I do not wish to be thought of as something I am not.
I am not a Nazi, nor a Nazi-sympathizer, nor a Confederate sympathizer, nor a Neo-Confederate, nor a white supremacist of any sort, nor a Fascist or Fascist sympathizer of any sort.
I have anger problems, and when I get angry, I say things without thinking. I’m a reactionary, and I am adverse to change (literally ANY change - not just political). I’m a young man who is both angry about things because of external non-political factors, and who is like a stick in the mud. I get angry and say stupid things.
I voted for Hillary Clinton in the primaries and general election last year.
I voted for Obama in my first election in 2012.
My favorite Presidents are Theodore Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and Gerald Ford.
I do not hate anyone based on race, gender, gender identity, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, color, or creed. I do not consider myself (or whites in general) superior to anyone of a differing race or ethnic group.
I do not want to be hated or thought of poorly. If it is an apology you would like, then I shall give a genuine apology; I want to be liked here. I have been on this forum for over a year and a half, and only in the past few weeks have I run into issues because I react too angrily and too nuclear when it comes to contentious topics.
I want to be liked and accepted here and not thought of as something I am not nor ever would be.
So, sorry for any offense caused, sorry for any anger incited, sorry for any stupid words said.
The most potent tool against Leftist overreach is ridicule. When they don their Che shirts and decry fascists don’t think it is lost on the silent majority.
And be wary of any alliance with the reactionary Right. Respect history but discard the refuse.
Also, respectful discourse goes a long way here. Once you’ve made your point (that the movement to tear down statues is going too far), no need to badger us.
Then stop using their snarl words like “SJW” and “Cultural Marxism”. After reading your non-Cafe Society posts, I seriously think you are just 14 words away from throwing out “cuck”.
Again, if you wish to be regarded as liberal /centrist/left of centre/whatever your first step is to cease using RW snarl words. Your next step is to advocate for left of centre positions. I certainly haven’t read all your posts but I don’t recall any political post of yours that wasn’t firmly right of centre, even by American standards.
You are also at risk of becoming a one-trick pony - how many threads have you started (never mind contributed to) about or related to Confederate statues? I seem to recall at least three, including one rightfully locked for trolling, and I’m pretty sure I’m under-counting. This is nothing to do with “reacting angrily” and is a borderline obsession. Maybe you should step away from this topic for a month or two.
It is a natural reaction for a person who is suffering from poverty or other issues to want to lash out. However, when one uses only the tropes of Sean Hannity or Tucker Carlson or David Duke to describe one’s situation, it is going to be natural to lash out at an imaginary “left” (that, in real life, has maybe 2000 members in a country of over 300 million).
A tiny number of people might attack you for being white. There is no one on the “left” that is telling you to be ashamed of yourself. Those are claims falsely made about people to the left of center by Hannity, Carlson, Duke, Coulter, and other Trump partisans.
As long as you echo those sentiments, people are going to see you as one more ignorant, disaffected person and the more you use those tropes to hurl insults, the more you present yourself as a Trump supporter.
Your pattern of discourse is based on a Lie. How you will be perceived is up to you, but reading from the playbook of the worst of the deplorables will shape how you are seen.
Step one for being a principled individual: don’t have “being liked” as a guide to your thoughts or behavior.
That doesn’t mean ignoring the ideas and opinions of others, of course. I’ve modified my approach to real-life issues I was facing a couple of times based on input received right here on the SDMB. But that was because I listened to and thought about other viewpoints - not because I wanted anyone here to like me.
I don’t think there’s any apology necessary. Keep on believing whatever it is you want to believe in, and the rest of us will either agree with you or call you on bullshit. Not everyone’s opinions fall perfectly within a particular quadrant relative to the economic and social political ideological axes. I know that I am, relative to most Republicans and even many ‘independents’ pretty much to their political left, and yet I disagree with the political left on some issues on occasion.
I don’t see the problem with Social Justice Warrior when used with some discretion, but if it’s used indiscriminately then it weakens the credibility of the poster. I appreciate engaging and thoughtful posters who happen to be on the political right, but if there’s one thing that annoys me to no end it’s someone who describes themselves as a progressive and yet posts pretty much everything to the contrary. Know thyself.
