do the right wing guys think it’s like a draco malfoy thing where they’re a good guy underneath?
like when it’s like a lady and a cop and the lady seems like a normal sorta boring suburban lady
do you know what i mean. this is one of the things where if you try to ask an AI bot it yells at you
I don’t think I would want to be with someone that went to the voting booth every few years and pulled the leavers to take my health rights away, because ultimately that’s what is happening. It would be a betrayal, it’s not benign and all the affable personality traits mentioned wouldn’t make me forget it.
For these rebuplican men, it’s saying “I respect you but regulation has gotten out of control, and your bodily autonomy is a price I’m willing to pay to fix it”.
The man shows no signs of sexism, of xenophobia or racism , or bigotry, but pulls the leavers for those things anyway.
You find his ideas crazy, note he has become propagandized, and is difficult to talk to about politics. I dare say if you pushed those conversations you’d be shocked at what you find.
Ultimately voting is an act, not speech or opinion, it’s an act to manifest your will and your priorities onto others through force of law.
So while one can take the approach of getting along to get along when it comes to regulation and corporate taxation, it becomes less easy when you recognize that, as a functional adult making an informed choice, your husband acted to end women’s bodily autonomy, erode women’s health care, end same sex marriage, deny and delay climate change action, and a whole host of other abhorrent policy goals.
I want to say, I take no pleasure at all in saying this to you. None. Your response to the post is just so personal it feels impossible to respond to in an impersonal manner. I just felt the need to challenge the idea that affable personality traits can make up for abhorrent policy goals.
There’s a reason why the feminist saying “the personal is political” is so threatening. Because it denies precisely the reasoning seen above and elsewhere in this thread.
Conservatives often complain about progressives ending relationships and friendships over “politics”. Because they want to draw a hard line between the two, where as long as they behave civilly to people’s faces, it doesn’t matter when they vote to make the same people’s lives materially worse. Because “politics” is something… I don’t know, abstract?
My experience living in a couple of countries in Europe is that people’s tendencies for how they relate at an interpersonal and also towards society are cultural and that further, interpersonal and societal forms of relation are in fact separate.
For example, in The Netherlands there is more a tendency to consider the broader impact of one’s actions (and being called “asocial” is actually considered insulting), whilst in Portugal if you don’t take advantage of “The System” when you can get away with it you’re considered a sucker (the dutch tend to think of “The System” as “everybody else”, whilst the portuguese do not) but in both countries screwing people (not in a good, sex, way) is considered a bad thing and I would even say the portuguese tend to at least express more their concern with other people on a personal level, quit likely even be more emphatic empatetic.
Meanwhile in the UK taking advantage of others, personally, whilst being very polite about it, is the essence the upper class upbringing (the “gentleman” is certainly no such thing).
I expect that you get the same thing in US were culture is not broken along language barrier lines but none the less seems to be siloed by other factors.
The problem is that many personal decisions have systemic consequences. Things like weight gain, smoking or even poor resource utilization cause serious societal and environmental harm, and yet terminating relationships over them is generally criticised. (Many of the biggest issues {climate change, healthcare, drug abuse etc} faced are directly caused by poor personal habits, not voting).
So the question is out of all personal decisions, why are political views being carved out as an exception that is worthy of terminating a relationship?
“is so threatening”
Sometimes when you are criticised it’s because you are a complete moron, not because your ideas are so brilliant they send people running.
Many of the biggest issues {climate change, healthcare, drug abuse etc} faced are directly caused by poor personal habits, not voting
This is just such utter nonsense. Many places around the world have made massive inroads into solving these problems and every single time, the solution has come from systemic policy decisions.
Healthcare has been addressed by various universal healthcare systems, drug abuse has been addressed through decriminalisation, offering of rehabilitation, and making sure people aren’t living under crushingly miserable economic conditions.
And climate change is not caused by individual decisions, but by the fact that our economic system only values profit, and thus incentivises the destruction of the environment to increase profit.
So the question is out of all personal decisions, why are political views being carved out as an exception that is worthy of terminating a relationship?
