America is fucked.

10 worst american social stigmas

You can kill a whole family and as long as you don't rape anybody you will not be as much of an outcast as you will be if you fall into any of the categories on this list. Most of these are pretty close to being universal meaning they are how people in every country pigeon-hole the people around them, but the degrees vary. If you live in Americaand you are any of the following, you will be stigmatized.

1. The Atheist among Evangelicals
First of all the average Evangelical will fear you because atheists, especially atheists willing to vocalize it and not claim agnosticism, are relatively rare and as such are an unknown factor. People have trouble with unknown factors. They also suspect that you are better able to argue the point of religion and while their duty is to try to convert you, they also don't want to look stupid, so any conflict will start as a series of light, non-threatening questions to feel out just how educated you are, and whether they can take you. These questions are about trying to get you to join up with them,do not be fooled into thinking that they are genuinely curious about what you believe. The heated argument is coming. At some point, with your average churchy-person a stalemate will be reached, not the peaceful amicable kind of stalemate, but one where they leave feeling that you are a hellbound piece of shit and you leave thinking that they are stupid vile people who want to ram their shit down your throat.

2. Homosexuality, as seen by straight people
First of all most heterosexual people are seriously repressed when it comes to sex, which results in them being obsessed with it. Sex is idealized and idolized and constantly on their minds. Your sexuality, as a result, is important to them. It's natural for people to find other people's sexuality somewhat gross. If you are not into sheep, the idea having sex with them is disgusting, one way to remedy this is to not think about people having sex with sheep. The repressed people can't get the idea of sex with sheep out of their minds, or anybody else's sex-life, for that matter. They are stuck with this mental burden of your disgusting sex-life so they rationalize it, they find a way to make it their business so that they can then rationalize getting you to stop. People don't want homosexuals to marry not because it threatens hetero-marriage but because they want to discourage homosexual behavior, period. They want guys to stop fucking other guys in the ass because they don't want to have to think about it.

3. Mental illness by everybody
This one is particularly insidious because everybody is so fucked up. All you have to do is get a reason and suddenly it all makes sense why your boss or co-worker, or neighbor is so weird. If anybody finds out that at some point int he past you saw a counselor or therapist then every mistake you make from that point on will be because you are sick in the head, and it will be taken as a sign of your general frailty and that you are a liability to your company or the neighborhood or the relationship. This happens even if they themselves have sought psychiatric help in the past. This will be seen by everybody as a perfectly reasonable, rational prejudice and that it should be acted on for the welfare of all.

4. Race
If you are white you are repressed, pompous and a poor athlete, if you are black then you are ignorant, loud, but a good athlete except when you are being lazy. Because people rarely interact with a broad cross-sectionof other races it's easy to come to bullshit conclusions about people you don't know, and because people are often insecure, the conclusions tend to make other people inferior on some level. Nobody assumes that because you are Asian you are good at math, they assume that you deliver food for some roach-infested dog-butchering Chinese restaurant and that you talk funny. If you look a certain way it will be assumed that you possess all possible negative traits of your ethnic group because it's easier than not knowing what you are. See #1, people hate unknown factors. This relentless stereotyping does provide certain advantages for the one being profiled, as demonstrated in the movie White Men Can't Jump, but most people would rather complain about the unfairness of life than take advantage of them.

5. Sex, as seen by guys
The assumption is that women are emotionally frail (prone to hysteria and hypersensitive), stupid about technical things, irrational, unable to concentrate, unwilling to take risks, and generally fearful. Unlike prejudice about race, these are not borne of ignorancesince most men have interacted closely with women on some level. Women are not an ethnic minority. It turns out that these preconceptions are often true since women have been raised in American culture to believe that these things are normal and acceptable feminine behaviors. Somehow it slipped through the corrective filters of 60's feminism and remains as a perfectly reasonable negative trait. If you are a woman it will be assumed that you are an emotional basket-case and roughly 50-60% of the time in America it will be the correct assumption. If you raise boys to believe that beating women is acceptable a lot of them will grow up to beat women, just because they can. There aren't any real social stigmas associated with manhood. Women claim to hate men, but this is almost always a means to get men to notice them.

