What blows my mind about the reaction to this whole thing is that pretty much no one is disputing that Trump did, in fact, hold on to highly classified documents the disclosure of which would be...
Exemplary
What blows my mind about the reaction to this whole thing is that pretty much no one is disputing that Trump did, in fact, hold on to highly classified documents the disclosure of which would be devastating to US national security. No one is disputing that he showed these to people not authorized to see them. No one is disputing that he stored them inappropriately. No one is disputing that the FBI repeatedly tried to get those documents back from him and that they were repeatedly rebuffed.
No one is disputing any of those things. They just don't think he should be accountable for them.
This sort of quasi-religious devotion to him continues to baffle me. I realize we all have our biases and distort reality in different ways, but I just cannot comprehend how you can see Donald...
This sort of quasi-religious devotion to him continues to baffle me. I realize we all have our biases and distort reality in different ways, but I just cannot comprehend how you can see Donald Trump and hear him speak, and be so awestruck by him you literally pledge to kill in his name. I find that insane and scary, and I don't really know how to deal with that to be honest...
I think this says something very revealing about human nature, and we need to be vigilant about that awareness because descent into fascism is very seriously not so implausible.
I think this says something very revealing about human nature, and we need to be vigilant about that awareness because descent into fascism is very seriously not so implausible.
As an outsider I think the US is very lucky that it is Trump who has rode in on this wave of populist nationalist/patriotism/jingoism movement. The man is hilariously incompetent and that is their...
As an outsider I think the US is very lucky that it is Trump who has rode in on this wave of populist nationalist/patriotism/jingoism movement.
The man is hilariously incompetent and that is their saving grace. If instead of Trump it had been an intelligent proactive effective authoritarian, I fear to imagine the damage they could have done, and how far down the route of fascism they could have dragged the country.
Agreed. Two things that saved the US from an all out descent into all out fascism were the TV-comedy levels of incompetence of Trump & co, and his total disinterest in anything besides his own...
Agreed. Two things that saved the US from an all out descent into all out fascism were the TV-comedy levels of incompetence of Trump & co, and his total disinterest in anything besides his own immediate personal benefit.
That's the thing though - I'm not sure how charismatic Hitler was in German, but it does seem like he was able to give comprehensible, rousing (if a bit spittle-filled) speeches. I see none of it...
That's the thing though - I'm not sure how charismatic Hitler was in German, but it does seem like he was able to give comprehensible, rousing (if a bit spittle-filled) speeches. I see none of it with Trump. Is "hurting the right people" really enough to get such following, even with not much else on top of it? That's blood- curdingly terrifying.
I haven't watched any Trump rallies and don't plan to start, but he was famously quite good at pleasing crowds. Telling people what they want to hear (but respectable politicians wouldn't say...
I haven't watched any Trump rallies and don't plan to start, but he was famously quite good at pleasing crowds. Telling people what they want to hear (but respectable politicians wouldn't say explicitly) was what got people excited. There was a feedback effect where he would learn to repeat whatever got the crowd going. That's the human version of a bad social media algorithm.
This isn't new, it's the populist playbook. The messages that work are sometimes a little different because the culture is different.
(Also, the basic feedback effect is the same for any speaker in front of a large crowd; the question is how irresponsible they are about using it.)
It's more about me getting a better understanding of the more tribal / emotional / manipulable parts of people than it is about Trump/Hitler. Yeah, Hitler was more eloquent before amphetamines ate...
It's more about me getting a better understanding of the more tribal / emotional / manipulable parts of people than it is about Trump/Hitler. Yeah, Hitler was more eloquent before amphetamines ate his brain, but their messaging was very similar in tone and content. Hitler basically used "Make Germany Great Again!" as his rallying cry.
When I saw millions flock to Trump, that was my lightbulb "oh, that's how Hitler happened" moment.
As a native German I can tell you this: very Nowadays his style of talking is too much linked to him for it to be effective outside of already far-right circles, but Hitler was really good at...
I'm not sure how charismatic Hitler was in German
As a native German I can tell you this: very
Nowadays his style of talking is too much linked to him for it to be effective outside of already far-right circles, but Hitler was really good at firing up a crowd. Like really good, he knew exactly how to play his audience.
As @escher correctly said already, later the amphetamines took their toll. And also yes, the core of the messages of both Hitler and Trump is basically the same.
