They don’t think we’re open minded and understanding.
They think we’re ignorant of how the world works, condescending, and irrationally judgemental.
I’m not saying this is how we ARE, this is just how they view us, and because they view us like that from the very start, there is no opportunity for meaningful dialogue.
It is bi-directional prejudice, and only by acts of understanding and patience and wisdom can that be overcome.
My suggestion to you would be to leave the virtue signaling to politicians and the figuring out how they work in order to beat them to the adults in the room.
Pretty true, obviously most racist biggots don’t see themselves as racist biggots. They don’t see us as “open minded” they see us as close minded to their views.
I spent most of my childhood being repeatedly informed by my incredibly Republican family that I lack common sense.
Yet, I have the common sense to know that if you let people do whatever the fuck they want to do with their own bodies and lives then they’ll stay the fuck out of your body and your life.
Perhaps that is an uncommon sense. However, it should be a common sense but the people who claim to have common sense fail to understand that consistently.
Maybe common sense is not all it’s cracked up to be.
Common sense is a thought terminator. It’s just “everyone who’s smart agrees with this”. It’s common sense you shouldn’t inject any aspect of a disease causing pathogen into people. It’s common sense that you can’t burn so much stuff you make the whole sky smoky or permanently warm the planet. It’s common sense that you don’t share an ancestor with an oak tree. Now none of that is true. You should get vaccines, uncontrolled combustion creates smog and contributes to global warming, and all eukaryotic organisms share a common ancestor. But if you phrase things right and say it’s obvious people will agree with your false statements and think people are over educated idiots for being right.
The bigger obstacle the left and right have to finding common ground is the hypocrisy of body autonomy. Vaccines, women’s rights, trans rights, drugs, health choices and more derived of things like this all boil down to an individual decision to do what they want with their own body and no one has any consistent logic. This is just one source of disagreement.
We’re way past the point of needing ranked choice voting to allow people to truly support the ideas the most identify with without being lumped in with other groups simply to avoid loss of voting power in a first past the post environment.
No. It is consistent. Bodily autonomy for everyone. You don’t get to go into the populations as a plague rat and kill others with your idiocy, though. That impinges on their freedoms.
And, their views typically do not include the things that most of the people I know hate the most about the platform that they ascribe to.
They just think being Republican will make them wealthier or fix problems in the country or make the world a better place.
The single issue voters have an opinion on a single issue and everything else doesn’t matter compared to that one thing.
They don’t care about all of the bad as long as the single bit of good can be accomplished, and they don’t care if you think that single bit of good is a bad thing.
They don’t care to talk to or be dissuaded by their family members who are not approaching them with a spirit of love and care for them.
Beside that, it’s not mentally or emotionally healthy to live spring-loaded with ontological traps that can be fired off with a single phrase to bring down judgment and the fires of hell on the people you meet.
They’re not going to want to hear you if that’s what you’re bringing to the table.
Of course, after Trump in the white house, it’s kinda irrelevant.
Historians have a word for Germans who joined the Nazi party, not because they hated Jews, but out of a hope for restored patriotism, or a sense of economic anxiety, or a hope to preserve their religious values, or dislike of their opponents, or raw political opportunism, or convenience, or ignorance, or greed.
That word is “Nazi.” Nobody cares about their motives anymore.
They joined what they joined. They lent their support and their moral approval. And, in so doing, they bound themselves to everything that came after. Who cares any more what particular knot they used in the binding?
“We” aren’t labeling “them” anything. They literally sided with Neo-Nazis. People carrying swastika flags in support of Trump, and you think “not Nazis” were ok with that? Sorry friend, but no. If someone is okay to march with Nazis, they’re a fucking Nazi.
I must have missed something if every single Trump voter was out there marching with the ones carrying the nazi flag. Maybe I should get my eyes checked, as I sure didn’t see tens of millions of people in those photos.
Stop misusing literally.
I understand what you’re getting at, but I vehemently disagree that guilt by association can be reasonably applied to the entirety of a group this fucking large. Has the same feel to me as being distrustful of every person with dark skin because of skewed crime statistics.
