Women and minorities voting for conservatives always gives me real "Jews for Hitler" vibes.
At this point, in my completely layman's opinion, I believe they're a cult. Or at least they meet a lot of the common criteria, even down to isolation/alienation and the threat of rejection/retribution as a result of refusal to participate.
the threat of rejection/retribution as a result of refusal to participate.
Exactly. Consider repercussions for not acting like the rest of the group. While your vote is supposed to be private, not everyone is good at lying. And maybe if the local polling place is run by these same people, maybe that privacy is in question?
And to drive home the point, let's go to the worst case. Imagine choosing to risk a beat-down from someone twice your size and way stronger than you, by breaking rank on a single election. Especially if you're convinced that vote will get outweighed by every other spouse in the same situation. You might toe the line too.
I think it's usually less explicit than that. Human survival is predicated on being part of a community. Exile is an existential threat. And for most of our existence, you couldn't just change communities. So you want to think like those around you. There doesn't have to be a threat of physical violence, just a threat of no longer belonging.
And this is why I'm generally against voting at home / via the internet (except for very, uh… exceptional situations), and that's without considering the boondoggle that is ensuring vote accuracy and privacy in an online system.
Sounds like school.
I think I have an answer for at least the white women on the right beyond the dismissive term "internalized misogyny" thrown around in here.
Go listen to ex-Mormons or Ex-Jehovah's Witnesses or even ex-Baptists talk. You'll hear them say that they had a large support community within the church. All their friends, their families, their mentors, everyone they could ever turn to were members of that church. They often talk about lots of companionship, that they had lots of people to turn to if they had issues. And that if they stepped out of line, the everyone they ever knew would turn against them all at once and they'd have nowhere to go. Being shunned by these groups basically means your life as you know it is over. There are people who are going through the motions in these communities despite falling out of belief because losing every single part of your support network at once is extremely daunting. If an insular community is all you've ever known, "I'll be alone" is a terrifying thought.
There really needs to be something that serves the social function of a church without being an unhealthy bigoted grift that protects pedos. We're social creatures and need support, and churches exploit that.
Any in-person hobby or interest group works. I do judo. I also just saw someone trying to start a local mutual aid network on FetLife.
That's just a parody religion, more designed to make atheists pat themselves on the back about how clever they are and to piss off fundies. Both laudable goals, yes, but if people were gonna build a Sunday go-to-meetin' space and arrange a couple hours of free childcare around that, it would have happened by now.
Very easy to forget how much of the modern religious institution is just a stop-gap for our decayed and broken public sector. Religious schooling, religious daycare, religious pantries and addiction treatment centers, religious medical centers, religious counseling services, religious jobs programs, religious housing...
Secular atheists don't organize, they don't form these strong community bonds with their neighbors, and they don't collaborate to pursue these large community projects in a reliable way. I blame a lot of this on modern western libertarianism, which tends to latch on to the atheist movement like a parasite. Murray Rothbard and Ayn Rand have been a scourge on secularism for over a century. Every time secularists try to create these large, lasting, communal institutions, they get denounced as "Evil Communists" and "Tax-and-Spend Liberals" from within their own organizations.
You're never going to see the Joel Osteen crowd tear him down for building a bigger Mega-Church. But the Sam Harris types will eviscerate secularists for doing any kind of more-useful equivalent.
Peer pressure is an enormously potent force in these people's lives, as evidenced by their belief that people undergo gender reassignment surgery solely because of (liberal) peer pressure.
Is voting not secret is US? Go thru the motions, but once you are in the booth. Vote on your best interest?
I've heard of churches having "Let's all fill out our mail-in ballots together" sessions.
I've also heard a lot of "My husband fills in my mail-in ballot."
The real power of this kind of thought control is its ability to govern people's thoughts and behaviors when nobody else is around.
Your ballot is secret in the US, but the fact that you voted is not. That's public record.
I'm an Ex-JW, and they expressly ban voting. As far as I know, they don't have anyone pouring over public records looking for members who voted. Though I wouldn't put it past a few busy body elders to check. That said, I would still hesitate to vote if I was PIMO (physically in, mentally out). I did vote for Obama in 2012 when I was on my way out, but I already had plans in motion to leave officially within months.
The whole point of church/religion is to get you to act a specific way in your daily life, not just at church or in the presence of other people of the religion.
Have a look at the ex mormon forums. What people sacrifice in order to leave the cult is literally everything
It is so true. As a gay man I had to leave the Mormon cult but it meant committing complete social suicide. It’s not an easy thing, by far the most difficult part of coming out.
Excellent point!
Personally I wouldn't necessarily say people talking about internalized misogyny / sexism (or racism for that matter) are being dismissive though, because I'd bet that's a component of why some women and minorities vote for conservatives. I'm middle aged and I know I've internalized a lot of pretty heinous stuff in my lifetime – including misogyny – and getting rid of that is nontrivial. Not that I've ever voted conservative, mind you, just using myself as an example. I definitely don't mean to use that term in a dismissive way because like you pointed out there's lots of other possible reasons too
Why do non-white, non-male, non-cis, non-het people vote Republican? Are they stupid?
That laugh is so completely genuine because Cleaveton Little's copy of the script didn't contains the words "You know, morons"... plus Gene Wilder's timing is just superb there - it still makes me grin despite not only know it's coming, but reading it instead of hearing it
Please add non-rich to that list.
Also add the people in the Top 5% that are not in the top 0.1%.
Many of them think that they are the rich people who are getting the breaks.
They are not.
The top 5% are definitely in that crowd, what do you mean?
Happy Cakeday! 🍰🎂
Yes, they are
The "R" doesn't just stand for Republican.
Why do white, male, straight people vote Republican? Are they stupid?
Also yes
I'd add that quite a few of them have also been intentionally misled. They've been fed a diet of shit information over the past few decades, and it has an effect.
