The only disagreement I have with the Harper’s Bazaar column excerpted below is the author’s decision to use plural pronouns to refer to singular antecedents:*
IF YOU ARE MARRIED TO A TRUMP SUPPORTER, DIVORCE THEM
I’m going to save you three years of therapy where you and your partner try to “agree to disagree.”
If your partner is a Trump supporter and you are not, just divorce them…
You do not need to try to make it work with someone who thinks of people as “illegals.” Just divorce them…
This may not always be possible. Some people may not have the financial or practical means available to get a divorce, but if you do have those means? DIVORCE THEM.
Because if one member of a couple believes the President should endorse police brutality and the other member believes that is balls-to-the-wall insane, that is not a disagreement you’re going to find common ground on. You can use all the measured voices and positive words you want. It’s not a question of disagreement about the most effective way to load the dishwasher, or even whether trickle-down economics works. Those are opinions that might be altered by showing compelling factual evidence.
Supporting Trump at this point does not indicate a difference of opinions. It indicates a difference of values.
Values aren’t like hobbies or interests. They don’t change over time, and they more or less define who you are. Trump’s administration may have been, for some of us, a time when what we value has become much clearer to us.
So, while you may be able to convince your partner that there is a more efficient way to load the dishwasher, you will never be able to convince them that they need to care about people they are fundamentally uninterested in caring about…
Luckily, I’m not married to a Trump supporter. Actually, luck has nothing to do with it — 20 years ago, I married someone who shared my values, which precluded future Trump support. But I can see how people could find themselves in this situation; my own parents were wildly ill-suited in that regard, and my mother’s decision to run like a scalded dog was the smartest thing she ever did.
Anyhoo, many of us have shared election estrangement stories in comments. I’m estranged from my Trump-voting relatives to varying degrees, including my only surviving parent. It hurts, but there it is.
The thing that gets me is how gob-smacked Trump supporters are that “politics” could create such a rift. Yeah, you used your ballot to metaphorically spit in my face, telling me I’m a second-class citizen and that you don’t give a shit about me, my daughter, my sister, our immigrant loved ones, etc. And we took it personally! Who could have predicted?
Open thread.
[H/T: @JesusHCristos on the Twitters]*Yeah, I know — the language evolves, blah blah blah. Get the fuck off my lawn while I disperse these clouds with the power of my voice!
Ceci n est pas mon nym
So what pronoun do you prefer? Should the author say him/her each time? Or do that thing I hate, alternate gender in each paragraph? I almost always end up with “they/them” because in American English, all the other possibilities are worse. In the UK I guess you can get away with “one” but I don’t see how to do that here. Hmm… “if one is a Trump supporter and one’s spouse is not, one should just get a divorce”. Ugh.
oatler.
Politics is our true religion. When the money runs out we’ll be throwing rocks at each other like Israelis and Palestinians, just happy to die if They die more.
Jeffro
It’s one thing for a principled progressive and principled conservative to be in a relationship or married – you might be able to finesse that, ‘agree to disagree’ on the size of government, etc.
It’s another thing entirely for anyone with a conscience, functioning brain stem, or a heart to be in a relationship with a Trumpkin. It tells you far too much about what kind of person they are, starting with who they look up to/are ok with as leader of this country.
That older couple wearing identical “Fuck Your Feelings” t-shirts, back during one of the campaign rallies? That’s what Trumpov romance is all about!
(same with that older single lady earring a “Trump Can Grab This P____” t-shirt…it fits, since that’s Trump’s idea of romance as well)
Baud
This. When election night was over, the last defense of “no harm, no foul” was stripped away.
Yutsano
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: When English dropped the ye/you distinction it messed up a ton of things. Plus we have no neutral pronoun like our German ancestors do.
Betty Cracker
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: I’d recast the sentence to make the antecedent plural too or eliminate the need to use a pronoun, e.g., “If you’re married to a Trump supporter, get a divorce.”
Mart
In case you are wondering, I have seen balls to the walls. They are (mostly were) used as speed regulators on rotating equipment. As the shaft spins faster, metal balls on steel shafts start to rise, When they reach the wall, machine is at full speed. (Term is also used by fighter pilots, but I don’t care for that new version.)
rikyrah
I can’t even fathom being in the same room with one.
Married to one?
Oh hell muthaphuckin’ NO.
rikyrah
Trump admin bypassing Democratic senators on judicial nominations. Hugely consequential, underreported story https://t.co/LDl78XRP04
— Ari Berman (@AriBerman) August 11, 2017
rikyrah
Republicans lose election to Dem: Try to recall her.
Republicans lose senator to Dem caucus: Try to recall her.
Welcome to the new world.
— Jon Ralston (@RalstonReports) August 11, 2017
rikyrah
NEW: 78% of the public, including 52% of Republicans, want the Trump administration to make the #ACA work https://t.co/m0ftArq4dm pic.twitter.com/z8xaYMsaWp
— Kaiser Family Found (@KaiserFamFound) August 11, 2017
Ceci n est pas mon nym
Since it’s an open thread, a note on the movies. We just watched “Dark Tower”. I think they did a good job. I knew it wasn’t going to have 90% of what was in the novels, there were SEVEN of them for FSM’s sake. It had an ending, unlike the novels (I love a lot of King’s stuff and I loved the Dark Tower series, but I hate, hate, hate the way he ended them.) The movie is a nice, compact, satisfying story. Self-contained package that nevertheless leaves itself open to a sequel.
I read an article about this movie about six months back and was a little alarmed that Idris Elba might be reduced to a series of grunts. It talked about how King, when sent a copy of the script, slashed all of Roland’s speeches. “Roland doesn’t talk a lot, he expresses himself with his eyes”. But in fact Elba is allowed to talk with his mouth. As well as, eloquently, with his eyes.
rikyrah
This is a key point. Any chance of a deal with DPRK goes out the window if Trump cancels a nuclear deal that Iran is complying with. https://t.co/vN98Ml2wPt
— Ben Rhodes (@brhodes) August 10, 2017
rikyrah
T-R-U-T-H
If we had the courage, we’d admit that GOP foreign policy is nothing more than a manifestation of White male insecurity vs. a brown planet.