I don’t know who you are, and I don’t recall any of your posts, other than you start a lot of threads. So take these comments as though I am a neutral party.
You are on a totally wrong track if you think that people want apologies from people who behave like jerks. If you want people to like you, treat them with dignity. Saying sorry doesn’t undo people’s poor opinions of you.
You have to change. It doesn’t sound to me like you are ready to put in the work to be a better person; it sounds like you’re seeking shortcuts to what you really want. That is a sign of immaturity.
Those are traits that will cost a young person a lot. The rate of change in the world will only accelerate over the next 70 years that matter to you. Most of those changes will be good. Some will be bad. All will be different.
A man who sets his face against all change is a man who will be bowled over by the future and have nothing but ever-increasing frustration.
Fix that. Get professional help if needed. But the world *will *change until you hardly recognize it. If you don’t learn to bend with it gradually you’ll simply be broken by it at some unknown point in the future. And be increasingly miserable every second of every day as you drive towards that breakdown.
Your choice. Your move.
Young men who do that tend to end up in jail or badly beaten in alleys.
Bigger picture:
You’ve been quoting the standard RW narrative. Which comes from listening to the standard RW mouthpieces. Whose very purpose is to spew anger. Their whole and entire schtick is “all anger all the time.” Nothing more. Why do they do that?
Because, just as you say, angry people don’t think. Instead they do. And what do they do? They do what they’re told to do.
It’s real valuable to have an angry mob you can instruct to buy your books and magazines, support your websites, vote for your candidates, and show up when ordered for demonstrations or whatever. So they have plenty of motivation to recruit a mob. Massive money andmassive power for them is a powerful incentive. For them. What incentive do you *really *have to be one of their mooks?
You have demonstrated in a lot of your non-ranty posts that you have a keen eye for historical political analysis. The apparent fact you can’t do that about current events tells me that you’re using garbage for data. Then the GIGO rule guarantees your conclusions will be garbage as well.
Your choice. Your move.
I mean all this in the most supportive way possible. You can get control of yourself and your destiny or you can let them drive you down the anger vortex into something pretty ugly and unhealthy.
Most Dopers don’t have very long memories for relatively newbie posters such as yourself. So if you lay off on the “stop hating me for being a white man” stuff, it won’t take long for you to go back to being just another rando.
It’s not just about the topic itself; he’s a one-trick pony with the whole thread-starting thing, especially in recent weeks.
The OP has made a total of 623 posts to this message board, and fully 124 of those (about 1 in 5) is a post starting a new thread. He has started over 100 threads in the last three months alone. That’s better than one new thread every day. People who do this are often shitty message board members.
I understand that there are no rules against starting lots of threads, but in my 16 years (fuck, is it that long?) on these boards, i have noticed a fairly decent correlation between people who start a lot of threads (as a percentage of their total post count) and people who start a lot of stupid or poorly-articulated threads. I suspect it’s because they’re generally more interested in getting attention for their views than they are in clearly and cogently discussing their views.
No, he just struck me as one of the few Presidents who was truly like your average American, did overall little damage, openly supported the ERA, started federal Special Education, and seemed like a genuinely nice person. He didn’t really have much time to do much else.
I’ve been a member for 2 weeks shy of 15 years. I have made 21,346 posts and started 184 threads in that time, or just over one thread per month on average.
That and I’m a 55 year old white man who thinks that anyone who thinks they’re hated for being a white man is a fucking moron who listens to people who are telling him that to make him angry.
To be fair, outside of a few recent political threads, most of the threads I’ve made are asking other people things. Usually their opinion on something, or their recollections of different times and events. I tend to like to ask questions because I find people’s POVs interesting. That’s why I make them. I want to hear people’s views on things (whether it be of a movie or of an event in the past or whatever). I can see how it would be seen the wrong way though.
The biggest help I need is basically cleaning the poison out so to speak. I was raised by people who told me there was a race war coming in the near future; I heard this from the time I was a kid. I heard that the media was run by anti-white people; and as a teen was shown all sorts of propaganda such as commercials which supposedly had anti-white content or that had an underlying anti-white message to it. I was raised up to feel that Orwell’s 1984 was going to be realized in the near future; that our American history would be changed and that political correctness would further stifle language. I was raised to distrust Blacks and Jews. That the media is trying to inflame a race war by focusing on white-on-black crime; that the media doesn’t talk about what happened to the Irish; that our family had to assimilate and lose their language and people today do not. All things I was taught from a young age.
