The atmosphere is so heated, and the statements are getting more and more extreme. Let’s just assume Harris wins the election. After a campaign like this, how could you ever have a normal relationship with your pro-Trump neighbor/father-in-law/Uncle/Barber or what ever again?
No. It’s called the Paradox of Tolerance. “Discussing” rationally with the intolerant only serves to justify their position in their own eyes and thereby embolden them.
In other words, putting up with them simply gives them more ink
Turning the other cheek only works if the person doing the slapping has a sense of shame. Trump and his ilk have long since proven they have none.
I don’t remember who said it first, but I’ve linked it before: there’s no paradox if tolerance is a social contact rather than an ethic. If someone breaks the terms of the contact, then the other party is not bound by it any more.
Yeah. Although what if half of the country is intolerant? What then? Divide the country into two?
I’m not sure it’s half, maybe half of the voting population but that’s usually only around 40-60% of the total population.
Then you remove the nazis from your country by any means necessary. I’m sick of people talking about tolerance in the face of genocidal bigotry.
Calm your pits Beka.
Nobody should be advocating for a Final Solution.
People were this divided over FDR. My next door neighbor only ever referred to FDR as that “gimpy legged sonofabitch”. This was in the 1970’s.
If the good guys win the election, we can start to heal this if we choose to. But only if we take the complaints of everyone seriously. Ignoring the needs and political power of white men is what got us into this cluster.
If the bad guys win, start looking for allies.
What complaint am I supposed to be taking seriously exactly?
The one where trans people are invading women’s spaces to rape them?
The one where immigrants are all violent criminals who eat dogs?
Or maybe the one where women are getting abortions instead of using birth control and should not be allowed to make decisions about their own bodies?
I am a white man. I don’t care about the complaints of white men that boil down to “I’ve been on top for so long that any attempt at equity feels like a threat to that position”.
Most of them are hurting in one way or another. This particular round it’s mostly the financial, mental and emotional aftershocks of the pandemic amplified by greedy people coming up with new and inventive ways to take money from the poor and give it to the rich.
But you need to first hear and understand their pain to have any hope of getting through to them.
They’ve been told over and over through misinformation that immigrants, people with disabilities, loose/secular/independent women, people of different religious beliefs, skin colour, whatever else are the reason for their suffering, and that they should be afraid of them. That initial pain is channeled from fear to anger to hate to dehumanization to… “final solutions”.
They want Trump in because they’ve been convinced that he’s powerful and “Trump will fix it.” ‘It’ being whatever the pain is.
The reality is of course a much different story of basically just greedy people distracting them while they steal their lunch money, and narcissists that will do anything to gain ever more power.
But if you want to unprogram someone from that you need to hear their pain. What was that thing that was used by the greedy and narcissistic to channel into hate.
It’s mostly hurt/hurting people who are voting for Trump. To turn them around you need to hear their pain.
If Trump said:
We would know what he meant. You are saying the same genocidal thing.
You have ignored my question about which part of the right-wing rhetoric we should be taking seriously.
If someone threatens my family and friends with violence and death, they get no sympathy from me. The difference is I am just a rando on the internet. Trump is potentially the 47th president of the United States. Trump has said terrible things that allude to violent insurrections and the killing of innocent people.
But you’re right, we should take his points seriously and incorporate them into society going forward.
Get fucked.