— Propane Jane™ (@docrocktex26) August 11, 2017
efgoldman
If my brother in law was still alive, I’m sure he’d have been a 150% Trumpolini. His widow gleefully voted for Orange Shitgibbon. Of course she had a profound stroke, from which she never fully recovered, and all of her care, including the nursing home, has been paid by some combination of Medicare, Medicaid, and the exchanges, but what the hell, hypocrisy has never been a bar to anything.
Baud
@rikyrah: As opposed to their domestic policy?
TaMara (HFG)
Agree with the divorce part – marriage is hard enough without throwing that into it. On the other hand, If I chose to separate myself from my family because of their Trump support, it would mean more than half of them. Instead I look on with pity and shake my head. I will not engage them and walk away if they try. They are all well aware of my politics and I found it very interesting that no one, down to a person, defended Trump or the Rethugs at any point during my last trip home.
I’m leaving the door open for them to come to their senses. I am finding it very difficult that the people who raised me to treat others equally, be kind to the environment and respect our differences, have turned into Trump supporting lunatics. But brainwashing is an powerful thing and Fox/Limbaugh have the technique down pat.
As for my extended family, I have no idea what brought them to this place. Although an uncle said of my upcoming trip to Europe – “Oh, I wouldn’t do that with all the terrorism over there…”
Luckily I can limit my face-to-face time with all of them.
I also find it interesting that many of them, including my parents, went out of their way this trip to tell me what an amazing person I am and how grateful they are to know me (not saying that to brag, saying it because, again, they know my politics and that I live my values – I’m assuming that’s what they were seeing – actual kindness and love for fellow man).
I remain hopeful.
Geeno
Actually using “they” as the neutral pronoun goes back to Middle English. It became improper usage sometime in the early 1700’s.
A Ghost to Most
I cut ties with my racist, ammosexual family 10 years ago. But my family was ahead of the curve compared to other fascists. I have been listening to the stories of people going through it now. Sad.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I have an uncle who voted for trump. We used to be pretty close, but we’ve drifted apart geographically and thus peronsally. We’ve never talked politics, he’s 86 and my mother’s favorite (and last living) brother, and I’ve seen him once since the election, so I don’t see the point in telling him his vote has changed the way I feel about him forever. But it has.
@rikyrah: no question– and on judges, I cannot fathom the general indifference of the broad left– from the professional centrists to Wlimerites, to the judiciary. Yglesias made this point the other day: to the extent that you can imagine a Dem trump, it’s hard to imagine Dems and lefties saying, “but we got a SC justice!”
rikyrah
#BREAKING: An NRA Spokesman Just Called For North Korea To Attack A Major Liberal American City https://t.co/Vxmt8CbvOF
— Occupy Democrats (@OccupyDemocrats) August 11, 2017
Brachiator
I don’t know. The hate sex might be amazing.
Among my co-workers, there is one couple where the husband love Trump and the wife loathes them. However, neither Trump nor politics is the center of their life, so … so far, so good.
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
Oddly enough, in most work documents, I use “they/them,” even though my mind rebels (them is plural, goddammit). But people have got used to it.
In more personal documents, I may start with either he or she and then throw in an occasional use of the other pronoun. I don’t try to mechanically alternate. I can accept the notion that in some contexts, ether he or she includes all genders. But some people get grammatical vapors if they don’t explicitly get gender neutrality, equality, whatever.
trollhattan
If I hear one more Trump voter with cognitive dissonance intone, “But we needed to change, shake things up!” I’ll implode like a light bulb on the ocean floor. You needed change so you opened that giant vat of bees? Check out the big brain on Brad.
RandomMonster
Thankfully, the one time I find myself disagreeing with you, Betty, is over the stylistic acceptability of they/them.
Baud
In this case, you could replace “them” with “the asshole.”
Baud
@trollhattan: It’s a lie. You notice that the GOP didn’t lose Congress, which is were all the problems were.
Immanentize
I think the Special A.K.A. got there first —
One of my favorite songs: Racist Friend
Jim, Foolish Literalist
“we needed to shake things up” is like the libertarian “vote’em all out!” bumper sticker, a way of admitting to everyone but yourself that you’re too dumb or too lazy to actually think about politics.
West of the Cascades
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
I believe the pronoun for a Trump supporter is “it.”
Felonius Monk
@rikyrah: I see from that article that the idiot deleted his tweet. Somebody must have informed him that his statement is treasonous and could result in his arrest.
TenguPhule
Or as John Cole put it, One person wants Italian and the other one insists on Tire Rims and Anthrax.
rikyrah
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
There is an arrogance and a privilege in both those statements, that I, as a Black woman in this country, has NEVER been able to indulge in. …neither could any of my ancestors.
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
That is such a great way to put that. Sometimes saying “That’s just my opinion, deal with it” isn’t a great defense. With such weighty issues, it comes across as cowardly.
Saying Hitler was right about the Holocaust, and then whining that it’s just an opinion when faced with shaming most definitely indicates a difference of values; a difference that can’t be overcome by “agreeing to disagree”. The Civility Police in the MSM can fuck right off.
TenguPhule
@rikyrah:
NRA, a ruthless terrorist organization determined to take over the world.
Because actual snakes sued them over their old moniker, Cobra.
Betty Cracker
@TaMara (HFG): My family is about 50/50 too. It’s been hard to process. It’s like finding out they’ve been running a criminal enterprise behind my back all these years, LOL! That’s not exactly it, but it captures a bit how disorienting it has been to find out these folks who changed my diapers when I was a baby and taught me to drive, etc., were so utterly lacking in character and judgment in so many important ways.
My first reaction post-election was to say no more Ms. Nice Lady — I had always avoided political discussions to keep the peace, and I don’t do that anymore. I give my unvarnished opinion. But I find it hard to be around them, knowing what I know now. I question everything I thought I knew about them. It makes me sad, but it’s true. Lately, as Trump flails, they no longer bring him up. I hope that’s a good sign, but I can’t “un-know” what they showed me.
Life in Queens
Language does change. In the case of singular they, it changed centuries ago. By all means curse out those sloppy millennials who wrote the King James bible, to say nothing of that slacker Jane Austen, but there’s nothing recent about this particular change. Singular they been correct standard English for, like, forever.
