- cross-posted to:
- politicalmemes@lemmy.ca
- memes@midwest.social
- cross-posted to:
- politicalmemes@lemmy.ca
- memes@midwest.social
cross-posted from: https://midwest.social/post/7076150
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Republican states also take more money from the federal govt for social services and entitlements.
A link that I frequently share:
That was just a gem.
Great read, thanks for sharing!
Far more. These states wouldn’t last more than 3 months if they seceded.
Disclaimer: I don’t live in the US and, when looking at US politicians, my opinions are most aligned with those of Bernie Sanders.
I don’t think that the problem here is the republicans or democrats, but both. These poor places have long been neglected and no politician care about states that are not swing states and have very few electors. The whole political system seems to abandon poor people, old people and people living in rural areas.
The reason why they vote for Trump is that they want to give a big middle finger to those that they see trying to dismantle their way of life: city people and rich people. Farmers work very hard to feed their country and there’s a pride in being self reliant.
Take for example modern cars, you’re not supposed to fix them yourself. That’s the producers fault. But when politicians make fuel costs go up and try to incentivize EV purchases, people can feel like their agency is taken away. The problem isn’t the fuel pricing or the drive train, but the fact that you can no longer service your own car.
This is a problem with society in general, not with republicans. The alt-right movement feeds on these fractures in society. It’s a symptom, not the underlying sickness. To combat this we need better social security, free healthcare, and more wealth redistribution.
Family farms went away late seventies early eighties. Farming is mostly corporate in America. There’s not a lot of profit margin, so they make up for it with size.
You are very wrong about that.
I get that political memes communities are for building an echo chamber where you say whatever confirms everyone’s preexisting opinion, but this post is catastrophically dumb.
Conservative economic policies suck (not exactly surprising given conservative policies are largely just aimed at helping huge corporations squeeze as much money out of their labor, the public and the environment as possible and are intrinsically unsustainable and damaging to things that actually matter, like american quality of life), but of course red states have poorer economies- rural areas are both conservative and also intrinsically not going to have as much money as urban areas where there are more and larger businesses.
You can demonstrate that conservative economic “principles” suck dogshit a lot more effectively if your examples aren’t obviously hollow to anyone who thinks about them for more than 2 seconds.
But I guess that doesn’t make a meme that lots of people will upvote because it tells them their opinion is smart and good and that they don’t need to think about why they think the things they do.
It doesn’t matter that the argument is good. Conservative propaganda is completely stupid, but it convinces the right people. It is those people who are less educated that you need to convince. And no rational, educated argument will convince better in 10s than a shitty catch phrase.
Its really strange to me that you would advocate the idea that we should parrot bad points to propagandize our perspective. I don’t mean this as insult, I just find that a really alien way to look at the world…
As a counterpoint to some of what I understand your stance to be, in my experience those kinds of hollow arguments tend to only appeal to people who already generally agree with them. To my mind, that makes them much more effective at polarizing perspectives than actually informing anyone’s perspective in a meaningful way. They ensure that people who have been consuming intellectually bankrupt reinforcements of whatever they already believed are even more incapable of meaningfully engaging with people they don’t see eye to eye with, when that opportunity arises
I understand that the popular, cathartic, take is that we should just hate the bad people who think the wrong thing and that talking with them is a pointless waste of time, but in my experience the only thing that ever seems to change individual perspectives is compassion and sincerity, perhaps especially when not entirely deserved. And I also find that dismissing the intellect or emotional capacity of anyone I disagree with as a means to justify hating them and what I’ve decided they represent is a really toxic way to engage with the world. And by that I mean toxic to myself- I think its toxic to others too, but frankly writing off half of my country folk as stupid wastes of oxygen we’d all be better without feels poisonous to my own emotional wellbeing.
Do with that what you will 🤷
Edit: some wording.
I don’t even necessarily disagree with your point that convincing people who are only going to engage superficially is politically important at scale, and that those people may at times be more swayed by hollow talking points than well reasoned arguments, its just very foreign to how I’m used to relating to the world I guess
Ok, to elaborate a bit, first, your argument is only aimed at people on your side already, as I said.