From what all I can infer from my experiences and observations, the initial attraction is that he speaks the same empty word-salad as them. So they feel that they "get" him as a result, even if...
From what all I can infer from my experiences and observations, the initial attraction is that he speaks the same empty word-salad as them. So they feel that they "get" him as a result, even if the contents of his word-salad is even emptier than the "business-jargon" that some politicians employ.
Pair that word-salad with constant validation of their otherwise discredited opinions (the racism, the backward thinking, etc.) and you have a potent cocktail.
I feel like it’s not so much about inspiring people to act the way they do. It seems to be more about him just letting all those people be the brains of themselves they’ve always wanted to be.
I feel like it’s not so much about inspiring people to act the way they do. It seems to be more about him just letting all those people be the brains of themselves they’ve always wanted to be.
An explanation I've seen for conspiratorial beliefs is that it isn't an accident that they're insane/ridiculous, it's a feature. If you can believe that reptilian space Zionists control the...
An explanation I've seen for conspiratorial beliefs is that it isn't an accident that they're insane/ridiculous, it's a feature. If you can believe that reptilian space Zionists control the government, you haven't answered a question (about, say, some plausible corruption in the MIC or Netenyahu administration), you've answered all questions. Why you got fired, why your girlfriend left you, why people don't agree with you on forums, why Ariel is black, etc. It is calisthenics for disbelief and the comfortable quieting of cognitive dissonance.
The conspiracist who feels superior by having access to some hidden truth also gets a stronger feeling of superiority the more illogical an idea, because it would take a superior mind to be able to see through something that even their fellow conspiracists think is ridiculous.
For someone who is religious you might see some of that pattern in something like "God has a plan" for an unexplained evil or tenet, like giving a child Tay-Sachs / eternal torment.
I find that insane and scary, and I don't really know how to deal with that to be honest...
It might be a great idea for a thread?
It is scary, and I don't have any good answer. I think lowering the cost for admitting you're wrong and normalizing intellectual humility would be good ideas.
The concept of X-to-Y pipelines that got popular a while back also make a lot of sense. No one (except with severe mental illnesses) go from hating liberals to thinking JFK Jr. is the shadow president without a lot of steps in between, and making that pipeline/gradient want to flow in the other direction seems like the goal.
Nail, meet head. I think this is quite accurate - just like a lot of the rest of us in the world, things are also pretty bad for MAGAs - they're facing the same increasingly depersonalized world,...
An explanation I've seen for conspiratorial beliefs is that it isn't an accident that they're insane/ridiculous, it's a feature. If you can believe that reptilian space Zionists control the government, you haven't answered a question (about, say, some plausible corruption in the MIC or Netenyahu administration), you've answered all questions. Why you got fired, why your girlfriend left you, why people don't agree with you on forums, why Ariel is black, etc. It is calisthenics for disbelief and the comfortable quieting of cognitive dissonance.
Nail, meet head. I think this is quite accurate - just like a lot of the rest of us in the world, things are also pretty bad for MAGAs - they're facing the same increasingly depersonalized world, lower wages, unfair work expectations, higher costs, worse weather, and powerful people laughing in our faces.
For a rational person, you learn early on that sometimes you have to say "we don't know exactly why this is, or how to fix it, but there's some evidence it's because of this and that this might work" - being comfortable in those gray areas is pretty hard. Convincing others to embrace the uncertainty is even harder!
So when someone comes along and says "your problems aren't because of you, and I'm going to fix everything for you", there are a lot of people (as we've seen) who are willing to get behind that for the sake of offloading their responsibility to work on fixing things. You see it in a lot of religious in-group stuff too - the problems of the world are because of wrong beliefs, or because some lady ate a fruit with her husband, ah, but we have the answer!
I think lowering the cost for admitting you're wrong and normalizing intellectual humility would be good ideas.
This is so, so important. Sometimes I jokingly say there are 6 deadly sins, and Pride above them. So many of the other 6 can be attributed to what we all lovingly call "main character syndrome" these days. If we could all just... get over ourselves a little bit, admit we're human, we're flawed, our natural inclination is to be selfish and animalistic but we can choose not to be.
Instead it sometimes feels like we've done the opposite - we pretend the expectation is to be a flawless angel, and it leads to situations where people want to argue that things that are clearly negative social traits are actually the right way to be, because if it wasn't, they wouldn't be that way.
If you have a love deficit from early childhood, a strong authority figure can seem to fill that void. Also, you may laboring under the false notion that the reason your parents abandoned you/were...
