Pitting Traitorous Black Male Trump Supporters

There’s been “race realist” threads, so no.

Is that another one of those rules that only apply to the left?

No, I doubt the Right is going to successfully nag anyone on the Left into changing their minds either.

For the record, I think that the liberal rebellion against the stifling conformity, social straitjackets and legislated morality of the pre-1960s era was fully justified. But somewhere along the line the Left shifted over into being just as preachy, moralistic (progressive morals that is) and oppressive as the anti-sex and anti-minority Old White Men’s society of the Right had ever been. It makes one wonder if the Left had ever really wanted the freedom for all that they claimed to, or if they really just wanted to seize for themselves the power the Right then enjoyed. Did they really want justice, or simply victory?

I doubt this is true, unless I forgot the decades long segregation enforced by the threat of death that the “Left” enforced across an entire region of the United States.

I don’t recall any Left states making laws that outlawed heterosexual relationships.

“When someone is accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.”

Since that would require the Left to commit mass suicide, obviously not.

You are pretending to a symmetry that doesn’t exist.

As long as the Left’s position is “we were only liberated from the concentration camp just yesterday”, all the people who don’t see them as victims– which includes the people who notice that for the most part the Left aren’t currently victims– the Left is going to have a credibility problem. After a while it gets tiresome; like the shrill screeching of Communists (in western democracies) who rant about how evil our entire government and society are and how we must immediately rise up in revolution.

No, that would be conservative Christians.

I would maintain that the progressive Left is an equal and opposite secular counterpart to the Fundies.

Except they are powerless, basically politically irrelevant and have nothing to do with the Democrats. They hate the Democrats. This wasn’t a Right-versus-Left election, it was moderate Right versus Nazis. And America chose the Nazis.

If you find it easier to argue against what you wish liberals had said than to argue against what they actually do say, then … I guess I can’t stop you.

But the straw man stuff reflects pretty poorly on you.

We need more intellectually honest conservatives – on the SDMB and in this country.

We may have to start genetically engineering them from scratch.

“Intellectually honest conservatives” is an impossibility, because intellectually honest people would stop being conservative. The hallmark of conservatism is that it’s simply factually wrong about essentially everything it claims. Reject everything wrong about conservatism and it doesn’t exist anymore.

If the problem is credibility, then why the everlovin’ fuck did anybody vote for Trump??

Look at the liberal agenda over the years. It champions equal rights, diversity, social services, etc, etc, etc. That answers your question. Sure, there are fanatics in any group or party, but look at the main thrust and draw your conclusions from that, not from what the fringe lunatics say and do.

In what meaningful sense is this true? Fundies have Project 2025, and its author is going to be in charge of the FCC. Fundies are banning crucial health care across the country in a way that’s leading to deaths. Fundies outlawed specific forms of marriage between consenting adults for decades, because they disapproved of those marriages. Fundies are siphoning off public education dollars to send them to segregation academies. Fundies deny well-established science in favor of a (fairly new) literal interpretation of a millennia-old collection of myths and pseudohistory.

In what meaningful sense is the progressive left “an equal and opposite counterpart” to any of this?

If what you mean is that the left has moral ideas that they speak about, okay, sure. But speaking about their moral ideas isn’t the thing that makes Fundies so dangerous.

There are certainly leftist extremists just as nasty as anyone on the Right. The difference is the leftist extremists are on the “guy who rants in a blog” level, not “has majority control of the national government” level.

I know I’m a month late…but this pithy summary deserves repeating.

I’m late to this thread, but this statement in the OP struck a nerve with me: I think these are very harsh and unkind sentiments to make about such a large group. (And also likely unproductive, as others have mentioned several times upthread.)

In any event, I would have to know someone’s motivations for voting the way they did. If they voted for Trump because of the malevolence and the hate he evinces, I would tend to agree with you.

But there are many people who believed the lies and misinformation spewed out by Trump, his sycophants, and the right-wing media, like the woman in the exit poll who said she voted for Trump because she wanted a “better life for herself and her children,” IIRC. :roll_eyes: There are surely black males who voted for Trump for similar reasons. These people are to either be pitied for having the wool pulled over their eyes, or if you are not feeling as charitable then regarded as complete fucking idiots. Ignorance or stupidity, take your pick.

Finally, there are the people who dislike Trump’s rhetoric, aren’t stupid or misinformed, but have made a calculated choice that Trump’s policies will be better for them than the alternative. People like my brother-in-law who works for a private bank that finances new oil and gas wells. These are the people I have the most trouble with figuring out how to deal with. They are neither evil or misinformed, just selfish and/or short-sighted.

But to lump all these people together, and to hope for people in the second group to also be put “face down in the dirt, dirt that is soaked in your tears and regrets,” and for you to say, “I pit you. I spit on you.” is over the top and unwarranted, in my opinion.

The thread has gone over this in various forms but in the moral system used by many people, someone being sort-sightedly selfish to the point of not caring if other people and the world will suffer harm by focusing only on what’s to their material benefit or emotional satisfaction, is evil and deserving of punishment.

Or if you don’t like the word “evil”, you may say “sinful” or whatever else means they did something that was bad and harmful, regardless of whether they acted with conscious malice, and retribution is due.

On the specific Thread Title “traitorous black male” line, she can of course correct me if I read her wrong, but ISTM OP Jasmine is reacting to an “Et tu?” moment. A sense of betrayal. It’s the utter incredulity that someone who is in a group already more likely to be put face down in the dirt when facing authority would care more about, oh… the price of eggs or of oil stocks or about an identity of manliness… than about their own and others’ oppression and how those things can possibly ever be more important than having the backs of those opressed.

And if they did that they were willfully stupid, and therefore deserve no sympathy. Trump has demonstrated how horrible and incompetent he is comprehensibly and very publicly; anyone who believes his nonsense at this point is outright denying reality. “Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me” except it’s a lot more than twice at this point.

Anyone who voted for Trump has committed an unforgivable act. No justification is good enough.