But more importantly, secondly, the point made is not completely wrong. Sure, it is only a correlation that’s pointed, and the left should try to help the conservative voters instead of blaming them. But as a matter of fact, conservative policies do empoverish people. Which means the argument has some truth condensed in an inaccurate catch phrase that can actually hit its audience.
I guess we went to the same conclusion on this.
I’m starting to believe these days that the leftists are prone to argue and disagree about technicalities and details, and it can be counterproductive to the information war that’s happening.
It is definitely more inherently difficult to build than to destroy, i.e. to move forward rather than back.
Moreover, most of the time when conservatives seem to argue on the internet, truth is not even a minority portion of their goals. Thus, liberals aim to argue in order to become correct - bantering back and forth the details until the most proper course of action can be decided upon that takes into account all of the facts - whereas conservatives argue in order to be effective, at “winning” the goals already given to them by an authority figure, who they presume to know more than they personally about all subjects (maybe God Himself even, via their chosen shepherd here in Earth, in spite of literally everything God has ever said in the Bible previously, such as the workers deserving their wages, taking care of widows and orphans, and other social justice matters).
So yeah, arguing “facts” with someone who has already decided their position in advance and is not listening to new ones coming in, is indeed a huge waste of time, most often. Sadly, I don’t know what would not be a waste of time, in terms of convincing conservatives about any factual matter. In the analogy above, until those coal miners saw for themselves that they were being evicted from their homes and could not purchase groceries with all the non-existent money that was promised to be flooding in as “clean coal” was to make its great comeback, I am not certain that they could be convinced by any means? In fact, I bet many were not convinced even after they became homeless - surely it was just their bad luck that they could not wait for the clean coal revolution, or you know what, I bet it was those damned dirty Democrats who did it, somehow!? (despite not being in charge of pretty much anything for multiple years straight) “Lock her up!”, no matter what she may or may not have done, bc it’s a convenient scapegoat.
And it’s not even that they are brainless, it’s more that they do not choose to engage their brains in these matters, preferring instead to defer to authority, whenever their brain comes to a different conclusion. So what is that precisely… laziness, perhaps? Or just flat gullibility. In any case, most definitely an easy target to aim to exploit, by oh let’s say some nation that would like very much to switch the USA from a foe to a friend to its goals, or at least neutralize it.
The founders warned us about all of this btw, saying that it would lead directly to the death of the at-the-time still fledgling democracy. We chose not to listen, and we’ve been coasting along ever since, likely protected more by the large oceans than anything else, back when that was a more daunting technological hurdle to have to cross.
I don’t think it’s an unfair comparison. Red states have large cities. Blue states have rural counties. I think the stats are based on median income? Red states are more “business friendly,” so you would expect all that business activity to trickle down and be reflected in the median wages?
And they want it that way. Because they can look at their constituents, point a finger at everywhere/everyone else, and say “look what THEY’RE doing to you! They’re causing ALL of your problems!” And those people continue to eat it up, every single time.
It’s always easier to put the blame on someone else and not change anything than to accept that you might have a tiny part to play in the solution, too
I can usually point out why conservatives think and act a certain way. Logical from their point of view, if mostly wrong. Still, I get them.
I’ve never had an answer to this sort of post. I guess they just fall back to, “It’s $somebody_elses_fault!” And that seems to work for 'em, drives votes.
I assume their answer would be some sort of afactual “it’s because we’re wasting all our money on illegals and gay libraries!”
When my mother talks about politics she’s not really interested in facts, policies, studies, or evidence. She’s speaking from an emotional perspective. It’s why topics and goalposts shift so easily in discussions with that kind of person. It’s like trying to follow dream logic. It makes sense to the person in it, but from the outside you’re left wondering why the chickens needed new gloves. They don’t even have hands.
It’s simple. The poor in red states have been made proud of struggling. They’ve been manipulated in to taking pride in being poor and uneducated. It’s such a sinister thing that has been done to them with no way of breaking that belief. They’re both victim and villain with no self awareness to save them.
Add in an (un)healthy dose of “rugged individualism” and American Exceptionalism, and everyone is just a “temporarily embarrassed millionaire” looking to get theirs and pull the ladder up behind them.
