I was referring to a Trope. 
No, seriously. Frilly Heck and I both afaict identify as sis female we find hysterical offesisve. Many, certainly not all, women do. The main issue here, however, is your insistence that it isn’t offensive because you don’t find it offensive. You’ve also informed a queer identifying person that a word/phrase they do not find offensive, is offensive because you’ve decided it is.
You don’t get to decide and preach to the rest of us what is or is not offensive. You specifically offended Frilly Heck and would not appologize because you decided she had no right to be offended. You are “mansplaining” to not just we little ladies but to everyone in this thread who has the temerity to disagree with you.
I will vote Democrat no matter which weak tea centrist they present us with. I will not do it gladly if it’s the same old republican lite they keep offering us. They are, indeed, better than any republican alternative, but sometimes the difference are more nuanced than I would prefer.
Ugh, get a clue already.
Well, it’s only women telling him it’s offensive. You can’t take women seriously, you know? He’s waiting for a respectable person to explain it to him.
ETA: @Czarcasm My apologies, you tried, but I get the impression you do not count as respectable to him despite your gender.
Word …
Thank you.
So far, the OPs lecturing about “hysteria” seems to not only failed to persuade anyone, but alienated people and produced pages and pages of angry arguments. I think that’s good evidence against their original position.
And, you know, we are in our present position in part because pounding the table and yelling about how your opponents are maximally awful people does in fact work quite well. The Democrats being all meek and “polite” has so far been a losing tactic for decades. They need some fire-breathers.
Personally, I check into this thread occasionally, to enjoy pointing and laughing at how wrong the OP was based on the thread’s title.
It’s true some anti-Trump predictions and fears were exaggerated. But this thread’s title implies that freaking out when Trump was elected a year and a half ago was entirely unwarranted. Obviously, freaking out was warranted — indeed, a certain level of freak-out would have been overly modest, sadly.
If the OP wanted to pit certain predictions that turned out to be wrong (so far), they should have titled the thread exactly that.
ETA: Upon rereading the full OP (first post), I get it. It is clear in its intent, and I mostly agree with its points. I take some of the blame for focusing too much on the thread’s title. A little tweak of it would help, IMHO: “I pit freak-outs over certain very unlikely scenarios under Trump, as they distract from the real and serious dangers.” I concede it’s challenging to come up with a pithy way to state this, without seeming to downplay that awful reality.
I would still think the OP would have failed even if that were the title.
Because firstly I haven’t heard anyone make those kinds of claims, it seems like a bit of a caricature to me. Normally of course, there’s no issue with someone pitting something that me, or other posters haven’t experienced because: so what; if you haven’t experienced X then you don’t need to post in a thread about X.
But in this case we’re talking about a president for whom criticism is often handwaved as “trump derangement syndrome” and so this kind of strawmanning is pretty salient right now. So I am going to challenge it: who has said these things and why is it more significant than people handwaving the immorality and incompetence of this administration?
Secondly this admin is moving full speed ahead towards such goals and is only being slowed down slightly by what few guardrails remain. For example on nuclear war: Trump’s genocide threat against Iran strongly implied he would use nukes, and several high ranking military officials have been dismissed recently amid rumors that they objected to the use of nukes. So year 1, no nuke dropped yet, but I certainly wouldn’t be pitting people who thought this was a strong likelihood as they’re looking pretty prescient right now.
As I’ve said, this is not the case.
This is a message board. All we’re doing is reading words. I have no idea who’s a man and who’s a woman. So I don’t address men and women differently.
And I am not saying that I get to decide what is offensive for everyone. In fact, I’ve specifically said I do not get to decide what is offensive for everyone.
But Frilly Heck also does not get to decide what if offensive for everyone.
Frilly Heck gets to decide what they find offensive and I get to decide what I find offensive. But neither of us gets to impose our standards on the other.
So somebody can declare that they personally don’t find the n word offensive and then nobody’s allowed to criticize them for using it?
Little_Nemo, I strongly recommend that you stop digging.
↑ I approve this post.
Whenever I read quotes like this (“so you’re saying that…”) , I always get my pitchfork out, because I need more straw, and there’s always a lot falling out of the man as he’s propped up there.
Note to Little_Nemo: People are saying the words they post.
I feel like it’s a good time to share a couple of stories about where people in my acquaintance are at right now, politically:
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I have a friend in my state whom I’ll call Dan. Dan is in his 70’s, a retired Hot Shot firefighter and a musician. Dan is on the left, but traditionally solidly within the Democratic landscape. He has been a precinct volunteer for literally DECADES. He just told me a couple of weeks ago that he stopped being a member of the Democratic party. He’s switched to Independent, and he is done with volunteering. His reasons have to do largely with Gaza, but also how unresponsive, arrogant, and out of touch any of our local Democratic leaders are. He’s not the only one with this complaint.
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My cousin, who lives in Seattle – let’s call him Simon. When Simon was growing up as a teen and young adult, he was very into politics as a progressive Democrat. He’s got pictures of himself with Hillary Clinton because he got to meet her as part of some fundraising thing. He was an early fan of Pete Buttigieg. I saw him last at a Thanksgiving gathering, and here’s what he had to say about the Democrats: “I have no clue WTF that party thinks it’s doing right now! Why are they so arrogant?”
