One reason why so many are turning bigots, you expressed it yourself: your refusal to consider them on your same level, as intelligent and critical thinkers as you. Somehow everyone is stupid but you (and I don’t mean “you” specifically, rather everyone who approaches discourse in the same way).
Calling our opponents dumb is being polite, or maybe a psychological defense mechanism against the horror of the alternative.
If you are dumb it’s not your fault. You didn’t, know better. If you are ignorant you can learn.
If you are smart and you still made the choices knowing the outcomes, then we have to go to other explanations: greed is the next least bad, and certainly it plays a part, but honestly that doesn’t usually follow. The vast majority of conservative supporters have no chance to benefit from their policies, so we have to go further to find an explanation.
Cruelty. They want the suffering, the death, the destruction of human potential. Or maybe sadism. They enjoy inflicting pain and deprivation.
The mind recoils, so we call them dumb, because the world in which the ignorant masses are being misled by nafarious elites is less soul crushing to contemplate than the world where the masses act out of cruelty and sadism.
We have more than enough evidence of exactly the opposite to dismiss this possibility. All the problems are less extreme in the countries with public healthcare and that don’t worship corporations
I have a graduate degree, been left/progressive my entire life. Only in the past few years have I been told, to my face, that I’m a bigoted ignorance stupid piece of shit. It’s almost as if the left has gone off the rails and basically thinks anyone who won’t vote for them should f off. And they wonder why they don’t get votes or population.
I used to be proud to be a Democrat. Ever since Clinton I’ve been ashamed and all the party has done is double down on their stupid sexist bullshit.
I remember talking about how clinton was a bad candidate and was going to lose in 2016. all i ever got in reply was ‘you’re a sexist piece of shit’. yeah, god forbid i be critical of clinton’s shity campaign, and her crappy policies that alienated huge swaths of america.
Plenty of us also criticized Clinton, we just recognized Trump was that much even worse and we’re willing to hold our nose. Because we care about getting our policies and will settle for closer to it, we aren’t going to go for whatever merely says theyll fuck over the powerful when we know the policies won’t actually hurt them.
One reason why so many are turning bigots, you expressed it yourself: your refusal to consider them on your same level, as intelligent and critical thinkers as you. Somehow everyone is stupid but you (and I don’t mean “you” specifically, rather everyone who approaches discourse in the same way).
Calling our opponents dumb is being polite, or maybe a psychological defense mechanism against the horror of the alternative.
If you are dumb it’s not your fault. You didn’t, know better. If you are ignorant you can learn.
If you are smart and you still made the choices knowing the outcomes, then we have to go to other explanations: greed is the next least bad, and certainly it plays a part, but honestly that doesn’t usually follow. The vast majority of conservative supporters have no chance to benefit from their policies, so we have to go further to find an explanation.
Cruelty. They want the suffering, the death, the destruction of human potential. Or maybe sadism. They enjoy inflicting pain and deprivation.
The mind recoils, so we call them dumb, because the world in which the ignorant masses are being misled by nafarious elites is less soul crushing to contemplate than the world where the masses act out of cruelty and sadism.
Which could also be that they are correct.
We have more than enough evidence of exactly the opposite to dismiss this possibility. All the problems are less extreme in the countries with public healthcare and that don’t worship corporations
This bias is real. Everyone thinks they’re the smart one. There also do exist huge differences in intelligence.
Yep.
I have a graduate degree, been left/progressive my entire life. Only in the past few years have I been told, to my face, that I’m a bigoted ignorance stupid piece of shit. It’s almost as if the left has gone off the rails and basically thinks anyone who won’t vote for them should f off. And they wonder why they don’t get votes or population.
I used to be proud to be a Democrat. Ever since Clinton I’ve been ashamed and all the party has done is double down on their stupid sexist bullshit.
I remember talking about how clinton was a bad candidate and was going to lose in 2016. all i ever got in reply was ‘you’re a sexist piece of shit’. yeah, god forbid i be critical of clinton’s shity campaign, and her crappy policies that alienated huge swaths of america.
Plenty of us also criticized Clinton, we just recognized Trump was that much even worse and we’re willing to hold our nose. Because we care about getting our policies and will settle for closer to it, we aren’t going to go for whatever merely says theyll fuck over the powerful when we know the policies won’t actually hurt them.