Boy, I sure will miss having a President capable of engaging in thoughtful and nuanced discussions of important ideas.
(Sarcasm)
Yeah, SJWs are cancer. Always oppressing me and telling me I am a racist. Their speech is so evil and oppressive.
I’ll have you know I’m a Social Justice Barbarian, thank you very much.
Beginning Jan 21, 2017 any idea presented to the President that can not be answered in a tweet, will receive the response of “We’re looking into that, believe me.”
Nov 4, 2020 can’t come soon enough (and yes, that’s what she said).
“And my advice to young people, and my advice to all of us as citizens, is to be able to distinguish between being courteous and being thoughtful and thinking about how words affect other people and not demonizing others versus having legitimate political debates and disagreements.”
Seems to me that we’re beyond the debate stage. We’ve been in the attack stage for a while now.
Another entry in the Republican-to-English Lexicon:
Politically correct – Having good manners, a decent regard for others.
I’ve never really understood the “politically correct” thing. Since Republicans don’t believe in it, can we assume they wouldn’t object to Melania Trump being called a mentally retarded whore? They seemed to feel they had a right to say anything that popped into their minds about Michelle Obama.
Short version: Conservatives go for this sort of bullshit!
sounds nice but this is NOT how it works…the idiots on the right…have always wanted confrontation over words…demanding penalty to so called liberals who are “PC”.
they are drawn to the fuhrer because he speaks THEIR language and trust he will extract such penalties as often as he can.
“not demonizing others versus having legitimate political debates and disagreements”
LOL. Someone want to tell me how I avoid demonizing someone and instead have a legitimate political debate with them while they are yelling about “street apes”, “Mooslimes” and “cantaloupe calves” and generally throwing a nationwide tribal white nationalist reactionary hissy fit and blatantly abusing our governmental structures to systematically institutionalize white Christina dominion over the country? How about you, Obama? Want to explain that one to me, because gosh…I’m at the point of believing quite the opposite, i.e., fuck legitimate debate, it’s time for curbstompings.
Ahh. A treatise on butt hurt.
The frog people constantly complain about everything from Kellogg’s to female actors.
They play the victim card better than any.
Angry white man’s new welfare.
We’re setting the bar way, way too high for those on the right, to expect them to see their own actions in the very stuff that they criticize. I have RW family members who posted their dismay about the protests of the president-elect a week after the election (“get over it, liberals”) and then, later the same day, shared a FB meme about what Jane Fonda did during the VietNam era. Really…
“And my advice to young people, and my advice to all of us as citizens, is to be able to distinguish between being courteous and being thoughtful and thinking about how words affect other people and not demonizing others versus having legitimate political debates and disagreements.”
Unfortunately, the Trumper side has decided that being courteous and thoughtful is a bad thing.
2016 began with a friend saying “let’s hope 2016 is less fucked up than 2015!” (how terribly naive in retrospect) It’s ending with my uncle shouting insults on Facebook at a paraplegic scientist he’s never met who pointed out a few of Trump’s many cons.
Obama said he faced such a response in reaction to his use of the phrase “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas,” the latter of which Trump has taken to gleefully wishing audiences on his “Thank You Tour.”
“It sounds funny now, but you’ll have entire debates in conservative circles around that. So it cuts both ways,” Obama said.
It doesn’t sound funny - it sounds terrifying. It is the Christian version of Sharia law. We are all living inside the brain of Roger Ailes whether we want to or not.
Several years ago my wife and I sent out Happy Holiday cards to all of our friends without a second thought. One couple absolutely took me to task over this, blah blah blah war on Christmas blah blah blah - I had no idea they had gone so totally insane watching FOX news. I loved these people who were kind and thoughtful but our friendship disappeared rapidly.
The Republican noise machine has cast us all into hell with this bullshit and I definitely have no idea what the solution will be. I will be out protesting on inauguration day and I will support the causes I think are striving to do good things and protect what is left of our democracy, but I have never felt so unsure of our country’s future as I do right now.
Worst Christmas ever, and I grew up in an alcoholic household.
And now those same right-wing groups who went apoplectic over “Happy Holidays” are demanding that Trump project lights onto the White House that say “Jesus Saves” or the like. The demands never cease, they just become increasingly horrific.