I’m not misusing the word. They saw Nazi flags flying and at best they thought
Well, I might not agree with what they’re saying, but they have a right to say it
Except that what a Nazi flag says is incompatible with what this country should be, with what these people who think themselves “patriots” profess to believe. You don’t think guilty by association is fair? Explain to me why not, please. In what way is “Yep, being on the same side as Nazis is fine” not just being a fucking Nazi? I will be positively floored if you can come up with a single reasonable scenario to convince me there’s any difference.
And don’t think this is in bad faith, either. If you can convince me you might just give me a fighting chance to forgive my family who went off the deep end. It is actually quite important to me, I’ve just given up there’s any hope of getting through to them after so long. Especially now he won.
It’s not a nice way to say it, but it is important to distinguish conservatism from the current situation where you have conservatives supporting nazis, planning concentration camps, and planning to pull a Hong Kong-style silencing of the opposition.
It is important to tell conservatives that the guy they voted for has gone off the deep end. For diplomatic reasons, I would probably avoid emotional words and say something along the lines of “we’re concerned that Trump plans to illegally block the democratic party from elections and trans people and immigrants may have to flee the country in the face of workplace discrimination or outright persecution and violence. His politicization of the military could lead to another coup attempt.”
But that’s just part of how you defuse fascism, those are the words you use with both Putin supporters and Trump supporters.
There is no place on earth and no time in history where “guh, inflation” is a reasonable excuse to vote for a nazi.
Person struggling to still call self conservative. I don’t like lefties either - they hear the world “conservative” and thing MAGA Nazi shitheads immediately. And they are constantly condescending and judgmental, yes.
But that doesn’t change the fact that if you voted for Trump, you are either a piece of shit or you’re stupid.
It also doesnt mean that we who can understand Trump has now determined he can and will abuse his power shouldn’t try to dialogue with Trump voters without being shitty to them. You’re not going to turn a vote (if there still is one next time) by being an asshat. Just make sure they’re not hardcore Trump diehards because time is precious.
A while back I myself made the sometimes painful journey from a conservative to the progressive I consider myself now. I know you didn’t ask, but here’s some stuff to keep in mind.
The internet has no place for subtlety. People desperately want the dopamine rush that comes from righteous fury, defending one’s viewpoint and crushing those who disagree. It’s true of a lot of people, and I’ll be honest, I’m guilty of it on occasion. It just feels so damn good to be right.
But in my experience, most people in life don’t really act that way. I mean, in high school I occasionally got shit on by people who were “lefties,” but I was usually asking for it. More generally, people were much more likely to ask me questions and discuss our differences. They may have been judging me, but I never got that vibe. It’s just easier to see the person you’re talking to as a fellow human in person. And those people were integral in helping me realize that a lot of the stuff I was seeing online about feminazis and whatnot was simply more rage product, designed to get that part of the brain pumping and let me feel good and superior to someone else.
Removed from the left vs right rage online, I found that it became increasingly difficult to call myself “conservative.” Not because I was worried about how people would think of me, but rather because the more people I met and the more I learned about the world, the harder it was to reconcile what I knew with the views I had held. And when I would try to provide context or data to my fellow conservatives, they refused to listen. Anything that didn’t reinforce the views they held, they didn’t want to hear.
So much of what I thought I knew about “lefties” was from online takes and screenshots that others shared, but none of that matched my experience with real people in real life. And I’ve been so grateful I had the chance to spend time with people with significantly different lived experiences from my own who didn’t shun me for my views but were friendly and helped me become a more empathetic person.
Of course, this goes both ways. The average conservative doesn’t want to kill gay people or black people. They aren’t represented by the extremes either. Generally speaking, people just want to live their lives. I truly think one of the biggest differences between progressive and conservative mindsets is about how many people whose lives are different from your own you’ve gotten to know. It helps us be less afraid of one another. It’s part of why densely populated areas tend to be more progressive, I think.
Anyway, I wish you luck in your journey. Hope you didn’t mind my musing here!
Former conservative here too. Just wanted to add this for others coming from a conservative background. Maga is not conservative. This is no longer the Republican Party.
Trump was a Democrat for abortion etc and then decided it’s easier to manipulate the right.
The government needs to get out of people’s personal lives. It’s none of their business what healthcare they get or who they marry. What happened to freedom and the pursuit of happiness?
Renewable energy is energy independence and self reliance.
Tariffs are taxes.
