Seriously, they are both former military, my dad was in for like 30 years, how do they like the drunk secretary? I get that he saw combat, but being in combat doesn’t automatically make you qualified for… well anything except therapy and medical care.
I know America thinks being in the military is an amazing thing, but if we tune back to reality, soldiers are not excellent human beings.
being a soldier does not make you an excellent human being.
much like existing doesn’t make you a good person.
I think my best guess is the “mere exposure effect”. The guy and his ego strikes me as something that’s probably fairly common in the military (as far as I can tell from the outside). Being exposed to a lot of men like him probably makes him feel comfortably familiar.
You can’t reason people out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into.
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Decades of propaganda
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I’m not trying to insult here, but your parents aren’t that smart. One of mine fell for it too.
Bottom line is if you fall for extremely obvious propaganda you are not, and never were, very intelligent.
I don’t think they aren’t smart in a logical sense, I think its more of a lack of critical thinking and a focus on short term gains (which i would argue aren’t even that good lol)
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Are they white? Do they have an aversion to non-white people? Do they make enough money to materially benefit from the Trump era tax policies? Yes to any 2 and you’ve got an answer, no to all 3 and I’m as stumped as you are.
I’ve got a former military buddy who is all about Pete because “he’s not gonna let the fatties and the faggots fuck up our military anymore.”
Nevermind that the navy has been called gay since their inception, or that muhreens have zero self discipline outside of a military situation, or that the air force has run more drug than most cartels, it’s the “fatties and faggots” that are the problem.
I always knew my buddy was dumb, but it took that conversation for me to figure out that it went all the way down to the core of who he was as a person.
Yeah, lot of bigots are self aware enough to try to hide their hatred and point to other things when it comes to making what they support more palatable to those who might not be. They aren’t complete idiots like some immediately assume which is why they have been underestimated by the opposite side and gained such huge traction and seen increasing success.
Even the dumb ones don’t try to show the full extent of the bigotry, since they know there are still some in society who resist such ideologies despite growing embracement of it.
I’ve got a couple dumb friends/colleagues too but just change the subject when they mention politics
Situational sexuality has assured that every navy has been pretty gay (that is, sexually adaptable) since the inception of maritime travel.
Brain damage?
Honest answer, as someone in the military:
A LOT of military people lament how “soft” the military has become, and someone coming down on beards, fat, etc, as well as being up front with what the military is for (e.g. Department of War), scratches a whiny itch they’ve always had. Because every old salty sailor and sandy equivalent feels like they came from the Old Guard.
I came from the Old Guard that my peers are nostalgic about. It was terrible and unnecessarily cruel. It was inefficient and left new people floundering instead of supported. The whole thing feels like a cycle of abuse.
But back to the point, they don’t care if he’s underqualified, makes bad and inexperienced military decisions, or has a host of DUIs (“who doesn’t?”). They only care that he’s calling generals fat to their faces and getting rid of beard ememptions.
What’s funny is that nobody alive today was alive and in the military for any major conflict that we were actually victorious in, so what “good old days” are these geezers even pining for? The days where we lost a bunch of soldiers in Vietnam and the ones who survived came back with PTSD and drug addictions?
The good old days where the people in charge could get away with anything, that’s what it comes down to.
nobody alive today was alive and in the military for any major conflict that we were actually victorious in
There are still a handful of WWII vets kicking around
Also depending on how you want to define “major” and “victorious” you could maybe make an argument for Dessert Storm, and possibly the 2003-2011 Iraq War. (Whether we should have been involved in those wars in the first place, and how those wars were fought are separate issues, and I certainly wouldn’t call them “unqualified” victories, but I do think there are absolutely certain angles you could look at them from and make the argument that the US was the victor in those conflicts)
The wars in the Middle East are tricky, though, because to have a “victory” you would need a clear metric for it, a clear goal. It’s not like the US was looking to conquer and annex those countries
If the goal was to completely fuck up a country with little to no (physical, not financial) damage to our home country, mission accomplished, one helluva victory.
If the goal was to stop Terrorism… that’s like the War on Drugs, there’s no winning that.
If the goal was merely to occupy them in order to (temporarily) prevent them from being a staging ground and financial support for Terrorism… I guess that worked? For awhile?
