That explains most human behavior. I don't think that's a bad thing or a good thing. I want to do what my people do. But what do you do when you feel like your people abandoned you and everyone else hates you?
About a year ago I decided I wanted to be conservative. It would reduce dissonance in my world. I think and act like a conservative. I belong to the most conservative demographic in the country. I wouldn't have to explain "I vote this way, but I'm that kind of person". Then Satan (Trump) hit and used his supernatural power to convince almost my entire group to vote for him.
Most voting has nothing to do with policies or candidates. It's an expression of identity. I wanted to vote for a Republican this year to express my identity. I don't think or act like Democrats. I think and act like Republicans. I wanted to vote Republican. Then the Antichrist showed up and I got forced into voting Democrat, the people who rejected me before. Forced into voting Democrat because of my values rooted in my faith.
A lot of why Hillary lost is she couldn't get the votes of straight white men. Almost all liberal straight white men went for Bernie, and most of them voted for Trump, Johnson, or Stein in the general election. The culture decided that only minority groups can support Hillary. Almost all the people I know who openly supported Hillary are women or gay men. I don't even know any straight black men who openly supported her. As much as I respect the rights of minorities, you can't build a movement if you're restricted to the Glee fan demographic of LGBT people and women. So I'm going to ignore race for the rest of this post.
For a lot of straight men, voting for Hillary is the equivalent of having sex with another man. It's a denial of their identity. It's not just because she's female, because voting for Jill Stein is not a denial of your identity the same way. I don't know why it is. Could be because Bernie is cool and hip and edgy and Hillary isn't. Could be that Hillary has the wrong personality. Anyway, this culture decided that straight men aren't allowed to vote for Hillary, so very few of us did. And a lot of the ones who did probably weren't aware of the unwritten rule that straight men can't vote for her.
If I wasn't Christian (or religious), no way I'd vote for Hillary. I wouldn't feel a sense of duty to the rest of the country. I'd let my identity determine who I support instead. I would have voted for one of Trump, Johnson, or McMullin. Probably Johnson. Even tho he barely knows anything about foreign policy, he's much better for my identity. I'd have trouble voting for Trump but I could see doing it out of self-preservation. Kind of like how I don't care for Hillary but I voted for her anyway to try to keep Trump out. I really like McMullin but he had zero chance and he didn't even have write-in access in Mississippi.
The strange thing is I found Hillary fans to be way more accepting of me than Bernie fans. Bernie fans get pissed off if you dare criticize Saint Bernie Christ. Since I had questions about some of his weirder ideas, like the $15/hour minimum wage, they yelled at me. Which turned me against Bernie and his cult. Bernie fans represent the part of the left that mocks me for being from Mississippi. Hillary fans accept anyone they can get. Turns out they have to because society says straight men aren't allowed to vote for her. Most Hillary fan groups are almost all women and LGBT. Straight men don't vote for Hillary and I don't know why we don't. I realized that a few weeks after I told everyone I supported her because she's not Trump or Bernie. Now I wish I'd kept it to myself. With all respect to gay people, I don't want anyone to think I'm gay. I should have kept my mouth shut and just bashed Bernie Trump and made people think I was voting for someone cool like Johnson that doesn't damage my identity.
I predict for the next election the Democrats will have an openly anti-Christian candidate. So anti-Trump Christians like me will have no viable candidate to vote for. A lot of Democrats like to pretend Obama's not a Christian because they hate Christians. That's telling. I don't think Bill Clinton even got that. I'm a pessimist, but only because my worst predictions keep coming true.
Friday, December 9, 2016
Monday, December 5, 2016
About the term "Social Justice Warrior"
I'll use the term "Social Justice Warrior" in future posts. I want to clarify what I mean. I do not use it as a blanket term for liberals. A true Social Justice Warrior thinks they care about social justice more than they really do. Someone who only cares about abstract issues instead of the people the issues affect. Someone who trashes everything for being prejudiced and "problematic" but has no problem being prejudiced against groups they don't consider worthy to exist. A total hypocrite. It's a useful term for a kind of person I've run into online.
Most SJWs are high school or college students. They usually grow out of it when they get to the real world. SJWs give real social justice a bad name. Social justice is an important part of my faith and I care a lot about real social justice. I don't want to be racist, sexist, or homophobic. Therefore, I oppose SJWs. Thanks to them I will never use the terms "problematic", "trigger warning", "safe space", or "check your privilege" with a straight face. Some of those may be good ideas, but I associate them with some of the world's most annoying people.
Too bad the alt-right idiots co-opted the term to use against all liberals. They ruin everything they touch. For more info on what I mean when I talk about SJWs, read the top definition from Urban Dictionary. It was written in 2011. And for a good parody, see everythingoffendsme.tumblr.com, which is so close to the real thing it's hardly satire.
