• 4am@lemm.ee
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    4 months ago

    You know I’m really sick of repeating the “face-eating leopards party” jokes, but let’s call a spade a spade here

      • 4am@lemm.ee
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        4 months ago

        Aw fuck. Man there isn’t a single figure of speech left in American English that I don’t find out is actually a racist dog whistle that I never knew about

        Well goddamn, I apologize for its use.

        • pdxfed@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          No need to apologize, I happened to have said it a year or so ago and then had a…wait a minute, down the Internet rabbit hole and here we are. The purpose of mentioning it is that it wasn’t originally or historically ever offensive and probably outside of the US wouldn’t raise an eyebrow today, but since I do live in the US when I read more about it I committed that one to memory.

          I recently had a phrase come to mind a family member used to say as an intensifying adjective, such as “God damned” in “call the God damned police!”, but the intensifier my family member said growing up was “cotton picking” as “get the cotton picking car out of the way!” I’m from pacNW US and only decades later had my brain tripwire catch on that it was clearly derogatory towards either slaves or at best those who did low-paid agricultural work when my family member was growing up. How that phrase made it into his family’s vocabulary is a wonder in the PacNW with no agricultural ties nor family history anywhere near the US south where you might expect it to be more common. Point is, we all have things that we absorb from the language around us, I just try to generally be cognizant of roots and context but it’s difficult even when you try sometimes!

      • lolrightythen@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        We don’t repeat neutral and boring phrases as much as the juicy remarkable ones.

        As a rule of thumb, we should be less uppity about… Blah

        You’re right and wrong

      • Maeve@sh.itjust.works
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        4 months ago

        I internally delved (pun unintended) into this a long time ago, knowing that “espada” means sword, and indeed is the reason of that suit in the standard playing card deck, afaict.

      • Kiernian@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        Wait, growing up in the Midwestern US, we’d call that a shovel, but the thing we’d call a spade would more rightly be called a garden trowel…

        I’m questioning so much right now…

        • n0clue@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          A trowel is a type of spade, a spade is basically a shovel but has a different shaped blade

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      It isn’t even “Ate my face” so much as folks who were sold a bill of goods by conservative propagandists

      • Family Values!
      • Christian schools!
      • No crime!
      • Patriotic Unity!
      • Entrepreneurship and an Honest Work Ethic!

      only to get there and discover

      • Spousal Abuse! Child Abuse! Rape! Intense Misogyny!
      • What kind of nerd needs an education? Get a job you stupid kids!
      • Lawlessness!
      • Deep misanthropy wrapped in the American Flag!
      • Scams! Price gouging! Poverty!

      Turns out a liberal is just a conservative who has been mugged by reality.

  • NABDad@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    What I’m wondering about is, are they “Conservative” as in they believe government is bad and taxes are bad and they are shocked, shocked I say to discover that there’s racism happening in this establishment, or are they full on fascist “Conservative” and racist as fuck themselves and they just didn’t realize they were one of the minorities they were supposed to hate?

    • octopus_ink@lemmy.ml
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      4 months ago

      Based only on some recent posts and comments I’ve seen about hispanic conservatives in general, I would guess it was because they are religious and feel they need to align with Republicans because of that. Now they have learned that Republican-style Christianity doesn’t really resemble Jesus-style Christianity.

      But also - isn’t Idaho literally the whitest state? Or is that Iowa?

      • frickineh@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        Maybe not by population, but Idaho has a huge problem with white supremacists. The Aryan Nation was founded there, and there’s a reason all the bigots in eastern Oregon want to secede and join Idaho.

      • DeadPand@midwest.social
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        4 months ago

        Idaho is a super Mormon state next to Utah, and momos are definitely more racist the closer to Utah they live

      • lone_faerie
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        4 months ago

        A hispanic neighbor came to my door a few weeks ago wanting to talk about the bible. Initially I was really annoyed, because obviously. I have a pride flag hanging outside and felt a little targeted. But we actually ended up having a really nice conversation about this, how Christianity should really be about love and understanding, but has been twisted to do the exact opposite.

        • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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          4 months ago

          A lot of African, Caribbean, and Pacific Island immigrants too. In the factory I work I think whites are a minority… and suspiciously it’s always team leaders and supervisors 👀

          • Pandantic [they/them]@midwest.social
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            4 months ago

            I think whites are a minority… and suspiciously it’s always team leaders and supervisors 👀

            Yeah, funny how that happens…. And we have some of the most awful factory jobs (ex: meat processing) that are almost exclusively filled by immigrants / minorities. It’s allmost like the system was built that way…

    • CosmicTurtle0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      4 months ago

      They are “conservatives” because they think they are better than other people.

      No joke, there is an immigrant in my state running the the GOP primary on the platform that immigration is broken and we need to fix the border.

      When you talk to these people, it literally is about how it’s okay because they are the good race. It’s those at the border that are ruining America.

      He talks about how his parents came here legally and how legal immigration is okay.

      My brother in Christ, do you not realize that the GOP is trying to make it illegal for any immigration to occur? You’re pulling the ladder after you, oh I’m sorry, your parents climbed on the ship. Now you’re telling everyone below that they are dirty and lazy for not making it up without a ladder.

      • ChicoSuave@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        That candidate is caught up in the very specific idea of “legal” and “documented alien” for methods of immigration without realizing that the racism inherent in the system will make it virtually impossible for anyone to meet legal qualifications for entry. Often the racism is hidden in the unwritten parts like the fees required to submit paperwork and the pressure for legal representation - all things that cost money and is designed to keep our the poors.

        That candidate has no idea what nuance means and will run things like a tyrant, confused by a lack of clear morality.

        • CosmicTurtle0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          4 months ago

          I highly suspect that he very much knows the nuances of the system and doing what every Republican does: using racism to get elected to gain power and influence.

          He doesn’t care if people get hurt so long as it’s the right people.

    • cottonmon@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      I know that a lot of immigrants from the Philippines are super anti-abortion and tend to align with Republicans because of this.

  • xantoxis@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    Conservative viewpoints:

    • We just want to deny people abortions, not experience racism.

    • We just want to pay no taxes and let infrastructure crumble; we still want weed to be legal.

    • We want to be able to subjugate women, not pay for war profiteers.

    • We just hate gays, not black people.

    • We just want jobs; why are all these billionaires fans of our party?

    See the thing about leftism is that it’s usually internally consistent. Authoritarianism cannot be internally consistent. Nobody wants ALL of the things fascism claims to represent; in many ways it’s not even possible.

    • ameancow@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      Nobody wants ALL of the things fascism claims to represent; in many ways it’s not even possible.

      Because it’s not a thinking ideology, it’s a feeling ideology. This has been studied and proven that conservatives lean more reactive and emotionally sensitive.

      See, the human brain doesn’t work the way most people think it does, we live with the misconception that we use our brains to decode the world, to solve problems and figure out solutions and analyze situations.

      This is NOT what your brain is doing. Right now, and at all times, your brain is scanning how you feel, all your physical and emotional sensations, and it’s constantly creating stories to explain those feelings, ever shifting and constantly reporting these subtle ideas for why you are experiencing things.

      About 100,000 years ago this was a fantastic survival tool. If you see huge paw-prints by the watering hole, you will figure out in your head why you’re scared, you will invent a simulated future where the creature that lives nearby will eat you, so you avoid that watering hole.

      Now our world is massively complicated, but our brains are still wired to do the same thing. It takes an emotion or sensation and just wraps a story around it with ease, and the funniest part is the story doesn’t have to make sense, it’s just how the brain assembles information and synthesizes results. This is why you have anti-vax doctors and nurses and scientists who suddenly become Flat Earthers. They aren’t using logic and reason, they are scared of something and their brain supply the rationalization. Be it a huge paw print, or a newspaper headline about climate change, it makes people feel the same thing, and react the same way.

      • Maeve@sh.itjust.works
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        4 months ago

        Scared of everything, mostly within themselves, which is so abhorrent, they can not countenance the very things they fear are themselves. Hence the infinite, horrific projection.

    • Someonelol@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      4 months ago

      See the thing about leftism is that it’s usually internally consistent. Authoritarianism cannot be internally consistent.

      You should see hexbear.