Major Major Major Major
@Baud: well that’s only because Russ Feingold didn’t go to Wisconsin.
Baud
@rikyrah: I think you are what they wanted to shake up, rikyrah.
JCJ
This is reasonable advice. My wife, daughter, brother, and nephews all loathe Trump so we do not have any familial issues, but my wife wants nothing to do with our neighbors. My next door neighbor had a 70th birthday party with quite a few people invited. My wife saw someone who had had a Trump sign in her yard and just avoided her. It is very likely none of the people there voted for Hilary besides us. I was very limited in my interactions with these people. If the neighbor with the birthday were not the primary care giver for our elderly cat while we are away I might have just stayed away.
TenguPhule
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
The people who want to shake things up do not expect to be the one’s shaken down by the winners (And as always, they’re dreadfully wrong).
TenguPhule
@JCJ:
This will serve you well when you have to cook them in order to survive the Trumpcolypse.
Jumbo76
Yeah, I’m not talking to my parents. My dad tried to text me a week or so ago, and I wrote him back just saying that he needs to take some responsibility for the world he has created. He’s a long time “conservative” and I used to think he was a rational person who could be convinced by facts and evidence. He has voted for Republicans since 1980 at least, blaming Jimmy Carter for high interest rates in the 1970s. Anyway, the thing that gets me is that Hillary Clinton based her campaign on the idea that Donald Trump was so offensive and disgusting that basic human decency would cause significant numbers of normal Republican voters to cross over and vote for her. Turns out, they don’t have basic human decency. Whoops! My dad tries to claim it wasn’t his fault given that he votes in a red state that went hard for Trump no matter how he personally voted. My point to him is that this is a democracy and there are no free passes–he is responsible even if other people are also responsible. Ugh.
Another Scott
Julia Ioffe points us to a AMA with Anna Fifield about DPRK on Reddit at 5 PM ET.
If you’re into that kinda thing.
Anna’s the Tokyo bureau chief for WaPo.
Cheers,
Scott.
TenguPhule
@Brachiator:
BalloonJuice, Ruining our eyes one line at a time.
Older
We are just recovering from attendance at two Great Big Family reunions, one for his family and one for mine. There were over thirty people at the His Family gathering, and about 100 at the My Family Can Almost Fit Into One Room (if it’s a hotel ball-room).
The great thing about this is that every single person attending these Feasts was, if not actually a Democrat, against Trump. Even my brother, with whom I never speak for entirely other reasons, said a few words about how happy he is to know that my vote can be counted on.
And I feel very lucky that I will never have to argue about this problem with a family member.
LongHairedWeirdo
Actually, the use of a plural as a gender neutral goes back centuries. The problem was, there was a “proper” way – always use “he”. The problem is, that proper way was even more ambiguous. You had no way of knowing if an author meant “a boy or man” or “a person whose gender I don’t know, or won’t reveal”. In this sense, using “they” to refer to a singular is a clean way of stating that you’re unsure of, or not revealing, gender… better than using the neuter-he (a phrase that should make most male sexists cringe anyway!).
The perfect solution, when possible, is to pluralize everything. “People married to Trump supporters should divorce them” – now, gender neutrality doesn’t matter because “they” means “a group of indeterminate gender”.
But I do have a proverbial dog in this fight. I naturally moved toward the gender neutral of “they” and was sternly corrected for it. I felt overjoyed when I learned that other writers, good writers, had used this over the centuries. So, for me, it was vindication, akin to being told one could go forth to boldly split infinitives that no one had split before.
(I heard a rant from an editor on the splitting of infinitives – and he actually agreed that Star Trek was okay on this – “to boldly go” was better than “to go, boldly…”. His point was that, in almost every single case, a split infinitive included a weak word. “to truly understand this” isn’t as strong as “to understand this in its entirety” or other similar phrasings. He always corrected split infinitives, but would accept them if the author defended the wording competenly – but *never* when the author merely whined that “never split…” was a holdover from Latin.)
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@Jumbo76:
No offense to your father, but that’s dumb. Sure, his individual vote would not have made a difference in the grander scheme, but at the very least if he had voted for Clinton, he could legitimately claim he’s not partialy responsible.
trollhattan
@Jumbo76: Tell good old dad one of his generational cohorts wishes to remind him of the economy in the era preceding Jimmy Carter. My econ professor tried teaching us in real time so as to demonstrate the disconnect between accepted economic theory and the “stagflation” of the day.
Anybody blaming the mid-late 70s economy on Carter is a deluded liar.
trollhattan
@TenguPhule:
Oh waiter, a dozen green balloons please.
Snarki, child of Loki
“The people who want to shake things up do not expect to be the one’s shaken down by the winners ”
There’s a lot of “shaken whiny baby syndrome” going around.
Percysowner
Just this week I told my daughter to use they when referring to a colleague. It was a situation where the email address contained a standard female name, but she asked to be addressed by a name that is usually, although not always, associated with a male i.e. jane doe is in the email, but asking to be called Alex. Because of the nature of the job, my daughter will have to writer memos and emails referring to Alex. She also had not met the person face to face, so had no visual clues as to gender.
With people being able to live authentic lives, it was possible that this was the choice of a transgender person. OTOH, how do you ask someone if they are male or female without being rude. After much pondering the consensus was use pronoun as little as possible and use they in communications when a pronoun was needed. The world is changing.
bystander
I tried to read Alain de Botton’s book on Proust. IIRC, he had about three grammatical errors in the first three pages, so I tossed it. How can anyone proclaim his love for Proust while violating his own language at will?
I can’t believe that any of the old line repubs of my maternal line could stomach Trump. They hated Goldwater and Nixon.
Baud
No love for s/he or her/im?
jl
We got enough sane votes in my family to cancel the very few Trumpsters. So, I don’t get mad, I just remind the others they have to get to the polls to execute the cancelling votes. I have the luxury of viewing family Trumpsters as sad and amusing cases, and an interesting project to see if we can bring them around. I don’t get riled over silly talk, as long as it is impotent and powerless, which the Trumpsters are in my family. Odd coincidence,, maybe, but they don’t function too good on their own and keep running to the rest of for help, for which they seem eternally ungrateful. Which means that help now comes with lots of humiliating strings attached. No Trumpsters otherwise in my personal life. I’ll be on the lookout for Trumpsters in my personal sphere.