Law and order means convicted felons get prison, not becoming immune to crimes.
Every time Republicans are in office there is a recession. Every time Democrats are in office the economy improves.
The US is not allied with Russia.
Free speech and corporate rights means Disney can say they support LGBT rights.
Here’s my problem with the “not all conservatives” mind frame: Nazis and maga have security attached themselves onto conservatives, and conservatives who “aren’t those guys” aren’t doing anything to eradicate those parasites.
If you have 10 conservatives and 1 Nazi at the dinner table, you have 11 Nazis.
I did try to eradicate them. I voted Harris. The fact that so many people voted Trump after seeing what he did is what makes me question calling myself a conservative.
But I’m just some person in a some county in some state. I’m not a registered Democrat or Republican. Other than voting, I’m not sure what I /can/ do
The fact that you’re trying to figure it out is the important part. It’s important to self-reflect and define your ideologies, not by what others have told you to believe, but by what you personally believe.
Also, it’s okay to not take a label. It makes sense to want to identify yourself as an individual before attempting to identify yourself as part of a group.
The thing is, I don’t think my fundamentals have changed at all:
The purpose of a government is to better the lives of its citizens
The constitution is a living document and was intended to be modified as time passes
Nobody is infallible. We can all misunderstand things
We shouldn’t change things unless there is evidence that things need to be changed (this is the conservative part)
You should strive for a moral viewpoint that everyone can apply equally. There is no us vs you.
Political parties are a detriment to the people
You should be able to vote for whoever you want. (George Washington’s viewpoint)
Compromise is generally good.
We should have the freedom to choose ideas
Work within the system to find what needs to be changed. Then, change the system to accommodate
Conservatives and liberals should agree on the end goal, even if they disagree on the me tbh is to get there.
I’m a bit of a centrist. I think we should always take the middle ground, after passing the options through a moral filter. In other words, the moral middle ground between genocide and don’t kill people isn’t to kill some people. It’s to not kill people at all.
I don’t like things like feminism, black history month, and pride month. However, I understand their importance. To me, female, black, and LGBTQA+ are just all people. They should all have human rights.
Don’t like feminists? Join them. The point of feminism is to create a world where feminism doesn’t exist. We’ll just all be humans.
Black history is American history and it should be included year round. LGBTQA+ is fine so long as everything about it is consensual - and it is.
Don’t like the gays? Don’t be gay. You don’t have the right to infringe on other people’s human
rights. We don’t need to make a big deal about it, or have a month of celebration. They should be able to just exist. My only objection to LGBTQA+ is porn. I should be able to choose between penis and not penis, but that is easily rectified behind the scenes.
I have viewpoints liberals hate: it’s okay to address the adverse side effects of marijuana (ie. Disproportionate imprisonment of a distinguishable subgroup — not subclass — of people). It should be okay to research marijuana. It is not okay to legalize it before the experts have sufficient data and have evaluated such data. The best way to battle climate change in transportation isn’t electric vehicles. Lithium ion batteries are unstable. The best way is to let me drive whatever car I want, and provide places to do so (ie. Race track that’s a toll road), and install public transportation. Then, you slowly take away lanes until there is only one lane and the shoulder to get by in case of an accident.
I have views Republicans hate. While I enjoy firearms, I think the second amendment interpretation ignores the precondition of the militia. The president should not be immune to criminal prosecution of any kind. Fascism because your “team” is on top is still not OK. Don’t like abortions? Don’t get one. Religion should not guide government policy.
Like, isn’t it better if things are data driven (and filtered for bias)?
Universal healthcare makes sense by the numbers. The more people you represent, the more leverage you have during negotiation. Sure, your taxes go up - but that’s how government works…
Fighting climate change makes sense. If climate is change is real and we ignore it, the world becomes nigh unlivable. If climate change is real and we do something about, life is better for all the organisms that live on earth. If climate change is false and we do nothing, cool. If climate change is false and we fight climate change, we can all breathe better. What’s the downside here?
Fines should not be a fixed amount. It should be based on percentage of income. $300 fine for some making $8/hr for 8 hours a day is, assuming average of 30.437 days a month, is approximately 15.5% of gross monthly income. Whereas if you make, say, $60,000/year assuming an average of is just 6%. And the actual spending power goes down drastically more, the less you take home.
