this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2024
352 points (93.1% liked)

Ask Lemmy

26628 readers
3438 users here now

A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions


Rules: (interactive)


1) Be nice and; have funDoxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them


2) All posts must end with a '?'This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?


3) No spamPlease do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.


4) NSFW is okay, within reasonJust remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected]. NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].


5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions. If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.


Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.

Partnered Communities:

Tech Support

No Stupid Questions

You Should Know

Reddit

Jokes

Ask Ouija


Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

The atmosphere is so heated, and the statements are getting more and more extreme. Let's just assume Harris wins the election. After a campaign like this, how could you ever have a normal relationship with your pro-Trump neighbor/father-in-law/Uncle/Barber or what ever again?

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 hours ago

I've cut out all Trumpers after Jan 6 2021 basically except for maybe my wife's parents. I'm afraid to ask them. All of us have a spoken agreement to not bring up politics because we all have to see each other and don't want to fight. A major caveat to that is that we see them as little as we can though.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago)

hope my older relatives fucking die or figure out it's time to change. on a more serious note, protest and try to help build coalitions against this but idk it seems quite grim.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 hours ago

Honestly I'm as agoraphobic as they come so, since I hardly ever leave my residence, I find it quite easy to forget that it's an election year, aside from many of the news outlets and media posts dictating it. My life outside of the internet has hardly any political interference.

Yes I still vote, but I keep my political beliefs to myself, but As Marcus Aurelius said, "You always own the option of having no opinion. There is never any need to get worked up or to trouble your soul about things you can't control"

I take a lot of solace in that. I know certain things and have certain opinions but I am absolutely not a politician and it's not something I'll wreck my soul over. Life is short enough as it is.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago)

This is the new normal. It’s everyone angry all the time until something snaps or the culture changes. Personally I believe you have to wait until the older part of Gen X is dead before we get relief.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 hours ago

That's been a growing issue for the last 15 years. The answer is community groups but they haven't been very successful.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 15 hours ago (2 children)

There hasn't been any normal for 8 years plus now. Somewhere between 30 and 45% of the population are openly trying for fascism.

Realistically it's only a matter of when unless we make some pretty damned sweeping changes which they are going to fight tooth and nail.

We need to unrig the judicial system. We need to unrig the voting system. We need to put guardrails up on media disinformation. And we need to start holding some of these fucking politicians accountable for openly lying in campaign. We need to roll back the dictator privileges they managed to shove in at the last moment for the president. We need to hold some of these oligarchs accountable for crimes.

They should lock Musk up for a month. Go ahead and have him shit himself that he's not above the law.

I don't know who the next Republican president will be. But you can bet money there's going to be plenty of bloodshed once they decide to do whatever they want with complete and total immunity.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) (1 children)

Way longer than 8 years. Depending on your perspective and level of privilege, it's been decades, generations, or the entire history.

Things got bad after Obama got elected in 2008 and the racists lost their shit. But they were also bad after Bush started two wars, or when Bush got installed as preznit in the first place in 2000. Or when Gingrich went after Clinton's penis in 1998. Or when Gingrich took over the Congress in 1994. Or when Clinton first got elected in 1992 and the racists and militias lost their shit and started bombing things. Or the year before that when the other Bush started a war. Or when Reagan broke multiple laws and got away with it, thanks to Ollie North. Or when Reagan got elected in the first place in 1980. Or when Nixon broke enough laws flagrantly enough to get impeached in 1974. Or when he bombed the shit out of SE Asia. Or when Johnson started a war in Vietnam. Or... I mean it just keeps going endlessly. But that's just my lifetime. If you are Black or Native American the fuckery goes back as far as when white people first stepped foot here.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 hours ago

If you just tweak what you're looking at a little bit you can easily move that statement back to all of recorded history.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 13 hours ago

I'm sure the sentence for everything Musk has done has to be far more than a month (the election stuff aside, he has some shady financial stuff surrounding the purchase of Twitter and probably Tesla stock, etc). They need to lock him up as long as they would lock up the rest of us if we did that.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

Boomer generation will be dead soon. And Gen X isn’t too far behind. This bullshit is already time-limited.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago) (2 children)

We've expected that for over a generation. It's more than just the boomers doing this. If you're waiting for Gen X, you're going to have to wait for Millennials too, because we thought the same thing.

It wasn't boomers that were influenced by r/the_donald and 4chan.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

Isn’t it most Gen-Z men are Trump supporters now?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 hours ago

Whoa, where did you hear that?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 hours ago (2 children)

Of course it’s more than just the boomers. But once those two generations are dead and gone, they take their lack of empathy and their unfettered narcissism with them.

And I know a few boomers who got plenty of their bullshit from those sites because those sites were just a circlejerk of Fox News lies.

I’m not saying younger generations won’t also have a collection of morons as well, but those generations grew up with this nonsense and they will forever remember the kind of country and world that was left to them.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

I think you've got an admirably optimistic outlook. I hope you're correct. However, I am afraid that you may be underestimating human greed and selfishness. Those aren't unique traits to any generation. Maybe it's human nature, maybe it's learned through existence in a capitalistic / hierarchically organized society. In any case, I am not confident that youth alone will prevent people from seeing the kind of country and world that was left to them, as you put it, and not desire to possess as much of the remnants as possible in an outburst of self-interest.

For every person that sees the ice caps melting and wants to fix it somehow, I'm afraid there's almost certainly at least one other person who thinks, "Hell yeah, new oceanfront property just dropped, how can I own/sell it?"