Most SJWs are high school or college students. They usually grow out of it when they get to the real world. SJWs give real social justice a bad name. Social justice is an important part of my faith and I care a lot about real social justice. I don't want to be racist, sexist, or homophobic. Therefore, I oppose SJWs. Thanks to them I will never use the terms "problematic", "trigger warning", "safe space", or "check your privilege" with a straight face. Some of those may be good ideas, but I associate them with some of the world's most annoying people.
Too bad the alt-right idiots co-opted the term to use against all liberals. They ruin everything they touch. For more info on what I mean when I talk about SJWs, read the top definition from Urban Dictionary. It was written in 2011. And for a good parody, see everythingoffendsme.tumblr.com, which is so close to the real thing it's hardly satire.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson: Pedantry in Space
Just linking this article because it's awesome and it's better than anything I can write:
Neil DeGrasse Tyson: Pedantry in Space by Sam Kriss
Not to mention that NDT is often wrong. I've seen him on Conan before and he's kind of fun for a few minutes, then annoying as hell after that. He's like Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory, except Sheldon is way funnier and more of a sympathetic character. Here's a good quote from the article:
I can safely say that "I fucking hate science". I don't hate actual science, I just hate "reason logic fact science evolution fuck". And that's what NDT is the figurehead for. All this has destroyed my interest in science. When I was younger I liked reading about science. Not any more. Science isn't for people like me any more. I'm not a creationist, a global warming denier, an anti-vaxxer, etc., but I wish I was all of those because the "reason logic fact science evolution fuck" crowd pisses me off so much.
Endnote: Anti-vaccine attitudes used to be part of the left until a few years ago, not the right. The only reason it changed was everyone started believing science was inherently left-wing. Don't ask. Don't fucking ask.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson: Pedantry in Space by Sam Kriss
Not to mention that NDT is often wrong. I've seen him on Conan before and he's kind of fun for a few minutes, then annoying as hell after that. He's like Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory, except Sheldon is way funnier and more of a sympathetic character. Here's a good quote from the article:
A decent name for this tendency, for stars and spaceships recast as the instruments of a joyless and pedantic class spite, would be I Fucking Love Science. ‘Science’ here has very little to do with the scientific method itself; it means ontological physicalism, not believing in our Lord Jesus Christ, hating the spectrally stupid, and, more than anything, pretty pictures of nebulae and tree frogs.
I can safely say that "I fucking hate science". I don't hate actual science, I just hate "reason logic fact science evolution fuck". And that's what NDT is the figurehead for. All this has destroyed my interest in science. When I was younger I liked reading about science. Not any more. Science isn't for people like me any more. I'm not a creationist, a global warming denier, an anti-vaxxer, etc., but I wish I was all of those because the "reason logic fact science evolution fuck" crowd pisses me off so much.
Endnote: Anti-vaccine attitudes used to be part of the left until a few years ago, not the right. The only reason it changed was everyone started believing science was inherently left-wing. Don't ask. Don't fucking ask.
Sunday, December 4, 2016
Thought Criminal, My Favorite Liberal Blogger
Read Thought Criminal's blog.
I'm a self-described moderate. I even leaned conservative for a while. So why do I enjoy reading a blog by someone who's so far left he considers Obama a moderate sellout? Lots of reasons.
I found him after I saw a link to an Alternet article bashing Christians. I wanted to see if anyone else thought Alternet and the like had an anti-Christian bias, and I found his blog. He totally agrees. I realized pretty fast that 1) he's very, very far left and 2) he would accept someone like me into the liberal fold. He says that the secularization of the left is the worst thing that could happen to the left. As he wrote on this post:
The guy's a brilliant thinker, not afraid to think way outside the box. Also, he trashes the bad parts of the left as much as he trashes the right. Keep in mind this is someone who calls all Republicans fascists. He makes cultural conservatives like me feel more at home with liberal ideas. He's far from a cultural conservative himself, but he doesn't like a lot of the cultural liberal rallying points. He represents a left wing that wants to include everyone instead of one based on mocking rural Southern Christians like me. It's the left of Martin Luther King Jr., not the left of Seth MacFarlane. He often uses the phrases "pseudo-religious right" for the modern right and "pseudo-left" for the modern Seth MacFarlane-type left. I'd love to meet him someday and talk about life, politics, music, Christianity, whatever.
He also has an army of trolls. I won't mention their names, but one of them is like the platonic opposite of me. A "rock music critic" who hates Christians, rural people, and progressive rock. I'll bet he hates cats and pineapple salsa too. The sad thing is there's way more of him on the left than there are people like Thought Criminal. How I wish it was the other way around. Thought Criminal's pretty angry, so a lot of his posts are responses to hate mail. I kind of wish he'd ban the trolls, but on the other hand some of his best posts started as hate mail.
