Things we might discuss if the forum didn't dieFollow

Most medical certificates travel pretty well

So I'm reading through Facebook and occasionally I come across some political things my conservative friends/family like or comment on. You know, like how 45 has created a million bajillion jobs overnight and how good x is because someone says it's a good thing, or the opposite.

--and every time I think, "wow, they will believe anything." Then I thought about how fun it might be to just randomly make **** up and put it on a website to see how they react to different things. Then with that I realized they won't actually believe anything. It has to be something that they want to hear.

It doesn't have to be anything positive. I could make up a story about a terrorist attack that never happened, or I could say everything to do with Russia and the current administration is a lie because Democrats and Libtards are mad about losing. --just something that hasn't already been done, and perhaps something with a specific purpose behind it.

It doesn't even have to be a lie. It can just be something completely irrelevant-- like this one thing I keep seeing about how the Democratic party in the year 1825 or something were doing things that resembled the Republicans of today-- therefore Democrats are evil!

I just really want to see how far it can go. It can be anything. Anything at all. I want to come up with something that is so absurd that no one could possibly believe it, and yet they will.

That's right, Lolgaxe, I called you a *****. What're you gonna do about it, you *****? Shoot me? HAH!

You realize that you could simply swap "liberal" for "conservative" and "44" for "45", and make the exact same statement. Well, except said statement only applies to random people on the internet, as opposed to say... the Nobel Peace prize committee. There's cheer leading, which is pretty normal all around, and then there's just plain pie-in-the-sky imagination.

I honestly see a lot more folks on the right being at best cautiously optimistic about Trump. Whereas it seemed like the left more or less fell over themselves to proclaim Obama to be the next best thing to the second coming. Although I'll fully admit the potential for perception bias there. Again though, that applies to you as well.



Again though, there's "stuff made up on some random site on the internet", and then there's "stuff made up on Whitehouse.gov. How many jobs were "created or saved" (how exactly do you measure that anyway?). Seem to recall folks swallowing that hook, line, and sinker. Same deal with "pass cap and trade or we'll all die!". Or frankly, any frantic claim made about how dire some problem was that needed a solution "right now!!!!", and so much so that there's no need to even look at the proposed solution or ask how it might help or even hurt the problem we started with (It's called the "affordable care act", right? Yet, the average household cost for health insurance has increased by $3k/year since it was passed).

There's plenty of cognitive dissonance to go around IMO. I'm not even saying one "side" is worse than another (although I personally do believe this to be true), but just trying to point out that it's not one sided, and maybe you should be just a bit aware of the same thing going on among those who believe as you do as among those who don't.



Yeah. This has been happening for some time though. There are already a fair number of fake sites and sources that exist solely for the purpose of creating fake stories and hoping the "other side" will pick up on it, push it publicly, and then be made to look foolish when it's revealed to be completely fake. In fact, there was a Clinton supporter who was doing just this during the election (I can't remember the name now, but I posted about this back when). He created some fake copies of supposedly leaked emails from the Clinton camp (specifically Podesta, among others). They were absurd and obvious fakes. He had hoped to catch conservatives passing this off as "real", but what actually happened was that some real emails were leaked, and when that was reported on, some liberal news sites latched onto the faked one, and argued that the whole set of Podesta emails were faked. They had a bit of egg on their face when it was revealed that, yes, this one was a fake, but it was created by one of their own, no one on the right fell for the bait, but the folks on the left did when they needed an obvious fake to try to dismiss the emails.

When it came out that the ones released by Wikileaks actually were real? That was a problem. And yeah, now you know the rest of the story...

Point being that this is already a thing. It's been a thing for some time. It's the same thing that folks tried to do by heading to Tea Party rallies, and waving around signs with hateful and bigoted messages. I can only assume they expected all those evil bigoted conservatives to cheer them and give them secret handshakes or something, and were quite shocked when instead they were told that wasn't what the groups were about and to leave. Of course, this generally didn't stop them from having their friends take pictures of the signs and attempt to pass them off as proof of bigotry among Tea Partiers.

Same deal with the folks showing up at the RNC and passing out Russian flags, so they could get photos of folks waving them. Um... Ok. Contrived, right? Same thing with folks showing up at any GOP or conservative rally and trying to start fights and create violence (cause they're all violent hateful people, right? Should be easy).

The funny thing (and yeah, this is where my own bias is going to play in), is that we on the right don't have to do this. Your "side" manages to wave socialist flags and wear t-shirts with violent terrorists on them without us having to do anything. We don't have to instigate fights at liberal events, they tend to turn into riots all on their own. And we don't have to show up and plant racist hateful messages there. They're already there. So there's that.



Odds are anything you've thought of has already been done. Be cautious though. Your perception of what conservatives believe and will accept is almost certainly very different from what conservatives actually believe and will accept. You might just find yourself standing around in a crowd of other liberals (or at least anti-conservatives) bouncing the "hateful/absurd" messages back and forth at each other, all pretending to accept the others silliness, in the pursuit of supporting a narrative, meanwhile all the actual conservatives are looking at you and wondering what the heck you're talking about.

Edited, Jun 12th 2017 5:38pm by gbaji

I hafta say. I hate using words like "conservative" and "liberal." I hate grouping people into broad categories this way. I avoid using words like that whenever I can if it can be helped. So this isn't easy for me.