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

I’m optimistic in the future generations, yes. And you’re right, at any given moment, there’s a bell curve that can describe the way people are for an event or a trend or an age. I suppose I see the younger generations as moving the curve along an axis toward a better world.

I may very well turn out to be wrong. But I’ll be dead by then.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

I was the generation we were hopeful for. All we've done is stall. We got Obama elected... and that's about it.

We need a plan that's better than "wait it out". That one tends to fail.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 hours ago

I didn’t preclude continuing to take action. I voted for Harris and will continue to vote for the most sane candidate in each election, primary and general. Same for down ballot.

Never once said the plan was to wait it out. I simply said the insanity perpetrated by the previous generations looks to be on borrowed time — an obvious assertion probably, but an assertion nonetheless.

Maybe my intent is cleared up now.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 hours ago

And who will they blame? Probably others.

[–] [email protected] 43 points 19 hours ago (2 children)

how could you ever have a normal relationship with your pro-Trump neighbor/father-in-law/Uncle/Barber or what ever again?

...Why would I want to? Seriously, why would I want to have a relationship with people that have shown me that the things they value are antithetical to the things I value? I don't give a fuck if people are nice to me; I want people to be kind across the board.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 15 hours ago

That's the funnest part of all: we don't

[–] [email protected] 11 points 15 hours ago

I think it’s fantastic because know it is very clear who I need to exclude from my life.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 18 hours ago

You don't. Most of us have already either fully cut-off contact with Trump supporting family members or limit our interaction with them heavily. Our country is rotted to the core, and this election won't be the end of it. Even if Harris wins, there will be contestion of the results. There may even be a successful coup by the Republican party. A civil war is not out of the question.

There is no normal. There won't be ever again.

[–] [email protected] -5 points 7 hours ago

They are just politicians and it is really not that serious. The race is tight and whomever wins is fine. There will be another election in two years and another two years after that for as long as you live.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 20 hours ago (8 children)

This has been the norm since 2016. Until the GOP unilaterally rejects Trumpism, this will be how it is every four years.

load more comments (8 replies)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago) (1 children)

Yes, things tend to calm down. If you read history books about US history, there were times in the 1800s where brothers were killing each other over slavery and where people were killing themselves in the 1950s over their children's sexuality. Time heals wounds, and people tend to swing in a pendulum from progressive to conservative and back again (the 50s, the 90s, the 10s).

I recommend The Lavender Scare by David K. Johnson. It's a fascinating book back when the US government shared a frightening similarity to the CCP. It shows how a community develops in the postwar period, how a moral panic gets set off, how people are affected, and how a social movement starts and heals the country over time. It is almost a word for word copy of what is happening in the US right now, and how people in the past defused a situation that was even more loaded in some ways than today's world. If you are looking for reassurance, it's a great read. Many of the landmarks in the book are still standing, by the way :)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 hours ago

I'm reading Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington by James Kirchick. It's also about the Lavender Scare but the author dives deep into several cases of great government aides whose careers were ruined. The chapters are separated by each presidency, gradually construing a narrative as public opinion shaped the politics of each era. I just have to warn that, as a reviewer puts it, the book is both "exhaustive and exhausting" with a whopping 800+ pages but I think it's worth reading every word. It's so good.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

this is normal. half the country is composed of backward degenerates.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 19 hours ago (2 children)

24% is backwards degenerates. That's the percentage of the population that voted for trump in 2020. No where near half, no matter how much they may claim to represent half.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 14 hours ago

Non-voters are complicit in what is happening. Maybe saying they are as bad is a stretch, but they clearly either don't care or are ignorant about it.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 29 points 23 hours ago (2 children)

You don't. You accept the fact things are progressively getting worse and move on

[–] [email protected] 23 points 21 hours ago (2 children)

You live through enough of these "Most Pivotal Elections" and the effect is muted.

I remember Bush winning in 2004 vividly, the soul-crushing realization that Americans were ready to continue the relentless slaughter of Arabs for another four years with a fuck-you kicker to anyone LGBT looking to come out of the shadows and get married. (Nevermind the shady vote counting in Ohio).

That was after the 2000 election was stolen in full view of the public by a nakedly corrupt court.

"How could so many people be so blaise about this shameless disregard for democracy, civil rights, and rule of law?"

But then 2008 rolls along and suddenly I'm surrounded by conservative revanchists who want to talk about secession, because a black guy just won the presidency. And it begins to occur to me... "Oh, I'm just living in a fascist country".

Now, having familiarized myself with US history a bit more, another fascist winning in one more corrupted and propaganda soaked election cycle makes perfect sense.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 hours ago

Great point about the relentless slaughter of Arabs. So easily forgotten how many innocents America slaughtered during this time period. America is morally rotten to the core, high on its own supply of hatred and cruelty.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 14 hours ago (2 children)

I don't think Bush ever sunk to the depths of the Hitler-like rhetoric that Trump and his cronies have been using, however. Maybe the guardrails will hold if Trump wins again (or loses again) but this is not normal.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 hours ago

The Bush administration pioneered the theory of the unitary executive, which is the idea that the president can do anything because he is the president. They're the ones who kicked over the guardrails, they just did it in the context of an endless war that they started. For more on this I recommend Sheldon Wolin's work.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 hours ago

Not rhetoric, but deeds. I bet Bush killed far more people than Trump did, even including COVID mismanagement.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 19 points 23 hours ago (8 children)

Don't worry, there's the insurrection and riots next.

load more comments (8 replies)
load more comments
view more: next ›