They actually love dogs a lot. They adore simple minds that give unconditional love. They’re not mindless monsters with different axioms, they’re just dumb as fuck. And we could absolutely use this to change narratives in this country if we understood it better.
Cops in the US murder around 10,000 dogs a year one study estimates, but the figure might be much higher, because it’s not surprisingly hard to get data on something that police turn off their body cameras for or deny releasing to any outside agency.
Basically, if you own a dog, and you let a cop into your house, if they bark at the cop the cop will likely shoot the dog in front of you and carry on like nothing happened and you have no right to do anything, as the threat stands pretty strong in the air over the sounds of your dog’s last breaths. If more people released videos of this happening, I think we could push police overhaul with far, far more success than we had with BLM.
And if you’re reading between the lines and saying “wow he’s saying that the right cares more about the lives of dogs than black kids” yeah that is what I’m saying. No, we can’t change it. But I think if we worked with those primitive feelings at front and center, we could make a lot more progress in turning them little by little.
edit: as you predictably recoil at this and feel dismissive and offended at the idea that conservatives love dogs and we need to leverage that as another tool to change how they feel, try to ask yourself if you’re reflexively angry here because you think they’re incapable of love and human feelings. If they’ve been dehumanized for you, congratulations, you’re sliding down the same path you’ve seen and condemned in others countless times before. Your enemy is human, they have human feelings. The difference is how they manage those feelings and the stories they tell themselves to explain those feelings. If you think understanding someone is the same as defending their actions and choices, you’re flat out stupid and deserve whatever misery you’re likely swimming in.
I’m afraid I must disagree. The right, in general, don’t care for dogs any more than they care for any other livestock. There are exceptions, of course, but in general they care about them as tools. Guard dogs, hunting dogs, great, but if that hunting dog misbehaves, they have no problem taking it straight to the gravel pit like Kristi Noem did. You even point out in your post that cops in the US shoot dogs at a mind boggling rate. Well, those cops are predominantly aligned with the right, are they not?
They may not have deep, intellectual compassion, but they have human feelings, and I can EASILY dig up thousands of facebook groups of right-wing dog lovers and their products, of people who have unparalleled love for guns, trump and dogs.
See, where you’re having a disconnect is the normal, human response to seeing behavior that runs against their own feelings. You’re encountering cognitive dissonance, and sorry to say once you start seeing it, you can’t stop seeing it and learn it’s fundamental to the human condition. Nobody is immune but some fall into it far more easily.
The cops that shoot dogs? Probably have their own dogs that they cherish. The people who scream and cry about how we need to deport immigrants? They would fight tooth-and-nail to keep their groundskeeper from being deported because “he’s a good guy and has a family.” The ones who want to see women die from miscarriages? They’ll drive their daughter over state-lines and pay for HER abortion. You see this everywhere. They voted on grocery prices… ask them how they feel about the price of eggs and poultry right now and you’ll get a dumb stare and a shifting goalpost, because those feelings were then, these new feelings are now.
And they do this all without a shred of self-awareness. I think we will fight the right a lot better when we understand that they’re not people who think the same way as we do. They aren’t aware of “punching down” or power structures, all they’re aware of is “punching” and cannot, will not EVER be able to separate themselves from their limited scope of “this is how I feel right now.” And this is also why this kind of mentality has been so successfully roped in by con-men who appeal to people’s selfish feelings.
Republicans only care about themselves. So they care about THEIR dog, THEIR family, etc. anything or anyone else is “others” that can burn for all they care. You see it when some of them suddenly support homosexuality when their kid is gay and “oh, so it’s actually NOT a choice!” But they’re also more likely to disown their kid or shoot their dog if it doesn’t meet their expectation or fit in their world view.
We attack what they’re feeling. We shift their feelings. We appeal to their ever-shifting emotions and their selfish wants in the “now” and we make them hurt inside in a way that can’t be shifted into anger at a target. Honestly the issue of showing how police kill pets is a HUGE one I think we’re all leaving behind because I think for a lot of leftists, we’re afraid that if we make it an issue we will get attacked by other leftists for ignoring all the other huge issues and the human lives that are also being harmed.
And that’s the rub, we try so hard to craft arguments and make cases that encompass everyone and everything that we lose sight of how to deeply inject our feelings into the heart of that old white lady who commands the respect of her grown chud kids. People who do NOT care about how well crafted our socialist arguments are or how much data backs up our ideals. We gotta stupid-down and find a new grass-roots compass for change, because we’re not winning.
