I fundamentally think you can't talk to them like adults in 90% of circumstances, and I am speaking as someone who was raised conservative and realized I had a brain around 22 because I saw too many friends die in an unnecessary war and things weren't making sense around me.
The conservative mind IS simple, you changed your mindset for altogether different reasons, and because you CAN change and adapt, you require a different approach, but for the died-in-wool, opinionated midwest conservative screaming about the bible and "killing the gays" they don't have any clue about policy, they can't form theory of mind, they were never trained to think in words and logic, they live in a world of reaction and feeling and cannot separate belief from choice when it comes to making decisions. IE: the WWF Wrestlemania Effect. They want a thing to be real, so they believe it and then believe they always believed it, because they don't have the mental capacity to hold a long-term mental narrative in their mind.
This sounds like I am being really harsh but I swear, at least for EVERY conservative that I ever grew up with, have been exposed to, and lived with, they are dumber than rocks. I am not essentializing, they are humans like everyone, but our society and system failed them, their parents failed them, and they were never given the proper perspective and tools to understand their own minds and how to look at the world the way you or I might. They have been essentially made into another species that thinks differently on a fundamental level and I cannot stress this enough, even if you haven't experienced this, either you aren't around many or you haven't had the blackpilling realization just how bad it is.
I went through some of the worst depressive episodes of my life when I realized how bad it actually is out there, and how few people really understand how bad it is.
I think most of these have just become self-satire and clever attempts to come up with increasingly convoluted ethical choices.
It's not anti-intellectualism, it's anti-trolly-problem specifically.
Two people who care about each other will provide all forms of validation and support that someone needs. This is kind of the point of being in a relationship, a partner who makes you feel like [insert thing you want to feel like] when you need it, and you give that validation back to them as they require it.
We seem to have gone severely off-course when we started expecting a world full of uncaring strangers to give us all kinds of validation for things.
Way back in '25, yeah, it wasn't as big as the ones we had recently but they say the latest pandemic should start to clear up by next year. Hopefully it won't be like the predictions they made in 2034.
It's been calculated many times, and yes, it would take an absurdly long amount of time, and that's the point. When dealing with infinities, time is irrelevant, whether you have infinite monkeys or one monkey and infinite time, they will still both do every possible thing a monkey could do.
In fact, infinite monkeys would not only write Hamlet, they would write it instantly, an infinite number of times, and in all possible languages, as well as the possible sequel where Marvel's Blade shows up to fight vampires. Instantly.
Good luck finding them though.
I think it's more beneficial to look at their level of progress towards accepting individuality as a journey we can learn lessons from. I don't think it's good any more than I think many of our own cultural norms are good, and definitely worse in many ways, but I just wanted to drop a reminder that people who read this and say "Why didn't [person] just do [thing]??" or other judgements are probably completely missing how any of these people feel.
There can absolutely be a winner in a limited-scale nuclear exchange.
The way many Asian countries view relationships between parents, offspring, and social status is very, very different than what we're used to in the West, and while it's all just more social constructs and norms being maintained like we know here, the similarities end there.
It would take a long to really explain, and several dozen people would chime in to say how their own family and upbringing was different, so it's not really something you can "teach" but it's worth pointing out that our normal lense in which we view family is not going to make sense looking at some families in other areas.
The relationship between family and social status is very, very different across many Asian countries than it is in the West generally. The same kinds of sentiments don't really apply.
Not saying that it's okay how the doctors and family treated this person, and it's great that she got some justice after, quite untypical for the region, but I would discourage people from viewing these interactions through the lens of western norms. You likely have no idea.
We need the democratic party to be far less kind and forgiving and actually want to win elections and learn to how to properly fight dirty.
At the same time, we need the people to be far less spiteful and hateful, because no matter what happens after an election we all have to live together, and even the people who are deeply steeped in this political theater are just treating it like WWE, it's entertainment and they don't even care that none of it is real, they just want to feel safe and have a group to belong to, and you could probably take many of them out of that environment and talk to them and see they're almost the same as us. Just less aware or cognizant of what's going on the world.
We need to treat conservatives the same way we treat dumb children. We use a firm hand, we dominate them with simple, strong language they understand, while at the same time having sympathy and empathy, because they are just humans tricked by their own feelings, like we're all vulnerable to.