They don’t think we’re open minded and understanding.
They think we’re ignorant of how the world works, condescending, and irrationally judgemental.
I’m not saying this is how we ARE, this is just how they view us, and because they view us like that from the very start, there is no opportunity for meaningful dialogue.
It is bi-directional prejudice, and only by acts of understanding and patience and wisdom can that be overcome.
Agreed, for the most part. I’m never going to be impartial and seek understanding with a racist Nazi. They will have to understand my fist.
What if the angle would be that you understand the underlying needs and feelings that are being expressed as support for Nazism?
That’s fun to say, but where they balk is they think you draw too big of a circle around groups to label them “nazis.”
So to them, you may as well think anyone who likes guns is a nazi.
Well they should stop actingike nazis if theyre gonna be so fragile about it. No amount of you explaining their mindset will make that mindset okay
My suggestion to you would be to leave the virtue signaling to politicians and the figuring out how they work in order to beat them to the adults in the room.
Lol. Yep Though in fairness, I am genuinely judging them so fucking hard.
Pretty true, obviously most racist biggots don’t see themselves as racist biggots. They don’t see us as “open minded” they see us as close minded to their views.
Depends on the person. I’ve been told to my face without a hint of irony that “you’re so open minded all your brains fell out”.
I spent most of my childhood being repeatedly informed by my incredibly Republican family that I lack common sense.
Yet, I have the common sense to know that if you let people do whatever the fuck they want to do with their own bodies and lives then they’ll stay the fuck out of your body and your life.
Perhaps that is an uncommon sense. However, it should be a common sense but the people who claim to have common sense fail to understand that consistently.
Maybe common sense is not all it’s cracked up to be.
Common sense is a thought terminator. It’s just “everyone who’s smart agrees with this”. It’s common sense you shouldn’t inject any aspect of a disease causing pathogen into people. It’s common sense that you can’t burn so much stuff you make the whole sky smoky or permanently warm the planet. It’s common sense that you don’t share an ancestor with an oak tree. Now none of that is true. You should get vaccines, uncontrolled combustion creates smog and contributes to global warming, and all eukaryotic organisms share a common ancestor. But if you phrase things right and say it’s obvious people will agree with your false statements and think people are over educated idiots for being right.
The bigger obstacle the left and right have to finding common ground is the hypocrisy of body autonomy. Vaccines, women’s rights, trans rights, drugs, health choices and more derived of things like this all boil down to an individual decision to do what they want with their own body and no one has any consistent logic. This is just one source of disagreement.
We’re way past the point of needing ranked choice voting to allow people to truly support the ideas the most identify with without being lumped in with other groups simply to avoid loss of voting power in a first past the post environment.
No. It is consistent. Bodily autonomy for everyone. You don’t get to go into the populations as a plague rat and kill others with your idiocy, though. That impinges on their freedoms.
Being convinced to give a shit about other people just shows that you’re gullible, to them.
And, their views typically do not include the things that most of the people I know hate the most about the platform that they ascribe to.
They just think being Republican will make them wealthier or fix problems in the country or make the world a better place.
The single issue voters have an opinion on a single issue and everything else doesn’t matter compared to that one thing.
They don’t care about all of the bad as long as the single bit of good can be accomplished, and they don’t care if you think that single bit of good is a bad thing.
They don’t care to talk to or be dissuaded by their family members who are not approaching them with a spirit of love and care for them.
Beside that, it’s not mentally or emotionally healthy to live spring-loaded with ontological traps that can be fired off with a single phrase to bring down judgment and the fires of hell on the people you meet.
They’re not going to want to hear you if that’s what you’re bringing to the table.
Of course, after Trump in the white house, it’s kinda irrelevant.
Sure, let’s just casually label half the fucking country as Nazis. That definitely worked last time.
Prime fucking example of exactly what their first comment was talking about.
“We” aren’t labeling “them” anything. They literally sided with Neo-Nazis. People carrying swastika flags in support of Trump, and you think “not Nazis” were ok with that? Sorry friend, but no. If someone is okay to march with Nazis, they’re a fucking Nazi.
I must have missed something if every single Trump voter was out there marching with the ones carrying the nazi flag. Maybe I should get my eyes checked, as I sure didn’t see tens of millions of people in those photos.
