TechyDad @ TechyDad @lemmy.world

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They've already rationalized supporting Trump by declaring that God is using Trump as a flawed vessel to bring about everything they want.

Once you get that far, it's not hard to justify anything else. Perhaps God had him say this as a test to see if anyone wasn't truly committed to God and would abandon Trump. Only the truly faithful would ignore everything Trump says and does and support him blindly!

I agreed with Trump twice recently.

Once when he said he was being treated unfairly. I agree. It's unfair that he gets to walk free when anyone else facing a fraction of his charges would be in jail awaiting trial.

The second time was when he declared that the threat to America came from within. I agreed with this, but disagreed with the source. He meant the left, but the threat really comes from what he sees when he looks in a mirror (and his MAGA followers).

It's also a horrid run on sentence. I'm no English teacher, but I want to grab a red pen and start correcting the whole thing. It might save time to just cross the entire thing out and write a big F across Trump's forehead. It can stand for both Fail and Fascist!

That's the way Trump sees the world. There are only two kinds of people: People who support him and his enemies.

If you support him, you're the greatest person in the world. But if you oppose him even once in a minor way, you're on the enemies list.

There's a very nasty racial slur against black people that starts with "jiga" and ends with "boo." Many people think that Trump's use of "peekaboo" in relation to the black Letitia James is a reference to that phrase.

He has a history of doing this. He has referenced the two black poll workers in Georgia that the MAGA conspiracy theories targeted as "Riggers" in a clear nod to the N word.

His followers love this kind of stuff. They think they're being sneaky by "hiding" their racism behind otherwise innocuous words.

They weren't intentionally seized. They were seized because classified documents were mixed in with his passports and other stuff. When they raid a facility, they don't have time to sort through everything there so they will often grab everything. Then a team sorts through it and returns anything that isn't part of the case.

Now, if a judge rules that Trump is a flight risk, they can seize his passports for real this time. Until then, though, Trump retains the ability to travel outside the country.

And the left generally disavows people who threaten or commit acts of violence. For example, a few years back a Bernie Sanders supporter went to a Congressional baseball game and opened fire on Republicans. Bernie quickly disavowed this person and said that he didn't stand for violence at all.

The right, meanwhile, celebrates violence. Just look at how they've treated the January 6th insurrectionists. They regard them as heroes and patriots of the highest order for trying to kill members of Congress. Even Republicans who were present and feared for their lives that day have claimed that these people are "political prisoners" and "they did nothing wrong."

As an American Jew, I've almost gotten used to facing anti-semitism from the right. A Republican politician is tacitly approving of Nazis waving swastika flags and chanting anti-semitic slogans? Must be a day that ends in Y.

What's scared me is the anti-semitism I've seen from some on the left. I'm not talking about criticizing Israel or wanting the Palestinians to be safe. I don't count that as anti-semitism. I'm talking about people on the left saying that all Jews are responsible for what Israel is doing and saying that American Jews (including Jewish temples and Jewish owned businesses) are legitimate targets because Israel did stuff they disagree with. And then there are others on the left who try to gaslight Jews who say they are encountering anti-semitism - telling them that they aren't and are just imagining it.

Intellectually, I know this is a very vocal minority, but suddenly hearing this from the left while still hearing anti-semitic remarks from the right has me scared and not feeling safe. I don't want to publicly identify myself as Jewish in public for fear of encountering someone who either hates me for my religion or who holds me responsible for the actions of a country that I'm not a citizen of.

And then you have blue states, like NY where I live. I live in a blue section within the state, but I could travel a half hour away and end up in an area so red that they fly Trump flags, Confederate flags, and vote for Elise Stefanik. (I get TV commercials for her despite not being in her area.) That area might as well be the deep south despite being in Blue NY.

This has been their way for quite some time. The Christian Nationalists believe that this is a Christian nation, that all people of different religious beliefs should be second class citizens at best, and that the country should be run via Christian rules.

But not "Jesus gives free healthcare, feeds the hungry, and opposes the wealthy" Christianity. That's the "wrong" Christianity. They want this country run using their Christian rules and the rest of us can convert or else.

They believe that all the Founding Fathers were Christians like them despite all evidence that they weren't. They believe that the Founding Fathers wanted this nation run as a theocracy, despite all the evidence that this isn't true. They don't care because all they want is the power to mold this country as they see fit and over the objections of the rest of us.

And, alarmingly, they're getting closer and closer to achieving their goal.

According to Speaker Johnson, gay sex will be criminalized, marriage equality will be banned, birth control will be strictly regulated, and everyone will be forced to live their lives according to Johnson's version of Christianity.

I'm not LGBTQ, but I have LGBTQ friends. I'm also Jewish and have no intentions of letting anyone force me to live my life by another religion's rules. My religious beliefs are my own. They bind me and don't apply to anyone else. Similarly, someone else's religious beliefs shouldn't bind me or anyone else.

