:dubious:
pfffft.
I’d say he lost you when he implied that he believed the federal government could (and should) work for the benefit of all citizens.
*Well I do my best to understand it,
But you still mystify and I want to know why
I pick myself up off the ground
To have you knock me back down again and again
And when I ask you to explain, you say…
You’ve gotta be cruel to be kind
*
I’ll never forgive the Wright brothers for killing Buddy Holly.
Cruelty is based on fear and weakness. The strong can afford empathy and kindness.
Do you have any idea how wrong this is, what a terrible idea to contemplate?? Bodies not only weaken a cement foundation from the get go, but their deterioration continues to do so in an unpredictable manner. What if that piece of shit building w/ a piece of shit in the foundation falls on a ***good ***person?
It is not a theoretical impossibility, it just has never happened. Whether it should or not is schoolmarm nonsense.
20 years ago, I was one of these people. I grew up in a household filled with people who are currently avid Trump supporters, and had things gone slightly differently, I would have been one of them. I married a woman of color who grew up well below the poverty line, and over time (it was not an immediate change), I realized that everything I had believed was wrong. I know, from my own thought process at the time, that the cruelty was absolutely the point.
I think my main thought process was that since I had no real convictions about anything, that nobody did. When I heard about someone wanting to save the animals, or clothe the homeless or protect the environment, I didn’t even consider the possibility that these were actual problems that actual people actually cared about. So, they were just pretending to care about these issues and they were vocal about it because they wanted to appear morally superior to me. And, by god, it was my job to knock them down a peg. It’s why I would have supported Trump, and why I would have continued to support Trump regardless of what he did or what he was accused of; he pissed off the people who were pretending to be morally superior to me, and any of the stuff coming out about him is either unimportant stuff that those moralizers are, again, pretending to care about, or it’s better than the alternative of having those morally superior folks get their way and have one of their own in office. The ends (putting those people in their place) justifies the means.
I’m thankful that I’ve evolved on this, but I probably can’t run for office based on some of the awful shit that I said to people before I did!
(I unlurked for this post!)
Kflqnaga, thank you for that insightful, eloquent, and vital post — seriously. Seeing people who (“pretend to”?) care about something as needing to be brought down a peg — fascinating.
I know where he’s coming from - growing up in a solidly middle class home and neighborhood where everyone’s grandparents were blue collar, this sort of attitude was not uncommon.
Basically the prevailing attitude was that you should keep your eyes on providing for you and yours; people who got wound up about saving the whales, or other “frivolous” stuff were viewed as suspect, not entirely within the real world, and dingy. And if they got to moralizing about it, especially politicians, they were viewed as either pretenders or absurd, and as such, deserving of scorn and hostility, as they didn’t have their focus on “more important things”.
The reason that the democrats seem to be the party of minorities is only in the stark contrast to the republicans who are the party against minorities. So, yeah, the minorities are going to be more represented in the party that accepts and welcomes them rather than the party that hates and vilifies them.
You do see the democrats standing up for minorities, but that is because the republicans are attacking them. It is not the democrats obsessed with minorities, it is the republicans that are obsessed with harming them.
If you see someone beating up your friend, and you make that person stop, does it make any sense for your other friend that is not being beaten up to be jealous that you aren’t looking out for his interests?
What I hear in this complaint that I do hear over and over and over from those who support racists out of their own short sighted selfishness is:“While you were preventing Steve from getting the shit beat out of him, who the hell was scratching my back? I’m gonna be friends with the guy that beat up Steve, because, even though I don’t like that he beats up Steve, he promised me a back scratch.”
*Sorry Steve.
Right, but that’s the thing, people can actually care about things that happen that are not right in front of their noses, they can care about the welfare of those who are not you and yours.
It is very selfish and short sighted to only care about your and yours, as there are others out there who will affect you and yours. If we work to make the world a better place, then we all get to live in a better world. If you are selfish and shortsighted, and only care about what’s in front of your face, then you will live in a worse world, and drag the rest of us along.
I actually never imagined that empathy and altruism would be traits that are looked on with scorn and hostility, until the republicans came along and looked upon empathy and altruism with scorn and hostility.
Kinda sickens me, actually.
Interesting metrics, especially how президент Trump is a whopping six tenths worse.
ETA:
Plus one, especially the bolded.
I’m talking historically; the overt hostility is a relatively new thing from what I can see.
Either way, from where those people sit, the Democratic party isn’t doing a great job of pointing out that they stand for them as well. Part of that may be that this whole political game is perceived as zero-sum game where if minorities “win”, they (white working/lower middle class) necessarily lose.
And that is the problem I have with many people when they make political decisions. We do not live in a zero-sum game, or a negative sum game. We have a positive sum game, where, quite literally, the better your neighbor does, the better you do. The better that person on the other side of the country does who doesn’t look like or talk like you, the better that you do.
When minorities “win”, so do we.
The only way to make sure that that “other” doesn’t get anything is to shift it to a negative sum game (there really is no such thing as zero sum in practice, you are either growing or shrinking, stagnation is never stable), but that means that you (all) will also have less, maybe not in the short term, if you are good enough at fighting over scraps, but in the long term, we will all, every one of us, be more impoverished.
When minorities “lose”, so do we.
Maybe it’s logarithmic. Which still doesn’t scale properly. If Obama has an 8 to be compared to the America-hating fuckstick, it’s an 8 on a scale oc 0-1,000,000; and the America-hating fuckstick’s score is 1,000,008.6.
So being the party of everyone is not enough?
I thought these were the “all lives matter” people. Why do they need to be singled out and reassured when the idea is that its a party for all types of people?
Seems pretty inconsistent.
I am largely in agreement with this post, but I think it’s becoming more and more necessary to remind people that we do not live in a finite game. Even tho we, as individuals, may die and be out of the game, the game continues. The strategies successfully employed in finite games can be disastrous when employed in an infinite game.
Not if it isn’t *seen *that way by enough people.
They really would have hated Jesus.
Reminds me both of several cases I know of people who got kicked out of their homes for wanting to go to college, and of my cousin who took 39 years to understand that the main reason other people had jobs different from his own was a combination of “I wouldn’t want to do what you do in a million years” and “I like this other thing I do” (yes, not everybody has a dream job; still, he had the kind of job which looks pretty on TV, not so pretty when you think of doing it yourself).