6. Intelligence/Education as seen by the stupid/uneducated
If you are educated it will be assumed that you think way too highly of yourself and that you need knocking down a peg. That's it. That's what words like "degree" and "graduation", and "reading" signal to a large number of Americans. You use a word that they do not know the meaning of and this means that you are on some level insulting their intelligence. This makes them very angry. Knocking you down a peg may mean finding some little thing that you don't know, like the names of the Rams' starting corner-backs or how to get your lawn-mower started, and rubbing it in, or it can mean just beating the shit out of you so that they can feel superior to you on some level.

7. Immigrants as seen by citizens
Where you from, boy? Being an immigrant to America puts you at two different kinds of disadvantages, first you have the practical one of genuine culture-shock and ignorance. This can be remedied by observing and experimentation, then there is the second, which is the perception that you are childishly stupid, which cannot be remedied. Part of why immigrants are often so successful in America is that they are not the semi-retarded hopeless dupes that an unfamiliar accent seems to signal to the average American. If you expect a drooling dullard and get an average person you will be pleasantly surprised. The race of the immigrant does not play a significant part in this, it just determines whether the condescension will come with a smile or a scowl.

8. Pedophiles as seen by guys who like hair and curves
For the most part this is a combination of two other things on this list: first there is the fact that an open sexual attraction to kids, like homosexuality is gross to many, if not most men, therefore we can condemn it completely without condemning our own proclivities. Here is a demographic that we don't fall into and that has disgusting appetites that we are for some reason obsessed with. The next thing is feminine hysteria. The whole attention-whore victim culture has made these people seem disproportionately dangerous, a side-effect being that mothers pass on their hysteria to their daughters. Apart from all that there is the fact that many men in America are attracted to thin, flat-chested, hipless, hairless women. All the symptoms of prepubescence are what women strive for here, because that is what the men want. The hatred of pedophiles may be a symptom of a variety of subconscious longings. Perhaps the attraction to children is now at the same place that an attraction to black women was at another time in American history. Secretly understood, but openly loathed.

9. Obesity seen by anybody less obese
The main thing that people assume about fat people is that they are lazy. Nothing will change this. If you are fat, and do more manual labor than anybody else at your job, you are lazy. If your house is tidy, and spotless, and you are fat you are still lazy, the house is just clean because you don't do anything to get it messy. If people see you walking it's because you are lazy or you would be running. Any physical effort you make as a fat person will be invisible. Another thing is that you are sweaty and smell bad, but since most won't get close enough to you to find out this one doesn't matter as much.

10. Religion as seen by each other
This does not mean that non-religious stigmatize religious people, but rather that religious people stigmatize each other. Muslims are terrorists, Jews as a group are holy and special people while Jews as individuals are evil money-grubbing and power-hungry and full of cunning schemes. Within churchy-land there are a million schisms between the true-believers, the false-believers, the whackjob cults, the compromisers and the ones who see Christianity not so much as a religion as they do a means to express their own personal prejudices. If you belong to one group, that says everything about who and what you are to everybody else and since you have been pigeon-holed by a deity don't even think about trying to appeal to reason.

source: http://www.scolister.co.cc/2008/11/10-worst-american-social-stigmas.html

How McCain Lost to Obama.

How McCain Lost to Obama.

The Republican party consists of many factions, but among the more important are the conservative "base" and fiscal conservatives.

The "base" includes largely illiterate fundies from the deep south who are united in their love for Sarah Palin, hatred of black or colored people, belief in Biblical predestination, including redrawing the map of the Middle East to prepare for the End Times, and religious values such as opposition to abortion and stem cell research, the teaching of creationism, etc.

They pay lip service to fiscal conservatism, mostly in their preference of "small government" but as various statistics show, they are mostly poor and take more than their share of welfare. Tax cuts to the rich do not benefit them, but it's part of their ideology.

They are pro-freedom to the extent of "keep your filthy hands off my guns", but quite clueless about other significant protections to individual liberties offered by the constitution. Hence they go along with government actions that abridge the 1st, 4th, 6th and 8th amendments; they actually defend such loss of liberties as necessary for the "war against turrurism" or "save the chillun", but they fiercely defend the 2nd amendment. Guns give them comfort, even when they are losing other liberties.

