the most was Mitt Romney cos he's a milquetoast flipflopper and I hated his rubber spine, instead of "is this person going to implode our entire country."

(FWIW, I interviewed Romney once when he was governor of MA and I walked away thinking "this isn't a human, it's a PR team in a skin suit.")
 
I go back and wonder sometimes how much of the extremism and hatred really was always present and how much of it is newly manufactured. Obviously I'm speaking in generalities and there's exceptions (the KKK, for instance). But I think, and I'm not committed to this yet, I think I believe that the vast majority of Republican voters are actually just stupid/ignorant/uneducated and easily led, rather than truly hateful. If those people had all been told by Republicans for the last 5 years that we HAVE to protect trans people at any cost because that's what Jesus wants -- I think most of them WOULD.

That's what makes me so sad about it. It really does amount to just the victory of misinformation, intentionally scuppered education systems, and people too weak-willed to think for themselves. And Trump is not only a victim of that himself, he also managed to become a ring-leader to turn so many people that COULD be normal into some of the most vile scumbags you'd ever meet. It's just so fucking sad and disheartening.
 
Yeah, the seemingly slow drip of finding out people you thought were cool actually have these horrible opinions has been quite disappointing. Not even surprising in some cases- my dad's side of the family, who, long story short, I've really been trying to reconnect with in recent years, have only doubled (maybe even tripled) down on their support for Trump. A couple years ago while visiting for Christmas- no exaggeration, I wasn't two steps in the door, and my grandpa told me a joke that, while I forget the setup, the punchline included the N-word. I've never been more ashamed to have the genes that I do than in recent years, and that's saying something. I still get chain emails every other day from my grandpa spewing some horrible, awful stuff.

A few of my family members have sort of backed away from the whole thing- not outright denounced any of what's being said, but reading between the lines, it's clear they don't necessarily agree with a lot of what's being done. It's been sad to see- in some ways, it makes my job easier on knowing who to keep in my life and where to put my energy, but on the other hand, me being me, I'm always gonna feel the need to, not rescue them, per se, but try and find the hurt, neglected part beneath the hate, if that makes sense. While I don't doubt that a lot of MAGA folks are just overflowing garbage bags in a trench coat, I've seen that some of my family members really are good, caring people, all bias aside. Even though nowadays there's not a single get-together that doesn't devolve into politics and hatred, there really was a time when that wasn't the case, and the family just enjoyed being together.

It's a fine, fine line, don't get me wrong, and I could certainly be wrong about a couple of them, but surely not all of them, right? I was never an ignorant kid (and that's not even me tooting my own horn- I had to grow up and realize a lot of truths way too fast), so I feel like I tend to notice the intricacies better than most my age (or at least I did). I don't know if it's just me trying to rationalize things as more hopeful than they are or if there really is some truth to it. The truth is always somewhere in the middle, I guess.
 
I think there's always been an undercurrent of hate, but it's also hard to not think about how we're 40 years into an attack on our education system, on an attack on a neutral and informed media, on media literacy, on critical thinking skills... the weird thing to me is that someone like Trump is the end game, because undercutting everything that could prevent paving the way to this level of hate and ignorance took a lot of work and planning and I would've expected the people doing it to want someone less... gross in charge. I was fully expecting us to run into some Aryan God type to take over, not a sagging flesh balloon of a man.

One of the things from that last argument with my brother that stands out is his saying "if they hadn't been shoving trans rights down our throats and actually cared about everyone else" and I'm like - I have a shocking number of trans friends. They don't ask for more than anyone else, they just ask to be treated like humans. But the messaging, the stick with which Republicans have beaten their voters for decades, is, "they're coming for YOUR stuff." And no amount of calm, logical explanation can undo all that brainwashing.

Democrats have their dog whistles, too, but I feel like they're subtler maybe? Like you can start a slap fight in any bar in Boston over a lot of different Democratic talking points. But I feel like the difference is "annoying" versus "barbaric." The Democratic dog whistles are fundraising distractions whereas Republican dog whistles get people killed.
 
I think we have to take people taking down signs and going quiet as a win. No one in our lives is likely to come out and say "I was wrong, I apologize." Demanding it of them will only re-entrench them. But every person that goes silent is one less person convincing the far right that the populace has their back.
 
docsilence said:
One of the things from that last argument with my brother that stands out is his saying "if they hadn't been shoving trans rights down our throats and actually cared about everyone else" and I'm like - I have a shocking number of trans friends. They don't ask for more than anyone else, they just ask to be treated like humans. But the messaging, the stick with which Republicans have beaten their voters for decades, is, "they're coming for YOUR stuff." And no amount of calm, logical explanation can undo all that brainwashing.
Click to expand...
And that's what's so frustrating to me about it all, especially as someone who was raised Catholic- they've worked themselves into the unique position that, if almost anyone who isn't a straight while Catholic male is given any sort of equal or special privilege, they see it as an attack on their beliefs because of what they're taught. But you point that out to them- ask questions about the beliefs, and they get defensive and shut down. And the reasoning they often give often just boils down to "it's what I was told was correct". They're like a big bundle of cords and cables that got tangled up- you untangle one, but somehow find ten more things all tied up.

Don't get me wrong- I don't hold it against anyone to have or practice religion. Again, having been raised Catholic, there will always be that part of me that clings to some of those beliefs or mindsets regardless of how far I move on. As stereotypical as it sounds to say, I know plenty of people who are quite religious but also accepting and loving of others. It really is, as is often the case, a very vocal minority (moreso "section" than "minority", but still). They've somehow woven religion and politics together, despite this country literally being built upon the opposite idea, to the point that they can- and do- cherry pick their beliefs while simultaneously dancing around all these other ones that, ironically, more closely align with the words in their scriptures, but do that same cherry picking to employ said scriptures to excuse their actions. It doesn't matter that their God said to love anyone and everyone, or that any of the people they hate are also creations of their God. They'd rather listen to the nutjob false idol who declares himself a messenger. I get plenty of spam messages each and every day, but I know well enough to know it's just a bunch of potentially infectious BS. The leaps in logic would put an Olympic athlete to shame.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top