Liberal contempt for rural people, especially poor white rural people helped propel that idiot Trump into office. Looks like he may get four more years.
Wait - isn’t the standard conservative position that one can have their livlihood and means of putting a roof over their head taken away for disagreeing with their betters? Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe that it is generally liberals who push for laws against discrimination in work and business in general. I certainly don’t think it was liberals who were objecting to the law in the Colorado baker case, or that it’s liberals who oppose laws against firing people for simply being LGBT. I thought that being allowed who you want to associate with or do business with was generally considered virtuous in conservative circles?
And the case that you’re calling people ‘assholes’ for isn’t even about someone’s fundamental identity, it’s about them choosing to shove political messages in people’s faces while working. Do you think that a cop should have to allow a contractor into his house who wears a ‘fuck the police’ shirt?
This is even weirder. Are you saying that people should not have a choice in who they hang out with on a social level? If not, what are you saying? you seem to be objecting to people only being friends with people they like. And in the case of ‘Christians’, mainstream Christianity has a lot of explicitly hostile stances towards a lot of people, it’s not exactly innocent (especially Catholic).
I note that you’ve failed to answer the simple question “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?”, and appear to be refusing to answer it. I think that just about everyone knows that such an undertaking would be really dangerous in real life, and would express no surprise if dress-tour-guy came back missing some teeth, and I’ll leave readers to interpret your unwillingness to answer the question how they like.
Of course he may get four more years - there are still tons of racists out there, and the republicans are going to run another massive falsehood-ridden smear campaign with the help of Russia just like last time. About the only thing that may save us is the fact that the people who previously sat it out are less likely to do so this time.
So-called ‘liberal contempt’ has nothing to do with it, and didn’t then, though Russian propaganda alleging, overblowing, and outright inventing it probably was and will be a minor, nearly inconsequential factor. That’ll happen no matter what liberals do, though, regardless of your attempt at victim-blaming.
His current tack is to pretend things like that don’t happen at all, while simultaneously implying that liberals are beating up conservatives left and right, in the hopes of pretending both sides are the same.
@Pantastic: I do agree that a dress-wearing man is likely to be in real physical danger in some conservative regions. That being said, a man wearing a dress falls on the more extreme end of the spectrum of “political exhibitionism” - more so than, say, someone have a Trump MAGA bumper sticker on their car.
I have no idea what you’re talking about. What I was saying was that refusing to associate with, or do business with, someone because they don’t vote the way you’d like, and especially depriving someone of his or her livelihood as sort of an enforcement tool, makes one kind of a jerk and a bully. That’s true for liberals as well as conservatives. I was in no way advocating for laws permitting the firing of LGBT people, and there’s absolutely no way you could infer any such thing from my post.
I was not talking about what anyone should *have *to do. I was saying that if a contractor shows up at someone’s home, wearing a shirt that indicates a conservative political leaning, and that person then says “sorry, get lost, I won’t be doing business with you until you get your mind right,” that person is kind of a jerk.
No, of course not.
I’m saying that bigotry is bigotry.
No. But I would object to people only being friends with people just like themselves. They’re free to do that, of course, but that’s a mindset I don’t share. Or like.
“Mainstream Christianity” is pretty varied. More so that you apparently know. It is your right, of course, to chooose not to associate with Catholics, or Christians in general. It’s pretty closed-minded, but it is your right.
Generally, I am in full agreement with monstro, but here I am forced to recall Hillary’s appalling “Deplorables” comment.
That said, I have to admit that I have not had a recent conservation (that is, in the last three years) with any pro-Trumper. I do think you have to distinguish genuine conservatives from pro-Trumpers, though.
If it doesn’t elicit a lot of push back, then I guess pretty much by definition it doesn’t count. I think in the great majority of cases, not all cases, not considering rare cases of violence (which isn’t justified just because somebody is being annoying), people who get a lot of flack for public expressions of their politics could just avoid that by keeping it to themselves. But that doesn’t mean if they don’t keep it to themselves but nobody really cares that it’s a big problem…if nobody really cares.
I think it’s an opinion not a fact that Fox is any more difficult to tolerate listening to than other cable outlets, and in the ideal situation we can even disagree whether something is an opinion or a fact without it blowing up into a huge battle. 
Personally I don’t like to be forced to listen to any particular TV show in waiting areas and make sure I have my earphones if I’m going to spending any time in one.
