wasn't sure how to title this....

[Canarr]

Here's the trouble: that perspective is a lie, and empathizing with it doesn't change it nor, by itself, show any way of getting people who currently believe it to recognize it for the lie that it is.

No, of course it doesn't. You still need to provide actual arguments to try and make people change their mind. However, empathizing with them may actually give you the opportunity to try and do so, which simply dismissing them as racist, sexist, uneducated Deplorables will not.

From the article:


In the beginning of their conversation, Virginia asks Gustavo how likely he'd be to support transgender rights legislation. Gustavo says he wouldn't support it because he's worried about predatory men using the law as an opportunity to enter women's bathrooms.

Virginia asks why he feels that way.

"I'm from South America, and in South America we don't like fags," he tells her.

This next moment is crucial: Virginia doesn't jump on Gustavo for the slur, and instead says, "I'm gay," in a friendly manner. Gustavo doesn't recoil. Actually, he becomes more interested.

Gustavo and Virginia go on to discuss how much they love their partners, and how that love helps them overcome adversity. Gustavo tells Virginia that his wife is a disabled person. "God gave me the ability to love a disabled person," he says, and that taking care of one another is why love matters.

"That resonate a lots with me," Virginia responds. "For me, these laws, and including transgender people are about that. They're about how we treat one another."

Now that Gustavo is in a place where he's more open, Virginia asks him to imagine what the worst thing could happen if he used a bathroom with a transgender person. He admits he wouldn't be scared. Then comes the breakthrough.

"Listen, probably I was mistaken," he says of his original position on trans rights.

Virginia asks him again if he'd vote in favor of banning transgender discrimination. "In favor," he says.


Of course, not everybody will be accessible to reason. But do you really wanna write of 62 million Americans as lost cases?

[HYHYBT]

Here's the trouble: that perspective is a lie, and empathizing with it doesn't change it nor, by itself, show any way of getting people who currently believe it to recognize it for the lie that it is.

[Canarr]

I'll leave this link here. A lot of good points:

In talking with researchers and looking at the studies on this, I found that it is possible to reduce people’s racial anxiety and prejudices. And the canvassing idea was regarded as very promising. But, researchers cautioned, the process of reducing people’s racism will take time and, crucially, empathy.

This is the direct opposite of the kind of culture the internet has fostered — typically focused on calling out racists and shaming them in public. This doesn’t work. And as much as it might seem like a lost cause to understand the perspectives of people who may qualify as racist, understanding where they come from is a needed step to being able to speak to them in a way that will help reduce the racial biases they hold.

[SNIP]

“Telling people they’re racist, sexist, and xenophobic is going to get you exactly nowhere,” said Alana Conner, executive director of Stanford University’s Social Psychological Answers to Real-World Questions Center. “It’s such a threatening message. One of the things we know from social psychology is when people feel threatened, they can’t change, they can’t listen.”

Arlie Hochschild, a sociologist and author of Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, provided an apt analogy for white rural Americans’ feeling of neglect: As they see it, they are all in this line toward a hill with prosperity at the top. But over the past few years, globalization and income stagnation have caused the line to stop moving. And from their perspective, people — black and brown Americans, women — are now cutting in the line, because they’re getting new (and more equal) opportunities through new anti-discrimination laws and policies like affirmative action.

I get that it's appealing to treat Trump's voters with scorn, but it's not going to be helpful in the long run.

[Valinor]

But a little experimentation on my part has shown that that's pretty close to what you see.

Well, as has been pointed out, if a conservative is partisan enough to consume news in a "micro-targeted" fashion (as John Oliver put it), then it likely doesn't matter if liberals were "crying wolf" on the issues of racism and sexism, because these conservatives wouldn't listen, anyway.

Also, just about every public forum we have was so saturated with talk of the elections that it really is unlikely that anybody could have been unaware of what Trump was saying and doing, or that conservatives (as well as liberals) were tearing into him for it.

But, if a conservative somehow did manage to block out everything outside of a single, self-validating news stream, like the Wall Street Journal's red Facebook feed, then I would say again that it doesn't really matter what liberals were crying wolf about, because these conservatives wouldn't hear anything they were saying to begin with.

I felt pretty sure Hillary would beat any Republican except Trump.

That's interesting, because I'd actually heard the exact opposite from a number of people - that Hillary Clinton would lose to any Republican except Donald Trump.

