“I voted for him, and he’s the one who’s doing this,” she said of Mr. Trump. “I thought he was going to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”https://t.co/31xvPe5Qyc
— McKay Coppins (@mckaycoppins) January 8, 2019
Guess this is why the Repubs decided Granpa Ranty needed some broad-spectrum media exposure for WALL!!!(tm) The basest of The Base are beginning to suspect they’re not his top priority… and the Elite Media Village Idiots are no longer pushing the Big Lie with the same sweaty enthusiasm:
MARIANNA, Fla. — A federal prison here in Florida’s rural Panhandle lost much of its roof and fence during Hurricane Michael in October, forcing hundreds of inmates to relocate to a facility in Yazoo City, Miss., more than 400 miles away.
Since then, corrections officers have had to commute there to work, a seven-hour drive, for two-week stints. As of this week, thanks to the partial federal government shutdown, they will be doing it without pay — no paychecks and no reimbursement for gas, meals and laundry, expenses that can run hundreds of dollars per trip…
In Florida, where Republicans dominated the November midterms and the state’s only Democratic senator went down in defeat, conservative towns like Marianna — along with farm communities in the South and Midwest, and towns across the country that depend on tourism revenue from scaled-back national parks — will help measure the solidity of public support for Mr. Trump and his decision to wager some of the operations of the federal government on a border wall with Mexico.
Jim Dean, Marianna’s city manager, said he had already been concerned, even before the shutdown, that the hurricane would prompt public agencies to consider reducing their footprint in the region. What if an extended shutdown contributed to keeping the prison closed indefinitely?
“I worry about the government pulling out of rural America,” he said.
This, after all, is one of many towns across the country where private industries are few and the federal government is intimately connected to livelihoods. Wedged near the border with Alabama and Georgia, Marianna’s 7,000 residents depend on the federal medium-security prison to employ nearly 300 people in good-paying jobs with attractive benefits…
And the prison isn’t the only federal benefactor. The United States Department of Agriculture provides crucial assistance to farmers, many of whom plant cotton or peanuts or raise cattle.“The U.S. Department of Agriculture office is currently closed, due to the lapse in federal government funding,” read a printout taped to the door of a local U.S.D.A. office on Friday. “The office will reopen once funding is restored.”
The phone rang occasionally in the office next door. A federal worker who was working without pay patiently explained to frustrated callers that no, she could not connect them to the person they needed to talk to, because that employee was furloughed for the shutdown…
Who could’ve imagined a “President” abandoning such very fine people?
— Scooter Trash (@stevekmartin) January 8, 2019
Gozer
Fuck ’em.
rafaelh
That first quote is telling. “hurting the people he needs to be hurting.” A policy born out of spite and meanness, voting for someone not because he will be better for the country, but because he will hurt those people you hate. You wanted government out of your lives! Govt just has to get out of the way and let the private industy flourish!!!! You’re getting the govt you voted for.
randy khan
This actually is an article about Trump supporters that interests me – what happens when they realize they’ve been conned?
Cheryl Rofer
This is kind of the definition of “deplorable.”
Adam L Silverman
@Cheryl Rofer: And yet she just voted to reelect that idiot Gaetz, voted for Rick Scott to replace Bill Nelson, voted for Matt DeSantis who just hired away the Federal Medicaid officer who believes Medicaid shouldn’t exist, and she’ll vote to reelect the President in 2020 too.
RandomMonster
And the thing is, they’d still forgive him if he was just doing more to hurt the people who need hurting. Which in their view also includes everyone commenting here.
Gozer
@Adam L Silverman: So how the fuck do we deal with these people? The past 2-3 years have really tested some of my principles as a decent liberal.
It’s almost like dealing with an addict who refuses help.
Mandarama
My town in MS was gutted by Reaganomics when I was young, too. All my people loved the genial racism, though, so they were all “Thank you sir may I have another.” My mom, not a Southerner and liberal to the core, hated Reagan and taught us how to see all of this for what it was.
Many of the white kids I grew up with are now Trump fans. I find that I have zero sympathy for my home state’s woes, except for how it affects people of color, and white FL can pretty much feel the pain too.
I’ve lost some of my ability to be a decent person in these tribulations.
SFAW
Oh, goody! Another article in the FTFTFNYT talking about those pore Shitgibbon idolaters, upset because “he’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”
Fuck them
Fuck their feelings
Fuck their families
Fuck everyone that thinks like them
The world would be a better place if they all DIAF. No, I don’t think they’re redeemable, but I’m kind of an asshole that way. [Well, other ways as well, but “that’s not important” right now, as Robert Hays would say.]
Oh, and Fuck The Fucking Trump-Fluffing NYT
Mike in NC
I always go back to the not-so-good people of the dying shithole town of Johnstown, PA, where in some NYT article they eventually do admit that they like Trump because “he hates the n*****s and so do we”.