Stop misusing literally.
I understand what you’re getting at, but I vehemently disagree that guilt by association can be reasonably applied to the entirety of a group this fucking large. Has the same feel to me as being distrustful of every person with dark skin because of skewed crime statistics.
I’m not misusing the word. They saw Nazi flags flying and at best they thought
Except that what a Nazi flag says is incompatible with what this country should be, with what these people who think themselves “patriots” profess to believe. You don’t think guilty by association is fair? Explain to me why not, please. In what way is “Yep, being on the same side as Nazis is fine” not just being a fucking Nazi? I will be positively floored if you can come up with a single reasonable scenario to convince me there’s any difference.
And don’t think this is in bad faith, either. If you can convince me you might just give me a fighting chance to forgive my family who went off the deep end. It is actually quite important to me, I’ve just given up there’s any hope of getting through to them after so long. Especially now he won.
It’s not a nice way to say it, but it is important to distinguish conservatism from the current situation where you have conservatives supporting nazis, planning concentration camps, and planning to pull a Hong Kong-style silencing of the opposition.
It is important to tell conservatives that the guy they voted for has gone off the deep end. For diplomatic reasons, I would probably avoid emotional words and say something along the lines of “we’re concerned that Trump plans to illegally block the democratic party from elections and trans people and immigrants may have to flee the country in the face of workplace discrimination or outright persecution and violence. His politicization of the military could lead to another coup attempt.”
But that’s just part of how you defuse fascism, those are the words you use with both Putin supporters and Trump supporters.
There is no place on earth and no time in history where “guh, inflation” is a reasonable excuse to vote for a nazi.
Yeah, ‘compassionate and nonviolent’ is translated to “judgmental cuck” in their language.
Those acts need to be bidirectional too. And guess what?
Hi,
Person struggling to still call self conservative. I don’t like lefties either - they hear the world “conservative” and thing MAGA Nazi shitheads immediately. And they are constantly condescending and judgmental, yes.
But that doesn’t change the fact that if you voted for Trump, you are either a piece of shit or you’re stupid.
It also doesnt mean that we who can understand Trump has now determined he can and will abuse his power shouldn’t try to dialogue with Trump voters without being shitty to them. You’re not going to turn a vote (if there still is one next time) by being an asshat. Just make sure they’re not hardcore Trump diehards because time is precious.
Hi!
A while back I myself made the sometimes painful journey from a conservative to the progressive I consider myself now. I know you didn’t ask, but here’s some stuff to keep in mind.
The internet has no place for subtlety. People desperately want the dopamine rush that comes from righteous fury, defending one’s viewpoint and crushing those who disagree. It’s true of a lot of people, and I’ll be honest, I’m guilty of it on occasion. It just feels so damn good to be right.
But in my experience, most people in life don’t really act that way. I mean, in high school I occasionally got shit on by people who were “lefties,” but I was usually asking for it. More generally, people were much more likely to ask me questions and discuss our differences. They may have been judging me, but I never got that vibe. It’s just easier to see the person you’re talking to as a fellow human in person. And those people were integral in helping me realize that a lot of the stuff I was seeing online about feminazis and whatnot was simply more rage product, designed to get that part of the brain pumping and let me feel good and superior to someone else.
Removed from the left vs right rage online, I found that it became increasingly difficult to call myself “conservative.” Not because I was worried about how people would think of me, but rather because the more people I met and the more I learned about the world, the harder it was to reconcile what I knew with the views I had held. And when I would try to provide context or data to my fellow conservatives, they refused to listen. Anything that didn’t reinforce the views they held, they didn’t want to hear.
So much of what I thought I knew about “lefties” was from online takes and screenshots that others shared, but none of that matched my experience with real people in real life. And I’ve been so grateful I had the chance to spend time with people with significantly different lived experiences from my own who didn’t shun me for my views but were friendly and helped me become a more empathetic person.
Of course, this goes both ways. The average conservative doesn’t want to kill gay people or black people. They aren’t represented by the extremes either. Generally speaking, people just want to live their lives. I truly think one of the biggest differences between progressive and conservative mindsets is about how many people whose lives are different from your own you’ve gotten to know. It helps us be less afraid of one another. It’s part of why densely populated areas tend to be more progressive, I think.
