Bay 12 Games Forum

It is entirely possible for folks to have voted for Trump and not known a thing about his VP or his VP's policies, y'know. That's not much better, since it's uneducated voting, but I find it much easier to believe than the idea that, in a country where gay rights have been slowly-but-steadily pushing forward, more than half the country is practically salivating at the thought of torturing LGBTs.

Maybe I'm wrong.

ETA: To clarify, I'm not saying that there aren't people who feel that way, because unfortunately and obviously there's still plenty of bigotry out there.

Note the other part was not caring, Siru, and uneducated voting is just that, at the very least when it's not an issue that has particularly been covered up. Only so much difference between salivating at something like that and giving so little of a damn you're willing to elect pence, or someone that willingly chose him as a political partner.

I get the whole other considerations, other issues thing. They're there, they exist, definitely. Different pressures, different calls on your time, all sorts of stuff. Bein' uneducated on a subject ain't necessarily something you do out of malice. But there's lines you draw, and there's a message you send when you say to a person, however unintentionally, that that person's life, well being, and sanity, ain't that line. That you may have reasons you didn't notice the line was there ain't comfort worth the meaning.

Fine, work yourselves up in a tizzy.
Me, Imma wait to see what the electoral college does, see if recounts turn up anything, etc. No sense panicking before anything is 100% confirmed.

*scratches head* I mean, it's not a matter of panic. It's a matter that a chunk of our population has just had it confirmed that a bit shy of sixty million people in this country are willing to put someone among the highest seats of power that has advocated for redirecting government funds to torturing them, and not enough of the rest of population care to stop him from ending up there. For LGBT folks, this is quite possibly one of the biggest slaps to their face they've experienced in a decade or two -- long enough for some of them to have now encountered for the first time exactly what it means when not just your locality or some particular demographic or political group, but your actual country, is hostile enough to your very existence it can not care if you're tortured and die, and is willing to let its money be used to pay for that.

That's not panic, not really. That's a bone deep reminder of the flat fact (that was looking like it might be on the down slope, even, which just makes the shock worse) that your country and your government is an existential threat to you and yours, shoved right into your face. And not in conspiracy theory land or black site fema camps or whatever. The VP has literally advocated for the government footing the bill for their torture. We don't really get to take that back, y'know? Fear of what happened this last day or two is not a "tizzy." The US just proved that we're not nearly as safe for them as it may have seemed (and we could have been a hell of a lot better on that front even without this ). Even if the results somehow flip, that's not going to change. That's been 100% confirmed, and it was 100% confirmed the second that EC count ticked over 270.

And yeah, @Soli, we do what we can. Just... don't like when people try to minimize what some of my friends and family just had happen to them, y'know? Even if that's not the intent.

I dunno, it strikes me as needlessly alarmist.

I agree that maybe this isn't the way we wanted this election to go, but could we at least give Trump a couple of months in office before declaring that everything is ruined 5ever?

Eh, you could, but I wouldn't blame, say, LGBT folks for hopping the border before pence (who wants to use government funds to torture them, it really can't be repeated enough), a R majority congress, and a conservative added SCOTUS actually started doing anything.

Though, uh, cript. The dems actually made gains in the senate. Up two or three, iirc. Still a minority but crushed it wasn't. Crushed would have been dropping below 2/3rds.

Give it to me this way:
In your opinion if Trump didn't exist would anti-Muslim violence be lower?

If we didn't have major political figures supporting and legitimizing anti-Muslim sentiment, up to and including our president elect? Wasn't spreading xenophobia and racism in general? Trump wasn't just replaced with someone saying the same thing? Pretty sure the rates would be lower, yes.

Maybe they wouldn't. Certainty's difficult. But when people aren't trying to tar a group for whatever reason, violence against them tends to be less likely, yes. Less accepted, less likely to come to mind as a possible course of action. Oddly enough, the less your culture considers something acceptable action, the more the frequency reduces.

Guys, I can't fault the uni for doing something like that. You folks talk about toughening up and whatnot but for a chunk of our country we just elected a VP that wants to legalize and fund with taxpayer's money their torture, to say nothing everything else the GOP wants to do and all the others they want to do it to, as well. I'm not going to fault them a bit of shock.

People have said that since the fuckin' sixties. 'Once the old people die, it's all peaches.' There will always be old people. Young people voted for Trump quite a bit, this election, compared to how much they voted for Obama. The world is never as simple as that.

... well, yeah. People have been saying that since the sixties, and more or less every time an older generation politically marginalizes we get gains in... most things, really, so far as I can recall (though given these last few generations and how bloody much has happened in them, that's kinda' understandable). Except the manufacturing sector, I guess. Still second in the world but we got too good at it, and those that got left behind wanted to suffer and wreck everything around them instead of allow themselves to be helped so :V Not that I don't understand the motive. Pride and whatnot, I get it. Got no use for it m'self, but I know it motivates other people.

Not saying kill 'em off or anything but those of us paying attention have been painfully aware we're waiting for people to die more than just about anything to get done what we think needs done, culturally, economically, and so on. There'll still be red (or blue, or whatever), but it'll be a different one, almost certainly with significantly more in the way of shared experiences and grounds to connect and communicate, forge agreements and ways forward. Above and beyond everything else, it's pretty astoundingly different to get older folks to change behaviors they've been practicing for longer than you've been alive. It's possible! Definitely possible. But you're talking about time and effort investments to get that change to occur that can ultimately be less efficient use of your time than just waiting for them to die and directing your attentions to wherever else you can make gains in the process; to accept that they may be a friend or loved one or whatever but they're not going to be your political ally without significantly more effort than they're practically worth on that front. You can spend all that time getting changes to occur in a demographic that's going to work against you in the process and then still die not long after you're done, or you can just let the latter happen and build bridges with the younger generations or others among your own and have coalitions that might actually agree in the process even somewhat and still be with you another decade down the line. Time investment's roughly the same, but the gains involved are notably different.

And it bloody sucks, by the by. It is one of the most intensely saddening, painful, frustrating, etc., things to know there's no way you're going to be able to get a friend or loved one or just fellow citizen to work with you. To see them doing stuff that has demonstrably made things worse both for yourself and them, and to try, and try, and try, and get nothing, and nothing, and nothing, all the while they're doing stuff to actively make your life worse, even if that's not really their intention. Y'try anyway but after a point it gets really obvious you're just kinda' pissing away your effort, that could be spent mitigating how they're screwing you over instead of failing to get them to stop.

Though yeah, at what isp said a bit back, point doesn't seem to be that they're all of it. Just that without 'em it would've been a lot easier to go a different path. Greater portion of the population made up of folks actually willing to listen, or at least that younger folks are able to talk with the right way (i.e. not be relatively young), without the same sort of cultural/historical baggage, that sort of thing.

Not that Trump, in pursuit of his other policies, would interfere with legal immigration to achieve his goals- that's actually rather likely. It's just not a directly stated policy.

Actually, isn't the USCIS a federal organization? Trump made an explicit promise to freeze federal hiring for everything except military, public safety (which I don't think immigration counts as), and public health. Not sure how it'd work out considering the self-funding thing, but...

E: Hrm. Actually, checked, but it's under the DHS. It might count as public safety, I'unno. Ah ha, checked further. Nah, it's safe. DHS child agency, which means it's under the public safety umbrella. Probably. Unless the GOP somehow manage to reclassify it in the next few years.