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How Half Of America Lost Its F**king Mind
https://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-one-talks-about
I'm going to explain the Donald Trump phenomenon in three movies. And then some text.
I still don't get why rural voters latched onto a clearly narcissistic big city property developer who lies constantly and treat rural people like shit as a response to big city politicians who rural voters think lie constantly and treat rural people like shit.
Just because he said words they wanted to hear? Politicians do that all the time! How is he the one they believe?
All the points in the article are accurate, but it just doesn't make sense that the personification of everything they hate about cities is who they end up worshipping.
He's a fighter. He fights everyone, about everything. I think that's the crux of it.
Over the 1990s and 2000s these people were completely and utterly forgotten. Textiles, mines, manufacturing plants, they shuttered over and over and over and over again, and their children moved to big cities en masse. Their small cities and rural towns went from being on a growth trajectory (everything was on that trajectory between WWII and NAFTA) to being on a path to contraction and decay. Over that time they got madder, and madder, and madder, and madder, and they watched the Republican party (the one who at least paid lip service to "small government" and "traditional values") lean harder and harder into corporatism. They were promised good things over and over and over again, and they were constantly pandered to, then lied to, and then ignored. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Well, Trump was the first one who didn't talk, act, and think like the other guys. He wasn't a politician, and that's a great thing because (as they'd all come to agree) politicians are lying scum. So then not only was he willing to fight ferociously for them (and only them), he was willing to spit in the face of the people who lied to them all those years. And those political figures started to look like whiny little children when they stepped up and started saying, "hey, he's lying to you!" The voters' response was, "yeah? so the fuck what! you did too!"
He flips the system on its head, and he exposes politicians for what they are, because he's exactly like them but he doesn't give a fuck about playing the political game. To them, this is a godsend (literally). It's the first crack in the political system that gave them any kind of sustained, meaningful authority to push back both politically and culturally, and he delivered a court system that'll now push the entire country to the right over the next few decades. They simply don't care about the democratic institutions he's destroying, because they never helped the rural folk anyway.
Note: I don't personally agree with much of this nonsense, and I think it's a lot like shooting yourself in the face to cure a hangnail, but I'm just giving you a sense of how they look at it, and why he's so weirdly transcendent to them. He's a rich, connected insider, who decided to burn the system down from the inside.
Except he didn't fight for them and he lied constantly about fighting for them with no results.
And dementedly burning down everything one sees and grabbing pussies doesn't make one "a fighter" - just a narcissistic asshole criminal.
Hooray what a hero.
Even if I grant all the arguments are true for the sake of discussion, the fact that they've seen how incompetent and ridiculously stupid he is for FOUR YEARS not to mention he tried to destroy their fucking government and they're all "yay we upset city people" Okay Granpa Jones but that makes you objectively a complete fucking asshole moron and your continued support of this rapist fraud criminal is not helping you in any way at any level. Try again. Got someone smart? Articulate? Anyone? We're open - any age, any gender, any race - anyone? No? This guy huh. He's your guy is he. Yeah.
That's what we thought.
But they didn't see who he was. Their news media fed them a different story about liberals getting in his way and the immigrants making things worse and the government not letting him fix things. It's all the "lazy" city people voting for big government handouts that's making the world worse.
Anything he''s accused of is just liberal politics and a hoax.
And dementedly burning down everything one sees and grabbing pussies doesn’t make one “a fighter”
Yeah it does.
Like, by definition. He fights.
It's not about facts though. They didn't logically choose to support him based on facts, figures, and results. It's all feelings.
It's a good explanation. And it confirms the core nihilism motivating these voters. "Burn it all down" is an abdication of responsibility and self-infantilizing by forcing that responsibility on everyone else.
Their frustration and motivation, while I can understand it, is an insult to those of us continuing to keep it together as they make everything worse.
“Burn it all down” is an abdication of responsibility and self-infantilizing by forcing that responsibility on everyone else.
Left wing doomers and "revolutionaries": sweats profusely
If only there was a group of people who told us neoliberalism and NAFTA would be disastrous!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Seattle_WTO_protests
Since NAFTA, Americans have watched the economy grow, but its stability plummet.
https://depts.washington.edu/wtohist/testimonies/comesatime.htm
Interesting reflection in today's world where we keep getting told that the current administration has done great for the economy, and yet the wealth devide keeps growing, and more and more people are living paycheck to paycheck.
There's an also an interesting linguistic difference that is very noticeable between this movement and today's repercussions of the inaction that followed. While in English we often speak of "anti-globalization" in French they say "alter-mondialisation". A different globalization instead of against globalization. The French term much better described the left wing movement of the time, while the media only spoke of anti-globalization which now became a calling cry of the right.
Fun fact, a Twitter was originally conceptualized as a result of the 1999 protests^1 due to the difficulties and successes people on the streets had with coordinating via SMS (which at the time was rather new and novel).
