[OutcastPhilosopher]

Progress is a HOAX

[Ibon]

But when I express a conservative viewpoint on globalism, the anti-science stances of the D party on certain topics, or a belief in national borders being a key to economic security none of my background or the way I treat other human beings matters because it is assumed I am a deplorable-racist-sexist-homophobic-mysoginist.

Here is why I am so sick and tired of social media. If you have 20 people reading a position you post and 1 of the 20 fires back an extreme position pegging you as deplorable this is what at the end of the day you end up engaging with or remembering. The other 19 may have read what you wrote and accepted your position remaining relatively silent. That reality creates the impression of intolerance on the other side because the only voices that get through are those that bark the loudest with intolerance. A specific example I can remember when you pointed out anti science positions of D's as a very good rebuttal to a statement I once made about republicans being anti science. Had someone pegged you as partisan for stating that you probably would have remembered that and not have been aware that your message was acknowledged by those who remain silent or don't bark back. In a diner or cafe face to face body language communicates a lot regarding folks who acknowledge and confirm a point that in social media you don't ever see.

Social media filters through the loudest assholes. Digital media and algorithms favor conflict and grievances. The news media reports on the extremes of movements. What else do folks conclude then that their adversaries are intolerant toward their positions. We have to be aware how the flow of information favors extreme positions. I read about all this intolerance about the Black Lives Matter movement on social media and then I talk to my daughter deeply involved with these issues in Oakland California and the difference is insane. Why is that? Exactly because of what I wrote above. And specific to that, your blue workers in Ohio who have been disenfranchised for the past 30 years and the inner city minorities suffering similar economic disruptions should be on the same side in addressing the inequalities and disparities of wealth and the culpability of globalism and lobbyists. As long as rural whites in Ohio are racists and BLM participants in Oregon or California are part of some woke culture of extremists then those elites in power have us all exactly where they want us. And we all know, everyone of us here on this site, when you stop and really sit back and think about it, the vast majority of folks on either side of these issues are not extremists and quite well meaning. Their voices do not get through the filter. Only assholes seem to pass through. We have enough of those even on this site as to make me lose interest hanging around. Given enough time only assholes remain!

You need to understand that the economy of Ohio and the surrounding states was moribund from 2006-2016. However very early in 2017 things took off here in a big way. Construction went up both commercial and residential. Jobs were suddenly recruiting workers erasing the "permanent" unemployment we had been told to accept. Until Covid shut downs things here were booming in ways we had not seen since 1990. Industrial plants that were running one shift part time were suddenly running a shift full time and in some instance putting on a second shift. Every state bordering Ohio had the same thing happen from western Pennsylvania, Kentucky, West Virginia, Indiana and Michigan and beyond. This is the part of the nation where manufacturing was/is the bread and butter for the working class and for about 30 years we have been sneeringly referred to as the "rust belt" by the mainstream media because our industrial plant was being shipped off to China and we were told to accept the future as low paid service workers if we could not afford a Masters degree level education in some field most folks here have no aptitude for or they would already be following that career path.

You need to help me understand something here. You wrote this suggesting that Trump was responsible for this resurgence of the economy in Ohio. Where there really specific policies that came out of his administration that opened up the economy post 2016? I would be very interested to understand that and what can be preserved moving forward.

[Newfie]

A quite good interchange there.

T is interesting but I have been doing this, gently applauding folks for there posts, for some little while.

To your point Ibon when I do this I always feel a but funny, who am I to be praising? Am I positioning myself as an authority figure and is my praise the equivalent of a teacher giving a good star?

And yet if we don't support one another, at least occasionally, are we not falling into the “loudest ass hole” trap you mention?

Writing this I was thinking of discussions in the British Parliament. There the custom is for Parliamentarians to respond as the speaker delivers his address. There are snide and rather rude comments but also shouts of support. To my American ears it sounds pretty awful, but maybe there is something more refined about that method.

