Can we forgive the Trumptards in our lives?

I don't think I can ever forgive the Trumptards in my life or on social media. I can't separate politics any more. I'm talking a family gathering happens and I won't even sit at the same table with the Trumptards after listening to their idiocy for these 4 years.

The question is unfriend or unfollow?

There are people who love him because they're dumb as fuck (not entirely their fault or a complete moral failing on their part) and people who love him because they feel inspired by him and everything he stands for (or "stands for," I mean of course he stands for nothing but that's a whole other discussion), and I don't think you/we/I should treat these people as a big monolith of the exact same kind of dangerous person.

I'm not here to tell you what to do with them. Believe me I don't want to sit at the table with them either. They're never setting foot in my house but if a dumb family gathering means enough to someone to have, especially after a year (or two or three, who knows?) of having to break a tradition that was incredibly important to them, and some braindead ex-hippie Trump apologist keeps his mouth closed, is it worth it for me to blow it up?

Not a single post I've made about this kind of thing has ever aged well.

I think the best way to change hearts and minds would be to repeatedly refer to them as retards

no

There are none in my life and never have been

Just voted in this poll

chrondog wrote:There are none in my life and never have been

Not even in your extended family?

The Trumptards doubled down and unfortunately for you progressives, you are going to get nuked just like what's happening in Britain.

And the GOP knows it. Winning trumps ethics for them, any day of the week.

So, bye bye Cheney and I have bad news for you, America is going to veer right just as I predicted last Summer. Get ready for a full on far right Presidency and Congress in 2024. Defund was a stupid slogan, sorry.

1 Stop using anything with the suffix "tard"

2 GOP is doing everything it can to suppress votes, and Cheney acknowledging reality is getting in the way of that. If they're confident, it's because of that, not because people support their policies (which they don't in part because they have no policies).

3 Defund was a stupid slogan, but shit like kicking out Liz fucking Cheney for being insufficiently "conservative" is keeping the GOP overtly reactionary, and even big corporations can see who the real radicals are out there. You don't hear Biden saying "Defund the Police" but almost all republicans have some version of "Stop the Steal" in their mouths.

WP64 wrote:

chrondog wrote:There are none in my life and never have been

Not even in your extended family?

I don't really give much of a shit about my family, in general.

We have a few of those, I think. I don't talk to or follow what they do at all.

Actually defunding the police is a popular political demand in a lot of urban communities. It is not just some activist slogan. People actually want to stop funding a militarized police force that slaughters innocent people and use that money to invest in municipal services and promote stable and healthy communities. I am sorry that it offends the precious sensibilities of whatever imaginary white middle-aged man we all seem to have in our head as the proverbial John Q. Public. We will make sure to workshop it for next time.

WP64 wrote:Actually defunding the police is a popular political demand in a lot of urban communities.

And yet, the City of Oakland claimed that a survey they conducted said 78% of residents want more policing and they upped the police budget again this year. This is Oakland.

What citizens mean when they say they "want more policing" is they want the cops to respond faster than 5 hours later when they call about a robbery. They want police to take an assault report the day it happens, not the next day. They don't want more militarized cops on the street chasing people who rob Best Buy at night. They don't want what happened to Mario Gonzalez in Alameda, where residents called the non-emergency line for public intoxication, 3 squad cars showed up, they pinned a sick man to the ground for over 5 minutes, and he died the next day.

I don't have a lot of belief in the short-term action on reducing police budgets. I think we're gonna see another 5-10 years of increased budgets in the name of "reform".

WP64 wrote:Actually defunding the police is a popular political demand in a lot of urban communities.... I am sorry that it offends the precious sensibilities of whatever imaginary white middle-aged man we all seem to have in our head as the proverbial John Q. Public.

Yeah, that's called "preaching to the choir".

There's support for holding police accountable, deemphasizing police as a solution to society's ills in favor of increased community investment etc., and demilitarizing the police, and while I'm not in sales or politics or anything, I think the thornier, more extreme-sounding rhetoric surrounding this issue, while understandable as a response, does push people away and confirm their fears. And that's a worthwhile concern if you're looking for change, not just being right.

Duff... wrote:3 Defund was a stupid slogan, but shit like kicking out Liz fucking Cheney for being insufficiently "conservative" is keeping the GOP overtly reactionary, and even big corporations can see who the real radicals are out there. You don't hear Biden saying "Defund the Police" but almost all republicans have some version of "Stop the Steal" in their mouths.

