• Rusty Shackleford@programming.dev
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    1 day ago

    spoiler

    I’m an anti-theist, who profoundly and especially despises the Abrahamic religions, but I’ll bet good money this is not about prayer calls and “Islam taking over”.

    This is about him being a brown immigrant socialist.

    It’s because, still in 2025 in the US, if you want publicly funded social programs for better individual outcomes in a capitalist economy, and you’re anywhere left of the fucking Einsatzgruppen, you’re a commie pinko who loves getting Eiffel-Towered by Stalin and Mao.

    Being honest, though, I would say this a very American mentality, but since I immigrated to the Netherlands from the US in '22, I’m sad to say, it’s infecting Western Europe.

    I’ll never understand the perverse allure of this type of thinking. I’ve had it explained to me. I’ve read The Righteous Mind by Dr. Johnathan Haight. I get it on paper, but it still seems very alien to me when people go on about “the <insertEthnicSlurHere> breathing up all our air and taking all our jobs and making things easier for the wrong people.”

      • Rusty Shackleford@programming.dev
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        11 hours ago

        I should clarify.

        I’m an American not of European descent. I’m not “white”. I’m perfectly aware that I live in a country (one of several) that enslaved my people during the colonial era of western Europe.

        When I was growing up in the eighties and nineties, my impression was that Europe’s lower and middle classes had largely evolved past the marriage of conservative economics, might-makes-right, and “fuck-the-brown-people-if-they-get-too-much-money” thinking behind. I’m certainly aware that “god, glory, and gold” did not start in the United States.

        When I moved to the EU, in the Netherlands, I was right about my estimation but I was taken aback by some people’s parroting the conservative religious nationalist talking points that’s destroying the US currently. It’s just that it was much more than I expected.

        • Cosmonauticus@lemmy.world
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          10 hours ago

          Then you didnt do any reading then. There’s a reason ppl want to piss on Margaret Thatcher’s grave. Plus you got economic colonialist France and Spain’s dictatorship ending in the 70s. Also the amount of blackface they claim that totally isnt racist. Fuck Zwarte Piet

          Europe is like Canada, they just have good PR. There’s a fuckton of skeletons in their closet and they havent changed as much as ppl like to think. Im an black American living in Germany and I clocked immediately its exactly the same as America. They just dont say the quiet parts outloud as often

    • Seleni@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      I mean, it does make sense if you have a tribalist worldview. Less people means more resources for your tribe, after all.

      And, if you make it so that ‘other tribe’ has some kind of easy identifier they can’t change, like skin color, then you know who to throw out on sight!

      Some people are just more tribal-minded than others. They’ve done studies and it’s pretty consistent that republicans/conservatives have a far more tribal mindset. Which tends to go hand-in-hand with a desire for a ‘strong leader’ and a strict tribal hierarchy.

      Unfortunately that tends to translate to whoever bullshits the best because they’re reacting off instinct rather than thinking about things, which makes it easy for scam artists like Trump that talk a big game to appeal to them.

      • Rusty Shackleford@programming.dev
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        23 hours ago

        It never stops.

        Once the “others” outside of the tribe have been eradicated, the various sub-groups within the tribe will take the place of the “other”, and so on, and so forth.

        Conservatism is a cancer.