I just wanted to thank you for your post, the thought that went into it and how I agree with your assessment. You have been given a lengthy like.
This is where most of this conversation loses me. Because it reads closer to they’re generally nice racists people who hate blacks and illegals and women with positions different than mine in reality.
This is a sticky point within the Democratic party. They’re not entirely wrong with the ask. Free college, for example, has a cost. And it’s not readily discussed without demonizing the people doing the asking… and that’s within the party.
I think that Clinton/Bush fatigue was an underestimated part of the entire debacle. Both parties put up yet ANOTHER member of their respective first families, and I think that everyone just kinda threw up in their mouths a little. The GOP got rid of their “legacy” guy pretty early in the process, but the Democrats just didn’t take the hint.
You see, you generalize it that way and it seems to make so much sense. But when it’s argued that that gangs seem to run parts of your town at night, that part of your tax dollar is used to support people who are not here legally and that the “baby” has as much right to life as the mother to terminate it, it sounds differently. It isn’t about hate or race it is about security and economics or morality.
I think in a perfect world people should be able to balance their hopes and fears with some semblance of reality, but we don’t live in a perfect world. So that balance swings to one side or the other.
Cept, you know, on the balance, violent crime is massively down nationwide, most gang violence is restricted to other gangs, illegal immigration was down the last couple of years (or even net negative? I forget the exact stat). . .
This would help the issue a lot, I suspect :)
Agreed. Trump, by accident surely, just happened to enter the race during what was a perfect storm for him. The GOP put up a legacy and a bunch of guys nobody really liked, and the democrats anointed another Clinton.
California, I think, has actually seen a spike in crime since the gutting of three strikes laws and the general release of felons from the state system to the local systems. That may be just California though. I am too lazy to check the stats but I may have to.
EDIT…a quick google search shows a 8.4% increase in violent crime in 2015.
As for immigration, the recession probably did more than anything to reduce the influx of illegals, but the real problem isn’t 99.9% of them, it is the .001% that run in gangs and are shooting up the cities at night.
This may sound bad, but when I read a paper or hear on the news that some gang members shot each other up again, I don’t care. But in so many cases there are innocent people killed in the crossfire. There have been cases this year of babies, high school girls and young men all shot by gang bangers trying to shoot others. That’s what people see in the news, that’s what they end up thinking of.
Generally speaking, California is safer now than at any time in the last 50 years since, uh, two years ago.
(Yes, there has been a small recent increase. It could well have to be due to the prison situation you mentioned, or the increasing percentage of indiscriminately violent Mexican cartels among gangs in Cali compared to previous crime groups or maybe last summer was just extra hot)
The issue here is that most people, when polled, think the world is a terrifying, dangerous place replete with child abductions, violent murders, and incessant rape.
Now, aside from the fact that rape’s probably still more common than the conviction rate would imply, that worldview is pretty thoroughly and provably wrong. But yes, thanks to the media wildly overpublicizing the “tragedy of the week” style stories, and, let’s be honest, more than a little latent racism, people somehow feel less safe in an America that’s at its safest levels in half a century.
I hear what you’re saying. Understand that I truly fell into the rhetoric of the times. It was pre gulf war. You could describe my family then as something akin to Family Ties and me as an idealistic Alex Keaton (I know you’re age, Armando, so please don’t rub it in if you don’t know anything about the show or those characters.) But it was just that, idealistic.
Then I joined the military and saw the good and bad the world had to offer. And I watched friends fuck up their lives for the stupidest of reasons, some politician somewhere thought it would be a good idea. I saw the mistreatment of people for things they had absolutely no choice over. And that the economic decisions of leaders with only their own self interest could cause squalor on a level I just couldn’t imagine as a comfortable middle class American fuckhead who had never left his home state. And then I came home to a family who showed me that helping others was the way to achieve harmony with the aggressiveness and selfishness of my past ways of thought.
What I think I’m trying to summarize is that yes, a cesspool like /r/The_Donald seems to be filled to the rim with the unsaveable, the people who will never change and will never back down from being stubborn, selfish idiots. But you know what, some will. Given time, life tends to teach you lessons that affect your entire being.