I don't understand why people continue to play the politics of "language police" with the sycophants on the right. They will invent your position out of whole cloth, lie about it repeatedly, and have that parroted by partisan and "both sides" news media. If it wasn't "Defund the Police", they would be railing against another slogan. If the left didn't say "defund", they may have invented it anyway. If the slogan was "Reform the police", you would see people on Newsmax saying, "Reform BLM and Antifa". When there's so much fighting over language and disinformation, how could you believe there is a direct correlation between sloganeering and popular support?

Yeah, exactly what Chrono said. I just don't have the energy to care about the thoughts and feelings of people who are going to intentionally distort and misrepresent every social justice concern in this country. It's really exhausting and self-defeating. They aren't going to vote for any of these proposals regardless. We aren't talking to them nor are we really trying to convince or persuade them of anything.

chrondog wrote: When there's so much fighting over language and disinformation, how could you believe there is a direct correlation between sloganeering and popular support?

I mean, the fact that there's so much emphasis on language seems to in itself suggest there's at least some correlation/causation between language and support.

Anyway, I'm not even talking about the right. As Chrono suggests, people want to feel safe, like someone is gonna be there to protect them or at the least help make things right. We agree that (at the least) too often the police are absolutely not doing that, but not everyone does, including people who support liberal causes. Just dropping "abolish the police" out there with no context makes people think that we're just gonna have roving gangs running wild in the streets smashing and grabbing whatever with no recourse. Coupled with actual rioting going on, justified or not, people are gonna get nervous.

The point I'm making is that a small group of activists who don't even have the support of most liberals used the phrase "abolish the police" for a few weeks and dishonest media outlets now try to attach that to the sitting president.

A significant number of politicians never embraced "defund the police" in a major way. Activist groups who are always on the fringe did. They represent a very small portion of voters. That didn't stop the misinformation campaign from associating mainstream Democrats who vote to increase funding for police with "defund the police".

Words and ideas matter, but not in the way that the mainstream tries to convince us they do. Campaigns and major interest groups need to hammer the media hard and force them to use language that reflects their actual positions, not a straw man invented to generate clicks. Democrats shouldn't be fighting good-faith activists who disagree with them, they should be fighting institutions and groups that misrepresent them to present "both sides" arguments.

Duff... wrote:people want to feel safe, like someone is gonna be there to protect them or at the least help make things right... Just dropping "abolish the police" out there with no context makes people think that we're just gonna have roving gangs running wild in the streets smashing and grabbing whatever with no recourse. Coupled with actual rioting going on, justified or not, people are gonna get nervous.

Communities want to feel empowered, not controlled. I just think this narrative presupposes that people are all innately reactionary psychopaths, which isn't the case. We should not take that for granted. Obviously a lot of people in this country are reactionary and have been made nervous by the media they consume but it is not a fact of nature, nor do they need to always be appeased.

I find it good and useful the way Duff is able to articulate these typical liberal anxieties, which I think are representative of a huge portion of the voting public. There's an interesting way that political logic works where points of view that are "common sense" but actually make no logical sense are held by the majority of people. Of course, "defund the police" would be a complex set of policy actions that would look vastly different in every jurisdiction across the country. That doesn't stop the "common sense" understanding of the slogan to be "cops won't be paid and will be shunned everywhere, so the streets will turn into the Wild West." Next to no one would advocate that or think it makes sense, but it has the Stephen Colbert truthiness "feels right" factor because our political culture is so violent and extremist. Every imaginary political reality that people understand is gross and horrible.

This is one of the spectres of our politics. WP, you're driving at this right now. People simply can't imagine anything working or any politician being well-intentioned. It's one big reason we've devolved into this social identity politics of tribalism and us vs them. Identity politics is waged in the absence of real policy.

chrondog wrote:There's an interesting way that political logic works where points of view that are "common sense" but actually make no logical sense are held by the majority of people. Of course, "defund the police" would be a complex set of policy actions that would look vastly different in every jurisdiction across the country. That doesn't stop the "common sense" understanding of the slogan to be "cops won't be paid and will be shunned everywhere, so the streets will turn into the Wild West." Next to no one would advocate that or think it makes sense, but it has the Stephen Colbert truthiness "feels right" factor because our political culture is so violent and extremist.

I dunno, given the number of completely nonsensical policy ideas that get thrown around, it really isn't that obvious. Just look at the murder weapon debate for instance. And a particularly loud (if perhaps small) number of advocates would be happy to correct you when you suggest a complex set of policy actions is really what's really being called for by saying "No, I just want cops to have no money", either in some youthful (or otherwise) nihilism or just one of the steps in the inevitable revolution that will be starting any minute now.

But I think what we're sorta pointing at here is that we're all talking past each other, that people expressing anger in the streets aren't the ones crafting policy and shouldn't be expected to, and that we're all doomed no matter what.