If you have a love deficit from early childhood, a strong authority figure can seem to fill that void.
Also, you may laboring under the false notion that the reason your parents abandoned you/were aloof/abusive is because of your lack of loyalty.
I understand that's what they believe but I think we should refute that position nevertheless. Trump was repeatedly asked to return documents to government custody and did not. Not only that, he...
But he shouldn't be held accountable because others weren't held accountable, see? Basically a grade-schooler's defense, which isn't very surprising.
I understand that's what they believe but I think we should refute that position nevertheless. Trump was repeatedly asked to return documents to government custody and did not. Not only that, he repeatedly asserted that he did not have them despite (obviously) having them.
In contrast, Biden and Pence (and I'm sure others) did their own investigations, reported the documents they found, invited the national archives to check for more, and have repeatedly and scrupulously complied with every request to ensure that any documents incorrectly in their custody were cataloged, secured, and returned.
It's the difference between being hitting someone with your car and then fleeing the scene of the accident vs hitting someone with your car, calling 911, administering first aid until first responders get there, and then insisting on paying for the damages to their car and any medical bills out of pocket.
I'm surrounded by Trump voters and I can tell you that they don't care about being refuted. They're constitutionally incapable of seeing anything Trump does as wrong. I've brought up the...
I'm surrounded by Trump voters and I can tell you that they don't care about being refuted. They're constitutionally incapable of seeing anything Trump does as wrong. I've brought up the differences between the Biden/Pence/Clinton/etc situations several times and it just does not matter to them. The reality distortion field is too strong.
The whatabout-ism drives me insane, too. Like yes, I do believe that if it turned out Obama hoarded a bunch of confidential documents, lied about it, and refused to give them back, that he too...
The whatabout-ism drives me insane, too. Like yes, I do believe that if it turned out Obama hoarded a bunch of confidential documents, lied about it, and refused to give them back, that he too should be indicted.
It's insane to me how they don't understand that no one else treats politics like a sports team.
They don’t care because the argument is all a distraction. What they like is the hope of more patriarchy, or more white supremacy, or more fascism. They don’t care if Trump ruins our democracy or...
They don’t care because the argument is all a distraction. What they like is the hope of more patriarchy, or more white supremacy, or more fascism. They don’t care if Trump ruins our democracy or kills Americans. As long as there’s a hope that soon the poor fragile conservative Americans can oppress others they’ll let Trump do what he wants.
If only that was true. The Qanon cult has been claiming the documents related to Hunter Biden and Hillary Clinton crimes. That Trump has taken them so that he could bring down the globalist elites...
No one is disputing any of those things
If only that was true. The Qanon cult has been claiming the documents related to Hunter Biden and Hillary Clinton crimes. That Trump has taken them so that he could bring down the globalist elites in one fell swoop. That the FBI raided him because they knew Trump was close to exposing the truth and had to stop him.
It's difficult when their views are beyond the most outlandish satire. If you assume they would hold the most awful outlandish view possible, you still find yourself shocked that is is even more...
It's difficult when their views are beyond the most outlandish satire. If you assume they would hold the most awful outlandish view possible, you still find yourself shocked that is is even more bizarre and irrational than that.
JFK Jr being resurrected in Dallas to become Trumps greatest ally and take down the globalist elites is simply beyond anything my mind could ever conceive, no matter how many drugs I pumped into my system.
Okay, but that's a pretty generic meme. Where do you go from there? I'd guess 95% are bluffing and many of the rest are fairly incompetent, as we saw in the January 6th riot. But they could still...
Okay, but that's a pretty generic meme. Where do you go from there?
I'd guess 95% are bluffing and many of the rest are fairly incompetent, as we saw in the January 6th riot. But they could still do some real damage and I hope the police are prepared this time.
Is it generic though? If it wasn't for my mom stopping him, my dad would have been at January 6 and stormed the capital. Why? Because he listened to this rhetoric and bought into it.
Is it generic though? If it wasn't for my mom stopping him, my dad would have been at January 6 and stormed the capital. Why? Because he listened to this rhetoric and bought into it.
Thanks. The people saying these things should be taken both literally and seriously because words mean something and when we take them as anything other than being serious we cheapen political...
Thanks. The people saying these things should be taken both literally and seriously because words mean something and when we take them as anything other than being serious we cheapen political discourse entirely.
It's easy to say "words mean something," but the next step is to decide what they mean and that often requires a lot of context. There's usually a person behind the words, but trolls exist. People...
It's easy to say "words mean something," but the next step is to decide what they mean and that often requires a lot of context. There's usually a person behind the words, but trolls exist. People also repeat stuff they heard and maybe they don't know what they mean by it. People also lie. Sometimes, they say things they mean, but aren't taken seriously, and it's only in retrospect that you realize how bad it is.
I've seen people say "literally and seriously" before and I think that's a meme too? I don't know what other people mean by it but I can speculate. I think it comes down to what decisions you need to make and what evidence you can dig up. For example, someone moderating an online forum will need to decide who to ban based on surface appearances and doing a deep investigation isn't worth their time.
The “literally and seriously” framing comes from just after the 2016 election. There was a lot of talk about how journalists took Trump literally throughout the campaign, reporting on all the...
The “literally and seriously” framing comes from just after the 2016 election. There was a lot of talk about how journalists took Trump literally throughout the campaign, reporting on all the bizarre, dangerous, and factually incorrect things he said, but not seriously because there was no way so many people could actually support him (…right?).
Meanwhile Trump supporters were said to have taken him seriously but not literally. They could be excited about the feelings behind what he was saying without worrying about whether there was any connection to reality on the actual words.
Given how things went, the big lesson was that we all should have taken him both literally and seriously.
Is it though? Why are you making an exception for violent politically speech? If Jan 6th has taught us anything it should be that when people make threats you must take them literally. This is to...
Is it though? Why are you making an exception for violent politically speech? If Jan 6th has taught us anything it should be that when people make threats you must take them literally. This is to say nothing of the steady rise of far-right (now becoming mainstream right) groups who engage violence regularly. Just look at what the Proud Boys do in the summer in places like Portland. Trump and many members of the mainstream Republican party a have been engaging in regular stochastic terrorism leading up to the run up of Jan 6th and pretty regularly thereafter.
I wasn’t thinking specifically about threats or violent speech, just writing abstractly about how speech works. Threats tend to be pretty obvious, but even then, people often don’t speak plainly....
I wasn’t thinking specifically about threats or violent speech, just writing abstractly about how speech works.
Threats tend to be pretty obvious, but even then, people often don’t speak plainly. Stereotypically, if some mobster says, “Nice store you got there. It would be a shame if something happened to it,” they aren’t saying your store is very nice and wishing you good fortune. Taking it literally isn’t how you understand the threat. You need to understand the sarcasm to get it.
So I don’t think there’s any substitute for trying to understand what people are saying. That doesn’t mean putting up with ambiguous threats or assuming they’re harmless, but it does mean someone who doesn’t understand cultural context will often do a bad job of it.
I've not really talked to him about it because he's so dug in and entrenched that he takes any political discussion as a personal attack. My dad is a truck driver who spends 8+ hours on the road...
I've not really talked to him about it because he's so dug in and entrenched that he takes any political discussion as a personal attack. My dad is a truck driver who spends 8+ hours on the road listening to right wing podcasts and AM radio. There's little that I can say that can counterbalance the sheer amount of disinformation that he takes in daily.
This is the same man who suffers from a pretty serious autoimmune disorder and refused to get the covid vaccine. He was within inches of his life and on a ventilator while my mom who was diagnosed with covid at the exact same time and was vaccinated only had very mild symptoms. My dad has revised his own experience and told everyone that his covid "wasn't that bad". You can't reason someone out of a position that they didn't reason themselves into. My dad went from being a regular run of the mill Republican who was fairly politically apathetic to radicalized by Beck and company.
There have always been crackpots and authoritarian followers, but the number sure seems to have increased a lot in the last 10 years. It's really disturbing how many people wallow around in the...
There have always been crackpots and authoritarian followers, but the number sure seems to have increased a lot in the last 10 years. It's really disturbing how many people wallow around in the right-wing media machine and are constantly furious about the wrong thing. And it's shocking how easy it is to manipulate people into voting and acting against the common good and their own interests.
There's been a saying on the internet the last many years - that the internet has allowed every village idiot to get in touch with each other. It's also allowed every authoritarian to find each...
There have always been crackpots and authoritarian followers, but the number sure seems to have increased a lot in the last 10 years
There's been a saying on the internet the last many years - that the internet has allowed every village idiot to get in touch with each other. It's also allowed every authoritarian to find each other.
