Politics dividing families at Thanksgiving time

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ASPartOfMe
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05 Dec 2024, 10:18 pm

Mona Pereth wrote:
Here, in the thread Zionists who say the Israili war tactics are criminal:

ASPartOfMe wrote:
Off Topic
In other threads discussions have developed about cutting off family members because of their political views. I think it is somewhat less prevalent in our generation than younger ones. In my immediate family as well as that of my cousins siblings disagree over politics but have not cut each other off. My NRA, cursing at the anti-Vietnam protesters dad never cut off my “liberal” brother. It doubt it was ever a thought.

Back then, though, a lot of people DID cut off family members over various matters that were not yet deemed to be political issues.

For example, a lot of families threw out kids who were discovered to be gay. And at least 50% of teenage runaways were LGBTQ+.

Also, before the 1960's, it was not uncommon for middle-class families to banish pregnant teenage girls to institutions, never to be seen again.

Since then, many issues that were formerly seen as "just personal" became political, as more and more women and LGBTQ+ people fought for our rights, sometimes making great progress, interspersed with periods of backlash.

And, as the personal became political, so too politics became more personal. For example, it's kind of hard not to take it personally when a family member favors politicians who intend to take away your bodily autonomy.

I did not say it did not happen. The main political one I remember was WWII vets threw out their anti Vietnam war protesting kids. But the “kids” were loosely our generation. I don’t remember kids not inviting older relatives nor do I remember our peers having nothing to do with other peers over political differences.


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06 Dec 2024, 12:44 am

Don't forget the huge difference between having a republican at the dinner table previously and having a Trump supporter at the dinner table now.

Difference in politics vs difference in humanity.



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06 Dec 2024, 4:11 am

Carbonhalo wrote:
Don't forget the huge difference between having a republican at the dinner table previously and having a Trump supporter at the dinner table now.

Difference in politics vs difference in humanity.

Yes, absolutely. It's not just a different point of view or a different view on policy, it's a difference in humanity and how to treat people, especially vulnerable people.



ASPartOfMe
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06 Dec 2024, 6:02 am

Carbonhalo wrote:
Don't forget the huge difference between having a republican at the dinner table previously and having a Trump supporter at the dinner table now.

Difference in politics vs difference in humanity.

Do we mean by Trump supporters anybody who voted for him in 2024?

Their
bee33 wrote:
Carbonhalo wrote:
Don't forget the huge difference between having a republican at the dinner table previously and having a Trump supporter at the dinner table now.

Difference in politics vs difference in humanity.

Yes, absolutely. It's not just a different point of view or a different view on policy, it's a difference in humanity and how to treat people, especially vulnerable people.
bee33 wrote:
Carbonhalo wrote:
Don't forget the huge difference between having a republican at the dinner table previously and having a Trump supporter at the dinner table now.

Difference in politics vs difference in humanity.

Yes, absolutely. It's not just a different point of view or a different view on policy, it's a difference in humanity and how to treat people, especially vulnerable people.

The humanity issues back then had a strong resemblance to now Vietnam War, death penalty, abortion, racism, how much money to spend on the poor.


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Mona Pereth
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07 Dec 2024, 1:00 am

ASPartOfMe wrote:
I did not say it did not happen. The main political one I remember was WWII vets threw out their anti Vietnam war protesting kids. But the “kids” were loosely our generation. I don’t remember kids not inviting older relatives nor do I remember our peers having nothing to do with other peers over political differences.

Once the Viet Nam war was finally over with, most white Americans our age just didn't care an awful lot about politics. We grew up in the era of an unusually large middle class, and many of us took that comfort for granted. Hence, most political issues seemed abstract to most of us, not something that touched most of our daily lives in any major way.

Also there was not, initially, a strong reaction against Roe vs. Wade. Back then, the only fervently "pro-life" people were the more fervently religious Catholics. Protestants, including fundamentalists and evangelicals, tended to dismiss it as just a Catholic issue, until Francis Schaeffer came along in the late 1970's and somehow convinced Protestant evangelical leaders that it was something they should care about, too.

Even then, the only substantial victory the "pro-lifers" managed to win was the Hyde Amendment, which affected only poor women, so most middle class folks (other than the few who were feminist activists) just didn't care about it.

The gay rights movement (as it was then called) existed, but did not yet have any significant political influence except in a few big cities.

So, for most white Americans, the personal was not yet political, and hence the political was not very personal, either.