Despite all evidence to the contrary, you have quite the conviction. Quite the dedication to defending a terrorist
Boelton shot their family dog after murdering both parents. Kristi Noem murdered her family dog because she didn’t want to train it and was promoted to a high level cabinet position
Police, by your own admission, kill many family dogs. Police also heavily skew conservative
In spite of all that you think this administration and its followers love dogs?
This is a juvenile and destructive bit of hyperbolic performatism and points to a clear lack of actual seriousness about the issue. If you don’t care about outcomes you’re on the wrong side.
Police, by your own admission, kill many family dogs. Police also heavily skew conservative
I will reference what I said elsewhere but you obviously didn’t read, which is that conservatism as a mindset is not coherent, it’s about how they feel now. They are gaining ground because we’re addressing intellectual ideas with them and they only care about what’s on their mind right now, this is what I’m saying we can exploit. But it involves something that will make reactionary turds on the left pretty uncomfortable, which is acknowledging that the vast majority of conservatives are normal people. Misguided but with the same emotions and wants for themselves.
The cops that shoot dogs? Probably have their own dogs that they cherish. The people who scream and cry about how we need to deport immigrants? They would fight tooth-and-nail to keep their groundskeeper from being deported because “he’s a good guy and has a family.” The ones who want to see women die from miscarriages? They’ll drive their daughter over state-lines and pay for HER abortion. You see this everywhere. They voted on grocery prices… ask them how they feel about the price of eggs and poultry right now and you’ll get a dumb stare and a shifting goalpost, because those feelings were then, these new feelings are now.
So my point is that we need to do better to appeal to the emotions they are using and figure out how to make it less about “including everyone” and more about “this is the pain you may feel next.”
If this is too “kind to terrorists” for you, you obviously haven’t been paying attention to how easily the underclass looking for equality can become the bad guys. Whatever happens in our country, we have to share it with them after, so I don’t entertain these kinds of tones that the right is inhuman monsters. Maybe the people bankrolling the media personalities, but the people are just people and you’re equally capable of losing cognitive thought and following your momentary feelings.
I appreciate that. People aren’t here in these sites for truth or being challenged, they’re here to pound war-drums together and drive up dopamine fervor towards a fantasy war with fantasy enemies. Not humans.
I’m always saddened by how easily our species devolves from having moral high-ground on an issue to feeling like the superior humans for making their ideological opponent into a vile monster, both overpowering and oppressive but also too pathetic to consider as a human. We’ve seen what this leads to over and over.
A question I ask folks sometimes is “if you won tomorrow, if you got overwhelming success for your party, your team, your group, what would the next day look like?” and invariably with few exceptions, they get angry and offended. Making someone consider their ideological opponent’s existence makes them feel like you’re taking the opposing side. This is why and how we get some of humanity’s worst acts.
We are, despite centuries upon centuries of evolution, civilization, philisophy and education, deeply tribal creatures. While right wing propaganda most blatantly and directly calls upon our tribalism to dehumanize the “other” of the day, it is a trait we all share. Frankly when you look at how far some people take the denial of easily verifiable reality to stick to a feeble story and prop up the most deplorable of men, it’s easy to feel they are terminally lost and can no longer be part of any kind of moral and positive society. But that way we just end up dehumanizing them as much as they do to us.
Even as they have been brainwashed and molded to be perpetually scared and angry and to reject other feelings, they are people nontheless who need to be treated fairly.
To some extent I understand that murderer, misguided as he is. It would, for me be a better world if I could remove people I see as harmful to the world from existence. If someone were to remove a bunch of republican supporting billionaires, the whole of that parties leadership and the heritage foundation from the world I would not be angry at all. Not because I hate them. I don’t really, I don’t know them personally. But because they are so harmful to all of us.
We may say things like “eat the rich” but we don’t really do that, at most we affectionately nibble a bit, without breaking skin. I’m too well aware that to people who live in actual abject povery, my middle class ass could be part of the group of rich folk on the menu. Once we start killing the people we see as harmful, where do we stop. Where do we draw the line? Who makes the grade? We could easily end up in a situation where, like in post revolutionary China or France anyone could be accused and convicted for not being revolutionary enough. Accused by an angry neighbor, a jealous lover or your own kids.