Vietnam and Korea were about stopping Communists from taking over the country. Huge failure on Vietnam, and apparently a draw in Korea (considering the North/South divide). But it was a clear enough goal. The Middle East? Who knows what the specific goal was (other than trillions of dollars to the Military Industrial Complex).
It’s easy to win over weak people.
they’re selfish and dumb and choose to be ignorant
simple as that. they might be nice people in some respects, but the above still holds true
Your parents are bad people
Not bad per se, more very misinformed and very influenced dare I say manipulated, just sad yeah
I don’t make a distinction between the two. If you make a mistake, you made a mistake. If you keep making mistakes, and never learn from them, and insist that you don’t make mistakes then you are a bad person.
These are not children without life experience, they are adults who have seen, and experienced, and learned, and been corrected, and have still chosen evil.
Well, bad the way Edmund Povensie was bad while under the guile of the White Witch, or the way the Little Mermaid was bad (i.e. poor ) at seeing through the sea hag’s hard sell.
No he’s a pretty blatant fascist, and they’re goddamn adults, not literal children against a literal witch
My dad’s a literal rocket scientist (just recently retired from JPL) and also a devout MAGA disciple and FOX News viewer. Human beings are just not sophisticated enough to deal with a trillion-dollar propaganda machine on their own. I don’t know what the solution is, and we don’t seem to have one so far, except to FO after the viewership FAs and elects autocrats and billionaire bro oligarchies into power.
Some of us are able to acquire electoral savvy and vote defensively, but a lot of us are too preoccupied or too exhausted from work and vote on vibes, to dire consequence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun
Or sometimes engineers are fucking fascists because they like fascism
In the case of dad, he’s very susceptible to loyalty-driven advertising, and is true believers in several sports teams as well.
I feel ya with this, but to paint this as black and white is to miss important nuance.
They’re deluded. As such, it’s an error to see them as evil in the same way that it is to see a person that’s high on meth and dangerous or schizophrenic and hostile as being evil.
They’re no less dangerous, don’t get me wrong, but to see them as bad is, I think, a critical misunderstanding of what’s going on here that leads people to think like this.
I didn’t say evil, I said bad people.
If propaganda can convince you to hate people just because of where they’re from, you’re not a good person.
Now, if you realize you were a bad person and work on being a good person, you can become one. If you know what you’re doing is bad and have no desire to change, then you’re evil.
And none of those are immutable qualities.
Yeah you’re right. I shouldn’t have used the word evil.
I would urge you to examine how propaganda has affected everyone.
Like other posters have said, probably the best choice OP can make is to actually talk to them and maybe not use lemmy for answers.
At this point, I’m not seeing much daylight between the two.
Yeah. It’s hard. It’s been hard for me too.
I’m teaching my kids as I learn for myself; it’s critically important that you not dehumanize people and seek understanding and strive to be compassionate.
I’ve also known people that have voted for trump 1st term to be good people for long enough that I see it as valuable to deeply interrogate the process by which they came to be such as they are now. For me, at least, it feels lazy and dishonest to flatly dismiss them as bad. Even trump 2 voters, I can see that they, nearly all, were submerged in a propaganda machine designed to break people.
Are some of them sociopathic monsters? You bet! Society needs protected from them.
I see the groupthink on both sides as the most dangerous thing though. The manipulation (of all sides) as the enemy. The dismissal of human life as the root problem. Most especially when profit is placed over people, but also when it’s done by either side.
My concern is that dehumanization plays into their hands and I see the dehumanization as a direct path to violent conflict. They want violence because it would free them to use the insurrection act as a means to their ends.
So, to bring it full circle, seeing them as bad and evil and unworthy of compassion or even dialogue plays directly into their hands.
It’s possible.
I’m more likely to say anyone who writes others off as bad people from a 1 dimensional, 3rd party anecdote is not an exemplar of “good people”. But that’s just me.
I guarantee you, they’re bad people who support this guy because they believe he will protect or further their wealth somehow.
Sorry to tell you this but the racism really resonated with them.
Your parents might lack empathy and are cruel, therefore they are looking for other cruel people to confirm their cruel behavior: The cruelty is the point
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/the-cruelty-is-the-point/572104/
Party of suckers and losers.
The comments here are wild. So much judgement about people we literally know one single thing about.
There should really only be one answer to this question: “I dunno. Why don’t you ask them?”
