You disagree with me so you must not be evolved...

in #philosophy8 years ago (edited)

Or so the sentiment seems to go. How people deal with disagreement is very telling. Within those methods of dealing with things there is quite often a helpful handful of hypocrisy.

Strange how life offers us interesting segues into new topics. Yesterday I wrote an article called Why do smart people fall for this? which was inspired by a friend and coworker actually asking that exact question.

That article had nothing to do with elections. It was speaking about psychology, logic, Prussian Education System, and many other things.

Yet today the world is a little different. Last night Donald J. Trump won the U.S. Presidency to go on to become the 45th president.

Today there are death threats against him coming out. There are small scale protests and things not yet considered a riot. With such a passionate and polarized election this is not surprising. It is a bit hypocritical though as these are the things that some among Hillary's supporters predicted Trump's supporters would do if he lost the election. Yet, they lost and now they are doing this.

That doesn't make their statements false. I believe it is highly probable you would have seen similar behavior from the Trump side of the aisle if Hillary had won.

Before I get too far. I voted a couple of weeks ago by mail for Gary Johnson. I did not vote for Trump or Hillary. I decided after 2008 I would never do the lesser of two evils vote again. I stuck to my words.

Source: giphy.com

Before you start saying "See that is why Hillary lost!" I would recommend you think again. If I had been forced to choose between Hillary and Trump my vote would have gone to Trump. I am not afraid of WORDS. I also don't find much meaning in campaign promises and words. Candidates say a lot of things, make a lot of promises, and break those promises or perhaps do exactly the opposite. I voted for Obama in 2008. He promised some things campaigning that were important to me. The things that were important to me he did exactly the opposite of his promises.

He was not the first to do that. There is some of that with every candidate I have seen. Yet, that was when I promised no more lesser of two evils votes. Instead I try to find the candidate that best represents me whether they win or not. This is not a sporting event. My job is not to elect a winning team. My job is to vote for the representative who best represents me. I am a pretty weird guy, so whomever I end up voting for will likely NEVER win.

Source: giphy.com

So now we have Trump and he could end up being as bad, or worse than Hillary. Yet that is purely guessing. I don't pay attention to words, I pay attention to actions. Hillary has been in positions of political power as First Lady, Senator of New York, and Secretary of State. She has a voting record available on votesmart.org. I looked at those things closely. She did a very poor job in my opinion. Those are actions. This is not even getting into the more conspiratorial things that people talk about, and is not talking about her emails. This is simply looking at her voting record, and her judgement calls with regards the Benghazi, Libya, Iraq, Healthcare, and many other things. She did not act alone, yet neither does a president. With this information I could speculate with fairly high probability what type of a president she would be.

Source: giphy.com

Trump all I have is words. His words tell me with high probability he is likely to say some very stupid things, and he is an ass. They do not tell me anything about what he will actually do as president. So I can make up great things he would do in my mind, or I could make up nightmares. Yet all they will be is my imagination. I am not a prophet and I do not believe in prophets.

Source: giphy.com

He could end up being good, status quo, or bad. We are going to find out now. We won't have to guess for long. Yet actions are what I find important not words. He was an unknown. Trump for me if I were forced to vote for him or Hillary would be a gamble. I don't know what he will do. Hillary was a known quantity and my research has shown her to be very corrupt and bad news. Yes, I've heard "all politicians are corrupt". All people have muscles too. Some are bigger, some are smaller. My research makes me view Hillary as perhaps the most corrupt politician to ever run for the office of President. This is not about gender. I'd personally find it cool if a woman were president. Yet I only see that as a tie breaker issue. Gender doesn't mean anything when it comes to policies and solving problems. So if I were to have two candidates and they were both equal in my eyes and one was male, and the other was female then I'd vote for the female as a tie breaker. That's about it. I would have voted for a random woman off the street before I voted for Hillary. That random woman would be an unknown gamble like Trump is to me.

Source: giphy.com

So how do people handle this?

Superiority, Arrogance, and Belittling


So the people who did not get their candidate. They come out belittling others. Questioning their intelligence. Apologizing on behalf of the entire white race. Apologizing for people not evolving.

This is arrogant, irrational, and also the pot calling the kettle black.

Source: giphy.com

If you want to convince people of things you don't belittle them. If you want to convince people of things you lead by example. If the example you wish to set is that anyone that disagrees with you is inferior and beneath you then you should seriously rethink what you are doing.