Anyway, I wish you luck in your journey. Hope you didn’t mind my musing here!
Former conservative here too. Just wanted to add this for others coming from a conservative background. Maga is not conservative. This is no longer the Republican Party.
Trump was a Democrat for abortion etc and then decided it’s easier to manipulate the right.
The government needs to get out of people’s personal lives. It’s none of their business what healthcare they get or who they marry. What happened to freedom and the pursuit of happiness?
Renewable energy is energy independence and self reliance.
Tariffs are taxes.
Law and order means convicted felons get prison, not becoming immune to crimes.
Every time Republicans are in office there is a recession. Every time Democrats are in office the economy improves.
The US is not allied with Russia.
Free speech and corporate rights means Disney can say they support LGBT rights.
Here’s my problem with the “not all conservatives” mind frame: Nazis and maga have security attached themselves onto conservatives, and conservatives who “aren’t those guys” aren’t doing anything to eradicate those parasites.
If you have 10 conservatives and 1 Nazi at the dinner table, you have 11 Nazis.
I agree with the Nazi statement.
I did try to eradicate them. I voted Harris. The fact that so many people voted Trump after seeing what he did is what makes me question calling myself a conservative.
But I’m just some person in a some county in some state. I’m not a registered Democrat or Republican. Other than voting, I’m not sure what I /can/ do
The fact that you’re trying to figure it out is the important part. It’s important to self-reflect and define your ideologies, not by what others have told you to believe, but by what you personally believe.
Also, it’s okay to not take a label. It makes sense to want to identify yourself as an individual before attempting to identify yourself as part of a group.
The thing is, I don’t think my fundamentals have changed at all:
I’m a bit of a centrist. I think we should always take the middle ground, after passing the options through a moral filter. In other words, the moral middle ground between genocide and don’t kill people isn’t to kill some people. It’s to not kill people at all.
I don’t like things like feminism, black history month, and pride month. However, I understand their importance. To me, female, black, and LGBTQA+ are just all people. They should all have human rights.
Don’t like feminists? Join them. The point of feminism is to create a world where feminism doesn’t exist. We’ll just all be humans. Black history is American history and it should be included year round. LGBTQA+ is fine so long as everything about it is consensual - and it is.
Don’t like the gays? Don’t be gay. You don’t have the right to infringe on other people’s human rights. We don’t need to make a big deal about it, or have a month of celebration. They should be able to just exist. My only objection to LGBTQA+ is porn. I should be able to choose between penis and not penis, but that is easily rectified behind the scenes.
I have viewpoints liberals hate: it’s okay to address the adverse side effects of marijuana (ie. Disproportionate imprisonment of a distinguishable subgroup — not subclass — of people). It should be okay to research marijuana. It is not okay to legalize it before the experts have sufficient data and have evaluated such data. The best way to battle climate change in transportation isn’t electric vehicles. Lithium ion batteries are unstable. The best way is to let me drive whatever car I want, and provide places to do so (ie. Race track that’s a toll road), and install public transportation. Then, you slowly take away lanes until there is only one lane and the shoulder to get by in case of an accident.
I have views Republicans hate. While I enjoy firearms, I think the second amendment interpretation ignores the precondition of the militia. The president should not be immune to criminal prosecution of any kind. Fascism because your “team” is on top is still not OK. Don’t like abortions? Don’t get one. Religion should not guide government policy.
Like, isn’t it better if things are data driven (and filtered for bias)?
Universal healthcare makes sense by the numbers. The more people you represent, the more leverage you have during negotiation. Sure, your taxes go up - but that’s how government works…
Fighting climate change makes sense. If climate is change is real and we ignore it, the world becomes nigh unlivable. If climate change is real and we do something about, life is better for all the organisms that live on earth. If climate change is false and we do nothing, cool. If climate change is false and we fight climate change, we can all breathe better. What’s the downside here?
Fines should not be a fixed amount. It should be based on percentage of income. $300 fine for some making $8/hr for 8 hours a day is, assuming average of 30.437 days a month, is approximately 15.5% of gross monthly income. Whereas if you make, say, $60,000/year assuming an average of is just 6%. And the actual spending power goes down drastically more, the less you take home.
Etc etc etc