I remember Trevor Noah commenting that the two nominees were both very lucky, because after (1) it was revealed that just about everything that Hillary Clinton had said in her own defense during the e-mail scandal turned out to be untrue, and (2) Donald Trump spent his speeches talking about what a great job Saddam Hussein did of killing terrorists instead of capitalizing on the e-mail scandal to put the Clinton campaign down for good, it was clear that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were "each running against the only candidate they could possibly beat."

The reasoning, basically, was that Hillary Clinton was so scandal-plagued, and Donald Trump was such a buffoon, that neither of them would have had any chance of defeating any of the other 21 candidates who had been running in the primaries. Clinton and Trump's only chance of becoming President was to face off against the one opponent who would look just as bad.

Now, please understand, I'm not saying that your reasoning is wrong, Hyena Dandy. I think you make a very good argument. I'm not saying that Trevor Noah was wrong, either. I just think that there were probably many, many factors influencing how, and whether, any given person would vote in this election, and ultimately, who would win.

[s_stabeler]

There's also the fact that neither Trump or Obama had significant national-level politics experience- Obama hadn't been completed a single term as Senator IIRC, while Trump has never held a political post. It's harder to accept a Washington longtimer like Clinton as a reformer.

[Hyena Dandy]

Q. Are you saying that these views actually simulate what a conservative or liberal sees?
A. No. It’s possible that users have a wide variety of news items appearing in their feeds. These are simply posts from sources that aligned with a majority of users of a particular political view in Facebook’s study.

And Washington Post's response is defending a specific idea.

Here's the thing. FB ensures you're likely to see what you most agree with or interact with, or things your friends agree with and interact with. It does not check that you said "Conservative" and only show you these things.

But a little experimentation on my part has shown that that's pretty close to what you see. You'll see links your friends post. The more you interact with (often the ones youa gree with getting liked and clicked) the more like it you find.

For example, a gay or transgender person living in a red state might have a very different perspective on being asked to relate to the plight of people who have, for decades, fought and voted against laws that would protect LGBT people from discrimination. Or worse.

Yeah, they're the people least likely to be able to. As a bisexual, I can tell you that I am the last person who you should ask about how much empathy you should have towards, say, my boyfriend's grandmother. I believe in principle on being happy with human life, but if I could wave my hand and cause her a heart attack, I'd happily do it without a second thought. Which is exactly why I'm the sort of person you shouldn't ask here. LGBT people are not immune from the pettiness that pervades the rest of the species. We're not magical saints.

You don't get any credit for having empathy for people who you don't think are really doing anything that hurts you. Nevertheless, empathy is needed, because empathy is what will help us move forward.

Black people can be pretty goddamn homophobic too. It's common in black culture, especially the parts of it in the cities, and not in Hollywood and LA. The guy who directed "Birth of a Nation" once said he would never debase the "Dignity of the black man" by playing a gay character.

That doesn't mean we should screw over black people, though. When it comes to black people, we have an understanding that they're in an awful situation, and terrible situations lead to people expressing their frustration with it in ways that can seem counter-intuitive to someone genuinely in that situation.

But when it comes to shitty behavior by the wrong sort of white people, we forget all that and treat them as morally bankrupt scum. Yes. They DO do horrible things. People around the world do horrible things every day. Why can we understand that this is driven in large part by societal forces for everyone EXCEPT poor white westerners?

When these towns supported Donald Trump, was that, as Mr. Wong puts it, a brick thrown through the windows of liberal elites? Undoubtedly. But may I point out, these people would have voted for the Republican nominee, even if it had been George Pataki.

A lot of the places that Trump won off of, are places that Obama took pretty heavily in 2008, and only a little less strongly in 2012. Obama was promising to make Washington better, to make it different. It didn't work. But it's pretty clear now that that's what they wanted, because they once again voted for a candidate who positioned themselves as fundamentally anti-establishment.

I honestly think that anti-establishment vein was what produced this result. I said to people going into the primaries that I felt pretty sure Hillary would beat any Republican except Trump. No other candidate had such a "Not a standard politician" feel to them. You could see it in the debates. A lot of guys went for it, but Trump staked his claim there, and that netted him the nomination. The last four were a guy proposing a different type of change-Washington that was fundamentally closer to Obama's (Kasich,) and guys with an appeal to only one strong part of the Republican party (corporate leadership in Rubio, and evangelicals in Cruz.) Since Trump's anti-establishment pitch was stronger than Kasich's, he ended up winning.