It is the blessing and the curse of such a radical increase in the ability of the average person to communicate with so many others. So many groups of people have been able to find each other,...
It is the blessing and the curse of such a radical increase in the ability of the average person to communicate with so many others. So many groups of people have been able to find each other, talk about the issue important to them, petition and protest, fundraise, support each other, and help raise awareness.
Unfortunately some of those groups are hateful idiots, and now their voice is amplified to the point we can't ignore them like we did when it was just Carl the local Nazi handing out flyers at the corner store in a small town where everyone knew to ignore him.
I think this is a really important point. Sure there are people out there with an agenda; bigots, con-artists and the like, but I feel that many people have built their beliefs off the same...
It's really disturbing how many people wallow around in the right-wing media machine and are constantly furious about the wrong thing.
I think this is a really important point. Sure there are people out there with an agenda; bigots, con-artists and the like, but I feel that many people have built their beliefs off the same correct fear - for many people the world is worse than it was 10+ years ago. The right-wing media are selling a purposely wrong solution to people who trust them.
Perhaps one longterm solution is finding a way to address the pitiful state of popular media (in general).
Honestly, these people have been swinging nuts so much that I wish they'd actually try (and bungle) something bad enough that the government finally takes off the kid gloves and puts them down...
Honestly, these people have been swinging nuts so much that I wish they'd actually try (and bungle) something bad enough that the government finally takes off the kid gloves and puts them down hard, then scours extremists from army and law enforcement and takes down the TV and radio networks that have been promoting their hateful goals. I hope they get they get such a kicking that nobody wants to be seen in public wearing a MAGA hat or waving a confederate flag again because of their association with loss and the danger of being physically attacked.
These people don't believe in ideals like freedom of speech, tolerance or democracy, and they don't deserve to exploit their safety and comfort. Their goal is to end democracy and install a theocratic dictatorship. Why should you tolerate people whose goal is to destroy you and everyone like you? Go on the attack, call them what they are, weed them out, plaster their names and offenses all over social media like they do with the minorities they want to harass out of existence. They behave this way because they feel encouraged and safe to do so, and they shouldn't.
I'm sure someone whose a bit more experienced politically will tell me why that isn't feasible, but I can dream. Mods, please don't feel bad for deleting this comment if it goes too far. I try and restrain myself more on here, but god I am just sick of these people.
What blows my mind about the reaction to this whole thing is that pretty much no one is disputing that Trump did, in fact, hold on to highly classified documents the disclosure of which would be devastating to US national security. No one is disputing that he showed these to people not authorized to see them. No one is disputing that he stored them inappropriately. No one is disputing that the FBI repeatedly tried to get those documents back from him and that they were repeatedly rebuffed.
No one is disputing any of those things. They just don't think he should be accountable for them.
This sort of quasi-religious devotion to him continues to baffle me. I realize we all have our biases and distort reality in different ways, but I just cannot comprehend how you can see Donald Trump and hear him speak, and be so awestruck by him you literally pledge to kill in his name. I find that insane and scary, and I don't really know how to deal with that to be honest...
I think this says something very revealing about human nature, and we need to be vigilant about that awareness because descent into fascism is very seriously not so implausible.
I never understood how Hitler happened until Trump happened. Real eye-opener, that.
As an outsider I think the US is very lucky that it is Trump who has rode in on this wave of populist nationalist/patriotism/jingoism movement.
The man is hilariously incompetent and that is their saving grace. If instead of Trump it had been an intelligent proactive effective authoritarian, I fear to imagine the damage they could have done, and how far down the route of fascism they could have dragged the country.
Which is why DeSantis is terrifying.
Agreed. Two things that saved the US from an all out descent into all out fascism were the TV-comedy levels of incompetence of Trump & co, and his total disinterest in anything besides his own immediate personal benefit.
That's the thing though - I'm not sure how charismatic Hitler was in German, but it does seem like he was able to give comprehensible, rousing (if a bit spittle-filled) speeches. I see none of it with Trump. Is "hurting the right people" really enough to get such following, even with not much else on top of it? That's blood- curdingly terrifying.
I haven't watched any Trump rallies and don't plan to start, but he was famously quite good at pleasing crowds. Telling people what they want to hear (but respectable politicians wouldn't say explicitly) was what got people excited. There was a feedback effect where he would learn to repeat whatever got the crowd going. That's the human version of a bad social media algorithm.
