Indeed. Historically I would have said conservatives in the US wanted the same thing (increased prosperity for all), and just had different ideas on how that was achieved.

Under Trump, it has become clear that they (edit: Republicans) want something fundamentally different: to do better than other groups of people. They care more about hurting those they disagree with than making things better for anyone.

Yeah. It seems like a lot of people think they deserve to be filthy rich with a large servant class working for them. The economics of it just don’t work though. It takes a lot of working people to sustain the lifestyle of one rich person.

I'm a US citizen, a self-identified conservative, and I cannot stand Trump (or the fact that on average, conservatives voted for him).

Not all conservatives fit your described profile.

This is true, I probably should have specified "Republicans" in the second half. Edited.

You were right in the past. The people who want to “drink libtard tears” are a small minority, a mirror image of people on the left who want to throw Republicans into re-education camps.

It’s curious how many conclusions people draw from a binary choice on a ballot.

Except that is a false equivalency, every Republican voter backed a candidate who ran on that platform and policy.

Yes, there will always be a few people at the extremes of any movement. It is very different when they control the movement.

They may have seen it as the "least-bad" option rather than actively wanting what Trump was offering, but honestly that distinction doesn't matter if they are willing to support that level of harm. You don't get to vote for Trump and claim you aren't in that group. If you enabled him, you own his policy.

> re-education camps

Aka schools? Honestly, what do you do with people making $40k / year who think they’re going to be affected by tax on earnings over $400k, going to pay tax on the sale of their primary residence, and going to be affected by the estate tax?

There are a lot of people that can’t seem to figure out they aren’t rich and are never going to be.

Republicans just elected a congressman who addressed the world after the election by saying "Cry more, lib." [1] I question whether Democrats elected anyone advocating sending Republicans to reeducation camps.

[1] https://www.citizen-times.com/story/news/local/2020/11/04/cr...

I guess it’s true, at least from many of these comments, that many people really want division. They seem to need division to qualify what are otherwise extreme or unbalanced opinions.

That sort of division seems to have cost one party the White House and the other a lot of seats in Congress.

I have no idea what you mean. "Division" (whatever that means) seems to be something you care about, based on your other comments, but I have literally no idea what you're driving at.

Your peers might be wondering why the only killings that become high profile, are those of people of color.

That was just an example of a controversial topic. I mentioned a spectrum of opinions that were observable amongst peers and on social media, and that is certainly one.

(The premises are false enough that it feels less like a "peers" opinion and more like a "social media rando who needs attention" opinion, but I guess that distinction illustrates the original point.)

Are you trying to cast doubt on the imbalance in the occurrence of these killings? That seems naive if I assume the best of intentions.

Could you quantify that imbalance? How many are killed by police, compared to the number of committed homicides (used as proxy for rate of legitimate police interventions), by race?

I am not going to reply to this because it’s a frustratingly crass response that lives up to the stereotypes of engineers. Is it that hard to believe that even in legitimate police interventions they are much more likely to use deadly force with a black person? “Black men are about 2.5 times more likely to be killed by police over the life course than are white men.” https://www.pnas.org/content/116/34/16793

For the benefit of readers less willing to selectively ignore statistics: non-Hispanic whites are 2.4x more likely than blacks to be killed by police (2.7x more if counting only unarmed deaths), per committed homicide. Sources:

https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/nationaltrends

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-...