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Tuesday, January 21, 2020

Disgust

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
You understand fully that I am utterly disgusted by my fellow Republi/Fascist voting Amurikans, right? Right? I can well imagine that you are too.

The current stratospheric cruelty and unmitigated idiocy began, perhaps, when Fat Boy Newt made his Contract On America.
...few figures in modern history have done more than Gingrich to lay the groundwork for Trump’s rise. During his two decades in Congress, he pioneered a style of partisan combat—replete with name-calling, conspiracy theories, and strategic obstructionism—that poisoned America’s political culture and plunged Washington into permanent dysfunction. Gingrich’s career can perhaps be best understood as a grand exercise in devolution—an effort to strip American politics of the civilizing traits it had developed over time and return it to its most primal essence. (source)
Make no mistake, the man is radically delusional and hellbent on destroying civilization. There still are, very sadly, people who think he's got a brain.

Psychology Today lists five traits of Trump supporters to help us understand how the fuck we got to this purely wretched place:
1.     Authoritarian Personality Syndrome
Authoritarianism refers to the advocacy or enforcement of strict obedience to authority at the expense of personal freedom, and is commonly associated with a lack of concern for the opinions or needs of others. Authoritarian personality syndrome—a well-studied and globally-prevalent condition—is a state of mind that is characterized by belief in total and complete obedience to one’s authority. Those with the syndrome often display aggression toward outgroup members, submissiveness to authority, resistance to new experiences, and a rigid hierarchical view of society. The syndrome is often triggered by fear, making it easy for leaders who exaggerate threat or fear monger to gain their allegiance.
2.     Social dominance orientation
Social dominance orientation (SDO)—which is distinct but related to authoritarian personality syndrome—refers to people who have a preference for the societal hierarchy of groups, specifically with a structure in which the high-status groups have dominance over the low-status ones. Those with SDO are typically dominant, tough-minded, and driven by self-interest.
3.     Prejudice
It would be grossly unfair and inaccurate to say that every one of Trump’s supporters have prejudice against ethnic and religious minorities, but it would be equally inaccurate to say that many do not. It is a well-known fact that the Republican party, going at least as far back to Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy,” used strategies that appealed to bigotry, such as lacing speeches with “dog whistles”—code words that signaled prejudice toward minorities that were designed to be heard by racists but no one else.
4.     Intergroup contact
Intergroup contact refers to contact with members of groups that are outside one’s own, which has been experimentally shown to reduce prejudice. As such, it’s important to note that there is growing evidence that Trump’s white supporters have experienced significantly less contact with minorities than other Americans. For example, a 2016 study found that “…the racial and ethnic isolation of Whites at the zip-code level is one of the strongest predictors of Trump support.” This correlation persisted while controlling for dozens of other variables. In agreement with this finding, the same researchers found that support for Trump increased with the voters’ physical distance from the Mexican border.
5.     Relative deprivation
Relative deprivation refers to the experience of being deprived of something to which one believes they are entitled. It is the discontent felt when one compares their position in life to others who they feel are equal or inferior but have unfairly had more success than them. (source)
AND they're just flat out nasty and mentally ill. 

Last night I saw, on ShoutyFace, that a BernieBros friend of mine has a Donald the Dodo voting friend. I was kinda stunned but realize, this morning, that it makes sense. What both have/had in common was an irrational hatred of and total incomprehension of Clinton combined with an inability to see how the US would descend into Hell under the Orange Manatee. Possibly there's an unhealthy dose of misogyny in the mix on their parts too.

If you think Mrs. Putin, Don the Con, the Traitor in the WH is dangerous (he is) and bad for America (he is in MEGA spades) vote Blue no matter who in November.

Are you registered to vote? CHECK! If you've been thrown off the roles RE-REGISTER!

1 comment:

  1. "At the end of a century that has seen the evils of communism, Nazism and other modern tyrannies, the impulse to centralize power remains amazingly persistent." ~ Joseph Sobran

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