Eviora

People can hold a different political opinion from me and be my friends. They just can't vote for a candidate who would oppress me given the chance, ignore the election as if it were a non-issue, or waste everyone's time voting for a candidate no reasonable person believes has any chance to win when there are real stakes. I judge by actions before beliefs, though I must admit, there are some beliefs I would find disqualifying, such as "you deserve to burn forever for not worshiping my god." But you're being ridiculous now. Being my friend is not some matter of social, economic, or similar importance. Any pair of individuals may not be friends for pretty much any arbitrary reason. Not even I want the government policing who we have personal relationships. Not being friends with a person is not on par with hating, or even disliking, that person. And, by the way, I'm not more likely to be friends with someone just because they're LGBT. Honestly, I'd say it makes me even sadder when I see someone who's willing to throw themself under the bus along with the rest of us. Where you fumble on understanding me is in the assumption that I care whether others care in the abstract space of their mind. Those who genuinely care will show me. The others are just liars, to me and maybe to themselves. By not voting Trump, at least you're not attacking your friends. But a Johnson vote doesn't protect them because - seriously, now - he has no chance of winning. Protecting your friends and some of your political viewpoints are in diametric opposition. You can choose one, or you can refuse. But hoping for a better world, a world where that choice isn't necessary, won't bring you any closer to one.

Oh, I've never been any good at making friends, and I'm even worse at keeping them. Remember all those times I said I was crazy? I wasn't kidding, and my brand of lunacy makes relationships quite difficult. That's okay, though, because it makes the few friends that do last all the more meaningful to me. It's pretty easy to be calm about threats against minorities when you're not a member of any of those minorities. Not all of us have that luxury. As was mentioned in last night's debate, the winner of this election could have significant sway over the Supreme Court, and therefore over all sorts of issues. There has been explicit talk about making a Supreme Court that would undo our progress and halt the progress we've yet to make that is so badly needed. Your willingness to characterize my focus on equality for everyone as tunnel vision is only proof that, while you may be intellectually aware of the problems that remain, you don't have the perspective necessary to actually understand them. If it's selfish to expect my friends to treat me as an equal and not to simply accept the status quo because there are other, "more important" things at stake, then yes, I'm selfish, and I'm not ashamed of it. Importance is subjective, after all. To consider someone as a friend, or as something more, is, in my eyes, to put them above the mass of blurry faces all around you. I do that for my friends, and I expect it from them in return. Any definition of friendship that doesn't involve something like that is too cheap and empty for me to bother with.

Selfishness has nothing to do with it. Consider a Christian mother who kills her infant child in order to have them sent straight to heaven, untainted by sin. She may be willing to sacrifice her eternal soul to protect that of her child. That excuse does nothing whatsoever to redeem her action. She's still the type of person willing to kill her own child. I'm the type of person who judges people based on what they do far, far more than what they believe. The Qur'an - and, yes, the Bible - proscribe all sorts of deplorable behaviors to those who follow them. Yet most of those people refuse to obey the worst of those commands. They make up interpretations of their own, or cherry-pick, or do whatever else they have to to avoid that depravity. And I think you'll find that in the vast majority of cases scholarship has nothing to do with their way of "following" their holy books. They are better than their holy books. They don't engage in those atrocities because they're too decent of people to do the things that are being asked of them. When they help someone, they deserve credit for that. When they hurt someone, they assume the blame for it, and the good things they've done do nothing to lessen their fault. People like to tell me things like "I'm your friend," or "I care about your well being." Then, some of them add, "And I'm voting for a candidate who would hurt you," or "And I'm too disgusted with this election to stand up for you." I've been subjected to enough abuse in my life to know it when I see it. I'm not buying into those inauthentic 'friendships' that exist only in words. Friends stick up for friends. Sometimes, you have to make a choice. You can vote for your perception of 'the greater good' over your friends, but don't expect to just be let off the hook for that. Your actions show me what you really care about. I'm not just to going pretend you're an ally of mine when you show me that you're not.

...And a certain someone, it seems, is still happy to offer the strawman that I even care about the reasons why people vote for whomever they do when, in fact, it is the action of voting for a particular candidate itself and not that rationale behind it that I view as defining. People do bad things for 'good' reasons all the time - keep in mind that the people behind 9/11 likely did what they did believing it was the will of the one true infinitely good god. On that grand scale, it doesn't excuse what they did, and nor do any of our personal excuses absolve us of the smaller scale harm we help cause in the voting booth. What you do, not why you do it, says the most about who you are.

Actually, I don't believe we can easily be friends. You see, I don't view friendship as some farce. Those who would vote to deny me my human rights are no friends of mine. Therefore,voting for Trump would disqualify you from being my friend. Feel free to make empty attempts at a personal attack, though. I'm very used to those. Meanwhile, I will continue to remind you of the fruitlessness of only accepting absolute proof in just about any endeavor aside from pure logic and math. Now, reasonable proof might be a different story, depending whether your definition of reasonable is actually reasonable. =p

If you can't even prove Trump isn't a Reptilian how is anyone supposed to prove anything to you? Answer: They can't. Therefore, you are in effect opening with the promise that you'll stick to your guns regardless of the evidence provided. So what's the point?

