You’re never going to get it, are you? If you can’t talk to the other side as responsible grownups, then it is your fault.
‘You’re a deplorable racist scumbag and I don’t need your vote because all the people who voted for Obama are going to vote for me.’ Then you lose the election. And the lesson to be drawn is that you can’t debate the other side, because they are deplorable racist scumbags who voted for Trump.
Right, right - you are happy to debate anyone who doesn’t mind being called names. Got it - that wins elections, for sure.
I thought one of the more telling things Pie mentioned in the rant was that the left does tend to muzzle and/or denigrate points of view that don’t agree with their orthodoxy.
For example, if I say just about anything about the black community’s problems that doesn’t reinforce the trope that everything negative about the black community is poverty-related or the white man’s fault, I’ll probably get castigated as a racist, or for not having standing to say it because I’m not black, or any number of other things, none of which are true.
It shuts down productive debates, and it hardens hearts on both sides of the aisle. You see the same thing with poverty-related discussions. If you so much as suggest that a lot of poverty is not due to things out of the control of the poverty-stricken, you’re pretty much shouted down. Again, it’s the orthodoxy at work.
If the Democratic party wants to really make headway, they need to get out of that echo chamber and actually listen to what people say, instead of hearing a small part of it that disagrees with their orthodoxy and proclaiming them a bigot, or a racist, or a sexist, rape culture apologist, or whatever, and shutting down the discussion right there.
It does win elections - if you’re a Republican. It also gets you television and radio ratings - if you’re a Republican. If you’re a Democrat, however, then your opponents get all sad and tell you that it’s your fault that they did something stupid.
Sandra Fluke trying to have an adult conversation about insurance coverage for birth control pills got her labelled a “slut” and worse amongst the right-wing media, including Rush Limbaugh spending literally two days doing this. Donald Trump literally spent his entire campaign calling his opponents names, from “Lyin’ Ted” to “Crooked Hillary” and encouraged his followers to literally beat up protesters. Is that “talking to the other side as responsible grownups”? In fact, how many examples can you provide of Republicans being the grown-ups in any political debate in recent years? Really, what you’re telling us is that IOKIARDI as always. But Democrats have to be good little boys and girls, or else the Republicans will be forced to Do Something Bad… and then will turn around and say “Look what you made me do!”
Stop blaming Democrats for Trump’s election. He was the Republican candidate, nominated by the Republican Party. The people who elected him are the people who voted for him. When the Party of Personal Responsibility can’t even take responsibility for electing their own candidate, any claims of being responsible adults fall very flat.
(In addition, of course, your approach conveniently makes it impossible for actual deplorable racist scumbags to be called out for their behavior. Clinton was referring to the alt-right, White Nationalists, KKK and fellow travellers in her “deplorable” remarks. But hey, you’re right - if only she’d been a little nicer to them, they might have voted for her. No, wait, I forgot - the left was muzzling the white supremacists by calling them “racists”. Never mind.)
Also agree with bump about the whole orthodoxy/shouting down and insulting anyone who appears to not be on the bandwagon thing. Happens a lot on this very board.
It’s almost as if they’re so convinced of their absolute rightness that they won’t even consider points of view that aren’t their own.
What’s most dismaying and at the same time amusing about it is that it’s very much the EXACT same attitude that the religiously convinced adopt in a lot of cases- they’re so convinced of their rightness and the absolute wrongness of the other side that they’re unwilling to compromise, because you don’t compromise with people who are WRONG.
The “religiously convinced” as you call them, bump, are a lot more Republican than Democratic. Are you saying that the problem that you have with Democrats is that they’re too much like Republicans?
Clumsy, hence ambiguous, or ambiguous, therefore clumsy. Is it the assertion that you are “not black” one of the things that isn’t true? I’m going to guess that your rebuttal is centered on the notion that, according to you, we don’t afford “standing” on black issues to anyone who is not, personally, black.
Does that happen a lot, so you can easily prove it? Person A offers an opinion on issues that affect black people. Person B immediately demands that Person A show us a long-form Certificate of Being Black. I take it you disagree? If that is so, you have my support, I firmly believe that anyone can study an issue with an open mind and arrive at a reasonable opinion. If that is your point, we have no argument.
However, if the crux of your biscuit is that people who are not black are unfairly disregarded if their opinions do not comply with the standards of the Central SDMB Committee on Political Correctness, I promise to remain open to persuasion, if you can offer any proof beyond your own authoritative statement.