And no, it’s not PC that’s a “sense of victimization.” That’s kindof an awkward way to conceptualize it. PC-ism is just one of their triggers, like the “war on Xmas” or Kaepernick kneeling during the National Anthem or having to wait in line behind a Hispanic family at the grocery store while they speak Spanish to one another or Dylan Roof being convicted of murder. You want the full list? Go to Faux News every day and watch what they focus on as part of their constant barrage of white nationalist outrage agit-prop. You don’t need to go to places like Stormfront or Breitbart for the alt-right’s freebased speedball versions of white nationalist agit-prop. Faux News is laying out fluffy white lines of it every single day, all day, and nobody is really calling them on it.
The “sense of victimization” is the loss of privilege and dominance they enjoyed as a natural coincident of now-rapidly-waning national cultural and ethnic homogeneity. Demographic shifts are now finally taking it all away faster than they can replace it or fight it and the end is unavoidable, imminent, inevitable, which is why I have repeatedly warned that they are in “no holds barred” mode and have accepted that the ends justify any means. It is why we saw Josh’s blog note the very astute observation by some elections academic that they voted like a minority bloc. Being reduced to “equal” from a formerly privileged stature that you believe was just “normal” and baseline, not undeservedly and inequitably advantageous, feels like something is being taken away, something they believe they are entitled to and have a right to. They now see it everywhere they look and it is used as a constant tool to keep them angry, resentful, distracted and myopic…embedding in them the mindset that they are now being victimized in the same manner as they victimized minorities in the past. It’s easy pickins, because they have always feared that minorities gaining power would result in “revenge” anyway.
Agree. I never really got this line of attack. So saying ridiculous, mean, false stuff is more politically correct? This whole thing was simply stupid.
That’s just astounding to me. It shouldn’t be, but it really is. Here, you’ve thought enough of them to send a card wishing them well and all they can think to do is whine about the wording on the card. What asinine, awful people. SMDH
It’s funny how this generation is going to have to re-learn the lessons of the past…
Black rage poured over in the 60s in response to centuries of racial injustice, but their leaders continually cautioned against violence to get their message across, because they knew their message would not be heard.
How much more so today, in a world where the news is motivated by sensationalism, and facts are available ala carte?
The minute that we devolve to violence and hatred to answer the legitimately egregious actions of our opponents is the minute that we lose the argument. Not because we’re “stooping to their level” or “surrendering the moral high-ground” but because we are giving FOX News the opportunity to point to that action as representative of the movement, so they can conveniently ignore the actual problem. Just look at Black Lives Matter… A legitimate point, consistently undermined by the tiny minority of members (or even just people easily labelled as members, regardless of the truth) which give conservatives the ammunition to paint the movement as terrorists, and change the conversation to one of whether cops are heroes or not…
I’m as angry as anyone at the way our country is going. In this, I have something in common with the average Trump supporter, so I can empathize with them. We disagree on the root cause, and the means to change it, but we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that we have something in common with our fellow Americans. They’re scared, they’re hurting, they’re lashing out because they are personally aggrieved.
Racism is a symptom, not the disease. The need to blame the other, whether you’re white and hating black people, or a liberal hating conservatives, it’s the same thing. You’re creating a straw man out of your opponent because it’s more convenient to imagine you’re in a fight with them, than to actually analyze and correct the problem.
People are poor, while others are obscenely wealthy, people’s way of life is slipping away from them, and that frightens them, even if another group thinks it’s for the better.
The anger that Democrats, and I number myself among them, feel at losing this election, is just a taste of what the other side has been feeling for 8 years.
Whether that’s legitimate or not is immaterial. As long as we frame the political debate as a matter of “winners” and “losers” we’re all failing to see the truth; that America was founded on the idea of compromise and togetherness. 13 colonies of radical different cultures and backgrounds, coming together because they recognized that, despite their differences and disagreements, they were stronger together than apart. That’s why they developed a system of government where Rhode Island howould have the same number of representatives in the Senate as New York.
The problem isn’t that “they” want one thing and “we” want another. It’s that we see people who disagree with us as “them”. It’s that we think of half the country (less than half the votes, more than half the electoral college) as so alien from ourselves, so easily demonized, that we can consider them the “enemy” and don’t bother wasting our time trying to understand them, or making them feel heard.
In that, we are just as guilty of all the sins we accuse “racists” and “homophobes” and “xenophobes” of. And much as research shows that the cure for homophobia is to spend some time with a gay person, so you can humanize them… perhaps the cure for the current rift in America is to stop standing on opposite sides of the aisle hurling invectives and start talking to the people who we’ve been trying to “beat”…