      • frezik@midwest.social
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        4 months ago

        Even ignoring that, “leftism” is a little too broad of a term in this context. There’s too many conflicting ideologies that agree with each other 90% of the way.

        That’s still not like the right, though. That’s more a mish mash of ideas that make no sense together whatsoever. It’s hard to square what the gospels are on about with having billionaires around at all, for example.

    • masquenox@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      Israel outdoes these lesser kapo organisations by several orders of magnitude - they’re even managing their own genocide (with the blessing and support of white supremacist empire) at the moment.

  • TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    Not sure how this is “US Authoritarianism” but okay…

    In any case, two things could be at play: either the family is truly conservative and thought white conservatives will accept them; or they are playing the respectability politics. If it is the former, many say most immigrants would be conservative voters (because many are religious and entrepreneurial), if it weren’t for conservative politicians and base demoraphics in their new country being racists. If it’s the latter, we all know those who present themselves as “one of the good ones” are grifting and acting in self-preservation. I have a mate who posts far-right stuff online and supports Trump, even though he himself is a brown immigrant (I suspect his father–who isn’t exactly the sharpest tool in the shed-- may be influencing him as well).

    Those who play respectability politics are acting in self-preservation. This is actually a tale as old as time. As one user here pointed out, there was a Jewish organisation who are Nazi supporters. During World War 2, Jewish elders and organisations in Europe actually gave names of their members to the Nazis. They thought they could save themselves or more lives if they cooperated. Hannah Arendt covered this tidbit of history in her book on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, from which the famous term “banality of evil” came from. Of course, the book caused controversy not just because it posits that evil people feel casual of their actions, but also that it brought the taboo that several Jewish leaders in Europe have enabled the facilitation of the Holocaust.

    For the record, I am not trying to be anti-Semitic with my post, I’m only explaining the result of playing respectability politics in the case of anti-Semitism and Holocaust.

      • Kiernian@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        I think the fact that there are so many bigots out there being disproportionately vocal and often working to recruit others to their way of thinking with couched language and dogwhistles make it too easy for some people to assume that anyone speaking negatively of an oppressed group is a bigot.

        The trick is usually identifying whether the negativity is about “all” of a group, or just some of them, but subtlety can be challenging in a text only format at times, especially if stuff ever gets taken out of context.

    • Maeve@sh.itjust.works
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      4 months ago

      There’s a lot of corruption in my government, at national, state and municipal levels. Not every citizen is corrupt (many are, how else would you survive without being shunned/blackballed? Unless you already gained stability some miraculous way --lotto, large inheritance?) and your post boils down to something I’ve been pondering for a few months: those who disapprove corruption without calling out benefit from corruption. It’s the madam/working girl, bully/bullied mentality. At least in my area, I don’t think it’s fear of life and limb, since most people I see are willing to risk life and limb on corruption, but I guess there’s a difference between going out relatively quickly rather than being tortured to death.

      • TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        I hadn’t thought of it that way before! I guess that some folks either try to work with the system but succumbed to it before they realise it; or they gave up entirely and join.

        • Maeve@sh.itjust.works
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          4 months ago

          A favor here, blind eye there. Then people have something compromising on you, so you do another favor and another,; there are mouths to feed. I’ve said it before, selling our souls is seldom done in one dramatic moment, but rather incrementally.

  • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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    4 months ago

    If Republicans could stop being so racist they would sweep into power and rule for 1000 years, and yet it will never happen.

    • Chloé 🥕
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      4 months ago

      Are you sure about that?

      A lot of the republicans’ voter base is white racists. For them, the republicans being racist isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.

      • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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        4 months ago

        They’re barely sentient cretins programmed by right-wing media. The base would vote Republican even if Republicans pivoted to Black nationalism, as long as the people on TV and the internet tell them to.

      • Isthisreddit@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        Wrong. Even if liberals and Democrats were progun and pro free-for-all-gun (which actually is what the issue is), Republicans would still say Dems are anti gun and conservatives would believe it

        • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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          4 months ago

          See: J’Biden signing an anti-asylum seeker immigration order and shutting down the border in violation of interational law.

