Ultimately I have to live with them as they are far too numerous to ignore. I will continue to think of them as fools or evil (even if that evil is the indifference to the suffering of others) though.
I live in deep MAGA country. It would be impractical and counterproductive to shun all the MAGA people I associate with or come in contact with. If they bring up the election I’ll try to change the subject. Yea, I am saying to myself they’re ignorant or foolish or naïve, but it would be futile for me to get on a soapbox about it.
Thank you for this! I have been quite unhappy to see the trend away from liberal education toward STEM (for career income maximization?), but I wouldn’t be able to articulate exactly why.
But now I see that, yes, sacrificing attention to the humanities has degraded American intellect and thus helped enable Trumpism.
Are Europe’s universities better than America’s at this issue?
And greed and avarice and sloth and indolence!
My own issue is STEM education being forced on young girls. If a girl is interested in STEM, and/or wishes to pursue a STEM career, great, but those aren’t the ONLY career options for girls, or boys either for that matter.
I saw an unattributed post about parents keeping their grade-school aged daughters home from school because boys are chanting Nick Fuentes’ quote about “Her body is MY choice now” or something like that. And the boys are getting away with it. It sounds like a rumor or a fledgling urban legend to me.
I completely disagree. In this society there is still pressure on girls to avoid science and math because they are not feminine. Young girl need to be taught the basics of math and science or else their interest will never be sparked. One friend of mine didn’t really consider a science career until she did well in science classes, turned out to be a whiz in physics and ended up with a PhD from CalTech.
I’m not saying that all girls need to take advanced science classes, but basic science and math literacy is sorely lacking. Yes those who truly love STEM will still gravitate to it but we need basic math, science and computer literacy as much as we need actual reading literacy ( which is also currently sorely lacking).
And pressure to take STEM courses because they aren’t “feminine” (and thus inferior), something I’ve heard women complain about. Neither Right nor Left seems much concerned with what the girls in question like, only in what is ideologically proper for them.
The practical difference being that the Right is going to be in a position to enforce it.
Thanks for inserting the missing “not” in my original post about STEM.
Gaudere’s Law in action (I was complaining about reduced focus on the language arts). 
Bingo! This exactly.
My experience raising a very math-and-science loving girl is that there is a lot of talk about encouraging women and girls in stem, and a lot of action discouraging women and girls in stem.
My daughter was driven out of chess and robotics programs in elementary school by sheer neglect and openly discriminatory behavior by the facilitators. In chess clubs she was constantly made to play with rank beginners who were learning how pieces moved. Even though she had one of the highest online ratings of anyone there. In robotics I watched her getting “moved on” by the instructors after a few seconds of hands on work, while the boys had several minutes each on their turns.
In high school the counselors kept steering her toward language and social studies. The principal found time to review her course selections entering junior year and disenrolled her from AP Computer Science, because he “didn’t want to set her up for failure”. Her math grades were the highest in the school. In Robotics Team she was assigned to Social (arrange food) and Fundraising (sell ice cream). There were no girls assigned to either Build or Code teams. When I complained, the response was that the teacher running the team was a volunteer (he was getting paid) and was “old school” so whachagonnadoyaknow.
The guidance counselor coordinating college applications added a bunch of schools to her “good fit” list that did not even have Engineering programs. Even when she got admitted to one of the best Engineering schools in the world, the counselor lamented that she wasn’t going to law. Someone who has taken AP Calc BC, AP Physics, AP Chem, AP Comp Sci A, AP Comp Sci P, AP Statistics and AP Biology is clearly gunning for a History degree and then Law School because she also took AP US History!
She was elected the President of the school’s chapter of the Math Honor Society. The school decided that the President should not be chosen by election.
On the other hand the school did make her an ambassador for Women & Girls in STEM. Where you get to organize events. Because that’s the role of Women & Girls in STEM. Organize events to talk about Women & Girls in STEM. And then when you go into the real world, you can help organize conferences where the Men in STEM can present their work.
This boggles my mind! Was it recently, and where are you located? (Just the general area of the country is OK.)
New England, a very progressive place. The Town has voted against Trump three times. But it’s very upper middle class, with a frightening uniformity of well educated SAHMs and highly paid professional dads.
Were all girls treated this way, or just your daughter?
All.
In the case of the Robotics team the girls worked on the robot of the team of the school two or three towns over. That team coach was a woman who was an engineer and patent attorney.