Anyway IME in a pretty left area, woke, upper middle class (usually) white liberals tend to be a nasty bunch if you don’t agree with their politics. Because they’ve gotten themselves into a frame of mind where they think, though perhaps paradoxically given their roots in the Counter Culture (if it feels good do it, man), in an absolute morality they’ve recently invented, almost every political issue has a simple moral right and wrong, and guess which side of it they are always on? They are nasty to people who don’t agree because ‘it’s the right to do’ from their POV, or at least they feel they’d be secular-saintly not to treat people who disagree with them like shit.
IME that’s not only less true of less political people (as it naturally would be), and political conservative people, it also tends to be less true of everyday working class (often non-white) people who only vote for the Democrats.
I’m not including extreme political violence (as opposed to street harassment etc that borders on violence). That’s actually very rare still and a different topic IMO.
Genuine conservatives are the ones that’ll refrain from voting in the next election, right?
How dare Hillary call the people that were screaming for her to be “locked up” without any due process “deplorables”. I mean, how fucking dare she.
Yesterday I was lurking on r/AskTrumpSupporters. There was a thread asking Trump supporters if they think it should be legal for doctors to discriminate against gay patients. The overwhelming majority said it should be legal on the basis of religious freedom. (I know of no religious text that forbids doctors from treating gay people, but whatever). Many also believe that all discrimination should be legal, including discrimination against groups that are legally protected now.
I can imagine how I would feel if I overheard coworkers saying stuff like “Hell yeah, it should be legal to discriminate against the gays/blacks/Mexicans/Muslims.” That ain’t mere “politics”. That’s hate. In my opinion, a conservative who thinks that kind of discrimination is OK and announces it loud enough for others to hear is a different kind of dick than the liberal who openly rants about bible-thumpers and gun-nuts and Betsy DeVos.
Yep. That’s what I was saying above. And I generally *do *agree with their politics, being a white liberal and all.
I do not say or do anything that others on this board do not also do–including yourself. I’ve established this so many times. There is literally a subforum on this board for people chastising others.
I’m actually a liberal who lives surrounded by conservatives. I generally don’t have much trouble, and find it rather easy to make friends. It probably helps that I’m still a Christian, and I’m not one of those coastal elites, but one of them. Also, of course, I’m a white, straight male.
I admit I don’t call people out as much in real life as I do online, but that’s not a choice I make. It’s simply that people don’t try the same shit in real life as they do online. Heck, early on, part of the reason I would get so angry is that I would be blindsided by something I would never expect from that type of person.
The basics just seem to be that, if I call out someone, they hate me. If I call out someone going against them, they like me. There doesn’t seem to be any general belief that calling people out is wrong.
I don’t know if this comes across as a lecture or not. But I think you have to expect it when you single me out like that. Of course I’m going to defend myself when you accuse me of being a jerk in some way.
Though I did try to keep it on topic by talking about my experience with being a liberal who lives among conservatives.
And this is exactly the sort of thing I mean. I almost never encounter this shit from conservatives in real life. It’s happened very rarely, and it’s been easy to just cut off contact.
Conservatism to me means the small government stuff. It means wanting God back in schools. It means being anti-abortion. It is unfortunately anti-gay, but in a paternalistic way of “those poor gay people need to learn the Truth.” It means being pro-gun to the point that it’s just assumed.
I was brought up in a conservative household, and I was also taught that racism and bigotry is wrong. Granted, a lot of that I learned from TV growing up, but it was TV that my parents approved of and would agree with. (They were actually kinda strict on what I could and couldn’t watch.)
The way the real life conservatives I know feel about discrimination against minorities seems to be the same way online conservatives feel about “discrimination” for being straight white Christian men.
Of course, I realize that, given the power they’ve shown with putting Trump into office, there have to be a lot of these real life conservatives who just don’t admit these beliefs in public. Even the racists I know in real life, I found out because of Facebook posts, rather than them admitting it in person.
And I think that voting to deprive someone of his, her, or their human rights makes one very much a jerk and a bully, and that declining to associate with a jerk or a bully is perfectly reasonable. The ‘voting’ here is not talking about disagreeing on a school bond referendum, after all.
As a group, ‘conservatives’ very much advocate for either repealing laws that protect LGBT people from being fired or against passing such laws in the first place. Someone calling themselves a ‘conservative’ is expressing support (possibly indirect) for such a position, even if they’d rather not admit it.