I have voted Republican exactly once in any election since 2000. I technically could have voted in 1998, but Kentucky wouldn't let me vote as a student, and I wasn't paying attention to my home state.
I voted for the Republican candidate for San Diego City Jail Warden in 2022. I did so because of two reasons. The first was that the previous guy (a Democrat) got fired due to having the largest death toll of any jail or prison in the US, and the Democrats decided to run his Deputy Warden as their candidate. The second reason was that I got my ballot in the mail, so I had a month to look at their history, and the Republican candidate's worst scandal was that he attempted to cheat on his taxes and got caught. Given the choice of someone with literal blood on their hands vs a tax dodger, I'll take the tax dodger.
I said all that to say this: I vote blue no matter who, unless the blue candidate has shown they will actively cause more harm than their opponent.
Some do solely because of Christianity and/or moral panics about communism.
money
I work with an openly gay republican man. I call him a "modern Max Naumann" every now and then, but so far it hasn't clicked that that label is actually a homework assignment. He has no idea who I'm talking about.
I mean yes, of course it's possible, but frankly I'm not sure how many people like him will realize their mistake until the police are knocking on their door to take them to a totally-not-a-concentration-camp
until the police are knocking on their door to take them to a totally-not-a-concentration-camp
I mean... that still counts as some day!
Touché!
I'm a school bus driver and most of my coworkers are hardcore trumpers, including two lesbians who are married to women and openly proud of it. It's just insane to me that they can't see the Republican threat to their lifestyle - but then they really hate black people so I guess they're choosing to accentuate the positive.
For bonus points, all of us drivers are Teamsters and very pro-union. They've heard of Project 2025 but they believe Trump when he says he has nothing to do with it. And they love 99% of it anyway.
Dudes rock
When the anti-gun control, anti-healthcare and eats dead bodies crowd calls them selves "pro-life". 🤮
Not to mention that their interest in a baby's life stops at the exact moment that baby is born. They're just handed a pair of bootstraps and told to git gud or die
You want to just GIVE them bootstraps?!? Communist!
I live in Cologne, Germany. We also have many turks living here. I mean so many, that a district is called Small-Istanbul and Erdogan does some heavy propaganda around here, just to ensure the votes from the community living here.
Something that has already happened a few times is a girl being murdered by their own family, because she brought shame to the family, by doing whatever is not allowed to do with guys from other religions. It even has a name, honor killing.
It's all pretty bad, but what caught me by surprise was a documentary about extremely conservative Muslims living in countries that are predominantly not Muslim.
Some women, most of them ex Muslims, were interviewed and told that the mothers are mostly the ones that enforce the Muslim rule in a household.
They are the ones that insist that their kids have to follow the rules, even living in a country where most schoolmates are not Muslim.
Is this an instance of internalized sexism?
no i think that's religious brainwashing
religious people living away from a place where everyone follows the same religion might become borderline fanatics as they feel the need to perform their religion for everyone around them, so they try hard to become what they believe is an exemplary muslim/christian/Buddhist/Hindu
similar thing can be seen with religion converts, they're often way more orthodox and conservative about their new religion's rules than people who were born into it
I guess this is the answer if you hate yourself. 🤷🏼♂️
This is the meme, but the truth of the matter is that Republicans aren't asking the women to vote for them. They're asking the rapists to vote for them.
And America has a big enough population of rapists and rapist-enablers that this becomes a viable election strategy.
And asking men to tell the women in their life who they are voting for.
They don't vote Republican because it helps them. They vote Republican for religious reasons, because they believe that the world has to be destroyed before God becomes real.
That, or it could be a situation where they want to vote for someone else but don't want the fallout from their significant other finding out.
Smart conservatives don't try to convince left leaning electorate to vote republican. They just want them not to vote at all
They tell leftists to refuse to vote if current administration doesn't change their stance on problematic issues: such as position on israel, taiwan, carbon tax, housing, etc
Democrats: we are genociding a lot of children in gaza. Vote for us because trump isnt polite
Well that's certainly one of the takes of all time
You're right about the democrats, but distilling trump to "not being polite" is an immense delusion.
There it is, the dumbest thing I'll read all day.
Ooooh, makes perfect sense now!
The creepy male leftists like Joss Whedon and Tariq Ramadan will let women abort after the R! Makes you guys so much better! I'm totally voting Hillary now.
At least update your shtick. Harris is on the ballot.
Been copy pasting the same line since 2016
Ugh I think you guys just are so isolated in your bubble and the politics is so polarised that you don’t understand anything that isn’t agreeing with your own views.
You even think of it as some pure evil stuff when it’s just different views and way of life.
Some people want to live traditional life and they view republicans as someone who upholds their traditional values. Probably religious too.
It may seem strange but many people have different values and what they deem important.
You can’t just go „ohwowoowa they have different views than me, how can they?” Cause that’s super immature and narcissistic
You can live a traditional life without forcing other people to do it
Well the other side does exactly the same. Hence no one can communicate anymore and we only dwell in our isolated meme bubbles and feed our egos with how much superior we are than them
Well the other side does exactly the same.
Oh?
"They force me to live in a society where people not like me are not opressed!!"
I meant the conservatives dwell in their own bubbles and think exactly the same how superior they are etc
Everyone thinks they have a monopoly on being the most awesome human being and refuses to even acknowledge that it might not be the case.
Our society was ruined by narcissism
Except one side is all about taking freedoms away from people, and the other is about making sure people don't have their freedoms taken. They don't have any moral high ground to stand on here. Stop acting like both sides are the same. They fundamentally are not.
I meant the conservatives dwell in their own bubbles and think exactly the same how superior they are etc
But the person you replied to didn't say anything about a bubble or bring superior, what they said was:
You can live a traditional life without forcing other people to do it
So you ignored them entirely to have a completely different conversation about how "both sides don't listen"?