I'll openly admit that his blog has pushed me further to the left. He got me more comfortable with the idea of voting for Hillary this year, when I was very uncomfortable with it at first. You should read him too. Here's an intriguing place to start, a series of posts critical of famous skeptic James Randi. (Who I'd never heard of before his blog, but I don't run in the same circles either.) Or try this post, Alternet Belongs On The Southern Poverty Law Center's Hate Group Watch List, which compares some Alternet writers to the American Family Association. I don't know if he'd like much of what's on my blog, but I like a lot of what's on his blog, even when I don't agree with it. If Thought Criminal says something, I listen and I consider the idea.
I'm a self-described moderate. I even leaned conservative for a while. So why do I enjoy reading a blog by someone who's so far left he considers Obama a moderate sellout? Lots of reasons.
I found him after I saw a link to an Alternet article bashing Christians. I wanted to see if anyone else thought Alternet and the like had an anti-Christian bias, and I found his blog. He totally agrees. I realized pretty fast that 1) he's very, very far left and 2) he would accept someone like me into the liberal fold. He says that the secularization of the left is the worst thing that could happen to the left. As he wrote on this post:
I have absolutely no idea who most of the people who read my blog are, I do know that several hundred people read it every week if not every day. If your accusation is correct and they're all creationists, I can't say that I consider it to be a problem. If they want to read what is said here, maybe they'll learn that they don't have as much to fear from real liberals as they're led to by the atheist pseudo-liberals. ... If any evangelical or fundamentalist or creationist reads me saying that seriously considers it, I'm not unhappy to have written it. They have the same right to my consideration as anyone else who does me the honor of reading what I write.I may have severed ties with evangelicalism since then, but I still believe similar to evangelicalism, I was an evangelical at the time he wrote that, and it means a lot to me. Most of the left won't give me the time of day. He explicitly said that he'll allow people who are far more fundamentalist than me to listen to him. Even creationists, the ultimate left-wing bogeymen.
The guy's a brilliant thinker, not afraid to think way outside the box. Also, he trashes the bad parts of the left as much as he trashes the right. Keep in mind this is someone who calls all Republicans fascists. He makes cultural conservatives like me feel more at home with liberal ideas. He's far from a cultural conservative himself, but he doesn't like a lot of the cultural liberal rallying points. He represents a left wing that wants to include everyone instead of one based on mocking rural Southern Christians like me. It's the left of Martin Luther King Jr., not the left of Seth MacFarlane. He often uses the phrases "pseudo-religious right" for the modern right and "pseudo-left" for the modern Seth MacFarlane-type left. I'd love to meet him someday and talk about life, politics, music, Christianity, whatever.
He also has an army of trolls. I won't mention their names, but one of them is like the platonic opposite of me. A "rock music critic" who hates Christians, rural people, and progressive rock. I'll bet he hates cats and pineapple salsa too. The sad thing is there's way more of him on the left than there are people like Thought Criminal. How I wish it was the other way around. Thought Criminal's pretty angry, so a lot of his posts are responses to hate mail. I kind of wish he'd ban the trolls, but on the other hand some of his best posts started as hate mail.
I'll openly admit that his blog has pushed me further to the left. He got me more comfortable with the idea of voting for Hillary this year, when I was very uncomfortable with it at first. You should read him too. Here's an intriguing place to start, a series of posts critical of famous skeptic James Randi. (Who I'd never heard of before his blog, but I don't run in the same circles either.) Or try this post, Alternet Belongs On The Southern Poverty Law Center's Hate Group Watch List, which compares some Alternet writers to the American Family Association. I don't know if he'd like much of what's on my blog, but I like a lot of what's on his blog, even when I don't agree with it. If Thought Criminal says something, I listen and I consider the idea.
Friday, December 2, 2016
Red Tribe and Blue Tribe
Read this (very long) post from Scott Alexander, I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup, and its (very long) sequel, Five Case Studies on Politicization, and you'll understand most of the problems with the world.
There's definitely a "red tribe" and a "blue tribe". Red tribe is cultural conservatives and blue tribe is cultural liberals. And I fit in with the red tribe almost to a tee. I'm from rural Mississippi, I'm Christian, I was homeschooled, I'm a teetotaler, etc. I'm probably the most conservative demographic in America. And each tribe has an outgroup: the red tribe has both the blue tribe and outsiders, but somehow the blue tribe made the red tribe the only outgroup. His eventual conclusion is that liberals think conservatives are worse than ISIS at a gut level. Sadly, this is a lot of why I'm not liberal any more. I don't want to hang out with a crowd that thinks I'm worse than ISIS. And unfortunately, a lot of the left looks down on me because I'm from the wrong part of the country, I have the wrong accent, I go to the wrong church, I do the wrong things that the wrong people enjoy. No matter how liberal my political views were, they still saw that I was the wrong kind of person. Being a white evangelical homeschooled Mississippian on the left is like being a gay Muslim Mexican on the right.
