Yeah, it was the people that drove me from the faith as well. Christianity would be so much nicer if Christians had listened to Jesus

Pretty sure ROFLCopter and rickrolling was Gen Y

Howdy pardner, maybe Strong Towns can help? Look and see if there’s a local chapter for your city and reach out to them. If not, start one! It’s pretty easy, they have a lot of great resources to support you, and getting a group started is as easy as showing up to a few city councils and networking with other speakers or putting a flyer up at the library or local coffee shop!

That mental image, Jesus christ

Day 100 of not letting it be forgotten that the republicans led a massive, distributed campaign of targeted vote rejection. They spent years getting true believers and laws and rules to support them put into place throughout states and counties, and it bore fruit. There was a disproportionately high number of ballot challenges this last election, and black folks got their ballots tossed a staggering 900% more often than white folks. There’s likely a very large number of people who thought they voted in this last election and have no idea that their ballot got tossed. This is the real shit that that dumbfuck starlink conspiracy buried. I’m still in awe that the Kamalampaign just basically shrugged and went “okie dokie! Pack your bags, Katy Perry, party’s over!” instead of doing the normal investigations, challenges, etc. Mind you, some of that IS normal, and double checking via the courts is a good thing to do; not like the Trump campaign and its like 300 bullshit ass claims, but more like ten or twelve claims with some actual weight.

I know that central Americans are very socially conservative; in general, that’s the way with rural people. I also know that there’s an economic left undercurrent that’s been present for a long time; it’s why the CIA overthrew the Guatemalan government for United Fruit and sponsored reactionary militias to go around murdering people and torching villages. I think that the right wing of the US never really forgave central America for “making us” (massive sarcasm quotes) destabilize their governments. The other half of that is that we’ve basically caused this crisis in our back yard, which is kind of the opposite problem to modern Russia. Where the USSR built up, modernized, and industrialized the countries it had direct control/ influence over, the US has done everything possible to keep central and south America down, so now you end up with Russia eager to reclaim (by any means) the valuable parts of the USSR that fell away in the 90s, and the US eager to keep out the people fleeing the shit we’ve been flinging over the wall for the better part of a hundred years.

As a typical American with little public transit experience, I’m right there with you. My understanding from people who do use public transit, though, is that eating a meal on the metro is a heresy deserving of immediate and excruciating death.

I think that church has a lot to do with some of it for at least some of these people. Church has become, for many evangelicals, a weekly dose of assurance. Instead of an opportunity to improve themselves or question how they can lead a better life, it’s a temple of worshipping the self as it already exists. “Welcome to church, you are right about everything and God loves you. They are wrong about everything and God hates them. God bless, see you at Denny’s, don’t forget to not leave a tip”

“other people are bad drivers” isn’t that hard of a sell tbh. The problem comes when you try to suggest alternatives.

See, the thing is that conservatives always believe that they’re deeper into the in group than they really are. They can’t imagine themselves as part of the out group. Quick example, about five years back, I had a fox news addicted co-worker bitching at me about millennials. I was like “bro, we’re in our thirties, we’re not kids anymore”, because he and I are both the same age, and both millennials. He looked like I just slapped him and said “no, I am NOT a millennial”, so, because I physically cannot stop myself from arguing with anyone about anything, I spent five minutes proving to him that he was, in fact, a millennial. He put up the WOKE FAKE NEWS^tm defenses, cleared recent history, and was back to griping about millennials before the day was out, still supporting things that hurt millennials and not daring the imagine that Fox News could possibly be talking about him. He’s the child of immigrants, he’s got his citizenship by his dad being born here and him being born here. He supports rounding up brown people and ending birthright citizenship because he’ll still believe right down to his core that they’re not talking about him even as they’re loading him into the box cars.