Conservative spaces ban users on sight for anything remotely dissenting. Do you really see that in leftist spaces? People do get banned in leftist spaces, often for being bigoted while Conservative spaces embrace bigotry and ban those who call it out.
And then there's folks like you who settle on on some nonsense centrism. Conservatives' idea of a "traditional life" comprises the following:
She won't work, because a) she'll have more time to take care of the kids when it's really more about b), her not earning her own money so she and her kids becomes financially reliant on her working husband.
Girls being groomed at a young age so they later believe that getting married and becoming a stay at home mom was really a choice they made independently when it absolutely wasn't.
Then there's guys like you who read all of the above and simply say "wow guise way to be intolerant of other peoples' way of life". Like give me a break with that BS.
Who is forcing the tradfans to do anything other than acknowledge that some people are different?
Well the other side does exactly the same.
As usual, asserted without any evidence.
Damn leftists, telling women to work and live independently of men... It's the exact same as what the right does 🙄
Some people want to live traditional life and they view republicans as someone who upholds their traditional values. Probably religious too.
You don't vote Republican because you want to live a traditional life. You can do that in your own house without involving politics.
You vote Republican because you want everyone else to live a traditional life.
There's nothing traditional about banning abortion. The Bible mentions abortion exactly once. Numbers 5 : 11-31. It tells you how do perform possibly the least safe abortion method I have ever run across. The Bible is Pro-choice.
Utter nonsense.
Don't like abortions? Then don't get abortions.
It's that simple.
There's plenty of things I don't like too. But I'm not over here trying to outlaw bibles and country music.
The Republican party that likes to make claim to being pro-individual freedom....it's such a farce I can't believe you all say it with a straight face.
"Then don't get abortions" unless you are a Republican. Cuz then it is something you can just pray about and your side won't be criticial at all. The OP saying that values are different is rarely correct. It is identity. And some people have so strongly identified with being a conservative/republican/maga that nothing about values will change their voting. I can't believe we are still talking about a difference in morals after years of Trump going against every value the right has claimed to hold. Clearly it is not about values.
Ugh I think you guys just are so isolated in your bubble
Oh really? Did the fact that you were replying on Lefty Memes@lemmy.dbzer0.com clue you in?
You can’t just go „ohwowoowa they have different views than me, how can they?”
Actually you can, if it's literally a community dedicated to "undogmatic shitposting and memes from a progressive, anti-capitalist and truly anti-imperialist perspective, regardless of specific ideology".
But I agree with you, they don't vote on politics, they vote for the party they are told represent their "traditional life" and "traditional values", probably religious too. In other words, without thinking for themselves and just taking the word of their community / religious leaders, who are in a sunk cost fallacy not to admit they've been wrong to the people who've been looking up to them. This is also the worst possible way to vote in a democracy, and if the majority of people do so, it will not be a democracy for much longer.
A "moderate" conservative acquaintance of mine told me to my face that he thinks the world would be a better place if us LGBT+ folks simply stopped existing. He's also completely convinced that all gender identities that are not cis are fake and we're just pretending, and that none of this stuff should be talked about in public or promoted in any way because it's "mental illness."
Do you fucking understand that conservatives aren't happy with just living their life the way they want to, but they want to force me to live my life the way they want to? For someone going off about how "we guys" (leftists I guess?) are "super immature and narcissistic", you're being hilariously myopic about this.
Do you seriously think that any of us would have a problem with conservatives if they just fucking left us alone? I don't give a flying fuck about how they want to live their lives and I'd be more than happy to let them do their own thing, that isn't the fucking issue here you utter cabbage – the issue is that these people literally want me to stop existing and actually use physical violence against me (and have done so for my whole fucking life; do you think the 80's were a great time to grow up in for someone who's not cishet?) just because they don't fucking approve of how I dress, how I look, and who I love.
You've got your head so far up your own ass that you think the problem we have with conservatives is that we don't like that they're different, and that they're completely happy just letting us queers (or black people, or brown people, or whoever the fuck they've been told to hate) live our lives if we leave them alone? How can you be so fucking blind? Have you been paying any fucking attention to what's been going on in the past, I dunno, SEVERAL FUCKING DECADES? Have you missed all the shootings at LGBT+ clubs? The murders? The laws restricting our access to medical treatment? The laws restricting our ability to even talk openly about who we are?
Fuck. And then you have the fucking nerve to call us immature and narcissistic, you idiotic fucking waste of carbon cunt.
You just paint some imaginary target form schizo people shooting at others or wanting others to die and call them republicans. It’s insane
You showed your true colors at the end. You are as bad as what you think you fight against
I hope you die in a fucking fire you piece of fucking human garbage
Oh how angery we are, that surely helps to prove your point
You never had a point other than discrimination is ok so long as it's your way of life so with all due respect eat dirt
The meme literally references how you bastards took our right to bodily autonomy away and now if women are raped in half the country they have no choice but to carry the child even if it kills them. Take your traditional way of life and shove it all the way up your wazoo you livid piece of shit. Go be a fucking Bible eater at home and don't pretend voting Republican doesn't hurt people.
There's nothing traditional about the American taliban
The sad truth is that Democrats don't want to codify roe v vade, because now they have something to run on. They even say "I'm pro-abortion" instead of "my body, my choice". It's horrible.
Here are some facts to back it up
This is a misleading perspective. Why would you need to codify "settled law?" SCOTUS had ruled that it was a constitutional right already so you wouldn't need a separate law.
You're also ignoring Casey. It wasn't just Roe.
They also don't typically say they're "pro-abortion."
The infographic states "facts" that weren't relevant at the time.
Don't bother. They're a conservative arguing in bad faith. Their comment history (especially comments like this) makes that abundantly clear.