Anyhow, I guess we should all vote for the neoliberal again, surely that will fix it!
I mean, you're not wrong. I think Trump's ascendancy represents the collapse of the neoliberal consensus of the late 20th century. Where we go from here is anyone's guess, but the fact that both the left and right are screaming about the evils of neoliberalism means that there's now a bipartisan coalition willing to dismantle the institutions that arose out of that consensus. It's a loose coalition, to be sure, and each wing is arguing for fundamentally different futures, but they're still targeting the same players, and new economic models are now en vogue and within the realm of possibility. Just sucks that one of them is outright fascism.
The two also have been fundamental in establishing those policies.
Reganomics/Thatcherism is just as much to blame.
and yet the wealth devide keeps growing, and more and more people are living paycheck to paycheck.
I'm actually go with "you are wrong". Under Biden, the wealth gap has grown in absolute dollars, but only because the wealthy had so much more to start with. Lower income families saw much higher percentage growth in wealth and income. Mathematically, it will take a long time for lower income families to catch up, but this is a good trend.
https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2024/feb/us-wealth-inequality-widespread-gains-gaps-remain
I still don’t get why rural voters latched onto a clearly narcissistic big city property developer who lies constantly and treat rural people like shit as a response to big city politicians who rural voters think lie constantly and treat rural people like shit.
Because he gave their bigotry a voice.
Credit to @shalafi@lemmy.world - this applies very well to this comment.
Occam's Razor is a philosophical thought experiment, nothing more.
That's why the important part of the phrase (that people tend to ignore) is "...all things being equal".
It means "if these multiple answers/solutions were to exist in a vacuum, and context was of no importance, the simplest answer/solution is probably the right one."
Here in the real, non philosophical world, absolutely nothing exists in a vacuum. Context always plays a role no matter how innocuous or silly the decision might be.
At it's simplest, I can say "Do I want to eat an Apple or an Orange right now."
Occam's razor tells me that the Apple is closer, so that's what I should eat.
But WHY is the apple closer? Did someone take it out of the fridge and leave it, so now it's spoiled?
Is it in a fruit bowl that happens to be out of oranges? That means someone might have eaten the last one, so getting up and going to the fridge to retrieve and orange could lead to disappointment and wasted time.
etc... etc...
Nothing is simple. Anyone who says it is is trying to sell you something.
Are you firm on the stance that it's only bigotry, and not, like, I dunno, motions wildly to the article a complex set of multidimensional issues?
What's the logical fallacy called when you misuse a logical fallacy?
E: "fallacy fallacy" or "argument from fallacy" (also known as: disproof by fallacy, argument to logic, fallacy fallacy, fallacist's fallacy, bad reasons fallacy [form of])
Description: Concluding that the truth value of an argument is false based on the fact that the argument contains a fallacy.
Good philosophy.stackexchange discussion about it.
Hey, if you want to believe it's just simple noble country folk that support Trump and not a bunch of fucking bigoted shitheels, that's your benefit of the doubt to give.
If you want to convince me, you'll need to do better than an op-ed in Store Brand Mad Magazine from someone who is airing his grievances that New Orleans got too much attention after Hurricane Katrina.
Are most of the people who voted for Trump bigoted shitheels? Possibly. Is everyone who voted for Trump in 2016 a bigoted worthless life? Absolutely not. Not even close. He campaigned on a multitude of issues, if you'll recall. And before that thought enters your head, no, I voted for Sanders in 16 and Biden in 20.
I know it helps to simplify things, but you can do better. Think outside of the Monkeysphere, or whatever you need to call it so you don't feel like you got the idea from Store Brand Mad Magazine.
Is everyone who voted for Trump in 2016 a bigoted worthless life?
Perhaps not, but January 6 left no doubt about the supporters who remained with him.
Lemmy: where everyone to the left of Biden must be a Russian Chinese Shill bot child, but let's give actual Trumpists the benefit of the doubt.
An excellent video on the subject of simplicity that some other kind lemming shared with me (after which I watched every video this guy has made).
I read that rural voters often feel like the government isn't for them, they feel disempowered. And in response, they seek to undermine and break the system that disempowers them. They do not look to improve or change the system, they want to destroy it. So when people yell at them for threatening democracy by voting for a lunatic with dictator fantasies, they feel empowered.
I get that for voting, but not for how they gush and fawn over his rambling nonsense like he is the second coming.
They are not mutually exclusive. They idolize Trump, in part, because he is the middle finger to everyone who has made a mockery of their existence.
To them he's not a man, he is a symbol.
Who they worship doesn't matter. Based on the article, they voted for a brick to be thrown into the window of the elites. It really doesn't matter who that person is, just as long as they inflict damage on the elites who have been marginalizing them for years.
It was a super informative article and I hope people read it, and not assume from the title or read the summarized version like we usually do.
