Isn’t how somebody votes one of the only things you can ethically criticize someone for?
Like, people often treat their party like it’s part of their tribe, but it’s not like you’re born into it. It’s not the same thing as race, colour, creed, gender, orientation, or any other prohibited grounds.
Voting is exercising a choice. If you can’t criticize someone because of the choices they make, what can you criticize them for?
She literally just called Trump a fascist. But like, I guess supporting fascists is like just one of those “agree to disagree” matters that shouldn’t be held against someone? They can still be good people who just want mass deportations, military tribunals of political enemies, and for trans people to just cease to exist.
I would guess that she’s trying to separate the voters from the representatives, so that when someone calls out a republican politician for being racist, they have a harder time convincing their voters that she was calling them racist as well.
Right now it seems like people see their political party as their identity, there are both democrats and republicans who do it but I’d say it is far, far more common with republicans.
You can, and should, hold your representatives accountable when they do bad shit, regardless of whether you voted for them or not, and if your party starts standing for things that are worse than another party then you should change who you vote for.
It’s a long road to get back from this division in the US, but I hope there’s a future where it’s possible.
They can be garbage and still be governed fairly at the same time.
She’s just trying to avoid Hillary’s deplorables comment. It’s true, of course, and you should absolutely cut those people from you life, but it was misconstrued and so could this.
Although, Kamala really wants a “Not all Republicans” message, so there’s that too. No use alienating those snowflakes so close to Election Day.
Would you cut out your own family members over voting choices?
Edit: not sure why am I getting downvoted, I’m genuinely curious, not a suggestive question
As a queer person I don’t feel safe around people who support killing queer people. So obviously yes.
I have many conservative family members who, misguided as they are, would be vehemently opposed to killing queer people.
Remember the bell curve. Most people are not the extremes.
If you’re at a table with 11 people and a Nazi, you’re at a table with twelve Nazis.
Most people aren’t the extremes, sure. But if they refuse to denounce the extremists, they create space for the extremists viewpoints to survive and gain traction and acceptance on a broader scale.
So, no, even though I know most of my family would be against outright killing me, I also know they support and vote for people who are in favor of killing me. So no, I do not feel safe around them. How do I know if any of them hold extremist viewpoints before it’s too late? If they don’t denounce it, they’re every bit as culpable.
I hope by conservatives they meant Republicans (the MAGA cult of fascists and deranged lunatics). We’ll see if there are enough conservatives that are “vehemently opposed” to all of this soon enough. The Harris team definitely thinks so, for what it’s worth.
The people that still insist on voting for Trump, for possibly the third time, after a decade of this madness… can’t blame anyone for losing patience and avoiding them. It’s tragic, but the cult is real and has detached people from reality.
Absolutely. These aren’t just “differences of opinion” as conservatives would pretend. Jews, gays and intellectuals didn’t just have “differences of opinion” with nazis in Weimar Germany.
I stopped talking to my grandparents not strictly because of their vote but because every single conversation turned into them screaming and ranting about the black/asian/mexican/etc menace, and saying anything in disagreement got you screamed at or sometimes threatened with violence. we could be pleasantly chatting about the wildlife in their backyard and then suddenly it’s all about how the ‘n----rs’ are ruining the country and we need to bring lynching back. these same people will loudly say they aren’t racist, somehow. they couldn’t even behave themselves in public and would talk like this at restaurants in full hearing of anyone around!
Yes, absolutely, and I think anyone who says otherwise is a liar, given shitty enough candidates in an election
Not over John McCain or Mitt Romney, but over cunty fatson? Yeah obviously. No nazis is a pretty easy life rule to agree on.
Tough question, but you spend though time online and you hear stories of abuse from Trump parents and people ghosting them. It’s not so much about the voting choices though, but who those people are— which of course is correlated.
That said, you shouldn’t think in absolutes. I certainly quarantine family to once-a-year if they’re terrible, if even that. It’s not as direct as making a pact to never see them, you just avoid unpleasant people. That just happens to be Trump supporters lately since he appeals to the worst kind of people, but before that it was my folks like my grandpa who called Obama the n word and kicked my dad out at 15.
That make sense?
Yeah, that makes sense in a normal, not batshit insane world. But I view this election as different, as we are talking about overt fascism being on the ballot (and the race is neck and neck).
When it comes to fighting against fascism, you must think in absolutes. This ideology is cancerous, and it must be completely eliminated in order to prevent the incalculable suffering and death that it promises.
Sorry if that hurts people’s feelings.