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@Baud:
That’s outdated and cumbersome. The singular “they” is the gold standard.
KithKanan
@Percysowner: I have a non-binary friend who I knew before they came out as such and still largely presents as female outside their circle of friends. They prefer ‘they/them’, and I do my best to respect that but I still slip up and refer to them as she or her sometimes (okay, about a half-dozen times while writing this comment. Changing long-ingrained usage one has had hammered into one for decades is hard!)
Hoodie
Slightly OT, but JMM has an interesting backgrounder in the NSC firings and the fruitcake memo about “cultural Marxism” that led to the firings. One thing I came away with is that Trump is a narcissistic megalomaniac who now is in a position where he gets fed shit like this and uses it as as a unifying ideology to support the cult of personality, i.e., he now has a cadre of ideologists who are creating a philosophical infrastructure for Trumpism.
The reason to run away from your true Trump supporter is because they’ve become a member of a cult. I’d qualify that by saying that someone may be merely Trump curious out of a general lack of political consciousness, and they will generally not join the cult after they get an up close look at it, e.g., by looking at something like this memo. The other takeaway is that there is a significant chance that McMaster (and maybe Mattis) are fighting a desperate battle to keep the real lunatics at bay, Marshall doesn’t think they’ll succeed.
Baud
@KithKanan: That’s a tough one, since it’s not a universal change in language.
trollhattan
Hot enough for ya? Yup.
Our last daily high under 90 degrees was June 27 and each new day brings a new consecutive-day record.
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@TenguPhule:
Hold my beer:
Trump Family Values
Trump: Are these my two scoops of ice cream, honey? (places hands on breasts)
Ivanka: Dad, get your hands off of me! I’m your daughter, Ivanka!
Trump: You can call me “daddy” if you like. (Tries to kiss her)
Ivanka: Jared! Stop him!
Jared: Are you kidding? This is turning me on!
/The SS step in, don’t worry.
Izabela
Even before I came to grips with the fact that I needed to transition, I very much liked the development of they/them into an acceptable singular pronoun to use when gender is unknown or unimportant. Now that I am transitioning, I appreciate the idea and use all the more.
So it’s a perfect fine headline to me. And note that I don’t speak for all transgender people, just that because of who I am, it very much shapes my feelings towards pronouns and how they are used in language.
sunny raines
a relative with 3 daughters talks liberal, but cannot understand the conflict in think he has republican “friends” – refuses to jettison the “friends”. I tell him his friends support a world worse for his daughters. He doesn’t seem to get that.
KithKanan
@Baud: Agreed, but it does also show that s/he or her/im aren’t inclusive enough.
TenguPhule
Are we on the brink of nuclear war with North Korea? Probably not.
Yeah, not exactly comforting. “Pretty sure it won’t happen unless one of them is insane….Oh.”
schrodingers_cat
No one voting for T is my friend. I have talked about my estrangement from JS voting friend. Her husband is the only T voter I know personally.
Doug!
Why not just “him” instead of them “them” anyway? It’s not like there’s lots of Hillary-supporting men married to Trump-supporting women.
Baud
@TenguPhule:
Vox
TenguPhule
@Doug!:
Given the white women vote spread, I wouldn’t be so sure about this.
TriassicSands
I just got to this thread and I’m going to have to leave soon. I don’t know if I have time to read all of the comments before this one. So, if this repeats something others have said, I apologize.
However, when I read the Harper’s Bazaar excerpt it immediately occurred to me that the author is many years too late. If Trump is what causes your values to rise to the surface in conflict with those of your spouse, then you haven’t been paying attention.
The values clash began years ago with Republicans, not in 2015 with Trump. In Trump, then, it seems the objection is to his style not his substance. Republicans have been for all the things Trump is for they’ve just been more restrained (for the most part) verbally. Occasionally, their vileness has slipped out in their words like calling it “legitimate rape.” But the vileness has been there all along and it is always visible in the way they treat the poor, people of color, and women, the 2nd Amendment, voting rights, and on and on.
That’s why I’ve never been able to understand how a couple with different political affiliations (R and D) could be married. I assumed they simply didn’t take their own political views very seriously or they had somehow managed to fail to equate openly suppressing voting with “values.”
Trump is the easiest Republican to hate, but his values aren’t fundamentally different from those of the Republican Party of 2017 (or 2008 or 2001). The only caveat here is that I will allow that the Republicans have been sliding down a slippery slope for decades so they may seem overtly worse in 2015 than in 2006. But they’re the same species.
Mnemosyne
I’ve said before that in most ways I’ve been lucky lucky lucky with this election, because most of my lifelong Republican relatives absolutely despise Trump. My retired cop cousin who’d never voted for a Democrat in his life was basically begging everyone he knew to vote for Hillary because Trump would be a disaster as president.
And since G’s dad became a Democratic precinct captain in Cook County (IL) at the age of 19, there was never any clash of values with my spouse, either. Whew! ?
TenguPhule
@Baud:
You mean our gutted State Department that has an entitled idiot at the helm and that Trump basically ignores?
That State Dept?
Baud
@TenguPhule: The white women vote spread says nothing about how their spouses voted.
Baud
@TenguPhule: Maybe he’s freelancing.
bmaccnm
@Betty Cracker: “If you are married to a Trump supporter, the only solution is divorce.”
TenguPhule
@Baud:
True, but its big enough that odds are your first presumption is incorrect.
Yarrow
I understand a lot better now how families split and fought on different sides in the Civil War.
Baud
@TenguPhule: What first presumption?
Tom Q
I’ve read about “mixed marriages” — generally female Dem/male Pub — but I’ve never quite understood how they worked. For my (sadly now-deceased) wife and me, politics had a good deal to do with how we saw the world. I’d have to have had the greatest sex life imaginable to put up with someone whose views were so different from mine on basic, daily subjects.