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07 Dec 2024, 1:16 am

ASPartOfMe wrote:
bee33 wrote:
Carbonhalo wrote:
Don't forget the huge difference between having a republican at the dinner table previously and having a Trump supporter at the dinner table now.

Difference in politics vs difference in humanity.

Yes, absolutely. It's not just a different point of view or a different view on policy, it's a difference in humanity and how to treat people, especially vulnerable people.

The humanity issues back then had a strong resemblance to now Vietnam War, death penalty, abortion, racism, how much money to spend on the poor.

Yes, I can see how those issues are also related to a difference in humanity. I guess the difference is in the crassness and the relish that Trump supporters take in matters that are so harmful to certain people in society. It's as if they enjoy doing harm. It seems a notch above just having a point of view that results in harm.



ASPartOfMe
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07 Dec 2024, 4:13 am

Mona Pereth wrote:
Once the Viet Nam war was finally over with, most white Americans our age just didn't care an awful lot about politics. We grew up in the era of an unusually large middle class, and many of us took that comfort for granted. Hence, most political issues seemed abstract to most of us, not something that touched most of our daily lives in any major way.

Also there was not, initially, a strong reaction against Roe vs. Wade. Back then, the only fervently "pro-life" people were the more fervently religious Catholics. Protestants, including fundamentalists and evangelicals, tended to dismiss it as just a Catholic issue, until Francis Schaeffer came along in the late 1970's and somehow convinced Protestant evangelical leaders that it was something they should care about, too.

Even then, the only substantial victory the "pro-lifers" managed to win was the Hyde Amendment, which affected only poor women, so most middle class folks (other than the few who were feminist activists) just didn't care about it.

The gay rights movement (as it was then called) existed, but did not yet have any significant political influence except in a few big cities.

So, for most white Americans, the personal was not yet political, and hence the political was not very personal, either.


bee33 wrote:
I guess the difference is in the crassness and the relish that Trump supporters take in matters that are so harmful to certain people in society. It's as if they enjoy doing harm. It seems a notch above just having a point of view that results in harm.


What you are both saying in different contexts is that now people choose to make it personal in a way they did not then. Gay rights might not have affected most white middle-class in a personal way but welfare did via taxes to pay for it and feminism(called women's liberation then) certainly did. There was a popular expression then that has gone by the wayside "Don't talk about religion and politics". Unless it was something like a Presidential election day people did not talk politics at work. Evading contentious issues has many downsides, but if you are not talking about them constantly there is less time to get worked up about them.

Dealing with contentious issues by joking about them was much more accepted then. The prime example was the success of the show 'All in The Family'. I don't recall people being offended by all those uneuphemistic slurs used or getting into fights over issues discussed. As I mentioned in another thread there was often banter used between classmates, friends, and couples over feminist issues with expressions such as "women belong in the kitchen" and "male chauvinist pig" tossed around. Afterward, friends would go to the park and get stoned or do what couples do.

I agree with bee33 about the way too many sadistic Trump supporters who get their jollies by "owning the libs". There have always been people like that. When people acted that way people would say in a tone that sounded like banter something like "You're an as*hole" and after a few times the rude behavior usually stopped and people remained friends. If they did not stop then they would be cut off. The problem now is that the sadists have validation from the former and next President and nearly every time they turn on their phones.


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Mona Pereth
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07 Dec 2024, 1:05 pm

ASPartOfMe wrote:
What you are both saying in different contexts is that now people choose to make it personal in a way they did not then. Gay rights might not have affected most white middle-class in a personal way but welfare did via taxes to pay for it

... but not a sufficiently large portion of taxes to make or break most white people's middle class status. So, it seems to me, even that issue felt relatively abstract to most middle-class white people, other than the most hardcore economic conservatives and libertarians.

ASPartOfMe wrote:
and feminism(called women's liberation then) certainly did.

Yes, feminism was always intrinsically personal as well as political.

ASPartOfMe wrote:
There was a popular expression then that has gone by the wayside "Don't talk about religion and politics". Unless it was something like a Presidential election day people did not talk politics at work. Evading contentious issues has many downsides, but if you are not talking about them constantly there is less time to get worked up about them.

Dealing with contentious issues by joking about them was much more accepted then. The prime example was the success of the show 'All in The Family'. I don't recall people being offended by all those uneuphemistic slurs used or getting into fights over issues discussed. As I mentioned in another thread there was often banter used between classmates, friends, and couples over feminist issues with expressions such as "women belong in the kitchen" and "male chauvinist pig" tossed around. Afterward, friends would go to the park and get stoned or do what couples do.