I think it makea sense and gives a fuller perspective on this. To me the key words are unpleasant people. I was thinking to make the tradeoff of suffering through listening to their opinions on matters to help arm myself (figuratively, FBI) when the next discussion opportunity comes up (or argument). I frankly don’t know if that’s effective, to be an opposing voice in their lives. And just to clarify this is aimed at misguided family members, not the ones that are outright unpleasant
To be fair, I do the same thing- arm myself (figuratively!). If you have the emotional and mental bandwidth to deal with them, flexing those debate muscles is a great idea. But, life is hard and if you don’t have that bandwidth, they aren’t your problem.
Preach!
Not over the voting choices but the choice at that point is a symptom of their view on life based on the political values of the party they voted for, you don’t vote before you embody at least in some form the values of said party.
I haven’t yet, but I’m prepared to if he wins and they continue to support him as he starts doing the overtly fascist shit that he’s said he will do.
It really depends.
I’m in Australia so while I detest our conservative party leader (not presently prime minister but probably one day), he’s not really as abhorrent as Trump.
If someone very close to me who I care about quietly mentioned that they voted for someone as awful as Trump, that wouldn’t be immediate irrevocable dismissable from my “inner circle”, but it would certainly change how I thought of them.
Perhaps oddly, it would be a bit like someone saying they believed vaccines were harmful or that the earth is flat. They’re not stupid (necessarily), but there’s some complex and concerning psychological stuff going on.
Democrats: “Vote for Harris if you want to save the country from Trump and the Republicans!” Also Democrats: “We need a strong Republican party and we love the Cheney’s!” The Left: “WTF is going on?”
I don’t really understand your issue… She doesn’t “love” them, she’s just associating with them. Are you so drunk on Trump’s bullshit that you think we should seek only division?
20 years ago it was Bush and the Cheneys that were so bad we would have been told to vote for anyone running Blue.
Can’t wait to vote for the Democratic candidate in 2048 based on the idea that they’ll only conscript first-born children into mandatory asteroid farming and have Barron Trump’s enforcement over Megahitler.
I can’t see it being more affordable to use humans to farm asteroids than machines. Life support systems seem expensive long term. That said, I also can’t think of a resource that would be worth mining off planet in that time frame.
granted, I should have given more thought to my hyperbolic hypothetical.
point being I dread to think what “lesser evil” we’re looking at when the time comes
No you really shouldn’t have to be. They are responding in bad faith and distracting from the point of a serious conversation by um actuallying the fake sci-fi of a hypothetical.
out of the principle of charity I chalked it up to the type of person who fixates on the wrong thing but I suspect you’re right
I usually just blame how autistic Lemmy is. Unironically, the amount of neurodivergent people here is huge and a common trait is focusing on the wrong fuckin details, especially with hypotheticals
Okay now explain how bad the alternative is that we need to support genocide
Lol, no distance on support for genocide, but criticizing people voting for someone she herself called a fascist is out of bounds.
MLs aren’t leftists.
If she honestly believes that she’s an idiot, and if she doesn’t she’s way too comfortable with lying to the American people about important issues. The truth of the matter is that if a person has supported the Republican party in the last five decades they are dangerous garbage, and unless they’re willing to put in the work to recycle themselves into something more positive we need to contain them and have their toxicity diluted to the point where it can’t hurt anyone, just like we would with any other waste. Elected Dems ignoring this difficult but painfully obvious truth is why our politics have kept getting worse as the Republicans have gotten crazier and faced no consequences for it.
You can only achieve a fair and civil society through fairness and civility. That is what (most of) the democrats have been working on for the last 50 years.
It’s always tempting to think that you could “defeat” evil through violence, repression, suppression, and exclusion. Instead, you only become it.
edit: I really don’t mean to lecture here. I wrote this because I saw myself in the comment I replied to, and I needed to remind myself to be kind.
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Everyone loves invoking the paradox of tolerance because it makes you sound smart and progressive.
Paradoxically, it’s most often used as an excuse to be intolerant of some group that you have arbitrarily branded as intolerant.
I hereby pronounce you intolerant, thereby according to the docterine of the paradox of tolerance you are forthwith stripped of your right to be tolerated.
As always, the problem is nuanced and you need to consider carefully the extent to which you’re willing to tolerate what level of intolerance under what circumstances.
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Good job ignoring the part about arbitrary labels.
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You understand that every conservative would use all sorts of labels to describe you right? Trump would refer to you as “the radical left”. He would also say you’re intolerant of his followers.
It takes a complete lack of self awareness to think that no one would label you in the same way you label others. Well done.
