Trump popularity.

If only Biden backed out, their win would be guaranteed

I actually threw away my red Nike hat just to avoid the confusion. Fuck trump.

Have you tried just minding your own business?

As a trans person, I absolutely disagree with you on that topic. But I do agree that a lot of the people supporting trump are single-issue voters, whether it be LGBT rights, abortion, immigration, etc.

You know, just placing "being a bigot" in quotation marks doesn't make you not a bigot. You are very much a bigot. Like, the very definition of one. So if you've got a problem with that, I suggest you take it up with Merriam-Webster.

Oh, I got sick of Trump so quickly that around a year after he got in office I was just catering discussions with "Why would you support a known and admitted rapist?" Doesn't advance the conversation with those fools, but it certainly ends it.

Belief is social. People struggle to believe things that clash with their in group. They'll go to great lengths to avoid it.

Personally I don't care to characterize em as lunatics, because that word really only serves to categorize them into an entirely different realm of brain function, and I feel like that's counterproductive and misrepresents how fascism works. It's not that millions of people lose their minds and frothingly support fascism, it's that fascism is capable of presenting itself as something else, or necessary, to an otherwise normal in-group base using a number of psychological weak points, many of which have been exacerbated in the Internet age with little popular understanding.

To name one example, I think of some folks I knew in my hometown, brilliant engineers, electricians, people with extreme talent in one specific thing, living in places where diversity has been historically squashed so they've only known a snow globe's worth of the world. And, especially among the older generation, they're simultaneously not very social media savvy but also way too online... Once they're given a nebulous external force to fear, the final stop of that train should be a surprise to no one.

I don't say this to absolve fascists of personal blame, because well and truly fuck 'em, they are responsible nonetheless. But fantasizing that their brains are just broken and don't function like ours is missing the point. Everyone's susceptible to a grift, social media bubble, or wishful thinking of some kind. And when you factor in trauma as a politically neutral psychological force, human behavior suddenly becomes a lot less "stupid" and a lot more... frustrating. Pretending we're not weak to analogues of many of the same things is doing ourselves a disservice. We need a better standard than just doing what they do when they talk about trans people like we're space aliens incapable of reason.

To be fair, that's likely because the more reasonable ones are smart enough to know it's stupid to openly proclaim support of trump. It's likely that outlier group I mentioned that are 'open trump supporters'

Hanlon's razor -- "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity"

It would seemingly require intentionally being ignorant. And if you're that ignorant, whether by choice or not, and then go and vote for the guy then that makes you a piece of shit.

Great way to rephrase my point, a lot more concise XD Sometimes I ramble.

But yeah, IDK, I'd vote for Trump over Biden

Then that makes you a shit human being.

because he is antiestablishment and his foreign policy is better in the long run.

He is literally pro-establishment. Where the fuck are you getting your information?

I'm still confused why some of the right wing people do some things. This is a good example of something I cannot make sense of. I can only guess it's in the same vein as absolute freedom, which is a core philosophy for some people, not necessarily just right wing people.

IMO, government regulations can, and often do, help the country as a whole. Absolute freedom borders on anarchy too closely for me.

Ummm… but what about all the men in the bible with many wives. There was no one man one wife thing in almost the entire Bible. Almost all of the people who are touted to be amazing examples of God’s peopel… were polygamists… and since that wasn’t enough, they would have the concubines on the side. Point that out and they run away.

There's several points in the Gospel where Christ points at a departure from this though, right, like in Matthew 19 and Matthew 22, but the most poignant passage is 1 Corinthians 7:

2 But since sexual immorality is occurring, each man should have sexual relations with his own wife, and each woman with her own husband. 3 The husband should fulfill his marital duty to his wife, and likewise the wife to her husband. 4 The wife does not have authority over her own body but yields it to her husband. In the same way, the husband does not have authority over his own body but yields it to his wife. 5 Do not deprive each other except perhaps by mutual consent and for a time, so that you may devote yourselves to prayer. Then come together again so that Satan will not tempt you because of your lack of self-control. 6 I say this as a concession, not as a command. 7 I wish that all of you were as I am. But each of you has your own gift from God; one has this gift, another has that.