Here’s hoping that it won’t take a catastrophic event to change those masses.
8.4% is a pretty good increase.
But yea, I know blaming the media is kinda Trump like but I do believe the media does bare some of responsibility for the way news is dispensed, and what news is dispensed. I know my wife will watch the news and cringe in fear at the mere idea of going to certain parts of town. And my response is usually that unless you are a gang member and are there at night (or are unlucky enough to live in that neighborhood) you probably have nothing to worry about.
My office is on the edge of such a neighborhood. A homeless guy was killed not 100 yards from the front door. There have been numerous shootings and killings within a mile of it. But I just try not to be here at night. We have bars on the windows and doors.
As for the prison comment, as part of Gov. Brown’s budgeting 2-3 years ago many felons were moved from state prisons to county jails, which of course then released many of them due to lack of room.
[quote=“Nesrie, post:1465, topic:58716, full:true”]
This is where most of this conversation loses me. Because it reads closer to they’re generally nice racists people who hate blacks and illegals and women with positions different than mine in reality.[/quote]
But thinking that way risks doing exactly what we’ve criticized the Conservative Right for doing, which is gross over-generalization of the opposition.
It is absolute fact that the racist/misogynist/shitbird factions of the Conservative Right have been very vocal throughout both the election and the Trump Presidency, and in many cases are now far more powerful than ever before. As vocal and visible as they’ve been however, the are still the minority when it comes to the electorate that makes up the Republican Party. There are far greater numbers of Republicans who are not only NOT racist sexist assholes, but who find such behavior abhorrent, and yet they still voted Trump.
One prime example to support this is how poorly Clinton did with certain segments of women voters. Only 51 percent of white women with a college education voted for Hillary. 62 percent of white women without a college education voted Trump. Hillary had lower numbers than forecast for non-white women as well, and for younger women, who were thought to be more in touch with the myriad of reasons why she was a far superior candidate to Trump on women’s issues. Bottom line, the vast majority of these women were not racist or (obviously) sexist, they simply voted Trump either because of Conservative issues being important to them (SCOTUS, Abortion, Religion) or because they literally would have voted for any woman OTHER THAN Hillary Clinton.
This extends to men as well. There is a huge block of the Republican electorate that are urban/suburban men who are educated, professional and/or fairly successful by any standard. These men aren’t flying Confederate flags from their pickup trucks, they’re not posting anti-Semitic rants to Facebook and they have wives and daughters they love and respect. But despite Trump’s obvious flaws, they voted for him anyway either because they felt Conservative issues were more important, they felt they were better off economically with Republicans in charge, or again, because CLINTON = EVIL. To say that everyone who voted for Trump did so because they are a piece of human garbage…that’s not only ridiculous, it plays dangerously into the Conservative Media mind-games of “us vs. them”.
Again, Conservative Media is responsible for essentially brainwashing many of these people into believing half-truths and outright lies and then pushing them to vote directly against their own best interests. Americans love a good team sport, they love to be associated with a winning team, and the thought of doing so while being patriotic is a heady combination that Conservative Media has learned how to exploit to it’s fullest. We keep talking about Trump’s war on the media…what we need is a war on Conservative Media. We need to relentlessly tear down Conservative Media organizations for the fake/slanted content they distribute, expose their biggest personalities as the hypocrites and liars they are in most cases, and generally destroy this new Age of Unenlightenment before it destroys us.
I hear what you’re saying, but when you vote to enable the party that wants to marginalize, imprison, or just straight up kill every disadvantaged minority in the country because they also claim to be Real Good Christians ™, you’re still voting to marginalize, imprison, or just straight up kill every disadvantaged minority in the country.
I think letting them wipe their hands of what they’ve voted for just because they really super duper like their guns lets them off too easily.
In the interest of fair play, this post coming from a guy who still feels like shit for voting to enable Obama’s relentless drone crusade against hospitals and schools in the middle east just because the guy would fumblingly compromise his way toward weak-willed centrism and sometimes accidentally achieve a marginal amount of progress.
