Many years ago, when I was in university, a friend made the comment that, what the US was doing today, Canada would be doing in 20 years. The subsequent 30 years have pretty much proven him right. If anything, the rise of the internet and social media have accelerated this.
I use to vote conservative, but in the last 15 years of so, there has been a steady movement further and further right every year, until the party pretty much stopped supporting any of the things I used to agree with them on, while increasing support for all the parts I was never a fan of.
Now, we see a lot more of the conservative voters who act just like the Trumpkins, or at least Tea Partiers - disdain for knowledge and expertise, refusal to consider evidence or do math, blanket condemnations of the Prime Minister and other political opponents as being “stupid”, “terrible”, “treasonous”, and all that, without even a fig leaf of justifications supplied for any such assertions.
That pretty well describes the Sam Stone of the aughts (hell, I never thought I’d use that word). Frankly, even Shodan used to belong to that group in my estimation. I rarely agreed with either one of them back then, but I didn’t find them vile. I don’t know whether the ugliness was there all along, but hidden until it was shown that it was shared by many, or whether they just followed others down the hole of ugliness that is the current conservative stance and found themselves not hating it.
I forgot to mention that in response to the title of this thread, it’s certainly not gullibility. I might not like what Sam has become, but he was always smart. Frequently wrong, but smart.
Behold the power of long-time immersion in carefully crafted deliberately fact-free propaganda. It can eventually turn almost any decent sensible person into a frothing jerk and can very quickly turn a fully-formed natural jerk into a terrorist wannabe or actual terrorist.
There are plenty of pundits on the international scene who aver the US is sleep-walking into becoming Turkey, the Phillippines, or Russia. Right now. This year.
Why? Because we have no life-long exposure to deeply cynical criminally motivated made-up-from-whole-cloth polemic media, we lack any sort of immunity to it. The Russians raised on Pravda know better. The Americans raised on Time / Newsweek, AP / UPI / Reuters, and ABC / NBC / CBS do not. Instead we (or at least lots of we) swallow that bilge hook, line, and sinker.
Once the authoritarians finish their takeover it’ll take about 10 years for everybody to grow the requisite cynicism. But grow it they will. Then it’ll be up their as yet unborn grandkids to overthrow the bad guys. The ayatollahs have been running Iran for ~40 years now. They’ve probably got 20 years to run yet. What they lack and have lacked for a decade now is popular legitimacy.
Unlike in actually democratic free countries, an authoritarian government seen as illegitimate can persist a long time.
We have Trumpists here in Ontario, too. It’s bizarre, like people with some sort of odd filter in their brain.
The Trump thing is really kind of beyond “not smart.” It’s not the same thing. It’s a sort of odd gullibility… or something, I’m not exactly sure what the correct word is. People who are otherwise seemingly intelligent can believe genuinely weird, reality-denying things, or accept mantras on faith. It’s usually oddly specific. Some people, for instance, simply cannot seem to turn on the skepticism switch when it comes to scams and cons. Doctors and lawyers have fallen for 419 scams, which you would think would simply not be possible, and yet, it is so.
I mean, I’ve met Trumpists who otherwise seem like well functioning adults, and yet when it comes specifically to Trump they have some kind of psychological block that prevents them from seeing that he lies nonstop. They believe weird myths about him, or say they do. And yet they are otherwise not obviously stupid people.
The sad thing is, I think there’s a need for that softer kind of conservative; the center right, thinking man’s conservative. It not only makes conservatism a better brand, it also makes liberalism a better brand as well.
The focus - correctly - right now is on how apeshit the conservative movement has turned in many parts of the democratic world, but with wealth inequality going the way it is, we could be talking about a violent swing in the other direction, which would be problematic in its own right. Bolshevism, leftist authoritarianism began that way.
Jesus Christ but this olace has gone toxic for anyone who isn’t part of the club.
For the record:
I think Trump is an ass.
I think Trump is a terrible president.
I think Trump will lose the election.
I think Trump is a congenital liar.
I think the Republican stance on masks is idiotic and dangerous to people around them.
How’s that for drinking the Kool-aid?
The reason I posted that thread was because in that specific case I thought his claim was too strong to be bullshit. I didn’t consider that the idiot would be referring to something he did a long time ago, nor did I get the distinction between ‘authorized’ and ‘mandated’ at the time, which gave him his ‘out’. My bad. On the other hand, the same mistake was made by at least Reuters, ABC News, The Globe and Mail in Canada, and those were just the three sources I had queued up in my ‘mea culpa’ post before you lost your self control and had the thread closed for bad behaviour.
This very minor, very couched QUESTION which I posted to specifically get opposing views triggered you so heavily that you couldn’t control yourself and had a thread shut down for insults outside of the pit. You behave like children when anyone disagrees with you in the slightest manner, then preen over how smart you are.
Then you think it’s fun to start attacking me on everything from my right to enjoy the music I like to how stupid I must be and how little I must understand about everything.
And now this discussion has to be in the pit, where I’m sure you will all get to have your little rage tantrums over someone not exactly like you having any kind of opinion you don’t like.
Oh, and by the way, the reason I occasionally post stuff like that is for BALANCE, because this place is becoming a monocultural echo chamber.
You should be thanking the few conservatives left here who are masochistic enough to put up with insults and mockery to try to give a bit of the other side’s view. Because one of the values of the SDMB was that it was one of the few places on the internet where you could find civil discussions between the right and the left.
You should WANT some conservatives around to help you understand the other side and their arguments. It is a value to YOU. And knowing that they are a rather persecuted minority arohnd here, you could try putting down the hate for a few minutes and actually take the opportunity to try and understand them.
Oh, who am I kidding? It’s much easier to ‘other’ them and hide in a bubble. Then yiu can pat each other on the back for being the good guys, responding to arguments from the other side with mockery and sophistry instead of real engagement.
We have conservatives around. Quite a few of them. It is the asshole RWers, the dogmatic reactionaries, that piss us off. The ones who use “conservative” in a way that comes to mean drooling fuckwit.
This place desperately needs balance between posters who have a healthy skepticism of things coming out of Trump administration and morons who take Trump Tweets at face value.
Translation – wah wah wah I’m a whiny baby who can’t accept that I was a festering dumbass for assuming a Trump tweet was something other than random poop flinging, so I’m going to whine and deflect and make excuses rather than accept that maybe since I already realize Trump is an idiot I should also realize that his tweets are meaningless blathering shit-flinging.