The label isn’t arbitrary when you’ve earned it by how you act. You have decided to arbitrarily label your opponent here as “intolerable” based on no evidence. Conservatives at large have been labeled “intolerable” based on their abject refusal to support basic protections of human rights and safety, bad-faith arguments, bait and switching, lying directly to the faces of their constituents as well as to other lawmakers who require an assumption of trust in order to operate, and actively and frequently calling for violence and murder against non-violent members of the out-group.
Your rights end where mine begin and vice versa, and overstepping those bounds causes the social contract to be voided. When you void your own social contract then you are personally responsible for whatever happens outside of the protection of that contract. Don’t want to get punched in the face? It’s real easy then, don’t tell me that my sister deserves to be murdered. Like will be met with like.
Conservatives at large have been labeled “intolerable” based on their abject refusal to support basic protections of human rights and safety, bad-faith arguments, bait and switching, lying directly to the faces of their constituents as well as to other lawmakers who require an assumption of trust in order to operate, and actively and frequently calling for violence and murder against non-violent members of the out-group.
This sentence contains the problem discussed at length in the wikipedia article and addressed in my original comment.
You’ve made a sweeping generalisation about conservatives, by applying a range of very specific behaviors to an entire out-group in a categorical and binary way.
To really dumb it down, some conservatives might just be idiots, and not actually intolerant. You’re seeking to weild the paradox of intolerance against them.
Nazis and proud boys often self-identify. And still enjoy the respect and understanding that centrists deny to anyone on their left.
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Paradoxically, it’s most often used as an excuse to be intolerant of some group that you have arbitrarily branded as intolerant.
This just isn’t a thing.
Of course it is.
That’s exactly how it’s being used here.
It’s just that you don’t want to tolerate the people this comment is targeting.
I mean, our country was founded through a bunch of people getting really uncivil and violent. Sure, it still needed - and still needs - a lot of improvement to be fair for everyone who wasn’t part of the “in-group,” but the same could be said for most countries at the time ours was founded.
I certainly don’t believe that it’s necessary to be uncivil and violent to achieve a fair and civil society, but it has shown past success at ridding a country of leaders who don’t have the people’s best interests at heart.
The rest of Britain became democratic without violence. I’m not convinced that the revolution was necessary to throw off the oppressors. I think it was more about protecting the wealthy in the colonies.
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Again, it’s not necessary, but it did work. I hope we can resolve the issues in our country democratically, but I’m mentally preparing myself for the violence that will inevitably follow if that doesn’t work. If our country falls to fascism, it’ll take a real fight to get it back.
I don’t agree that it worked. Regular folk in the US have a modicum of rights now, none of which can be attributed to the revolution.
Correct - every government eventually welcomes corruption that needs to be flushed out, and if it gets too strong of a hold on the country, it may need to be forced out. When the US was founded, it was prosperous for the wealthy and non-wealthy alike, and continued to be prosperous for a while. There were ups and downs, but it slowly got worse for the common citizen as the wealthy used their power to influence the country in their favor over time. It came to a head about 100 years ago, and we were able to get through it nonviolently back then.
It’s happening again now, and we might be able to pull through democratically again, but we might not. 100 years ago there was much more of a sense of solidarity against the rich and powerful, but now that we live in a world with a much better understanding of human emotion and motivation, a huge percentage of the country has been thoroughly convinced to fight for their own exploitation by the wealthy. Pair that with all of the war going on right now that we’re more aware of than ever given the technology that globally connects us, and we’re a lot more divided than we were back then.
I hope that we don’t need violence to solve our current political issues - democracy has certainly worked before - but it’s always been the backup plan when civility doesn’t get the job done.
I agree, but following with the “garbage” comment also feeds into the Republicans sense of somehow being both the greatest and the victims.
Their victim-games are theatrical manipulations and should be ignored completely. Every word uttered by a conservative is deception or manipulation. They are not capable of shame or remorse. If you are not with them, you are against them. Period.
Also, who gives a shit about the opinions or feelings of a fascist?
You have no idea how electoral politics works, do you? Of course it’s true, and of course she agrees with it.
Trump voters are not garbage, most of them are frankly just ignorant and maybe a little dull. Calling Trump supporters garbage on the other hand would be an insult to garbage
At what point is the ignorance a choice? Most of us have the wealth of knowledge the internet provides in our pocket.
Just trying to avoid a basket of deplorables moment.
Jesus Christ lady you’re not getting maga votes, stop trying.
And yet, she’s getting GOP endorsements left and right…
I mean I hate the Cheneys more than most people on Lemmy, which believe me has come as quite a shock to see how popular they are on here, but even I wouldn’t describe them as magas.
Dear Kamala: they don’t care what you think. You’re the bogeyman.
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