This isn't new, it's the populist playbook. The messages that work are sometimes a little different because the culture is different.
(Also, the basic feedback effect is the same for any speaker in front of a large crowd; the question is how irresponsible they are about using it.)
It's more about me getting a better understanding of the more tribal / emotional / manipulable parts of people than it is about Trump/Hitler. Yeah, Hitler was more eloquent before amphetamines ate his brain, but their messaging was very similar in tone and content. Hitler basically used "Make Germany Great Again!" as his rallying cry.
When I saw millions flock to Trump, that was my lightbulb "oh, that's how Hitler happened" moment.
As a native German I can tell you this: very
Nowadays his style of talking is too much linked to him for it to be effective outside of already far-right circles, but Hitler was really good at firing up a crowd. Like really good, he knew exactly how to play his audience.
As @escher correctly said already, later the amphetamines took their toll. And also yes, the core of the messages of both Hitler and Trump is basically the same.
From what all I can infer from my experiences and observations, the initial attraction is that he speaks the same empty word-salad as them. So they feel that they "get" him as a result, even if the contents of his word-salad is even emptier than the "business-jargon" that some politicians employ.
Pair that word-salad with constant validation of their otherwise discredited opinions (the racism, the backward thinking, etc.) and you have a potent cocktail.
I feel like it’s not so much about inspiring people to act the way they do. It seems to be more about him just letting all those people be the brains of themselves they’ve always wanted to be.
An explanation I've seen for conspiratorial beliefs is that it isn't an accident that they're insane/ridiculous, it's a feature. If you can believe that reptilian space Zionists control the government, you haven't answered a question (about, say, some plausible corruption in the MIC or Netenyahu administration), you've answered all questions. Why you got fired, why your girlfriend left you, why people don't agree with you on forums, why Ariel is black, etc. It is calisthenics for disbelief and the comfortable quieting of cognitive dissonance.
The conspiracist who feels superior by having access to some hidden truth also gets a stronger feeling of superiority the more illogical an idea, because it would take a superior mind to be able to see through something that even their fellow conspiracists think is ridiculous.
For someone who is religious you might see some of that pattern in something like "God has a plan" for an unexplained evil or tenet, like giving a child Tay-Sachs / eternal torment.
It might be a great idea for a thread?
It is scary, and I don't have any good answer. I think lowering the cost for admitting you're wrong and normalizing intellectual humility would be good ideas.
The concept of X-to-Y pipelines that got popular a while back also make a lot of sense. No one (except with severe mental illnesses) go from hating liberals to thinking JFK Jr. is the shadow president without a lot of steps in between, and making that pipeline/gradient want to flow in the other direction seems like the goal.
There are also a number of cult deprogramming books out there I've really been meaning to read, like Escaping the Rabbit Hole / The Rape of the Mind.
Nail, meet head. I think this is quite accurate - just like a lot of the rest of us in the world, things are also pretty bad for MAGAs - they're facing the same increasingly depersonalized world, lower wages, unfair work expectations, higher costs, worse weather, and powerful people laughing in our faces.
For a rational person, you learn early on that sometimes you have to say "we don't know exactly why this is, or how to fix it, but there's some evidence it's because of this and that this might work" - being comfortable in those gray areas is pretty hard. Convincing others to embrace the uncertainty is even harder!
So when someone comes along and says "your problems aren't because of you, and I'm going to fix everything for you", there are a lot of people (as we've seen) who are willing to get behind that for the sake of offloading their responsibility to work on fixing things. You see it in a lot of religious in-group stuff too - the problems of the world are because of wrong beliefs, or because some lady ate a fruit with her husband, ah, but we have the answer!
This is so, so important. Sometimes I jokingly say there are 6 deadly sins, and Pride above them. So many of the other 6 can be attributed to what we all lovingly call "main character syndrome" these days. If we could all just... get over ourselves a little bit, admit we're human, we're flawed, our natural inclination is to be selfish and animalistic but we can choose not to be.
Instead it sometimes feels like we've done the opposite - we pretend the expectation is to be a flawless angel, and it leads to situations where people want to argue that things that are clearly negative social traits are actually the right way to be, because if it wasn't, they wouldn't be that way.
Why would anyone pledge their life to some king? I don’t know but humans love doing it.
If you have a love deficit from early childhood, a strong authority figure can seem to fill that void.
