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This event and Brexit are proof that you cannot shame people into voting how you want. Calling them bigots over and over just galvanizes them if anything.
by bdrool 10y ago
This event and Brexit are proof that you cannot shame people into voting how you want. Calling them bigots over and over just galvanizes them if anything.
- M_Grey 10y agoEspecially when they're bigots.
- blahi 10y agoThis is exactly the moral of the story. If you want to blame somebody for Trump, blame yourselves. Democracy, especially in the US is ruled by consensus. If 30% of the people are extremely opposed to something, like gay marriage, you cannot shove it down their throats. You cannot disregard their feelings and opinions. You just have to swallow it and move on. Because if you don't, somebody will take advantage of your foolishness.
- QUFB 10y ago40% of Alabama was opposed to interracial marriage: https://ballotpedia.org/Alabama_Interracial_Marriage,_Amendment_2_(2000) https://ballotpedia.org/Alabama_Interracial_Marriage,_Amendm... Should that be outlawed too?
- cobalt 10y agoalso about half the country was opposed to letting "all men be equal"
- xienze 10y agoAnd you know what? Eventually that changed. It takes time. The approach the left has been taking lately is to make sweeping changes that a lot of people aren't comfortable with RIGHT NOW OR ELSE YOU'RE A BIGOT AND YOU DESERVE TO HAVE YOUR LIFE RUINED. For a large portion of the population it was just too much, too fast and they had enough. Well, that's the social side of it. The rest of the election was about economic factors.
- vilmosi 10y agoI'm sorry I don't want to sacrifice my life and dreams because some people are slow learners. But it's OK, because the next generation will not suffer. /s Give me a break.
- csallen 10y agoYou do realize we fought a civil war, right? And it's universally agreed that the people who were pro-slavery, against the female vote, etc were total bigots who deserved to lose as soon as possible. The fact that the bad guys can hold out for a while before losing doesn't cease to make them the bad guys.
- umanwizard 10y agoWe didn't fight a civil war to ban slavery, we fought a civil war because a bunch of states seceded from the Union. They were seceding proactively to protect slavery which was in their mind threatened; we weren't fighting the war to ban slavery but to prevent them from leaving.
- tajen 10y agoPerfect example: Brendan Eich, former CEO of Mozilla, who was perfectly competent but fired for having donated to a gay or non-gay cause (I don't remember which one). This kind of opinion dictatorship has to end.
- rjbwork 10y ago> This kind of opinion dictatorship has to end. I agree. I am refraining from commenting elsewhere in this thread because I really just don't know WHO I would piss off, and this alias is tangentially tied to my IRL identity. Self-censorship is a sneaky, evil, corrupting beast.
- pluma 10y agoI was actually supportive (in the "I upvoted and retweeted stuff" sense, because god forbid anyone gets out of their chair over politics) of the calls for his promotion to CEO being reversed at the time because it was my understanding that the decision was made against the will of many Mozilla employees and that they felt he could not accurately reflect the standards Mozilla tried to stand for due to his personal beliefs. But the more I learned about it, the more I realized how the narrative was shaped by people outside of Mozilla being offended on behalf of others (although there were apparently one or two displeased employees). That was also the last time I took online moral outrage serious. It doesn't matter whether it's SJWs shaming supposed racism/sexism/homophobia/transphobia or the religious right shaming supposed anti-Christians/Satanists. The outrage is almost always overblown and rarely justified. Sometimes there's some truth to a particular story but if the leading narrative paints someone as unambiguously evil, it's almost always a complete fabrication.
- bby 10y agoI don't see why not?
- lactau 10y agoNo, because 40% is smaller than 60%? Well, without jokes, tyranny of the majority is the topic, which is studied in political science, a complicated one actually.
- Scea91 10y agoThe problem is that in your example there are 70 % who are pro gay marriage and you cannot ignore their voice either.
- wool_gather 10y agoWhat is being "shove[d] down their throats" because my sister fell in love with a woman and wants to make a family with that person? Stopping her from doing that is throat-shoving. Her freedom to make her life with a particular someone doesn't harm anybody. _You_ cannot disregard _her_ feelings.
- blahi 10y agoI'm sorry about the situation. I really am. But this not being normal has been the norm for thousands of years. Thinking you can change it now, in a decade, is naïve, and worse, it is arrogant. Calling people who don't want gay marriages biggots will just deepen the divide, and this is exactly what has been happening for a lot of time now - shaming, lecturing and ironically, complete disregard for the differing opinions. It is what it is and it's unfortunate but they are more and they are fanatics. Humans are animals. If you challenge them, prepare for the duel.
- henrikschroder 10y agoIt's more of a case that us upper-middle class liberal elites think we are shaming this segment of the population when we are calling them bigots and racists and stupid and uninformed and homophobic and hicks and white trash, because those are horrible things that we don't want to be called. But a large part of the population don't share that sentiment, they're not shamed, they don't care that you're screaming "RACIST!" at the top of your lungs. And when you address their actual concerns that globalization and automation are killing their jobs, killing their communities, and killing their people with a shrug, with an "I'm so sorry, move to the cities, get an education!", they'll get angry. And political. And here we are.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- lactau 10y agoI stopped caring about 'racism' long time ago. In the past race was about your color and physical features, now race is a 'big ethnicity'. Well, I can and do dislike different cultures and their cultural practices. I don't care about color. If you redefine race to something not connected to genetics, I am fine with being racist, perfectly fine. Because that's not the type of racists I hate. If I see a black guy, I won't have any prejudices. If I see a black or white or green or whatever guy, who says that only black people can use the word 'nigger', I would consider him racist (in its old sense) and stupid.