[REAL Green]

The environmental and woke liberal are for centralization talked about in the referenced article. This is by instinct in necessity. This is because honest science is telling us time is of the essence with the climate and global ecosystem. So, with this group of modern liberals who are very educated they feel the end justifies the means because of necessity. Contracts found in the rule of law and Fair play is the baby thrown out with the bathwater because of necessity.

Woke is especially dubious. I would say absurd. I can relate to the environmental liberal but I see right through the reactionary racism of the woke crew. They are liars using racist tactics to supposedly correct racism. What they are doing is just polarizing and poisoning the body politics ensuring racism will be enshrined in the peoples mindscape for the coming crisis of civilization. This will mean the “them” instead of the us in the future. The “them” of finger pointing and attacking instead of the Us of common sacrifice.

I won’t even elaborate on wokism that is a lie and farce. The more important point is the environmental liberal who does have a point. The problem is the physics of a green transition are dubious. I would say fantasy. I would say we are boxed in not only hitting a brick wall. The GND is just digging the hole deeper. Renewables are already being introduced and with checks and balances unlike what the GND will do. Biden administration will not dive into the GND because they don’t believe in it. They don’t believe in woke either. It is all about the power of divide and conquer of the Deep State. Biden is a corpse and if Harris gets in, she is just a puppet. We saw what she was made of in the primaries.

This is then where the great “Reset” comes in. The clique of Billionaires or the global Oligarchy are offering Blue America the option of realizing their goals and the modern liberal is buying this siren song. They will give up their rights and privacy for their dreams. Let’s face it sacrifice is what is ahead not the flying pigs of the techno optimist of a green revolution of a woke world of safetyism.

There is so much talk about the Trump deplorable and in many cases, they are deplorable but what is so hypocritical is liberalism has become deplorable. Please don’t tell me Antifa and BLM are freedom fighters. They are Brown Shirts. Notice how these grass roots effort shut down immediately once the Blue handlers told them to be quiet! The modern liberals are supposed to be educated and adults but instead they are showing a lack of education and moral depravity.

I am a liberal environmentalist and what I am seeing from the new liberal environmentalist is you have to be woke to be green. WTF, please, that is absurd and a huge detour that will just jackknife the effort. Another issue is being honest about the science is one thing but then delusional about the science of solutions quite another. IOW 1*0 is Zero. Don’t tell me honesty is also banking on false solutions just because you are honest there is a problem. Sounds like the late stage unreformable alcoholic.

This next article points to all this coming to a head in the next few years. It appears the system won this fight. Another word for it is Deep State. They won illegally and with no moral high ground to carry with them. Sacrifice is coming and what will happen is wealth and power transfer to their group. It will be taken from Red America because, you know they are deplorable and deserve it. We the Blue America are the righteous one that are going to save the planet and right the wrongs of racism. BUNK.

So, Marxism and Fascism will be used to attain the results desired by Blue America in the guise of compassionate socialism. What is really at work is the clique of Billionaires will be cementing their power base at all levels except with a large amount of the people. Something similar is happening in Europe. The China project is already done with dictator XI and a road map to power for the Clique. Russia is a unique in that they are a Mafia nation that is very nationalistic and rightly so. The next fight is for global hegemony that could eclipse this internal fight in the US and Europe. But right now all eyes are on the US.

This is why I point to civilization coming apart. This is no way to confront the decline ahead. This current “Reset” will make it worse because what has happened is lies and lies poison. Polarization is much less an issue than poison. Polarization is people holding their cherished ideas up against others. Poison is theft and lies that destroy.

“Europe’s Machiavellian Moment”
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/ ... an-moment/

