I Think We Have Lost

Politics & Elections
161

Somehow I wonder how you have lived through the last 6 years without noticing the massive changes that we’ve undergone.

You know someone in your life that watches Fox News, listens to conservative radio, talks on Parler, all that shit, right? And you know exactly what they’re outraged about on any given day, because they get their orders about what to be outraged about through that media bubble. They’re all outraged about the same thing, in lockstep. Today it can be vaccines and the vast medical conspiracy where every doctor is evil until you need them. Tomorrow it can be the threat of trans people raping our kids in bathrooms every day. The next day it can be The War On Christmas again, because hey, why not. That echo chamber can create outrage about whatever culture war issue they want at any given time and about 30-40% of Americans will follow it in lock step. They can basically choose whatever issue they want and 50+ million Americans will respond by becoming outraged by it even if they’d never even heard of it yesterday.

Additionally, it’s springtime for white supremacists. They elected one of their own, got a government full of their own, and got to come out of hiding. One of the biggest impacts the last few years have had is to reverse all of the work society has done to shame and isolate and keep toxic garbage human beings (like hardcore racists) from being loud and proud about their beliefs. We were effectively making racism less acceptable in normal life.

Electing Trump was a watershed moment for them. They viewed it as vindication for their toxicity. They were sick of not being able to go to family dinners and rant about n-words. They hated that they had to check twice to make sure that everyone around them was as shitty as them before they told racist jokes. But it was working. Open racism had made huge strides in the last 20 or 30 years in becoming unacceptable in normal society. Trump changed all that. To them, they won. One of them was the most important person in the world, and was able to say the things that they say and get away with it. The tides had turned, they can be who they were again. They could be shitty and toxic and feel loud and proud about it.

There’s no way you haven’t noticed this. If you pretend it didn’t happen, you’re in denial.

So, to answer your question - that’s why it’s an issue now. White supremacy is on a huge resurgence. They want to flex their muscles by reforming how we teach history to make their side look better and to make those they hate look worse. And since their outrage is completely steered in any useful way by their media bubble, they were able to get everyone on the same page with the same lie at the same time. Their masters need their outrage. They need them to be constantly battling over the culture war, and so they lie to them and make up new shit to be outraged about every day. Because a few of them aren’t the absolute scum of the Earth - they’re a little bit concerned with this whole ending of democracy fascist takeover thing - and so the culture war machine has to convince them that they need to keep voting republican no matter what or else the imagined persecutors of white people (or whatever the culture war battle of the day is) win.

The degree to which you are in denial about the changes of the last few years is sort of staggering to me, because I wouldn’t have imagined you being a right wing partisan until recently, although there were hints of it like when you tried to defend Sarah Palin all those years ago. I think you’ve developed an identity where you see yourself as someone who battles liberals. And that doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to team up with conservatives. And I think you sometimes make an effort to keep that distance. But since so much of what liberals do these days is to fight against extremist incursions from the right, and your identity is almost reflexively fighting liberals, you end up viewing yourself as being on the same team with other anti-liberals.

And you must realize, on some level, that they’ve gone bonkers in recent years. So how do you reconcile the cognitive dissonance of being on the same side of people you know, deep down, are awful? Both in terms of their values and their attachment to reality and good faith? It would appear denial, where you basically pretend that politics is the same as it was 20 or 30 years ago, and basically act as though you haven’t seen any of the massive changes that have occurred in recent years. Half the time I read your posts it sounds like you came out of a coma from 2003 and just kept arguing as though everything conformed to those norms.

162

A little under 2/3rds of the states still have bans against same sex marriage, which are only held in abeyance by the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision. Almost all of them were adopted within the last 20 years.

Seems to me that “LGBTQ+” stuff matters an awful lot to you people.

163

The onus is on the person who made the claim to back it up with citations; that’s the way it works.

I’ll take your non-cites as an admission that you were once again trying the conservative tactic of just declaring something to be true and inarguable.

When come back, bring facts.

ETA: Yes, having grown up and lived in the southern US, I remember constant bitching and fighting about teaching the civil war, teaching about the civil rights movement, etc.

You are wrong; everything you wrote is bunch of bullshit.

164

If your intention was to show that left wing sources are biased, it’s probably a poor logical argument to show a right wing source that is stupidly biased. It sort of does not prove your point. At all.

As has been pointed out, your understanding of CRT is based on a straw-man proposition, that has been popularized by sources that seek to spew ourtright lies in order to push their own agenda.

ETA: Go and read the posts from SenorBeef above. They say it MUCH better than I can.

165

Here’s the thing. I think it’s legitimate for parents to object to their children being told they’re inherently racist because they were born white. I also recognise that that’s a caricature of the overall premise of CRT, but the abbreviated, aka pantomime, version of CRT that’s meant to be taught in a few hours pretty much has that message. You may disagree with me. The question is, how many non-Democratic Party voters are going to agree with me? The related question is how many voters view the teaching of CRT as a leftist issue, and how many view it as a Democratic Party issue? My opinion is that quite a lot of voters don’t want their children to be taught that they’re inherently racist, and if those voters associate CRT with the Democratic Party, then they’ll vote against the Democratic Party. In other words, when Democratic Party representative pursue left-wing objectives that most Americans disagree with, they’re hurting the party and causing it to lose. And to address the OP, I think that circumstance is endemic to the Democratic Party as a whole and if they lose Trump as an antagonist, they have indeed lost because they’re the party of making people feel bad, rather than the party of making people feel optimistic towards their future.