Denying that a common phenomenon exists doesn’t make the phenomenon go away. People on this board like to deny things like this, or ‘cultural appropriation’ accusation, but they happen. A popular SNL skit highlights this phenomenon pretty well - it’s clear that at the end, the white guy is not allowed to voice an opinion on BLM. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7VaXlMvAvk
That sketch was awkward and uncomfortable, which is what makes it so good. What makes it better is its sly confirmation of our shared humanity and the weakness inherent in possessing a navel. It appears that you take it as something altogether different. Which is rather sad, if hardly surprising.
Actually I don’t think either will support you if you call them names. But then they probably weren’t gong to vote for you anyway. Everyone is offended by the deplorables comment was by definition a Trump supporters. This rhetoric wasn’t what cost her the election.
That is was is a popular notion on both the left and the right for the following reasons. Generally Liberals tend to be of the let’s all work together in tollerance and diversity. They actually believe the “We go high when they go low” and so when they fail they tend to think that they just allowed themselves to be dragged low, forgetting the lessons of the prisoners dilemma that although understanding, cooperation and compromise lead to the best universal results, when attempted on a ruthless competitor nice guys finish last. On the Conservative side, there is nothing that conservatives like more than to feel that they are being persecuted. Despite clear majority, the fact that some 2% or so of the population is allowed to marry means that Christians are undergoing unprecedented persecution. So being able to whine that they are the ones being called bad things in spite of all evidence to the contrary is popular with them as well.
What happened in this election is the vindication of the Republican strategy of party before country. By deciding from day one that their goal would be to make sure that as much as possible they would block any governmental action that would help the American people for fear that a Democratic administration would take credit. For example fighting against delaying implementation of the much disparaged Obamacare, because they knew that rushing the employer mandate would cause chaos and so make Obamacare look bad. This along with drum beating of doom and gloom resulted in a government (both congressional and executive) that was viewed with slightly less popular than a stomach flu.
Then along come the snake oil peddler when the snake oil peddler comes around and say that the standard so called traditional medicine hasn’t been able to cure your headache, try my special elixir of 30% terpentine, 10% bleach and 60% swamp water from down stream of the local sewage treatment plant. What have you got to lose, many people said sign me up.
I also think that Clinton’s strong poll numbers hurt her in the end. Given unpopularity of government people were itching to give a protest vote. So long as there was no chance that Trump would actually win, it was safe to stay home, vote for a third party, or actually cast a protest vote in his direction, to indicate your dissatisfaction with Clinton. I am quite sure that there were a large number of people who on November 10th wished they hadn’t done what they did on the 9th.
No, what I’m saying is that the left/Democrats AND the super-religious seem to both display the same trait, and that’s an absolute conviction in their beliefs, and a corresponding unwillingness to engage in debate about things they view this way.
It’s a problem for both groups- if one side decides the other side is WRONG, then they’re not willing to debate or discuss or anything. It’s just time to fight at that point.
It was a hypothetical example of what I believe the more left-leaning members of the SDMB hold as some kind of sacred cow. I don’t have any concrete examples off-hand.
But you have to admit, there’s a pretty large amount of politically correct groupthink on here- if you don’t toe the line on some things, you’re vilified, even though what you’re saying may not be out of the mainstream, or particularly hateful or anything. For example, if you have an opinion that’s anything other than being pro-transgender people in every way, shape and form, you’re going to be told that you’re a hateful bigot pretty much immediately when in fact, that may not be the case. There’s often not much debate that’s not marred by name-calling and frothing, indignant, condescending rebuttals when these things happen, even when the question is very legitimate.
There are times when one side is on the wrong side of history. People against abolition were WRONG, people supporting jim crow were WRONG. I feel that those who do not wish to allow gays or trans to have the right to be treated with the same dignity that everyone else is is WRONG, for much the same reasons.
But then, I have never seen a situation where hatred, contempt, oppression, or marginalization is RIGHT.
There are times when it is right to call someone out for being WRONG.
If you don’t like an economic policy, and wish to act to ensure its destruction, there is nuance for reasonable people to disagree.
If you don’t like a particular group of people, and wish to see them destroyed, there is no nuance, that is just WRONG.
So, I think part of the problem is that the people in the center are not talking to eachother. We have the moderates of one side only talking to and acknowledging the fringies of the other. We have the moderates of one side judging the other by their fringies.