Because politics affects people’s lives. I could not care less if you’re a nice person to my face if you are voting for policies that make it impossible for me to live my life.
You talk about personal choices as if someone being overweight is going to measurably affect your life, when it just isn’t, no not even through increases in health insurance costs. And then downplay the actual effect of conservatives criminalising my healthcare.
One of those actions clearly has orders of magnitude more impact than the other. Yet strangely, you are concerned about the one with negligible impact, and want to ignore the one with considerable impact.
Sometimes when you are criticised it’s because you are a complete moron, not because your ideas are so brilliant they send people running.
You are below my contempt. Your ideas are simplistic and have been addressed decades ago. You are painfully boring.
That’s an interesting take. Conservatives tend to have an image of hypocrisy - ie, maybe treat a woman well, yet seek to restrict her legal rights or prevent women from protections, and they seem to think that this hypocrisy cannot be questioned. They never like being called out or questioned on it.
Interestingly something like 41% of women identify as pro-life. I know you and the person you were responding to probably wouldn’t, but my point is just that there are a lot of women who would see their conservative male partner vote for anti-abortion candidates and not be bothered at all. Not because they’re rationalizing it, but because they don’t see it as a negative in the first place.
Allowing it to be called “pro-life” has been the greatest lie told by the oppressors in quite some time.
Both pro-life and pro-choice are sanitized descriptions of the beliefs they refer to. Both movements contain people that believe completely insane things on the topic, like that women or doctors should be imprisoned or worse for making a certain difficult health choice, or that unborn children aren’t really people until they’re on a particular side of their mother’s vagina.
Where I do think you have a point is that I find any conservative hypocritical because they think one rule for them & different rules for others. He knows this. But am I perfect? No way. And on voting, when I vote I also have to make compromises because no party here is willing to protect the environment or give us healthcare or push back against our oligopoly. I think yeah he convinces himself on the social stuff because he believes the R will bring a better economy by some magic, and that’s about it. I cancel him out and 11 votes back me up, all our kids who are old enough to vote, all their companions.
But no, I’d not give up a loving and mostly compatible relationship because of politics, and apparently he wouldn’t either. I think without these connections, we’d be so much worse off. He would be worse in an echo chamber, and isn’t an idiot in other ways at all.
Obviously your calculation will be different. But I can love someone who is not me.
Alright, sure. But that’s still just him being not just willing, but actively trying, to strip your human rights away for this magic economy and you rationalizing his actions as an acceptable compromise.
I would see that as a clear example of disrespect and disregard for my well being and the well being of people who I care about.
This isn’t about finding someone just like you to love, far from it, compromise is normal and differences between people in love are wonderful. What this is about, for me anyway, is that I would draw the line at someone who is actively supporting the deterioration of my human rights regardless of how many dishes they do.
True. I mean, it’s sad for her to be with someone who’s got such a low bar. Does the dishes? Honey, you can use a machine for that. I’m doing them right now!
That’s the opposite of why people stay together. Usually people say, “Well they have trouble doing the dishes, but at least our major beliefs are similar.”
Honestly she seems pretty similar to her husband in how illogical she’s being. He’s like, “Well Republicans might be terrible socially but they might lower my taxes!” She says, “Well he votes for people I despise but at least those dishes got done!”
They are similar people in that they both make bad life choices. So maybe it works?
Yep. She’s lying to herself.
“Oh honey, you’re so good at doing the dishes” while he votes to remove all of her rights.
Not only her rights, the rights of people who aren’t straight, the rights of people who aren’t cis, the rights of kids to have a decent education, the rights of indigenous people, the rights of non-whites. That’s even not to mention that they’re against providing people with healthcare so that they don’t die, against trying anything that might make this planet livable in the future (for the kids that they claim to want to protect), and against not trying to fucking overthrow democracy. I don’t need to agree with my partner’s every opinion and political ideal, but at the very least I have to be able to respect them, and throwing everyone who isn’t a well-off white man off a cliff for “lower taxes” isn’t something I can respect.
