(11-17-2016, 11:51 PM)taramarie Wrote: I am just going to leave this right here.
You want to build bridges you have to cease identity politics and labeling.
It is about engagement and part of that is dropping stereotype at the door and listening. Then you know the person more and what the core issues are. THEN you can discuss.
Should be the top video. Sorry I found this interview on fb. If not it is the video that has "Its about engagement" at the top.
Its about engagement
But identity politics is nearly a surrogate for ideology in a country so polarized between center-left and Hard Right. It's who gets the goodies and who gets the shaft. For the next four years, the well-connected Right will get the rewards and everyone else will get taxed to support those rewards..
At the worst, consider (if without the serial mass murders of Saddam Hussein) Iraq under Saddam Hussein. If one was in the right side of the regime one could live up to standards characteristic of at least southern Europe. If not one was living under standards characteristic of India (except with great fear). Government worked for one or made life miserable in what proved an Apartheid system (Christians and non-Kurdish Sunni Muslims OK, Shiites and Kurds not OK).
It's patronage or punishment. It looks as if Donald Trump will be a big-government Republican, using the Treasury to reward those to whom he made the biggest promises but cutting off government services that he can get away with cutting off aid to everyone else. That happened on a smaller scale with the younger Bush.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.