The Effects of the FB Filter-Bubble re Attitudes of Trump Voters

On Facebook, I recently posed a Tweet by Chloe Valdary, a kind-hearted even-keel peace-making thinker who is most definitely not pro-Trump.  She is willing to call out problems on the political left as well as the political right. I find her opinions thoughtful and instructive.

Here is how I introduced Chloe's Tweet (above) on FB:

I won't be voting for Trump, but I'm still concerned he might win re-election. I think many people feel similarly -- otherwise, why do so many people keep talking about the election and the polling? I've often wondered why so many people will vote for Trump, despite his many cataclysmic negative personal qualities. I'm glad that Chloe Valdary asked Trump voters to respond to her Twitter account by stating why they support Trump. She has received more than 300 responses that I found interesting to review. These responses don't change my mind about Trump, but I do see many Trump supporters in a different light.

In response, I saw a firestorm of anger from people on the political left. People who were angry with me that I would even consider what Trump voters think.  Many of them seem to be assuming that Trump voters are perfectly aligned with Trump. They vented at Trump voters as close-minded people who are, seemingly, identical to Trump in everything they think.

I see a big tent on on the right as well as on the left. Just as there are people who are going to hold their nose and vote for Biden, there are people on the right who are going to hold their nose and vote for Trump. I think it is a worthy project to ask those Trump supporters why they are voting for a man who I find to be so personally despicable. Yes, there are many Trump supporters who I do find deplorable (and some of those people on the left too), but there are many other people (some I know personally) who I like as human beings, who I disagree with on many issues, but who are going to vote for Trump.

Instead of curiosity in reaction to my FB post, I'm seeing lots of hostility for even asking the question, for inquiring. This unwillingness to be curious about the facts troubles me on many levels. In fact, this is self-defeating behavior suggesting an "analysis" that has been contaminated by roiling emotions. I understand the emotions and I understand the stakes of this election, but it seems that many of us could do much better. Rather than being smart, they are getting drunk on anger. They need to listen to Yoda:

“Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.”

“Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny. Consume you, it will.”

Anger… fear… aggression. The dark side are they. Easily they flow, quick to join you in a fight. If once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will, as it did Obi-Wan’s apprentice.

They also need to consider this idea by Sun Tzu, from the Art of War":

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.

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A Line I Don’t Cross in WokeLand

I saw this announcement from Indigo Books on a Twitter feed. Indigo is a big book store in Canada. Here's a recent store announcement:

Indigo is a private company and they can do whatever they want, of course.

I have long been concerned about religions, though, and the Land of the Woke appears to be the birthplace of a new religion, at the same time as many traditional religions are losing members.

Here is the big clue that we are dealing with a religious cult: the phrase "without question or judgement."  I don't accept anything without question or judgement. It's not like I understand everything, of course. There are many things about which I am an ignoramus and where my questioning and judgment hit dead ends.  But I would never make an announcement that I am willing to accept anything, especially anything complex and potential harmful to young people, without at least trying to question it.  Whenever an organization tells me that I cannot question something, that's the smell of religion.

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Whites-Only City Employee Meeting in Seattle

What planet am I on? I need to re-ask that each day. Today, I'm on a planet where only the "white" employees of Seattle were invited to a meeting set up by the City of Seattle, apparently for the purpose of disrupting their employees' sanity. Here's an excerpt from a City Journal article titled: "Cult Programming in Seattle."

Last month, the City of Seattle’s Office of Civil Rights sent an email inviting “white City employees” to attend a training session on “Interrupting Internalized Racial Superiority and Whiteness,” a program designed to help white workers examine their “complicity in the system of white supremacy” and “interrupt racism in ways that are accountable to Black, Indigenous and People of Color.” . . .

At the beginning of the session, the trainers explain that white people have internalized a sense of racial superiority, which has made them unable to access their “humanity” and caused “harm and violence” to people of color. The trainers claim that “individualism,” “perfectionism,” “intellectualization,” and “objectivity” are all vestiges of this internalized racial oppression and must be abandoned in favor of social-justice principles. In conceptual terms, the city frames the discussion around the idea that black Americans are reducible to the essential quality of “blackness” and white Americans are reducible to the essential quality of “whiteness”—that is, the new metaphysics of good and evil.Once the diversity trainers have established this basic conceptual framework, they encourage white employees to “practice self-talk that affirms [their] complicity in racism” and work on “undoing [their] own whiteness.”

Seattle seems to be a City on the cutting edge of . . . something I'm still struggling to understand, but it seems to fit within the framework of a cult. There is a lot of troublesome information to digest in this article, including the reference to the new race-sensitive math curriculum being considered by the Seattle school district.

I'm wondering how much the Diversity Trainer was paid for the Seattle meeting and whether that Trainer's name was Syvester McMonkey McBean (from Dr. Suess' The Sneetches). Maybe that sarcasm is apt, given that Suess' book was written for little children. After all, even young children can easily understand that it is morally wrong to treat groups of people differently based on how they look.

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Pew Study: Religion Still on the Decline

Interesting stats on Religiosity from Pew, published in October, 2019.

 

In my view, there are also many other forms of groupishness that I see as religious or quasi religious that are not considered by these surveys. I also suspect that as traditional religions melt away, other groups that don't look like traditional religions at first glance, but which have similar functions, take their place.

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