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I wish I followed this advice earlier. The way I've heard it was: "When someone tells you who they are, believe them."
From an interview with Oprah Winfrey in 1997:
When you look at that process of waiting on somebody who has told you they were going to do something and told you they were going to be there for you and they were not, they are showing you in that moment exactly who they are. That means that's somebody who cannot be trusted. So why would you the next time trust that person?
So, Maya Angelou said to me, when I was telling her one of these stories about, "I'm waiting and I couldn't believe it and he didn't call me and I don't know what happened," she was saying, "My dear," in her Maya voice, "My dear, when people show you who they are, why don't you believe them? Why must you be shown 29 times before you can see who they really are? Why can't you get it the first time?"
And so the adjunct of that is, when people show you who they are, believe them the first time. Don't wait for the twenty-ninth time."
The full quote is "When people show who you who they are, believe them the first time."
Which I think is the best version of the quote, honestly. We've been letting conservatives scream about who they are without really believing them for 70 fucking years now. Now they're not even afraid to put on a mask, they've gone fully mask-off on abuse and racism. This is what you get by enabling them through not believing them the first time. To me that's the further issue that Angelou didn't touch on. You're enabling that behavior by treating them as though they will somehow magically change. For Oprah it was assuming that man would suddenly start calling and treating her right. For the US political establishment it's for assuming conservatives are operating in good faith.
(It is Oprah Winfrey rephrasing statements she had been told by Maya Angelou. So the quote often gets attributed to them both, but I would consider it a Winfrey quote simply because she's paraphrasing someone else, using her own words.)
(Also, while the quote is good and Maya Angelou is good. Fuck Oprah Winfrey and all the fucking snake oil peddling freaks she promotes.)
Cringe as fuck
Bad advice really
So... You shouldn't take past behavior as an indication of future behavior?
I think it's good advice. Saves a lot of time
What you all need to realize is, those last 70 years have been DEMOCRATS showing you who they are: Useful idiots for the truly evil Republicans.
Yet no one believes it despite that being the only thing Democrats do... Obama Care is a Republican plan from Mitt Romney from the 90's. Biden is now ALSO screeching about "securing the border"...
Democrats are the blissfully unaware idiots helping evil people, and nobody believes it.
Maybe they don't believe it because that's not what happened 🤔
Right, the affordable care act ISN'T based on Mitt Romney's plan, and Biden totally didn't say, "give me the ability to close the border and I'll do it!".
Ya'll are in fucking denial and it's beyond pathetic. The fascists are winning because you're too fucking weak to understand that the Dems have been the "good cop" to the Republicans' bad cop for decades.
Again, grow up and engage with the real world before it's too late.
I am NOT saying, "don't vote for Biden over Trump". I'm saying, "don't trust Biden to fix much without GREAT pressure.". Yet you fucks cannot even hear the basic truth that not even the Dems are your friend unless you make a HEALTHY six figures or more. Pathetic. Fucking Pathetic.
I'm not American dude
I didn't say them by name, but Democrats are who I was thinking about when I discussed how pretending they are operating in good faith is enabling that behavior.
Democrats enable Conservative criminality, because they play an endless shell-game of "but they're really operating in good faith this time, we promise. We just need to
reach across the aisleget a reach-around.""If we 'meet them in the middle' and shift a mile to the right for the 3,041st time, they'll totally meet us in the middle THIS TIME instead of sprinting another two miles to the right like they have every other time, we swear!"
I understand the panic in marginalized communities and them saying if dems don't win they're going to be fucked now, but they don't get that we're only a couple election cycles from democrats throwing them under the bus same as Republicans.
Well, if my options to get dragged to the camps is either right now or in a few election cycles, I'm on the side of it taking longer.
I would think people would prefer "not being dragged to camps at all" but everybody keeps voting for "yes to camps but in 4 years"
Just weird to me but go off I guess. 🤷
Well, I voted Biden in 2020, and here we are four years later and I ain't in a camp yet. Kind of seems like that's an inaccurate prediction, and you would be served by considering the chain of reasoning that led you to this pass, to see what improvements might be made in your process to enable better predictions in the future. Not every change is an improvement, but every improvement is a change.
Sure, there's no way the inexorable march rightward the dnc follows and the explicit moves it makes to ensure leftists, third parties, and other establishment "outsiders" are acutely informed (including via court rulings stating that voters can eat shit the dnc does what it wants) that they have no place in the dnc ends badly.
Trump hasn't put you in a camp either yet so by your logic he's totally fine!
Trump and the rest of the red team are loudly and proudly proclaiming that they want to and moving that way in territory they control.
Do you have a suggestion as to what I should do that isn't accelerationism or removing any power I have to influence outcomes by turning to fantasy as a solution?
Thousands of other people are though, more than were under trump, more than were under Obama, more by the day, every day.
I agree that that's fucked. Giving the red team power means that number gets bigger, faster, and that no improvement whatsoever takes place. Perfection isn't on my political menu, do you have a suggestion that isn't accelerationism or not influencing the situation at all? Because "vote third party" sure doesn't seem to have "sent a message" in any way I can recognize. It just enshittified the country faster. Looks like harm reduction is the order of the day in politics while encouraging improvement via other means.
Leftists and third parties didn't enshittify the country faster -
That was Democrats who roll over and enable Republicans. That dedicate WAYYYY more energy to fighting anyone left of Joe than they EVER have fighting Republicans. That move the goalposts every time a third party meets the requirements for inclusion.
You blame third party voters for not "voting blue no matter who (even if that blue is anti labor and pro genocide)" but refuse to place blame with your precious democrats for actively stifling any voices left of mid right corporatism and actively changing the rules to keep anyone but the duopoly out of the system.
Fascism is fascism, and your insistence that the people actively supporting a racial cleansing will NEVER support it for other marginalized groups is lunacy.
That’s funny, because things like the voting uncommitted campaign have already done more to move Biden to the left than any “strategic voting democrat” has done in decades.
You keep giving them your vote, you say, definitively “I agree with your current course.” They don’t hear, “oh they don’t like us so we’ll move left” they say, “lefties are more willing to sacrifice their values and still vote for us, so let’s move right and court more right wing votes”.
Unless you live in a swing state, there is vastly more strategic value in voting third party than there is in signing off on austerity and genocide and fascist immigration policy.
The common thread I get from dems is that camps are perfectly fine as long as it's not lgbtq folk.
Any other qualifier is A-OK and not a bad thing at all.
Yep! They don't have to have evil intent themselves to never the less still effectively be the "good cop" accomplice to the Republican's bad cop.