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this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2024
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That's the most important thing to remember about all this. They know he's an abuser. They know he brags about it. They know all the despicable things he's done.
And it's either unimportant to them, or they've managed to become so psychologically twisted that they actually like it.
We have a society being dominated by deeply, deeply broken people right now.
This is a common problem all over the place. We don't care what people we like do, and it's not limited to Trump/Republicans.
R Kelly was a known pedophile for years, and still a celebrated musician until he finally went to jail. Ray Lewis killed a guy, but was on the Raven's sideline as an honored guest and former player. Ellen Degeneres fostered a toxic work environment for year while hosting a popular talk show. Weinstein raped women for years while being a celebrated producer. Chris Brown has been beating women for years and still had success after many high profile incidents.
Chris Brown is wild to me. Many other cases are circumstantial-but-damning-because-frequency for a long time. Brown beat the fuck out of Rhianna, there’s police reports and photos of her in the public domain, and yet he still has a public celebrity that isn’t the “Chris Brown global apology tour”
I feel like Ellen caught a stray here, I'm not sure being a mean boss is equivalent to what Weinstein did.
I don't know much about it her particular case but have had mean bosses (like one guy thought it would be funny to drug me with something, no idea what, when I asked for an advil - it was in a different country, he told me that's why it looked different; another would scream at grown men until they cried). I have known lots of people whose lives were terrorized at work by monsters who knew they needed the job and had to take it. It's not ok.
Violence is violence.
I wasn't trying to make an equivalent list, but she does feel out of place, but she did have a decade long talk show while being toxic behind the scenes. Chevy Chase was a known asshole before he left snl in comparison.
A lot of it boils down to abortion. When you see abortion as baby murder, it would take an awful lot to offset that moral significance. In other words, many who support Trump wouldn't exactly condone rape, corruption, etc, but they feel abortion is a much larger moral issue.
No, it's not about abortion. They are just bad people.
I see where you are coming from but I have direct experience with a decent number of these people, including my mother. She is kind, empathetic and generous but extremely fearful (not just of out-group humans - literally any unknown).
She has trouble understanding cause and effect despite being of reasonable intelligence and competence otherwise. She has been in conservative news circles for 40+ years. As you might expect, she is a straight-R voter for the single reason that she can't risk the lives of pre birth fetuses.
She has an extremely short attention span and short term memory problems. Despite being willing to discuss issues, abortion is such a foundational topic to her worldview there is exactly no chance that she could change her understanding of abortion or Republican voting habits.
Edit: just want to be clear here, I'm a pragmatic anarchist and despise her worldview. However, I feel like it's important to truly understand how people outside your bubble perceive reality, for the specific purpose of neutralizing their terrible opinions
I'm sorry to break it to you, but if your mother is a trump supporter, she's not a good person.
At this point you have to be mentally handicapped to not know the man is an absolute monster, and anyone who supports him is complicit in the monstrosities he commits.
A kind, empathetic person would never vote R.
Everyone is picking the lesser of two evils in our electoral system. If you view abortion as the killing of nearly a million babies a year, what is that evil held up to the evil trump commits? If it was actually babies, I think even most democrats would pick Trump over the party that wants to be allowed to kill a million 1 month olds. Most people just don't view those as the same thing.
If she's getting all her news from Fox or worse, it's very plausible that all she's ever heard about the bad shit he's done is "fake news", and that she genuinely sees him as a smart, kind man.
I'm not claiming 'morally good' status for her and I personally avoid communicating with her any more than I absolutely have to. I just wanted to add perspective that may be useful for the discussion
Exactly as her preachers told her, I know what you mean. Funny enough, they seemed to neglect all the parts of the Bible that would provide context - e.g. verses saying how workers deserve their wages, how leaders should not accept bribes, and hold themselves to higher standards in other ways too, not just speak the words but truly show love to one another, which nowadays is dismissed by "that's socialism!" (to give a crap about the poor).
And the biggest one of all: Christians are not to judge the world, but are to judge their own, in-group selection, with filtering rules in place. So e.g. if abortion was so bad, maybe excommunicate someone that got one, but don't BAN it in the secular sense. Except they never bothered to do the former? If they truly meant it, then why act hypocritically, as Jesus commanded to be avoided at all costs btw, by allowing abortions in their own communities, but not in those "other" places? (performed by the poors) And likewise, why vote for rather than decry and remove Trump, or at least vote for him while also stating how what he did was BAD?
