05-15-2016, 06:43 PM
(05-07-2016, 06:48 PM)Kinser79 Wrote: Eric, you are abusive toward everyone. And everyone knows it. That said keep me on ignore. I have very little but insults for you as you've proven yourself incapable of learning anything.
You underestimate Eric. He can learn a few things.
People just don't change their value systems. In 2008 I went to the local Republican headquarters and asked about local politicians, as I usually split my ticket. I can vote for a Republican for sheriff or for a judge. I said that I had made up my mind on Barack Obama, and I found myself in an effort to brainwash me. "He's a Muslim". "He hates America". "He will sympathize with terrorists".
Being a Muslim? It wasn't even true, but if it were, as Colin Powell put it, "Who cares?" Islam is a moral view of the world, and even as a secularist I recognize that I have more in common with religious people who believe in something than with secularists who believe in nothing but Self. So I dislike drugs, drunkenness, sex-centered life, and the idea that everyone can be out for himself alone. So do Muslims and fundamentalist Christians. That he hates America? There are ways to express profound hate in America -- like the New Black Panther Party. He was as mainstream as anyone gets. Sympathy with terrorists? He has proved himself on that. He needs not make fanatical statements on the topic; he has only had them killed.
The next day I went to Democratic headquarters and volunteered.
At our celebration of the election of Barack Obama and many other Democratic wins, I explained why I had become an active volunteer.
"See these wrinkles? See this graying, thinning hair? Do I look like the sort of person who is going to change values that I have held for thirty years so easily and without compelling cause?"
Can I change some values? Sure -- when I see a need for change. Having been threatened with gay-bashing, I saw the problem not in being insufficiently macho (I am about average on the sissy-to-brute continuum, and I believe that the right place to be), but instead that people think it acceptable to beat homosexuals for being homosexual. If I can never accept homosexual molestation of children (heterosexual molestation is no better), I can at least do my share to create a safer climate for people who might be gay-bashed. I quit telling "gay jokes" or ridiculing apparent gays for their tastes. I started to accept the inclusive attitudes toward homosexuality. If they want marriage and children and they are hostile to sexual abuse of children, then I can adapt.
It is a good thing that people show some ideological rigidity if they are not extremists. Values allow one to have some moral compass.
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.