Chetan Murthy
@Mandarama:
QFT.
Villago Delenda Est
None, not one, of these dipshits thinks anything through…just like Donald.
Fuck these motherfuckers. I’m tired of their whining, I’m tired of their parasitism, I’m just tired of all of them. I didn’t freeze my ass off in Germany and Korea to let them make really, really bad choices.
Barbara
@Mike in NC: It was Politico, not NYT. Another woman in the article above sounded like she was on the way to waking up.
Adam L Silverman
@Gozer: They can’t be reasoned with. You just have to do what you do, recognized they’ll never support anyone who would actually do something beneficial for them policy wise, and not lose sleep over it.
SFAW
@Adam L Silverman:
I heard NPR interviewing Ted Fucking Yoho, another one of Florida’s Finest, shortly after Speaker Pelosi was sworn in. He kept calling her “Miss Pelosi.” What a fucking asshole.
It would not surprise me if, when a Rethug files to run as a Rethug, the RNC had a form a potential candidate has to fill out: if one does not check the box “Are you a stupid fucking asshole?”, then the RNC wants nothing to do with him/her. And that’s even before they get to the “Are you willing to betray your country?” section.
Fuck them all..
tobie
The quoted article really drove home the meaning of the prison-industrial complex. It never really occurred to me that there are towns whose only industry is a prison.
SFAW
@tobie:
With the wrong people on the outside, sounds like.
Major Major Major Major
I would enjoy these stories more if only their poor decisions didn’t have such negative externalities.
B.B.A.
We must secure the destruction of their people and a future for nonwhite children.
Gozer
@Adam L Silverman: Trust me, I know these people. Though I didn’t grow up in FL, my folks retired there a few years back and Ron-fucking-DeSantis was their congressperson. I’ve been to some of the rural areas between Orlando and Daytona Beach…it’s a real fucking freakshow.
I know they’ll always choose the quick high of prejudice over substantive policy solutions, but that in and of itself is highly problematic. In a policy manner we’ll have to figure out the analog to cutting off an addict.
trollhattan
@Gozer:
Pave over them and keep driving. They’re not changing and we needn’t waste time convincing them or ourselves otherwise, Morning Edition Trump-country voter focus groups notwithstanding.
chris
@B.B.A.: Word count checks out.
tobie
@SFAW: Yeah, corrections officers are a pretty frightening lot, following by the Highway Patrol, which always strike me as being militaristic with their hats with a strap in the back resting on their crew cuts.
StringOnAStick
@tobie: Look at Jackson, Michigan. The only good jobs left in that trump humping town are at the state prisons there.
Mike in NC
@Barbara: Thanks
B.B.A.
@chris: yeah, I’d have said “children of color” but that’d be one word too many
GregB
America is drowning in a pool of stupid.
The Dangerman
@trollhattan:
Nah, hand them a rake and pay them minimum wage to rake forests. Lotsa forests to be raked.
mapaghimagsik
You know what, they blow their money on 4K TVs and cellphone and cars, they need to learn to live within their means, and pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
Get. A. Job.
Isn’t that what they say?
The Pale Scot
Karma’s a bitch ain’t it
Adam L Silverman
@SFAW: Usually the biographies of those in the candidate pools for those being incarcerated and those working as corrections officers have significant overlap.
Yutsano
Eh. I can’t even be sussed to feel federal solidarity here. They got what they wanted. Ain’t my fault they can’t get any assistance out of their state because that’s what they vote for.
On les emmerde.
The Moar You Know
“He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”
This is one of the vilest things I have ever read. You’re straight up morally bankrupt if you can say anything like that and mean it.
JaneE
@rafaelh: That was my first thought too. It sounds about right. All the people who say Trump is doing good things really mean he is hurting people they don’t like. Hillary was too kind when she called them deplorables.
Redshift
Let’s not overlook the fact that these proud supporters of the anti-government party are entirely dependent on the government to provide the jobs that make their town viable.
SFAW
@Redshift:
Just like a certain right-wing policy “wonk” who was Speaker of the House for a few years? Some guy who did his utmost to fuck over those who didn’t grow up with the same welfare benefits he had?
ETA: “Wonk” was in quotation marks not because it’s a colloquialism, but because a REAL wonk has a fucking clue about policy, his/her math actually works, and is not a fucking Objectivist moron. Or moron Objectivist.
Villago Delenda Est
@SFAW:
They work together no matter what the word order.
andy
Stings a bit, when the marks start to discover they got skin in the game, after all.
CaseyL
Maybe this has been said already, but here’s my take on why the networks gave Dolt45 his airtime: They’re salivating at the distinct possibility that he’ll declare his “national emergency” during the tirade. Never mind that the US effectively ceases to exist as any kind of democratic republic at that moment: they just want to be in on the scoop.