[Canarr]

Finally ... If, after everything I have said, you're still not convinced, Canarr, then I think we're just going to have to agree to disagree on this. I don't believe that it's really possible for most (if not all) people in the U.S. to have gone this entire year without hearing of the substance of the racism and sexism controversies surrounding Donald Trump. If you still do, then we're clearly never going to see eye-to-eye on this, so I will let the matter rest.

First of all, thanks for the detailed background on this.

Second: my apologies if I wasn't clear on my original post(s) on the topic, both in this and in other threads: I don't actually believe that none of Trump's voters knew about the controversies surrounding him.

If I'm not mistaken, close to 62 million Americans voted for Trump. No, I do not believe that all 62 million of them managed to avoid hearing about Trump's many, many, many scandalous, stupid, contradictory statements. But neither do I believe that 62 million Americans are racist, sexist assholes.

Neither do I make the claim to understand why all those people felt motivated to vote for him. I do believe the feeling ot being left behind, disregarded, unwanted by the political establishment (yes, both Democrat and Republican) is one important factor. We see that in Europe as well. But it probably doesn't account for his popularity in the higher income brackets.

There is probably a multitude of reasons. I still believe that Clinton as a candidate didn't have it in her to mobilize enough voters; some may believe she's a criminal, or corrupt, or too liberal, or too conservative, or too female... in the end, she didn't get the voter turnout to beat Trump, and that's that.

But what I *am* sure of, is that condemning, vilifying, discarding his voters isn't going to fix this. You (Americans) will need to talk to these people, figure out their grievances, help them find another solution than setting it all on fire. And we (Europeans) need to do the same to those among us who feel like Trump's voters do - otherwise we'll have the same shit to deal with that you do.

Okay, maybe not the same shit. Similar shit, but not the same. I don't think there's another Trump out there.

[s_stabeler]

they might well be motivated by believing that Trump was legitimately better than Hillary for them. However, that does not invalidate asking the question about if they seriously believe that someone who has expressed views of almost all isms there are (racism, sexism, nationalism, religious bigotry and arguably classism (it's complicated, but when you claim to be self-made because all the help you received from family was 'a small loan of a million dollars' you are at best out-of-touch with how hard it actually is to build a business from literally nothing. Trump also wasn't taking the same risks- had his business failed, he would not likely have been truly destitute ( in the sense of needing a MW job to keep a roof over his head and sweating over if he could pay the bills) while a normal small businessman could actually face personal bankruptcy if the business fails even if it is an LLC due to the loss of income meaning they can't pay their personal bills.

[HYHYBT]

Third, if a person really is partisan enough to intentionally seal themselves in a bubble, to filter out any information that doesn't validate the opinions they already hold...

It's usually not intentional. It's more that sources that line up with what you believe register as more trustworthy than those that say the opposite. Magnify that with a good portion of the news you hear being filtered by what your friends decide to share, and it's more a matter of having to actively avoid the bubble than of intentionally choosing to close yourself into it.

But it's one of those things where, however you got there in the first place, if you stay too long you *will* become the kind who would choose it intentionally.

[kathykit]

*will try to keep this brief, honestly not sure how to word things*

To give some brief background - "Grace" used to be a member of the church my family attends, she's a lovely person, and happens to be bi-racial.

Anyhow, it's getting to the point where I'm feeling that while I do not want to unfriend "Grace" on Facebook, I do need to hide her posts from my Facebook feed. And that makes me sad, because this is a woman whom I had liked and had a lot of respect for.

I really understand your feeling!
Just like my friends on facebook, they seem really different from before.
Actually I from Hong Kong, the government in there also messy.
But my friends just try to against everything whatever right or wrong, they just focus the people.
What I have done also like you, hide their posts. I tried to talk to them but useless.

[Anthony K. S.]

Or, check out the Exec Editor at Cracked.

I am addressing this separately, because, well, it's a separate issue from whether or not Trump supporters actually knew the substance of the racism and sexism controversies involving Donald Trump.

Now, I expressed some of my thoughts on David Wong's Op-Ed in a post on this thread.

Here, I would just like to say something. Perception is always going to vary with the individual, but I honestly think that disputing the idea that Trump supporters are racist was probably the least salient aspect of the argument that the author was putting forward.