And that was my view decades ago, when I first met my wife. The parties since have diverged to a far greater extent, especially post-Gingrich, and the GOP has become positively toxic from late Bush on. From what I’m reading, Trump has been something of a last straw for people on our side — dating services report huge upsurges in people refusing to be matched with Trump supporters, and I’ve heard personal stories of people shying from potential meets with anyone who voted for the guy.
My mother gleefully tells the story of her father — who hated Roosevelt — bantering with her Eleanor-loving aunt (she once put a funeral wreath on his front door the day Roosevelt was re-elected), and how they utterly loved one another despite differing politics. Those days are a distant memory; it’s blood sport now.
Baud
@Tom Q:
I think you mean there’s no difference between them. /Internet
TenguPhule
@bmaccnm:
I want to make a joke, but I can’t under Adam’s new rules.
TenguPhule
@Baud: This one:
Baud
@TenguPhule: That’s Doug, but I agree that’s there’s probably not a lot of them. Most white women who voted for Trump probably have husbands who voted for Trump.
randy khan
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
@Betty Cracker:
Usually there are lots of ways to write something to avoid the personal pronoun problem without sounding stilted or awkward. A bit of creativity might be required, but there’s nothing wrong with that. (That said, when someone expresses a specific preference for a pronoun, I go with that regardless of my personal views on plurals, etc.)
TenguPhule
@Yarrow:
Sadly, as I understand it that was usually done with regret and lots of them didn’t want to but did their duty anyway.
Now is a completely different story. Regrets are few and the breaks are real and enduring.
RobNYNY
@trollhattan:
Remember Richard Nixon’s price freeze? Occasioned by high inflation.
Remember Gerald Ford’s WIN buttons? “Whip Inflation Now!”
Those are both dispositive evidence of Jimmy Carter’s fault.
TaMara (HFG)
@Betty Cracker: I used to fight them tooth and nail, questioning how the hell they could even think what they think. But…something switched after I recovered from the shock of Trump. I think it happened during the march the day after inauguration. Something about realizing we are the movement…I feel very empowered, much like I did after Obama won. This is the direction we are moving and these people are not able to stop us (well barring nuclear war, I suppose).
And each day with Trump proves he’s as bad (worse) as we said he would be. So there’s that.
During my divorce there was a lot of shit said about me….and it didn’t take long – within a year – when many of the people who believed what my ex said, began to call me and apologize. So I guess that gives me some perspective – truth will out and people cannot hide who they really are for long. And with Trump, man are they getting a lesson in truth pretty damn quick.
TenguPhule
@Baud:
Whoops! Sorry about that.
In my defense, aren’t we all Dougj?
Major Major Major Major
@Doug!: Not all people are married to opposite-gender spouses, either, of course.
So, to answer your question, much is wrong with using ‘him’ when ‘they/them’ is perfectly adequate and, according to many, perfectly correct, while avoiding all these fraught assumptions (and no small amount of sexist history where the male pronoun was the default pronoun).
Baud
@TenguPhule: Yes we are.
eclare
@TenguPhule: What rules?
TenguPhule
@eclare: Jokes about non-peaceful life terminations are banhammer.
Baud
Via Reddit
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C2-M7FCWgAMCP16.jpg
randy khan
When I was in college, I dated someone who not only had voted for Reagan, but actually had done volunteer work for the campaign. I am happy to say that she converted to the correct side of the world by the time the relationship had run its course. I can’t imagine being with someone who supported Trump, though.
Kay
This gross photograph should outrage anyone who ever worked hard for anything:
Jared and Ivanka think this is appropriate. That they should sit and set policy for tens of millions of working people who will serve an apprenticeship.
Do you know how long it takes to become a journeyman electrician in Ohio and Michigan? Five years. They spent five years making sub-wages so they will learn how to do that job properly. 5 years, One day out of 14 is spent in a classroom.
Jared and Ivanka? Zero. No training or work experience at all. And they think they’re fit to DESIGN programs for working people.
They’re bad people. Good people would know better than to do this. Good people would say “gosh, that’s sort of presumptious and disgusting of me to scold 18 year olds on the skills gap when I myself achieved NOTHING on merit and was a nepotism hire”.
KithKanan
@TriassicSands: You’d be amazed at the level of denial it’s possible to live in. “Well, they may support _____ but they’re a good person and can’t possibly be on board with _____.”
Trump is so over the top horrible that there’s no denying that anyone who supports him is supporting the whole package, and particularly for a lot of white people who were previously in denial (I am one, since I live in a blue coastal state and the number of trump supporters I know personally can be counted on one hand with fingers left to spare) the implications of that are terrifying.
Mnemosyne
@TenguPhule:
No, Baud is correct if you look at the numbers: assuming that all of these white people are heterosexual, if 65 percent of white men voted for Trump, but only 53 percent of white women did, the odds are much higher that you’ll either have 2 Trump voters or a male Trump voter and a female Hillary voter than a male Hillary voter and a female Trump voter.
Frankensteinbeck
@TenguPhule:
Yep. The people actually doing the work that Trump doesn’t know exists (both people and work) while Trump says stupid shit that will never be acted on.
Fair Economist
You want to use thee and thou? I think that sounds quite stilted.
(Thou didst know “you” is the plural 2nd person, right?)
SiubhanDuinne
@Percysowner:
I know, right?
TenguPhule
@Kay:
And the example is going to ruin a whole generation or more of people who saw that being good is for suckers, crime is what really pays off.
Yarrow
@Kay:
Yes. Yes they are. In so many ways.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Felonius Monk: Just some light treason.
Fair Economist
@randy khan:
Reagan at least pretended to be a decent person. Even W did, although it ran rather thin sometime. There’s no pretense with Trump.
TenguPhule
@Frankensteinbeck:
The problem is they have no actual authority thanks to Tiller and Trump. Can’t negotiate shit when the other side knows nothing you say actually represents your government and that any promises made will not be honored.
Credibility is the Diplomatic coin and the State purse is empty.
TenguPhule
@Mnemosyne:
And all of the non-white men married to white spouses?
Yarrow
It’s Friday afternoon. Is a big story going to break, as per tradition?
Betty Cracker
@Yarrow: Me too. Let’s agree to never discuss Oxford commas!
