Maybe now you guys will listen.
This is precisely one of the reasons why I wrote a whole article about how to avoid this. I got firm nods from like a third of guys, while the other two thirds flamed me.
Unless we make our diverse political make-up public and obvious--as well as hash them out in conversations that aren't dismissive of one side--we're going to get lumped in with these groups, discredited, and maybe even ruined. The fact that you, durang, and me are in the same forum discussing matters, and that our politics couldn't be more different, is very significant. This is a transpolitical (if not apolitical) demographic.
We also need to insulate ourselves from the accusation that only thing that brings us together is that "we all hate women." We don't. We're not radical. We're just masculine. We're not conservative. We're not liberal. We're not "independent" (a stupid term). We're all those affiliations. We're not incoherent either. We have a set of shared beliefs that a more complex than a simple political designation or inflammatory label.
Our political stances (and not just in the right-left spectrum, but in other complex ways) need to reach a level of sophistication that they have yet to attain. The left-is-the-enemy stance makes us sound a little like the real whack-jobs holed up in rural Montana blaming the government and immigration and Obama for everything while stockpiling military-grade weapons.
That perspective is not only stupid and over-simplified but also, as we see here, dangerous.
This is precisely one of the reasons why I wrote a whole article about how to avoid this. I got firm nods from like a third of guys, while the other two thirds flamed me.
Unless we make our diverse political make-up public and obvious--as well as hash them out in conversations that aren't dismissive of one side--we're going to get lumped in with these groups, discredited, and maybe even ruined. The fact that you, durang, and me are in the same forum discussing matters, and that our politics couldn't be more different, is very significant. This is a transpolitical (if not apolitical) demographic.
We also need to insulate ourselves from the accusation that only thing that brings us together is that "we all hate women." We don't. We're not radical. We're just masculine. We're not conservative. We're not liberal. We're not "independent" (a stupid term). We're all those affiliations. We're not incoherent either. We have a set of shared beliefs that a more complex than a simple political designation or inflammatory label.
Our political stances (and not just in the right-left spectrum, but in other complex ways) need to reach a level of sophistication that they have yet to attain. The left-is-the-enemy stance makes us sound a little like the real whack-jobs holed up in rural Montana blaming the government and immigration and Obama for everything while stockpiling military-grade weapons.
That perspective is not only stupid and over-simplified but also, as we see here, dangerous.