Also, you may laboring under the false notion that the reason your parents abandoned you/were aloof/abusive is because of your lack of loyalty.
Childhood trauma is a bitch.
But he shouldn't be held accountable because others weren't held accountable, see? Basically a grade-schooler's defense, which isn't very surprising.
I understand that's what they believe but I think we should refute that position nevertheless. Trump was repeatedly asked to return documents to government custody and did not. Not only that, he repeatedly asserted that he did not have them despite (obviously) having them.
In contrast, Biden and Pence (and I'm sure others) did their own investigations, reported the documents they found, invited the national archives to check for more, and have repeatedly and scrupulously complied with every request to ensure that any documents incorrectly in their custody were cataloged, secured, and returned.
It's the difference between being hitting someone with your car and then fleeing the scene of the accident vs hitting someone with your car, calling 911, administering first aid until first responders get there, and then insisting on paying for the damages to their car and any medical bills out of pocket.
I'm surrounded by Trump voters and I can tell you that they don't care about being refuted. They're constitutionally incapable of seeing anything Trump does as wrong. I've brought up the differences between the Biden/Pence/Clinton/etc situations several times and it just does not matter to them. The reality distortion field is too strong.
The whatabout-ism drives me insane, too. Like yes, I do believe that if it turned out Obama hoarded a bunch of confidential documents, lied about it, and refused to give them back, that he too should be indicted.
It's insane to me how they don't understand that no one else treats politics like a sports team.
They don’t care because the argument is all a distraction. What they like is the hope of more patriarchy, or more white supremacy, or more fascism. They don’t care if Trump ruins our democracy or kills Americans. As long as there’s a hope that soon the poor fragile conservative Americans can oppress others they’ll let Trump do what he wants.
If only that was true. The Qanon cult has been claiming the documents related to Hunter Biden and Hillary Clinton crimes. That Trump has taken them so that he could bring down the globalist elites in one fell swoop. That the FBI raided him because they knew Trump was close to exposing the truth and had to stop him.
Ok, that's fair. I probably should avoid underestimating the vacuous mental depravity of the Qultists.
It's difficult when their views are beyond the most outlandish satire. If you assume they would hold the most awful outlandish view possible, you still find yourself shocked that is is even more bizarre and irrational than that.
JFK Jr being resurrected in Dallas to become Trumps greatest ally and take down the globalist elites is simply beyond anything my mind could ever conceive, no matter how many drugs I pumped into my system.
When they tell you who they are, believe them.
Okay, but that's a pretty generic meme. Where do you go from there?
I'd guess 95% are bluffing and many of the rest are fairly incompetent, as we saw in the January 6th riot. But they could still do some real damage and I hope the police are prepared this time.
I hope the police are not personally involved themselves this time around
That, too.
Is it generic though? If it wasn't for my mom stopping him, my dad would have been at January 6 and stormed the capital. Why? Because he listened to this rhetoric and bought into it.
Well, the meme is generic but your story is not. Sorry to hear it, and good job by your mom.
Thanks. The people saying these things should be taken both literally and seriously because words mean something and when we take them as anything other than being serious we cheapen political discourse entirely.
It's easy to say "words mean something," but the next step is to decide what they mean and that often requires a lot of context. There's usually a person behind the words, but trolls exist. People also repeat stuff they heard and maybe they don't know what they mean by it. People also lie. Sometimes, they say things they mean, but aren't taken seriously, and it's only in retrospect that you realize how bad it is.
I've seen people say "literally and seriously" before and I think that's a meme too? I don't know what other people mean by it but I can speculate. I think it comes down to what decisions you need to make and what evidence you can dig up. For example, someone moderating an online forum will need to decide who to ban based on surface appearances and doing a deep investigation isn't worth their time.
The “literally and seriously” framing comes from just after the 2016 election. There was a lot of talk about how journalists took Trump literally throughout the campaign, reporting on all the bizarre, dangerous, and factually incorrect things he said, but not seriously because there was no way so many people could actually support him (…right?).
Meanwhile Trump supporters were said to have taken him seriously but not literally. They could be excited about the feelings behind what he was saying without worrying about whether there was any connection to reality on the actual words.
Given how things went, the big lesson was that we all should have taken him both literally and seriously.
That actually tracks really well, have’t heard it put that way before.
