Is the division in American politics the result mostly from movement to the left by the left?

[SlowSpyder]

So dishonest. None of that matters at all. The fact remains that McCain was booed by his own supporters for praising Obama in his concession speech. There's no basis for "they're just as bad".

Yes, it absolutely does matter. She was the first candidate in ~50 years not to concede on election night. Her supporters came there expecting madam president, with all the liberal think tanks and leftist (aka mainstream these days) media outlets telling them that was what was going to happen. Had she not been a drunk wreck (a great sign of leadership, when things don't go your way) on election night she would have had to go in front of her militant feminist, crying, and shell shocked crowd and announced to them Donald Trump would be the their president. These are the same people that threw tantrums and tried to claw down the Supreme Court doors. You can't pretend like the circumstances don't matter, you are the one being dishonest here. But you're not even being dishonest to me, you're being dishonest to yourself for the sake of your ego.

 

[pmv]

Sure, but the issue is where should this courtesy come from? Is it not courteous of me to call a man a pronoun that relates to a man, when that person is in fact a man? Or is it not courteous for a very small percentage of the population to expect the overwhelming majority of the population to play their game of make believe?

It's discourteous of you to put your non-evidence-based stubborn absolutist belief that 'man' and 'woman' have some absolute definition and your desire to pretend that the science of gender is more definitive than it is, ahead of the psychological well-being of the person you are referring to. It's _deeply_ discourteous to sneeringly declare others are 'playing a game of make-believe' based on nothing but your own prejudices and non-evidence-based beliefs. I really am puzzled where that anger and hatred in you comes from.

I mean, I am not entirely 'on-side' with the transgender agenda. I simply _don't know_ what the truth of the matter is. The relation between gender and the physical external body is a big puzzle to me.

And science can't definitively tell me - there are so many things we don't know about the human organism. So I would indeed be hesitant about, for example, allowing those under age of adulthood, to have surgery or anything irreversible. And it wouldn't surprise me if it turned out that _some_ of the increase in transgender identitification has elements of a fashion about it. But I simply don't know.

But I also don't put a desire to _pretend_ to know something I don't ahead of listening to people and trying to accommodate them insofar as it really doesn't do me any harm. What do 'he' and 'she' actually _mean_, anyway? They are words, conventions, like all words their meaning can shift.

 

[Jhhnn]

Yes, it absolutely does matter. She was the first candidate in ~50 years not to concede on election night. Her supporters came there expecting madam president, with all the liberal think tanks and leftist (aka mainstream these days) media outlets telling them that was what was going to happen. Had she not been a drunk wreck (a great sign of leadership, when things don't go your way) on election night she would have had to go in front of her militant feminist, crying, and shell shocked crowd and announced to them Donald Trump would be the their president. These are the same people that threw tantrums and tried to claw down the Supreme Court doors. You can't pretend like the circumstances don't matter, you are the one being dishonest here. But you're not even being dishonest to me, you're being dishonest to yourself for the sake of your ego.

Putting things that actually happened on the same basis as things that didn't is bullshit. Always.

Conservatives' attitude were shitty in 2008 and only got shittier in 2016, thanks in no small part to GOP obstructionism across the intervening years. The banks & the Wealthy recovered just fine. They left Trump country twisting in the wind. But it was all Obama's fault, of course, and Crooked Hillary's as well. Two years into the Trump delusion it's not any better at all, either. Ask Midwest soybean farmers. Ask the farmers whose spring planting loans have been delayed because of the shutdown. Ask American manufacturing workers screwed by tariffs on steel & aluminum.

That's the real MAGA.

 

[Moonbeam]

Sure, but the issue is where should this courtesy come from? Is it not courteous of me to call a man a pronoun that relates to a man, when that person is in fact a man? Or is it not courteous for a very small percentage of the population to expect the overwhelming majority of the population to play their game of make believe?

That is a very difficult and challenging question. It is intimately related to how we approach the answer to the very nature of two questions your question itself poses. 1. Is reality determined by what a majority believes? Was the earth, say, flat when a majority believed it was and physically alter later, or was it always rather spherical? 2. Who is really playing the game of make believe or who else may be playing it? Is there really a majority, say, who feel it to be discourteous to comply with peoples’ pronoun requests in certain legally defined contexts and is the offense they take at this perhaps the result of living in a game of make-believe.

I would say, judging from the level of hostility and discourtesy leveled at you here in this forum that courtesy may in fact, but sadly, be hard to come by. What goes around comes around, I suppose.

An additional point I would make is that in the reality I observe, people who have been treated with disrespect as children grow up to live lives disrespectfully of others for the very purpose of generating the only kind of attention they have ever known. Their revenge takes the form of proving in the real world the inner so called reality, the imagined reality they were forced to feel as children.