Just because your parents like some guy that they’ve never met doesnt mean they are evil, sociopathic, racist monsters. The most likely explaination is that they got walked down the right wing media rabbithole by some network of acquaintences, and now they are trapped in a fairy tale depiction of the world designed to appeal to their baser emotions.
People believe in bigfoot and the flat earth. Why? Mostly because they feel lonely and powerless, and want to feel like they are part of a group that is united in their knowledge of The Truth.
Yours is the best answer but my kneejerk gut feeling is:
.Edit: The ‘you’ in this image refers to OP’s parents.
Most reasonable answer. Propaganda is insidious. It is subtle, it can latch onto anything. It could be racism, that’s one thing sure. It could be that they wanted lower taxes and over time it slowly convinced them it was all of the others. It could be anything. To assume like this, well, it’s exactly why the right has so much just reasoning when saying we’re quick to throw the racism card. Because, well just look at this thread.
I think their just trapped in a bubble of bad info and are influenced by racism subconsciously. I KNOW my parents aren’t bad people, but they sure as hell arent talking like good people or even well thought-out people.
I guess I just thought my parents were smarter, that they could see through this admins BS. They seriously claim that Trump is doing much better than Biden, but I talk to everyone I know, and they are all having money problems, food insecurity and housing problems, all being made worse under Trump.
I think my parents are just selfish. And it breaks my heart that they are betraying everything I thought I learned from them. I guess maybe they didnt influence me as much as I thought.
It was kind of funny though, because my husband was like, “Now you know how I feel.” At least they are a-okay with me and my husband, though, at this rate, I’m worried that wont be the case in a couple years.
I’m getting pretty convinced that as people get older, they get more selfish. The evidence is all anecdotal for me, but perhaps the mentality of “I don’t have much time left, better get mine” creeps in for those who aren’t satisfied with what they have. (Which, of course, is doubly so for those who were already selfish)
But yeah that propaganda “news” is a powerful bitch.
Recently I have been looking at how ai is likely to impact my job. There are things I would do career-wise, if I were in my twenties, that are not realistic at my age.
Ageism exists, so does the simple fact that an employee in their twenties can put in much longer hours (at least until they burn out) than I (who was worked to burnout in my 20’s/30’s).
I have to think carefully about what I am going to be able to do as I get older and weaker, in what I am sure is going to be a more economically constrained time.
That “I don’t have much time left, better get mine” can be driven by fear, or legitimate concern, rather than selfishness, at least in some cases. Yeah others just want to pull up the drawbridge when they get economically secure. Capitalism pits us against each other, join a union, vote for genuine socialists or similar, or read a few books and try and change things.
Right, and those who supported Hitler were just poor misinformed good people.
I think it depends on what you mean by “supported”. But during the Nazi regime, the vast majority of Germans were, in some way or another, working to support the Nazis. But after the Nazis were defeated, the Germans became one of the most progressive people in the world. And these were the same people.
No. Hard No. The progressive Germany we (I live here) have today was fought AGAINST those that continued to shape Germany even after the war. A strong shift was the 68 movement that specifically questioned why people who worked in administrative positions under Hitler continued to work in sometimes the same positions in West Germany. And also it was not because the Germans were the one calling the shots. A lot of the democratic reforms were only possible in the first place because those Germans that championed them were backed by the guns of the allied forces.
And honestly most problems we currently have are exactly because of remnants from Nazi times that weren’t sufficiently destroyed.
And so currently we have exactly the same problem so many others have: conservatives who don’t conserve anything but rather are regressive and want back to a “good old days” that never existed
The most likely explaination is that they got walked down the right wing media rabbithole by some network of acquaintences, and now they are trapped in a fairy tale depiction of the world designed to appeal to their baser emotions.
So you know, sociopathic racists.
Or white people who’ve never thought of the wider world. Yeah, there’s racism there, but that’s mostly fear of the unknown. Not excusing racists, just saying that people know what they know and conservative propaganda reaches them faster because it meets them where they are (afraid of the unknown and not knowing anyone who isn’t white)
The biggest mistake I think people make is they automatically assume racists must be misinformed or tricked or stupid. When they can be intelligent and know more, and it comes down to simply not liking a certain group for existing and wanting to reduce those groups influence and population within their country. And that can be despite them seeing more of the world than other people.
I think this automatic assumption of wanting to believe they are dumb or tricked is why they have successfully gained traction, since people still keep underestimating their intelligence and planning. Its like people just don’t want to believe people can actually be evil at their core.