I have never liked that language tbh. If you talk directly with someone who dropped out of school at an early age, you will see that they are quite aware that they will never ever in their entire lifetime become anywhere close to being rich. Many know that they are likely to die within the decade, lacking access to medical care, which in turn affects whether they can keep even a minimum wage job, much less afford a house. The spiralling downwards of court appearances and jail time, which further affects their ability to even be considered for a job, are all too clear to them.
It turns out though, they simply do not care. They vote conservative bc they (have been told to) actually believe that the rich deserve more than they do. i.e., that phrase gives them too much credit to be voting towards their own best interests, even for the far-distant future, when instead they are aware that they will never become one. Except even my previous sentence still gives too much credit to the enlightened self interest - by way of kinship selection - of some, who do not even think about it as deeply as that, and instead they simply vote as they are told and as everyone else votes around them (especially when those around them who do not vote that way are too afraid to speak openly about their local “defiance” to the entrenched authority structures).
That said, some of them are very much aware that they are being lied to. Though again, they simply do not care, even though the outcome of their vote still affects literally the entire nation (e.g. Mitch McConnell could not be a national leader if he did not keep being reelected locally).
Good heavens sir/ma’am/they! We do not speak of understanding conservatives around here! Are you mad!? They’re all simple morons who have no logical reasons for believing as they do.
To retain your social media score, repeat this mindless chant:
“The cruelty is the point.”
The assholes I see here, and formerly on reddit, have never been around conservatives, have never spoken to them, have never travelled the blasted countryside. And no, arguing with dad over Fox news doesn’t count as “experience”.
There’s much to unpack. Not worth the effort? Repeat the quote above and wonder why they call us “ivory tower liberals”.
Thank you for some sane input. You can’t see me, but I’m standing on my chair applauding you.
And for anyone who wishes to try and understand, give this a pass. Still the finest thing I’ve read on the subject:
https://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-one-talks-about
And I am applauding you back - though to be clear, only figuratively b/c you cannot see me anyway so need to do it literally:-).
People forget SO MUCH - e.g. how
more(oops, the new official term is “moar”, as in not simply more but moar and More and still MOAR excess!, I gotta remember that) people voted AGAINST Hilary Clinton than FOR Trump.And therefore we have a nonzero, heck a QUITE LIKELY possibility that we will DO IT ALL OVER AGAIN, in the next election, if
moremoar people dislike Biden+Harris than DT.We forget how Obama’s economic stimulus recovery $$$ went almost exclusively to the cities (or so I heard? you can’t trust news anymore these days but… what else am I supposed to do, spit thunderbolts from my arse like Bruce Wallace!?:-P no I can only report what I currently know; oh… also I hadn’t read that far down into the article yet, sorry, but I’m going to leave this here anyway in case it’s useful b/c it was my thoughts that came in response to what that article). I cannot speak to if that was the proper thing to do or not, but it smacks enormously of this little theory that I have heard of called “trickle down”, where ultimately the effects of those $$$ies would make it out into the countries, if they just wait long enough for those in the cities to purchase goods from the farms (apparently by this logic the rural people never purchase anything made in the cities, one presumes). And it truly is LEGIT complicated - like if you give money to people then they can buy things like TVs, both the sets and subscriptions, but also Hollywood would have to continue to exist in order to make the shows to watch on them. But in any case, rural people got PISSING MAD at that - and not all or even most of their anger vs. that black man was warranted I strongly believe (and especially the form that it took - I mean, good grief, commenting on how he himself, his wife, and his two daughters all looked like monkeys? that’s not even dog whistle language like up in the high frequencies where human ears cannot hear it, EVERYONE can hear THAT!), but SOME portion of that anger… may have been? I am saying that at the very least, he had an opportunity to reach across the aisle and consider the optics of the whole situation, and do more to make rural people feel included (or maybe he did even, and again the news media just didn’t explain it to me well… though I kinda doubt it, as he was definitely a city folk himself).