Things aren’t all that great at the University she’s at now either. I attended a welcome event at the engineering school. After celebrating the achievement of having achieved a 25% female entering class, the Dean then proceeded to use “him”, “he” and “your son” to refer to the entering undergraduate student in the rest of his talk!
Can you truly not see that by refusing to vote for Harris, you deprived her of a vote she needed to defeat Trump?
Isn’t this something you earlier said you saw on a local news segment where people were handwringing that those poor girls were being forced into STEM classes? Cite that this ever really happened outside some local news ratings week outrage.
I don’t want to continue any hijack but I am encouraged to see some supporting my point. Keep in mind I am not saying that all girls have to take AP sciences but when we talk about “young girls” I am assuming we are talking about primary and middle school and I strongly feel that all students need a background in STEM these days.
For what it’s worth, I definitely benefited from being raised in an area that encouraged women in STEM. When I told my mother at age 3 that I wanted to be a doctor, she could only find a nurses kit for girls. However, at about age 11 I was invited to a conference for girls in science where the girls were able to learn from real life female scientists, mathematicians and even an actual female astronaut ( this was the 70s). In 8th grade I was selected by my math teacher to be part of a team of four to compete in a junior high math contest ( I had no idea I was one of the top students, thought the teacher hated me and assumed the three boys on the team were math geniuses). I felt better when I won my portion of the competition and we took the overall trophy. This is still the only trophy I’ve ever won and I cherish it. I want to see girls continue to have the same kind of encouragement.
Back to the topic, I am disgusted by the open mysogyny I have seen online since the election and I worry about the future for women in our society.
I’ve said before that I’m going to be fine because I’m just a white heterosexual dude and I just assumed Mrs. Odesio would be fine because she’s a white heterosexual lady. When I said we’d be fine it wasn’t because either of us were happy with the results of the election, it was simply a recognition that neither one of us was part of a group that was especially vulnerable to MAGA lunacy.
For the first time ever, we had to talk about her health care options because we’re not sure if her birth control pills will be available or whether procedures she might need will still be legal. I was resigned to having to eat a shit sandwich like everyone else, but now I feel as though some MAGA sandwich aritist personally made my wife that shit sandwich like some Subway sandwich artist from hell.
I’m not prepared to be sympathetic to Trump voters. They hurt my family. Whether my ignorance or with deliberation their feet are on our necks.
I know a lot of people who are soft conservatives, the ones who happily voted for Romney or even GWB but don’t like the Palin/Trump turn their party took. In my case they’re mostly middle-aged professionals.
They’re the vanishingly rare “swing voters” that the news channels are always seeking out. Their votes really have been mixed, though they still lean GOP.
They’ve seen plenty of outright sexism and hard-R racism in their lives. They probably have an uncle who still goes on about the blacks (even he has learned to use that word in mixed company) if he gets wound up at Sunday dinner and even though they’ve learned over the years that engaging only makes it worse, they tell him to shut up, especially if the kids are around.
They don’t secretly agree with that uncle–they really do believe he’s wrong, and a relic from another time. They know they’ll never change his mind. But when they grew up that’s the kind of thing adults would talk openly about with no one at all speaking up. They take some pride in not being like that.
And that’s why these are the people who get so upset when they think they’re being called racists. That uncle is what racism looks like, and they’re nothing like that. They’re genuinely furious about the suggestion that they didn’t vote for Kamala because she’s a black woman.
But if you ask about why they voted for Trump, they’d tell you that they just didn’t like Harris. They can’t tell you why, they just don’t like her. Note that they’ve never said any such thing about a white male politician. (They might have said this about Hillary, but all this applies to sexism too.) The idea that this might be a result of unconscious racism/sexism is offensive, because they’re just not like that. It’s just something about her.
This is a crack that MAGA has wiggled itself into, They turn every lesson about insidious or systemic or other more complicated manifestations of racism into “they’re calling you a racist!”. They turn DEI efforts into something unrecognizable and shit all over them.
The only way to do anything about this is education–people need to understand that racism is more complicated than their uncle’s version, and fighting against racism is more than just not being personally outwardly prejudiced, and saying that everyone has a role in fighting racism is not the same as calling them racists. But that’s exactly what MAGA has pushed back against, and it will only get worse in the coming years.
As someone else has said, I believe people voted for Trump because the Democrats have abandoned the working class party. They talk too much about the rights of transgendered people, pronouns, and diversity. I’m sick of hearing about those things. Also, they took COVID restrictions too far, and a lot of people were unhappy with how schools were handled.
I still voted for Kamala because I care about global warming, but I disagree with a lot of what the Democratic party emphasizes these days.