So, again, if a contractor shows up at a cops home wearing a ‘fuck the police’ shirt, the policeman is a jerk if he says “sorry, get lost, I won’t be doing business with you until you ditch that shirt?” If a contractor show’s up at one of your Catholic friend’s houses wearing a shirt that says “The Catholic church protects and pays child molestors very well”, your friend would be a jerk to tell him to go away? Or does this idea only run in one direction?
There’s quite a distance between ‘just like themselves’ and conservative positions like ‘thinks people like me and my friends should not be allowed to exist, or show themselves in public’ or ‘thinks people who weren’t born rich should suffer and die from diseases that could easily be treated’ or ‘thinks women should be forced to act as human incubators’ or ‘thinks research on climate change should be forbidden by law’.
So if someone held the position that they’d really like it if all Christians would be stoned to death, but are willing to settle for letting Christians live if they don’t talk about it or do anything Christian-acting in public, and made sure to tell everyone that they were in the anti-christian group, you and your Christian friends would hang with them? And you’d consider any Christians who didn’t want to hang with the ‘I’d like to stone them, but I’ll settle for them staying in the bible closet’ guy to be close minded? I suspect this rule isn’t exactly universal.
The fact that conservatives consider the mere existence of a person wearing non-typical clothes for their apparent gender to be ‘political exhibitionism’ worthy of violent response really answers the OP. I am glad that someone is honest enough to admit that being the ‘wrong type’ in a conservative area is extremely dangerous if you can’t or won’t hide it.
For Pete’s sake, you’re building a straw man here. That’s *nothing *like the situation (or the shirt) I described in my post.
Funny. I actually know a fair number of conservatives. None of them think you and your friends should not be allowed to exist, or that the poor should suffer and die, and so on and so on. Or that women should be forced to act as incubators. Hey, I’m married to a conservative, double-Harvard-grad lawyer. Really, you’re just caricaturing here. No doubt there are people who would identify themselves as “conservative” that think those things, but it’s by no means all conservatives.
I’ve never met anyone who holds those positions.
Look, not all conservatives are the same. You seem to be insisting that every “conservative” is a rabid, Trump-rally-going, racist, ranting, ignorant moron.
Not having led a sheltered life, not existing in a bubble, I know that to be untrue.
Do you really think that, for example, George Will is the *same *as Donald Trump? Or that David Duke is the *same *as Barry Goldwater?
You’re kind of proving my point here.
I once had a coworker corner me in my own office to get my opinion about something that was bothering her. This happened right after the Charlottesville thing. She’s a Trump-voting conservative who has revealed some rather weird ideas to me but nothing offensive. And she’s nice for the most part (when she’s not cramming cookies down my throat).
She wanted to know why “the black people” were so angry over the Confederate monuments. Didn’t they understand that’s their heritage too? Didn’t they understand that those soldiers were fighting for state’s rights, not slavery? She said all of this to me with tears in her eyes and a shaky voice, as if it was one of her own monuments that people were protesting. When she could see me getting a bit pissy, she apologized and left me alone.
She wasn’t being a dick to me. She wasn’t being loud and self-righteous. But I still felt very uncomfortable with this interaction. Much more uncomfortable than if she’d asked me about how I feel about the responsibility of government to control healthcare costs or whether we should build a wall to control illegal immigration. I really don’t want to hear people gushing over their love for Confederate “heroes” when I’m on the job. I also don’t feel like dealing with flat-out ignorance. It took every grain of my being not to yell at her when she said that the Confederacy wasn’t treasonous and that slaves fought on the Confederate side too. My coworker was brought up a certain way, I get that. But it is still tough to hear that kind of shit from someone you’re supposed to get along with and respect. That incident happened a couple of years ago and I still can’t get it out of my mind.
Maybe it would be different if I were a white person. I can’t imagine that my coworker would have been compelled to question me about all the “black people hate” for Confederate monuments if I were just a fellow white woman.
I guess some people here are unaware of college students reacting to conservative speakers like Ben Shapiro, Dinesh D’Souza, Ann Coulter, or Jordan Peterson.
I have never heard of YAF rioting when Lefties speak at their schools.
“Small government” is the exact opposite of what they want, and contradicts nearly everything *else *they want. They simply want to strip all the benevolent, constructive parts of government and have one that has no purpose beyond tyranny and cruelty. They want a government that doesn’t protect or help anyone who isn’t a rich white male, stomps on everyone else, and makes bigotry the law of the land.
“God back in schools” = religious persecution and the suppression of science. “Anti-abortion” = oppressing, torturing and killing women. “Anti-gay” = persecute, torture and kill homosexuals. “Pro-gun” = support for right wing lynchings and terrorism.