Funny how conservatives have to more or less literally always resort to dishonest arguments. It's just so fucking rare to see one who's capable of good faith argumentation
"Conservatives" aren't a real thing, they are masked fascists, unable to argue in good faith by definition. Open fascists are what you see when "conservatives" argue in good faith.
They have to invent boogeymen because they don't want to admit that there isn't really a monster under their beds.
Hey look a Nazi
Even the Nazis were more principled than modern conservatives – at least they had the fucking backbone to actually say that yes they hate minorities and want to literally murder entire groups of people, or that they want women to be baby factories, etc. etc. Conservatives nowadays go through some pretty impressive contortions to make it seem like they're normal fucking people and not, you know, NSDAP v2.0
Conservatives play like they aren't fascists, but they just need time to get there.
Yeah, a self-described "moderate" conservative acquaintance recently told me that the world would be a better place if all of us LGBT+ folks just stopped existing. He definitely wasn't this unhinged before, it just took him a while to start getting all Final Solution.
Of course he swears that it's us dirty leftists who have been radicalized, not reich-wingers. My political views have been more or less the same for years, although I do have to say that the fact that so many conservatives seem to now openly wish for genocide has gotten me to reconsider many things…
My political views have been more or less the same for years, although I do have to say that the fact that so many conservatives seem to now openly wish for genocide has gotten me to reconsider many things…
The big change is that, in what has literally become a meme with how often it's come up, Conservatives are now 'Mask off'/'Saying the quiet part out loud'/etc. They've always felt these things, they just didn't say them because we'd slap them back down. Over time they managed to make it more and more acceptable to shove countries to the right, until people woke up and went "wait a second, why the fuck am I talking about the testosterone count of a boxer when we have a few decades until climate change kills most of us?" Capitalists via Conservatives have made this happen, and a lot of the 'centre-left' parties around the world moved to the centre, while right wing parties went more right wing. Neo-Liberalism let fascism fester, and then we got Donald Fucking Trump in the most powerful position on the planet, and Putin is fucking invading countries, Israel is literally committing genocide, and we're going "wait a second, what the fuck happened?" And now, you're seeing a huge upswing in left and 'far left' numbers, because we've done this dance before, and we know the outcomes, especially women.
Yeah, a self-described “moderate” conservative acquaintance recently told me that the world would be a better place if all of us LGBT+ folks just stopped existing.
My kids have been telling me they have some 'enlightened centrist' friends who are currently battling with their own right-wing thoughts. They have lots of friends who are queer, and at least two trans friends, but they keep trying to justify their plan to vote Conservative. They're desperate for it to be okay, because that's what the right promises, 'vote us and everything gets better, once we deal with (whatever scapegoat).' But then they hear that their friends are the scapegoats, and they can't fully connect it. So they will literally waffle between full on Conservative, and pretty left-wing.
Sadly, the more they're online the more they go Conservative, but when they're outside and talk to people, they are clearly battling away those thoughts.
The big change is that, in what has literally become a meme with how often it’s come up, Conservatives are now ‘Mask off’/‘Saying the quiet part out loud’/etc. They’ve always felt these things, they just didn’t say them because we’d slap them back down
I guess I was just holding out hope that more of them would turn out to be, well, something other than fascists. Not that I expected something other than, well… what we're seeing right now.
And now, you’re seeing a huge upswing in left and ‘far left’ numbers, because we’ve done this dance before, and we know the outcomes, especially women.
Ain't this the fucking truth. I'm no spring chicken so I've Seen Shit™ over the years, and growing up in a conservative area as a neurospicy queer femme enby (yay intersectionality bingo) wasn't exactly what I'd call a picnic – any deviation from accepted norms meant violence. Lots of violence. Being nonbinary wasn't even an option I was aware of until the past decade or so, which conservatives naturally take to mean that I just started "pretending" I'm now something else than my assigned gender instead of having always been this way and only now even having the terms to describe myself.
The past 15 – 20 years did make me feel like maybe shit actually can get better and we wouldn't have to do this fucking dance anymore, but nooooooo.
I guess I was just holding out hope that more of them would turn out to be, well, something other than fascists. Not that I expected something other than, well… what we’re seeing right now.
Well we have good news and bad news. The bad news is it's going to get a bit worse. The good news is it will then get much better. Conservatism is at a point where it needs to either completely take over, fuck everything up, and have it all come crashing down, or people will realise that's what is coming, and we'll see a wave of progressive governments across the world. (I imagine a particularly deadly Climate Crisis Summer in a first world nation will prompt this).
Ain’t this the fucking truth. I’m no spring chicken so I’ve Seen Shit™ over the years, and growing up in a conservative area as a neurospicy queer femme enby (yay intersectionality bingo) wasn’t exactly what I’d call a picnic – any deviation from accepted norms meant violence. Lots of violence.
Ugh, I'm so sorry you had to grow up like that. I cannot imagine being 'neurospicy queer femme enby' in a Con area. Seriously, I'm so sorry, I'm fourth generation atheist in a Left-leaning household, so I only saw that in my friends. My heart goes out to you, sibling.
Being nonbinary wasn’t even an option I was aware of until the past decade or so, which conservatives naturally take to mean that I just started “pretending” I’m now something else than my assigned gender instead of having always been this way and only now even having the terms to describe myself.
This is pretty much their modus operandi -- they make something impossible, and then when it's made possible people struggle, and that's their 'proof' it wasn't needed/necessary/etc. See: Women in sports. I'm glad you're finding yourself, and if it is any consolation to you, despite growing up in a rather accepting household, I'm discovering a lot I had hidden as well, bordering on the ENBY/Femme front. And I'm in my 40's, haha. It was my son coming out as queer that did it, because suddenly I'm doing makeup, clothes shopping, and nail art with him and going.. "wait a sec... this is really fun."