So while I understand the feelings that lead to the actions, I cannot condone murder, nor do I take such action myself, besides, I have a job to do, kids to care for, bills to pay etc, etc, etc.
And no, I have no solution for any of this, it’s way too complex to solve with rigid ideology or easy to shout slogans.
They actually love dogs a lot. They adore simple minds that give unconditional love. They’re not mindless monsters with different axioms, they’re just dumb as fuck. And we could absolutely use this to change narratives in this country if we understood it better.
Cops in the US murder around 10,000 dogs a year one study estimates, but the figure might be much higher, because it’s not surprisingly hard to get data on something that police turn off their body cameras for or deny releasing to any outside agency.
Basically, if you own a dog, and you let a cop into your house, if they bark at the cop the cop will likely shoot the dog in front of you and carry on like nothing happened and you have no right to do anything, as the threat stands pretty strong in the air over the sounds of your dog’s last breaths. If more people released videos of this happening, I think we could push police overhaul with far, far more success than we had with BLM.
And if you’re reading between the lines and saying “wow he’s saying that the right cares more about the lives of dogs than black kids” yeah that is what I’m saying. No, we can’t change it. But I think if we worked with those primitive feelings at front and center, we could make a lot more progress in turning them little by little.
edit: as you predictably recoil at this and feel dismissive and offended at the idea that conservatives love dogs and we need to leverage that as another tool to change how they feel, try to ask yourself if you’re reflexively angry here because you think they’re incapable of love and human feelings. If they’ve been dehumanized for you, congratulations, you’re sliding down the same path you’ve seen and condemned in others countless times before. Your enemy is human, they have human feelings. The difference is how they manage those feelings and the stories they tell themselves to explain those feelings. If you think understanding someone is the same as defending their actions and choices, you’re flat out stupid and deserve whatever misery you’re likely swimming in.
I’m afraid I must disagree. The right, in general, don’t care for dogs any more than they care for any other livestock. There are exceptions, of course, but in general they care about them as tools. Guard dogs, hunting dogs, great, but if that hunting dog misbehaves, they have no problem taking it straight to the gravel pit like Kristi Noem did. You even point out in your post that cops in the US shoot dogs at a mind boggling rate. Well, those cops are predominantly aligned with the right, are they not?
They may not have deep, intellectual compassion, but they have human feelings, and I can EASILY dig up thousands of facebook groups of right-wing dog lovers and their products, of people who have unparalleled love for guns, trump and dogs.
See, where you’re having a disconnect is the normal, human response to seeing behavior that runs against their own feelings. You’re encountering cognitive dissonance, and sorry to say once you start seeing it, you can’t stop seeing it and learn it’s fundamental to the human condition. Nobody is immune but some fall into it far more easily.
The cops that shoot dogs? Probably have their own dogs that they cherish. The people who scream and cry about how we need to deport immigrants? They would fight tooth-and-nail to keep their groundskeeper from being deported because “he’s a good guy and has a family.” The ones who want to see women die from miscarriages? They’ll drive their daughter over state-lines and pay for HER abortion. You see this everywhere. They voted on grocery prices… ask them how they feel about the price of eggs and poultry right now and you’ll get a dumb stare and a shifting goalpost, because those feelings were then, these new feelings are now.
And they do this all without a shred of self-awareness. I think we will fight the right a lot better when we understand that they’re not people who think the same way as we do. They aren’t aware of “punching down” or power structures, all they’re aware of is “punching” and cannot, will not EVER be able to separate themselves from their limited scope of “this is how I feel right now.” And this is also why this kind of mentality has been so successfully roped in by con-men who appeal to people’s selfish feelings.
Republicans only care about themselves. So they care about THEIR dog, THEIR family, etc. anything or anyone else is “others” that can burn for all they care. You see it when some of them suddenly support homosexuality when their kid is gay and “oh, so it’s actually NOT a choice!” But they’re also more likely to disown their kid or shoot their dog if it doesn’t meet their expectation or fit in their world view.
I think that’s what the other person is saying too.
If they can’t be changed, then what?
We attack what they’re feeling. We shift their feelings. We appeal to their ever-shifting emotions and their selfish wants in the “now” and we make them hurt inside in a way that can’t be shifted into anger at a target. Honestly the issue of showing how police kill pets is a HUGE one I think we’re all leaving behind because I think for a lot of leftists, we’re afraid that if we make it an issue we will get attacked by other leftists for ignoring all the other huge issues and the human lives that are also being harmed.
