It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone’s fault. If it was us, what did that make Me? After all, I’m one of Us. I must be. I’ve certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We’re always one of Us. It’s Them that do the bad things.
-Terry Pratchett
I mean, they’ve won basically unfettered power, so yeah.
Unless they live in a state with filial responsibility laws, in which case the parents will take all the kids’ money anyways.
The first viewpoint, “emotion creates reality,” is truth for a great many people. Not a healthy truth, not a truth that promotes good relationships, but a deep, lived truth nonetheless. It’s seductive. It means that whatever you’re feeling is just and right, that you’re never in the wrong unless you feel you’re in the wrong. For people whose self-image is so battered and fragile that they can’t bear anything but validation, often it feels like the only way they can face the world.
Is it just me, or are more people starting to act like this? Or is it just that these last few years they’ve gotten louder?
Sure I’m going to go over a waterfall as soon as I go around that bend in the river up there, but why should I get my canoe out of the water now? I mean, everyone knows if a problem is in the future it doesn’t really exist!
FYI, dude, it’s not in the future. Women are dying from miscarriages now. Racially-motivated assaults are on the rise now. Nazis are marching through the streets now. Orange Hitler and his Project 2025 cabinet wants to just bring this bullshit nationwide, and they will do so.
More like puppets with a talent for parroting.
Because they’re Koreans. Don’t kid yourself, Japanese people are crazy racist.
Yes, yes, we should totally be understanding of the people who want to see my cousin dead and my uncle run out of the country.
/s because there are sadly a lot of people who legitimately think this way
Last time this happened, they were thrilled to take it to the chin since it meant ‘helping Trump’. I foresee them cheering this on too, even as they fall into poverty and have to sell the farm.
They don’t care. The owners of Walmart are some of the richest people in the world. So like all rich people they just figure they’ll hike prices and people will still pay (and they’ll have to, because Walmart tends to drive all its competitors out of town).
Maybe because they’re trying to get people to pet a blue-ringed octopus?
Dude… these guys go there because us western women are ‘too woke’, ‘too feminist’, ‘don’t understand traditional gender roles’ (i.e. we refuse to be a housebound sex slave) etc, etc.
They’re told that women in X country (Mexico, Japan, and Thailand are the usual culprits listed) are submissive, traditional, uneducated, and you can just buy one, instead of, you know, actually working at building a relationship.
They don’t bother to learn the culture. They don’t bother to even learn the language. They believe that, because they’re white, all they have to do is show up and wave money around and every woman will fall all over their epic alpha maleness.
These guys are just gross.
The line to draw, I feel, is are you attacking institutions (i.e. smashing the windows of Wall Street, chaining yourself to the doors of the police station), or people (like the loons here in Oregon attacking minority families during the fires)? Are you harassing oppressed groups (like kristallnacht did) or the overpowered establishment (like Blair Mountain did)?
(Obviously, punching individual Nazis is still fine.)
But really, at the end of the day, violence is still violence, and while it may be the right action, it is never a good action. That is something I feel all protesters need to keep in mind.
To paraphrase Dan Shive, there are times when you best (or only) choices lie between the least-bad and most-bad options. And when that happens, humans tend to try and rationalize the least-bad choice as being the good one. This is a trap. If you start to think of the least-bad choice as a good choice, pretty soon you start to believe it—and then you stop looking for the actual good options.
Even if an actual good option—like a nonviolent protest—isn’t feasible for one situation, you should always try to find a truly good option, if you can. That’s why the combo of violent protests on one side, peaceful group on the other, tends to get the best results.
Good for you. History disagrees with your disagreeing.
Look up Malcom X, the Black Panthers, and the Battle of Blair Mountain sometime. Pretty much every victory oppressed groups have won has had to draw blood in order to win the day.
MLK didn’t; Malcom X did. MLK’s underlying message was ‘acknowledge my peaceful protest, or you get stuck with his less peaceful protest’. Peaceful protesting alone tends to get you a whole lot of nothing.
Edit: of course, most history classes seem to forget Malcom X even existed, because the ‘just peacefully protest over in that corner and don’t bother us, it will totally make us change our ways’ narrative is much more desirable for certain demographics.
I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.”
Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
-Martin Luther King Jr
Got a lot of the same vibes, really
Be great for getting things off the top shelf ;)
Waves hand hi, I’m one of the downvoters! I downvoted you for being an ass, no hive mind necessary.
Even if there were other circumstances pertaining to their firing (and I’ve seen this sort of ‘cartoonish villainy’ before, albeit it was a model employee who wanted time off to go to her own graduation, so I’d say it’s entirely possible their story is true) to quote The Dude, ‘You’re not wrong, Walter. You’re just an asshole’.