Yeah, is shedding even the right word in this case? Other than the complete load of horseshit that this is, of course. The dander and hair that my kid loses could give your kid the disease my kid was vaccinated against?
I think shedding is a real thing, which typically refers to just-vaccinated people, by virtue of having live (weakened) vaccine-bacteria in their bodies, transmitting the weakened vaccine version to others, essentially vaccinating them.
I think that anti-vaxxers have twisted that into claiming that vaccinated people can just randomly infect people.
I can’t tell if that Facebook message refers to flu season, i.e. that it’s the season for people to be getting flu vaccines, or if they’ve somehow conflated virus shedding with the bi-annual fur shedding of dogs and house cats.
Holy crap. Even if shedding is a real thing, you know what the protection against it is? Being fucking vaccinated.
You need to get woke, Daagar!
Had a spate with family on FB. My mother’s family is from the south and these people are some of the most racist you’ll ever meet. My mother included. So the last few weekends with the NFL stuff have been fun.
My aunt just posted a Ken Blackwell video about the situation and how liberals are dividing the nation with their hate and will ruin the country. I think I’ll bite my tongue and walk away from this one. These people are not educated and it’s really a waste of time trying to talk sense to them, but it’s frustrating as fuck knowing they belong to the same hereditary tree.
Can’t have civil discourse with anyone that has ‘MAGA’ in their social media profile, no matter how closely related you may be to them. It is quite literally impossible.
Had a similar exchange with an old high school classmate. As a veteran, he is incensed at the disrespect being directed at the flag, the president, and all veterans everywhere. I pointed out that kneeling is not generally a disrespectful act, more like the opposite. I quoted Kapaernick saying that his protest was also on behalf of veterans who were being mistreated by their country, and that he had the greatest respect for them. I got back – “Timothy McVeigh said the same kinds of things.”
So, yeah, that escalated quickly. Kneeling, blowing people up, what’s the difference, amirite?
I don’t think us folks on the morally right side of this issue have the luxury of giving up.
Don’t let it devolve into a spat. Don’t take any bait. Don’t let any negative emotion like frustration enter into it. You’re not out to change anyone’s mind. Just state your case reasonably and politely and maybe we can move the needle 3-5%. Hell, that may have been enough to make the difference in the last election.
I was having this discussion on facebook last weekend and my friend’s mom started her reply with, “I think you are missing their point.” and I just cringed. If you want someone to be open-minded, don’t invite them to close it.
This is a tremendous opportunity for a productive dialogue. That’s the whole reason for the protest. If we bicker, we’ve failed.
My problem is they don’t want to hear a damn thing about why Colin or anyone else is kneeling. Get out of the country is the refrain. Don’t care about centuries of slavery and/or oppression, that’s all in the past and magically balanced by welfare, which all people of color are on. They’re a separate race, did ya’ know, and the races should not commingle! Who cares about the human genome being mapped and showing truly insignificant variations between ethnicities. Who cares about economic or political imbalances.
I would challenge Gandhi to remain reasonable with these people. Personally I think he’d either walk away or start cracking skulls.
Okay, another idea. Don’t give history lessons. Slavery is in the past, “not my fault”, total dead end.
I think it should be an appeal to their emotions and their humanity.
I think it also helps to concede points and agree with some of what they say. Then maybe you can move toward common ground. This flag protest issue isn’t a case of They’re Wrong/We’re Right. It’s more like They’re Right/We’re More Right.
I’ve had good results with something that I first saw posted here in another thread:
“When people go on a hunger strike, they’re not protesting the food.”
It’s probably going to be too subtle for some, but when you frame it as the players reluctantly depriving THEMSELVES of standing for the anthem, it changes the tenor of the conversation.
See, I tried something similar with my mom yesterday, asking her of Rosa Parks was protesting the bus or protesting having to sit in the back of it. She hand-waved it away and all police brutality because she knows of one white guy in Springfield, OH, who got smacked in the face by a cop and lost a few teeth.
Which is when I said, “You really don’t understand statistics, do you.”
I’m reading the responses, which I appreciate, and I’m curious if you guys have ever really experienced home-grown Appalachian racism. It’s in their bones, their blood. My mom talked about how if as a young person she saw “one” coming down the sidewalk the other way, she and her siblings knew to cross the street. Literally passing a person of color on the same sidewalk was anathema to them.
She also told me a few years ago she’d prefer my daughter (now 14yo) to date a white piece of trash who beat her over a good kid who treated her with respect if the latter was colored.
That’s what I’m dealing with here. Trust me, for years I’ve tried various angles of attack to pierce that bubble of unbridled hatred and none work. She literally moved from her first retirement home 10 years ago because a black family moved into the condo behind her.