So, when I try to have a reasonable conversation with someone on the other side of the aisle, they get mad at me for something that someone way over there said to them. Which would be one thing, I suppose, if it were actually a group, where I could ask them to knock it off while the adults speak, but when it is some description of a facebook post that a friend saw once that has so inflamed someone, I have no idea where to go with that. It does seem that those on the right have been looking for things to get themselves worked up and upset over, when some college student’s blog or facebook page suddenly becomes what all the conservatives are pointing at as “proof of liberal…” whatever it is that is being proved this time.
I have almost never read an op/ed piece about gender, sex, or sexual orientation issues that was not first linked by a right aligned person, telling me that I have to defend this indefensible thing. Most of the time it is something like talking about how an episode of Thomas the Tank reinforces gender stereotypes, and I end up going a dozen posts trying to figure out what it is about he op/ed that has them so inflamed in the first place. Then they get mad because I didn’t agree with them, and accuse me of being unwilling to debate.
The solution, the only solution I see, is for the adults to simply ignore the kids.
If someone does not make what you feel to be an honest argument, simply ignore it, move on. If someone says something that irks your ire, just ignore it, and move on. If some facebook post from a college student in california tells you that you are doing something wrong, either take the advice it gives (if you feel it is good advice), or ignore it, and move on.
If you stop to engage with every single person on the other side that says something that you find hurtful, then you are going to only have time to engage in conversation with people who say things that are hurtful.
Well, I can think of one recent Democratic candidate who was too much like a Republican — she even got all palsy with Henry Kissinger, still able to weave his seductive magic as if he was still a whippersnapper of 317 — for me to consider her.
The amusing thing is sincerely she was probably the most profoundly christian believer of any candidate these 50 years. And brooked no rival: she was compelled to raise the first doubts about Obama’s true beliefs, and more recently had to point out that Bernie Sanders was a Jew.
:rolleyes: Shodan, you’re the one who’s not getting it, and I think it’s because you’ve forgotten what we were talking about in the first place. Let’s recap:
The OP came in here specifically to discuss a linked video claiming that conservatives voted for Trump essentially because they felt liberals were being mean to them, so it’s the liberals’ fault that Trump won.
I pointed out that that hypothesis makes conservatives look like whiny children who cast their votes out of personal spite and resentment rather than on the basis of what electoral outcome they sincerely prefer.
If there are any conservatives who really did vote for Trump specifically for such petty childish reasons, contempt and mockery is the only appropriate response. (Well, that or compassionate silence, I guess. But certainly rational argument would be pointless.)
Note that that opinion in no way denigrates or mocks any conservative who chose to vote for Trump for other reasons. So your follow-up complaint completely misses the mark:
Now let’s look at what I actually said:
I repeat: I am not in the least mocking or denigrating conservatives who voted for Trump because they sincerely wanted him as President. What is laughable and contemptible is conservatives allegedly voting for Trump against their own better judgement just because they wanted to get back at liberals for being so “mean” to them. :rolleyes:
Here’s another tactic used by conservatives (not exclusively, though), called moving the goalposts. This bears absolutely no relevance to the point of my post, that figuring out why Trump won and Hillary lost is an academic pursuit and does nothing but waste time.
But on that point, I saw the same interview and VICE episode (or was it a stand-alone documentary? I forget.) you did, but I got a slightly different message from it. Obama screwed up, and even he admitted it. Now apply that to Trump. Can you see the orange-haired one EVER admitting he was wrong about anything? And, once again, are you claiming that the excuse for eight years of intransigently refusing to work with Democrats on ANYTHING can be boiled down to one quote from one speech?
I don’t believe anyone thinks that is the actual conscious thought process going on in the heads of many people…some? possibly, people are weird.
Nor do I believe that anyone is trying to say the full reason for all of Trumps support was left-wing derision.
But for absolute certain there were plenty of reasonable people in the centre that perhaps toyed with the idea of voting Trump and found themselves vilified for even considering it. At that point, if you are using insult and self-righteousness against them then you are not going to bring them back. They were the ones that may have tipped the balance in Hilary’s favour, they were there to be convinced but hectoring and lecturing will not do that.
Now the left either wants to win those people back and convince them of a better way, or they do not, which is it? and what tactics do you suggest we use?
I go with Jonathan Pie, reasoned debate, sensible discussion and try to pick a better candidate next time.