Cool down politics, reject demonization, abandon your jersey, vote for politicians who demonstrate a track-record of putting people first.

There are smart people on both sides of the aisle. The majority of people on either side of the aisle (I'm referring to general citizenry, though I think politicians, to a lesser extent, this also applies) are *good people*, who happen to come from different backgrounds and hence have differing motivations. These people are your neighbors, and we've all been participating in this insane social experiment where the box in the living room, or more contemporarily your hand, tells you about the monsters on the other team. It's precisely why a kid--incapable of the same long-term thinking for which you advocated--just made things a whole lot more distressing for all of us. The news cycles are designed to divide and separate us, and then the politicians play Risk with the political map on "who can we convince, who can we lock into our ideology". Both liberals and conservatives are guilty. Why do you think the republican party--which summarily rejected Trump in 2015--has turned into the MAGA machine it has today? Votes. The way it's fed to us is a sort of perverse culture war: who has the better culture: Bootstrapping Conservative White-nationalist Christians, or Socialist Neoliberal Atheist LGBTQIA+? It's an ill-formed question because first of all it's not remotely posed in good faith, and second of all even if it were in good faith, it's completely subjective in its criterion, so it's unanswerable. The only answer is to "Turn the TV off", as it were.

No surprise then that I sit somewhere in the center, because I'm routinely bugged by good ideas on both sides of the aisle, though the noise. Not just from politicans, but from neighbors and activists. I've tried being hard democrat, I've tried being hard republican. The truth is "being a democrat" and "being a republican" is a stupid fucking jersey to own.

Regarding a strict longterm thinker policy:

Elon is a long-term thinker. Larry Elison is a long-term thinker. Jeff Bezos is a long-term thinker. JD Vance is a long-term thinker. Peter Thiel is a long-term thinker. None were directly voted for (ok, save Vance), and I believe all are invested in America tearing itself apart so they can construct a technofeudalist society post-civil war, and run off to explore the solar system.

Or something.

I'm not the one injecting politics here - the parent comment did that for me. I'm the one pointing out the hypocrisy.

It is a bit ironic to post this in a thread where someone who arguably wielded only words succumbed to someone wielding violence. From Sartre:

> Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

It happens, because itnworks well. For years and years, it allowed moderate Republicans to pretend their party goals are something they were not.

It allowed center to pretend to themselves both sides are the same. It allowed us all to to just dismiss those who actually read what conservatives say and plan as paranoid.

This dishonesty worked well and that is why it was used.