The past 15 – 20 years did make me feel like maybe shit actually can get better and we wouldn’t have to do this fucking dance anymore, but nooooooo.
Well I have some good news! Sadly it begins as all of these with bad news: Men (and boys) are way behind. The conservative illness has infected them quite badly. The good news is that women, as always, come to us as saviours; we just have to get my fellow men the fuck out of the way so we can actually progress forward.
Good luck, and if you ever need to talk to someone, message me, I'd be glad to :)
Yes, me trying to explain why women or minorities would vote for Republicans, makes me a nazi... Suuuure...
At this point, in my completely layman's opinion, I believe they're a cult. Or at least they meet a lot of the common criteria, even down to isolation/alienation and the threat of rejection/retribution as a result of refusal to participate.
Exactly. Consider repercussions for not acting like the rest of the group. While your vote is supposed to be private, not everyone is good at lying. And maybe if the local polling place is run by these same people, maybe that privacy is in question?
And to drive home the point, let's go to the worst case. Imagine choosing to risk a beat-down from someone twice your size and way stronger than you, by breaking rank on a single election. Especially if you're convinced that vote will get outweighed by every other spouse in the same situation. You might toe the line too.
I think it's usually less explicit than that. Human survival is predicated on being part of a community. Exile is an existential threat. And for most of our existence, you couldn't just change communities. So you want to think like those around you. There doesn't have to be a threat of physical violence, just a threat of no longer belonging.
And this is why I'm generally against voting at home / via the internet (except for very, uh… exceptional situations), and that's without considering the boondoggle that is ensuring vote accuracy and privacy in an online system.
Sounds like school.
I think I have an answer for at least the white women on the right beyond the dismissive term "internalized misogyny" thrown around in here.
Go listen to ex-Mormons or Ex-Jehovah's Witnesses or even ex-Baptists talk. You'll hear them say that they had a large support community within the church. All their friends, their families, their mentors, everyone they could ever turn to were members of that church. They often talk about lots of companionship, that they had lots of people to turn to if they had issues. And that if they stepped out of line, the everyone they ever knew would turn against them all at once and they'd have nowhere to go. Being shunned by these groups basically means your life as you know it is over. There are people who are going through the motions in these communities despite falling out of belief because losing every single part of your support network at once is extremely daunting. If an insular community is all you've ever known, "I'll be alone" is a terrifying thought.
There really needs to be something that serves the social function of a church without being an unhealthy bigoted grift that protects pedos. We're social creatures and need support, and churches exploit that.
Any in-person hobby or interest group works. I do judo. I also just saw someone trying to start a local mutual aid network on FetLife.
Flying Spaghetti Monster FTW
That's just a parody religion, more designed to make atheists pat themselves on the back about how clever they are and to piss off fundies. Both laudable goals, yes, but if people were gonna build a Sunday go-to-meetin' space and arrange a couple hours of free childcare around that, it would have happened by now.
Very easy to forget how much of the modern religious institution is just a stop-gap for our decayed and broken public sector. Religious schooling, religious daycare, religious pantries and addiction treatment centers, religious medical centers, religious counseling services, religious jobs programs, religious housing...
Secular atheists don't organize, they don't form these strong community bonds with their neighbors, and they don't collaborate to pursue these large community projects in a reliable way. I blame a lot of this on modern western libertarianism, which tends to latch on to the atheist movement like a parasite. Murray Rothbard and Ayn Rand have been a scourge on secularism for over a century. Every time secularists try to create these large, lasting, communal institutions, they get denounced as "Evil Communists" and "Tax-and-Spend Liberals" from within their own organizations.
You're never going to see the Joel Osteen crowd tear him down for building a bigger Mega-Church. But the Sam Harris types will eviscerate secularists for doing any kind of more-useful equivalent.
Peer pressure is an enormously potent force in these people's lives, as evidenced by their belief that people undergo gender reassignment surgery solely because of (liberal) peer pressure.
Is voting not secret is US? Go thru the motions, but once you are in the booth. Vote on your best interest?
I've heard of churches having "Let's all fill out our mail-in ballots together" sessions.
I've also heard a lot of "My husband fills in my mail-in ballot."
The real power of this kind of thought control is its ability to govern people's thoughts and behaviors when nobody else is around.
Your ballot is secret in the US, but the fact that you voted is not. That's public record.
I'm an Ex-JW, and they expressly ban voting. As far as I know, they don't have anyone pouring over public records looking for members who voted. Though I wouldn't put it past a few busy body elders to check. That said, I would still hesitate to vote if I was PIMO (physically in, mentally out). I did vote for Obama in 2012 when I was on my way out, but I already had plans in motion to leave officially within months.
The whole point of church/religion is to get you to act a specific way in your daily life, not just at church or in the presence of other people of the religion.
Have a look at the ex mormon forums. What people sacrifice in order to leave the cult is literally everything
It is so true. As a gay man I had to leave the Mormon cult but it meant committing complete social suicide. It’s not an easy thing, by far the most difficult part of coming out.
Excellent point!
Personally I wouldn't necessarily say people talking about internalized misogyny / sexism (or racism for that matter) are being dismissive though, because I'd bet that's a component of why some women and minorities vote for conservatives. I'm middle aged and I know I've internalized a lot of pretty heinous stuff in my lifetime – including misogyny – and getting rid of that is nontrivial. Not that I've ever voted conservative, mind you, just using myself as an example. I definitely don't mean to use that term in a dismissive way because like you pointed out there's lots of other possible reasons too
Why do non-white, non-male, non-cis, non-het people vote Republican? Are they stupid?
That laugh is so completely genuine because Cleaveton Little's copy of the script didn't contains the words "You know, morons"... plus Gene Wilder's timing is just superb there - it still makes me grin despite not only know it's coming, but reading it instead of hearing it
Please add non-rich to that list.