Then there are the fiscal conservatives, who pay lip service to social conservative issues such as abortion and gay marriage bans. But their real interest is in protecting the money flow. These are well-to-do people, many of them quite wealthy. They want to protect high incomes and corporate profits. They are also generally smarter, and realize that no party can run this country without the support of middle America.

While the conservative "base" would turn off any moderate voter who came close, with their blatant racism, homophobia, biblical certainties, etc., these fiscal conservatives form the "buffer" to middle America. They are capable of putting their arguments in persuasive and non-offensive words that moderates and independents can agree with, at least until the votes are cast. Many of them are writers, TV personalities, journalists, etc. These are the people we commonly hear on TV. The conservative "base" is largely hidden from middle America, though it does sometimes rear its head, as people saw in McCain rallies where the fundies screamed "kill him". You can get some idea of how they think if you peruse fundie sites like freerepublic. The "base" calls such fiscal conservatives "RINOs" -- Republicans In Name Only.

Fox is a business, so I suspect their philosophical alignment is more with the fiscal conservatives, or RINOs. However, every single successful election for the Republicans involves energizing the "base", therefore there is much pandering to fundies going on, specially during the election cycle. At election times, their interests sort of coincide. The "base" provides the bulk of the numbers and much of the cash, and the RINOs provide the "moderate" commentary that will convince enough of middle America to vote their way, to tip the election.

This election was different in that the fundie base really hated the Republican nominee, John McCain. This kind of thing happens occasionally, because it's hard to find the perfect crossover candidate who can appeal to both fundies and moderates at the same time. McCain is a bit worse than most. What he calls "mavericky", the fundies call "liberalism from hell". His nomination cooled the enthusiasm of the base very considerably.

Things were going really bad, because the Republicans simply can't win without the support of the base. So the leadership did what they thought was a smart thing - they picked Sarah Palin as the VP. Their thinking probably was - here's a candidate who's fundie enough to comfort the base. She's obscure and unknown and therefore not powerful enough to threaten our agenda. She's a woman - that and her obscurity might suddenly focus media attention back on us, and give us the boost we need for the election.

Unfortunately, they miscalculated. Palin didn't just energize the base, she drove them crazy. She is dumb enough to speak their exact language, the words they understand. She's got 5 kids. She's got a Down's baby. She is unreservedly against abortion. She's the perfect fulcrum for the anti-RINO backlash that was building in the base, since the nomination of John McCain. She raised a firestorm that the leadership wasn't prepared for.

The conservative base cannot be reasoned with. Theirs is an all or none viewpoint, you're with them, or you're the enemy. This makes it very hard for the moderate Republicans right now. They need the base, because without it they can't win. But they can't let the base take over the party, because most of them wouldn't want to live in a country governed by the Republican base.

Fox is caught in the middle. They are not trying to appease Obama, they are not trying to make up with the liberals. You can forget that feel-good nonsense. They are simply trying to chart a course between the two factions of the Republican Party. The leadership is playing the blame game right now, since they lost. If they say McCain was a bad nominee, they have to accept at least partial responsibility for it. So they would rather pin the blame on Palin's stupidity. To the base, however, things are exactly the reverse. Fox is trying to be "fair and balanced" between these two viewpoints for the first time in their lives, and finding that "fair and balanced" is exactly what the base hates most.

Fox will need to make a choice. I suspect the choice will be in favor of the base, because ultimately it's the base that brings in the Nielsen ratings that helps them sell ads and pay salaries. So look for a strong pro-Palin tilt to come. After all, the moderate Republicans can be convinced in time that this wasn't personal, it's just business. You could never convince the base of that, to them, everything is personal.

For Democrats, the best approach right now is to support the conservative base as much as possible on the Palin issue. This is a huge wedge that can be driven into the Republican party. Palin is ultimately un-electable. She can mobilize the base like no one else, but that's her limit. She knows all the words that whip up the base to a frenzy. But she doesn't know the words that move middle America, and she is too dumb to master them. Without middle America, without moderates and independents, the Republican Party cannot win a presidential election. Supporting Palin is the surest way to ensure Democratic dominance at the Presidential level for a long time to come.

From DaveM191

My profession has just become a little unprofessional...

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