David Wong did, in fact, acknowledge that the people in these rural communities hold a number of, to put it kindly, misguided beliefs about blacks, Muslims, gays, women, etc., although he also argued that it wasn't as bad as people would make it out to be.

Ultimately, his point wasn't about whether the residents of these small towns were racist or not, or whether they cared that Trump was.

Rather, he was arguing that the economic devastation in these communities, combined with the failure of the political establishment to provide any help or even show any concern, had created a situation so bleak and hopeless that these people felt that they had no choice but to vote against the status quo, any way they could. So even if they did find Donald Trump a despicable person, they simply could not afford to let that stop them from voting for him.

Now ... Please forgive me if this sounds harsh, but people are not under any obligation to agree with what David Wong is saying.

For example, a gay or transgender person living in a red state might have a very different perspective on being asked to relate to the plight of people who have, for decades, fought and voted against laws that would protect LGBT people from discrimination. Or worse.

In fact, I would be willing to bet that at least some of the people who actually live in the small towns that Mr. Wong is speaking of probably don't agree with him (or at least not completely) for one reason or another.

But now that David Wong's perspective has been put forward, I would agree that people here, and anyone else who reads it, should take it into account when deciding whether or not it's fair to judge that for Trump supporters, racism and sexism were not "deal breakers" in choosing a President.

You can choose not to agree with them, but please, at least listen to what they have to say.

All of which is just looking for the easy answers - which just aren't there.

This, I can actually agree with, from both sides.

[Anthony K. S.]

Check this out.

I have, and I noticed this in the explanation of the Wall Street Journal's methodology :

Q. Are you saying that these views actually simulate what a conservative or liberal sees?
A. No. It’s possible that users have a wide variety of news items appearing in their feeds. These are simply posts from sources that aligned with a majority of users of a particular political view in Facebook’s study.

The WSJ website created those two feeds so that people could see and compare the most widely shared "very liberal" and "very conservative" posts on Facebook. They never claimed that this is what liberal and conservative Facebook users were actually seeing.

More to the point, they never asserted that conservative Facebook users did not have news posts from other sources in their feeds. Which could easily have carried mentions of what was going on in the Presidential election, considering how saturated the news media was with those stories over the past several months.

I think I heard on John Oliver that 40% of Americans now get their news either largely or exclusively through Facebook.

Not quite.

Assuming that this is what you're talking about (the relevant portion starts at 12:15 in the video), John Oliver played a clip of a news anchor asserting that 62% of Americans get news from social media, and 44% of Americans get it specifically from Facebook, according to this study from the Pew Research Center. But look at the study a little more closely.

A 62% majority of adults in the U.S. do get news from social media, but out of that 62%, only 18% say they do so "often." 26% say "sometimes," and the last 18% say "hardly ever."

The study did say that 44% of Americans get news from Facebook. But the researchers reached that conclusion simply by combining two statistics : 67% of Americans use Facebook, and two-thirds of Facebook users say they get news on the site.

That's how you get 44% of Americans using Facebook for news. But the study does not assert that the entire 44% relies on Facebook as their primary or exclusive source of news.

The study has a large section titled "The audience overlap," which states that a 64% majority of the people who get news on social media do so on only one site (most commonly Facebook). But if I'm reading it correctly, that section of the study only observes whether these people get news from other social media sites, not from all other news sources in general.

In other words, these people (most commonly Facebook users) don't get news from other social media sites, but they might still get news from news websites, television, radio, or newspapers. In fact, the study has a section that notes that "social media news consumers still get news from a variety of other sources, and to a fairly consistent degree across sites."

Back in February of this year, the Pew Research Center posted a study that found that a very large majority of Americans were getting news on the Presidential election from multiple types of news sources, with television still being the most common, at 78%.

John Oliver, and researchers as well, have expressed concern that many Americans are putting themselves into "echo chambers" in which they only read news that validates the opinions they already have, but as far as I can see, there doesn't appear to be any hard data on how widespread this is.

So, if you're a Trump supporter, chances are you don't read about the loads of crap Trump has pulled - or at least, not before you've read how the liberal media is manipulating the truth

First of all, it isn't simply a matter of where people choose to get their news from. This stuff was everywhere. News about Presidential elections have a way of permeating just about every aspect of people's day-to-day routine here in the U.S.