Also add the people in the Top 5% that are not in the top 0.1%.
Many of them think that they are the rich people who are getting the breaks.
They are not.
The top 5% are definitely in that crowd, what do you mean?
Happy Cakeday! 🍰🎂
Yes, they are
The "R" doesn't just stand for Republican.
Why do white, male, straight people vote Republican? Are they stupid?
Also yes
I'd add that quite a few of them have also been intentionally misled. They've been fed a diet of shit information over the past few decades, and it has an effect.
I have voted Republican exactly once in any election since 2000. I technically could have voted in 1998, but Kentucky wouldn't let me vote as a student, and I wasn't paying attention to my home state.
I voted for the Republican candidate for San Diego City Jail Warden in 2022. I did so because of two reasons. The first was that the previous guy (a Democrat) got fired due to having the largest death toll of any jail or prison in the US, and the Democrats decided to run his Deputy Warden as their candidate. The second reason was that I got my ballot in the mail, so I had a month to look at their history, and the Republican candidate's worst scandal was that he attempted to cheat on his taxes and got caught. Given the choice of someone with literal blood on their hands vs a tax dodger, I'll take the tax dodger.
I said all that to say this: I vote blue no matter who, unless the blue candidate has shown they will actively cause more harm than their opponent.
Some do solely because of Christianity and/or moral panics about communism.
money
I work with an openly gay republican man. I call him a "modern Max Naumann" every now and then, but so far it hasn't clicked that that label is actually a homework assignment. He has no idea who I'm talking about.
He'll realize some day. :P
I think you meant to link to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Naumann 😀
Ah, I see you're an optimist.
I mean yes, of course it's possible, but frankly I'm not sure how many people like him will realize their mistake until the police are knocking on their door to take them to a totally-not-a-concentration-camp
I mean... that still counts as some day!
Touché!
I'm a school bus driver and most of my coworkers are hardcore trumpers, including two lesbians who are married to women and openly proud of it. It's just insane to me that they can't see the Republican threat to their lifestyle - but then they really hate black people so I guess they're choosing to accentuate the positive.
For bonus points, all of us drivers are Teamsters and very pro-union. They've heard of Project 2025 but they believe Trump when he says he has nothing to do with it. And they love 99% of it anyway.
Dudes rock
When the anti-gun control, anti-healthcare and eats dead bodies crowd calls them selves "pro-life". 🤮
Not to mention that their interest in a baby's life stops at the exact moment that baby is born. They're just handed a pair of bootstraps and told to git gud or die
You want to just GIVE them bootstraps?!? Communist!
Fuck, busted
You may read this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internalized_sexism
I live in Cologne, Germany. We also have many turks living here. I mean so many, that a district is called Small-Istanbul and Erdogan does some heavy propaganda around here, just to ensure the votes from the community living here.
Something that has already happened a few times is a girl being murdered by their own family, because she brought shame to the family, by doing whatever is not allowed to do with guys from other religions. It even has a name, honor killing.
It's all pretty bad, but what caught me by surprise was a documentary about extremely conservative Muslims living in countries that are predominantly not Muslim.
Some women, most of them ex Muslims, were interviewed and told that the mothers are mostly the ones that enforce the Muslim rule in a household.
They are the ones that insist that their kids have to follow the rules, even living in a country where most schoolmates are not Muslim.
Is this an instance of internalized sexism?
no i think that's religious brainwashing
religious people living away from a place where everyone follows the same religion might become borderline fanatics as they feel the need to perform their religion for everyone around them, so they try hard to become what they believe is an exemplary muslim/christian/Buddhist/Hindu
similar thing can be seen with religion converts, they're often way more orthodox and conservative about their new religion's rules than people who were born into it
Oh I was more being facetious than serious, but yeah that's exactly it. It's just so sad.
And it's not like I'm 100% free of internalized sexism either, which is double sad. At least I'm aware of it, which is something I guess?
I guess this is the answer if you hate yourself. 🤷🏼♂️
This is the meme, but the truth of the matter is that Republicans aren't asking the women to vote for them. They're asking the rapists to vote for them.
And America has a big enough population of rapists and rapist-enablers that this becomes a viable election strategy.
And asking men to tell the women in their life who they are voting for.
They don't vote Republican because it helps them. They vote Republican for religious reasons, because they believe that the world has to be destroyed before God becomes real.
That, or it could be a situation where they want to vote for someone else but don't want the fallout from their significant other finding out.
Smart conservatives don't try to convince left leaning electorate to vote republican. They just want them not to vote at all
They tell leftists to refuse to vote if current administration doesn't change their stance on problematic issues: such as position on israel, taiwan, carbon tax, housing, etc
Democrats: we are genociding a lot of children in gaza. Vote for us because trump isnt polite
Well that's certainly one of the takes of all time
You're right about the democrats, but distilling trump to "not being polite" is an immense delusion.
There it is, the dumbest thing I'll read all day.
Ooooh, makes perfect sense now!
The creepy male leftists like Joss Whedon and Tariq Ramadan will let women abort after the R! Makes you guys so much better! I'm totally voting Hillary now.
At least update your shtick. Harris is on the ballot.
Been copy pasting the same line since 2016
Ugh I think you guys just are so isolated in your bubble and the politics is so polarised that you don’t understand anything that isn’t agreeing with your own views.
You even think of it as some pure evil stuff when it’s just different views and way of life.
Some people want to live traditional life and they view republicans as someone who upholds their traditional values. Probably religious too.
It may seem strange but many people have different values and what they deem important.