If we keep labelling them 'deplorables', it'll make things worse. We need to reach out and listen while also helping as best we can.
But they are deplorable. I've been personally affected abused by these people psychologically. So no, I won't shed a single tear when they elect Trump and lose social security and medicare, their freedoms, their hopes and dreams. When they wake up and find themselves in a wasteland they helped create, I'll just smile.
Imo you should recuse yourself from the debate about them then due to your acknowledged bias.
Perhaps. But it's ongoing harassment in the safety of my home and the police won't do anything because of the good ole boys network.
Then you're admitting that you're adding to the problem vs trying to resolve it. I know it's hard but nothing worth doing is easy.
Thing is that tiny d is one of the elite - a nepo baby and Manhattanite. Anyone that wanted to "throw a brick into the window of the elites" by voting for tiny d is not really voting for that, most likely.
Because rural voters are stupid, because Republicans have spent the last 30+ years destroying public education, especially in rural and minority heavy areas.
This isn't an insult, its a fact.
When you're uneducated and have little experience of the outside world... well, youre extremely easy to convince with rhetoric over actual policy results.
Then combine that with the massively super effective Republican media machine (Rush Limbaugh, Bill O Reilly, Sean Hannity, Ben Shapiro, Steve Bannon, Alex Jones) which reinforces the religion + culture + politics of the rural Republican areas, and there ya go.
I dunno, it seems obvious to me, but thats probably because I was raised by a ditto-head (Rush Limbaugh's term for his followers) who later became a Q Anon, illegal-firearm-manufacturing-in-his-garage wacko, in a poor, technically suburban but realistically rural area.
Why latch on to Trump in particular?
Because he made it ok for them to mask off and hate all the things they hate but have been lying about hating for decades.
Its a kind of catharsis for them, that manifests in collective hatred of inferior enemy groups.
You know, standard fascist shit?
It doesnt matter that Trump himself is the antithesis of what an idealized Republican person would be. What matters is he lets them feel comfortable expressing themselves.
It's not what he says, but how he says it. He knows what outrages them and plays on it. He pretends that it outrages him too.
I think it's partly his 'strong man' persona, but also that he was one of the only candidates hitting on all the things they needed to hear. We need to do more for our rural communities. Help the farmers! Help the coal miners! Keep oil production flowing! He touched on the lifeblood on these rural towns, which is something other conservative politicians weren't doing as much. That let his message spread wider organically, from people who were quite literally willing to devote their life to him. He 'stuck to his guns' (on the issues they cared about anyway) which is what let them ignore the other things he said and did. There was also one of the largest state-sponsored propaganda campaigns in Internet history backing his election. In many or most small towns it became an Us vs. Them (Trump being the Us) and if you know how small towns work then you know it's "When in Rome..." creating a massive echo chamber across conservative America. When the mob is rallying for something, you stay quiet or face the consequences. Many didn't stay quiet and became outspoken, which furthered the division.
He said those things and did nothing for rural areas. Why are they still in love with him?
I knownthe answer is Fox News and repetition, but how do they not see through the obvious facade?
You said it yourself. Propaganda works.
It's probably not a coincidence that the essay anchors on fictional movies as a foundation.
We really should have understood television while it was the only thing out there. We deliberately did not. (Well, there were nevery any tv shows about it. With the possible exception of TV Nation)
I still don't get why rural voters latched onto a clearly narcissistic big city property developer who lies constantly and treat rural people like shit
I'll go with the easy answer/low hanging fruit: he said the same racist and xenophobic shit they think instead of trying to couch it politically correct speech (which is one of the most ironic things I think I've ever said). The perfect encapsulation of this is a well known Lee Atwater quote:
You start out in 1954 by saying, “N*****, N*****, N*****.” By 1968 you can’t say “N*****”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N*****, N*****.”
Unfortunately, republican mindsets haven't changed in the last 60 years, so we're still dealing with the same bullshit.
It's tempting to just boil it down to racism and call it a day, but it's far more complicated than that.
To quote the article:
The rural folk with the Trump signs in their yards say their way of life is dying, and you smirk and say what they really mean is that blacks and gays are finally getting equal rights and they hate it. But I'm telling you, they say their way of life is dying because their way of life is dying. It's not their imagination.
Yup. Digging the county by county stuff too.
Here's my state for 2020:
You see those three GIANT counties in SE Oregon?
Left to right that's Lake, Harney and Malheur county.
Ruby Red. Here's how they voted in 2020:
Lake - Biden - 792 - 18.15% Trump - 3,470 - 79.53%
Harney - Biden - 894 - 19.95% Trump - 3,475 - 77.55%
Malheur - Biden - 3,260 - 27.62% Trump - 8,187 - 69.36%
Sorry guys, square miles and cattle don't get a vote.
You see that tiny little sliver of a blue county next to the panhandle? That's Multnomah county. I.E. "Portland" or "where the people live".
