4268

I see this behavior described in the survey results in one of my college age sons and his friends. He would not use the word despise (again, clickbait) against all that vote republican, but would use it against specific Republican leaders.

4269

Well up to a point thats true. If disagreements are things like tax policy or trade, or what infrastructure projects to do? Sure.

But there are parts that are quite a bit more existential. If you vote for someone who in their campaign said that police should shoot people at BLM protests, ergo that police should have shot me because I was at some, that’s quite a bit different.

If you are a vocal supporter of The Big Lie, and support or lack of that is a key component of your vote? Thats different.

If your solution to gun violence is pushing the courts to abolish what weak laws there are, and more guns? Well fuck you, and no we can’t be friends.

I mean there is a significant percentage, even a majority, of GOP voters whose driving animus is ‘fuck the libs’, who actively push for policy just to hurt/ target/ make liberals angry. Doesn’t matter if it has benefits or not. If it angers libs, thats good enough. Assholery as political identity. That is what the GOP is today. And I have no interest in friendship with someone who derives political positions out of antagonism.

4270

Put another way, GOP voters tend to be very aggressive with pushing politics into every conversation. They engage in politics as team sport. They look for ways and reasons to drag it into every situation.

One of my wife’s friends husband is like this. We were playing Jackbox with a few couples online. And every time there was some type of text entry answer he would make it political. Answers like ‘Fuck Sleepy Joe’ or ‘Trump for King’ and shit like that. Every single answer.

I asked him to stop, he refused, so I was done. Fuck that guy

4271

so say we all

4272

Would it be weird for me to say that I don’t want to be friends with any members of the National Socialist Party? I don’t think that would be a weird position to take. So after that, it’s just a question of where you draw the line.

4273

The biggest poll numbers are for “would you date someone who voted for the opposing presidential candidate”, and I think those numbers make a lot of sense. In that case political affiliation is acting as a stand in for other things like “should women be able to choose what to do with their bodies” or “should contraception be illegal”. Even as a guy it would be a deal-breaker if I did not know that I was on the same page with the other person on contraception & children. As a woman it would be even more yikes if my prospective date had just voted for a rapist for President.

4274

You gotta figure though, a ton of Trump voters likely had no real deeply held convictions that led to voting for him. Again, most folks don’t follow politics.

4275

There are a lot of people like this. Basically 100% of people with Lets Go Brandon, Trump 2024, etc bumper stickers are just like this.

Even if they hold no deep rooted ideological basis, their political identity is clearly asshole.

Voting for Trump is a good litmus test for asshole, and I prefer not to be friends with assholes.

4276

i find this to be a self correcting problem in that people who i think are assholes end up not being my friends. if they are in favor of shooting things, be that animals, black people, or schoolchildren, or forcing a woman to bear a child after being raped, or forcing libraries to ban certain books, or ignoring history, or electing rapists, or a bunch of other things that a person is in favor of if they vote gop, then i am really unlikely to be their friend. especially when i keep telling them what a horrible person they are repeatedly.

so hearing that someone votes gop saves me and the gop shitperson a lot of time - theres no fucking way we are going to be spending any time together.

it makes perfect sense to me.

4277

Yes, this.

4278

Oh ya, those people are definitely assholes.

But I think a lot of folks who voted for Trump aren’t cultists like that.

4279

I’m curious what makes you think that. I guess there’s the question of what “a lot” means. In my view, it seems like a solid majority of Trump voters, something like 3 in 4, uncritically accept and believe information from bad sources and display a lot of absolutist “conservatism can never be failed, it can only BE failed” type thinking. That’s based on a combo of anecdata, personal experience, and polling on both political beliefs and polling/ratings on media consumption. The remaining 1 in 4 of Trump voters are IMO roughly split between “traditional Republicans” clicking R b/c that’s how they do, lower engagement / lower information voters attracted by Trump’s presentation as a “strong leader with good business experience” (yes it’s a false presentation but…) That’s my sense of it.

What’s yours?

4280

Well, Trump got 75 million people to vote for him in the last election. I don’t think those guys are all the hard core trump cultists.

Like, for example… when I ride my bike, there are two houses in particular that I ride by. Total crackpot houses. They still got Trump stuff up… they believe the big lie and all that crap.

But I’m sure that those two houses aren’t the old folks who voted for Trump. I think a bunch of the other folks are just normal folks who maybe pulled the lever for Trump without giving it that much thought, rather than because they had deep allegiance.

Certainly, there’s definitely some distribution between the crackpots with the Trump signs up to this day, and most of those voters.

4281

According to Newsweek 71 percent of Republican voters believe Trump definitely (46 percent) or probably (25 percent) won the 2020 election with 6 percent not sure. That’s a good example of roughly 3 out of 4 Republican voters disregarding reality and embracing a near cult like devotion to Trump, IMO.

There are a lot of other polls and other info that show a similar ballpark of Republican voters disregarding reality on a bunch of topics - climate change, evolution etc. Overall there is fairly decent data showing a solid majority of GOP voters choosing the party line over reality.

4282

You don’t think the people who voted for Trump a second time are perhaps not the best people? They’re either all-in on Trump, or so all-in on some aspect of the GOP that they still voted Trump.

They could have just not voted… :)

4283

I’m not sure about facts here. Timex doesn’t think those guys are all hard core trump cultists, same as he doesn’t think they will be trying to make abortions unconstitutional. Guess all we can do is sit on our hands and wait to see if he’s right?

4284

The way I see it, anyone who voted for Trump is either:

  • Hardcore Trumpist (asshole)
  • Person who chuckles because Trump “tells it like it is” and who thinks “the left has gone too far” in its attempt to provide everyone basic rights (asshole)
  • Person who thinks they’re a fundamentally good person but who sees Trump for who he is and resolves their cognitive dissonance by refusing to think critically about the issues and mumbling something about “the greater good” (asshole).
  • Low information voters who see everyone else being assholes and think that’s the team they want to be on (assholes)

Sure, some of those people might seem like nice people, and they might even do nice things. But on average, they’re gonna be assholes, and why would I go to all the effort to figure out whether or not they’re assholes when there are plenty of people who are visibly not assholes for me to hang around?

4285

You guys keep in mind that a huge number of Americans don’t have nearly the same degree of party allegiance as folks here. They don’t know much about politics, and they don’t really care.

I think most of those folks don’t vote, but I think a lot of them do. I gotta figure some non trivial number of Trump voters voted for him on the basis of celebrity.

I dunno, I’ve definitely been on the other side of this… Folks can find posts from me condemning anyone who voted for Trump as monsters. I’m just not sure I still believe it.

4286

My own observation is the the Qt3 crowd probably confirms the polling above. More of those on the left revile the right, more of those on the right are more or less silent (?).

In real life this is also what I see in a big liberal US city, including with online dating. Politics is a bigger deal breaker for the dating left, to the point that a Democrat-voting moderate is unacceptable (really!).

4287

Except when they accuse liberals of being baby murderers, groomers, terrorists, secret Muslims, traitors, pedophiles… I mean, except for that, those on the right are silent.

I mean, WTF man? What version of reality are you living in? Do you isolate yourself completely from right wing media or do you so whole-heartedly believe it that you don’t see the problem.

I have to say, I consider your statement that I quoted to fly in the face of reality, to be an insult to all of many liberals who have been absolutely slandered, insulted, falsely accused and otherwise pilloried by the right for decades. I mean, really?