The attitude of the ancient Greek stoics impresses da fuq out of me. DO what you can, don’t sweat the rest!? Hell f-ing yeah, as in literally what else could possibly be done, ever!? (I will tell you, in fact: you can stress out endlessly about stuff that you cannot control, and waste enormous amounts of time not doing what is in your control, so when I say what else, I mean to imply, except now I outright am stating it, that nothing else is viable)
So instead of saying “why are conservatives such dumbfuqs, unlike me who iz smurtz”, we might try to… I dunno, take ownership of the stuff that we can control? e.g., if Hillary had campaigned a little harder instead of just assuming that it was in the bag; though to be fair it was legit surprising, and DT’s wife even cried upon hearing the news, as in not happy tears, nor did DT himself expect to actually win that seems fairly clear.
This is the point where (most of the time) I remember that Putin controls both sides of our for-profit media (if not fully then he loves to at least inject memes into the internet for our…“consideration”), and a favorite trick is to pit the “two sides” against one another in an effort to distract us while he gets away with whatever he wants. At the very least, if he were not doing that, then he should, b/c it would be an extremely smart play (e.g. the CIA does this all the time on behalf of the USA). Especially since we (i.e. especially the USA and UK) are mostly too dumb to realize that it is even happening.:-( Including, in fact especially, me.
But also we are greedy AF (that stands for “as fuck” btw, now you know:-P) and even knowing that, each “side” has to play to “win”, even at the expense of our entire nation. Which… here is as far as I’ve gotten, might even be okay, or at least was more so in the past, b/c DT is not only a symptom of our nation, but he is also a cause that spreads more stuff (violence/hate/fear/suffering/etc.) in his wake, but is it really, truly okay to “win”, if it is America itself that ends up losing? e.g. again, when Hillary ran, what “choices” were offered to the American people, specifically the liberal or at least non-conservatives among us, when there was almost nobody brave enough to run against her, not even just to get their name out there to help for a future election? And then the release of her emails… no not that time, no not that other time either, but here I mean the time when they showed collusion with the DNC, that proved illegal tampering with the election process - e.g. Bernie Sanders was not given the questions in advance, but she was, in secret. SHE may have been the one that lost that election, but didn’t we all lose out as a result of that revelation, really? And not just Americans, but people world-wide that had to put up with DT for 4 years. It is hard to argue against her corruption when the Supreme Court asked her to turn over all of her emails and she said “no”, in order to spend DAYS removing the ones that she did not want them to see. So yes, conservatives may be dumb AF, but liberals are also dumb AF too - again, I know I am, and I don’t really see a way out.
But actually listening to one another might be… a start, maybe? Thank you for sharing btw.
I’d rather fight alongside republicans and democrats to make sure everyone lives in dignity and isn’t ground into dust by the gears of capitalism rather than pushing more red vs blue rhetoric. Fuck the politicians that put the south in the position it’s in today.
The problem is both parties are in favor of grinding people into dust to keep the gears of capitalism going, so if anything they’re more likely to team up for the opposite reason.
Right, I should’ve been more clear. I think there’s a major disconnect between what the politicians want and what people want, but I think I was referring to the people when I said republicans and democrats in my previous message since so many people identify with either group for one reason or another. Not good phrasing on my part. It probably would’ve been easier to not use labels at all, but the main topic was about red v blue, so I stayed within that idea.
I also kinda need the hope of everyone getting sick of the late stage capitalism we live in and working together to fix it somehow. It’s a lot harder to imagine that becoming a reality if it’s only a handful of people going against everyone who calls themselves democrats or republicans.
Easy there or you gonna be called a tankie.
i’d rather call it “unregulated capitalism”. because it seems to work pretty goddamn well in most european countries, and they regulate to what extent you can exploit your workers. unions are a good thing for everyone.
That goes well for them because they exploit the global south.
The main criminals in Amazon forest are Norwegians and Canadians companies.
Capitalism is only good for them. The rest of the world is fucked because of it.
welp, time for the governments to have a few words and actually stop deforestation.
America’s capitalism is very well regulated. Its just a matter of regulated by and for whom.
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Republicans don’t have policies. I know because i asked reddit’s conservative sub once and got down voted with no responses.
Or you could look at the 2020 Republican platform.