Multnomah - Biden - 367,249 - 79.21% Trump - 82,995 - 17.90%
I remember looking up Iowa's county results right after a past election, and Florida too, and thinking: it is very easy to see the university towns. One or two oddities I had to look up... it turns out they were small universities. The correlation between education and liberalism is extreme. Austin vs. Texas at large would be another example.
Whereas I do believe that it’s not just “education” but moreso intelligence that is the predictor of liberalism today, the “where the people are” as well as the age bracket make a big difference. Most small colleges are in small towns, but these colleges have a commanding presence in the population of the area. They can be gerrymandered into oblivion tho.
Not as much as you might think.
To use a caricature example: a literally genius 10-year old who is still relying on argument-by-authority may think one way, before after a few years of thinking by themselves switch sides, so there really is something to the combined heft of a few thousand years of collected human knowledge, even if absorbed only by osmosis by people who never finished high school yet exist side-by-side with professors in those small college towns.
Also, wrt to Congress at least the two sides did not used to be as extreme as they are now - case in point: when the economy got really bad, Obama's solution was to bail out the banks (yeah in return for concessions but still, how "liberal" are Democrats, really?). So anyway, I could see a selfish farmer strategically voting for their own short-term best interests, in a manner consistent with being intelligent - i.e., it's not entirely IQ that may have been the driving force, so much as EQ.
In the past at least, though you did say "today" so... yeah, I have to agree, I just wanted to add that caveat that being exposed to other cultures and other ways of living by way of education may have been the more important factor not too long ago.
Edge (caricature) examples will always exist. In college, I used to walk past the area where the “SchoolName Republican Meeting” took place. It always had 20 or so guys and 3-4 girls dressed like they were headed to a job interview. That’s not a hypothetical 10 year old but real people.
The Republican Party used to have ideas and thoughts, albeit backward and horrifying in many circumstances, but as of Trump, they’re largely nihilistic. You’re also correct in the thought that today’s democrats are in many ways to the right of 70’s and 80’s Republicans.
I’m not disagreeing that education plays a role, but that there’s a lot more nuance to how that is reflected in voting.
Nuance, absolutely. I try to keep separate in my mind that "Democrats" != "liberals" (rather, the former are some kind of predatory species called "politician" that exists by getting the latter to vote for them, so uses their talking points but then after getting elected does whatever da fuq it wanted to in the first place - e.g. "we care about school shootings" prior to voting, but then after being voted in could give two shits about that topic anymore) and likewise "Republicans" != "conservatives", and then there are so many subdivisions after that as well e.g. "Tea Party Republican" != "Alt-Right Republican", and so on. Even if a voter were to somehow remain fully stationarily consistent throughout a long, several-decade lifespan, their relationships to these political entities would shift, as a result of that relative motion happening around them.
Also, I think Republican ideas appeal to a certain type of voter, who likes short, pithy statements that legit might have somehow worked, even if 30 years in the past and with HEAVY caveats (e.g., if the top marginal tax rate were still 96%, and also neither automation nor globalism existed in any way, then sure, lowering it to lets say 90% might actually trickle down to workers under those specific set of conditions). And similarly Democratic ideas appeal to people who live in fantasy dreamlands / ivory towers - like how much of Republican obstructionism could have been avoided if the Dems had not opened the door to it by including abortion provisions into the Affordable Care Act, which really was shoved down lawmakers throats so quickly that they barely had time to read it, much less deliberate over the pros and cons, and consider the political much less practical realities that would ensue? Yeah, "it's complicated", for sure - b/c while something is nearly always better than nothing... is it though, given finite resources and a plethora of items on the agenda that picking to make progress towards one goal necessarily means choosing to forego other goals, some of which (like Black Lives Matter) are DESPERATELY NEEDED, though also ofc much harder to achieve. And ofc I get downvoted to hell whenever I even whisper such thoughts as "Trump is super old, but also Biden is super old too", showing me that it is most definitely not true that intelligence = liberals. Each side there is vulnerable to different types of errors (conservatives more of a top-down authoritarian view, while liberals more of a groupthink consensus one)... and yeah, Trump just blows all of that out of the water, by offering to actually DO all those things that Repubs have been talking about for decades, like overthrow democracy itself and maybe even start rounding up and shooting professors, which is an ENORMOUS shift rightwards that makes the past Left vs. Right divide look positively wholesome and identical by comparison (both in the past were "pro-democracy" and wanted a functional government, well, before Newt Gingrich I mean).
TLDR: I absolutely agree - it's complex AF:-).
Yeah I got to that part and remembered the meme "See all that red area? That's sand."
I get that it's tough to find a point of view for trump supporters that isn't racism or hate or idiocy, but . . . I dunno. voter maps aren't that useful. We're not talking about an average politician here - some interchangable figure who could have been active between 1950 and 2020. This guy is objectively a demented rapist fraud who tried to overthrow the government to stay in power.
