Which is harder - being liberal and surrounded by conservatives, or vice versa

It’s my belief that most (if not all) violent acts of that nature are carried out by people with “extremist Right” views. If you wanna believe otherwise, knock yourself out.

It’s not a matter of belief. It’s a matter of facts. What facts do you offer to back this up? I mean, you thought WC was ‘spot on’ about the Islamic Terrorist groups all being right wing, and that’s trivially easy to disprove. Hell, if I showed you 1 that would pretty much disprove it, and there are many more than 1.

The thing is, if you want to ‘believe’ that it’s all the ‘extremist Right’ that is carrying out all or even the vast majority of the acts of a violent nature then that’s fine…but it’s sort of like the belief in the Easter Bunny or the Queen of England, to paraphrase from MegaMind. :wink:

Don’t know if this counts as “leading with my chin,” but anytime I’m in a business establishment (restaurant, car dealership waiting room, etc.) where I’m going to be spending more than a couple of minutes, if they have Fox News on the TV I ask them to change it to anything else – news, sports, game shows, anything but Fox News.

So far no one has refused, pushed back or even said anything other than “sure, okay.” (In one restaurant, I did have to ask the server twice.)

I’m in a purple area of a blue state. I suspect many people don’t even realize how rabidly partisan and fake Fox News is. Either that or they’re extraordinarily accommodating to views that differ from their own (at least with paying customers).

septimus:

In this age of cyberbullying suicides, I’d say that old adage is outdated.

The discussion is about whether people are incited to crime based on their hatred for the opposite political position. People stealing your wallet because they want the money need not apply.

It is CERTAINLY not the case that all conservatives are violent. (Or all liberals either, obviously. Centrists I’m not sure about.) The question is, essentially, what the general trend is when one side or the other has a majority. If the trend is for 40% of liberals to call you an asshole when they see your red hat, and for 1% of conservatives to beat you to death when they see your blue one, which is worse?

That adage was always wrong regardless of time and era.

The most violent places in this country are mostly poverty-stricken and crime-ridden inner cities that I’m confident are mostly Democratic strongholds.

Are we related by the same father? This is my dad exactly.

Or it might show that:

  • Conservative messages are inherently more objectionable than liberal ones, and much more likely to cause offense.

  • Conservatives are oblivious, and don’t notice slogans other people wear.

  • Conservatives are illiterate.

Or that conservative messages (in the current environment) are often crafted to provoke and offend liberals, whereas liberal messages are crafted to persuade and rally other liberals.

This reminds me of the furor caused by “It’s OK to be white”

Can I get a cite? Cities might have more crime because there are more people, but I’m not sure that per capita, they have more crime.

Are you saying you don’t think that slogan was meant to provoke and offend?

Yeah, I get it – the words themselves are anodyne. But everything about the context (who, where, when and why) was meant to offend.

Certainly. See here: 2016 FBI UCR report, table 11. You’ll want to focus on the violent crime RATE column:

No, I was agreeing with you, at least in part. “It’s OK to be white” was exactly targeted at getting libs to freak out over something utterly mundane.

I don’t think rural people are more prone to political violence than urban dwellers are. Since it is your assertion that they are, why don’t you give me some hard facts to back your claim up? Otherwise, our conversation is over, as I’ve no interest in discussing your imaginary version of rural people.

In other words, what you’re saying is people who worry about getting beaten up or killed by bigots in places where it’s likely to happen are the real bigots. What I know about people who are transgender, gay, or otherwise gender noncoforming, and people in interracial relationships is that there is a very real threat of violence outside of major towns because they’ve experienced. Having someone threaten to drag you behind a car for being female appearing and wearing men’s clothes, or a local sheriff tell you that you should just stay out of the area for being a large-framed woman in a dress are not things that come from fiction, they are actual experiences my friends have had.

I also note that you are dodging around the core issue here, so I’ll ask directly - do you really think that it’s a reasonably safe undertaking for a guy wearing a dress, or two guys obviously acting as a couple, or an interracial couple to tour bars in out of the way places?

There is a real world experience that my friends who look non gender conforming have had where they are threatened with violence or suffer actual violence if they simply exist in grocery stores or gas stations outside of major metropolitan areas, in many cases the threat of violence comes directly from LEOs and not just regular people.

I mean ‘is there a significant risk to doing so,’ it’s really basic English. Like do you think that if someone spent a week bar hopping between redneck bars out in the country as a guy wearing a dress, or a pair of guys acting as a couple, or an interracial couple, that you’d expect them to end up being subject to violence or threatened with violence just for showing up? “What do you mean by significant risk” and the diversion into a study on domestic violence rates are obvious attempts to dodge the question. Everyone knows that this not remotely a safe thing to do.

And it worked. We’re kinda programmed that way.

Give me verifiable facts, not stories about your friends. I’ve no interest in discussing your imaginary rural people either.

I’d be curious to hear family dynamics: Dopers who were/are the lone liberal in a conservative family and vice versa. How did it go?
And then by extension, friends, school peers, etc.