The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Was a conversation held? Reasons given? A good old fashioned discussion? Sorry it just seems bizarre to me that personal intimacy to the point where you'd call each other girl/boy friend can be destroyed by this. Facebook unfriending, sure. Dropping of acquaintanceship across the internet, yes, I've seen it. But breaking up with someone you're supposed to be somewhat intimate with? Over a vote? Maybe this reveals enough fundamental disagreements that you are just not compatible, but I would have imagined such things would have come to light earlier.
My best friend--been with me through thick and thin for most of both of our lives--straight up told me if I was a Trump supporter, that was the only thing that could ever end our friendship.
To me, there are far worse things than simply supporting Trump, and there's a not implausiblr chance it was simply a venting/signaling sentence, but it was still a bit chilling to hear (as someone who is most emphatically not a Trump supporter, but at risk of being assumed to be one in certain circles for simply not thinking it's as bad as the histrionics would suggest).
I do not doubt you. I think though what people imagine when they imagine "Trump supporter" is a demon of their own creation, not the actual humans in voting booths with reasonable perspectives. I think also with dialogue that (at least some) people can be made to realize this.
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I genuinely think you're typical-minding here. There is a contingent of people so intent on hating Trump supporters that when there's a conflict between their idea that 1) Trump supporters are horrible human beings who support Bad Things and 2) this person I know is good and principled, they'll resolve the cognitive dissonance by sacrificing 2) to protect 1), instead of entertaining the idea that there's a remotely valid train of thought that might allow someone reasonable to consider supporting Trump.
It seems quite bizarre for me as well that this would be someone's reaction, but people can indeed be so afflicted by political derangement so as to do this - they see casting your vote for Trump as tantamount to ushering in the American equivalent of the Third Reich. It's just such an illegitimate position to them that they refuse to humanise their supporters; it's a close-to-irredeemable action that overrides much of the positive personal qualities you may have had and makes them see you as barely even human once you've done that. I am only slightly exaggerating.
It doesn't help if you never discuss it. Steel Manning her position here: she wouldn't have reached that level of intimacy had she known up front, there was an element of fraud to the proceedings.
Divorcing my wife because she fell into debt is very different from deciding not to marry her because she revealed she revealed to me late in our engagement that she'd been in hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt all along, even if both could be described as "Making marriage decisions on the basis of money."
This is a very obvious false equivalency and I'm not sure how you don't see it. Failing to disclose something, like your debts, that you know will affect the other partner personally is beyond the pale precisely because it is so relevant to their future wellbeing - you can't really say you care for a person and yet want to dupe them into taking on your debts.
Something like voting for Trump, on the other hand, is just not super relevant to the other partner's personal life or material wellbeing outside of "You hold opinions I don't like and that makes me feel bad". Who your partner voted for is not your business in the way that your partner's debts are your business. If someone wants to abandon a relationship for that reason, it's certainly their prerogative, but it is their own hangup that's at fault.
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To be fair, the mindset he describes is typical in my experience. People that invested in politics are not the majority, thankfully.
This is true, but typical-minding someone who's been described to pen comments "more hateful than the worst comments I have seen on Reddit" is probably a bad idea. And I do personally know people who have dumped friends who have voted for Trump - incidentally (or not), they themselves generally happen to be fairly shit people in my experience.
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The fact that I do not live in the US certainly weighs in on this view of mine, no doubt. I was recently in conversation with solid blue tribers who did not disavow me as a friend, though we did agree to change the conversational topic.
Are politics in Japan as vicious as they have been here lately? Can you summarize the "sides"? Maybe material for Transnational Thursday.
They are not. Others here are probably more cognizant of the machinations of politics in Japan than I. On the macro level the LDP or Jimintō party is typically the winner, with only a few brief periods of upset. The LDP is weirdly partnered with (New) Komeito, which is affiliated with the Soka Gakkai sect (some might say cult) of Buddhism, which has great social and political sway in Japan (if to some degree implicitly).
There are of course randos in Twitter who have opinions, but typically elections pass without great interest, with voter turnout not great, but similar to that of the US.
It's nowhere near as circus-like as in the US. Elections do make the news and on election nights the results are covered on the Japanese TV networks (which still receive considerable viewership despite Netflix) but there's not the wild and woolly atmosphere. It's rare (for me) to hear anyone discuss politics openly, which may or may not be gor cultural reasons (e.g. desire for social harmony )
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We did have a discussion. She was willing to hear me out. I am also surprised it didn’t come to light earlier. I think her logic was: “Obviously no respectable person would ever vote for Trump. My boyfriend is a respectable person. Therefore, my boyfriend obviously wouldn’t vote for Trump.”
The conversation was very 2015 Tumblr. The one thing I didn’t have a response to was when she brought up the fact that she has friends who are “undocumented”. I could probably salvage this by going full Hanania and pledging my opposition to deportations and my support for abortion, which is a quite tempting option at the moment tbh.
There are nuanced approaches. I wrote a kind of steelman a few months back. There really are bureaucratic SNAFUs. And the United States Government is truly not kind when an actual SNAFU happens; they are incredibly by-the-book, even when that book is extremely opaque and confusing. Even though there are significant pro-immigrant advocacy organizations out there who will throw every argument they can at the courts on a pro bono basis (yes, they'll throw utterly silly arguments at the wall which should be rejected, too), the courts are for the most part pretty deferential to the gov't in the realm of immigration. The threat of penalties like being banned from the US for ten years can be bandied about for surprisingly minor things.
Now, the trick is to try to divide that group, who mostly are at least trying to do things legally, but who get caught up in some garbage, from the group of folks who are literally just walking across the border, not even trying. Rhetorically, this may get you a long way with your girlfriend. Of course, that trick is surprisingly more difficult to translate into actual policy, and she may honestly be fully justified in thinking that Donald Trump is not going to thread that needle. He may genuinely make things more difficult for some number of sympathetic folks. But of course, now we're getting into the land of tradeoffs, where it's hard to make good estimates. How many people in the 'mostly good' category are really going to suffer? How many people in the 'not even trying' category are going to be kept out? It's probably impossible to predict what fine-grained policy choices will ultimately be made up/down the chain and how those choices will ultimately come out in terms of the tradeoffs.
If you can get her at least this far, and she's capable of understanding that the truly apocalyptic-sounding BS that people are spouting off (e.g., "They're gonna deport all green card holders!") is completely irrelevant and that the most likely outcome is some shifting around of tradeoffs, which may or may not impact her friends... and that you do feel sympathy for any 'mostly good' folks who get further harmed by the tradeoff game, then you're probably in luck. If not, and she simply can't extricate her mind from the most insane propaganda takes? Whelp, you've got decisions to make.
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If you actually are opposed to deportations and in favour of abortion, then do it. Nothing wrong with telling the truth.
Otherwise, I wouldn't advise it.
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I'm not going to try and co-pilot your conversations, obviously, and I trust you know what you're doing. I would suggest if she decides to bail on you for this there may be a lack of emotional maturity worth thinking about--and which may itself be a consolation to you. This is regardless of whether you or she is the one "in the right" politically.
I would like to think, however, that she resists the urge to just walk away and rid herself of the cognitive dissonance that seems to be at play, and that this is a kind of wake-up call for her.
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