It is still too early to say, but perhaps the U.S. election is the beginning of a new ‘Turning’ (in the sense of the ‘Fourth Turning’). Of course, what happens in the U.S. is most people’s primary focus now; but even as that plays out over the coming year – perhaps chaotically – the seeds sown on 3 November, and in its aftermath, take us to a pivot: Does the centralising project of progressive ‘wokedom’ in Blue America…have the ‘grit’ to persevere – or will its leaders fold in the face of the approaching crises – and concomitant public anger? The Project has three main pivots: the centralisation of Big Tech and MSM; the concentration of banking and financial tech, within centralised Central Banking…What is so significant about the U.S. election; what is so significant about the last four topsy-turvy years in Washington, has been the casting aside of all illusion of democracy, and the blunt demonstration that real power is exercised by a clique of billionaires. Europeans with little by way of independent news may be the last to notice. But for sure, China, Russia, Latin America – and the Middle East, which has suffered the most from America’s and Europe’s ‘moral’ sieges and wars – have taken due note. They will not further put up with European or American moral hectoring. We may look back, and conclude that the post-war era effectively came to its end on 3 November. What happened? For most Americans, if asked what it was that made them American, they likely would mumble about the Constitution, about its’ first and fifth Amendments, about its founding ethos. But the courts, and the institutions of America have ‘moved on’ under the influence of an activism that amends old rules to seal-in ‘new values’…Well, thanks to the ‘Great Disrupter’ (Trump), as David Stockman is wont to call him, many Americans have come to the settled view that their votes matter naught in eyes of those navigating ‘the centralisation project’. That there is scant accountability to it, and that all benefits accrue to the oligarchy. They feel disenfranchised – and are angry. What they are traumatically experiencing, though, is the planned transition from ‘the politics of rules’ to the era of coerced consensus – as Middelaar so proudly outlined it. The ‘Project’s modus operandi of a seemingly ‘depoliticised’ progress towards centralization, however, has crashed into the ever-unpredictable ‘rock’ of Trump. He intends to drive straight through – and past – the election ‘fraud’…U.S. politics today is not just polarized, it is poisoned…Again the question is: Are these élites as solid and as confident as they seem? When the recessionary crisis truly strikes, and anger explodes, will they fumble it? Trump and his supporters may conclude that precisely will be the moment to go to the streets.

[Pops]

Oh that's an easy one. I am a Christian right of center person and when I express conservative views on any subject I get labeled with the above accusations and many more as a reflex response. Not being of those viewpoints is irrelevant because the people who assume I hold them discount everything else I say using my purported illeberal positions on those issues as the basis for ignoring everything else I espouse.

You describe exactly the conclusion I've reached after 4 years of trying to figure out trumps appeal. You say it's because of your various conservative views that people unfairly lump you in with the Republican deplorables. I think it is deeper than that. I think you feel people look down their nose at who you are not just what you say. You describe how the hoity-toity costal elites disparage all non-college blue collar workers, especially Ohioans, the "rust belt", religion, whatever conservative ideology. You feel like the underclass now.

When Clinton stole the Rs thunder by abandoning labor and new deal social democracy to tap the pockets of the new educated meritocracy, the supra-nationals and their FIRE economy, he gave the Rs no choice but to go all Gingrichy radical right—where else were they to go? Trumpublicans are what Republicans have wanted to be for 30 years, through BushCo, the tea party, freedom caucus, etc, they never wanted fiscal discipline or compassionate conservatives or Chamber of Commerce candidates like Boner and Romney. They wanted someone to make the libs cry, if nothing else to avenge their own perceived loss of station—that is trumpism and it is republicanism now.

And it has parallels in resurgent populism around the world.

That is the Doomer Outlook
.

[Ibon]

Oh that's an easy one. I am a Christian right of center person and when I express conservative views on any subject I get labeled with the above accusations and many more as a reflex response. Not being of those viewpoints is irrelevant because the people who assume I hold them discount everything else I say using my purported illeberal positions on those issues as the basis for ignoring everything else I espouse.

You describe exactly the conclusion I've reached after 4 years of trying to figure out trumps appeal. You say it's because of your various conservative views that people unfairly lump you in with the Republican deplorables. I think it is deeper than that. I think you feel people look down their nose at who you are not just what you say. You describe how the hoity-toity costal elites disparage all non-college blue collar workers, especially Ohioans, the "rust belt", religion, whatever conservative ideology. You feel like the underclass now.