Iowa Old Lady
@Kay: Did you see the quote from some European diplomat who said they treat Ivanka the way they treat idiot Saudi princes? They flatter her to stay in good with her father.
eclare
@TenguPhule: Gotcha, thanks.
Frankensteinbeck
@TenguPhule:
You can negotiate a fair amount when the other side knows that the top people screaming lunacy make very few of the decisions of how the government actually interacts with other governments. This is the concept of the Deep State. The executive branch does an enormous amount of stuff, and Trump is unaware of almost all of it. That stuff doesn’t stop being done because he isn’t making decisions. The workers still there keep doing it without leadership. It’s not a great situation, but it leaves the career diplomatic corps still doing things like having meetings to explain to their opposite numbers what to actually expect, deciding which VIPs go where, protection services, how aid services are funneled, and probably much, much more that hasn’t occurred to me. Neither Trump, nor Tillerson, know that these are decisions anyone makes or these processes even exist, so all of them can keep going under their own power. They just have no central leadership anymore.
Baud
@TenguPhule: I’m confident both Clarence and Ginny Thomas are Trump supporters.
@Iowa Old Lady: I would do it too if I were them.
oldgold
Projection!
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
Polls are starting to look really bad for Obama. Looks like he’ll have to start a war or major conflict to win. Don’t put it past him!
7:30 AM – 17 Oct 2012
efgoldman
@Frankensteinbeck:
Except he and Rexerson have left thousands (literally) of desks and offices unfilled, so there’s no-one to do the work.
jl
@oldgold: Going on six weeks since Trump could claim 40% approval. Now seems stuck down in 36 to 38 percent range for last month. Let’s hope for the best.
Frankensteinbeck
@efgoldman:
There are many, many more desks than that are still filled. The ones not filled are predominantly the ones that ensure there is no connection between the top and the people doing the work.
Gelfling 545
@Percysowner: I usually adhered to they as a plural but over time I have realized that the contortions one has to go through to avois it are just not worth the trouble. Also I had some interesting conversations with some of my granddaughter’s friends who prefer non-binary designations. It’s either they or invent a new pronoun which would, again, be more trouble than it’s worth as I don’t see that idea catching on too quickly.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Hoodie: Yes, that was really quite a read. Apparently the Alt Right has decided the Atheist Communists and the Radical Islam are sekretly’ allied together to take out America and…and.. do something, Apparently the message is the slightest deviation from the vision of REAL America (as in white, male, Protestant, Republican) America as presented by Leave it to Beaver will destroy Western Civilization.
The whole cult thing and paranoia that seems to pervaded the Alt Right coupled with their need to increase their feeling of terror makes me wonder who long it’s before something like a mass suicide with them happens.
Yarrow
Baud
Should I start referring to myself in the royal “we”?
We are Baud!
Mnemosyne
@TenguPhule:
I would need to see some examples. In all of the couples I know IRL, both voted for Hillary.
Gelfling 545
@Baud: “that could help resolve the crisis.” Not if they let Trump talk.
Frankensteinbeck
@Yarrow:
Yep. Just because they don’t want to impeach him doesn’t mean congress likes him. They hate that arrogant ignorant asshole. When he held a meeting with the House Republicans to whip for AHCA, some of them said they decided against it because he was so insulting.
SiubhanDuinne
@Izabela:
I came to feminism in the mid-1960s, and one of the liveliest ongoing conversations at the time was on the then-customary use of masculine pronouns to refer both to males and to mixed or unknown people (“mankind,” if you will). So I went through several decades of very deliberately using s/he, him/her, and his/hers, for the sake of total inclusivity, and still do occasionally. But increasingly I find that formulation to be cumbersome and ugly to the eye and ear. The growing acceptance of “they/them/their” is very welcome.
/hands over pedant credentials to security
Yarrow
@Baud: We are all Baud now.
MoxieM
@TriassicSands:
It’s easy to say that kind of thing if you haven’t discovered that you’re partnered up with an actual Cluster B Narcissist. Some of them, like my ex, are covert. They are such expert liars–chameleons, even, that you really, truly can’t know. Until they peel the human skin back for a millisecond. wow.
While I think my ex holds fairly progressive political attitudes, and certainly would never be a Trump voter, he had no compunction about an affair with a super racist Bush/Ryan supporter (she lived in WI). That part was the revolting rotting dab of fruit on top of the shit ice cream concoction comprising learning that the person I’d been living with for more than a quarter century was a lying creep. Yeah, fun times. And I’m far from alone.
Reader, I divorced him.
But I find it pretty fucking blithe to just make those kinds of assertions or recommendations if you haven’t, yourself, been through the meat grinder of a heinous divorce (with offspring).
Suzanne
I think that not only should we not marry Trump supporters, I think NO ONE should marry Trump supporters, so they can die alone.
This is similar to how I feel about the future nuclear war: you assholes voted for it, so you and your children can fight it and die in it.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Yarrow: The Baud Collective, you will be absorbed.
Dmbeaster
@Betty Cracker:
Sadly, they are probably believers in the various myths that their warrior Trump has been stabbed in the back. As you said, nothing really corrects a core moral flaw in values.
Another Scott
@Frankensteinbeck: You’re right that the Ship of State has a lot of momentum of its own, and the professionals in the civil service can keep it running as if nothing has changed under Donnie for quite a while.
But that momentum depends on a budget, and on raising the debt ceiling. Obama was able to kick many of the stinky cans down the road for a while, but it resulted in abominations like the Budget Control Act of 2011 which gave us things like the Sequester. And they Congress is in worse shape now when it comes to actually doing their jobs…
Lots of bad things could start happening on October 1.
A certain baseline level of competence is required to keep the lights on. It’s not clear that Donnie and his minions (and Paulie and Mitch and their minions) can even reach that baseline.
:-(
Cheers,
Scott.
SiubhanDuinne
@TenguPhule:
But if there were, I guarantee NPR would track them down and find them and interview them.
BruceFromOhio
Anthrax and tire rims.
TriassicSands
@MoxieM:
I’m sorry for what you went through.