Mandarama
@Redshift: That’s the part that always gets me. My town is/was hugely dependent on a Naval air station that really isn’t necessary. It duplicates efforts from Pensacola. But every year our Congresscritters would fight to keep it open because of all the good Republican-voting yahoos in my area dependent on government contract jobs. Similarly, my hometown has an aging populace and a ton of hospitals. As you all probably know most of the state of Mississippi is on Medicare or Medicaid. If it wasn’t for the federal government, how would my high school classmates who are now hospital workers get paid?
James E Powell
First, what’s with the NYT and the diners? Seriously. Can someone call & ask?
Second, “He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.” As many of us noted at the time, Trump’s promise to his cult members was that he would hurt the people they hate.
TriassicSands
@The Moar You Know:
And the difference between that and “He’s not helping the people he needs to be helping,” is linguistically tiny and morally immense. I can’t decide if that was a Freudian slip or what an obvious idiot meant to say.
However, it is a good illustration of how impossible it is to deal with Trumpists. They don’t offer a difference of opinion that presents a possible middle ground for compromise. Like their leader they offer despicable idiocy. It’s like a compromise dessert where one side wants a fruit salad and the other wants pure shit. What sane person would want a fruit salad with a shit topping.
RobertDSC-Mac Mini
@B.B.A.:
Winner!
Mnemosyne
@The Moar You Know:
They pretty much expected to get the Rapture on Earth that Tim LaHaye et al promised them: Good (straight, white, Christian) People rewarded, Bad (everyone else) People punished while the Good People watch and enjoy.
Some of them are dumb enough or fanatical enough to accept getting crushed in the process of crushing the Bad People, but most of them are getting pissed that they’re also getting hurt. This isn’t what my pastor said was going to happen!
They won’t wake up, though. Their desire to have the power to punish others is too strong. They’ll just look for the next leader who promises them that this time they’ll totally get to punish their enemies with no consequences to themselves, just like Jeebus promised.
KithKanan
@TriassicSands: Why, someone might almost say
Jim, Foolish Literalist
the powerful leadership of Kevin McCarthy
jl
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Uh oh, that will make ending the shutdown the ‘bipartisan’ position, huh?
TS (the original)
@rafaelh:
Says every MAGA supporter in the USA. It’s those “others” that should be hurting
Mnemosyne
@jl:
Pfft! Of course not, silly! By definition, only the Republican position is “bipartisan.” A position that Democrats hold that Republicans vote for is a terrible, partisan position that will tear the country apart right after we all go bankrupt. Get it right!
James E Powell
I believe it is very common for a person who is personally involved with an issue or a situation to believe that the issue or situation does not get sufficient coverage in the press/media. That said, I am kind of surprised that I haven’t seen any national press/media talking about the fact that we Los Angeles teachers are set to strike on Thursday.
Short set up. Big money charter advocates poured almost $10 million into school board races in 2017 to change the board to a pro-corporate charter majority. They hired an investment banker to be superintendent. It seems that he wants to provoke a strike to break the union. Some details here.
We are the second largest district in the country. Is this a big deal or do I just have a distorted view because I’m involved?
Chetan Murthy
@tobie: It’s even worse. Typically those are small (white) towns. Their census “weight” is increased by all the prisoners, but those prisoners can’t vote (typically) so each resident gets a disproportionate voting weight. That, on top of the gerrymandering.
Martin
Dear world,
When you declare “He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.” as being the job of government, you’re really rolling the fucking dice that the answer to that question isn’t “you, you’re the one who needs to be hurt”. After all, in any non-dictatorial system, someone you don’t want is going to be running the government at some time or another and they’re going to get to pick who needs to be hurt.
Anne Laurie
@StringOnAStick:
True story: Back in the 1970s, the motto printed on the green town-line signs read Welcome to Jackson — You May Never Leave.
By the early 1980s, they changed it to Welcome to Jackson — We Like It Here.
No extra emphasis on the ‘we’, although it was kinda implied…
hueyplong
Sending thoughts and prayers to the woman who said “He’s not hurting the people he needs to be.”
Nothing else. Just thoughts and prayers.
KithKanan
@Anne Laurie: As far as prison town slogans, I was always partial to the now gone It’s Happening In Soledad billboard.
jl
I clicked the link to find context for the quote. But it was the last thing in the article. Which I think is bad journalism. Another example of the NYT’s bathetic preciosity and confusion about what trade it is plying. If that rag wants to publish short stories, they should publish short stories. So what is the point of ending an article like that? so, I can be a thoughtful sophisticated NYT reader and wistfully reflect ‘Oh… whither humanity?”. Naw I didn’t do that, instead I thought, ‘Whence this crap?”