When Clinton stole the Rs thunder by abandoning labor and new deal social democracy to tap the pockets of the new educated meritocracy, the supra-nationals and their FIRE economy, he gave the Rs no choice but to go all Gingrichy radical right—where else were they to go? Trumpublicans are what Republicans have wanted to be for 30 years, through BushCo, the tea party, freedom caucus, etc, they never wanted fiscal discipline or compassionate conservatives or Chamber of Commerce candidates like Boner and Romney. They wanted someone to make the libs cry, if nothing else to avenge their own perceived loss of station—that is trumpism and it is republicanism now.

And it has parallels in resurgent populism around the world.

That is the Doomer Outlook
.

You commented on this previously and it is a very good assessment. Trumps rise is an indictment of the democratic party since Clinton abandoned the working class for Wallstreet elites. Probably he was bragging about how he played the Republicans at their own game during one of his trips to Eppsteins whorehouse in the Bahamas. And of course this was all in retaliation on how Gingrich and Kenneth Star did everything to fuck over Clinton.

You feel like the underclass now.

Trump's instincts in playing race card was tapping right into this.

What you see is all this Machiavellian games playing on humans most basic primitive lizard brain instincts. Facebook does it as well with their algorithms.

We have the media, politicians and advertisers all agitating our darkest ego instincts instead of a more enlightened altruism of calling for unity.

I am a typical cynical aging baby boomer but I do not buy into the narrative that as civilizations decline environmental feedbacks start pinching that the only human response is appealing to the primitive. That is the lazy way.

[Tanada]

You need to help me understand something here. You wrote this suggesting that Trump was responsible for this resurgence of the economy in Ohio. Where there really specific policies that came out of his administration that opened up the economy post 2016? I would be very interested to understand that and what can be preserved moving forward.

I shall try, though I doubt I shall succeed.

Economic vectors are almost always about the perception of the people spending money to accomplish their goals. In the Great Lakes region since the rise of Globalism and selling out of the industrial heartland the perception of the masses of the population from business owners down to grunts working the lines in blue collar jobs has been that the Government is NOT here to help, they have written off the region and wish we would all just shut up and take whatever crumbs they throw us with gratitude overflowing. This cultural mindset was very strongly reinforced by the Obama administration repeatedly saying things like "industry is gone and never coming back".

The effect of this cultural environment is that during the periods when President Obama was President everyone around here hunkered down, spent as little money as possible, some moved away and others turned tighter inward. Then President Trump comes in saying everything people here were dying to hear. Industrialism is NOT dead, the borders are NOT supposed to be open to an unlimited flood, China is NOT the answer to all our gadget supply desires. Like a breath of Oxygen to a person who has just been rescued from drowning the masses here once again saw a reason to be optimistic about their future prospects. Maybe they can keep their good paying job and send their kids to college after all, maybe they can buy that hunting cabin up north in Michigan or catch up on buying a few luxury purchases they have been denying themselves for the last 10 years due to economic fears.

So al these formerly economically pessimistic folks started spending a little more money than they had been like for example eating out once more a month than before. The additional eating out stimulated the food industry causing them to hire more employees, give raises or whatever and that in turn allowed their employees to have more spendable cash in hand that they used to finally do whatever they had been putting off for so long.

New roof for your old house now looked like a good investment because you wouldn't be losing the house in a foreclosure when your job went to some poor worker in China. Or a new HVAC, or Pool Table, or Tankless Water Heater to take an endless hot shower when you really wanted too.

The economy has two basic modes, boom or bust. When the President tells you a lot that your future is bleak as hell you hunker down and scrimp on spending. This ripples through the economy when you see businesses closing or housing developments stop new construction. These ripples reinforce each other in a bust loop grinding the economy down to a minimal performance level where businesses tell employees 'sorry no raise for you this year'. When the President tells you your future is bright you risk spending a little more. As you do so you see a neighbor putting a new roof on their house, or a new house being built in that half empty sub division that has been stagnant for a decade. That causes a boom loop where you feel confident spending a little more money leading to your neighbor seeing your new whatever or hearing about a new job opportunity nearby.