You can’t just go „ohwowoowa they have different views than me, how can they?” Cause that’s super immature and narcissistic
You can live a traditional life without forcing other people to do it
Well the other side does exactly the same. Hence no one can communicate anymore and we only dwell in our isolated meme bubbles and feed our egos with how much superior we are than them
Oh?
"They force me to live in a society where people not like me are not opressed!!"
I meant the conservatives dwell in their own bubbles and think exactly the same how superior they are etc
Everyone thinks they have a monopoly on being the most awesome human being and refuses to even acknowledge that it might not be the case.
Our society was ruined by narcissism
Except one side is all about taking freedoms away from people, and the other is about making sure people don't have their freedoms taken. They don't have any moral high ground to stand on here. Stop acting like both sides are the same. They fundamentally are not.
But the person you replied to didn't say anything about a bubble or bring superior, what they said was:
So you ignored them entirely to have a completely different conversation about how "both sides don't listen"?
Conservative spaces ban users on sight for anything remotely dissenting. Do you really see that in leftist spaces? People do get banned in leftist spaces, often for being bigoted while Conservative spaces embrace bigotry and ban those who call it out.
And then there's folks like you who settle on on some nonsense centrism. Conservatives' idea of a "traditional life" comprises the following:
Married with a white wife who is ideally a virgin because weirdo conservatives want someone "pure". Or an Asian wife that is super subservient so the ©traditional*" minded weirdo is assured he won't be cheated on.
Wife will have kids, the more the better
She won't work, because a) she'll have more time to take care of the kids when it's really more about b), her not earning her own money so she and her kids becomes financially reliant on her working husband.
Girls being groomed at a young age so they later believe that getting married and becoming a stay at home mom was really a choice they made independently when it absolutely wasn't.
Then there's guys like you who read all of the above and simply say "wow guise way to be intolerant of other peoples' way of life". Like give me a break with that BS.
Who is forcing the tradfans to do anything other than acknowledge that some people are different?
As usual, asserted without any evidence.
Damn leftists, telling women to work and live independently of men... It's the exact same as what the right does 🙄
You don't vote Republican because you want to live a traditional life. You can do that in your own house without involving politics.
You vote Republican because you want everyone else to live a traditional life.
There's nothing traditional about banning abortion. The Bible mentions abortion exactly once. Numbers 5 : 11-31. It tells you how do perform possibly the least safe abortion method I have ever run across. The Bible is Pro-choice.
Utter nonsense.
Don't like abortions? Then don't get abortions.
It's that simple.
There's plenty of things I don't like too. But I'm not over here trying to outlaw bibles and country music.
The Republican party that likes to make claim to being pro-individual freedom....it's such a farce I can't believe you all say it with a straight face.
"Then don't get abortions" unless you are a Republican. Cuz then it is something you can just pray about and your side won't be criticial at all. The OP saying that values are different is rarely correct. It is identity. And some people have so strongly identified with being a conservative/republican/maga that nothing about values will change their voting. I can't believe we are still talking about a difference in morals after years of Trump going against every value the right has claimed to hold. Clearly it is not about values.
Oh really? Did the fact that you were replying on Lefty Memes@lemmy.dbzer0.com clue you in?
Actually you can, if it's literally a community dedicated to "undogmatic shitposting and memes from a progressive, anti-capitalist and truly anti-imperialist perspective, regardless of specific ideology".
But I agree with you, they don't vote on politics, they vote for the party they are told represent their "traditional life" and "traditional values", probably religious too. In other words, without thinking for themselves and just taking the word of their community / religious leaders, who are in a sunk cost fallacy not to admit they've been wrong to the people who've been looking up to them. This is also the worst possible way to vote in a democracy, and if the majority of people do so, it will not be a democracy for much longer.
A "moderate" conservative acquaintance of mine told me to my face that he thinks the world would be a better place if us LGBT+ folks simply stopped existing. He's also completely convinced that all gender identities that are not cis are fake and we're just pretending, and that none of this stuff should be talked about in public or promoted in any way because it's "mental illness."
Do you fucking understand that conservatives aren't happy with just living their life the way they want to, but they want to force me to live my life the way they want to? For someone going off about how "we guys" (leftists I guess?) are "super immature and narcissistic", you're being hilariously myopic about this.
Do you seriously think that any of us would have a problem with conservatives if they just fucking left us alone? I don't give a flying fuck about how they want to live their lives and I'd be more than happy to let them do their own thing, that isn't the fucking issue here you utter cabbage – the issue is that these people literally want me to stop existing and actually use physical violence against me (and have done so for my whole fucking life; do you think the 80's were a great time to grow up in for someone who's not cishet?) just because they don't fucking approve of how I dress, how I look, and who I love.
You've got your head so far up your own ass that you think the problem we have with conservatives is that we don't like that they're different, and that they're completely happy just letting us queers (or black people, or brown people, or whoever the fuck they've been told to hate) live our lives if we leave them alone? How can you be so fucking blind? Have you been paying any fucking attention to what's been going on in the past, I dunno, SEVERAL FUCKING DECADES? Have you missed all the shootings at LGBT+ clubs? The murders? The laws restricting our access to medical treatment? The laws restricting our ability to even talk openly about who we are?
Fuck. And then you have the fucking nerve to call us immature and narcissistic, you idiotic fucking waste of carbon cunt.
You just paint some imaginary target form schizo people shooting at others or wanting others to die and call them republicans. It’s insane
You showed your true colors at the end. You are as bad as what you think you fight against
I hope you die in a fucking fire you piece of fucking human garbage
Oh how angery we are, that surely helps to prove your point
You never had a point other than discrimination is ok so long as it's your way of life so with all due respect eat dirt
The meme literally references how you bastards took our right to bodily autonomy away and now if women are raped in half the country they have no choice but to carry the child even if it kills them. Take your traditional way of life and shove it all the way up your wazoo you livid piece of shit. Go be a fucking Bible eater at home and don't pretend voting Republican doesn't hurt people.