All of this is also why I react very poorly on the rare occasion I’m accused of being racist myself. I spent years getting this garbage out of my head, starting around 18-19yo.
I’ve seen the numbers- forget where, but a higher percentage of Bernie folks voted for Hillary, than Hillary folks in 08 that voted for Obama.
There aren’t many people left whose minds can be swayed- only two things good that can happen is we generate more desperation and fear on our side in order to get people out, or we discourage Trump folks from voting. I really think at this point we have to see the folks remaining with Trump as people who have to be overcome and dealt with instead of folks that are capable of being persuaded.
I agree. I know many “reluctant Trump voters” and those people can be swayed. They’re not his base, and already disapprove of a lot of his actions.
But his core base? Out of all the people I know that are what I would call a Trump supporter (as opposed to a voter), I can’t see any conceivable way of reaching these people. I can’t even have a rational conversation with many of them, because it’s like communicating across a barrier between parallel universes. There’s no foundation to build a discussion off of when you can’t even agree on what is real.
8 years of anti-Obama, anti-Liberal, anti-Democrat, the-sky-is-falling conditioning by Conservative Media has completely convinced these folks that anyone who isn’t 100% on board with their every talking point is the enemy, and America will not be safe until they are all converted, deported or destroyed.
The brief shining moment of triumph for them when a Republican candidate actually defeated the evil Hillary Clinton to shock the world has quickly turned to ashes as they have watched infighting within the GOP and a bumbling and incompetent President blow every opportunity they’ve had at further moments of triumph. This failure only infuriates them more, and causes them to double down on their ideological stance rather than question it. George Soros must be to blame, or the Clinton Foundation, or Obama the shadow puppet-master, or moderate Republicans too corrupt to give up their old ways and join the side of the patriots and God’s chosen.
I used to think there was an element of the GOP that could still be reasoned with, that common sense Conservatives could still turn the tide and fix their party from within. They cannot. That branch of the GOP is simply too weak or too afraid of what will happen if they go against their more right wing compatriots. In it’s desperation to regain control of Washington the Republican party has been usurped by the very machine it created to help it gain back that power. There is no more “Republican stance” on any issue, the Republican stance is simply “the opposite of whatever Democrats and Liberals want”, even when taking the opposing stance makes ZERO actual sense and can actively harm their constituents.
Anyone still aligned with this nonsense at this point is a lost cause. Reasoning with them is futile, they don’t recognize the same factual universe that you live in, they only recognize what Fox News and Brietbart and Facebook memes have told them is the truth. The Seahawks burning the flag picture above is a PERFECT example of this. People last week were outraged by that image, an NFL team, and a black man, burning the flag in their locker room. Those ungrateful sons of bitches! Nevermind the fact that 5 seconds of rational thought is all you need to know that picture is totally fake. Rational thought is for libtard losers! Don’t talk down to me and tell me I’m stupid you liberal elitist, I know this country is going to hell in a handbasket because I’VE SEEN THE PICTURES ON FACEBOOK!
Good, good gentleman. Let the hate flow through you. You will need its strength in the days to come.
Honestly: no.
I don’t know if I would have the patience to try and debate that level of baked-in xenophobia. The folks that I’m talking with are “just” FOX-watching dittoheads; aging Baby-Boomers who have been fed a bill of goods and (I think) are salvageable with a lot of patience and some well-phrased arguments.
My proud example is my mother-in-law that I think I talked about in some of the election threads last year. She’s a 70-year-old widow who lives on Facebook and who swears up and down that she’s not racist at all… while also getting loudly upset at the necessity of having to “push 1” to continue in English. In June of 2016 she was a Trump supporter because she couldn’t stand Hillary. By November she had a pro-Clinton yard sign.
Having grown up in East TN and still having a Facebook populated by a hundred or so diehard meth-head racist shitheels from high school who haven’t blocked me for being a godless pinko-commie yet, I can confirm everything @John_Reynolds has written. People who try to paint the Southeastern US as “not as bad as everyone says it is!” and “totally full of good guys!” really have no idea what it’s like to live in that place, or have never lived long enough elsewhere to develop a proper mental comparison, IMO.
I can co-sign. These folks are that bad. You don’t have to travel that far to get away from it here, and the folks who can largely do- but then they get gerrymandered.
It’s infuriating and I really worry that America is doomed these days, to the point I keep a getaway fund.
Regarding how to try and understand and/or talk to family or friends who could think or feel the deplorable things they post on facebook, it’s important to understand you’re dealing with a brainwashed individual.
How brainwashers work:
Identifying brainwashed:
Suggestions to aid people who have been brainwashed: