You know, if this scam wasn't both easily avoidable and actively calling for the imprisonment and/or death of various groups of people within the country, I might be a bit more sympathetic. I know it can be tough watching someone you know fall for it and not being able to stop it, but getting mad at internet strangers who say that MAGA followers got what they should have seen coming to them has the same vibes as going "But my uncle was a good guy before he fell for all this Nazi stuff Hitler is saying, he didn't deserve this," while overlooking that they volunteered to be a guard at one of the camps.

Nobody is forcing people at gun point to go MAGA at present,, and adopting and promoting that ideology has real impacts on other peoples' lives, which currently include arbitrary imprisonment, an inhumane death camp in El Salvador and Trump's brown shirts beating and killing people in the streets. So it might suck on a personal level, but who are you to tell someone who lost their access to abortion, medical care and/or the ability to just live a normal life if they happen to be trans or gay in the wrong state, or even someone they know being rounded up by ICE that they're bad people when they say, "Well, good thing another MAGA person died, that's one less of them fucking up my life," in a situation like this?

Again, it sucks for you that you lost your uncle, but he didn't live in a vacuum and the ideology he adopted has real, severe consequences for everyone else who has to deal with it.

With that said, I do think we need to give some serious thought to deprogramming these folks and reintegrating them with civilization in the near future. "Screw them all, let's just kill them," is hardly going ti be a viable strategy when we have to face our own period of de-Nazification in the future and could be helpful in actually getting some off the indoctrination pipeline and reducing their numbers in the present. There are millions of people who have openly embraced fascism in the US, and millions more supporting right-wing extremists in Latin America and Europe. Indefinite imprisonment or mass executions are both equally unfeasible as solutions for when we collectively pullour heads out of our asses as humans and go "Oh shit, we really fucked up with this fascism stuff, again. What do we do now?"

[–] GalacticGrapefruit@lemmy.world 1 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

Where did I say that he was pro-Trump? I said that he believed medical misinformation. He had conservative leanings, but he didn't vote for him. He fell down a different rabbit hole.

[–] hraegsvelmir@ani.social 4 points 17 hours ago

You know, that was a bad assumption on my part commenting on an article about conservatives and their conspiratorial views, but it still just changes the specifics of things, rather than the grand picture, as your uncle still didn't live in a vacuum. The vaccine skepticism and other nonsense still made things worse for everyone, and caused needless deaths, aside from your uncle's. I get that it can be harsh for those who personally knew an individual, but you can't ignore the impact that line of thinking has on everyone else around them and pull out the surprised PIkachu gif when people are less than sympathetic towards them.

Personally, I had to deal with those sorts of yokels yelling at me and being jackasses because I was wearing a face mask in the fall of 2020, actively following up on the health issues that arose after I had the OG Covid and was left unable to walk more than two blocks from my apartment without being completely exhausted, and had to deal with my body deciding that it was an excellent time to develop an autoimmune disease and nerve damage. I'd be yelled at to take off "that face diaper" because Covid isn't real, and vaccines are fake, blah blah blah, from the same sort of people who were all in for Trump, so I've got a bit of a bias there. Still don't have much sympathy for them, though.

As someone else pointed out, they had access to the same information as the rest of us, and chose to go with the dumbest possible conclusions they could draw, yelling "Fake new!" and "Do your own research!" to the rest of us desperately screaming at them to knock that shit off, get with the program and stop actively making an ongoing pandemic worse for themselves and those around them. They decided that they and their misinformation monger(s) of choice knew better than the rest of the world, and now we all have to live with the consequences of it.