I would say it’s a crisis of empathy, but I’m not sure that’s completely true. I’m not going to fight people on Lemmy about it, but I personally know my own share of conservative people who have no problem with empathy (and many who do have a problem with it, in fairness). I think it’s a distinct phenomenon that they really do believe that it could never happen to them, or to anyone who doesn’t “deserve it”. I’ve encountered that kind of circular logic quite a bit, where if their policies hurt you, it’s probably because you deserved it, and their policies can’t possibly hurt them because they know they don’t deserve it.

Oh, yeah, you didn’t know about that? Romney was even the one who spilled the beans, he was telling a fun and completely normal human story about how he took his family on a road trip, and the dog, being strapped to the roof, got so freaked out that it had diarrhea all over the roof of the car and he had to go into a car wash and rinse the car off. I don’t remember if he said he took the dog off to wash the car, but one can hope that he at least managed to emulate that level of human behavioral subroutines.

Yeah. I’m in Merced, CA, which was one of the initial collection points for detained Japanese Americans before they were put in the internment camps. We have a little memorial at the fair grounds, which is where they were collected up at. I’ve always believed that people 50, 100, 200, and 2000 years ago really aren’t fundamentally different than people today, and anyone today who professes to be disgusted by Jim Crow but still embraces modern forms of oppression would have embraced Jim Crow back then. We’re seeing that now. These folks, without even a second thought, will eagerly embrace Hispanic internment camps while denouncing the Japanese internment camps as something that never should have happened, and dismiss any semblance with a thought terminating “but this is different.”

That fact is going to haunt me in the late hours of the day. I didn’t think that the second standard deviation of political views equated to “absolutely batshit insane”.

Yeah. Ego, in the sense of the story about yourself that you tell yourself, is an extremely potent concept. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen people get called out on their extremely shitty and deliberate choices and react with “I won’t take this, this isn’t fair, I’m a good person.” They actually believe that they are a good person, and good people don’t do bad things, so they’re being misunderstood and unfairly attacked. When the mirror is held up that attacks that narrative about themselves, it’s like an actual psychic pain, and people react almost like they’ve been physically attacked.

MFs like this are why we really need public transit. This dude is sharing the road with everyone else while he’s trying to eat chicken and shitpost. He could be doing that without endangering everybody else (though he’s probably deservedly catch some shit about eating a rotisserie chicken tbh) on a train.

There’s also people that just assume it’s more of the usual WEE-WOO-WEE-WOO FOX NEWS ALERT OBAMA WORE A TAN SUIT AND USED TO SMOKE, IS HE THE ANTI-CHRIST?! WEE-WOO-WEE-WOO MITT ROMNEY SAID HE HAS BINDERS FULL OF WOMEN* stuff and don’t pay any mind. We’re some of the most heavily propagandized people on earth, and some folks choose to save their sanity by just ignoring it. Trump’s bullshit has actually been bad enough to burst the bubble for a few of these people.

*Binders full of women was legitimately just fucking funny. I actually laughed when I heard the debate live on the radio. For proof that Romney is a lizard person, you have to look at how he strapped the family dog to the roof of their car to go on vacation.

FTA:

For example, most Americans (61%) disagree that the federal government should place immigrants who are in the country illegally in internment camps guarded by the U.S. military until they can be deported.

Only 61%? Have I lost my fucking mind? This feels unbelievable to read.

“but all I wanted was an even more negative tax rate and to be able to fire workers for getting hurt on the job! I didn’t want the dictator to threaten me with the window treatment”

“free speech”

Never ever take fascists at their word, they’re all bullshitting you always.

We’ve been extensively propagandized to believe that even the most modest forms of protest are high crimes punishable by death. Stop traffic? Die, scum. Sit in at a park? Terrorists! Even standing around peacefully chanting and waving signs is often met with vitriolic reactions and observers wishing violence on the protestors for their inappropriate display. The only appropriate protest, according to how we’ve been propagandized, is one where you sit quietly in a closet for a few minutes after work, write in a journal, and tell nobody about it. If you protest and nobody notices, can you call it a protest?