There's nothing traditional about the American taliban
The sad truth is that Democrats don't want to codify roe v vade, because now they have something to run on. They even say "I'm pro-abortion" instead of "my body, my choice". It's horrible. Here are some facts to back it up
This is a misleading perspective. Why would you need to codify "settled law?" SCOTUS had ruled that it was a constitutional right already so you wouldn't need a separate law.
You're also ignoring Casey. It wasn't just Roe.
They also don't typically say they're "pro-abortion."
The infographic states "facts" that weren't relevant at the time.
Don't bother. They're a conservative arguing in bad faith. Their comment history (especially comments like this) makes that abundantly clear.
Funny how conservatives have to more or less literally always resort to dishonest arguments. It's just so fucking rare to see one who's capable of good faith argumentation
"Conservatives" aren't a real thing, they are masked fascists, unable to argue in good faith by definition. Open fascists are what you see when "conservatives" argue in good faith.
They have to invent boogeymen because they don't want to admit that there isn't really a monster under their beds.
Hey look a Nazi
Even the Nazis were more principled than modern conservatives – at least they had the fucking backbone to actually say that yes they hate minorities and want to literally murder entire groups of people, or that they want women to be baby factories, etc. etc. Conservatives nowadays go through some pretty impressive contortions to make it seem like they're normal fucking people and not, you know, NSDAP v2.0
And never forget, the Nazi's were inspired by Jim Crow laws, and the term plus idea of the 'Final Solution' was taken from Canada.
Conservatives play like they aren't fascists, but they just need time to get there.
Yeah, a self-described "moderate" conservative acquaintance recently told me that the world would be a better place if all of us LGBT+ folks just stopped existing. He definitely wasn't this unhinged before, it just took him a while to start getting all Final Solution.
Of course he swears that it's us dirty leftists who have been radicalized, not reich-wingers. My political views have been more or less the same for years, although I do have to say that the fact that so many conservatives seem to now openly wish for genocide has gotten me to reconsider many things…
The big change is that, in what has literally become a meme with how often it's come up, Conservatives are now 'Mask off'/'Saying the quiet part out loud'/etc. They've always felt these things, they just didn't say them because we'd slap them back down. Over time they managed to make it more and more acceptable to shove countries to the right, until people woke up and went "wait a second, why the fuck am I talking about the testosterone count of a boxer when we have a few decades until climate change kills most of us?" Capitalists via Conservatives have made this happen, and a lot of the 'centre-left' parties around the world moved to the centre, while right wing parties went more right wing. Neo-Liberalism let fascism fester, and then we got Donald Fucking Trump in the most powerful position on the planet, and Putin is fucking invading countries, Israel is literally committing genocide, and we're going "wait a second, what the fuck happened?" And now, you're seeing a huge upswing in left and 'far left' numbers, because we've done this dance before, and we know the outcomes, especially women.
My kids have been telling me they have some 'enlightened centrist' friends who are currently battling with their own right-wing thoughts. They have lots of friends who are queer, and at least two trans friends, but they keep trying to justify their plan to vote Conservative. They're desperate for it to be okay, because that's what the right promises, 'vote us and everything gets better, once we deal with (whatever scapegoat).' But then they hear that their friends are the scapegoats, and they can't fully connect it. So they will literally waffle between full on Conservative, and pretty left-wing.
Sadly, the more they're online the more they go Conservative, but when they're outside and talk to people, they are clearly battling away those thoughts.
I guess I was just holding out hope that more of them would turn out to be, well, something other than fascists. Not that I expected something other than, well… what we're seeing right now.
Ain't this the fucking truth. I'm no spring chicken so I've Seen Shit™ over the years, and growing up in a conservative area as a neurospicy queer femme enby (yay intersectionality bingo) wasn't exactly what I'd call a picnic – any deviation from accepted norms meant violence. Lots of violence. Being nonbinary wasn't even an option I was aware of until the past decade or so, which conservatives naturally take to mean that I just started "pretending" I'm now something else than my assigned gender instead of having always been this way and only now even having the terms to describe myself.
The past 15 – 20 years did make me feel like maybe shit actually can get better and we wouldn't have to do this fucking dance anymore, but nooooooo.
Well we have good news and bad news. The bad news is it's going to get a bit worse. The good news is it will then get much better. Conservatism is at a point where it needs to either completely take over, fuck everything up, and have it all come crashing down, or people will realise that's what is coming, and we'll see a wave of progressive governments across the world. (I imagine a particularly deadly Climate Crisis Summer in a first world nation will prompt this).
Ugh, I'm so sorry you had to grow up like that. I cannot imagine being 'neurospicy queer femme enby' in a Con area. Seriously, I'm so sorry, I'm fourth generation atheist in a Left-leaning household, so I only saw that in my friends. My heart goes out to you, sibling.
This is pretty much their modus operandi -- they make something impossible, and then when it's made possible people struggle, and that's their 'proof' it wasn't needed/necessary/etc. See: Women in sports. I'm glad you're finding yourself, and if it is any consolation to you, despite growing up in a rather accepting household, I'm discovering a lot I had hidden as well, bordering on the ENBY/Femme front. And I'm in my 40's, haha. It was my son coming out as queer that did it, because suddenly I'm doing makeup, clothes shopping, and nail art with him and going.. "wait a sec... this is really fun."
Well I have some good news! Sadly it begins as all of these with bad news: Men (and boys) are way behind. The conservative illness has infected them quite badly. The good news is that women, as always, come to us as saviours; we just have to get my fellow men the fuck out of the way so we can actually progress forward.
Good luck, and if you ever need to talk to someone, message me, I'd be glad to :)
Yes, me trying to explain why women or minorities would vote for Republicans, makes me a nazi... Suuuure...