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Exactly.
lol I couldn’t tell if he was for or against the statement he was replying to but it turns out he just can’t read
I can read, I’m pointing out they have no platform.
2024 will be the same. “Whatever Trump wants.”
ah fair enough my bad
“Fiscally conservative”
Give me a break. If you understood conservatives economic policy you would not want anywhere near it. Unless you’re a bigot and think human suffering fuels the prosperity for a select, “morally superior”, few.
Points gun at you: “I win”. /s
(you may think this is in poor taste but consider: isn’t this the actual, authentic reality of the situation?)
I think it is great tasting
Or maybe poorer (and often less educated people) tend to vote Republican?
Kind of a chicken and egg situation isn’t it? One begets the next and so on, but I guess I’m not sure which came first.
If poor people voted reactionary and reactionary policies made places wealthier, then the wealth and political allegiance of places in America would flip flop every few generations. We would expect that places like Texas are getting richer and places like New York are getting poorer, and that 100 years ago New York would have been poor and right wing, while Texas would have been rich and left wing.
But if poor people voted reactionary and reactionary policies made people poorer, then we would see that poor places stayed poor, reactionary places stayed reactionary even through the party switch, and the wealth inequality between reactionary states and progressive states would increase over time.
Which of these two results do you think is true?
Maybe neither?
I would say less educated people tend to vote reactionary. But reactionary policies do not necessarily make people poorer.
Sure they do. For example, there’s the problem of suburbs. A suburb requires more roads, more buses, more plumbing, more electrical, more broadband, more land, more water use, and more energy per person than a medium or high density neighbourhood, like brownstones or terrace houses. Water is wasted on lawns and energy is spent on heating and cooling because isolated buildings have more places to leech heat. And that’s in addition to all the problems of simply taking up more space. Suburbs cost the taxpayer more money, and they’re also bad for small businesses, because people in cars are less likely to spend money at independent grocery stores, cafes, thrift shops, and etc. They visit big box stores and franchises, which leech money out of the community. Everything about the economics of suburbs is a disaster.
So why does America have suburbs? Because Americans are racist. When segregation ended, they wanted a way to avoid living next to black people. And pricing them out of living in these expensive suburbs was a great way to do segregation without technically doing segregation.
more uneducated than poor, i would vote democrat if it meant i can make a bit of extra money at my job.
Also, 11 of the 20 most violent crime ridden cities are in red states. The city with the most violent crime is St. Louis, which is in Missouri, a very solidly red state.
Number 20 on that list? Republican favorite boogeyman Chicago. Safer than Nashville, Tennessee. Safer than Anchorage, Alaska. Safer than Indianapolis, Indiana. Safer than Little Rock, Arkansas. But I suppose those are all “blue” cities.
Yeah, republicans are very dumb.
I have a lot of points against conservatives but I don’t think this is one of them. It could similarly be framed as “the rich vs the poor”, and quite often we would side with the poor.
In their eyes, democrats have somehow stolen their wealth through their policies, thus making them victims of external disruption. Not saying I agree, of course, but you can see how they view it that way.
Unfortunately you are correct in that is probably how they see it. Something along the lines of, Democrats flooded the country with immigrants who stole our jobs and therefore we are poor.
Or actually shit like NAFTA and other trade agreements fucked a lot of blue workers out of their jobs.
I actually sympathise with a lot of the anger the reders have with some of the economical policies that were passed, by both sides btw since they fucked the middle class pretty hard and allowed corporations to use our infrastructure to make money while shiping jobs oversees and hiding their money in tax shelter counties all in the name of “free trade”.
It’s part of the reason the Democrats lost the rural voters so hard, is because they don’t even acknowledge this problem.
Republicans acknowledge this problem (that they also caused btw), but they acknowledge it and of course offer no solution except hate, but they are still ahead of the Democrats in the voter’s eyes becuase hey… At least they tell us there is a problem.
But the NASDAQ went up 40% last year. People aren’t allowed to complain about their economic conditions. /s
I don’t think you can draw a direct line from the statistics to economic policy. It may be more true that the voters for the Republican party are less educated and more rural in those counties
It’s all about love languages. Gotta find a way to love people the way they want/understand love.