If you watch television - even programs that have nothing whatever to do with news or politics - you will see ads and references to the elections and what's happening in them.

Go to a convenience store to pick up some snacks, and you will see the headlines of the newspapers as you walk by them.

Read discussion forums on the Internet, and you will often see people talking about this stuff. Heck, walk down the street, and you might very well overhear people talking about it.

Go to a bar or restaurant, and they might have the news playing on a television set on the wall.

Megyn Kelly said that one of the lowest points of her year was when her 5-year-old daughter asked her what a "bimbo" is. Try as she might, there was no way for Megyn Kelly to prevent it from reaching her daughter's ears.

We live in an Information Age. Nowadays, it is often harder not to find out about things than it is to find out about them.

Second, they always say that about the "liberal media" and their news bias. But conservative media was reporting on this stuff, too. Surely, FOX News doesn't qualify as "liberal," and Megyn Kelly was one of Trump's harshest critics on the sexism issue.

Third, if a person really is partisan enough to intentionally seal themselves in a bubble, to filter out any information that doesn't validate the opinions they already hold, and dismiss out of hand any news that conflicts with their views, then I would submit that it probably doesn't matter what the opposing side says, because the person in question would just ignore it anyway.

In other words, if a conservative is actually partisan enough to do this, then it likely doesn't matter that liberals were "crying wolf" over racism and sexism, because even if they hadn't been, this conservative would just dismiss anything that liberals had to say, anyway.

Finally ... If, after everything I have said, you're still not convinced, Canarr, then I think we're just going to have to agree to disagree on this. I don't believe that it's really possible for most (if not all) people in the U.S. to have gone this entire year without hearing of the substance of the racism and sexism controversies surrounding Donald Trump. If you still do, then we're clearly never going to see eye-to-eye on this, so I will let the matter rest.

[Canarr]

So what exactly are we saying here?

Did these people actually think, "Well, Trump has said all of these things about women, about Mexicans, Muslims, blacks, Asians, Native Americans ... and a lot of conservatives have condemned him for them ... Oh, but liberals are saying that he's sexist and racist. Therefore, he must NOT be sexist and racist. I'm sold!"

Seriously?

We don't just form our opinions about candidates based on what other people say about them. If nothing else, were these voters not reading and watching the news and seeing and hearing for themselves the actual statements that Trump had made, quite apart from what anybody else was saying about him?

Check this out. I think I heard on John Oliver that 40% of Americans now get their news either largely or exclusively through Facebook. And that's filtered. So, if you're a Trump supporter, chances are you don't read about the loads of crap Trump has pulled - or at least, not before you've read how the liberal media is manipulating the truth, or how the Pope endorsed Trump...

Or, check out the Exec Editor at Cracked. His opinion:

Look, we're going to get actual Nazis in the comment section of this article. Not "calling them Nazis for argument points" Nazis, but actual "Swastikas in their avatars, rooted against Indiana Jones" Nazis. Those people exist.

But what I can say, from personal experience, is that the racism of my youth was always one step removed. I never saw a family member, friend, or classmate be mean to the actual black people we had in town. We worked with them, played video games with them, waved to them when they passed. What I did hear was several million comments about how if you ever ventured into the city, winding up in the "wrong neighborhood" meant you'd get dragged from your car, raped, and burned alive. Looking back, I think the idea was that the local minorities were fine ... as long as they acted exactly like us.

If you'd asked me at the time, I'd have said the fear and hatred wasn't of people with brown skin, but of that specific tribe they have in Chicago -- you know, the guys with the weird slang, music and clothes, the dope fiends who murder everyone they see. It was all part of the bizarro nature of the cities, as perceived from afar -- a combination of hyper-aggressive savages and frivolous white elites. Their ways are strange.

Read the article.

[KabeRinnaul]

I've seen comments where women were threatening to cut their S.O.s off from sex if they even suspected their S.O. was a Trump supporter.

A tactic with at least a 2,427-year history.

[mjr]

I've seen both... Trump's male voters are accused of hating women, his white voters of hating POC, and his female voters of deserting "the sisterhood" and ruining the chance of having the first female president of the US.

All of which is just looking for the easy answers - which just aren't there.

I've seen comments where women were threatening to cut their S.O.s off from sex if they even suspected their S.O. was a Trump supporter.