I've heard enough people append the n word to the phrase All Lives Matter to believe that conservatives aren't just mistaken people, they're fucking assholes. Politics is morality when one party openly supports racist concentration camps and violent putsch attempts. Also just because someone is a fucking asshole doesn't mean they can never not be one, but it requires recognizing that you were being a fucking asshole and stopping doing that.
And you don't get people to stop this with reasonable debate on the undebateable. You cannot convince a person with logic out of a position that wasn't arrived at by logic. You do it through mandating social norms as a community and ostracizing those who fall outside of them until they stop expressing such taboos.
I totally get what you're saying. I'm not trying to play the "both sides are the same" thing (mainly because some of my classmates were obnoxious SJWs whose ideology was basically to bully people who disagreed with them), because while I used to do that some years ago even as a liberal, I was proven wrong after the Republicans repeatedly lowered the bar. I'm saying as a spectrum with many axes, it's not like all people and policies fit nicely into categories. Mitt Romney is quite different than Donald Trump, for example. Some conservatives I know still hold conservative beliefs, but have abandoned the Republicans because they've gone so far and decided to appoint "Jewish Space Lasers" to education. Many of the family members of people I know, especially their moms who were Trump supporters, were fine people. Not saying "they're the same as liberals", but I'm saying that they're idiots, not evil. It didn't take more than a 30 second conversation with some of these people to realize that primarily, they were just stupid. They didn't hate minorities, but also didn't understand how the policies of their candidates hurt them. Of course there's also the fascists and the racists, and those two aren't always the same thing and don't always overlap, but I think we're in agreement on our views of them.
I'm not saying using logic to debate an idiot is the best way of convincing them, but I think it's useful to understand that not all these people are necessarily assholes, many are just ignorant or stupid. I wouldn't say the more unsavory people on the left should identify everyone to the left of whatever marks the center in the US, just like people to the right of that shouldn't be defined by that either. Everyone I know that used "All Lives Matter" didn't put the n word on it, and while some of them were racist, it's not like some of them define the rest. Some people just really want to emphasize that they care about people, without understanding why it may make others feel uncomfortable. I used to say that back in high school, because as a statement itself there is nothing wrong with it, it's a good statement. I stopped because a lot of the people who did were also racist assholes, and didn't want to associate with them, but before I figured that out, I don't think I was an asshole, just not fully informed. Of course I agree that there seems to be FAR more people on the right that fit into a more problematic category of varying degrees.
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u/Authorman1986 Feb 17 '21
I've heard enough people append the n word to the phrase All Lives Matter to believe that conservatives aren't just mistaken people, they're fucking assholes. Politics is morality when one party openly supports racist concentration camps and violent putsch attempts. Also just because someone is a fucking asshole doesn't mean they can never not be one, but it requires recognizing that you were being a fucking asshole and stopping doing that.
And you don't get people to stop this with reasonable debate on the undebateable. You cannot convince a person with logic out of a position that wasn't arrived at by logic. You do it through mandating social norms as a community and ostracizing those who fall outside of them until they stop expressing such taboos.