The US is different: The D vs R divide

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
81

This highlights how absurd all of the ‘why can’t we get along in spite of politics’ claims are. If you’re going to define ‘politics’ so broadly that wearing ordinary clothes you can buy at Target is a political statement that warrants violent retaliation, then of course people are going to ‘drag politics into the discussion’, because they’re going to wear some damn clothes.

Also, even if it is a ‘political statement’, the claim I was responding to was that right-leaning people were more tolerant of political statements that they disagree with than left-leaning people, and would just say something like ‘eh, you’re wrong, lets have a beer together’. It sounds like you confirm that such a thing would not happen for a man wearing a dress or a woman wearing a buzzcut, button-down shirt, and slacks, that the response would be… a bit less friendly than ‘lets have a beer’.

“Right-wingers have the level of tolerance we expect from countries regarded as hideously repressive by Western standards” is exactly my point. Thanks for agreeing with me!

82

I’m not arguing with you at all. I think over the past 20 years or so, politics has become extremely wrapped up in the culture that one identifies with. It may have always been this way, but it’s much more noticeable as of late. Political clashes are therefore cultural clashes. Political statements are therefore cultural statements.

83

I’m saying they are both (the trans-person walking into a redneck bar, and a woman showing skin in SA) examples of cultural clash that the rednecks/Saudi men may take as political and cultural statements rather than simple clothing choice, since politics and culture are so wrapped up in each other.

84

It had always been a political clash when straight cis Christian white men enforced the social order by lynching black people or beating up gay people.

The difference now is that the other side now has enough political power to make a go at fighting back.

85

No. Because there are more than one variable and the population would continue to bifurcate.

86

OK, let’s take a less extreme example – the “War on Christmas.”

A while back, businesses started to realize that lots of customers weren’t Christians, and rather than risk alienating those people they started saying “happy holidays” instead of “merry Christmas.” That wasn’t a political statement, just a business decision reflecting a changing culture.

Christians and the right made it a political statement, somehow construing “happy holidays” as an insult to their Christianity and actually boycotting businesses that used the phrase.

This idiocy transformed four simple, well-meaning words into a red/blue litmus test. Well done, snowflakes.

87

The goal posts have quietly been moved from “the left is more emotional and intolerant than the right” to “the right is no more emotional and intolerant than the left, unless you say something we strongly disagree with. In which case, you should expect us to beat you up”.

I’m reminded of the story that someone who disapproved of the Dixie Chicks’ criticism of President George W. Bush over OIF said they believed in free speech, but not in public.

88

Important note: I didn’t give an example of a trans person walking into a redneck bar. Both people had a complete match between their biological sex and social gender. Even if you extend ‘trans’ to include transvestites, neither one was actually cross-dressing. There are a lot of guys who wear dresses simply because they’re comfortable, though they usually limit it to places like music festivals because of the risk of right-wing ‘tolerance’ (aka brutal violence). Plus there’s a trend in some circles for guys to wear kilts, that would read as a dress or skirt in the circumstances. And there are a lot of women, especially lesbians, who wear their hair short and wear traditionally masculine outfits like slacks and a button-down shirt. I explicitly picked a non-trans person for the example, since a trans person would be subject to right wing tolerance-violence for simply existing.

Calling it a political statement also fails to defend the original claim, because the person I responded to claimed that the expected response from right leaning people to a differing political opinion was ‘eh, you’re wrong, lets have a beer together’. Even if you claim that a person wearing a normal outfit when they visit a bar is making a political statement, it still makes the original example fail because the original example was about discussing explicitly political opinions.

And there are a lot of problems with declaring that people living their lives normally are making ‘political statements’ and therefore to blame for any negative response. You’re going to need to explain to me why a woman wearing her usual work outfit, a guy wearing his usual leisure attire, a guy wearing his family’s traditional formal dress, a black man hanging out with his white wife, someone hanging out with their spouse of the same gender, and a lot of other people just going about their business are making incendiary “political and social statements”. Especially when the standard straight WASP doing the same thing in their usual outfit and with their usual partner doesn’t count as one.

