Hey, we’re in the pit. You’re a fucking moron.
Let me know in 10 years how satisfying and effective ostracizing your family was.
Fuck you moron.
On the list of the very, very many reasons I despise Trump and everything he’s doing, “Ceding global leadership to China,” is about medium-high. Like, top 50%, but not quite top 25%.
Point being, if you want to do something to check China, you still have to get Trump out of the way first.
I can see why your powers of persuasion are so effective! Please tell me in real life how many people you’ve swayed back into the light. Oh, that’s right, you run and hide from people who don’t share your particular world view not realizing they are probably sighing in relief. Like I said, get back to me in ten years about your forum-spamming uncle-shaming strategy and its outcome.
I don’t do it because I like it. I’m doing it for self-protection. Being surrounded by ignorance and hate, having it revealed to you that some of the worst in humanity has surrounded you, hidden, lurking, just waiting for its day in the sun is damaging. It’s like breathing in poison. It’s not something I do because I’m petulant or I’m gleeful or I’m punishing them, it’s because I can barely make it through my day as it is and I can’t have the people choosing to inflict this suffering on all of us close to me.
Trump should be out of the way in a couple years. But Trump is symptomatic of a set of much larger issues in the West and those issues aren’t going anywhere. With media designed to maximize attention and engagement we don’t have the cultural ability at the moment to deal with significant efforts spent to exacerbate societal cohesion.
You’re a dumb guy.
Well, you are losing the ability to be a moderating influence. Look, I have folks in my family that are borderline nuts. And ostracizing them would not solve anything. That would only make them spend more time in their particular hive. A lot of how people think is due to their wiring. If you want to influence that it takes a long time. But deliberately Balkanizing at the level of the family unit? Then, shoot, the folks who are deliberately exacerbating social cohesion in an effort to gain relative power are winning.
Is there some level of evil that your relatives could enthusiastically support where you felt that you could no longer have them in your life?
This seems like an odd choice of phenomenon to be pushing back against. Do you imagine that there are lots of people deliberately and permanently ostracizing their family members over a minor difference of opinion?
Personally, I am very grateful that my friends and family members have always been pretty much on the same page with me about the principles of common human decency and the appropriate type of political choices required to support them. But I have friends and acquaintances who haven’t been so lucky.
All of the people I know who years ago made the anguished decision to sever ties with, or substantially distance themselves from, family members who disagree with them on fundamental issues of civic morality and humanity are a lot happier now. I think you may underestimate the emotional burden it places on a person to watch somebody they used to love and admire constantly parading their hatefulness and bigotry. Especially when it’s directly attacking and distressing other people you love.
There’s only so much that, say, the loving parent of a transgender teen can take of their own parent constantly going off on diatribes about how “the transes” are all sick perverts and attacking women’s rights and trying to mutilate children and so on. As a friend of mine in that situation remarked, "I still love the mom that I remember having, but I don’t feel guilty about not loving the grandma that [child’s name] has now."
Yeah, organ harvesting and concentration camps like what the Chinese are doing. Working for the former Assad regime would be another. A cartel torturer wouldn’t be getting a Christmas card. Voting for a candidate I don’t like and wearing a goofy hat is not in the same ballpark though.
As a person who actually did reach that threshold with my own mother, I would say yes. I didn’t stop talking to my mother for political reasons, but her beliefs did reinforce for me that there was little to salvage in the relationship. It’s incredibly painful.
I don’t think the OP is talking about people for whom it’s unbearable emotionally to be around their Trumper family members. I think the OP is talking about people who can hang around them just fine and feel no need to disown them. I haven’t seen a shred of evidence (anecdotal or otherwise) that disowning people solely for their political beliefs is an effective strategy for social change. And it flies in the face of my education and training in the area of social change. I know people who work tirelessly every day to move the needle for the people most in need, and they don’t succeed by just not talking to people who see things differently. On the contrary, they forge relationships that, over time, open up the other person’s mind and allow a change in the system. I’m talking about professional advocates and people I know who work for political campaigns.
If you don’t want to do the one thing that actually works, because it’s too difficult emotionally (which I fully respect) or because it’s beneath you, fine. But let’s not pretend the nuclear option is in any way conducive to getting the results we want.
(That is general you, not you, Senor Beef.)
? You lost me here. AFAICT, the OP of this thread makes no mention of anybody needing to “disown” Trumper family members, and the OP’er who made this thread hasn’t posted in it again.
You’re right, I’m sorry, it wasn’t the OP.
I hate when my regularly-scheduled program is preempted by the Octopus Show.
You know you’re minimizing it. We’re not talking about Mitt Romney or something. We’re talking about a cult that is systematically destroying the US. It has destroyed the US alliances that were key to remaining the dominant political, financial, and military power of the world, eliminated its soft power, it has created a secret police force that abducts people off the street and murders them with no accountability. They deny reality. They’re at the 1984 stage of believing what they party tells you over what you see with your eyes and ears. They’re enthusiastically supporting the brutalization of their fellow Americans. I could go on like this for a hundred pages easily.
You understand what’s going on, but you’re doing PR for the bad guys by trying to pretend that we’re in a normal time of political squabbles with minor disagreements about policy or preferences between two sane candidates or something like that.
It must be hard to be in your position, knowing that for all these years you supported something that turned out to be so evil. But you still hate liberals and you’re not going to admit you were wrong, so instead you try to take this middle ground of not overtly supporting Trump but instead downplaying him as though what he’s doing is not that big a deal and that his supporters are the same as anyone else who have a preference for a political candidate. Deep down I think you know you’re doing work for evil, but to admit that means that you’ve been supporting what lead to this monstrosity all along, and that’s troubling.
I don’t expect you to come to some grand realization, but you could always stop digging deeper. You can stop downplaying the threat that Trump represents and stop denying the damage he’s doing. Because people like you are still part of what’s supporting his agenda, even if you’re more indirect about it than the MAGA crowd.
I never did confuse you with an original thinker. Feel free to use the ignore button.
Huh. You would cut ties with a relative for “enthusiastically support[ing]” internment camps in China, but you think it’s absurd and inappropriate to cut ties with a relative who enthusiastically supports stuff like this in Trump’s America?
Actually, to be honest, the only people I have on ignore are folks who are only looking for fights, who twist words that I say, and who are openly trolling.
You, on the other hand, I disagree with most of the time, but you aren’t any of that stuff. So no, you’re not going on ignore. Despite everything, you aren’t a shithead.