166

And I agree with that. Why not just say that.

Instead, we have all of the unnecessary made-up terms LGB>LGBT>LGBTQ>LGBTQIA. Seriously, what’s the point? How does it improve communication?

167

And here is the fundamental disagreement. Why in all the universes in the metaverse would a parent want to hear their child described as an antagonist to the view you’ve described?

168

Could you re-state or clarify your question? I don’t think I understand what you’re asking me.

169

A couple of decades ago, “sexual orientation” was the buzz term. As in people shouldn’t be discriminated against based on their sexual orientation. Sometime later, that shifted to LGB and very quickly after that to LGBT. A few years later, it shifted to LGBTQ, although that shift hasn’t totally taken effect, and sometime after that to LGBTQ+. Do you think mainstream America has a clear understanding of the people who fall under “Q+” and support their protection under US Department of Labor regulations? Or do you agree that the “LGBTQ+” reference in the Democratic Party platform was put in there to appease the party’s left wing?

170

Did you ever think of asking someone in that community to explain what it means to you? These are real people that exist. The term wasn’t created by the Democrats to appease the left wing. I don’t feel qualified to speak on that community’s behalf, but this whole “it’s all so confusing! Does anyone know what it means??” schtick is weird. If you really are curious, there are many ways to find out the answer to your questions.

171

You are describing why right wing propaganda works. You do realize you are exactly explaining how the right wing media machine crafts the political narrative for their own gain, right?

172

I genuinely have no idea how that’s relevant to my observation, or the general conversation around gay rights. Are you suggesting that the entrenched right wing hostility to non-heterosexuals is because there’s more than one term used to describe that population? That Republicans would have been okay with “not discriminating against sexual orientation,” but got all confused by the idea of “not discriminating against LGBT people,” and voted in a bunch of bigoted legislation that they wouldn’t have otherwise supported?

173

Can I just say, as a gay person, that I don’t think the basic access to full participation in society is quite such a fringe issue as you [this “you” only applies to a few people in this thread, obviously] think it is. But the fact that you can say it tells me what you think of my entire orientation as people: we’re not as valid as straight people.

As for the acronyms, yes, they’re stupid. But we’re trying to be inclusive, and the list of people marginalized on account of gender and / or sexual orientation gets longer every time we turn around. There’s a lot of dissent in the community, as well: many Ls don’t like the Ts, but many other Ls actually are T. It’s early days in figuring out the language for how to deal with this in the open: we’ll get it sorted. But in the meantime, by and large, we’re standing up for each other even when we have next to nothing in common because you sure as hell aren’t standing up for us.

Personally, as lots on this board know, I left the USA permanently because I couldn’t both marry another gay man and sponsor him for immigration, so I had to choose between love and country. Country lost, because they had shown me quite clearly that they did not value me as much as they would have had I been straight. There’s only a gap of 20 years between the first country to accept legal gay marriage and America’s acceptance of it, so my situation is just an issue of timing, but the point is that it may not matter to YOU, but it matters to a lot of people and in theory to their friends and families, which at the end of the day amounts to a decent chunk of the population.

174

In the context of teaching CRT to high school students, do you believe that those students should be categorised as you’ve described? Or if not the actual students, then their parents of grandparents? I don’t think a child should be taught that they have an “evil history”. Or to look at a different part of your post, “black poverty”. Just explaining black poverty in a sociological and statistical manner would take hours, and could have huge disagreement between actual scholars. But you think it should be inserted into a US history lesson book? What, three pages after the civil rights movement?

175

CRT IS NOT TAUGHT TO HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS. What part of this are you not getting.

Your sources are telling you this, and using this as an excuse to stop history teachers from discussing facts like how slavery existed in the USA, or the origins of the civil rights movement in the 60’s. These FACTs are not “CRT”.

You have been duped.

176

The question is, is the treatment of the “Q+” community of fundamental importance to mainstream Americans, or in narrower terms, to mainstream Democrats? Could mainstream Democrats actually define who “Q+” encompasses? I’m guessing not, and that having “LBGTQ+” in the Democratic Party Platform is a bone to their left-wing, as opposed to a key plank in the party platform.

177

You do realise that this discussion is about why the US liberals/Democratic Party has lost, correct?

178

If.

What are Democrats/liberals supposed to do about so many people being gullible enough to swallow complete bullshit and fabrications? You do understand this is a bad thing for society, right? And you are blaming the party who isn’t poisoning the discourse constantly?

179

The ones supporting it in the past need to know that the current Republican Party is ok with disparaging science up to the point of being deadly for many.

As for your cites, the BBC one does match what I pointed out early, indeed there are no good picks supporting you that are not coming from serious researchers, far from it, the BBC does point at hatchet men like Christopher Rufo who are misleadingly making mountains out of molehills with the intention to divide.

180

Even the BBC you pointed out reports that who is winning remains just an opinion. What is more likely to happen is that the courts, like what they did with creationists in the past, will find that the ones that pushed the false narratives against CRT will be the ones that will lose in court, of course years from now, after the damage is done.