Just to name a few of the biggest issues that come to mind recently: 1. Racial profiling by the police that has led to a few deaths that have been ruled homicides 2. Marriage Equality is currently the law of the land, but malicious judges could try to reverse that. 3. In a similar vein, members of the LGBT community are still not protected from being discriminated against in housing, the workplace, public spaces, etc simply for being who they are 4. Women don't yet have equal pay for equal work (We may not be a minority, but it remains an equal treatment issue) 5. Trump has claimed that he would temporarily bar Muslims from immigrating into the U.S. They may not be citizens yet, but, again, it's a matter of equal treatment. Discriminating against them also feeds into the terrorists' 'Us vs them' rhetoric. As you may imagine, I could blabber on. There's plenty we can do on a governmental level to lessen these problems. One of our candidates talks down to women and either demonizes or would widen the gap for the rest. The other, though she's no paragon, does not.

Seriously? You may not think Hillary is very responsible, and maybe she even isn't, but she isn't a hothead, either. I'd trust my dogs with the nuclear codes before Trump. We're talking about a man who can't even control what he says much of the time. As far as civil rights go, there is plenty of inequality left, and plenty of it is enforced or ignored on a governmental level. If you choose not to value the lives of those who have it worst enough to stand up for them, that's on you. There are concrete steps that could be taken to defend everyone's rights on state and federal levels. There are also steps that could be taken to undo the rights we've been able to provide for people who deserved them. You can choose to sacrifice minorities for "the greater good" or some nonsense like that, but that's the same sort of reasoning that Neo Nazi I was talking about might use to justify their atrocities. That kind of reasoning won't sway me. A country that doesn't fight to protect it's most vulnerable citizens is no country worth fighting for. And if you don't think any civil rights issues are visible on a national level right now, I don't know what news you've been watching.

@Cyanna Honestly, I've spoken to plenty of people who support abhorrent opinions. I feel no need to do it over and over. And I feel less need to get involved in endless debates comparing one "fact checker" with the other. There are good reasons and there are bad reasons. These fruitless back-and-forths provide none of the former. As far as the whole email thing goes, frankly, I don't really care. It's a small issue in relative to, say, the civil rights issues at stake. Hillary did mess up, and no amount of excuses undoes that. But that mistake was a fairly small one that had been latched on to in an attempt to discredit her. Frankly, there are enough legitimate issues with her that this one is minor by comparison.

@Cyanna I imagine there would be some story behind holding such a repugnant opinion. But, frankly, I don't care what that story is. I don't have the time to individually examine everyone who believes something so depraved. The moment they take action to progress that opinion into a reality the value of their action supersedes whatever is going through their heads. @FairFamily Literally. This is an exercise in the limits of proof, of course.

@Cyanna Always be open to other opinions, huh? Say I'm talking to a Neo Nazi who believes all Jews should be rounded up and executed. Should I be open to that opinion?

Aw, you wanna talk to me! Before I can engage in any meaningful conversation, though, there's a little snag I need to get over. You see, I'm totally convinced that no humans named Donald Trump appeared in the second debate, but that instead, a Reptilian posed as Trump and argued with Hillary Clinton. Could you please disabuse me of that little notion? I'll need absolute proof, of course.

I don't think you understand how evidence works, Absol, considering your eagerness to answer concerns with a swarm of assumptions. If you're looking for absolute proof of much of anything, you're going to be looking for a long time. And the fact that you freely admit you'll cling to your opinions until presented with the sort of logic that only exists in a vacuum is a testament to your unwillingness to listen to practical reason. You're basically declaring that you aren't worth arguing with. So I won't bother. Enjoy your alternate reality.

I think Michelle Obama put it best in her recent speech. The people who even now support Trump despite the way he treats women are showing us who they really are. They'll do mental gymnastics to avoid it, but a vote for Trump is an endorsement of that kind of behavior - and I'll take that one step further. Those who refuse to take sides, who want to distance themselves from politics, and those who value sending some squeak of a message to no one by voting for a candidate who obviously can't win endorse the same behavior through their apathy. A refusal to stand up for the women in their lives in addition to for non-white people, disabled peopled, Muslims, and members of the LGBT community, is a statement made through action that those people aren't worth standing up for. Trump told us at the second debate that the man in the video wasn't him, but it isn't on a stage in front of a nation that we're most likely to reveal who we really are. We do that through smaller interactions, through the way we treat people on a day to day basis, the way we speak in the locker room, and, yes, the way we vote when no one is looking. More and more people are coming to realize that they're not willing to stand by idly, or indeed, to lend a hand, as a man who so clearly has so little regard for women seeks the highest office in the land. As they step away from him, the ones who stay - and Trump himself - are bound to cry foul, because now it is becoming increasingly clear not only that they're unlikely to win, but that in throwing their support to him, they've made a statement about how they view others and perhaps even themselves. That can be a hard thing to admit to. So they don't want to admit it. They deny it, claim the whole thing to be a sham, because they don't want to face the fact that they may well be exactly what Hillary called them - deplorable. It's a desperate tactic, and one that won't work, because the rest of us are not fooled. Of course, all that is just the opinion of some crazy girl. =p