Political Correctness, Free Speech


In the current climate we hear a lot of people lauding free speech, until someone says something they do not like. Then those same people will say there should be a law to stop that, or they should only be able to do that in certain areas.

Source: freepress.org

This is hypocrisy. This is we like FREE SPEECH as long as you say what we want to hear. Yet that is not what free speech was added as the first amendment for. Popular speech that people want to hear does not need protection. The only speech that needs protection is that which is unpopular and would be silenced.

Source: giphy.com

Why am I mentioning this?

The belittling of those who disagree and chastising them or implying they are not evolved or inferior comes from this same mindset that believes FREE SPEECH is a great thing as long as you say what they want to hear.

I see some people I consider smart making actions like this. I don't think they realize it. I think this is normal. This is what happens when our passions and emotions are more in the driving seat than reason. We get passionate and speak up without realizing we are being a hypocrit or fully thinking things through. This is normal. I am guilty of this at times myself. Yet it is something we can try to get better about. We have to first notice when we are doing it.

A better world


I think many of us have realized long ago that the mainstream media is an extreme tool for propaganda. They repeat what they are told, endorse who they are told, censor what they are told, and are nothing like true journalism. They are owned by a small number of corporations and they march to the agenda of the Share Holder's of those corporations. This means they are not unbiased. Unless you are writing an opinion piece and have indicated it is such then you are not practicing true journalism. If they did indicate it was an opinion piece then a very large of all news would be of that ilk in this day and age.

I've noticed them censoring candidates, and force feeding the population candidates for years now. Many people still eat it up. It is known that if you repeat a lie enough that the people will eventually see it as the truth. The mainstream media is very fond of repeating things OVER and OVER and OVER. Often those things are fabrications and sometimes complete lies. Their favorite tactic is to take sound bites out of context.

So what is my point?

Mainstream media has been trying to shove Hillary down people's throats like mad. They used all the tricks in the book. I actually expected Hillary to win, and am pretty surprised.

The fact that Trump won does not represent people are not EVOLVED. It is the first time I know of in my life of 46 years that the mainstream media did not get the candidate they want into office. Is evolution when things continue the same or status quo, or when something new occurs and we see whether it is fit to survive?

If that is the case then Trump is evolution... it is something new. That does not mean it is the fittest and that it will survive. That remains to be seen.

Hillary would have been business as usual other than the fact she has a vagina. So if you were concerned about her having a vagina then yes if she had been elected that would have been a new trait for a president.

Technically every president is a new person so we always have an evolutionary like process going on. Yet in the overarching picture, Trump was a veering from what mainstream media's agenda clearly was.

I suspect that a lot of Trump votes were simply people fed up with being force fed the narrative they should believe.

Like threatening if Trump is elected we will have Nuclear war, when the Russians were actually teaching their people to find their nearest shelters and saying it was likely if Hillary were elected such a war would happen. This was not simply political. ISIS and a lot of the unrest in the middle east where a lot of the tensions are had its seeds in the works of Hillary Clinton while she had political power, and others she worked with. So in a sense some of what we are dealing with now in terms of world issues had seeds in actions made by Hillary. (especially Benghazi and Khadafi) So if you were a Russian would you have seriously seen her as a good thing? Try to see past the media propaganda. Look at her actions. Now that Trump has won Putin has already expressed an interest in renewing relations with the U.S. and easing tensions.


Above is 3 Months ago... I actually watched that the day he gave that speech. So having watched that when the Mainstream media came out later talking about Trump causing WW3 and Hillary was the only way to stop it, I knew it was completely fabricated propaganda as it did not match what had been coming out before that.

This will be attacked as Trump being in bed with the Russians or a spy. Think about that... If it were true... SO WHAT? Would you rather have war, or peace? Do you truly hate Russians? Are we reentering an era of McCarthyism where speaking to Russians is bad? Should we meet people with a sword rather than words?

The media has spun people into a frenzy over Russians. It is like people would like the resurrect the Cold War.

I don't believe Trump is in collusion with Russia. I simply believe that the Russians likely are weighing ACTIONS as I am and considering probabilities. They are not operating off of imaginary nightmares that their mind generates for them.

This may not be true...

Apologizing for being white


Talk about irrational. Apologize for skin color. Blame skin color for the political climate. Blame skin color for the decisions people make. There is a word for that.

Racism.

You cannot defeat racism by being racist.

Racism will only die when it is no longer watered and fed. Let it wither on the vine. When people STOP emphasizing race be it black, white, red, yellow, brown, etc then racism will die. As long as people pick races and emphasize them they are simply rotating the crops. This decade the white field will flourish, the next the black field, etc.