Is it though? Why are you making an exception for violent politically speech? If Jan 6th has taught us anything it should be that when people make threats you must take them literally. This is to say nothing of the steady rise of far-right (now becoming mainstream right) groups who engage violence regularly. Just look at what the Proud Boys do in the summer in places like Portland. Trump and many members of the mainstream Republican party a have been engaging in regular stochastic terrorism leading up to the run up of Jan 6th and pretty regularly thereafter.
I wasn’t thinking specifically about threats or violent speech, just writing abstractly about how speech works.
Threats tend to be pretty obvious, but even then, people often don’t speak plainly. Stereotypically, if some mobster says, “Nice store you got there. It would be a shame if something happened to it,” they aren’t saying your store is very nice and wishing you good fortune. Taking it literally isn’t how you understand the threat. You need to understand the sarcasm to get it.
So I don’t think there’s any substitute for trying to understand what people are saying. That doesn’t mean putting up with ambiguous threats or assuming they’re harmless, but it does mean someone who doesn’t understand cultural context will often do a bad job of it.
What’s your Dad’s opinion on Jan 6 and Trump now, in hindsight? Would be very interesting to hear.
I've not really talked to him about it because he's so dug in and entrenched that he takes any political discussion as a personal attack. My dad is a truck driver who spends 8+ hours on the road listening to right wing podcasts and AM radio. There's little that I can say that can counterbalance the sheer amount of disinformation that he takes in daily.
This is the same man who suffers from a pretty serious autoimmune disorder and refused to get the covid vaccine. He was within inches of his life and on a ventilator while my mom who was diagnosed with covid at the exact same time and was vaccinated only had very mild symptoms. My dad has revised his own experience and told everyone that his covid "wasn't that bad". You can't reason someone out of a position that they didn't reason themselves into. My dad went from being a regular run of the mill Republican who was fairly politically apathetic to radicalized by Beck and company.
There have always been crackpots and authoritarian followers, but the number sure seems to have increased a lot in the last 10 years. It's really disturbing how many people wallow around in the right-wing media machine and are constantly furious about the wrong thing. And it's shocking how easy it is to manipulate people into voting and acting against the common good and their own interests.
There's been a saying on the internet the last many years - that the internet has allowed every village idiot to get in touch with each other. It's also allowed every authoritarian to find each other.
It's also not just the last ten years, here's an article from 2001 talking about the issue.
It is the blessing and the curse of such a radical increase in the ability of the average person to communicate with so many others. So many groups of people have been able to find each other, talk about the issue important to them, petition and protest, fundraise, support each other, and help raise awareness.
Unfortunately some of those groups are hateful idiots, and now their voice is amplified to the point we can't ignore them like we did when it was just Carl the local Nazi handing out flyers at the corner store in a small town where everyone knew to ignore him.
I think this is a really important point. Sure there are people out there with an agenda; bigots, con-artists and the like, but I feel that many people have built their beliefs off the same correct fear - for many people the world is worse than it was 10+ years ago. The right-wing media are selling a purposely wrong solution to people who trust them.
Perhaps one longterm solution is finding a way to address the pitiful state of popular media (in general).
It's an open and shut case, the fact people are yelling for blood is very unsettling.
For what it's worth, the arraignment is pretty quiet so far. If they're organising a civil war, it's not happening yet.
What arraignment? The one that's happening tomorrow?
Oh my apologies, you're right, he arrived today but it's happening tomorrow.
Honestly, these people have been swinging nuts so much that I wish they'd actually try (and bungle) something bad enough that the government finally takes off the kid gloves and puts them down hard, then scours extremists from army and law enforcement and takes down the TV and radio networks that have been promoting their hateful goals. I hope they get they get such a kicking that nobody wants to be seen in public wearing a MAGA hat or waving a confederate flag again because of their association with loss and the danger of being physically attacked.
These people don't believe in ideals like freedom of speech, tolerance or democracy, and they don't deserve to exploit their safety and comfort. Their goal is to end democracy and install a theocratic dictatorship. Why should you tolerate people whose goal is to destroy you and everyone like you? Go on the attack, call them what they are, weed them out, plaster their names and offenses all over social media like they do with the minorities they want to harass out of existence. They behave this way because they feel encouraged and safe to do so, and they shouldn't.
I'm sure someone whose a bit more experienced politically will tell me why that isn't feasible, but I can dream. Mods, please don't feel bad for deleting this comment if it goes too far. I try and restrain myself more on here, but god I am just sick of these people.