Whenever I see someone use the word "liberal" as a means of othering someone, I immediately stop taking them seriously-- because the meaning behind words like these have become completely subjective. Too often I see someone speak their opinion about something like, say, abortion-- and depending on their stance on the issue, they are immediately given one of those two labels, regardless of what they think about anything else.

It is hard. It is messy. I know. --but there exists a demographic of certain people who happen to typically identify as "conservative" who I feel a profound level of disgust for.

and. AND-- I realize there are people who identify as "liberal" who are just as bad, if not worse. They are the ones I was talking about a few weeks ago on the other thread which I'm not sure if you saw or not.

I think some better words we could use to better describe the "conservatives" I am referring to (IF we must use labels) might be either/or: Puritans, Social Darwinists

--and on the other hand, a better word for certain "liberals" who have drawn my ire is "Social Justice Warrior."

Today, I saw this article and the comments section served a sort of list of people who seriously deserve to die in a fire. I can't say for certain what all of their political ideologies are. I don't know any of them. Granted, I'd be willing to bet they identify as conservative, but being conservative alone is not enough to make me want to strangle a person to death the way I do for so many of these. My oldest brother is "conservative" and would probably agree with said people, but I know him. He is complex. I could probably talk to him about it and explain to him why he's an idiot for thinking that getting everyone a gun would do anything to stop terrorism.

Edited, Jun 13th 2017 3:21am by Kuwoobie

No. Those were your conservative friends. Oops, sorry..."conservative" friends.

Y'know...the ones you claimed were a poisonous part of the right - over and over - and claimed the right couldn't exclude them despite their totally racist, hate message...over and over? Because despite their evil rhetoric, they were in the right (heh) because they were "fiscally conservative" and therefore justified?


Over and over and over again?

Edited, Jun 13th 2017 1:24am by Bijou

It took you this long to stop taking Gbaji seriously?

You don't have the guts.

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A friend and coworker of mine has a saying that I find to be very interesting and appropriate: "Stereotypes save time".

I don't use words like "liberal" and "conservative" to promote otherness or sameness, but as a broad and time saving description of the ideological and/or political positions at hand. I suppose I could have used a more narrow term like "Democrats", except then I'd get people protesting because they aren't members of that particular political party. Or, I suppose, I could have used some long and meandering statement like "People who slavishly supported Obama no matter what", but then that would have been circular in the context of the point I was making.

If you don't like the label, that's fine, but we have labels for a reason. They're generally useful ways of describing things.




That's great. My issue is with your stated reasons though. If you had listed off a set of positions on various issues, ideological principles, etc, and said "I disagree with these things", that would be one thing. But what you did was talk about how a set of people (let's call them "conservatives") support Trump and/or the GOP "no matter what". I responded by pointing out that this is a characteristic of "liberals" as well. So your complaint is meaningless IMO. It's equivalent of complaining about how bad Fords are because they have four wheels. Um... So do Chevy's. And Toyotas. And every other brand of car.




I don't recall it. As I mentioned in my own post, I'm well aware that I can exhibit bias as much as the next person, and am certainly more likely to see broad characterizations tossed at a group that I associate with and respond negatively than when it's leveled at a different group. I figure it's up to people who identify as liberal to defend their group.

I'll also point out, I personally believe that the behavior you are speaking of is *more* prevalent on the "left" side of our political spectrum than on the right. And I, unlike you, provided several examples of this.



Ok. Those are great labels and stereotypes. See! Now you're getting the hang of things. Of course, you have to do more than just identify a group by a label and declare your disgust for them. Tell me *why* you dislike that group. What behavior do you dislike? Why? For example:



You see how you didn't actually say what about their comments you disliked? You said that they "deserve to die in a fire", and that they are probably conservative, but that's not "enough to make me want to strangle a person to death the way I do for so many of these.". Your older brother is "conservative" and "would probably agree with said people".

Only at the very end did you even hint at a reason: "he's an idiot for thinking that getting everyone a gun would do anything to stop terrorism."

Great! Why? Make an argument. Don't just declare the other guys position to be idiotic. You're actually kinda doing what you said you hate. Just lumping people into groups and then judging them based on the group. I mean, I get what your position probably is. But it would be nice if you'd actually express that position. Gun ownership is a hot topic, and certainly debatable. But to hate an entire group of people just because you disagree with them? And then not being willing to state *why* you think they're wrong?

What's funny is that I've personally had the mental thought each time a terrorist attack occurs where the attackers are armed with knives that "Gee. One civilian with a gun could have stopped that pretty darn fast". I don't happen to think that's an unreasonable thought at all. There may be a number of other reasons you might be opposed to civilian ownership and carrying of firearms in public places, and to be honest, some of them are quite reasonable. But "bad at stopping a terrorist attack" isn't one of them. If anything, it would be one of the best deterrents to terrorist attacks of this type, which largely depend on a helpless public. The argument against it is the other problems of having an more armed population (fights escalating to shootings, more criminal access to firearms, potential of well meaning folks shooting each other accidentally, etc).

Again though, we can only have that discussion if you actually express your reasons for your position rather than just stating disgust towards those who you disagree with. I find the latter approach to be less than useful. But that's just me.

Edited, Jun 13th 2017 5:02pm by gbaji