8 Now to the unmarried[a] and the widows I say: It is good for them to stay unmarried, as I do. 9 But if they cannot control themselves, they should marry, for it is better to marry than to burn with passion.

The purpose of getting married is the relief of sexual lust - and since we are talking about just relieving it, the idea of having multiple wives or concubines on the side is a perversion of this. We can even look at the story of King David and Bathsheba as an example of why you shouldn't covet moaaarr wamen. It has been pointed out before that, like, adultery and lust are so powerful and pertinent that 2 of the 10 commandments are about it...

So i would say that one of the clarifications that exist, and one of the new usherings in of Christianity, is strict monogamy, and also praise for monasticism...

Conservatism, at its core, has always been a purely reactionary opposition to liberal and progressive politics. In the modern era, it has felt the need to wrap itself in something resembling a positive ideology which presents thinly falsifiable policy positions, regardless of how narrow and mutable those ideological boundaries might be.

Well, there's two major divides within conservatism as it plays out today, right?

Classical liberalism, we can call one, and then populist conservatism...

Classical liberal Republicans/Libertarians are highly principled and highly progressive with very positive, engaging values - think about these old guys like Paul Findley who were fundamentally isolationist, anti-war, pro-Palestine conservatives, that truly believed in Hayek's Constitution of Liberty and that the key to bettering humans is through decentralization of power, minimal government, and human freedom.

And then there is conservatism that goes back to, like, tradition or populism.

Of course, these things often combine, but I think you need to treat conservatism with a lot of nuance because otherwise you are just dismantling a strawman.

Because until recently, abject, reactionary nihilism has been seen as a losing position.

Revolutionary nihilism is how radical liberalism was portrayed by Dostoevsky in the Devils - a great book - and it does make sense, because we see at its root that some of these radical movements actually were about reinventing all of society around totally new principles and annihilating what has hitherto been normalized in Western civilization...

Yes, there is like the Nietzschean reactionaries who want to build the New Man, but yeah, it's still a losing position. I do not even think that guys like BAP are even on that level - like some of the hardcore neopagan LARP squad certainly envisions a completely new basis to muh Western civilization. But it's not like Varg Vikernes is a viable option - in spite of how wildly popular Black Metal became after hipsters getting into blackgaze and shit after ironic Pitchfork album reviews, not even one of the most seminal figures in the genre can be anything much more than a joke for having these beliefs.

I think one of the problems we have is the paranoia about this stuff - you act as if the right is really some monster that is rising to swallow the country in a wave of Fascism, but it's not the right who are anywhere near successfully removing their opponents from ballots.

I'm not sure I understand what you've said. There seems to be a language barrier.

We’ve discussed it before, it’s not that. It’s the anti-vax, illuminati-believing “secret hand sign” crowd that she’s part of…

I mean, the writing was on the wall. Even before the election, he was saying things like: "Oh, they're gonna rig the election against me, folks", and his rhetoric was so toxic that at Republican debates, the moderators were asking him things like: "If you lose the election, will you abide by the peaceful transfer of power?" Which, of course, he didn't agree to.

I mean, yes, he hadn't actually incited people to try to overthrow the government at that point, but he very much was on record saying that that was his intention.

Yeah. At this point (honestly by 2020 no matter what) there's no question. The only two possibilities are a multi-million-Democrat conspiracy against him, or the dude's guilty of 21 major crimes related to election theft.

But Trump voters actually support the idea that it's ok for the Republican to steal an election. Simple as that.

I'm kinda surprised I'm getting down voted for pointing out someone has a bigoted opinion about an issue they have no knowledge about. As someone whose actually been dealing with gender dysphoria since the 1970s I've become rather knowledgeable about the subject and as someone careening towards 50 I don't have the patience to coddle bigots.

If that makes me unpopular then oh well.