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Three comments - (0) Nice setup of the sane and compassionate versus... Trump supporters? Who cannot in any way be sane or compassionate... (1) If Trump suppo

Three comments - (0) Nice setup of the sane and compassionate versus... Trump supporters? Who cannot in any way be sane or compassionate... (1) If Trump supporters must be fought and excluded from any sort of decision-making that affects the public sphere, then why bring up US Democracy? The very nature of democracy allows the dangerous, the racist and the sexist to affect it. Are you suggesting something else? (2) While I might criticize the five silos you toss Trump supporters into, I wonder more whether you'd find a Sanders revolution abhorrent. Not that all revolutions have been as bloody or as horrid as the French - are you saying the American Revolution was a terrible thing for the world? Certainly the Brits might think so. ;-)

vonnik 10y ago
0) I was contrasting non-compassionate responses (such as ostracism) to Trump supporters, with a sane and compassionate response, which I attempted to describe in my second point. I clearly don't consider Trump supporters to be sane, and by definition they cannot be compassionate beyond a limited group of people, since their candidate is a bigot and a misogynist. If you can't see that, I'm not going to explain it to you. The evidence is overwhelming. 1) For a democracy to be alive, it must have the capacity to destroy itself. I think we agree on that much. Trump and his supporters represent a threat to democracy -- I'm sure we don't agree on that. I'm suggesting they be fought with democratic means. 2) I didn't mention the American revolution because it was different from the others. A bourgeois, nationalist revolution that transferred power from a tiny, foreign elite in Britain to a wider suffrage of propertied white males in America. You could argue that the deeper revolution in North America was the vast transfer of property from Native Americans to settlers, and that was indeed a terrible thing for the tribes.

vonnik 10y ago

0) I was contrasting non-compassionate responses (such as ostracism) to Trump supporters, with a sane and compassionate response, which I attempted to describe in my second point. I clearly don't consider Trump supporters to be sane, and by definition they cannot be compassionate beyond a limited group of people, since their candidate is a bigot and a misogynist. If you can't see that, I'm not going to explain it to you. The evidence is overwhelming. 1) For a democracy to be alive, it must have the capacity to destroy itself. I think we agree on that much. Trump and his supporters represent a threat to democracy -- I'm sure we don't agree on that. I'm suggesting they be fought with democratic means. 2) I didn't mention the American revolution because it was different from the others. A bourgeois, nationalist revolution that transferred power from a tiny, foreign elite in Britain to a wider suffrage of propertied white males in America. You could argue that the deeper revolution in North America was the vast transfer of property from Native Americans to settlers, and that was indeed a terrible thing for the tribes.