I agree with bee33 about the way too many sadistic Trump supporters who get their jollies by "owning the libs". There have always been people like that. When people acted that way people would say in a tone that sounded like banter something like "You're an as*hole" and after a few times the rude behavior usually stopped and people remained friends. If they did not stop then they would be cut off. The problem now is that the sadists have validation from the former and next President and nearly every time they turn on their phones.

Yep, that's a big problem.

In my next post I'll talk about some other cultural changes I've noticed, resulting in part from the rise of the big social media platforms.


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07 Dec 2024, 1:18 pm

Another thing that has changed politics, a lot, has been the rise of the big social media platforms. Below I will describe some of what I see as the resulting cultural changes, plus some other cultural changes I've noticed.

Before the advent of Facebook and Twitter, the only people who spent much time online were nerds, many of whom were online for the specific purpose of participating in niche subcultures, of one kind or another.

Also, back then, in my experience, the biggest online cultural divide was between aggressively-proselytizing hardcore Christians (usually Protestant evangelicals, but sometimes conservative or charismatic Catholics too) and everyone else. The hardcore Christians had a reputation for being general all-around killjoys who believed that nerdy pastimes like role-playing games were of the Devil. (See, for example How “Satanic Panic” Almost Banned Dungeons and Dragons by Skylar Bohannan, March 30, 2024, and What is the background of Christian resistance to role-playing?, 2014.) Some of them still thought rock music was of the Devil, too.

Back then, shared anger at the Christian religious right wing helped foster some mutual sympathy between groups of people who otherwise wouldn't get along with each other very well, such as atheists and Pagans. And it helped foster sympathy (among the predominant cishet white male nerds) for women's rights and for LGBTQ+ people's rights, as well as sympathy for the many people who had been falsely accused in the Satanic panic of 1980-1995.

Also, among people in various nerdy subcultures online, there was a strong shared opposition to authoritarian religious groups like Scientology, which were known for harassing ex-members who criticized them. The 4chan crowd, not yet infamous for Gamergate and QAnon, was instead famous for exposes of Scientology and for the hacker collective Anonymous, which was seen by many as (to borrow an RPG term) chaotic good.

But then, eventually, the evangelical and charismatic Christians wholeheartedly embraced Christian rock music, toned down their denunciations of secular rock music, and stopped worrying so much about RPG's. So they were no longer stepping hard on the toes of most cishet white male nerds. Besides, with the advent of the big social media platforms, it became easier to ignore them.

So, most cishet white male nerds no longer shared a common enemy with feminists and LBBTQ+ people. Instead, they got more and more annoyed at (1) women who wanted less-sexist video games and (2) the newly-online people of color who wanted better representation in mass media and video games too. Hence a lot of white male nerds moved rightward, resulting in even more acrimony between them and nerdy white women a.k.a. "SJWs."

Meanwhile, after 9/11/2001, the "conspiracy theory" scene got a big boost from the "9/11 Truth" movement. People like Alex Jones breathed new life into long-ago debunked claims about "Satanic cults." I worried about this, but most of the people I voiced my worries to, even 9/11 conspiracy theory debunkers, didn't see Alex Jones and his grand conspiracy ideology as a serious threat at all. Alex Jones, and others like him, were seen as just insignificant fringe characters. One Jewish man told me, "You're not even Jewish, and you're more worried about antisemitism than I am!"

Alas I turned out to be a Cassandra when Alex Jones became a major figure in Trumpworld, and when grand conspiracy ideology morphed into QAnon. So we now have a whole lot of Republicans who believe that Democrats support leaders who literally kill children in order to drink their blood.


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07 Dec 2024, 3:24 pm

The most contentious issues online that I remember from the late 90s and 2000s was between Microsoft and Apple fanboys. There was a culture war aspect to it. Apple users were perceived as successors to the hippies and Microsoft users as stuck up businessmen. Linux fans looked down upon both groups.

Social media is anonymous and encourages short put downs rather than nuance and thinking through things.


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07 Dec 2024, 3:39 pm

Mona Pereth wrote:
Another thing that has changed politics, a lot, has been the rise of the big social media platforms. Below I will describe some of what I see as the resulting cultural changes, plus some other cultural changes I've noticed.

