Look man at this point saying either party has a monopoly on pedophilia is sort of ridiculous. It’s very obviously a rich/powerful thing, not a left/right thing.

I don’t see how anyone doesn’t understand that at some point. Diddy’s arrest was less than 24 hours ago.

No, but the idea that any random white guy could get away with what Trump gets away with is also laughable. Since 2016 there have been a million and one politicians trying to act Trumpian, and none of them enjoyed the nearly success Trump has.

For reasons beyond my comprehension, Trump seems to have this larger than life persona that has allowed him to escape scandal after scandal that would doom literally any other politician.

As a fun sidenote, look up DC Mayor Marion Barry. Dude made Trump look pedestrian.

Look man I don’t know how old you are, but this type of comment is what I’d expect a teenager to write. it’s not just that you’re acting like a massive asshole; You’re using insults and arguments that I’d expect a teenager to come up with. It’s the sort of argument that only works if the vast majority of people in the audience are already both deeply in your corner and also immature. Otherwise you’d just come off looking like a massive jackass.

Do you have any experience talking to people outside of an echo chamber? How does that go for you?

This is a serious answer so it’s gonna get down voted to hell, but whatever.

There’s a huge portion of Americans who are suffering. Their personal lives are kind of awful, they live in communities that are impossible to get ahead and the communities are often that way to due the direct actions of the political establishment in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Above all else, these communities don’t really feel heard by the liberal establishment. They feel as though their concerns are dismissed by what they see as the powers that be. They feel that their anguish is belittled as a personal failure, and often downright mocked. They also feel as though a lot of entities that fucked them are liberally coded.

To these people, Trump is the guy who makes those people seethes and tells them to fuck off. That endears them to him and offers extreme loyalty. They often dismiss the allegations against him because at some point every single conservative has been implied to be a disgusting person in popular culture.

Ironically I think a lot of Trump’s worst actions solidified the support of his base, because of where America has been at since his political ascendency. The US culture war has been raging for a decade now, and both sides have a habit of taking extreme positions while vilifying their opposition. That is naturally going to cause people to get more aggressive, which in turn villifies Trump.

An example I love to use is vaccine skepticism during covid. There were two huge groups of vaccine skeptics in America: rural whites, and black Americans. Both had suffered greatly at the hands of an aloof medical establishment, and both had their suffering ignored. While the Black community’s wounds run deeper, the rural white community was fresh off the opioid crisis. They had every reason to be skeptical about big pharma lying to them for profit, because that’s literally what happened just a few years prior.

The liberal response to the black community was understanding and outreach. The medical community made a huge effort to reach out to black community members and popular figures in black culture. There was a direct acknowledgement of the medical establishment’s bigotry in the past. There was not a culture of shame for people who did not choose to get vaccinated. This was also reflected in news articles and social media posts.

Their response to the rural white community was basically the opposite. The medical establishment’s outreach was extremely limited by comparison. The opioid crisis was written off as a failure by the Sacklers as opposed to any systemic issues that the medical establishment needs to address. Vaccine skeptics were repeatedly and aggressively shamed, with open discussion in regards to simply enforcing vaccination via mandates. Basically every MSM article talked about how the vaccine hesitancy was a character flaw. Social media went even farther. Not only did they call conservative vaccine skeptics things like death cultists, but there were forums dedicated to making fun of antivaxxers dying of covid. People would post private Facebook posts of people they knew by two or three degrees of separation, and then liberals would more or less celebrate their demise. You even had the return of the word “sky fairy” on reddit to describe when these people prayed to God.

Trump, for his part, encouraged people to get vaccinated. He stated multiple times at his rallies that vaccines could end covid, and that they were making him look bad by not doing so. He was, at his own rallies, booed so loud he had to stop talking. He quickly changed his tune.

A consistent trend in liberal circles is the belief that they have complete moral and intellectual authority, as well as the belief that this authority gives them the ability to treat people who don’t conform like shit. I’m pretty sure I’m voting for Harris, but there are also times where I felt like I should just say home. It’s completely fucking insufferable, and ironically has a ton in common with evangelical christian politics that dominated the US in the 1980s. So long as that mentality is there, you’ll have people like Trump gaining undeserved support.

Look honestly I don’t think this is that dystopian.

Smoke detectors existed in bathrooms forever. The main use in high school seems to be catching particularly dumb teenagers smoking cigarettes in the bathroom. When I was in high school they were tuned to be super sensitive to the point where water vapor could set one off. I remember one time where the entire school had to stand out in the rain after a fire alarm went off, in what was later determined to be just two teenagers smoking in the bathroom.

Teachers also have been trying to catch students smoking for like 50 years. Back in the 20th, there were assistant principals that basically roamed the halls looking for whiffs of cigarette smoke. Part of the reason memes about hanging out under the bleachers started is because it was the best place to smoke on account of being outside, out of the way, and old school gym teachers just not giving a fuck.

This dudes app just seems like a modern update on very old concepts. Instead of teenagers smoking cigarettes, they are vaping. Instead of a smoke detector, you have something designed specifically for vapes. Instead of some super anal assistant principal on patrol, you have some super anal assistant principal sprinting across the school. Who knows, maybe this is the thing that forces teenagers to touch grass because I’m willing to there aren’t vape detectors under the bleachers and gym teachers still don’t give a fuck.

The way they are doing it is needlessly vitriolic and cruel. I have a hard time seeing how anyone writing these comments can be a good person.

I’ve talked with my therapist a lot. The conclusion I’ve come to is while the level of upset I get is outsized, my emotions are valid.