Yeah, I gotta go with Armando on this one. You’re asking us to distinguish from racists and folks who will tolerate racism because it fits their agenda to do so. I don’t consider those morally equivalent but I’ll be damned if I feel terribly conciliatory toward the latter.
I do think a bunch of these folks are due for a massive Trump hangover, but probably not until a fair bit of pain has been inflicted on them. Unfortunately a lot of folks below them on the economic ladder are going to feel that pain a hell of a lot worse, and for longer.
I don’t think calling a huge part of the electorate ignorant racists is a good way to understand what happened in 2016 and what needs to be done in 2020. Fact is, for most of you (I live in California), they are your neighbors, friends and relatives.
But I also think that by 2018 and 2020 many of them will be tired of Trump, and without Hillary as an excuse to vote for him they will see the light. Well, maybe.
Okay, I just hope we get some fresh, decent candidates as options.
This is sort of like the abortion issue for the religious right. If you believe life begins at conception and it’s your moral and godly duty to stop the murder of innocents, then abortion is a single issue non-negotiable. People that support abortion, even in terms of women’s health or choice, are enabling baby killers. That’s that. Any concession is a direct approval of murder.
Imagine it from that point of view. You’re surrounded by baby-killing maniacs and selfish people that put their convenience over the sanctity of life. How can any other issue take precedence over that? What is wrong with everyone?
Let me put this another way. I know a gentleman who works a blue collar job, tips people an extra amount because he knows they work hard, tries to support his children, and feels like he is struggling but refuses to ever give up and accept assistance because that’s not the right way. I would never describe this guy as a generally “nice guy” because he calls anyone with a turban on their head a towel head, has nothing nice to say about Mexican men, and goes on rants about illegal immigrants. I don’t consider racists as “nice” guys. But I know a lot of people will take that disgusting trait, push it aside as if somehow all these other things trump being a racist and therefore you can be a nice person and be racist.
I do not believe a person can be a nice person and be blatant racist like that. I simply don’t. So when I hear these little spiels of this nice hardworking guys, I suspect there is a but there that no one thinks it’s as important as I truly think it is.
If *racists needs to be slapped next to someone’s name, the word nice should not follow. And no amount of Fox News, CNN or MSNBC is suddenly going to make me racist. You can’t give everyone an out due to media for everything.
Except for the fact they aren’t pro-life at all. I’ll cross post this (long) piece that describes what these wonderful “pro life” Republicans do in Texas:
This, exactly.
And an EDIT because … well, it kinda irks me when I read that “EVERYONE HATED HILLARY.”
She got the same amount of votes as Obama (who received four million less votes than he did in 08.)
Wait … this is it exactly though. We’ve bled from two discussions and I think that’s the problem. Discussing the racist hate spewing bigot crowd that defines itself as the alt-right (and we brought up as /r/the_donald,) and then what @SlainteMhath was describing, which is lumping in the entire Conservative Right in there, aka the over-generalization that every conservative right person MUST be a racist.
They aren’t. We cannot do that. It’s like saying I love everything about Mrs. Clinton because I chose her on the ballot.
A tacit racist by any other name.
Tell me, why have Republicans won the white vote since 1964?
What I am saying is that “nice guy”, could very well be a racist, and for some reason people will overshadow that trait as if it’s something to overshadow. The guy I am talking about (no he’s not my dad), is described frequently as a hard working nice guy who voted for economical reasons but guess what, he’s also a racist. And if you look at the polls, there are several people like this. White hard working men, just trying to get buy *oh who says incredibly racists things anytime Obama gets on the television, or makes horrific remarks when he sees a Mexican man or boy on the side of road, believes every brown person driving a truck is a terrible person, an illegal or otherwise unworthy of the job.
What I am saying, is I think this nice guy story gets played over and over again, but we already know, not guessing here, that a lot of these nice guys allowed race and racism to play a part in their voting. The polls show this, and those numbers exceed the small penis guys running around in raised pickup trucks with confederate flags all over the place…
Also, women can be and are, absolutely sexist, against other women. You cannot assume someone is not sexist because of their, well sex.