Those aren't rural concerns, afaik.
I grew up in a town where the factory closed and poverty grew. More poverty than most of the red voters will ever see. This made me move so far left and I don't understand how seeing these things happen makes people want to vote for Trump. The lack of having a voice is partly on people in rural areas and this is a tantrum for not having made their voice known as more and more detrimental things happened. The busiest store in my home town is Wal-Mart. People love Wal-Mart. The food co-op that provides local farmers a place to sell their produce is frequented by the left leaning types. In my view, the voice that is that the right wing does not care about helping their community through any kind of sacrifice. Ease and convenience are king. Cheapest cost is best, regardless of what sweatshop clothing was made in and what underpaid illegal immigrant picked their produce. And, they vote for a party who wants to remove regulations so worse and worse corporate actions can provide cheaper goods lining the pockets of billionaire owners.
The factory that closed moved to North Carolina and then overseas. The people that live in the small town now vote for tax breaks for the owners of that factory and vote for the party that villifies ebt, welfare and programs that help their neighbor. They think people are lazy who use these programs, not that they have experienced the loss of economic activity they have seen. If this factory, which was profitable but not at a high enough margin for the owners, were owned by the workers, it may still be operating today. This is my conclusion in seeing what the Cracked article discusses. Corporate greed has done damage to communities and the ability to give more power to workers is better than voting for some con-man who gives tax breaks to the rich. How could hard working Americans look at Shawn Fain and think his view is dispicable and think that what Trump has to say is better?
The article: Rural people aren't just racist, homophobic assholes - they're struggling with apocalyptic economic destruction, constant discrimination and hatred, and have fallen through the cracks of society while society stomps on their face.
The comments: RURAL PEOPLE ARE BAD, FUCK RURALS
I guess you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make them read the article...
I will say, though, that as much as rural people get fucked out of their votes in most situations, they are vastly over-represented in others. For example, each vote in the electoral college for California represents 703,000 people. In Montana, on the other hand, each electoral vote represents closer to 250,000 people. There's a strong sense among city dwellers that the rural folk are dragging the entire country into hell just because they're suffering under capitalism - and they aren't wrong, in some sense. America's inconsistent, patchwork electoral system definitely contributes greatly to the urban / rural conflict.
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It’s not that rural people are bad, to me, it’s that they’re under resourced and groomed. They’re often victims of their ignorance, which is why so many people that ‘get out’ cite the exposure to other ideas as to why they evolve.
Yes they are dragging us down and backward, I don’t think there’s any doubt about that. But the ones to be angry at are the people in power.
Yeah I think it’s extremely tactically important (and good for the moral high ground) that we don’t mock them for being rural or for the struggles rural folks face. The meth and opiate problems are no funnier than crack. It sucks when you’ve only ever had one prospect and it was going to kill you but you can’t even do that just because it’s causing an apocalypse
Suffering under capitalism, yet they keep voting for those supporting the worst forms of it.
The article: let’s construct a false image of city dwellers having a false image of rural dwellers to absolve rural dwellers of any personal responsibility.
It completely ignores how much they voted for and continuously cheered on their own economic demise and acts as if poverty only exists in the country and no one has ever suffered similar hardships in an urban setting.
The article got one thing right, THEY LOST THEIR MINDS.
They’ve lived through how many republican administrations yet it’s everyone else’s fault? Republicans have continuously gotten their way… reagonomics, 3 terms from the bush family, Donald trump…and things are demonstrably worse off. You cannot look at America and say the issue is that it was at any point NOT conservative enough.
All while these sensitive rural voters call the rest of the country “out of touch”. They aren’t bad people but holy shit how much do we need to coddle these children while this happens?
It really is two different America's;
Urbanites have to compete internationally, Chicago vs. Sao Paulo, Los Angeles vs. Berlin. The international corporations compete against each other.
Rural folk are at the mercy of the urban markets, and large corporate resellers. The local wealthy merchant, isn't interested in international affairs, they want to be a despot of their local county/state.
So you get local rural 'noble', that have every interest in undermining urban business, as it doesn't affect them. It's why politics is so bitter and cancerous. The wealthy rural owners, have no steak in the game for America to do well internationally. The most conservative people tend to be wealthy rural people, think of the guy that owns a farmers co-op in rural Nebraska.
Essentially this is what happened during the American Revolution. The northern cities had enough of England, and rural American farmers fought because they thought they would wrestle some control for themselves away from the east coast cities.
In my home of Ohio we’re so gerrymandered that we regularly pass ballot initiatives. We frequently have to amend our state constitution.