Booms and Busts start with external forces like the 2008 crisis, but how long they last is greatly influenced by the consumer confidence level. That confidence is bifold, what you see and hear for yourself, and what the people in charge tell you to expect in the near term future. If all the local businesses are struggling it doesn't matter what the Government attitude is at first because everyone is in the bust on a personal level. But after a few months or a year what you expect from the near future comes to dominate the "recovery period". Here in the Great Lakes region we heard all about how great Wall Street was doing and how all the big megabanks had been rescued. But when we went to refinance our mortgages because we were having trouble we on an individual basis were told we were too small to be taken care of and the foreclosure agent would be around soon. We saw people working in New York or LA talking up the economy in the financial industry while at the same time telling us we were obsolete and had no future. All of that has a deep profound impact on the local economy.

[MickN]

Had to log in just to say, tremendous bit of writing Tanada. Great stuff(and I have no particular dog in this fight).

[JuanP]

post by Tanada » Tue 22 Dec 2020, 13:10:58

What a great post, Tanada! Thanks for taking the trouble to write that. I understand 100% where that comes from and totally agree with every word you wrote. I am agnostic, extremely socially liberal, mostly fiscally conservative, and definitely left of center, but I respect your position completely, and I agree that many on the left, including most of the Democrats, have been disrespecting, misunderstanding, ignoring, looking down, and abusing people like you more and more every day since I came to the USA in the late 80s. And this problem has gotten significantly worse in the last five years.

I am a far leftist who is completely sick of the left in the USA and thoroughly disgusted with the Democratic Party's behavior.

[Ibon]

Tanada, your post was excellent and unlike what you thought very easy to understand. And I am mostly in agreement, as I also stated the way blue collar workers embraced the conman in Washington is an indictment to how they were left in the lurch by democrats..... and thus desperate to be heard and validated which Trump did. The democrats wrote them off since decades in favor of globalism and finance and wallstreet and high tech.

I take your post somewhat hopefully, you don't need a conman pathological socio path to be an advocate for blue collar workers, this can just as easily come from sane and well meaning politicians. And you don't need to put immigrant children in cages or play the race card. Or accuse your opposition of being communists. Those were all hooks that many blue collar workers rallied around but as you say it wasn't these divisive issues that drew them in as much as it was that their plight was finally being recognized and that they were validated. In the end historians looking back may actually credit Trump in a positive way in the way he validated the working class. He opened a door and that was important. And politicians that don't carry on what Trump started will do so at their peril. Of course without the divisive and polarizing tactics.

Being heard and validated is by the way the overwhelming message you also here from the BLM movement. As I have mentioned many times here there are disenfranchised on both sides that should be natural allies.

[JuanP]

Being heard and validated is by the way the overwhelming message you also here from the BLM movement. As I have mentioned many times here there are disenfranchised on both sides that should be natural allies.

I completely agree with that. The problem is not the BLM cause, but the way they are going about it. I have been fighting racism all my life and I consider myself a rabid anti racist. My problem with the BLM and cancel culture, particularly among Millenials, is that they are going about it in all the wrong ways with extremist, racist, violent, and abusive behavior. If someone like me, who has been fighting for the same cause for decades, feels alienated by this, I believe that most people will, which means that their movement will fail, IMO.

My wife and I have volunteered helping Africans Americans for 30 years. I tutored many to teach them basic literacy skills and remedial English when I went to college. We've volunteered at soup kitchens and homeless shelters in minority inner city neighborhoods. We've funded, designed, built, and managed food gardens in those neighborhoods, particularly in schools, but also in community centers, libraries, parks, etc. for about a decade now. I've volunteered teaching life skills to African American HS students. We regularly volunteer with a program for African American women with children whose partners are in prison and allow them to host community events at the farm for free.

And, in spite of decades working with, volunteering, donating to, and assisting poor African Americans and deeply symphatizing with their plight, I feel completely alienated by the way the BLM is going about fighting for their cause. And I know from talking to many people from all walks of life in the USA that a majority support their cause, but not their ways, and that many are feeling alienated by this. I fear a potential racist backlash as a consequence that could undo much of the little progress achieved on the subject in the last decades.

[Pops]

I don't have a "black friend." I don't even know any black people. Nor any gay people. I don't volunteer, donate or march in their rallies.

