I strongly disagree. Just because someone else doesn’t uphold their end of the deal doesn’t give you license to not uphold yours. That’s where integrity comes in, and it’s absolutely worth fighting for. Not to mention, slinging insults just pushes the other side to dig in and reject anything further you have to say. If someone thinks Trump has okay-ish policies but isn’t sold yet, and you attack him over something completely irrelevant to his campaign, you’re going to push that person into supporting him more strongly. But if you attack his policies and explain how they’ll be bad for them/America, they may change their mind.
Insulting someone like Trump may feel good in the moment, but it’s counter-productive.
Zagorath@aussie.zone 2 months ago
I think “weird” is an interesting case precisely because it’s a subjective term. Whether or not someone is weird is in the eye of the beholder. It can also be taken positively or negatively, depending on one’s outlook. And it can be for different reasons; calling someone weird based on their political beliefs is different from calling them weird for how they look, for example. And even calling someone weird for holding one particular value is different from calling them weird for a different value.
Insulting one person for being weird doesn’t actively target anyone else because people may identify themselves as weird or not, and separately may identify it as an insult or not. It works very well against Trump and his allies because they specifically position themselves as believing in the values of the normal American. So being called weird is a doubly-whammy of undermining their self-image and being based on something that actually does make them a bad person, and so the only drive-by victims are other people with harmful beliefs.
Gradually_Adjusting@lemmy.world 2 months ago
That’s all reasonable enough. I don’t mind that we disagree, just wanted to make it clear I’m not like, a crazy person about it.