this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2026
397 points (99.0% liked)
politics
27924 readers
3412 users here now
Welcome to the discussion of US Politics!
Rules:
- Post only links to articles, Title must fairly describe link contents. If your title differs from the site’s, it should only be to add context or be more descriptive. Do not post entire articles in the body or in the comments.
Links must be to the original source, not an aggregator like Google Amp, MSN, or Yahoo.
Example:
- Articles must be relevant to politics. Links must be to quality and original content. Articles should be worth reading. Clickbait, stub articles, and rehosted or stolen content are not allowed. Check your source for Reliability and Bias here.
- Be civil, No violations of TOS.
It’s OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It’s NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
- No memes, trolling, or low-effort comments.
Reposts, misinformation, off-topic, trolling, or offensive. Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
- Vote based on comment quality, not agreement. This community aims to foster discussion; please reward people for putting effort into articulating their viewpoint, even if you disagree with it.
- No hate speech, slurs, celebrating death, advocating violence, or abusive language. This will result in a ban. Usernames containing racist, or inappropriate slurs will be banned without warning
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
That's all the rules!
Civic Links
• Register To Vote
• Citizenship Resource Center
• Congressional Awards Program
• Federal Government Agencies
• Library of Congress Legislative Resources
• The White House
• U.S. House of Representatives
• U.S. Senate
Partnered Communities:
• News
• World News
• Business News
• Political Discussion
• Ask Politics
• Military News
• Global Politics
• Moderate Politics
• Progressive Politics
• UK Politics
• Canadian Politics
• Australian Politics
• New Zealand Politics
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
it's a problem with how human beings think. us vs them. us is the good ones, them is the evil ones.
and the way you get rid of them, is by killing them.
the mindset isn't exclusive to any 'side'. and really, you can't be better than them. you want to eliminate them too.
the question is, whose ideas will the broader public support? them, or yours?
Just because you can draw a similarity between two methods of thinking doesn't man they're equally valid/invalid. You have to compare it to reality. You're also invoking the tolerance of intolerance fallacy here.
whose reality? people live in very different realities and in 2025 the notion of a shared reality is ever more tenuous as people bubble themselves up.
i invoke fallacies because they are part of reality. the vast majority of human beings operate with cognitive and logical fallacies, there are inherent aspects of every single person.
you can prattle on about your perfect society where intolerance is not allowed, but how are you going to enforce that? through violence? would you yourself, wish to be subject to such violence if you yourself had thoughts that society deemed intolerant? if so, great. but many people would not want to be a part of such a society.
There's only one reality, some people are just more wrong about what they think it is. Let me know if you are seriously arguing for "alternative truth" so I can block you now and save us both the trouble.
The rest of your worldview seems poorly thought out as well. The logical endpoint of a society which must tolerate everything is true anarchy. We created rules and societal structure to avoid that because it SUCKS. You cannot collaborate effectively without rules and the backdrop of a functioning society. You must spend an incredible amount of energy being vigilant, defending yourself from the world, and verifying things. You cannot trust anything that you do not completely understand AND trust the source of, and you're less likely to understand things without knowledge sharing. People who are physicslly unable to contribute, who are arbitrarily deemed "weird", or who do not wish to harm others suffer massive disadvantages. Again... not worth it.
Saying that I should not be intolerant of intolerance is not only practically unsustainable, it's also hypocritical. You are yourself being intolerant of my intolerance, the very thing you are arguing against myself doing. In fact, if you are against intolerance wholesale, shouldn't you agree with me that whoever is being intolerant in the first place is wrong?
It's called a fallacy because it's a thought trap. It's something so obviously paradoxical and self-defeating that honestly, if you want to continue running into them at full speed and insisting you're right anyways by waving your hand and saying abacadabra, I don't see the point of replying further. Suspicions confirmed, goodbye and good luck.
yeah no, youre way off. waning the other side dead is specifically and exclusively a problem of the right wing. there is no equivalence.
is it? I see a lot of calls to violence in left wing spaces. and I've had violence direct at myself by so called left wing people.