But I don't vote for racist homophobes for whom division and acrimony is a strategy
.

[Tanada]

I don't have a "black friend." I don't even know any black people. Nor any gay people. I don't volunteer, donate or march in their rallies.

But I don't vote for racist homophobes for whom division and acrimony is a strategy
.

Maybe if you did know some people different than your own demographic on a personal level you would also know that they cover as broad a spectrum and hold views on the current President widely different from your own? I don't mean the high level D activist like Al Sharpton, I mean the regular street level people you could meet farming in MO or living in a nearby town.

[Newfie]

I keel thinking back in 2 simple things. The Trump “No More Bullshit” posters that we say in Pennsylvania. But also the black ladies I met on a criminal trial jury; they were also tired of the “bullshit” although they didn't use that word. They did say they were tired of the thugs running the streets and wrecking their neighborhood and they didn't buy the defendants sweet innocent smile for one second, they had seen that bullshit before.

I get the sense the majority of people are tired of the BS from both sides.

[JuanP]

I don't have a "black friend." I don't even know any black people. Nor any gay people. I don't volunteer, donate or march in their rallies.

But I don't vote for racist homophobes for whom division and acrimony is a strategy
.

There's nothing wrong with that. I only knew a handful of black people growing up in Uruguay (they were African diplomats and their families) and no gays. Living in today's Miami Beach I do have friends, coworkers, neighbors, and acquaintances of all colors, ages, national origins, sexes, and sexual orientations.

I read your comment below, so I understand your political views better now. Am I right in thinking you voted for Biden then?

[Pops]

Not when it comes to gop & trump, Tanada, somewhere around 85-90% of blacks voted for Biden.

About 87% of Black voters nationwide chose Biden over Trump, according to preliminary national exit polling. Those early exit polls show that 19% of Black men voted for Trump, as did 9% of Black women.

An Associated Press VoteCast survey showed overall larger Black support for Biden — 90%. According to the AP survey, 12% of Black men voted for Trump, while only 6% of Black women supported him.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/ ... 222692002/

And guess whose votes trump wants to toss?

In Wisconsin, Trump's campaign has paid for recounts in just two counties, one of which is Milwaukee County. In Michigan, Trump personally called two Republican officials who now want to decertify the vote in Wayne County, which includes Detroit. In Pennsylvania, Trump's legal team has challenged vote-counting procedures and made unsupported allegations of fraud in two cities: Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. In Georgia, the Trump team filed a lawsuit targeting absentee ballots in Savannah, and another suit took aim at the state's ballot-curing process.
The pattern is obvious and appalling: Trump and the Republicans are trying to invalidate votes in cities with large African American populations — cities that happen to have voted overwhelmingly for Joe Biden. In effect, Trump is arguing that Black people have no right to vote him out of office.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... story.html

It doesn't matter how many black people I may get to "know" to assuage my conscious, or reputation, if I vote for a party who actively works against their interests. The whole "working people support trump" because: economy —is bunk. It is the same strategy as it ever was:

But the most explicit repudiation of an incumbent president since FDR’s victory in 1932 makes clear that the fusion coalition the Southern Strategy was designed to crush has, nevertheless, grown in strength. Despite his promise to champion American workers as a political outsider, Trump lost to Clinton among poor and low-income Americans in 2016 by eight points. Four years later, he lost to Biden among the same demographic by 11.5 points – a 40% gain, representing millions of people who have seen through the lie of the Southern Strategy. When you consider that Trump improved over 2016 among Americans who make more than $100,000 a year, it’s clear that this crack in Trump’s imagined “populist” base was the real key to Biden’s victory. Trump lost because his explicit appeals to fear and division increased turnout among poor Black and brown people and their white allies.

This is the real reason Trump and his enablers cannot accept the results of the 2020 election: to do so would reveal that the Southern Strategy has run its course. By investing in division, Republicans have clung to power for half a century, betting on having the larger half if they could split the nation in two. But increased turnout, especially among Black, brown, Native and low-income Americans of every race, not only flipped the rust belt but also broke through the sun belt in Arizona and Georgia. Despite the obstacles of a public health crisis and intentional voter suppression, a new majority engaged the democratic process in 2020 and rejected the Southern Strategy. Republicans are standing by a delusional president because they cannot yet imagine a future apart from the imagined past they promised to white America.