Before the advent of Facebook and Twitter, the only people who spent much time online were nerds, many of whom were online for the specific purpose of participating in niche subcultures, of one kind or another.

Also, back then, in my experience, the biggest online cultural divide was between aggressively-proselytizing hardcore Christians (usually Protestant evangelicals, but sometimes conservative or charismatic Catholics too) and everyone else. The hardcore Christians had a reputation for being general all-around killjoys who believed that nerdy pastimes like role-playing games were of the Devil. (See, for example How “Satanic Panic” Almost Banned Dungeons and Dragons by Skylar Bohannan, March 30, 2024, and What is the background of Christian resistance to role-playing?, 2014.) Some of them still thought rock music was of the Devil, too.

Back then, shared anger at the Christian religious right wing helped foster some mutual sympathy between groups of people who otherwise wouldn't get along with each other very well, such as atheists and Pagans. And it helped foster sympathy (among the predominant cishet white male nerds) for women's rights and for LGBTQ+ people's rights, as well as sympathy for the many people who had been falsely accused in the Satanic panic of 1980-1995.

Also, among people in various nerdy subcultures online, there was a strong shared opposition to authoritarian religious groups like Scientology, which were known for harassing ex-members who criticized them. The 4chan crowd, not yet infamous for Gamergate and QAnon, was instead famous for exposes of Scientology and for the hacker collective Anonymous, which was seen by many as (to borrow an RPG term) chaotic good.

But then, eventually, the evangelical and charismatic Christians wholeheartedly embraced Christian rock music, toned down their denunciations of secular rock music, and stopped worrying so much about RPG's. So they were no longer stepping hard on the toes of most cishet white male nerds. Besides, with the advent of the big social media platforms, it became easier to ignore them.

So, most cishet white male nerds no longer shared a common enemy with feminists and LBBTQ+ people. Instead, they got more and more annoyed at (1) women who wanted less-sexist video games and (2) the newly-online people of color who wanted better representation in mass media and video games too. Hence a lot of white male nerds moved rightward, resulting in even more acrimony between them and nerdy white women a.k.a. "SJWs."

Meanwhile, after 9/11/2001, the "conspiracy theory" scene got a big boost from the "9/11 Truth" movement. People like Alex Jones breathed new life into long-ago debunked claims about "Satanic cults." I worried about this, but most of the people I voiced my worries to, even 9/11 conspiracy theory debunkers, didn't see Alex Jones and his grand conspiracy ideology as a serious threat at all. Alex Jones, and others like him, were seen as just insignificant fringe characters. One Jewish man told me, "You're not even Jewish, and you're more worried about antisemitism than I am!"

Alas I turned out to be a Cassandra when Alex Jones became a major figure in Trumpworld, and when grand conspiracy ideology morphed into QAnon. So we now have a whole lot of Republicans who believe that Democrats support leaders who literally kill children in order to drink their blood.


One Jewish man told me, "You're not even Jewish, and you're more worried about antisemitism than I am!". That could have been me. I thought the Mossad did it theory that Jones was always going on about was plausible. Israel had the motive but I had my doubts that Israel would take the risk of the American public finding out. At the time I was fairly sure Madoff would cause a spike in Antisemitism. He fit the greedy cheap Jew stereotype to a T but nothing happened. The antisemitism I experience was not about conspiracies but about money. Kids throwing a penny on the ground and demanding I retrieve it.


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07 Dec 2024, 5:00 pm

ASPartOfMe wrote:
The antisemitism I experience was not about conspiracies but about money. Kids throwing a penny on the ground and demanding I retrieve it.

Luckily there aren't very many out-and-out neo-Nazis or other far-right extremists in NYC or on Long Island. For them, hating Jews is mostly about alleged conspiracies, and only secondarily about Jews being individually greedy.

I was worried about a possible forthcoming explosion in popularity of outright neo-Nazism and/or Nazi-adjacent ideologies. It seemed to me that Alex Jones was promoting a Nazi-adjacent ideology, consisting of much more than just the "Mossad did it" theory of 9/11.

Here in NYC, the "9/11 Truth" movement included a group called We Are Change, which was dedicated to promoting Alex Jones. It seemed to me that Alex Jones and We Are Change were using the "9/11 Truth" movement to promote a larger grand conspiracy ideology.


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Last edited by Mona Pereth on 07 Dec 2024, 5:49 pm, edited 1 time in total.