• BarqsHasBite@lemmy.ca
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    3 months ago

    I wish I followed this advice earlier. The way I’ve heard it was: “When someone tells you who they are, believe them.”

    • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      3 months ago

      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.)

        • grrgyle@slrpnk.net
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          3 months ago

          So… You shouldn’t take past behavior as an indication of future behavior?

          I think it’s good advice. Saves a lot of time

      • MotoAsh@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        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.

          • MotoAsh@lemmy.world
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            3 months ago

            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.

        • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          3 months ago

          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 aisle get a reach-around.”

          • Facebones@reddthat.com
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            3 months ago

            “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.

            • HopeOfTheGunblade@kbin.social
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              3 months ago

              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.

              • Facebones@reddthat.com
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                3 months ago

                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. 🤷

                • HopeOfTheGunblade@kbin.social
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                  3 months ago

                  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.

                  • Facebones@reddthat.com
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                    3 months ago

                    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!

                  • Bartsbigbugbag@lemmy.ml
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                    3 months ago

                    Thousands of other people are though, more than were under trump, more than were under Obama, more by the day, every day.

          • MotoAsh@lemmy.world
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            3 months ago

            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.