[Outcast_Searcher]

Progress is a HOAX

Yes. We still live in caves, bang on rocks, and forage berries for a living.

All that stuff about powerful computers doubling as a cell phone, GPS networks, electric cars, solar energy, jet planes, and any other technology you'd care to contemplate since written history (ironically, including writing itself) is just a conspiracy theory.

Why even bother to post such nonsense?

Big hint: Just because progress generally has some side effects and consequences (which humanity may well handle badly over time) doesn't mean REALITY DOESN'T EXIST.

[Outcast_Searcher]

I don't have a "black friend." I don't even know any black people. Nor any gay people. I don't volunteer, donate or march in their rallies.

But I don't vote for racist homophobes for whom division and acrimony is a strategy
.

As a white guy who happens to have a LOT of black friends and a number of gay, trans, etc. friends (I don't make my friendships on superficialities, but what people stand for, are interested in, how they behave, etc), it's amazing the assumptions people make about how huge group X is somehow homogeneous in their attitudes. The EXACT OPPOSITE is the case, overall, even if, for example, lots of people vote for Trump for POTUS (for MANY different reasons). For example, perceived self interest in their family's finances was a very common reason people voted for Trump. No mustache twisting evil conspiracies against other groups intended or required.

I don't donate or volunteer or march in rallies, etc. either. I prefer to help individuals or families, one at a time, as seems to make sense, based on what I see happening "on the ground".

This is the US. People are allowed to have differing opinions and express them, even if many will totally disagree with them, to the extent of great anger.

[Outcast_Searcher]

But when I express a conservative viewpoint on globalism, the anti-science stances of the D party on certain topics, or a belief in national borders being a key to economic security none of my background or the way I treat other human beings matters because it is assumed I am a deplorable-racist-sexist-homophobic-mysoginist.

BRAVO !!!! That's exactly the way I feel.

It's not just D's who make such misapprehensions, commonly. Many groups do. One example:

I don't like organized religion, to the extent I refuse to attend any organized church.

But several times over the years, when I learned that my girlfriend's adult Sunday school class was doing some project to help a group of people, I handed her a check (which she later would point out was more than the entire Sunday school class gave), and told her that as long as the funds were all going to go for THAT cause, fine. But otherwise I wanted any money NOT going to that cause back, as random church improvements, etc. were NOT something I wanted to support.

Her class never could figure out how to classify me. Was I a lazy (sleeping in Sundays), evil, plot hatching sinner refusing "God's wisdom", was I a very weird but nice guy, or something else? And of course, they NEVER would quit trying to get me to go to church and Sunday school EVERY TIME I attended a social function they had with my girlfriend, no matter how many times I politely refused.

That steadfast refusal to perceive reality and make false assumptions seems to be endemic in human behavior -- especially groups of any size.

[OutcastPhilosopher]

Progress is a HOAX

Yes. We still live in caves, bang on rocks, and forage berries for a living.

All that stuff about powerful computers doubling as a cell phone, GPS networks, electric cars, solar energy, jet planes, and any other technology you'd care to contemplate since written history (ironically, including writing itself) is just a conspiracy theory.

Why even bother to post such nonsense?

Big hint: Just because progress generally has some side effects and consequences (which humanity may well handle badly over time) doesn't mean REALITY DOESN'T EXIST.

Yep. Humans built themselves a prison and Outcast Searcher loves being a prisoner inside of it.

Outcast Searcher: Hell yeah I love my slavery keep giving me some more.

Bill Gates: Ohhh yeah I got a vaccine for you buddy....it'll give you Bells Palsy.

Outcast Seacher: Sounds perfect....I'll be first in line.

You can have your jet planes that fall out of the sky....

You can have your cell phones that cause cancer and sterilize you....

You can have your electric cars that spontaneously combust....