Are you sure it's exclusively a problem of right wing people? do you not recall Charlie Kirk? most leftists seem to see nothing wrong with his murder, because he 'deserved it'.
i've been politically active for almost 25 years, and I've seen violence and death called for by everyone. the only major difference is who they want to be the victim(s) of that violence.
Only a shitlib or someone afraid of repercussions will say violence or killing is inherently wrong (although leftists usually say it should be the responsibility of a state or system of governance, which is still violence), like all actions it depends on the context. The difference between the right and the left is that the right wing takes inconsequential characteristics they find to be icky and demands blood over them, while the left condemns people for actions that actually harm others.
Yes Charlie Kirk deserved to die, yes it was good that it happened, because he was actively working to make the world unbearably worse for everyone.
right, so just kill everyone you don't agree with. sounds like a very progressive and liberated and FREE society... one where you must live in terror and fear lest you upset the government or your neighbor.
Oh piss off, no one is falling for your disingenuous nonsense. You can't have a free society with people like Kirk actively making strides to enforce their authoritarian nightmares. He worked hard to push the country into Christian nationalism and made measurable progress towards that goal. There are people who deserve it way more than he did, but that doesn't excuse his evil bullshit.
charlie kirk was killed by a groyper.
"i’ve been politically active for almost 25 years, and I’ve seen violence and death called for by everyone. the only major difference is who they want to be the victim(s) of that violence."
ive been politically active for over 30 years and ive never heard anyone on the left call for murders. i can link countless rightwing nutjobs in and out of office that are calling for death. im calling bs on your claim.
I feel that you are a lot closer to the answer, but even a psychosocial analysis as simplistic as this one is a bit reductive nowadays. Especially in the context of trying to fight back.
I suspect there is much more to it that we have yet to understand…
It's tribalism. It's not that complex.
My tribe good, your tribe bad. Anyone in the tribe who doesn't follow the tribe rules, is bad.
You may subscribe to a 'all human beings are the same' globalism, but very very few people do. And most of those people who do are educated in a certain way. And even those who do believe that... their actions are often in contradiction to those beliefs.
I live in a very progressive city full of 'global citizens'. Most of them lose their shit at having to see homeless people and open talk about just killing them because they are gross to look at. They feel similar about non-white, non-educated, and immigrant populations. Why? Because those people aren't part of their 'tribe'. They are happy to tell me this because I'm part of their tribe and they can 'be honest' with me.
I'm not debating whether tribalism plays a major part in this-- even many major parts... what I suspect is that, as we have tried to address issues like this for over a century, now, the issue itself (and its roots) have evolved into a much more complex state, and that more is now required to understand and address these newer complexities that didn't exist in the past.
for example: I grew up in the 80s and 90s as a closeted gay kid, and eventually came out in 1997 when there was a huge global surge in LGBTQ visibility, acceptance, etc. And that went on for almost 15 years until a conservative backlash slid in and began dismantling so many of the strides towards unity and acceptance the LGBTQ community had hard-won. But the attacks, today, the criticisms, everything the MAGAs do to just tear away at the civil rights of not only LGBTQ people but any minority deserves reconsideration as to the how their attacks have changed, and the what it is that they appeal to in their base that elicits their support.
I'm trying to approach this from the perspective of not only defending against newer, more complex and advanced tactics, but also understanding them better.
Even if tomorrow trans people stopped being an issue, there would be some new group to cause controversy over or who wants recognition that isn't getting it.
In my town there are now debates over the legalization of polyamory, for example. Because here queer/trans issues are largely over and done with. One city in my state legalized it, but it's such a tiny minority of people it's not a big deal yet. Also, since only one town legalized it, it has no broad hold on state-wide laws or institutions. It just means that they allow you plural filing of marriage licenses in the town clerk office and town employees can have their multiple spouses covered under healthcare, etc. And knowing some poly people... they love to go on about how society oppresses an is unfair to them and how monogamy is evil.
