Political Memes

That was just a gem.

Great read, thanks for sharing!

“We're going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.”

The moment Clinton said that (and that's a direct quote), she lost any hope of getting most of Appalachia to vote for her.

To be clear about what Clinton's plan looked like, even if you ignored her terrible delivery of it, here's what it sounds like to the guys on the ground who'd benefit from it:

Step one, first you lose your job, and we're going to speed that up by tightening regulations with the express goal of killing the coal industry faster.

Step two, then you get put on unemployment and a retraining program. This of course will cause some of you to lose your hones and vehicles, and for some your family too because especially in very socially conservative areas a man losing a job for a prolonged period is often a catalyst to losing a marriage. Now that you've lost your home, downsized your car and lost your family it's time for...

Step three, the industry you've been retrained for doesn't exist, or doesn't exist at remotely the necessary scale here, so now you just need to pull up stakes and move elsewhere. Hope you didn't have any family nearby you cared to see, or took care of, or if you lost your wife in the previous step ever wanted to see your kids again.

Step four, congratulations! If you made it here, you probably have a job again. I mean, you had to sell your home just to stay afloat through the retraining, it pays less than your old job, you're living somewhere with a higher cost of living now, and you had to be cut off from your entire support network, but you're probably employed!

And all of that assumes her plan as proposed was actually going to be a thing that actually happened. As opposed to the at least as likely scenario where they still use regulations to kill the coal market more efficiently, but don't do any of the other stuff. Which was probably at least as likely in a post-Byrd world (Byrd was corrupt as all hell, but he always did his best for his constituents).

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

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.

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.

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.