Yeah I spend alot of time weighing the proportions of how much right-wingers are dumb versus how much they’re just shitty people (on an individual basis).
Same, because I come from that world. Specifically the trumpy, angry, racist, paranoid, dunning-kruger overconfident american conservative world. That’s the family I was born into.
I think my presence on Lemmy suggests my curiosity and skepticism and giving-a-shit-about-other-people-itis led to me clawing my way out of that toxic hole over the decades.
But for how much I can deeply relate to you weighing the priorities, I have no better answers for you. When you are in their in-group (especially thinking extended family) they can be loving and giving people.
I personally think there are two big drivers that don’t get enough attention because it sounds like you’re trying to insult them.
The first is ignorance. As in literally ignoring the world around you. Living on auto pilot. Out of sight, out of mind. They mentally check the box of “responsible people follow the news” by passively absorbing content from Fox News or one of their local Sinclair news channels. Propaganda works extremely well on them.
The second is the mental pain of undiagnosed mental and/or neurological issues. Treatable stuff like anxiety, depression, and ADHD. In other words I’m not just implying they are narcissists or have borderline possibility disorder.
In my corner of the world, the more conservative a person is, the more irritable they are all the time. It’s like they are an animal with a thorn in its paw and don’t even know it. I know what that existence feels like, and then you have all these evil forces in the world waiting to reveal who is causing your pain! Surprise, it’s those others!!
Part of me judges them harshly. We’re talking about middle aged and older people who have had the time to learn. But there’s a huge part of me that knows that pain that makes you angry all the time.
What I come back to every single time though, is that every awful person that has ever existed has a sad story. Even if no other person did things to twist somebody into a monster, they had the bad luck to be born with a brain that gives them psychosis later in life, or whatever the situation is.
At some point you have to judge people not just by their actions but on the effects and outcomes of what they do. I can be polite to ignorant ordinary people living ordinary lives. But for high-level politicians that destroy lives by the thousands and millions as they take advantage of it, I really don’t care how horrible their upbringing was. I mean I do, but it’s only like 0.01% of the suffering we’re talking about, and it’s not the preventable kind.
We’re talking about middle aged and older people who have had the time to learn.
To expand on this. It usually just looks like they’ve had the time to learn.
I also was raised conservative, my mentally ill stepfather was seduced by a borderline cult of a church, so I was in deep deep.
It takes so much out of you. Being that religious is literally exhausting and takes up all the available time people would have otherwise had to learn. I’m talking church three times a week, plus home church meetings, all full of propaganda about how demons lurk behind every corner and the only people you can trust are the people running the church. They’ve got it intentionally set up so that you are drowning in fear, and the only lifelines you trust are pure fantasy.
I don’t disagree, but there’s a nasty cycle there. Conservatives defund education, deregulate airwaves, and so the kids of conservatives don’t get a good education and are brought up by Fox News. Because of that, they are ignorant of the real world, and they believe the lies spewed by conservative media, so they vote conservative and the cycle continues.
Quite frankly, anyone who lives in this era and falls for Republican propaganda is a moron. Until they block basic data and history from being searchable, anyone who votes a clean Republican slate is a moron. No “their education is so bad they voted wrong”. Sure, we need to improve education. But they still only fall for that level of propaganda (most people will fall for some propaganda, but the degree is different), they are morons
The place I grabbed it from said something about XKCD - Alot, but I didn’t pay too much attention. I just grabbed the first “ALOT OF TIME” I could spot and pasted it in.
The original, of course, comes from Allie Brosh, whose stuff is/was amazing.
some stupidity is a choice (there’s so much free available information and i know some damn smart and well educated poor people), and that’s pretty shitty
Yeah I spend alot of time weighing the proportions of how much right-wingers are dumb versus how much they’re just shitty people (on an individual basis).
Same, because I come from that world. Specifically the trumpy, angry, racist, paranoid, dunning-kruger overconfident american conservative world. That’s the family I was born into.
I think my presence on Lemmy suggests my curiosity and skepticism and giving-a-shit-about-other-people-itis led to me clawing my way out of that toxic hole over the decades.
But for how much I can deeply relate to you weighing the priorities, I have no better answers for you. When you are in their in-group (especially thinking extended family) they can be loving and giving people.
I personally think there are two big drivers that don’t get enough attention because it sounds like you’re trying to insult them.
The first is ignorance. As in literally ignoring the world around you. Living on auto pilot. Out of sight, out of mind. They mentally check the box of “responsible people follow the news” by passively absorbing content from Fox News or one of their local Sinclair news channels. Propaganda works extremely well on them.
The second is the mental pain of undiagnosed mental and/or neurological issues. Treatable stuff like anxiety, depression, and ADHD. In other words I’m not just implying they are narcissists or have borderline possibility disorder.
In my corner of the world, the more conservative a person is, the more irritable they are all the time. It’s like they are an animal with a thorn in its paw and don’t even know it. I know what that existence feels like, and then you have all these evil forces in the world waiting to reveal who is causing your pain! Surprise, it’s those others!!
Part of me judges them harshly. We’re talking about middle aged and older people who have had the time to learn. But there’s a huge part of me that knows that pain that makes you angry all the time.
What I come back to every single time though, is that every awful person that has ever existed has a sad story. Even if no other person did things to twist somebody into a monster, they had the bad luck to be born with a brain that gives them psychosis later in life, or whatever the situation is.
At some point you have to judge people not just by their actions but on the effects and outcomes of what they do. I can be polite to ignorant ordinary people living ordinary lives. But for high-level politicians that destroy lives by the thousands and millions as they take advantage of it, I really don’t care how horrible their upbringing was. I mean I do, but it’s only like 0.01% of the suffering we’re talking about, and it’s not the preventable kind.
To expand on this. It usually just looks like they’ve had the time to learn.
I also was raised conservative, my mentally ill stepfather was seduced by a borderline cult of a church, so I was in deep deep.
It takes so much out of you. Being that religious is literally exhausting and takes up all the available time people would have otherwise had to learn. I’m talking church three times a week, plus home church meetings, all full of propaganda about how demons lurk behind every corner and the only people you can trust are the people running the church. They’ve got it intentionally set up so that you are drowning in fear, and the only lifelines you trust are pure fantasy.
It’s insidious.
They’re all just stupid. Being that level of shitty requires being stupid.
I don’t disagree, but there’s a nasty cycle there. Conservatives defund education, deregulate airwaves, and so the kids of conservatives don’t get a good education and are brought up by Fox News. Because of that, they are ignorant of the real world, and they believe the lies spewed by conservative media, so they vote conservative and the cycle continues.
Quite frankly, anyone who lives in this era and falls for Republican propaganda is a moron. Until they block basic data and history from being searchable, anyone who votes a clean Republican slate is a moron. No “their education is so bad they voted wrong”. Sure, we need to improve education. But they still only fall for that level of propaganda (most people will fall for some propaganda, but the degree is different), they are morons
I think you underestimate how easy it is to fall for propaganda, and how smart people do too. Especially when it’s how you were brought up.
There is a fine line between being an asshole and stupidity. Somehow they’re typically both.
Naivevil
is that a crossover?
The place I grabbed it from said something about XKCD - Alot, but I didn’t pay too much attention. I just grabbed the first “ALOT OF TIME” I could spot and pasted it in.
The original, of course, comes from Allie Brosh, whose stuff is/was amazing.
some stupidity is a choice (there’s so much free available information and i know some damn smart and well educated poor people), and that’s pretty shitty