I get the nuances here. I really do. Most of the people I’ve dated have been Appalachians, my girlfriend grew up on a tobacco plantation in Tennessee. Most of my career puts me in rural factories where as a visibly queer women in a male dominated career I’m routinely treated slightly worse than in cities and I deal with their very real problems. But the thing that I keep coming back to is that they aren’t punching up, and when we mock them as slack jawed yokels we aren’t either. We need to show them solidarity but we also need to stand firm on important issues. Yeah feel free to mock us city folk for thinking we’re better, but don’t act like plenty of us didn’t flee your small towns because of your behavior.
When we as a left show them an open hand we can let them reject it
You are spot on. I need to disable my notifications on Lemmy or I'm not going to get any work done today.
We need to move past First Past The Post.
For example, each vote in the electoral college for California represents 703,000 people. In Montana, on the other hand, each electoral vote represents closer to 250,000 people.
On the other hand, more conservatives voted for Trump in California than in Texas. That's a LOT of conservatives who are having their voice drowned out. This is also why a few red states have signed on to the national popular vote amendment. So many people in deep blue and deep red states stay home on election day, we don't actually know how the popular vote would play out. People like to say we have way more democrats but that's not necessarily true - it's just a matter of current vote totals.
Article summarized:
“Cities are big, scary places where people do things we consider weird. And we’re so brainwashed that we think that cartels in Mexico and religious extremism in the Middle East are somehow the fault of liberal cities in the US. Our small towns are still clinging to industries that died 30 years ago and are now relying on subsidies from the blue states to survive, but people are afraid to move somewhere relevant because their neighbors lie about how horrible those places are, so instead of actually doing something about it we all collectively threw a temper tantrum.”
This is basically the same shit they were saying pre Civil War to justify keeping slaves. It’s a toxic mindset that’s 200 years overdue to die.
If Republicans finally decide to stop just making shit up and actually listen to scientists rather than spitballing from a 2000 year old mythology book, then they can participate in adult conversations. Throwing a childish tantrum and then refusing to grow up garners no sympathy from me.
The article is not about sympathy. It's about understanding how all this happened. And maybe a bit of empathy.
The author has some other great reads, here are a couple I may submit later.
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The site put his "10 Things Everyone Should Know Going Into The Next Decade" article next for me, and point 3 had a pretty noteworthy bit, being said 1/1/2020:
Go back 10 more years, and things get confusing and darkly hilarious. The big worry in 1999 popular culture was that Clinton-era economic prosperity was robbing white male professionals of their innate need for meaning (Fight Club, American Beauty, The Matrix). "Sure, we all have good jobs, nice homes and plenty of money, but at what cost? Can't this much easy comfort be a bad thing?"
No one could have known 9/11 was around the corner, of course. In the same way, you can't possibly guess the huge thing that's coming to fuck things up in a few years. Hell, even if someone came back and told us, we'd probably just be confused. (I'm imagining 2010 me trying and failing to wrap my head around "Gamergate" or "incels.")
Hell, even if someone came back and told us, we'd probably just be confused.
I won't say WW3 is inevitable, but something big is coming. Russia is draining our resources (including mental focus of agents) in Ukraine, Iran and Saudi Arabia are draining our resources via Gaza and the Red Sea, China is stepping up their cyber attacks and North Korea is readily collaborating with all of them. Meanwhile the flames of propaganda are no longer being fanned on Ukraine, but on Israel, one of our most touchy allies.
How likely is China to start a war?
How the US is preparing for a Chinese invasion of Taiwan
NSA says it's tracking Ivanti cyberattacks as hackers hit US defense sector
Tried What is the Monkeysphere??
It's really old and the formatting is a bit broken, but it explains much about people's behavior.
I had not but that was fantastic, thank you. I shivered a bit at the boob and football ban, remembering when that happened and realizing how old I'm getting. That article topped it off for it, I'm buying a couple of his audiobooks. I was worried when clicking on Jason Pargin brought up David Wong, worried that it was some Cracked ownership fuckery, but I was relieved to know who the author really was, wasn't lost to time.
Yeah that was a great read. It actually made me empathize and see it in a different perspective.
Fanaticism happened in the 8 years since. Trumpism is essentially a new religious movement and to its adherents, anything Trump says goes.
In 2014 these rural people would have gladly driven their 4 wheelers over to Russia to shoot Russians themselves. Now, since their god-emperor is in bed with Russia, they love Russia.
All the motivations that led rural Republicans to vote for Trump in 2016 no longer apply. Now it's pure religious fanaticism, propaganda, and doublethink.
I'm very surprised cracked has released an original article at all.
But I feel the author has drastically missed the mark. Summarized near the end with
"Already some of you have gotten angry, feeling this gut-level revulsion at any attempt to excuse or even understand these people. After all, they're hardly people, right? Aren't they just a mass of ignorant, rageful, crude, cursing, spitting subhumans?
Gee, I hope not. I have to hug a bunch of them at Thanksgiving"
Didn't they just spend the entire article justifying why the red non-urban areas feel that way towards the blue areas?