And yes, there will always be backlashes. That's how people are. The answer to your question is to just... campaign better. Liberals/leftists don't really fight, because they don't really believe. People on the right, fight and believe, and have been fighting for decades. They simple care more about being against you and thus they tend to rally more support. They fought against abortion for decades and decades and the left mostly didn't care about it, so they lost.
the liberals fought in the 1960s and won. then largely chilled out for the next 50 years and the conservatives started being the belligerent and winning and the left has been on the defensive ever since.
Yes, I know. I am not debating this. I accept this as a truism and one of the fundamental weaknesses of humans and society-- one which we must constantly struggle against... which we must understand it if we have any hope of overcoming the worst parts of ourselves. It's not enough to simply fight back against it, but we must come to understand what about ourselves, as humans leads us to this and how to, ultimately, stop it from happening in the first place. Or, at least... become better people and society for it, even if it's in baby steps.
But, first, we must understand the very core of the "why" of it all, and that's something that keeps evolving into something more complex-- not just in how people understand it, but also (especially recently) how it's being used to manipulate people into political positions.
I mean we clearly both understand it.
You can't stop it from happening. Anymore than you can stop yourself from needing oxygen to breathe. Reality is limited, people are limited. My perspective is rare and only a product of certain luxuries that many people don't and will never have and many people are totally hostile to my perspective to the point they'd kill me if they could.
I've been threaten with violence and physically attacked by people on the right and the left for my own viewpoints. Because violence is a great way to silence people who are different than you. Reason I left reddit was because I was constantly being banned for my perspectives that human beings are what they are and there is no changing us into beings of perfect good, and believing you are a being of perfect good is the more surefire way for you to justify violence and evil upon others.
I just pursue my own good and focus on what I value as bettering myself. Other people disagree with me deeply about that and often tell me that I'm a stupid idiot for not doing what they think I should be doing, which is mostly agreeing with them and validating their choices and beliefs. But my choices come at a cost, I don't get to 'belong' or be a part of any tribe because I won't pursue the party line of 'us vs them' and people think I'm a selfish-jerk for not doing so. Even in personal relationships, I refuse to see the world in 'us vs them' terms and it drives my partners insane because to them the point of a family is to form a unit to 'protect' itself from the 'evils' outside of the unit.
look... we've had a nice conversation up to this point, but I'm going to say something that is going to sound confrontational, but I'm not intending to insult you...
but this isn't about you... buuuut you may have, without realizing it, given me not the answer I was looking for, but the lens I need to look through in oder to better understand it. You've given me an interesting perspective on this and other matters that, maybe, I hadn't considered thoughtfully enough.
OK.
it is about me, and about you. it's about everyone. I used to teach. funniest part of it was people think it was a some sort of deep revelation when they learned something.
trans people arent "an issue" and they certainly arent the cause of any controversy. please consider your language more carefully if you are trying to defend the trans community.
There is no such thing as the trans community. There are trans people of all different beliefs and identities. Some trans people hate other trans people.
Trans community is something people impose on them to force them into a collective group so they can grand stand about them.
I don't support them, because I'm not egotistical enough to think I speak for them. I let people speak for themselves. Some trans people I've known were cool. Others were total shitbags of human beings who were violent and abusive towards other people.
yikes
I'm wondering if there are some people who naturally reject the tribalism, or if rejecting it is something that needs to be learned.
The only people I want to die are the people who want people to die 😉
Yes, but they get rejected by society largely, because people don't like people who don't want to be a part of the tribe.
And you want everyone to die. Because everyone wants someone to die. If not physically, at least spiritually.
What you don't get is that anti-queer people see queer people as a existential threat. Hence why they are very motivated. You want to say they are crazy and delusional, and they are, but that doesn't mean their feelings aren't real. They very much believe queer people are going to steal their children if they don't stop them.
You just described most of the formative years of my life.
I mean if you truly feel that way, you will be rejected forever. Because people naturally want to form exclusionary groups and they don't like people who want inclusion.
At this point people need me so they tolerate my complaining about their tribalism.