The absolute worst thing for Christianity is for it to be identified with the red tribe. It's almost impossible to evangelize to blue tribe people. For this reason, I'd consider people like Nadia Bolz-Weber to be very important - she's a Christian pastor and about as blue tribe as they come. Meanwhile, the red tribe people are already sure they're Christian because they were born into the right family or they had a religious experience once when they were younger. It doesn't matter how they act. Most of my blue tribe Christian friends have quit the faith. They don't act very different from secular blue tribe people and there's not much incentive for them to stay if they live in a blue tribe bubble. If they want to stay in religion, they tend to go to more blue tribe-friendly religions like Wicca.
It's also horrible, like I mentioned above, for liberals trying to explain their views to people like me. There are some who accept me and don't look down on me, and I respect them a lot. But in my experience, most of them do look down on me and everything I love. I don't want to live in a big city, I don't want to eat organic everything, I don't want to see Hamilton, etc. And as I'll go into detail in the future, I hate snark.
One of the worst things about this election is that my red tribe, the people who think and act like me, went almost wholesale for Donald "Antichrist" Trump. If I was part of the blue tribe it wouldn't hurt so bad. I wish the red tribe got the sensible candidate and the blue tribe got the complete moron, like if it had been Marco Rubio vs. Bernie Sanders. Of course, most blue tribe people I know wanted Bernie anyway. Ironically they're the same people who wouldn't shut up about Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump all the time. And they were mad about having to vote for uncool Hillary instead of cool edgy Bernie.
Seriously, Scott Alexander's posts put a lot of my thoughts into words way better than I could. He comes from a completely different perspective but he comes to the same conclusions. Read them if you have the time, I don't know how to summarize them.
There's definitely a "red tribe" and a "blue tribe". Red tribe is cultural conservatives and blue tribe is cultural liberals. And I fit in with the red tribe almost to a tee. I'm from rural Mississippi, I'm Christian, I was homeschooled, I'm a teetotaler, etc. I'm probably the most conservative demographic in America. And each tribe has an outgroup: the red tribe has both the blue tribe and outsiders, but somehow the blue tribe made the red tribe the only outgroup. His eventual conclusion is that liberals think conservatives are worse than ISIS at a gut level. Sadly, this is a lot of why I'm not liberal any more. I don't want to hang out with a crowd that thinks I'm worse than ISIS. And unfortunately, a lot of the left looks down on me because I'm from the wrong part of the country, I have the wrong accent, I go to the wrong church, I do the wrong things that the wrong people enjoy. No matter how liberal my political views were, they still saw that I was the wrong kind of person. Being a white evangelical homeschooled Mississippian on the left is like being a gay Muslim Mexican on the right.
The absolute worst thing for Christianity is for it to be identified with the red tribe. It's almost impossible to evangelize to blue tribe people. For this reason, I'd consider people like Nadia Bolz-Weber to be very important - she's a Christian pastor and about as blue tribe as they come. Meanwhile, the red tribe people are already sure they're Christian because they were born into the right family or they had a religious experience once when they were younger. It doesn't matter how they act. Most of my blue tribe Christian friends have quit the faith. They don't act very different from secular blue tribe people and there's not much incentive for them to stay if they live in a blue tribe bubble. If they want to stay in religion, they tend to go to more blue tribe-friendly religions like Wicca.
It's also horrible, like I mentioned above, for liberals trying to explain their views to people like me. There are some who accept me and don't look down on me, and I respect them a lot. But in my experience, most of them do look down on me and everything I love. I don't want to live in a big city, I don't want to eat organic everything, I don't want to see Hamilton, etc. And as I'll go into detail in the future, I hate snark.
One of the worst things about this election is that my red tribe, the people who think and act like me, went almost wholesale for Donald "Antichrist" Trump. If I was part of the blue tribe it wouldn't hurt so bad. I wish the red tribe got the sensible candidate and the blue tribe got the complete moron, like if it had been Marco Rubio vs. Bernie Sanders. Of course, most blue tribe people I know wanted Bernie anyway. Ironically they're the same people who wouldn't shut up about Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump all the time. And they were mad about having to vote for uncool Hillary instead of cool edgy Bernie.
Seriously, Scott Alexander's posts put a lot of my thoughts into words way better than I could. He comes from a completely different perspective but he comes to the same conclusions. Read them if you have the time, I don't know how to summarize them.
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