I feel the cities would welcome people from the country side, while you can't spend 1 day in a country town without being "from one of the big cities, and you should go back to it" (from experience, as a child)
Well for one, this isn't newly released: this is from 2016.
But to address your point, the reason it isn't hypocritical is because (like he said in the article) power and culture and conventional wisdom flows from the cities. It's the difference between punching up and punching down. Yes, rural people often have shit attitudes about cities, but it is culturally nearly homogenous to have negative opinions about rural people. The amount of people and the weight of the opinions they hold are not even close to balanced. Plus, and this is the more important bit: it's not just their shitty attitudes. They also have, as he outlines in the article, legitimate complaints and cries for help that we wrap up with their shitty opinions and ignore. It's not helpful.
I liked this article when it came out, and I still like it. I too moved from an area just like his to the city, and I couldn't agree with his points more. I have friends that have spent their whole lives in cities that continually miss the mark on this stuff because they have no concept of what rural people are like or actually think.
Didn’t they just spend the entire article justifying
No they did not, and please for the love of Christ can lemmy stop equating "explaining", "justifying", and "supporting"?
You steal that from me OP?! LOL, I've posted it a few times because I believe it's an accurate and important take, and no less so for being written in 2016.
I've lived and experienced both sides of this. Yeah, it all rings true.
I may have! I read it in a comment here a few months ago, so thank you for sharing. The authors ability to see the big picture as it was happening is to be admired. I've also experienced both sides so that's why it resonated with me as well. Growing up in a small farming town of 2k people, to living in New Orleans, and San Diego for a bit, to now living in the largest city of my home state. I get to see the 'both sides' aspect of it. I have a lot of conservative friends and liberal friends. My politics are a mishmash of my own, as I get older leaning more conservative in some ways and more liberal in others. This article was a great help in putting many of my conflicting feelings on the division between rural and urban into words. There is so much hate against each 'team' and a lot of it is inorganic. I'd like to say that most of it started out inorganic but that's probably being naive. However as we've been through the mainstream internet propaganda machine for 4 cycles now and 2016 was the most blatant, and best work (from a propagandists perspective) so it's my hope a majority has wised up to the most blatant propaganda. But the realist in me thinks this year may be even more insidious, with even more fake grassroots boots-on-the-ground efforts, and a completely new set of strategies.
Damn, Cracked was a loooooooong time ago. This article was hardly new but still long after their heyday. And his other stuff was almost the same mix of thought provoking and hilarious that the old articles provided, if a bit more of column A and a bit less of column B.
Cracked made me fall in love with after hours, then they killed it in front of me for spite. Never again, cracked
This is a fucking fantastic read. I've been saying this to anyone who'll listen lately. When this dust settles we're still going to have to live with these people.
I've lived in cities most of my life. I'm now in a very rural area.
Yeah, it's economically dead. I have to drive 45 minutes to get to work. I'm not super enthusiastic about that. Rents aren't really that much lower than in the cities, because there really isn't much available to rent, other than a trailer that might or might not have utility hookups. I understand a lot of the points that the guy makes.
On the other hand, yeah, there's overt racism here, and overt homo- and transphobia. Yes, local lose their goddamn minds over the thought that a trans person might need to pee, or play sports. My state is passing laws to prevent libraries from having any books--other than the bible--that even mention sexuality, or the possibility that LGBTQ+ people exist. One county south of me was a sundown county up until the 80s (!!!); in the 20s. Nearly every goddamn public official in my county ends their term of office by going to prison for some kind of corruption on embezzlement; people see that as just the way shit goes.
I do agree that many city people have lost the ability to be self-reliant in any meaningful way, or even reliant on small, self-defined communities. Most people I know in cities can't do basic auto maintenance (maybe because they have no place to work or tools, but often no interest as well), certainly don't do home maintenance (which, yeah, if you rent, that's risking eviction), they certainly don't hunt (I don't either yet, to my chagrin), and many of them don't do any significant cooking. They're usually more reliant on systems rather than other people; there's a breakdown of community in cities, with people feeling less connected to each other. And as a former city person, I'm certainly guilty of that now, since I share so fer of the values with people that live near me.
Jason Pargin is a smart guy but he never tires of hearing himself talk. Also, this is from 2016....none of this is recent knowledge.
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But we aren't in an Idiocracy like in the movie. That movie was about well meaning idiots in government because they were the "smartest" of the idiot population. What we currently have is an evil corporatocracy. Capitalism decides how our elected officials govern through lobbying. People are becoming dumber over time because of knowing, bad actors who want that to be the case. Education is getting worse, those in charge want citizens to fall in line and they want us to fight so that we elect the same people over and over and over again so that said people can continue to reap the benefits of that corporate lobbying.