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Lastly, I have a friend who is a Green Party member, and a somewhat frequent candidate for office. He is trying to understand what is going on with the US Green Party (which is clearly being/been highjacked by right-wing interests). He, along with other local Greens, decided that Kamala Harris was the lesser evil compared to Trump OR Jill Stein, and both voted and advised others accordingly. This was a really good thing for them to do, because I know of at least one person who wanted to join the Green Party out of disgust for how the Democrats were handling Gaza and the Gaza protests, and they were able to help convince him that he could vote for Harris as harm reduction. Anyway, my friend (whom I’ll call George) is very talented at public speaking and fundraising, unhappy with the Green Party, but still too far left to feel welcome in the Democratic party.
All of these people are probably going to vote, and for Democrats. But if they felt more heard, they would also be out there busting ass and getting the Democrats more votes. I would like that to happen. I think the Democrats can be a big enough tent to accommodate a wide range of political ideas, but they have to prioritise correctly. And they need to have a unifying message. “Shut up with your hysteria already” is NOT it. That’s a terrible message that reeks of Republican gaslighting.
There are already people within the Democratic big tent that are doing good outreach toward the right – I already linked to https://leavingmaga.org/ before, but I will again. This is great support group for people who are on the fence or fresh out of MAGA.
Bill Kristol, of all people, is out there fighting the Trump administration and recruiting people to the antifascist cause. I follow Bill Kristol, and former Tea Partier Joe Walsh, on Bluesky because even though I have have political disagreements with both of them, they give me hope for the future where we can all have a nice civilized fight over taxes or some shit. Neither one of these guys trivializees the fears people have about Trump – if anything, they are much more alarmist than most Democrats, because they don’t feel the same constraints. They really do make me feel like part of a big tent in a way that @Little_Nemo 's posts do not. If you haven’t been reading/listening to Bill Kristol lately, do it! Talk about weird bedfellows!
I hope this helps make reasonable people understand that I’m not just trying to have a personal spat here. I think this thread is genuinely harmful to the goal @Little_Nemo has in mind, and I have done way more work on the ground than he has, so I think my insights are worth sharing. By the way – remember how Arizona went for Biden in 2020? You can thank a lot of people for that, and I’m one of them. I went to the mat hard for Democrats in 2020 and 2024, despite many of my own misgivings, and one of the most dispiriting parts was all the gaslighting about how Trump really wasn’t that bad. It’s very disappointing to see Democrats take up the same language Republicans have used to sow discord and hostility.
I think if you appeal to people like that, you’re going to lose people like my parents, or three or four couples I can think of where the wife is in my wife’s fitness class. Political normies who see things like the pro shoplifting article in the New York Times or all the crazy shit that Pro Pallies do and who cannot understand why Democrats aren’t wholeheartedly condemning that sort of thing.
I know people like your friends, too - my sister in law is a lot like that. But for every one hyper progressive like her, I know five or six normies who think that she and people who agree with her are nuts, and that Trump is also nuts. I want to get those people to vote Democrat, not shake their heads at how insane “both sides” are.
I don’t know the extent to which people like your parents outnumber, like, nearly every Democrat I know, but I can add that this is a much bigger problem in a swing state like mine than it would be in, say, California.
Anyway, I am still pretty sure you can say something to appeal to your parents without shitting on someone else for their honest fears and concerns. It’s hard to please everybody, but the bare minimum should be to treat one’s collaborators with a cautious politeness.
No, I agree with my parents and friends and acquaintances, the fact that the Democratic party mainstream isn’t doing much, much more to distance itself from these people IS deplorable, not to mention dangerous. This is the nascent left wing bizarro mirror version of the Tea Party, and if given the chance they will ruin our party just like MAGA ruined the Republican party. So I can’t just handwaved away their concern - I share it.
What I can do is highlight just how bad the Republicans have already gotten, relay in detail what happened on January 6 and more importantly with the false slates of electors, and hammer home how fucked up it is that Republicans didn’t hold anyone to account for all of that literal treason.
But I won’t pretend that Blue MAGA isn’t concerning. I don’t want people who do not share my Liberal values in the party. It’s not a way to win, it’s a way to lose forever - like the Republicans did to MAGA.
I do not collaborate with illiberals of any ilk.
I think you ought to table that concern for the post-Trump era, or we will never get a post-Trump era (well, the guy will not live long, but the era will remain).
I share your concerns about Platner, and I don’t share your concerns about a lot of other stuff. But I can promise you that a Democratic establishment that shits on the left is going to produce more of these guys, because there’s always a pipeline toward fascism/cryptofascism for angry, disconnected people.
I disagree. In this last election the Democratic candidates bent over backwards for these people, and so they invented shit whole cloth to smear them with. That turned off many moderate voters, and in the end, it didn’t even help.
Making overtures towards the far left is costly, in that it is extremely off-putting to political normies. And it is of extremely limited benefit - look how they smeared “Genocide Joe” and “Holocaust Harris”. Why would we pander to these assholes again?