Liberals' New Year's Resolutions

The BBQ Pit
41

:eek: :dubious: Gracious, dear, check your major premise. No, I never said that the very act of voting for Trump in itself automatically constitutes “a tantrum”.

What I said was that voting for Trump specifically because you got your white male feefees hurt by some mild PC-type criticisms (or what our OP likes to call “CONDESCENDING DEMONIZATION”) is the electoral equivalent of a toddler tantrum.

I hope, and trust, that there were many white male Trump voters who made that choice for other, more mature (although probably still quite debatable) reasons.

42

I suspect the feeling was we’ve had enough of this bullshit, let’s send the fuckwads who are forcing it on us into the political wilderness. And they did. As an added bonus the resultant fury and despair among said fuckwads has an entertainment and amusement value which will last for years.

43

What bullshit? “Black lives matter”? “Please stop mansplaining”? “Stop complaining when a black celebrity speaks to issues of black cultural identity”? Seriously, what innocuous bullshit are you not willing to bitch and whine about?

Again, it’s this insane entitlement. What we’re “forcing” on you is an understanding that the world does not revolve completely around you, that there are other people, and that their lives and rights matter. If that’s enough for you to throw a stupid fucking hissyfit like this, then you’re a shitty child who should have their “adult” card revoked. You have no ground to criticize the people who wanted playdoh and coloring books after the election, because nothing they’ve done is anywhere near as petulant and childish and entitled as what you’re doing right now. You not only demand to be the main social force, you demand that that be unquestionable, that nobody else complain about it, and that nobody else’s issues (many of which are caused by you) should matter. You shitty, petulent, entitled child. Grow the fuck up.

And by that I mean you. Not white people in general. Just you.

44

In other words, you think that a significant number of white men actually did choose to vote for Trump because their white male feefees were hurt by hearing some smug PC moralizing about white male privilege?

Yup, that’s a tantrum. Aw, the poor little snowflakes. :dubious:
Not to mention completely pointless as far as avoiding smug PC moralizing about white male privilege goes. Contrary to the fantasy that a number of Trump voters seem to have constructed, PC moralizing about race, gender, privilege and related issues isn’t a government or party initiative, and isn’t going to vanish just because Democrats are currently in the “political wilderness”.

Under a Trump administration, interracial and gay couples are still going to appear in TV ads, action movies will still be made with female heroes, supporters of liberty and equality are still going to fight for LGBTQ rights, and there is still going to be plenty of smug PC moralizing about race, gender, privilege and related issues. The tantrum-throwing snowflakes, despite what they may believe, have not actually been granted a free pass to go back to being knuckledragging bigoted pigs with no negative consequences.

How sad that the tantrum-throwing snowflakes shoved the country under a bus in an attempt to retaliate against some smug PC moralizing, only to find that they couldn’t even accomplish that, because smug PC moralizing isn’t actually going anywhere.

Oh, honey, there’s going to be enough fury and despair to go around for everybody (except perhaps a subset of the very wealthy). At least some of us will have the comfort of knowing that we weren’t the ones who deliberately inflicted it.

45

OK, but “PC BS” seems to be one of the more common complaints of Trump supporters. Whenever Trump railed against PC culture at his rallies he got a lot of applause. Perhaps not the primary reason for voting for Trump in general, but pretty high up there.

46

The entire premise of PC is that some people are so pathetically fragile that anything that can remotely hurts their feelings should lead to ostracizing the thoughtcriminal.

47

It is kind of amazing how so many conservatives perennially seem to think that if they can just get another Republican into the Oval Office, they’ll manage to reverse the post-1960s cultural current.

In the Reagan/Bush I years, for many Republican voters, it was all about getting rid of abortion rights and blocking the ERA and cutting off those Cadillac welfare queens, as well as dropping all that pesky anti-discimination governmental interference in private enterprise and racial integration. The Moral Majority embraced this divorced and remarried Hollywood star as its new avatar of “family values”. Meanwhile, “Cagney & Lacey” and “The Jeffersons” were TV hits, AIDS activism was pushing back against homophobic mores, hip-hop music brought a new wave of black artists to celebrity, and a wildly popular major TV character become a single mother despite (in fact, referencing) the Vice-President’s openly expressed disapproval.
Many Bush II voters in 2000 hoped to roll back “political correctness” with a return to white Republican patrician (now evangelical/fundamentalist Protestant) mores, a ban on same-sex marriage, getting rid of gays in the military, and renormalization of the sort of “kinder, gentler” racial separatism practiced at campaign speech location Bob Jones University. What they got, besides the Iraq War, was an unmarried black female national security advisor and a black Secretary of State, more women than ever before serving in the (non-conscript) military and in combat, Lawrence v. Texas, same-sex civil unions and marriages at the state level, the rise of “New Atheism”, a Supreme Court with two female justices, and the first Muslim member of Congress.
And now in 2016 a lot of Trump voters have an even more extreme agenda, including in some cases actual white supremacism/separatism, deportation of millions of non-whites, bans on Muslim immigration, deliverance from PC talk about racism, sexism and “privilege”, rollback of marriage equality, and right-wing Christian determination to shut down reproductive rights once and for all.