          Republicans just say it’s an amnesty order for open borders 😒

    • Maeve@sh.itjust.works
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      4 months ago

      They may do, anyway, and they’re already mimicking third Reich symbols and language, right down to the term, “Reich”. Also autocorrect insists on capitalizing that odious word.

      • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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        4 months ago

        They will certainly try, but without some kind of mass support they can’t hold on to power. This isn’t Nazi Germany where one ethnic population absolutely dominated. At the very least the country would collapse.

        • Maeve@sh.itjust.works
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          4 months ago

          That’s probably going to happen, either way. It’s an ivory tower built on faulty foundations and swampy-loamy soil. Without serious, deep reflection and lots of internal work, I don’t see how it can continue. We needed serious value shift, whether the tower falls or not. The tower falling may be what forces that to happen.

          TL;dr I see how other nations have called us the great Satan.

  • Antagnostic@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    Probably true, but also could be that they are from California. Idahoans hate Californians for weird reasons.

    • Snowclone@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      Idaho is one of the most racist states in America, if you Google ‘‘move to a state with no black people’’ Idaho has got you covered. Huge organized white power hate groups there too. My family is from Idaho, man. Trust me. It’s not casually racist. They are actively salivating for the race war.

      • HessiaNerd@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        I was getting headhunted for a job in Coeur d’Alene. It’s a beautiful place. I could afford a nice house there near the lake. I could bike to work (given adequate gear for winter)… We have friends in Montana we could actually see.

        I know if I move out of CA it will be very hard to come back. The politics there seem pretty backwards. I couldn’t see living there. What you say really seals the deal.

        • Snowclone@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          It really looks bad now that they are literally dealing with brain drain after Roe v Wade got over turned. Not a single medical postgrad will go there and almost everyone with a specialty related to birth has left. And they’re running out of qualified teachers for k-12.

      • Death_Equity@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        It is mostly because Californians leave California because of the realities of living in California and move to a state that isn’t like California and then try to make it like California instead of moving to a state that is like California already.

        The lack of assimilation of local culture doesn’t help either. Don’t be a Californian-Californian in a conservative state and nobody will care after you get past the initial hurdle of being assocoated with the stereotypical Californian, and the proper enunciation, also every time you say soda instead of pop, cola, or coke.

        Source: Am Californian and left, been told why they don’t like us 'round them parts.

        • Match!!@pawb.social
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          4 months ago

          WARNING: This poster contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer, and birth defects or other reproductive harm

          • Snowclone@lemmy.world
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            3 months ago

            You know that’s a gimmick right? I’ve sold stuff with those labels for a long time, before they had ‘‘the state of California’’ labeling they just had the exact same labeling with ‘‘warning’’ or ‘‘caution’’ for the exact same chemicals and materials or consumer grade hazardous materials that the federal government has required labeling on for decades. They know if they put the California label on, it will make customers dismissive of the hazardous materials and more likely to buy their product. Similar to people going ‘‘you could drink out of the hose when I was a kid, why is it bad all of a sudden?’’ Because the hose we drank out of as kids was an all rubber hose with a cloth mesh holding the shape and they lasted MAYBE one summer. These hoses aren’t sold anywhere in the US anymore, the materials are totally different, and they will make your kids infertile if they drink from it. There were no soaker hoses when I was a kid, just a rubber hose and a awl to punch holes in it. The ones that shrink and grow, the high pressure hoses, all different. People don’t get this. Corporations LOVE the misconceptions, it might kill some people, but it sells more hoses.

            • Match!!@pawb.social
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              3 months ago

              Aah, my intention is to convey that California requiring spurious labels like that specifically diminishes the value of such a warning label and provides cover to actually harmful things (and is the kind of tedious bad governance that people don’t like about Cali)

              • Snowclone@lemmy.world
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                3 months ago

                What I’m trying to explain to you, is that companies put those lables on items when CA isn’t why they need the label, to create a customer response you are describing. It’s a scam. It’s a gimmic, it’s intentional to get you to dismiss actual danger of hazardous materials.

      • Maeve@sh.itjust.works
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        4 months ago

        Lived in a red state most of my life. I dream of that Golden State, and also other places around the globe.

      • John_McMurray@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        I’m sure it has nothing to do with most of them acting like they’re smarter than everyone else because of having lived in a particular state