Top to bottom the system is the way that it is because of intelligent bad actors squeezing us for all we are worth, not idiots.
votes do not matter and the election is rigged
there are people such as myself barred from voting and there are states wanting to only have one candidate on the voting ballot on top of what this article mentions
please change my mind with good facts begging you please give us hope that this comment is wrong
also great fucking article
If votes don't matter then you shouldn't care that you can't vote.. I'm of the opinion that no one should lose voting rights ever. It's a stupid punishment.
The election is "rigged" if you consider "rigged" to mean that first past the post voting always devolves into a two party system, and Citizens United caused both of those parties to be bought.
If by "rigged" you mean that someone today already knows for certain who will win in November, then no, that's crazy. But I'd agree that the difference in candidates is smaller than it should be because both are heavily influenced by money.
mean rigged as in the bipartisan politics that took my vote away were crafted by the same groups that have candidates on the ballot for people to "vote" for
democrats and republicans made laws and policies on a bipartisan effort nationally and statewide to invalidate a portion of Americans from voting and they disallow third parties from debating on the national debate platforms
https://www.democracynow.org/2012/10/17/green_partys_jill_stein_cheri_honkala
the two corporate parties both rigged the game board in their favor plain as day and it does not matter which of the two "parties" win because either way we the people lose
Ok yeah. That's just the first past the post voting system in action. Until that changes, the best we can do is vote against the candidate we hate the most.
I'm not the commenter but likely a felony. In the US, anyone who is found guilty and charged with a felony has their voting rights and gun ownership rights taken away (I'm not sure if indefinitely, but you can make an appeal on the latter after some time, for sure.)
I guessed as well but didn't want to assume.
I think the concept of felons losing voting rights (for a time) is ok, but really needs to be revisited. It needs more nuance and appeal (and fixed time period).
In an ideal justice world, the felon has proven they aren't a real member of society, by being a danger to it. But the point of like, not just killing people or deporting them should be to get that person rejoining society as an effective member. Voting is part of that. So improved sentencing, rehabilitation, monitoring, all driving towards getting that person back into society, including voting.
That said, if you do a violent crime with a gun you should never be able to own a gun again.
If you do a political crime you should never get to vote, lobby or run etc.
I mostly agree with your points, especially about violent and political felonies, but there are a ton of nonviolent felonies (many drug and money-related) that I don't believe should have your right to participate in society taken away. I agree that it needs an overhaul. The sad thing is that there is a ton of case law that exists about these things, and many of the cases that result in felonies could have been lesser charges, had the defendant been able to afford a lawyer.
Good points. Yep, I would hope for a future to view crime more like addiction. These people need to be in rehab, to learn how to be good to themselves, others, and contribute to society when they get out. Voting should be seen like, not have full privilege while in rehab. Once you're out, and no longer on parole/probation, you should be a normal citizen again, barring certain exceptions
in the US your rights are dependent on which state you reside in 24/7 and you are not allowed to live in more than two states 24/7 so only one state's rights per person and those rights do not carry over state lines
Vacation houses and the like do not count unless you register as living there 24/7 which registering requires an ID or driver's license from where the state gives out licenses (different office and name in different countries mean states)
this is all because of how fractured the "US" is think fifty different countries all pulling in fifty opposite directions even the states that are in the republican or democrat camps
the stickiness comes in when a citizen of one state registers as a citizen in another state without giving up the other state's citizenship thus making a person at least on paper as living in two states simultaneously giving that person the rights of two different states depending on which state they are in and registered also
for example registering to vote is a state by state thing not connected nation wide and if you are registered as citizen in more than one state you could in theory be registered to vote in more than one state and do so since not really checked nationally only state wide and registering to vote is validating an address
some state driver's license/ IDs are slowly being connected nation wide but it is still not a national thing across all "states"
to wrap this up not able to vote because am living in more than one state 24/7 in order to use the rights of other states when am at my other address - if voted it could be contested and deemed illegal voting which is a felony because being registered in another state is very frowned upon
so technically could vote legally but it could result in a felony if contested
would not be an issue if the US had national laws that all states had to abide by and a national playbook that was played on in all states
I've never heard of someone splitting residency truly 50/50. I've heard of folks needing to spend a very specific amount of days in one of the two homes, as per the laws, to be able to claim their home-address for tax and voting purposes.
Makes sense that if you are effectively "nomadic" that you don't really have a claim to be a "citizen" of a state, and lose certain benefits as such.
If you register to vote in the new state, as long as you don't cast a ballot in the old state, you are fine. A number of people are in your situation. You can vote in your "other" state by absentee ballot*, or your "current" state by registering by the deadline defined in your current state. Extensive article about it here.
You are legally allowed to have multiple residences in multiple states. All that matters is you follow the rules, which means not voting more than once, and either registering an absentee ballot in the other state or registering in the new state.
Citizenship is based on country, not state. Unless you left out being a dual national (citizen of another country) I don't see why you can't vote.
* Some states have fickle laws about absentee ballots and it may require you to take a day trip on voting day.