89

So you think that 20 years ago, when anti-sodomy and anti-gay-marriage laws were still enforceable, it was safer for a guy wearing a dress or a woman with buzzed hair, button-down, and slacks to turn up at a redneck bar? What about 20 years before that, when the right wing was cheering on AIDS for punishing gay men? Or 20 years before that, when police raids on gay bars were common? Do we also want to try the same experiment with a black guy coming in with his white girlfriend on his arm? Or are you going to admit how divorced from reality the ‘right-leaning people will disagree with you but still have a beer with you’ claim is, now and especially 20-40-60 years ago?

Culture and politics have always been intertwined if you’re not the dominant culture. The major difference between now and 20 years ago is that Republicans have moved to explicitly embrace the ‘beat up some queers’ crowd while the Democrats have moved against that, so it’s more noticeable as a D vs R issue.

90

Bolding mine.

Actually that is the entire idea of a government at all. It really has no other purpose. Stopping people from murdering and stealing from each other, “forcing” people to contribute to community fire protection and roads. I have no idea how this became a “leftist” point of view – if governments did not do this, they wouldn’t be governments, they would not exist.

To say otherwise is beyond crazy.

Also, there are very few things in the social world that are NOT a matter of degree. I can’t think of any, off hand.

91

I wonder something and would like to hear other people’s opinions.

My Fox News loving BIL is a typical angry white guy, very conservative and believes that white males are the most disadvantaged group left in America.

I would visit them every Christmas from around 2001 to 2005, and he couldn’t have a conversation without it going off onto a rant about evil Democrats and liberals.

Before Trump was elected, I never heard the same outright anger from liberals. After Trump, then not only did I hear the same anger from other liberals, I found myself getting angry as well.

92

Yeah.

I don’t see a reconciliation. What counts as moral to the left wing is considered immoral to the right and vice versa. To the right abortion is about killing babies. To the left abortion is about protecting women from misogynists. To the right, rules restricting minorities are about tradition and purity. To the left these rules are oppressive and un-American.

Plus all the white authoritarians moving to the republicans has made the GOP more extreme and anti-democracy, and the GOP going extreme is shocking, horrifying and enraging the left who are becoming more extreme to deal with the issue.

Yeah, its a problem.

93

See: Tabarnia.

Tabarnia (from Tarragona + Barcelona) is the response of a group of Catalan artists and intellectuals to separatism. They’ve taken the same exact arguments that Catalan separatists use to justify separating from Spain and applied it to Catalonia, thus deducing that Tabarnia (formed by the cities of Tarragona and Barcelona and their highly-industrialized surroundings) should secede from Catalonia.

The concept has been taken up by a lot of the people who think that Catalan secesionist is absurd. For several months, Tabarnia flags sold out as quickly as they could be made.

Now take “separate red from blue” and apply it in the US by State lines. OK. Each of the new countries will suddenly have a half that’s to the side of the other half, politically! And they’re not even along state lines: the racial and religious makeup of the Florida panhandle and of Miami are very different, but so’s that of the Keys; California has red corners and purple areas; Texas has towns where more people speak Spanish than English (and often they’re towns where everybody eligible is in the Reserves), a blue core in Austin…

Keep on splitting, we’ll end up with each person being his own country.

There are also a lot of women, specially above age 35, who are pretty sick of people thinking that if you wear your hair short you’re automatically a lesbian. People make that assumption even if the woman in question wears dresses that would have been just fine in the set of Hairspray.

94

The abortion one is correct. The minority one is not. If you asked ‘the generic right’ about rules restricting minorities, they would say “Such things are oppressive and un-American.” The difference is that they don’t see the same things as restrictive that the left sees as restrictive. The right comes from a more individualistic background rather than a collectivist one. They don’t look at systemic oppression, but rather individual oppression.

Here’s an example:
Bob and Wes are two students with a 3.8 GPA and a 27 ACT. Bob is black and Wes is white. Someone from the right would say, “Good for them. They are both equally good students, they should both enjoy the same chance of getting into the University of Awesome.” Someone from the left might say, “Wait a minute, Bob got the same scores, but Bob did it in spite of years of systematic oppression. It was much more difficult for Bob to achieve those scores, so he deserves a place in line ahead of Wes.”