The joke of it is, I’m not from the South. The people who taught me these things aren’t members of militia groups, or Klansmen, or uneducated people. But they held and hold those beliefs so strongly. I do not think they would ever hurt a Black person or a non-White person in general. The irony of it is that the people who held these beliefs had among their friends a Black man and a Jewish woman. A Black man was (R.I.P.) my godfather. My father held most of the anti-black views, yet Joe was his best friend who like I said, was my godfather; He was an Italian from Benshonhurst who did some time in jail with members of the NOI, which helped to cultivate his distrust of Blacks. He would hang a Confederate flag on the wall, yet as I told another poster privately, he cried the night Obama was elected. Not from sadness or sorrow, but from carthasis. He thought Blacks and Whites could finally let go of the old baggage. My mother held the anti-Jewish sentiments and yet one of her closest friends is and was a Jewish woman, with whom we actually once spent Passover; I even spent time in a Jewish summer camp once as a child and was always around her son. My mother gained her anti-Semitism through her mother, who would tell her that there is (verbatim) “Nothing worse than a Liberal Jew.” Then again, my grandmother would also say that there was “Nothing worse than an Irish from the other side”, meaning an Irish person from Ireland (she herself was Irish-American).
My brother in law was the one who would show me the anti-white propaganda. He was indepenantly bigoted; he never really talked much to my parents, and his own mother struck me as being quite enlightened. He was a Civil War Re-enactor in his youth. He was into war gaming, Warhammer 40k, and such things. He was a pervert. When I was as young as 14, he would point out hot women to me and say he would “destroy them”; I remember a conversation where, I was about 15, he told me that “licking a woman’s ass” drives her over the edge (in terms of an orgasm).
Both my father and brother in law were fights, men quick to anger, men who would speak of their fights were they beat the shit out of another man. My father spoke of a time he took a guy’s elbow and busted it over the bannister of a staircase, breaking it, or when once in jail, he attacked a black guy at lunch by hitting him repeatedly with the metal lunch tray.
I was taught that masculinity = violence. Yet I’ve never been prone to violence myself, leading to issues with my own sense of masculinity, which breeds bitterness and contempt. “Why am I not a violent guy? Why am I not a fighter?” It’s not my nature. It makes me angry and deeply resentful, and all of those ugly emotions are tied to my uglier views I was raised to have.
So yeah, those were my primary role models; and my male role models.
I have always tried to idealize my grandfather, who I have heard from various people was quite progressive for his day in his racial views. The only friends of his I’ve ever heard of were all minorities. He kept a book called “Why America Fights” by Sherwood Eddy, which says in part, that America was fighting in WWII to bring about ‘social justice’; and that after the War we needed to focus on bringing ‘social justice’ to our land with regard to the races; that it was our Christian duty to do so. He held this little booklet as so important that he made sure to keep it in pristine condition from the time he got in 1942 to the time he died in 1975. I never got to meet him, so he stands more as an ideal than someone I could actually listen to or take advice from. My other grandfather isn’t bigoted, but he doesn’t speak much about anything, he is generally silent, so there is not much to be gotten from him.
I would like to be more like my grandfathers, and less like my parents. It is a struggle. It’s a struggle that leads me to even have a love/hate relationship with EVERYTHING Baby Boomer related.
Internally, a part of me knows these things are wrong, and works to fight against what I was taught. Another part of me is bitter at the world and bitter toward life in general and clings to these hatreds because hatred is easy to cling to; When you fuck things up, it’s easy to blame others rather than yourself. When you see society changing, it’s easy, almost instinctual, to believe that the things you were told were going to happen, are happening. Thus at times I’ll come off like a relatively nice Leftist person, because that’s myself - my enlightened self - talking. When I say stupid alt-right shit, that’s the part of me that was raised to feel that way talking. It’s a struggle. There is also a heavy element of pride as well as a degree of Narcissism in there (then again, my generation is said to be the most Narcissistic).
Bigotry is a security blanket. That’s all it is. It’s a hard blanket to shake off.