I don't apologize for being white. It was not my choice. I was born that way.

I have not had white privilege. I have not lived anywhere that blacks were treated worse. I have visited such places. I've actually had black bosses at two different jobs, and many black coworkers. I have worked side by side with Mexicans (from Mexico) in factories and learned really foul Spanish in the process. I am very much not racist.

Yet I also see that the most common way people attack racism is by being racist. That will never work. It just shifts the problem around and it will cycle back.

Stop thinking of people as race, stop referring to people by race, and it will kill racism. I also am not part of the white race. My skin is white, but my heritage is diverse. I am part of the HUMAN RACE.

Steem On!

Sort:  

Well put. It's good to see that some are willing to out the propaganda and outright hypocrisy of the forces trying to start a race war right now. The only people that are acting racist are the ones organizing and funding the violent rioting, paying the "news" to incite the crowds, and calling everyone names.

If this cannot somehow be explained to the immature children rioting and providing cover for what is basically an attack by Soros, then this is going to be a long 4 years.

I love your point about the media's role in all of this because I was literally saying the same thing to my wife the other night as the votes were rolling in and it was beginning to look dire for Hillary. Even after the tally was in and it was all but certain that Trump would win, NBC was playing clips of Trump's gaffes over and over again, almost continuous loop, as if people hadn't heard them the first thousand times. Their coverage of the election was basically a continuous op-ed in the guise of news reporting (not just NBC, pretty much all of the media, even alternative sources). They've turned their entire industry into the mockery that is the Fox News model, in spite of their anointed one, Jon Stewart, so resoundingly showing the absurdity of that kind of reporting with his comedy. We shall see, but I imagine we'll have some new faces of integrity that will begin to materialize in the media in the coming years. Nobody takes the old guard seriously anymore, obviously.

Yep. People mock me if I don't cite some mainstream media source, yet the mainstream media is so obviously propaganda that requesting such sources is begging to be given fiction.

The only speech that needs protection is that which is unpopular and would be silenced.

Exactly. It's an incoherent concept currently. as if it's devolved to another semantic meaning: 'using words don't cost you money'

It's because of the constructionist philosophy taking over the sphere which people define rights and cultural values. It's a system that is a methodology for critical thinking, it's not for creating anything.

I'm deciding on a book title on the subject: 'stupid white men' or 'stupid black men'

Not sure which one is taken

Wait...Trump being President is going to add a lot of intentional and unintentional humour to world politics. It's going to be highly amusing. I think the internet will break from all the memes. The end of the internet will begin ww3 for sure

edit: I don't know why anyone takes american politics so seriously. it's entertainment more than anything

Well said. Very comprehensive argument about our current culture. It's hard to make people see their own behavior, since it just seems natural to them. Asking people to consider their behavior is often like asking a bird why it makes a nestm it just does, it doesn't know why. It's just the natural thing to do,

Yeah... I realize it may be wasted effort, yet I felt I should still try. You never know.

I disagree with you ... of course, politicians are lying, if they tell the truth, they are not elected. This is what we call democracy. A bad system, but we do not know a better one, today. When you have two candidates, 70 years old, it is easy to choose by looking what they have done the previous 50 years. They are not equal. If you do not vote, you let your power to people who do not expect the same society and do not share the same values as you do.

So far you are not really disagreeing with me. First we had more than two candidates. I never said they are equal.

I also voted. So not sure what you are disagreeing with.

Great post - all very true

Simply very good post, excellent job congratulations

Very very good one. Applause.
I have actually written one today about one part of this, about talking and understanding "the others" and that they act logically according to their world. Unfortunately for you its in German ;) https://steemit.com/deutsch/@lennstar/nach-wahl-warum-ich-nicht-ueber-die-ueberraschung-ueberrascht-bin
headline is: Why I am not surprised at the surprise (because I was listening to the Trump bubble).

At the end I have put a citation of someone working in Germany... foreign committee? Whatever the word is in the US.
It goes like this:
We have underestimated the radicality with which the voters are willing to choose the consequences of their personal situation.
That one says a lot.

This post has been ranked within the top 80 most undervalued posts in the second half of Nov 09. We estimate that this post is undervalued by $4.91 as compared to a scenario in which every voter had an equal say.

See the full rankings and details in The Daily Tribune: Nov 09 - Part II. You can also read about some of our methodology, data analysis and technical details in our initial post.

If you are the author and would prefer not to receive these comments, simply reply "Stop" to this comment.

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