This essential disagreement between Bob being an individual and Bob being a member of a group is really the crux of the problem (Not always, racial profiling of Muslims as an example, but broadly.) For instance, stop and frisk. The right looks at stop and frisk and says, “Listen, these rules apply to everyone equally. If a police officer suspects you of potentially committing a crime, then they have the right to stop and frisk you. If a white person is hanging out next to an ATM looking shady, they would be stopped and frisked as well as a black person. This is a fair law.” The left would say, “90% of those stopped under the law are minorities, this is obviously targetting.” The right might respond that “90% of gang members in New York are minorities, so it would make sense that that proportion is stopped. The law applies to Wes as much as Bob. If Wes is in a gang, he would be stopped and frisked. It’s not Wes’s fault that he’s not.”

Generally speaking, laws that target minorities specifically are not tolerated by either side. The right does not typically couch its speech in terms of purity-although religion is sometimes referred to as tradition, but this divide too is about an individual choice vs a collective choice and the failure to regard systemic pressures as real things. For instance, prayer in schools. The right would probably be very unhappy if a school prayer forced Ann the atheist to pray to God. They would say that no one should force Ann to do anything. They would say though that if 24 out of 25 kids do want to pray in school, then the school should certainly be able to lead a school prayer, but Ann can opt out. They don’t view that as an oppression of a collective, but rather an individual choice. They would say, “No one has a right to tell atheists what to do, but neither do they have a right to tell us what to do.” They don’t see a school sponsored prayer as oppressive as long as the individual gets to choose whether or not to participate.

95

This is absolutely, provably untrue. North Carolina Republican legislators requested information on the demographics of who used which voting practices, then passed a law specifically to restrict the practices used by minority voters. The claimed reason for the law was to stop voter fraud, but the law didn’t touch absentee voting, which has had some actual cases of voter fraud but is primarily used by whites. Republicans wholeheartedly supported the law in spite of the release of emails detailing that it was specifically targetting minorities, and then lamented that the law was struck down in Federal court.

Far from ‘not tolerated’, a voting law that specifically targets minority voters was cheered and it’s rejection by the courts jeered by republican legislators and voters. Yeah, sure, they’ll object if a law literally says ‘reject black voters’, but that won’t stand up in court anyway.

North Carolina GOP Brags Racist Voter Suppression Is Working—and They’re Right

96

This is a collective vs individual difference. What they would say is that the law provides the same rules for everyone to follow. There is nothing inherent in the law that stops ‘Bob’ from voting. Bob is following the exact same rules that everyone else follows. The early voting being in only one location applies equally to black and white voters. There is nothing inherent about skin color that prevents black voters from registering earlier or getting a state ID. They would say that an individual black person can get a state ID using the exact same process as a white person and if they don’t, then that’s not a problem with the law, but a problem with the individual.

Again, those from the right do not look at collectives or systemic issues in the same way. They think the system should treat everyone the same and if it does, then it’s up to the individual to use the system to their best advantage. They would view this as a basketball game. A basketball game might inherently favor the tall, but they don’t think that it would be OK to allow shorter people shoot at a lower basket or count their points as worth more. They would say it’s up to the shorter person to leverage their talents in other ways or learn to work around the taller people. If the rules change to ways that favor shorter people, then it’s up to the tall people to adjust or vice versa as long as the rules stay the same for everyone.

97

No. It’s creating a law specifically to target minorities, period. They asked for demographics of who uses what type of voting, then passed a law to restrict only those types of voting used primarily by minorities. It’s extremely cut and dried what they did. Smokescreening about ‘collective vs individual’ is complete nonsense when the people who wrote the law followed the process of ‘ask which methods of voting are used primarily by black people, then restrict only those methods of voting’.

Again, the people writing legislation asked for a list of what demographics used which types of voting, then passed a law restricting only the types of voting used by minority voters. There isn’t any ambiguity here, they wrote the law specifically to target minority voters, and the Federal court agrees with this. You can throw up whatever smokescreen you want about ‘collective vs individual issues’, but the simple fact is that NC republicans wrote a law to specifically target minorities, their supporters cheered it, and were upset when it was overturned by the courts. Republicans accept and endorse explcitly racist laws as long as the law gives them even the barest of fig leaves to cover their endorsement of blatant racism. This is simple fact, you are defending an overtly racist law.

