Thanksgiving Dinner

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.

What if the angle would be that you understand the underlying needs and feelings that are being expressed as support for Nazism?

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".

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.

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!

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.

that's why the word was invented, to replace the obvious intolerance for openness

I still haven't looked into what "woke" actually means, but from what I can tell, it seems to mean anything far-right people don't like.

Your grandma sounds like a wonderful human who lived a wonderful life. I hope you are doing well.

Your grandma sounds like a terrific human being. Sorry to hear that she has passed. Thanks for sharing.

He always stays sober and doesn't join in the violent and racist tirade

Nm, what’s a klerb with you?

Redneck for club. Similar to "they're stealing our jerbs!"

A recently viral line from Broad City. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/in-da-clurb-we-all-fam

about tree fiddy

Klerb deez nutz ex-dee

Mom and Dad have to die some time.....

It may happen when he's old and grey, rolling outside on his futurstic hover wheelchair wondering why people say it's the hover-servos that make his chair fly and not Jesus.

TL;DR: My family’s “black sheep” are ultra-conservatives, while the rest of us range from liberals to full-on anarchists. My uncle, a cringy wannabe-cool guy, stopped talking to me after declaring I’m "possessed by demons" and blaming Mexicans, evolution, and Satan for everything. His son (my cousin) is a Bible-thumper but is at least polite because he wants to borrow my VR gear. My aunt (related by blood) still shows up for Thanksgiving but is only sane relative to her QAnon husband and son. We’re trying to civilly help her and maybe her son escape the culty nonsense, but the son is deep in Fundie school denial of history and science. Honestly, I’m worried for him when the real world eventually hits.

ChatGPT is good for something, amirite?

Me in my twenties - mocked for my idealism and the related accessories on my car and person that proclaimed such ideals.

Me in my thirties - starting to feel a little beat down by life, really hard to get myself to care about more than keeping a roof over the family's head.

Me in my forties - starting that stereotypical rightward slide, spent a few years listening to some folks I shouldn't have, which didn't help.

Also me in my forties - started to realize on topics I knew something about, those people I was listening to were full of shit. Stopped listening. That idealism of my twenties was quietly going "Hey I'm still here, I just need a little attention!" I couldn't hear it for a long time, but it never stopped tugging.

Me in my fifties - I'm not sure what fucking happened, but I started to feel more like my twenties than I had in a long time. Still struggling, still paycheck to paycheck. But more believing in the good people around me. More believing in those ideals from my twenties. More mentally flexible than I'd felt in a long while. Peace and love for everyone.

Me still in my fifties - eat the rich, fuck Republicans, and fuck Democrats for pretending to care all these years. I need to find politicians who represent me, because it sure as hell isn't these donor-controlled far-right and center-right assholes.

I'm old enough to understand that every time you think "this will never happen to me" it's DEFINITELY going to happen to you.

If you guys keep thinking you've won every debate, always have the correct opinion on everything, and don't prove it because you think you don't have to defend any position because all you do is demonize your opponent, that's how you lose elections to orange reality TV stars.

Keep up the smugness. Enjoy republican rule.

Ya got me.

Reminder: there is no such thing as the paradox of tolerance.

The rules of tolerance only apply to the people who abide by them.

Therefore, you are tolerant of tolerant people if you abide by the rules of tolerance. You are intolerant of intolerant people if you abide by the rules of tolerance.

It is very straightforward, the only pathway to paradox is from a lack of lexical understanding of the rules of tolerance.

That's exactly my point.

It gets thrown around like any flavour of the year amongst American blues, but I am starting to realise most people have no idea what a paradox fundamentally is. Rather they think it's some sort of guiding idea because everyone keeps saying it and something about a philosopher—the entire premise whooshing over the heads of whichever tribalists "gotcha bombs" it entirely out of context.

Two comments of it here and I imagine at least one of you have never comprehended what it is and where they fit into it. Someone's the chicken; someone's the egg. A true idiot thinks they know the solution to that.

Any possible reason why anyone could have voted for Trump besides being racist or an idiot. That blanket labelling half the country as Nazis wasn't effective last time and isn't effective now. That a large portion of the populace feels so desperate for change that they were willing to vote for the fucking cheeto supreme.

I voted for Harris, and I completely believe Trump was the worst fucking choice the voting populace could have made, but unless you're actually calling for the extermination of roughly half the country there has to be some attempt at understanding or bridging the gap wherever it can be bridged.

Haha, I can. Thats the beauty of it. I can express an opinion. I'm well used to this place fallaciously assuming that a single opinion against the grain must mean an all out attack against the tree.

It's a funny little tree that thinks itself the centre of the forest.