She TRUSTED her leaders to lead her correctly, and they let her down. The thing is, if she voted, then she also became a "leader", and thus bears some responsibility. Perhaps truly responsible people should implement an IQ test or some such for voting, but as it is, she isn't solely a victim. Which is one of the sadder parts of all of this. She just loves people, and tried to step up and help as best she could - the same as those who showed up on January 6 btw - and they made her complicit in their crimes against humanity. It's becoming "brother against brother", just like the Civil War and fight against actual slavery, all over again, with people in the vast middle ground caught up on either of the various sides, both of which are condoning literal genocide, but not equally bc one is advocating for it specifically here inside our borders.
Sorry if this is a bitter pill to swallow, but literally lives are on the line here, and based on your words I thought you might be receptive to wanting to know that. She's a victim yes, but not only that, if her actions are leading to people's literal, actual deaths.:-|
The basest crime here is how some fucking assholes in like 1953 realized they needed some way to protect their voting base from being logically annihilated any time issues are debated, and laid out the correct strategy to create a separate perception of reality via media control.
You can't even try to discuss how "real Christians" should act because up is down and forward is backwards. It's "tough love" to make kids go hungry, "protecting the family" to hate trans/queer folk. Given the common thread of short attention span, by the time you establish any sort of shared reality, attention span timer is up and you have to start over or give up.
Or were they "smart" to have done so? I think not, but the degree of truthiness in that statement is that it is at least "strategic". But I don't blame them fully, b/c Rome also fell for similar reasons - it is inherent to any democratic society that it can fall victim to internal rather than purely external factors, and likewise that is also the reason that many/most of us will die, b/c of some type of cancer whether the autopsy bothered to go hunting for it or not. They are evil yes, but like a lion is going to eat you evil, it's just the nature of the "game" they choose to play.
Also, and I cannot emphasize this enough: many Republicans (like several Democrats too) are really dumb - like the lion, they do not even realize themselves why they are doing what they are doing. Some stuff (quite frankly, pretty much all of it) just works whether you think about it working or not.
At which point I start to wonder why the other side - liberals - aren't smart enough to have noticed that and tried to counter it? Could it be that they(-ir handlers) also wanted that outcome too? For example, even now there are several states that could pass laws protecting women's rights to medical care... so why don't they? If the only thing going on is that big bad "other side", then wherever that big bad is not, there should be nothing stopping the doing of good works, yes?
Tbf, when the Dems were in charge for a few short months, at the beginning of Obama's presidency, they passed what had the potential to be the biggest reform of our era - the ACA, which affects not only economic matters but those that directly impact literally life & death. Except even there, why include the stuff about mandatory payment for abortions, when a large swath of the American populace was so die-hard against that? They handed the Repubs the ammunition to have elected Trump!!! Did they not know how the other side would respond? Did they not care?! It confirmed every worst fear of the middle-of-the-road people about the heavy-handed nature of the Big Government, which forced even small businesses to provide payments for actual, outright abortions. Ignoring the rightness or wrongness of that fact, it spent a lot of political capital, and left a deficit in place.
And next, following up that decision is this question: at what point in (modern) history has the USA ever had anything other than a cycle between Repubs and Dems in the White House? Therefore what hope did the Dems have immediately after Obama, especially when putting up Hillary Clinton of all people!? And this just after the massively unpopular (in many states) ACA - were they HOPING to lose!?!? Or were they just living in a fantasy dreamland where rainbows and puppies exist, but somehow not school shootings?
Anyway, I understand (somewhat, though I do not agree) why your mom feels the way she does: she was manipulated & tricked, not by her evil nature but by her good one, plus inherent weaknesses. Though that is not to say that the other relevant side in this discussion (liberals/Democrats) are blameless. There are issues with discussing things with people on both sides - though ofc they are nowhere near equal, yet they do exist.
At the end of the day, we are all merely human.
If that let's you disengage from the issue, then OK. But, alas, reality is more nuanced than that.
Yep, no one is allowed to draw conclusions or to accept the truth about the people around them. They have to blindly do and believe what you tell them to, otherwise they're unempathetic or otherwise bad people.
Miss us with that shit
WTF are you talking about? I'm sorry, I can't parse what you've said as a response to what I said. I do, however, hear that you are very angry. I'm sorry for your frustration and hope you are able to figure out some positive way to channel that energy. I agree, there's a lot going on in the world that is super-upsetting. I just don't think we'll solve anything by dehumanizing broad swathes of the population. Sure, some people are assholes and they're certainly over-represented among Trump supporters. But, for example, the other dude who responded about his mother. Someone like her is not such a black-and-white case. And, generally, more is accomplished by trying to understand the motivations of others than by dismissing them as bad people.
Edit: But, yes, some people are bad (Trump, for example). And, it is not a good use of time to try to understand their motivations. I guess it comes down to how and where to draw that boundary of empathy, so-to-speak.
What are you talking about? You assault us with a wall of text that means nothing because you obviously didn't think about what I am saying.
Trump, who has 100% paid for multiple abortions to be performed.