The weird comment was just the last straw. Since 2018, I’ve seen so much toxic behavior justified by political coding. It started off online, but post covid it really hit the mainstream. A lot of this behavior is almost objectively unacceptable, and the talking through this kind of stuff with my therapist affirmed my gut feeling that the political coding was just an excuse. Here are some examples I’ve seen, from online and real life:

• During covid, there was a subreddit called HermanCainAward. It made fun of antivaxxers actively dying from covid via screenshots of their social media pages. While it was supposedly about awareness, the comments seemed absolutely giddy
• It’s pretty common for liberal social media personalities to insult conservative for being ugly and unable to succeed with woman. This is in direct contradiction to their claims that slit shaming is unacceptable and their messaging about body positivity
• I’ve met multiple women in “ethical” polyamaorous relationships. They weren’t ethical. The women in questions were in LTRs, wanted a harem, and the partner always ended up devasted. Every time it was justified by framing poly as a sexual identity and throwing shade in regards to gender roles and heteronormativity
• I’ve met a significant number of women who treat men as a whole in a toxic manner. I used to gently ask how they would feel if that was the way they were being treated, and I always got a liberally-coded lecture about historical oppression
• Democrats in my city proudly matched in support of Hamas, a totalitarian regime dedicated to the murder of Jews worldwide. They justified this by using oppressor/oppressed rhetoric
• I’ve seen people excommunicated from a friend group for problematic behavior, but that standard is never evenly applied. A single, not conventionally attractive, guy can be cut off on a single sentence. Meanwhile a conventionally attractive man or woman can say horrid things and they’ll be excused.
• My siblings will straight up try to trigger an autistic meltdown any time I see them. They’ll always justify it by saying I was doing something problematic, but their justification was super thin.
• The biggest assholes I know are super vocal about being liberal. Like they’ll be casually cruel to people, but then brag about going to drag brunches.
• A lot of TV shows and movies these days are straight up bad, but then use flimsy political coding to imply that anyone who doesn’t like said IP is just a deplorable

At this point I’ve seen this toxicity on a personal level, from democratic politicians, on social media, and in traditional media. It is very much a real part of liberal culture.

What therapy has also helped me realize is that, in the past, I felt a similar resentment towards conservative culture. My shift in anger corresponds to when I moved from a more conservative area of the county to a liberal area of the country. I think that there are a certain type of people who are just shitty and looking to excuse their behavior, and political coding is the way to do that in 2024.

I’ve also explored how I became the person I am today, specifically how I “beat” the bullying. The answer was ultimately that I disengaged. Senior year of high school I avoided anyone in my grade that I didn’t have an explicitly good relationship with, and successfully attempted to make friends outside of my school. In college, I chose a university that students from my high school almost never go to, and made it a point to attempt to form connections from people with a different background. After college, I made a commitment to not move anywhere close to my hometown.

I am actively applying these conclusions to my decision not to vote. My feelings that liberal culture is toxic are valid. The best way to deal with them is to disengage. At the same time, there are equivalent issues in conservative culture that I’m not having an emotional reaction to by virtue of lack of exposure. So, the best solution is not to vote, and to transition to being a more apolitical person as a whole. While that’s by no means a perfect solution, absolutely nothing will change if I continue taking the same approach towards politics that I have for a good decade at this point.

Stop trying to gaslight me. I’ve seen this for years at this point. People will hurl insults and accusations, and then plead ignorance based off the idea that implications, connotations, and subtext don’t exist.

I was equivocated with the guy in the article. The guy in the article was heavily implied to be a racist. Therefore, I was called a racist.

Also the democratic party loves sob stories. Everyone’s lived experience matters except mine apparently.

You think I’m the one who feels morally superior?

Yes because that’s what democrats want to bring to mind when they call Trump weird, government policy.

It’s not selfish to refuse to vote for a candidate that does not respect you or your struggles.

Again, I don’t. I am not voting for Trump. I just think it says a lot that Democrats choose to attack him on his lack of social conformity vs all the other almost objectively awful things about him.

As I keep repeating. I am not voting for Trump. I’m just going to stay home.

That’s great, but the woman who testified before my city council that the women raped by Hamas were lying bigots leveraging #whitewomantears got the cheers of many progressive leaders in the audience. These same groups participated in regular “pro Palestinian” protests where phrases like “globalize the intifadah” and “Houthi freedom fighters were thrown around”

No, I cared for years while getting nothing out of it. Meanwhile, behavior that was extremely upsetting to me was normalized on multiple levels. That care and respect was not returned.

So I’m out.

It’s not a badge of honor to have an intellectual disability that, among many other things, makes it harder to function in social situations.

My decision is a direct result of my fairly unique life circumstances. I don’t think anyone else cares, and I don’t really hold that against them. There are a lot of things wrong with the world, and a lot of different reasons for people to vote a certain way.

Comments from individuals are a huge part of Lemmy. I told people why I disagreed with the point this article was trying to make, and how that affected my personal decision to vote. My vote is ultimately going to be about me and the way I feel about both candidates/parties. That’s how voting works.

I at no point told anyone to vote a certain way, or not to vote. I at no point implied anything about people who choose to vote for Harris. You’re the one who can’t handle any sort of perspective that sits outside your worldview.

Oh that’s another thing. I’m Jewish. A huge amount of the people most vocal about fighting facism expressed support for Hamas (not Palestine) after October 7th. Hamas is a totalitarian regime with the explicit goal of wiping out Jews worldwide. In areas with strong progressive local governance, violence against Jews has been handwaved away.

I would not want to do any sort of fighting alongside those people. They scare me.

Yes, because that’s what people will think when they read your comments. That you are a good and courageous person.

You equivocated me to the guy in the article, who uses “every slur under the sun”. I assume that includes racial slurs.