98

I’m discussing both historical and modern conservatives. And conservatives have targeted entire groups for oppression. Jim Crow would be a good example of this.

Also how do conservatives feel when their rules directed at out groups are applied to them? Conservatives like to discuss freedom when it is in groups (whites, christians, men, native born Americans, heterosexuals) denying opportunities and priviledge to out groups (anyone not an in group). How do they feel when an out group treats them the way they treat the out groups?

Muslims demand that the police, military and intelligence agencies crack down on white men, since white men are a major source of domestic terrorism?

Women demand that the police heavily police men, since men commit 95% of all serious crimes?

Women promote laws restricting men’s reproductive choices and rights, perhaps laws restricting vasectomies, condom purchases and viagra.

Muslim bakeries refuse to bake cakes for christian weddings.

LGBT groups promote laws restricting the ability of christians to marry or adopt children.

You mention how minorities make up a disproportionate number of gang members. Which is true. But christian white men with conservative politics make up a disproportionate number of domestic terrorists and neo-fascism supporters. Would conservatives support stricter intelligence and police surveillance of all christian white male conservatives due to their higher risk of terrorism and fascism?

99

Firstly, I’m not defending anything. I’m not conservative and have not voted for a Republican for more than a local election since 1996. I’m attempting to explain the difference in mindset.

Let’s go back to the basketball analogy. In 1944, goaltending was introduced into the game (Goaltending is when you block a shot when it’s on its downward trajectory so above the rim, but on its way down.) It was introduced specifically because of a man named George Mikan who was exceptionally tall and had an exceptionally high jump and so was able to defend by sitting at the rim. So, a conservative might say, “Yes, this rule specifically targeted George, but it’s not a rule about George. This rule applies to everyone equally. No one is allowed to goaltend. It’s not our fault that George is the only guy that currently can goal tend nor that this impacts only him. The rule applies to everyone equally and it’s up to George now to change his play to leverage his talents better or else lose his job.” A liberal might say, “Wow, they specifically made a rule to stop George and jeopardize his career. That’s not fair.” A conservative would say, “George needs to learn to adjust to the new rules. It’s fair because no one else is allowed to make that play either.”

100

I guess I disagree. I’m sorry if I came across as hostile though, I do think we need honest dialogue about these issues. But I feel that this is an instance of JP Morgan’s quote ‘A person always has two reasons for doing something. A good reason and the real reason’. I feel this applies to conservative arguments about these things, they have the good reason (they don’t like identity politics or treating groups differently) then they have the real reason (they want to build a society where in-groups have more privilege than out-groups).

My impression is that conservatives are interested in social hierarchies where the more in-group boxes you check, the more status and privilege you are awarded.

[ul]
[li]Male[/li][li]Christian[/li][li]Native born American[/li][li]White[/li][li]Heterosexual[/li][/ul]

etc. They may claim they support equality but IMO what they really support is laws that mean people who check more of those boxes are considered more valid, more valuable citizens than people who do not check those boxes and they deserve special rewards for checking those boxes, and they need to defend their culture from the growth of out-groups. Also the in-groups who check these boxes have certain legal rights that out-groups do not, and the in-groups have social and legal dominion over the out-groups.

I personally consider the ‘personal freedom’ argument to be a smokescreen to distract from this. That is why I brought up examples of conservative’s arguments being used against them.

Christian heterosexuals trying to deny adoption and marriage rights to LGBTs to them is fine. LGBTs trying to deny marriage and adoption rights to christians is not.

Men controlling women’s reproductive choices is fine. Women controlling men’s is not.

When a christian company like Hobby Lobby denies birth control to women, that is fine to them because it is a private company practicing their religion.

What happens when a Muslim owned company refuses to hire men who own guns and vote republican because the privately owned company claims those men are a threat to democracy? Will conservatives support that? no they won’t.

In my experience, conservatives will decry minorities who talk about systemic oppression and claim they need to stop complaining, then those same conservatives will turn around and claim that conservatives themselves (white christian men) are the most oppressed group around. Again, I don’t believe the argument they are making is really about what they say it is about.

The real agenda is maintaining a social system where certain in-groups have more privilege, power, status and validity than out-groups. They just couch those arguments in discussions about personal freedom, tradition, religion, fairness, etc because their true motives are offensive when they are laid bare.