Well, that’s ridiculous. 70+ million Trump voters cannot be accurately compared to KKK members or Nazis. Yes, I know it’s an officially endorsed position on this site but it’s still bullshit.
I would have thought it was going too far up until about a year ago, but post-COVID and ESPECIALLY post-election, I really can’t trust anyone who continues to be a Trump supporter. I don’t mean I hate them and think they’re totally irredeemable souls, I mean I can’t TRUST them. Post-COVID, the Trump movement has become a cult of recklessness, carelessness, dangerous behavior - they’re actually being the exact opposites of what “conservative” should mean, and they are directly opposing the concept of “law and order”. Again, this was a different situation a year ago. But COVID demonstrated that these people are being willfully destructive, and especially after the election, the ones that STILL can’t get over the fact that they lost and STILL think Trump is their champion, are, as far as I’m concerned, classified with Scientologists. They cannot be trusted.
That earnest and self-righteous demonization of the other is, in part, what leads to outcomes of the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century.
Which is one of the top reasons so many of us hate Trump and the people who enable him.
You are correct. However, 70 Million trump voters were OK with trump enjoying being backed by white supremacist groups. trump openly supports those groups, and they voted for him anyway.
Like the Germans who knew about the Camps, disapproved of them- but silently, and still said Heil Hitler! I still have hopes for them, maybe they were scared, who knows?
But I did say that for myself only a rabid trumpist would be ixnayed. Same as a religious person who tried to convert me on the spot, or a party boy who offered to share a line.
I was just trying to point out that everyone has a line that would exclude certain people. For me, Trump supporters are over that line. It doesn’t mean they’re Nazis or KKK members, it just means that they are deplorable in other ways.
You misunderstand me. I’m actually cutting them a lot of slack. I’m not into demonizing people. I’m constantly trying to push back AGAINST demonization, when I remind people, for instance, that an unbelievable number of the people in America performing vital services to the day-to-day functioning of our country are Trump supporters and you can’t just write them off as lost souls. We had a blackout in my city a few weeks ago, and in my neighborhood it was almost 24 hours before the power went back on. And I can virtually GUARANTEE that the guys who rolled up in those bucket trucks and got it fixed, voted for Trump. I KNOW from personal experience that those type of jobs are filled with working-class white conservatives who are exactly the demographic that Trump appeals to most. I don’t HATE these people. But in the past few months - and it’s impossible to discuss these things without speaking collectively and making generalizations - I can’t TRUST them anymore. In four years, if a different kind of Republican populist is leading a movement that isn’t quite as INSANE as Trump’s - even if I disagree with the platform - they might regain my trust. But as of now, I just can’t do it.
I am capable of compartmentalizing out a LOT of objectionable views in order to go about the business of dealing with other people. But I draw the line at being willful disease vectors! As I said, COVID changed everything.
What about the folks who gather for religious reasons or for ‘peaceful’ protests? Mass gatherings, regardless of one’s loudly declared virtue, are more prone to spreading disease than maintaining distance. Yet, some gatherings are blessed by the the powers that be and some are condemned. The one consistency is which side of the political aisle is being benefitted.
At some point, how others behave, even if it’s foolish or self destructive, such as risky sex or drug use can’t be used to completely isolate or punish.
So those of you who would not hire Trump supporters… I take it that your opposition to the Hollywood blacklists was only about who was blacklisted, and not that the idea of blacklisting people basd on their politics is a terrible idea?
Let me be clear: Using political beliefs as an exclusion for hiring is a terrible idea that will help break down civil society and damage a free society. That’s true whether you are excluding Trumpists or Socialists.
I’m also very uncomfortable with searching people’s social media as a requirement for employment. I’ve heard of employers demanding access to social media accounts as a condition of employment. Such employers woild get a big middle finger from me.
We used to understand that private life and commercial life were separate, and gave people zones of privacy. That seems to be going away due to the left’s newfound love of de-platforming, doxsing, and demanding that people be fired for non-work related behaviour. That’s a troubling development that will not end well.
Also, people should keep their politics out of the workplace unless they work in a political job. There was a time when anyone yapping about politics on the job woild get a talking to from management about boundaries and what did and didn’t belong at work, because there were people of all political stripes may work there, and politics are not conducive to effective teamwork. That too seems to be going away, and that’s a bad thing.
I’m curious how you would feel if you applied for a job but lost it because your prospective employer read through your SDMB posting history and discovered something about you she didn’t like, such as your politics or religion. Would anyone here be okay with that? Maybe being permanently judged based on the worst thing you said on the worst day you had 10 years ago?