- dguaraglia 10y agoSo basically, you are saying that you, and you alone, can judge people from different cultures and backgrounds on their practices because... hey, you are superior or something. Yeah, that sounds pretty racist.
- verroq 10y agoI can damn well judge on FGM and other "primitive" practices as backward. Nothing is immune to criticism if the argument is valid. Granted there are many different types of cultural relativeism, but you decided by yourself to judge him as racist, I guess that means you are superior to him or something. Sounds like you're pretty racist.
- cJ0th 10y agoNo it's not. They are merely two data points. Look at Germany. I guarantee you Merkel is going to be reelected next year. Okay, the AFD is going to gain some power but it is outright impossible for them to win the election. But this isn't just about the AFD. What the experts and the media forced down the throats of the people is that there is no alternative to what's currently going on. SPD, Grüne, Linke, FDP don't even need to bother finding a Chancellor candidate.
- pluma 10y agoTo be fair, Merkel's policies are fairly centrist compared to the usual CDU/CSU rhetoric and ever since the WASG split the SPD has been more center than left, too. Merkel is also relatively popular with many non-CDU/CSU voters because her policies all in all have been very moderate. She's generally perceived as very static despite having had to deal with the economic crisis, the refugee situation and now Brexit. The rise of the AfD is largely a result of conservatives (who probably would have voted CDU/CSU otherwise) being upset with Merkel's handling of the refugee situation. The far left still hates her because she's a conservative, the far right hates her because she's too liberal. She's in the sweet spot where her policies are just balanced enough nobody can propose any sane alternatives that don't sound like almost exactly what she's been doing and any criticism either sounds petty or hyperbolic. The problem for the SPD is that they alienated their leftist demographic under Schröder (leading to the rise in popularity of the Linke) and later with the coalition government aside the CDU/CSU. Aside from traditional party loyalists they're now directly competing with the CDU/CSU for conservative voters. The only thing that concerns me is that the CSU is taking a lesson from the revival of the AfD (which was pretty much doomed to fail when the Euro crisis waned but was rekindled by the refugee situation) and is now spouting even more populist xenophobic rhetoric than usual. Considering how much disproportionate influence the CSU traditionally holds in the Union, this might spell trouble for the CDU internally. As an anecdote: I would never have voted for the CDU (I've previously voted for Linke and the Pirate Party) but unless one of the other parties surprises me with a great candidate, I would probably vote to re-elect Merkel.
- InclinedPlane 10y agoIf you don't call them out it doesn't stop them being bigots either. And with Brexit we saw just how much bigots were emboldened by the vote, thinking that it was a validation of their worldview. Hate crime in Briton went up by 60% after Brexit. It's not that bigotry is a non-issue in these elections, it definitely is, the KKK endorsed a presidential candidate after all. The issue is that there are deeper underlying problems that are being exploited by race baiting politicians to win elections. The problem in pre-Nazi Germany, for example, was a deeply dysfunctional economy and trying to seek a scape-goat for the loss of WWI and the shame and humiliation that caused. Today the problem is largely economic inequality and a lack of economic opportunity and mobility for most people in the bottom half of the wealth distribution. Wages have stagnated while housing, college, and healthcare costs have skyrocketed. The recent recession left a huge crater in the economic histories and career developments of most folks under 30 in the form of unemployment and under-employment. Outside of the cities there hasn't been an economic recovery in the last decade. On top of that you have the opiate epidemic. It's gotten so severe that life expectancies for middle aged folks in middle America took a significant hit (due substantially to increases in suicide and deaths from alcoholism and drug overdose). All of that has nothing to do with gay marriage, Syrian refugees, or increased awareness of police brutality. But a lot of the people who have been disadvantaged over the last few decades have been able to be convinced by demagogues that the cause of their problems is the elite establishment (especially liberals) and to capitalize on latent feelings of racism, anti-gay sentiment, etc. Make no mistake those bigots are not the entirety of the vote, but they are enough of it to swing the election. More so, as in Britain, there is a huge section of the electorate who may not be intrinsically bigoted per se but is perfectly content to sit around and run in a pack with true bigots and to support candidates and policies that will rollback progress in racial, gender, and sexual orientation equality. Sufficiently advanced indifference to issues of racial equality is indistinguishable from bigotry. You're right that you can't fix this by calling everyone who voted for these things bigots, almost certainly not. But ignoring that aspect doesn't lead to a good outcome either. It's necessary to fix the underlying economic problems while at the same time maintaining a hard line on driving forward to improve equality, enfranchisement, etc.
- intoverflow2 10y agoReally shocks me that this wasn't obvious to people post-Brexit. I was a remain voter who was shocked by that result but this win has been obvious to me for a long time after that. Calling leave voters racists achieved nothing and only strengthened their views. It was obvious when Trump voters appropriated the term Deplorables that personal attacks were going to fail. All you did was cause the polls to not reflect the final vote because people would say Hilary when asked but put an X next to Trump in private.
- CM30 10y agoTrue. And let's not forget that the GamerGate fiasco shared a lot of things in common with Brexit and Trump's presidency in how the media covered it too. The media tried to attack people over and over while painting those it disagreed with as bigots, and it worked about as poorly then as it did with this election and Trump supporters. But no, same general pattern occurred with both Brexit and Trump, with similar results.