Seriously, they are both former military, my dad was in for like 30 years, how do they like the drunk secretary? I get that he saw combat, but being in combat doesn’t automatically make you qualified for… well anything except therapy and medical care.
I feel ya with this, but to paint this as black and white is to miss important nuance.
They’re deluded. As such, it’s an error to see them as evil in the same way that it is to see a person that’s high on meth and dangerous or schizophrenic and hostile as being evil.
They’re no less dangerous, don’t get me wrong, but to see them as bad is, I think, a critical misunderstanding of what’s going on here that leads people to think like this.
I didn’t say evil, I said bad people.
If propaganda can convince you to hate people just because of where they’re from, you’re not a good person.
Now, if you realize you were a bad person and work on being a good person, you can become one. If you know what you’re doing is bad and have no desire to change, then you’re evil.
And none of those are immutable qualities.
Yeah you’re right. I shouldn’t have used the word evil.
I would urge you to examine how propaganda has affected everyone.
Like other posters have said, probably the best choice OP can make is to actually talk to them and maybe not use lemmy for answers.
At this point, I’m not seeing much daylight between the two.
Yeah. It’s hard. It’s been hard for me too.
I’m teaching my kids as I learn for myself; it’s critically important that you not dehumanize people and seek understanding and strive to be compassionate.
I’ve also known people that have voted for trump 1st term to be good people for long enough that I see it as valuable to deeply interrogate the process by which they came to be such as they are now. For me, at least, it feels lazy and dishonest to flatly dismiss them as bad. Even trump 2 voters, I can see that they, nearly all, were submerged in a propaganda machine designed to break people.
Are some of them sociopathic monsters? You bet! Society needs protected from them.
I see the groupthink on both sides as the most dangerous thing though. The manipulation (of all sides) as the enemy. The dismissal of human life as the root problem. Most especially when profit is placed over people, but also when it’s done by either side.
My concern is that dehumanization plays into their hands and I see the dehumanization as a direct path to violent conflict. They want violence because it would free them to use the insurrection act as a means to their ends.
So, to bring it full circle, seeing them as bad and evil and unworthy of compassion or even dialogue plays directly into their hands.