What they’re going to get, besides a glitzy showbiz-celebrity POTUS with five children from three former and current model/actress wives (of which the latter is an immigrant born in Communist Eastern Europe with nude photos circulating online), is either military draft registration for men and women both or an end to mandatory registration altogether, a growing fight for transgender rights, the first Latina Senator, four South Asian-American Congressmembers, a multiracial Broadway show about the Founding Fathers created by a mixed-race Puerto Rican-American composer and sold out for the foreseeable future, a re-energized and internationalized Black Lives Matter movement, international women’s rights and gay rights movements, sanctuary cities and campuses, and as I said, an undiminished cultural emphasis on issues of discrimination, bigotry and privilege.

That clock is just not going to turn back. Not without, at the very least, some kind of devastation that literally wipes out most of the modern world. Which, with vigilance and fortitude, we still hope to be able to avoid on Trump’s watch.

:dubious: Actually, what that sounds like is Donald Trump. “Nasty individual or entity said something critical of me or my enterprises! Sad! Failing! New laws will let us sue for that!”

48

So, basically, the OP, aldiboronti, Trump, and the mess of Trump voters who took this kind of disagreement as reason to punish others? I agree, fucking children, the lot of you.

Right, and it’s disgusting, because as these people use it, “PC BS” is a shorthand for “not being a gross bigot”.

49

It’s not “the left” in this thread typing in all caps.

How do you feel about people who single out liberals as if they share a hive mind?

50

Exactly! If I’m responsible for MTV, some people owe me Lots Of Damn Money!
(When that check clears, the local Offenderatti can feel free to Bitch Away…)

51

Just picking up this false-analogy post for Stringbean and any other slow learners in the Intro to Logic class:

Analogy fail, because:

  • It is indeed a very offensive generalization to suggest that tips on committing murderous acts of terrorism would be relevant to Muslims in general. The vast majority of Muslims, of course, have no connection with terrorism whatsoever.

(Hint: If you had titled the edition “Dear Radical Islamist Terrorists” instead of “Dear Muslims”, that would not have been an offensive generalization, because accusations of terrorism are indeed applicable to terrorists. See, it’s not actually so hard to avoid offensive bigotry once you learn to use your logic on it! :))

  • It is not an offensive generalization, on the other hand, to suggest that tips on recognizing and understanding very common attitudes influenced by societal privilege conferred by whiteness and maleness are relevant to white males in general within such a society.
  • By the way, it is also offensive, though considerably less so, to make a gratuitous and inaccurate distinction between “Muslims” as a group and “white Christians” as a group. Many Muslims, including Muslim radical Islamist terrorists, are white, and many Christians, including Christian victims of terror, are non-white. In fact, a more appropriate distinction would simply be between radical Islamist terrorists on the one hand, and non-terrorists of whatever race or religion on the other.

(Hint: It was also an analogy fail for you to describe your hypothetical parody video with Christian non-terrorists (I presume) giving advice on how to commit terrorist acts. To be truly analogous to the actual video you’re trying to parody, you’d need to have the non-terrorists explaining how to avoid committing terrorist acts! Duh, right? Don’t worry, all beginners slip up in their logical analogies from time to time. :))

52

So you’re lumping together all liberals and criticizing them for lumping together all white males and criticizing them?

53

Unfortunately, as I disagree with how Sringbean went about saying what he has, I do agree with me of what he’s saying.

People DO generalize Liberals. People ARE stupid enough to vote for a guy like Trump in protest. It may be their problem. But we have to live with it. People bring up TV like Fox news and CNN… All this is happening online, and it’s bigger there than it is elsewhere.

All these ads are making it difficult to type on my computer.

Damn it!

54

I think lumping a big group altogether and criticizing them for something that does not apply to 100% of them is always foolish. It’s always wrong to say “stop doing x, white males”, or “stop doing y, black women” if x and y aren’t something that literally every single white male or black woman does. Always foolish and always unnecessary.

So I think the MTV link in the OP could be phrased better, tactically speaking. And Stringbean did the same thing (for “liberals” or “the left”), as did many other posters in the thread.

But this kind of thing is literally the worst thing that has ever happened to me because I’m a cis straight white male. I’ve literally never experienced any discrimination greater than someone online lumping all white males together and criticizing them. Every woman, and every person of color, and every trans person, and every non-straight person, that I’ve ever spoken to about discrimination, has experienced worse discrimination than this (most of them far worse). Every single one.

So while, if asked, I will say “that’s a mistake that should be easy to avoid, and one can make the same point without such a generalization and collective criticism”, I will put my significant concern and effort into fighting forms of discrimination that are much more significant and affect far more people, the vast majority of whom are in categories other than white male.