This was exactly my view when this whole "black people learned valuable skills from slavery" thing came up.

Let's say it was true. Jim is a slave and he's learned a few valuable skills due to being a slave. How can Jim use those skills? It's not like he can just tell his master "I've decided to quit and open my own business." He's literally a slave. His entire being is owned by his master.

The only way he might be able to put those skills to good use would be to flee slavery. Even then, though, he'd first need to avoid capture or being killed. He'd have needed to make his way north to Canada. Former slaves couldn't just stop in a Northern "free" state because the South got a law passed to allow them to go into Northern states and drag escaped slaves (and sometimes free black people) back to the South.

The best case scenario for this "slave that learned valuable skills" is that they might be able to use those skills only after a perilous escape and journey during which they risked dying in a multitude of ways. There is no way that "but they learned useful skills" makes slavery any less horrific.

The problem is that they don't want abortions to be safe, rare, and legal. They want abortions to be non-existent. If women need to go to back alleys where some guy with a hanger will perform a dangerous abortion on them, then "that's their punishment for having sex."

They ignore that some women get abortions after being raped - when they literally had no choice in sex occuring. (Or, they blame the woman for the rape ala "she shouldn't have been drinking and shouldn't have worn that dress, it's all her fault.") They also ignore that some women WANT to have the baby, but things go wrong during the pregnancy and the choices are either abortion or carry a dead/dying fetus inside them until they both die.

The details don't matter. All that matters is that they control women's lives (and likely deaths).

There are two reasons: the religious and the capitalist.

The religious reason is that they think there can never be any change. God made the world as is and nothing can ever change. If something changes, it's because God changed it, not man. So scientists saying that man is changing the climate can't be right because it would mean that the world is changing and that the change isn't coming from God.

The capitalist reason is that they have a lot of money tied up in things that would need to change to address climate change. These changes would cost money and wouldn't increase their profits. They'd rather the earth burn if they got another few billion in profits in the short term than take a short term loss for long term gain.

Same with their gun laws. Conservatives love to point to Chicago's gun crime rates despite Chicago's gun control laws. The problem is that Chicago has a lot of red areas around it with lax gun laws. Criminals go to these red areas, buy guns, and then use them in Chicago. Gun crime rates would be very low in Chicago if you filtered out guns that were legally obtained in red areas and then imported.

I had an Internet stalker for a time who was determined to report me to the police for crimes I committed against children. Her proof? God told her. Yes, she literally thought that God spoke to her and told her who was abusing kids.

It was very stressful, but thankfully, apart from harassing me online, she never successfully convinced any police department to arrest me. I guess the police file their "God told me he's a criminal" reports in "the special filing location" (aka the trash).

Still, it's scary to think what grief she could use caused me had she been able to hide her crazy a bit better. (I've greatly summarized this tale for this post. The full tale takes place over years, involves multiple people including Boy George and the CEO of Firefox, a "worldwide hacking organization," and more.)

If it was one call, I'd agree with you. Better to check it out and find out it was wrong than to not check it and miss abuse. Maybe this can excuse the second and third call as well. But when you get to the 24th time, maybe the agency should be questioning whether this is a person trying to use their agency to harass the person. (The CPS version of Swatting.)

They should refer this matter to the police and have them investigate who is making these calls. Not only were they harassing a family that they've checked multiple times, but they are both diverting resources away from actual abuse cases and are causing the abuse that they claim to want to stop.

A $35,000 car (with what I could afford for a down payment, what I think I'd get for my trade-in, and at 8% interest), would be $655 a month. That's budget busting for me.

Even ignoring costs to install a charger, I spend about $80 in gas a month, so that wouldn't be a huge savings. I'd still be spending an additional $575 a month which would be enough to put me in the red every month.

The hybrids I was looking at cost $21K to $29K and even those would stress my budget out.

The problem is that cars are needed for many people to get to where they need to go. In my case, if I didn't have a car, I wouldn't be able to get to many of my doctor's appointments and grocery shopping would be extremely difficult.

There are buses where I live, but they don't go to where my doctors are. And when I do my weekly grocery shopping, I can have 8 full (reusable) bags of groceries. Even if the buses went to the stores I go to, carrying all these onto and off of the bus myself would be extremely difficult.

Owning a car is a necessity for many people.

My current car is 14 years old and fully paid off, but likely won't survive for much longer. I really want an electric car, but the prices on these are beyond what I can afford. So I looked at hybrid cars and even these were going to be extremely pricey. Finally, I looked at some regular gas cars, but even those would stretch my budget to the breaking point.

If my current car goes, I'll need to buy another one, but I'm not sure how I'll afford it.