Nicole
My cousin is in a mixed marriage, but, a little oddly, the wife is the Trump voter, while he put a Trump bumper sticker on the toilet lid. I think they don’t discuss politics much. I do like her a lot, but I was concerned when they got married she’d pull him over to her side. It’s been over a decade and not a sign of him changing, though.
I have a number of GOPers in my family. Most of them are pretty quiet about politics these days, though I think my one sister-in-law is on the verge of cracking and coming over to the light. I have hope.
Suzanne
@MoxieM: Apparently Bruce Springsteen was (is?) cheating on Patti Scialfa with a woman who is a Republican, and the fact that she is a Republican is, to me, the truly upsetting element of that whole story.
Mnemosyne
@MoxieM:
My sister in law has a Cluster B disorder (borderline personality) and she still managed to vote for Hillary.
And it’s not a fun club to be in, but you’re not the only one here with a toxic relative. In my case, I have a sister-in-law on each side of my family, but at least 2 other commenters had narcissistic (now ex-) spouses.
SiubhanDuinne
@Baud:
L’état, c’est Baud.
Mnemosyne
@Nicole:
In a country where something like 4 (four) percent of Black women voted for Trump, I’m not saying it’s impossible to have a marriage where the husband voted for Hillary and the wife voted for Trump. Just statistically unlikely. ?
SiubhanDuinne
@MoxieM:
Yup, and me too.
ETA: We met, and bonded, over politics. Fifteen years later, we divorced over politics (among other things). TL;DR version: I changed, he didn’t.
Alain the site fixer
@Immanentize: Preach it, Brother Rudie
Nicole
@Mnemosyne: Heh. Oh, I know! A great-great uncle was a leader of a labor strike, and one of my waaaaaay back ancestors was a signatory on the first public petition against slavery, so I like to think the liberalism is in the genes. While I do have plenty of Republicans in my family, they either married in or were adopted.
Alain the site fixer
@LongHairedWeirdo: god I love this community!
StringOnAStick
The last straw for me with my right wing parents was them throwing me out of their house after I’d spent 6 days doing 14 hour days of labor in the hot sun on their acre of yard, and it was over his smashing in the side of his truck because he was too drunk/senile to be driving and I told him so as gently as I could. The fact that I now know they voted for tRump is why I have no intention of ever being involved with them again.
I grew up being browbeaten by my asshole father for my liberal wrong-think and it has never gotten any better, only worse. They cut off contact with me for 2 years after the second Obama electoral victory because the was apparently my fault, and in those 2 years I realized my life was better without them in it. The fits and starts of a crappy relationship with them since that time have just reinforced that. Hard core conservative revanchist republicans are toxic whether you are related to them or not, and blood ties don’t mean you have to be involved with these people.
Mnemosyne
@StringOnAStick:
It’s never too late to tell the toxic people in your life to fuck off. I am a virtual stranger, but I am proud of you. ?
Annie
What, those Trump supporters wearing the shirts saying “F*** your feelings” are surprised we took it personally?
They’ve forgotten that we can say “F*** your feelings” right back.
TenguPhule
@Frankensteinbeck:
I work with bureaucracy and I can tell you that is not happening at State. Nobody is going to risk going above their designated position’s authority by trying to negotiate above their pay grade. Trump’s first action was to fire all the people with final authority there immediately below the Secretary and Tillerson compounded the problem by trying to establish his own little corporate thinktank kingdom there.
There are still lines of communications open and informal exchanges of information no doubt, but there is ZERO chance of them brokering any kind of agreement because our nation’s word of honor is not worth the paper its printed on and the level of authority required is solely at Tillerson’s level now because the stupid fuckwits think State Dept is not necessary.
TenguPhule
@Frankensteinbeck:
And you are quite wrong on that.
A Ghost to Most
@StringOnAStick:
Hang in there.
StringOnAStick
@Mnemosyne: thanks, Memno. My therapist agrees. My younger sister the chronic helper wants us to be the Brady Bunch but that ignores reality. She spent 16 years being the spit upon slave to her Trumptastic ex husband even though she’s a liberal, and I know her self destructive pleasing behavior is exactly due to her upbringing and being the youngest while they were at their alcoholic worst plus only interested in their jobs, not their kids.
MoxieM
You bunch of jackals are great! I’m not at all surprised, alas, to hear about Springsteen–if memory serves (of course it often doesn’t) he married Patti S. after cheating with her on a previous wife. Sorry to say that once a cheater, always a cheater seems to be a truism that’s well, true. It’s all about the entitlement.
And I’m sorry too, for others here who have the Cluster B noxiousness in their families–it’s like Japanese Knotweed, I think, if you see it somewhere, it’s a good bet it will be cropping up in other places as well.
I’ve heard that a number of therapists’ practices went on overload after the election of the *resident. I know I found it personally triggery, in addition to the, “holy fuck, what is going to happen to the country ?!? sense”.
Ruckus
@TriassicSands:
I’ve said this before as well. It didn’t start with Reagan, it won’t end with drumpf. Conservative dogma hasn’t changed in my lifetime, the only difference has been how open the real issues are. WF Buckley was a very well spoken man, that still didn’t make him a good one in any sense of the word.
Ruckus
@StringOnAStick:
Truly sorry that was your life, glad you were able to make the break.
I’ve done that, made a break with a toxic relative. Not over drumpf but over the toxicity. It had been festering for a couple of decades but was for the most part manageable due to distance. That’s no longer the case so I had to make the break. Cousins who know wonder how I lasted as long as I did.
Blood may be thicker than water but if it’s infected it will make you sick or kill you. Life is way too short to have to put up with that kind of toxicity. Hell just normal day to day life can be difficult to deal with, why make it far worse.
Mnemosyne
@Ruckus:
Interesting thing I found out when I was hanging out on Raised by Narcissists message boards a couple of years ago: the “blood is thicker than water” thing is a shortening of a quote from the Bible that actually says the exact opposite. It’s something like “the blood of brotherhood is thicker than the water of the womb,” meaning that your friendships are more important than the people you’re related to.
It was kind of mind-blowing to find that out.
sylvania
I have former friends who are Trumpanzees that I no longer talk to. The article pretty much nails it on the values thing. I have decided that anyone still willing to support that idiot must not be a very good person deep down inside. That’s the only possible explanation.
dww44
@Betty Cracker: Thank you. Settles the matter nicely.
