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comment by kleinbl00
kleinbl00  ·  2569 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Overdoses in W. Va Drain Fund for Burials

Yeah.

Republicans have aligned with social conservatism, which makes the poor and under-educated vote against their own financial best interests. Democrats, meanwhile, have aligned with exactly fuckall which has made them the party of "sweet jesus is this really the only thing between the American Taliban and the abyss? Fucking fine, Hillary Clinton I guess."





OftenBen  ·  2569 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Not just financial best interest, their lives.

There are people who exist who voted for Drumpf who will die because they will lose their Obamacare.

I cannot wrap my head around that. I don't know how to help them.

Edit* It's like the morbidly obese person who has fused with their couch. Yes, they need to lose weight, but they are physically incapable of lifting themselves from sitting, and even attempting to do so is painful. What is there to be done for such a person?

I've tried to approach this from different base assumptions and they all fell flat. You can't reason someone out of a belief they didn't reason their way into.

kleinbl00  ·  2569 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I don't know if you listen to much country music. The joke is true - play it backwards and you get your dog, your wife and your truck. It is a music genre based on loss and alienation. Hillbilly/Southern/Whatever culture is all like that - "we don't have much but we do our best." It is now, has always been and shall always be about the struggle.

    Workin’ on coming to Jesus, kicking the bottle,

    Wrestling with our roots,

    Trying to turn off Mama’s tears, and feel up Daddy’s boots

    Shutting off our pride, fixing bridges we burned,

    learning how to live and learn

    Keeping our demons down and our trucks up and running

    Loving them angels sitting pretty in the middle of ‘em

    Fighting with the man in the mirror til we gone

    Yeah, that’s what all us good ol’ boys gonna go out workin’ on

    Gonna go out workin’ on

Unfortunately, it's also not a genre of government intervention and boons from benevolent Yankees.

So you're left with a culture that recognizes despair but also values self-sufficiency above all else. Also, Jesus. And as it's become more insular and forgotten, it's looking more and more like the Panjshir.

user-inactivated  ·  2569 days ago  ·  link  ·  

For many, many people, social mobility under Obama was the same as it was under Bush II and Clinton. That's to say it was very slow, stagnant, or even possibly a backwards slide. When you had a Presidential candidate that offered a lot of "Hope and Change" and then because the world is what it is and that never transpired, and things actually got worse for many people, all of the sudden the false promises from either candidate is really what catches your ear. It's what you've been hurting for for years and years and years. Not just social mobility, but really, a strong sense of stability.

I remember all three presidential debates, I made threads for all of them here on Hubski. I remember being very distrusting of both Trump and Clinton for various reasons. I remember Trump actually talking about bringing jobs back, with conviction, and thinking to myself if that was Bush or McCain or Romney up there, they would have gotten my vote. Must have been one hell of a dog whistle he used, because I have a deeply engrained love/hate relationship with corporate America and even I, if only for a brief moment, liked Trump.

Also, Loretta Lynn is an angel.

kleinbl00  ·  2569 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Behold the Long Boom.

It's more accurate to say that social mobility was the same under Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Reagan, Carter and Ford. It's just that when that mobility is slightly negative, it may take a while before you are really and truly in the shit. But when your myths are built in the '50s, and when your breadwinners are still riding that pensioned gravy train, things don't start looking shitty until Grampaw is in his grave.

By 1969 we'd been to the moon, had a Mach 2 passenger jet and were enjoying an eight year decline in the unemployment rate. By 1974 we'd impeached a president, effectively abandoned the moon, gave up on our own SST and started enjoying an oil embargo.

Thing is, you have to have been paying attention for longer than many voters have been alive for context on this shit. I mean, FFS. My hometown company town was in the megadeath industry. SDI? that was our bread'n'butter. And in the amount of time it took for me to get from preschool to high school, we'd closed three of seven elementary schools and one of the two Jr. Highs. The march of history does not favor small towns and as agriculture and manufacturing become information and service, the people without a bridge are left on a sinking shore.

The problem is that on a historical spectrum, the Clintons are Republicans. They aren't even moderate Republicans. Take away Barry Goldwater's staunch disinterest in black people, and he's effectively Bill Clinton. Sanders? Sanders is a bomb-throwing crazy-eyed socialist that happens to be slightly to the right of Kennedy.

user-inactivated  ·  2569 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Party A goes out of their way to help you reaffirm everything you believe in and that even though the world is a scary place as long as you vote for them you stand a chance at being better off.

Party B goes out of their way to tell you that everything you believe is wrong and that your misbeliefs are the cause for a lot of strife in the world and the sooner you come to grips with that, the sooner you can be a part of rectifying things and help the world be a smoother place to be, but first you have to stop being so stubbornly wrong. Meanwhile, you see instances where they do get their way and things are still screwed up so how right could the actually be?

For Republicans, Democrats are Party B. For Democrats, Republicans are Party B.

For Independents? Everybody is a bunch of jackasses and maybe things would actually get better if everyone stopped acting like a bunch of teenagers who think participating in team sports is the be all and end all of highschool.