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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/26226188
cross-posted from: https://lemy.lol/post/39626252
We have to agree where we ARE before we stand a chance to agree about what we do from here.
Admitting you were wrong would help getting you in the right direction, it would make you a bigger person.
That probably is too much to ask, though
Or just grow up, admit you were wrong, and do something about it. "It'll make them feel bad!" Good, they should feel bad. They voted for an openly hostile, dumb, Russian bootlicker of a president. I just don't get this post that keeps being reposted and why coming together means forgetting how we got here.
Imagine an abusive wife trying to come back to her husband because she didn't realize she signed a prenup and wants to say she was lied to about leaving now that life is hard. Like, no, not going to take any responsibility for my temper/violence, or even say I'm going to change, let's just pretend I didn't know that punching you in the face was gonna leave a black eye because I didn't think it would hurt my hand.
Look at your retirement go! Good thing everyone who has a dick is forced to go into the dick restroom:
This is the correct way to do it. We're all in the same boat no matter what choices we made that brought us here. If we keep up with the petty I told you so's or doing things out of spite of others choices were going to stay falling down this nightmare path. A lot of people make bad choices but not everyone is doing it cause they are a terrible person.
We keep treating Rep with kid gloves. No more.
how about this.
you were lied to, we told you as much. you refused to listen. listen now. stand down, and the only thing hurt will be your pride.
you stop at you where lied to, you do not need to do the I told you so, you do not need to shame them. If you want to bring people on board you do not antagonize them more than you have to
No more. Get out of the maga cult or get out of the way.
Encapsulating people in these little ideological bubbles and walling them off from one another with technological barriers in order to more cheaply extract labor from them is more-or-less the thesis of "The Network State", the guiding doctrine behind the modern Trump administration.
You need your Red Team and your Blue Team to be fully alienated from one another, insisting that each side is this horrifying inhuman entity incapable of reconciling with the other. And then you can have the Gray Team - the Objectivist neutral rent-seeking arbiters - moving between them as overseers and police agents, to extract surplus and compel obedience by implicitly setting the rules by which the Reds and the Blues live.
MAGA exists as this hyperactive immune system, intended to polarize a segment of the population against the whole. And on the flip side, you have these ultra-orthodox neoliberals doing the same thing but from a "Woke" side of the fence. They're both fiercely capitalist. They're both fiercely identitarian. And they're both obsessed with compelling obedience from the top down - whether its crushing campus student protests for being antisemitic or purging RINOs from state and local governments or consolidating media markets into mega-corporate behemoths like Sinclair and Clear Channel and the Gates/Bezos monolith.
You're not going to get people to leave the MAGA Cult because they're not going to hear you. They're segregated and pumped full of anxiety such that they don't dare leave their enclosures. At the same time, you're being walled in yourself. You're told not to set foot inside a church or show up at a rival political rally or otherwise have any social contact with anyone in a Red Hat (except to participate in some kind of retaliatory violence). Don't talk to your neighbors if you see them showing the wrong kind of swag. And always be wearing your own colors, so people can instantly identify which team you're on in public.
Its an ugly state of affairs.
Thank you for the interesting read but i don't think this forgive and forget narrative fixes the problem. I wish I had an alternative I could provide because it seems irreconcilable when this "other side" advocates against your existence to your face.
i don’t think this forgive and forget narrative fixes the problem
I don't think this is forgive-and-forget. Its recognizing the source of the conflict as fascist propaganda, not some intrinsic impulse within some subset of people.
Rather than trying to debate bro your parents on Trumpism, try cutting their cable line and see how their opinions shift without a steady diet of reactionary TV.
I don't disagree with you.
Gonna be real hard for me to hold hands and sing Kumbaya with a group of people who vote against democracy by elevating rapists and felons who illegally attempt to overturn elections and who have a ton of racists and sexists in their ranks.
Wouldn't have said that 10+ years ago, but they've crossed all sorts of lines since then. They don't really deserve to be forgiven.
I agree but we have to acknowledge that it's not helpful. Like there is nothing MAGA can say or do to make me think they are good people, but if we can at minimum get them to understand the propaganda they swallowed whole we can actually do better, for all of us.
MAGA are evil people.
I don't even consider them people at this point. They want to treat people like dogs and breeding mares then that's exactly how I'll treat them.
Follow the social contract or get fucked.
The problem isn't that they're bad at spotting a liar, it's what they were lied to about.
It's the transphobic, anti working class, white supremacist ideologies that allowed them to be duped in the first place. Get rid of that and we can talk.
A lot of the people I know who fell for MAGA are the types to believe falling for a lie is a personal failing on their part, and will refuse to admit any sort personal failing out of whatever they think pride is.
Right wingers fucking around: "Yeah let's deport all the ILLEGALS, lower our egg prices, and make the government fascist! MAGA!"
Right Wingers finding out: "Boohoo my benefits are cut, Canada boos at our National Anthem, and I have to sell my left kidney to buy groceries!"
Fuck these people. Conservatives were drawn in to Trump because of his hateful rhetoric and they only changed their minds when they were personally affected. They'll vote with a hard R the next election cycle anyway and don't deserve our sympathy. They were around and even voted for Trump's first administration and wanted more of his hate.
Frankly, it's most important they admit to themselves that they were lied to.
Do you think they will?
Yeah. People don't just deserve forgiveness. Acknowledgement of bad behavior comes before forgiveness. That's standard operating procedure. They aren't doing that.
Even more important that someone they liked and someone they thought liked them lied to them.
Trump openly stated he would do what he's doing now. His campaign published project 2025. It wasn't a conspiracy. They did it out in the open while crowing about doing it. There's really no excuse for not listening when he told you his plans.
You either made a mistake because you were purposely uninformed or you agreed with what he wanted to do until it started affecting you. Either way you were wrong and need to accept and admit that before serious work can be done. Otherwise it'll just happen again when the next demagogue rears their ugly head.
“It was supposed to hurt others. Not ME!”
Thank you. This is what is needed.
Edit: obviously many people are not worth the effort but not even trying is not going to help. Don't associate with Nazis, period. Not everyone who causes harm is a Nazi, however.
Also not endorsing the language 100%, however I do think this is a good start.