I am against ALL public gatherings at this time, regardless of the reason. I am an absolutist on the lockdown. I am this way because I’ve observed it to work in other countries and we could have avoided an UNBELIEVABLE amount of trouble here in America if we’d just done the responsible thing to begin with, which is what anyone who calls himself a “conservative” ought to be in favor of. As far as I can see, only one group of people in this country has made a giant fucking cause-celebre out of publicly violating the lockdowns.
They condemn McCarthyism which was targeted against actual communists. The ideology that is not was responsible for the deaths of a literal order of magnitude more than fascism in the 20th century and is the ideology that the rising economic and industrial power of the 21st century is at the very least nominally aligned to. Yet, modern McCarthyites are embracing hatred, ostracism, and ultimately other more sinister acts against a loosely aligned and far less dangerous political movement while excusing political violence and intolerance amongst their own. It is truly a fascinating time to be alive to witness such irony.
If you don’t see support for Trump as a very real threat to the very existence of American democracy, then I suppose you have a point. I’m not suggesting a Trump supporter blacklisted, I’m saying it would be disqualifying for any job I’m hiring for. I’m not advocating my entire industry do the same. (also, I should point out that I don’t actually try to determine if a given applicant is a Trump supporter. I assume everyone I meet is not, unless they indicate otherwise.)
Maybe I’m lucky. I live in an area where MAGA isn’t really a thing. Apart from the occasional asshole with a big truck sporting Trump flags, I don’t run into Trump supporters. Its easy to find qualified applicants who are decent and intelligent.
Uh, no, the reality was that only a few were, so the result was an abuse of human rights by McCarty and henchmen.
Although it is true that Soviet spies were at work in the United States (recently declassified documents reveal that Julius Rosenberg was indeed sending atomic secrets to the Russians, though Ethel was innocent), only a tiny fraction of those who lost their positions were actually connected with the USSR in any way. (4)
Perhaps you and Sam do miss that I mentioned that I demand something else besides someone being a Trump supporter, so clearly if they are claiming after January 20 that Trump is still president…
I don’t know about you, but several Republicans in power have already acknowledged that Biden will be president. You are demanding then to embrace what would be by then the real sinister thing, something that not many Republicans in power will support.
Those who seek power under the pretext of engaging in a ‘moral’ crusade unsurprisingly don’t care about collateral damage.
I would screen them out for pretty much the same reason I would screen out followers of the Sovereign Citizen movement.
ISTM that it’s “going away” largely because individuals are voluntarily (if not always with full awareness of their actions) throwing away their own “zones of privacy”. That is, with the rise of social media, individuals are conducting their personal activities, under their own names, in online forums that are easily visible to literally almost everyone in the world.
Communities and employers didn’t used to “give” individuals “zones of privacy”: rather, individuals used actual privacy to conduct personal activities in ways that it was difficult for others to find out about.
Once it became widely known what scandalous behavior they were up to, they were generally given the boot, not a polite pretense that nobody could see what they were doing inside their theoretical “zone of privacy”.
Moreover, ISTM that the more people and parties permit their “political beliefs” to overlap with flat-out anti-factual delusional wacknuttery, the less moral ground they have for claiming that their public expression of said political beliefs should have no bearing on their perceived fitness for employment.
It’s one thing to argue that an employer shouldn’t use “political litmus tests” to screen out job candidates who support or oppose balanced budget amendments, or gun ownership rights, or whatever. It’s quite another thing to argue that it’s unfair or too “political” to screen out job candidates who resolutely deny fundamental facts and basic science in order to claim that climate change is a hoax, or COVID-19 is a hoax, or that Barack Obama is a secret Kenyan Muslim, or that massive mysterious ballot fraud illegitimately “stole” the 2020 election from Trump despite the entire absence of evidence of any such fraudulent activity.
In short, if conservatives/Republicans don’t want their political beliefs to be perceived as adversely affecting their fitness for employment, then maybe conservatives/Republicans need to stop aligning their political beliefs so closely with complete fucking delusional denials of reality and common sense.
What Czarcasm said, you keep going as if what one says does not count huh? Again, I said that after January 20th anyone claiming that Trump is still president goes into sovereign citizen territory, most Republicans would also agree with not giving positions to guys like that, not all of them are Trump after all.
Laughs in queer
Yeah, that’s exactly how things used to work.
On the list of “things that lead to outcomes of the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century”, “attempting to overturn a democratically-elected government and install a right-wing autocrat” also ranks pretty high.
I have no material issues with how people vote (in fact, I’m a great believer in free and fair elections, even if I don’t always like the outcome). But right now there are a lot of people - potentially millions - who would be fine with the election result being simply thrown out because they don’t like the result. Many of those are actively advocating the implementation of martial law. It’s not “demonizing” those people to condemn what they are doing and saying.
Yes. Yes it is.
No. No they don’t.
^ This 100%.