55

ISTM that the only real solution is to discuss issues across party lines based on actual facts. I think even partisans can generally find a compromise, or at least a point of agreement to disagree, if we are on the same page with regard to the basic Who What How When Where.

The biggest problem with that, AFAICT, is widespread fact-poverty and fact-averse rhetoric in major right-wing media (also in some much smaller and much less influential extreme leftist media, as well as general pervasive shallowness and lack of context in much mainstream media).

Fox and their ilk have spent a long time training their viewership to disregard or gloss over inconvenient facts in favor of catchy rhetoric and deep-rooted distrust of other media sources.* It makes it very hard to argue with right-wing media consumers who have developed strong resistance to factual information.

Ultimately, I think that the only way forward is for the Republican Party to re-commit on a fundamental level to supporting factual reporting and scientific analysis. This strategy of endorsing a bunch of anti-science positions and voodoo policies and scotch-taping it all together with a sort of post-truth indifference to accuracy is not sustainable in the long term. As the Republican mainstream saw with the Trump campaign, there is only so far you can persuade voters in favor of realistic and intelligent ideas if they’ve been thoroughly schooled to value partisan rhetoric over realism and intelligence.

*Note that this is emphatically not the case for right-leaning serious periodicals such as the Economist or Christianity Today and, among the harder-core, National Review. But the communication problem is not with the comparatively small group of their readers but with the much larger subset of conservatives who get their information only from right-wing TV and radio.

56

Citation needed. Republicans have never been more fact-free, and they currently control all branches of the government on the national level. The internet has made it easier than ever to drag bullshit into the mainstream. There’s a decent portion of the populace who will link to a fake news site, and when shown citations from Snopes, Factcheck, Politifact, and TruthOrFiction that it’s bullshit, will dismiss all of the latter as “biased”. A further portion may not go so far, but will still get their news from sites like Breitbart or Daily Caller, sites that, while not constantly lying, still tinge the news in the most extreme, biased way possible.

The dominant party in the USA rejects the existence of anthropogenic climate change. Think about that one for a moment.

Why should this stop? It doesn’t hurt the republican party.

57

It does, though. Remember that as recently as back in August, Republicans were basically eating each other and major conservative journals were denouncing the Republican nominee and advocating reluctantly voting for the Democratic one.

A combination of seat-of-the-pants crisis management and a perfect storm of Clinton negatives clawed out an EC victory for Trump from what was effectively a statistical tie. And now in the post-election lull, the Republican Party is coming out of its chaotic stagger with a hastily-assumed “Yeah, I meant to do that” expression on its face.

But if events had been only slightly different, the Trumpsters and the regular conservatives would be completely fragmented right now, with the establishment Republicans trying to consolidate their Congress gains and lock in their last-gasp anti-Executive obstructionism, while the Trumpoons gibbered and caterwauled about rigged elections and “Second Amendment protests” and what have you all day on Trump TV.

The Trumpublican coalition looks reasonably stable in this pre-inauguration limbo because they’ve achieved their theoretical division of labor—POTUS and the Trumplings shaking down the players while the establishment cons prepare to gut the government—and they don’t have to cope with the strain of actually trying to do something or making the electorate happy. That doesn’t mean they’ve actually got a coherent strategy.

Sure, maybe the Republicans will be able to seamlessly manage their stale supply-side schtick and their neo-populist constituency and their Christian Right assaults on civil liberties and their destabilizing fiscal policies and their irresponsible foreign policies and their embarrassment of a loose-cannon kleptocrat Chief Exec and their thoroughly unimpressed allies and rivals and their even less impressed opponents and electorate, and keep the day-to-day of government ticking over, all at the same time. Maybe. But I hae ma doots.

58

Well, “all” they have to do is blame someone else. Maybe we’ll test just how far that can go.

59

It’s plainly offensive by lumping an entire group together and ascribing them negative qualities. You can’t do it with any other groups, and white males notice that. It turns many of them off who might otherwise want to listen to the arguments. You don’t change minds by telling someone upfront that they are guilty by association. Adding in the ending qualifier “not all of you are guilty of this” after 90 seconds of plain group stereotyping is a cop-out.

This video serves no good. I’m a white male conservative who voted against Trump because he is a dangerous man with tyrannical inclinations. But I see what empowers him. It is the acceptance among liberals to forsake their principles to demonize the dominant group in our society. They are hypersensitive to the wholesale characterization of particular groups. Extend that white males and acknowledge this video crosses the line.

That’s not too much to ask. It’s simple consistency and fairness.

60

For example, this course being offered at University of Wisconsin-Madison is predicated on the notion that there is an inherent problem in being white.

Is this his wholesale branding of an entire group acceptable simply because white males are the traditionally dominant group in our society? There is a problem being born white?