And that’s the rub, we try so hard to craft arguments and make cases that encompass everyone and everything that we lose sight of how to deeply inject our feelings into the heart of that old white lady who commands the respect of her grown chud kids. People who do NOT care about how well crafted our socialist arguments are or how much data backs up our ideals. We gotta stupid-down and find a new grass-roots compass for change, because we’re not winning.
Despite all evidence to the contrary, you have quite the conviction. Quite the dedication to defending a terrorist
Boelton shot their family dog after murdering both parents. Kristi Noem murdered her family dog because she didn’t want to train it and was promoted to a high level cabinet position
Police, by your own admission, kill many family dogs. Police also heavily skew conservative
In spite of all that you think this administration and its followers love dogs?
So several things:
This is a juvenile and destructive bit of hyperbolic performatism and points to a clear lack of actual seriousness about the issue. If you don’t care about outcomes you’re on the wrong side.
I will reference what I said elsewhere but you obviously didn’t read, which is that conservatism as a mindset is not coherent, it’s about how they feel now. They are gaining ground because we’re addressing intellectual ideas with them and they only care about what’s on their mind right now, this is what I’m saying we can exploit. But it involves something that will make reactionary turds on the left pretty uncomfortable, which is acknowledging that the vast majority of conservatives are normal people. Misguided but with the same emotions and wants for themselves.
So my point is that we need to do better to appeal to the emotions they are using and figure out how to make it less about “including everyone” and more about “this is the pain you may feel next.”
If this is too “kind to terrorists” for you, you obviously haven’t been paying attention to how easily the underclass looking for equality can become the bad guys. Whatever happens in our country, we have to share it with them after, so I don’t entertain these kinds of tones that the right is inhuman monsters. Maybe the people bankrolling the media personalities, but the people are just people and you’re equally capable of losing cognitive thought and following your momentary feelings.
Just wanted to say, in the face of downvotes and angry replied, that I think you are absolutely right.
I appreciate that. People aren’t here in these sites for truth or being challenged, they’re here to pound war-drums together and drive up dopamine fervor towards a fantasy war with fantasy enemies. Not humans.
I’m always saddened by how easily our species devolves from having moral high-ground on an issue to feeling like the superior humans for making their ideological opponent into a vile monster, both overpowering and oppressive but also too pathetic to consider as a human. We’ve seen what this leads to over and over.
A question I ask folks sometimes is “if you won tomorrow, if you got overwhelming success for your party, your team, your group, what would the next day look like?” and invariably with few exceptions, they get angry and offended. Making someone consider their ideological opponent’s existence makes them feel like you’re taking the opposing side. This is why and how we get some of humanity’s worst acts.
We are, despite centuries upon centuries of evolution, civilization, philisophy and education, deeply tribal creatures. While right wing propaganda most blatantly and directly calls upon our tribalism to dehumanize the “other” of the day, it is a trait we all share. Frankly when you look at how far some people take the denial of easily verifiable reality to stick to a feeble story and prop up the most deplorable of men, it’s easy to feel they are terminally lost and can no longer be part of any kind of moral and positive society. But that way we just end up dehumanizing them as much as they do to us.
Even as they have been brainwashed and molded to be perpetually scared and angry and to reject other feelings, they are people nontheless who need to be treated fairly.
To some extent I understand that murderer, misguided as he is. It would, for me be a better world if I could remove people I see as harmful to the world from existence. If someone were to remove a bunch of republican supporting billionaires, the whole of that parties leadership and the heritage foundation from the world I would not be angry at all. Not because I hate them. I don’t really, I don’t know them personally. But because they are so harmful to all of us.
We may say things like “eat the rich” but we don’t really do that, at most we affectionately nibble a bit, without breaking skin. I’m too well aware that to people who live in actual abject povery, my middle class ass could be part of the group of rich folk on the menu. Once we start killing the people we see as harmful, where do we stop. Where do we draw the line? Who makes the grade? We could easily end up in a situation where, like in post revolutionary China or France anyone could be accused and convicted for not being revolutionary enough. Accused by an angry neighbor, a jealous lover or your own kids.
So while I understand the feelings that lead to the actions, I cannot condone murder, nor do I take such action myself, besides, I have a job to do, kids to care for, bills to pay etc, etc, etc.
And no, I have no solution for any of this, it’s way too complex to solve with rigid ideology or easy to shout slogans.