[TheBlueMarvel]

Quote:

Originally Posted by hasbroherofan

Playing along with delusions only leads to things getting worse. When someone starts spouting conspiracy level crap I immediately lose any interest in talking to them. We're at a point now where people have lost relatives to delusional cults like Qanon because of crap like this, so forgive me if I'm not shedding any tears over one actor's stupidity getting them canned.

The conspiracies being promulgated aren't delusions, they are purposeful manipulations designed to take advantage of the gullible and misinformed. Dictators, cult leaders, televangelists, and conmen share a perverse reverse EQ (emotional quotient; emotional intelligence) in that they know exactly which buttons to push to supplant their followers ability to think objectively for themselves. Abusive personalities use all kinds of exploits from feigning regard/connection, to lying/gaslighting to exploit the emotions of their targets in an effort to prevent them from realizing they're little more than marks or rubes to these sociopathic puppet masters. In a society that breeds sociopaths, there is a surplus of Ebony Maws out there.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Thor Laserpunch

I'm listening, I just can not shrug off her comments as harmless. We're past the point where people in her position are just stating their opinion, words like hers are stoking a very dangerous fire and doing so with incendiary underlying racist meaning. I can't view that as a run of the mill foot in mouth mistake.

And you shouldn't shrug her comments off as harmless because they were deliberate and contemplated. I don't know her well enough to give her the benefit of the doubt of merely being stupid. The facts are, after tweeting a racist conspiratorial image, designed to propel an anti-Semitic message, she doubled down and used Jewish persecution as a prop in an absurd false equivalency argument. That's just too much "dumb" on display for me to suspend my sense of disbelief. With the wisdom that Maya imparted - when someone shows you who they are... yeah, I believed her the first time.

Can she change or improve as a person? I'd like to hope so, but my experience, unfortunately, is that people don't change much.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Thor Laserpunch

We're already living in the dystopian timeline if you ask me, and are not even close to the Hollywood happy ending. But the historical context you provide I think is so on point about where we are now and why it's important to treat bad ideologies as the disease they are. Shit's gonna get scary from here on in imho because of our hubris, because we always said U-S-A is #1 and were too complacent about The Big Lie, the whole damn thing's now gone off the rails in a way that is quite terrifyingly unpredictable.

Sadly, I agree with your assessment of where we are as a nation. As a country, we have spent so much time avoiding a serious national dialogue about racism and bigotry that the issue has metastasized into a stage 3 cancer. We are so very close to being terminal. The pernicious sickness that is bigotry is systemic, institutionalized, and spiritual in nature. The denial and avoidance of putting this age old malady behind us has created a context in which our nation's enemies - both from without and from within - know just how powerful a tool it is to divide and destroy us all.

The experiment is nearly over... not so fun times.