wtfamievendoinghere

[wtfamievendoinghere]

I strongly oppose Trump, and I want to issue an invitation to any and all Trump supporters to message me and have a conversation. This would not be a debate. I think the only way to combat hatred is through understanding, and I think there is far too much hatred in the world and in our country right now. I want to hear your assumptions about me and other people I might interact with, and I promise to respond honestly. My goal with this is to share our core values and see if they are as different as so many seem to think. Again, I am not looking for a debate. If we have a long conversation about values and decide that it would be worthwhile to exchange sources and reasons for our worldviews we can do that, but I don’t think it is helpful to start out that way without understanding each other first.

[wtfamievendoinghere]

I read it. I will always read what the other side has to say. I just want to know what sources you have looked at and why you are so sure Trump will be good for our country. The Biden administration was not great, but most of the problems our country had in the past few years have been shared by nearly every other country because these were global issues. Why do you think you would compromise your mind if you turned against Trump? What is the pull that you are resisting? If you would like to talk some more privately I would welcome it

I just posted about how I have sympathy for Trump voters, and I want to add on to that. Some of them were willfully ignorant consciously or subconsciously, but we need to consider what they would risk if they successfully figured out the truth. If all their friends and family see Trump as a savior, seeing him for who he truly is would isolate them from almost every close connection in their lives and take away their fantasy that someone in the government is going to make everything better for them. They would be left with a bleak world and no one to help them cope. Some people on the left would accept them, but many would be waiting with “I told you so”s and telling them that all the Trump supporters they love are evil and that they were a moron for falling for the lies. It might be the right thing to do to know the truth, but cults keep people in them by making the prospect of leaving unthinkable.

Imagine clicking on an article that risks tearing your world apart that everyone tells you there is no need to click on because it is all propaganda and you are smart enough that you already know the truth. It would be easy to convince yourself that what you already believe to be true is true without looking further into it, especially if you have never been taught the importance of challenging your beliefs. They can keep feeling smarter than others, not risk their relationships with all their friends and family, and be optimistic about the future, or they can risk all that to possibly learn a painful and bleak truth.

This doesn’t describe all Trump supporters, but it describes a lot of them. People call maga a cult, but they also blame people for not being able to break free.

[wtfamievendoinghere]

I just posted about how I have sympathy for Trump voters, and I want to add on to that. Some of them were willfully ignorant consciously or subconsciously, but we need to consider what they would risk if they successfully figured out the truth. If all their friends and family see Trump as a savior, seeing him for who he truly is would isolate them from almost every close connection in their lives and take away their fantasy that someone in the government is going to make everything better for them. They would be left with a bleak world and no one to help them cope. Some people on the left would accept them, but many would be waiting with “I told you so”s and telling them that all the Trump supporters they love are evil and that they were a moron for falling for the lies. It might be the right thing to do to know the truth, but cults keep people in them by making the prospect of leaving unthinkable.

Imagine clicking on an article that risks tearing your world apart that everyone tells you there is no need to click on because it is all propaganda and you are smart enough that you already know the truth. It would be easy to convince yourself that what you already believe to be true is true without looking further into it, especially if you have never been taught the importance of challenging your beliefs. They can keep feeling smarter than others, not risk their relationships with all their friends and family, and be optimistic about the future, or they can risk all that to possibly learn a painful and bleak truth.

This doesn’t describe all Trump supporters, but it describes a lot of them. People call maga a cult, but they also blame people for not being able to break free.

[wtfamievendoinghere]

I have sympathy for Trump voters. I know a lot of people on the left can’t feel that right now, and it’s okay to be really fucking angry at them, but losing all empathy for a group of people is dangerous. I have watched some clips from Trump’s speeches, and they were the things I had ignored before the election because I knew they were lies, but his speeches were not just him spewing racist hatred. He tried to brand himself as the anti-war candidate and succeeded with a lot of people. He and his cronies talked about the exploitation of people trying to immigrate illegally, and some believed that the best way to protect those people was to make it clear that America had a secure border. Some people believed him when he said that democrats were trying to make infanticide legal or that DEI meant hiring unqualified candidates simply because they were in a certain group.

Trump exploited human nature to get power, and he was able to do it because a lot of the people he manipulated were unaware of their human nature or thought that those tricks couldn’t possibly work on them. Even the people who bought into his racist rhetoric thought that they were just basing their opinions on facts and logic because they were lied to so many times. We are all products of how we started and everything that happened since, and we are all vulnerable to some degree to the tactics that Trump uses. Thinking that we are an entirely different type of people to Trump supporters means that we will eventually fall into the same traps. When the rest of the world convinced themselves that they were fundamentally different than the Nazis, it meant that Trump supporters didn’t consider that the same form of manipulative radicalization might be happening to them.

[wtfamievendoinghere]

I feel like too many people, both utilitarian and not, don’t think about these things in regards to utilitarianism

Even in a purely, coldly utilitarian moral system, there are three questions to ask before accepting harmful or destructive Means because they ostensibly lead to a better End:

Do the Means lead to some other negative End, in addition to the intended one? The classical example of the naïve utilitarian doctor who kills a patient in order to harvest their organs and save five patients, in practice, if accepted, leads to general loss of trust in doctors and hospitals and therefore to much greater loss of life; hence, doctors should follow a hard rule of not killing patients to harvest their organs, even if this might save more lives in the shortest term.

Are the Means necessary in order to achieve the End? The negative utility of atrocious Means still ends up in the final account along with the supposed positive utility of the End (and without the penalty for uncertainty that the latter should arguably be given). The Means are as much part of the final state as the End.

Do the Means, in fact, lead to the End? Any consequentialist justification for an atrocity-for-the-greater-good automatically fails if the atrocity does not plausibly bring out the greater good, even before any other consideration is taken. It's all well and good to say that you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs, but (ignoring for the moment that people are arguably owed more consideration than eggs) a large chunk of the 20th century was a sustained and furious festival of egg-crushing and egg-trampling that resulted in precisely zero omelettes.

[wtfamievendoinghere]

I’m not sure why I’m posting this here, but this is where I shout into the void and I just want to say stuff.

I firmly believe that no suffering is a good thing in and of itself. The suffering of an evil person might be a net good for society, but that is because of all the results of the suffering rather than the suffering itself. So in this way, I think that beyond our emotional reactions to someone’s suffering no one really “deserves” to suffer I will probably say more, and likely not many people will even see this, but if anyone does, I want to know if this is a hot take

[wtfamievendoinghere]

I love elder-sitting because it’s just like babysitting except you offer them bourbon and wine for being good rather than cookies

[wtfamievendoinghere]

I may have chronic pain but thankfully I’m a masochist so I guess it works out