TKinNC
@Betty Cracker: My mother voted for … that thing. She recently came to NC (from FL) to visit another relative and wanted me to visit too – I told her I was still too angry about the election.
She has 3 grandkids! And a son who had cancer a couple decades ago – a massive pre-existing condition. What was she thinking?
Ruckus
@Mnemosyne:
LOL.
Wouldn’t be the first time that quotes from the bible have been misinterpreted or misused. Given that the book has been rewritten a number of times to suit whatever it is that someone with power wants and that it’s a tale in the first place it’s more surprising that anyone ever gets what it does say correct or that the meaning is valid and current with the discussion at hand.
Ruckus
@sylvania:
I work in a very small business with a drumpf voter. He was a vocal one before the election. We live in CA so his vote had no tangible effect, other than to show that he is worthless as a human being. I talk to him only when I absolutely have to for work, in the fewest words. And he avoids me, gets out of my way if we are walking by each other. He’s also an ex meth addict, his recovery was suggested by a court and paid for by, well us. I don’t mind that, one less meth addict is a good thing. IOW I can’t fully avoid him, I can’t reasonably cut him out of my life, but I’ve done as close as possible. And he fully knows it. I have no clue if he’s figured out that his idol is a complete fucking asshole. Which also makes him one.
TenguPhule
@Mnemosyne:
But blood really is thicker then water in real life. All that hemoglobin for starters.
/Sociopathic Pedant
Dmbeaster
@Ruckus:
He was also a stone cold racist, so no amount of well spoken word can cure his abomination.
Puggsley
For a few years recently I’ve been in touch with my ex-high school prom date–we were kind of an item back in those days, many decades ago, and although that’s no longer true, we’d recently been enjoying a sort of warm and fond long-distance relationship. Never talked politics, though, although she made it clear she couldn’t abide movies with cuss words in them and had a somewhat prim view of morality. Came the day after the election, and her FB feed carried a series of canned, jeering, snotty triumphalist RWNJ posts (instead of her usual cute-kitty or ‘you won’t believe what happened next’ recirculated FB posts), and I knew then how she’d voted. Cut her off then and there. Defriended, blocked, and not responding to her emails. Month or so ago, I get an email, the subject line of which is “ill”–turns out she picked up a virulent, often fatal disease and is getting concentrated medical care. I extended her a sort of half-hearted condolence, and a “glad you’re OK” when the disease finally was curtailed. But what did I feel? Really, nothing; whatever fondness or affection I might have felt before has been pretty well chased by the subsequent actions of the Republican pond scum she voted for. Now, I understand how it could happen that near-destitute white people in the hinterlands, with genuinely no hope of any sort of prosperous future, could go for Trump. But upper middle class elderly, existing almost entirely on government programs (plus a financial windfall from a previous marriage), yet somehow deliberately voting for certain death, from lack of medical care, for millions of others? How are you entitled to my sympathy, I ask. Why should I care about you, when you obviously care so little about innocent people who’ve done you no harm? Of course that lack of empathy I feel for her, is what I excoriate “them” for; yet here I am displaying it too. But still asking myself what so many others on this thread are kind of asking: what sort of new category of “human” to put these Trump voters in.
Sorry about the length of the post. Thanks for the community space to post it in
Doug G
@Doug!: I’m one (and named Doug, amusingly). My wife is a fundie, and while she will always be such, if things work out for me as I plan, she will not always be my wife. She simply pretends politics doesn’t exist, and I am very well-informed and very liberal.
Amir Khalid
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
This may have already been covered upthread — I have to sleep at some point, so I wasn’t here until just now — but (American) English needs a singular third-person pronoun that doesn’t specify gender. Many users of the language have adopted “they” as that pronoun. It’s a lot less awkward than “he or she”, “him or her” and “his or her”. I’ve heard it used in British English all my life.
Tehanu
@StringOnAStick:
How awful for you. As Mnemosyne and A Ghost said, hang in there. I wonder, do you know the blog Making Light? They had (and may still have – I haven’t been there for a while) an annual, or maybe semi-annual, feature or thread about dealing with “Dysfunctional Families” that you might, well, “enjoy” isn’t the right word! But you might find it interesting or get something out of it. Um, here’s another link: http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/016519.html#016519.
Ruckus
@Dmbeaster:
That was my point. He was always on talk shows blathering on in his self important way of speaking, that he knew more than anyone else and yet he was a stone cold conservative asshole, different than drumpf only in that he was was an articulate racist. And condescending fuck. No wait they share that trait.
Ruckus
@TenguPhule:
You need both to live but you can also boil water to make it drinkable if it is infected, not so much with blood. You can also piss water out but if you piss blood, you are in trouble.
Ruckus
@Tehanu:
That second link, that is good. Real good. To say that it’s amazing how many people have horrible upbringings is an understatement. It’s amazing that they manage to survive and even prosper. I think exposure to others in similar situations and getting away from family can help that immensely. The number of my friends who grew up with functional realistic families is amazingly small. And even then not everything went right. I know someone who has been in jail for over 40 yrs for murder. I went to school and church with her, I’ve been to her home and met her parents. For all I could tell and see they were good people. But people get sideways for many reasons. It seems family is a big one.
Clifford Engle Wirt
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: I strongly agree. My attitude has always been that if Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, and Jane Austen can use ‘they’ as a gender-neutral singular pronoun, so can I. So there.
Caphilldcne
@Percysowner: I think in that situation your daughter can just ask the person what their preferred pronouns are. “Hey, I keep meaning to ask if you have a set of preferred pronouns?” I suppose it’s awkward but it’s also awkward to go around not knowing. A lot of LGBT organizations and groups just list their preferred pronouns as part of their email signatures. I have one person in my life who has changed their pronouns twice which has been kind of tough keeping up. I also managed to misgender someone who is literally famous as a transgender activist. Anyway mostly people are cool if you show good will and they know you are trying to be in a place of acceptance.
Aardvark Cheeselog
Just give up on resisting they/them/their as the pronoun for indeterminate gender, Betty. If I could do it, you can.