[SpicyLemonZest]

I'm sorry to break the news to you, but if you're using the phrase "democrat politicians", you're extremely conservative. This phrase does not exist and is never used outside of deeply partisan conservative circles. If this doesn't align with your understanding of who you are and what you believe, I'd urgently reevaluate your media consumption habits.

[LPisGood]

I’m on the left and I use that phrase. It took me forever to figure out what was “wrong” with it. They’re democrats, democrat politicians.

Like the other person said, this usage is extremely common and not just on extremist conservative spaces, unless your definition of “extremist” includes 80% of the USA’s overton window

[tombert]

Yeah, that’s the thing.

I think a lot of people spend all day on leftist YouTube and live in leftist Discord servers and hang out with self-proclaimed Marxist friends, and that’s all completely fine, but as a result of people not being tuned into their specific vernacular they act like this shit is a dog whistle instead of the fact that i just don’t know (or care much about) this specific vocabulary.

I suppose I could be a useful idiot for this, but I don’t feel like saying “democrat” is really that bad as far as these things go.

To be fair, republicans are far worse with regards to “pretending to be offended”. You cannot convince me that anyone is actually offended by the term “happy holidays”, but every year I get to hear about a “war on Christmas”

[LPisGood]

I have personally known people to be offended by the term and the broader war on Christmas they feel it represents.

[tombert]

I know a bunch of people who say they’re offended by it. I don’t believe them, they’re lying to me or themselves, but I think the former.

I could be wrong, it’s likely even, but it’s just not something I am going to be convinced of. I think they’re pretending to be offended, because if they act offended then it’s easier for them to “both-sides” stuff, or they think it shows how good of Christians they are.

[tombert]

It’s actually not conservative at all, they run under the democrat sticker, this is the self-prescribed label.

We can argue that the American democrats aren’t very left-leaning and I would probably agree with you, but I reject the idea that I cannot use their own labels to describe them without being described as conservative.

[sjsdaiuasgdia]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democrat_Party_(epithet)

You're wrong on both the history and modern usage.

[tombert]

Fair enough. I meant to type Democratic but I guess I typed Democrat by mistake and didn’t realize it had baggage. I was typing on a phone.

It does seem like a pretty easy mistake to make regardless and I don’t think it’s reasonable to call me “extremely conservative” for making it. It’s still pretty common to call these politicians “democrats”, so someone who isn’t terminally tuned into semantic games might not realize it.

[sjsdaiuasgdia]

> It’s still pretty common to call these politicians “democrats”

Yes, this was the Republicans being successful in their efforts.

I appreciate you acknowledging the term has baggage.

[tombert]

Sure, but at this point it just kind of feels like splitting hairs and just a means of getting offended on purpose.

Calling people “extremely conservative” because I used a term that is very commonly used pretty much everywhere but leftist circles is needlessly pedantic and very annoying. I think it’s reasonable to give people the benefit of the doubt.

Also I’m not fucking conservative. I think Ben Shapiro and Steven Crowder and Donald Trump and Charlie Kirk and pretty much anyone on the internet who has ever challenged anyone to a debate is a fucking moron.

[sjsdaiuasgdia]

The commonality of the term is the result of intentional usage over a long span of time by right wing politicians, media, and personalities.

If you've ever disregarded or downplayed the power and reach of right wing media and propaganda, think on this conversation and how a derogatory term for members of the Democratic party entered common usage.

You don't have to actually watch or like right wing propaganda to be influenced by it because it is pervasive in the United States and has been for decades.

[SpicyLemonZest]

The reason it seems like an easy mistake to make is that you've been consuming conservative media that uses it routinely. Presumably this is the same media that told you about this ETF whose ticker is a joke about Nancy Pelosi, and suggested that it proves some fact comparable to the current administration's misconduct. Again, I'm not saying you personally consider yourself to be conservative - but if you don't, you've been tricked, and you need to urgently reevaluate how much you listen to the people who tricked you.

[tombert]

Which “conservative media” are you referring to? I don’t watch Fox News, I don’t watch Newsmax, I don’t listen to Alex Jones, I don’t watch CNN, I don’t watch MSNBC, I don’t listen to any political commentators.

The fact that the ETF is outperforming the regular market demonstrates that there’s some shiftiness going on. I am pretty sure that was the point.

I didn’t say it was comparable to the Trump admins misconduct, read my comment again. I said that democrats aren’t immune from shittiness.

Pretending to not understand what I was saying is extremely irritating.

ETA:

I reread my comment and I realize that I said “not categorically better”, which can easily be interpreted as an equivalence.

That wasn’t what I was trying to say. I was just trying to say like we shouldn’t act like there isn’t some level on shittiness on the democratic side.

[SpicyLemonZest]

Hard for me to know what you watch and listen to. Stereotypical "podcast bros" are one big thing I've seen - there's a lot of political content out there that gets cast as "apolitical" because the nominal topic is something else or the hosts are sympathetic to Bernie Sanders. (And this is something I'd absolutely is a both-sides thing, a lot of the content creators I follow do take broadly left-wing themes for granted.)