Now, the grifters, pundits and media stars trying to stroke those feelings and turn our neighbors against us? I have so little sympathy for those bags of pure, distilled evil that if I spoke my opinion on how they should be treated, I would probably get banned.
I don't think we should ever listen to moral opinions from ANYONE who has dedicated their lives to skimming as much money as possible off other people's hard work, and not just a few people but millions and millions. They are whatever the capitalist, economic version of a serial killer is.
Why are WE the ones afraid of consequences? Why should the so-called "mightiest nation on Earth" be the one that cowers whenever someone makes nuclear threats? Didn't we used to lead the world in creating fear of our military and our nuclear weapons?
I don't get how the right in particular treats the USA like a mighty jugger- nah I can't even frame my rhetorical thought, we all know that Russia is deeply involved in shaping the opinions and attitudes of our country's dumbest fuckwads.
There are a lot of girls who enjoy role playing games, both digital and traditional.
The key to not blowing it with them, is don't be a stereotype.
Most companies have PTO of some kind, but there's not a lot of real enforcement and whatever rules there are vary state-to-state, a situation I'm sure is about to get much, much worse with an administration coming promising to gut or destroy federal agencies.
Most established companies usually only offer a week or two of PTO a year, and this includes sick-time and sometimes holidays, so if you want to take Christmas and new years off, some companies force you to spend your PTO days on it. Many times if you don't use your PTO it just expires at end of the year and doesn't accumulate, they wouldn't want anyone saving up and taking a few weeks off while being paid. Most Americans manage to swing a handful of 3-day or 4-day weekends a year, and that's the extent of our down-time or escape from work.
I've never seen a futurist community online that isn't just an attention-span-bankrupt group of headline-whores and hype-addicts, desperately trying to escape reality by embracing futurist ideas and sensational new stories without critical thought.
People want excitement more than they want truth.
This is why Trump was elected again.
MAGAs are not some strange species of subhuman. They're humans like us, genetically identical almost, same with nazis and Jim Jones cultists and everyone else who has ever done anything inexplicable. They have the same vulnerabilities and the same biases and the same reactions. If they're dumber, then the stories their brains will tell them to explain their feelings will also be dumber, but your brain does the same thing every time you feel a thing.
We're all going to have to confront this unpleasant fact about just how much free-will we actually have in the coming decade as more and more of reality becomes compromised in our daily scrolling rituals, as more bots and scammers and influencers become far more sophisticated and intelligent in their schemes.
I hope that after some period of hardship and confusion we all look at information in a different way, as the internet becomes consumed by the AI slop engine and nobody can prove what's real anymore and anyone can manipulate anyone else's image and voice perfectly and we all have to embrace new attitudes towards ourselves and our ego.
That would be FANTASTIC, I don't know if you mean state house or federal, either way, imagine if every election there were more leftist/progressive candidates running than unopposed conservatives? I say this ALL THE TIME, that you can make a much bigger impact on your country by being more involved with politics, not less.
Learn who's running in your town, your county, your state, get to know your neighborhood, find out what people are thinking about, talking about, who they trust and not, just gather information and get practice being social and making friends. You can do so much to ensure that the people who prop up the foundations of our federal systems are people who actually represent us.
Saying this too shall pass is some privileged bullshit.
Or maybe people trying to give each other comfort and hope.
You're still responsible for taking whatever measures you feel necessary but lets not attack people trying to help.
You're not entitled to harm people on your side, we've done that for the last decade and all it's gotten us is a fractured ideology with a hundred different camps of people bitching about minor differences in what progressive things are good or not, and allowed a monster to get elected because nobody cares about trying to make leftists happy anymore. Lash out at someone else who actually deserves it.
Fucking hell, this is why we'll never have nice things. Our side is just as emotional but not quite dumb enough to unify and focus on one target.
Everyone shares some level of accountability, and I know nobody wants to hear it and will stomp and huff and gnash their teeth at the notion, but it's true. Some carry a much larger chunk of that responsibility than others, from of course the people who didn't care and didn't vote, and the people who cared and still didn't vote, to just the people who rolled their eyes every time someone posted a "political" picture in /r/funny and had to start a 300+ comment deep thread about how stupid politics is, down to the small pieces held by everyone who did everything right but never valued their community, didn't make a stand against people saying and doing things we didn't agree with, and lets not forget everyone who never involved themselves in their local elections even enough to vote for the people who represent them, they allowed many to go unchallenged and those people went on to prop up a government run by and representing a minority ideology.