Anyway, no telling who that woman thought should be hurt. Might be minorities, or liberals, or maybe Jew Bankers, or maybe rich bankers of all types. but whatever the case, to say the bottom line summary of any policy, or politician is to hurt someone is primitive and vicious. That voter is not up to speed on civics.
Paul M Gottlieb
@randy khan: If history teaches us anything, they’ll attack the Jews
Chetan Murthy
@jl:
If there’s one thing that the 2016 Apocalypse taught me, it’s that far, far far too many of our (ahem) “fellow citizens” flunked Civics class back in high school. Also, American History.
Mart
@tobie: I toured a private prison east of Midland, TX where there was nothing but wind. At the time the guards were paid $15+/hour – one of the the best jobs in the area. The prison housed Mexicans who were convicted felons in the US. It was just awful. They just had several riots over shitty health care. The racism was open, and the Mexican Americans working there were not much better than the whites. Hostages had been taken just before my visit, security fences cut, and several buildings were set on fire. (They tried for a mattress bonfire, but the mattresses really are fire resistant.) A couple times I thought I was going to be jumped. The guards have no weapons on the prisoner side, and there were hundreds of them and a handful of us. As we were walking to an adjacent facility the guards radios went off; a bunch of guards came running down the chute with handcuffs, piles of prisoners were spilling into an outdoor fenced area. My contact asked me if I needed to tour these buildings. I told him I have everything I needed, and I was ready to head home.
Paul M Gottlieb
@James E Powell: You are in a big city, not a rotting former steel town, so you’re not even real Americans. And you are opposing a bunch of billionaire venture capitalist who are trying to exercise their God-given right to look the public education, so you’re practically communists. Why would the mainstream press care about you?
PS: I hope you guys kick ass!
John Revolta
“Some people are never satisfied, I mean, I let the whole country of Puerto Rico, a yuuge country, full of criminals and takers, I let it go completely to hell, and what thanks do I get? Sad!!”
jl
@Paul M Gottlieb: Early in the Trump campaign I had a hard time believing the rancid antisemitism was real. I thought it was a stunt to outrage the liberals. I thought there just can’t be a substantial number of old school Nazis who believe that crap. But then… ooops, I realized there were plenty of them and it was very real. Then piled on top of that are the End Times fundamentalists, who in their own way are equally antisemitic.
Luthe
@Chetan Murthy: The prison quirk is one of the things in the Census I can’t stand. Though on the other hand it benefits college towns because the students get counted as living in the towns and not at home. Still, counting someone as a resident when they do not “reside” in a place by choice makes no sense. Aside from those with life sentences, every prisoner is eventually going to go somewhere else.
Perhaps there should be an adjuster for persons in group quarters? Like, if one is anticipated to still be in those quarters in five years*, they would count as a resident of that area, but anyone not anticipated to be in those quarters would be counted as a resident of their last known address. (*five years being long enough to cover most college students, thus balancing the scales)
*wanders off ranting in Social Scientist*
sigyn
@Chetan Murthy: That’s how Michelle Bachman kept getting elected in Minnesota, and I’ve just realized that those assholes in Stillwater are probably hurting too.
Good.
Ladyraxterinok
@tobie: I think many prisons were put in rural areas so escapees would have to travel some distance to find food, etc. And then towns grew up around them to house the people who worked there and to supply services for those people.
NotMax
@mapaghimagsik
Almost makes one nostalgic for the days of T-bones and Cadillacs.
On second thought, no it doesn’t. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
NotMax
@Anne Laurie
Yeah, the people of Love Canal and Times Beach liked it there as well.
;)
(((CassandraLeo)))
@Adam L Silverman: …they can’t be bargained with. They don’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And they absolutely will not stop, ever, until we are dead.
…what? Someone had to.
smike
@rafaelh:
That was my thought when reading the quote – they want to hurt people not like them and thought that tRump would do that for them. They loudly cheered every threat that tRump threw up. Fuck ’em.
(((CassandraLeo)))
@SFAW:
… but you repeat yourself.
Raven Onthill
The spite vote, personified.
Chetan Murthy
OT, but yanno, she’s kickin’ ass an’ takin’ names!
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2019/jan/07/polyana-viana-attempted-mugging-rio-brazil
“UFC’s Polyana Viana says mugging ended in predictable and bloody fashion”
sukabi
@jl: given drumpfs rhetoric during his campaign, it’s pretty clear the “people he’s supposed to hurt” were poc and “leftists” – (pretty sure to drumpf supporters leftists are anyone that doesn’t wear white sheets or nazi garb) and non white immigrants — documented or not.
joel hanes
@hueyplong:
the woman who said
It’s Mnuchin’s wife, isn’t it ?
Noskilz
I wouldn’t be surprised if a fair chunk of trumplings are simply unsalvageable, but I’d also expect at least some of them to be very unhappy that the policies they’ve been encouraged to support are going to give them a good mangling as well. What – if anything – they do with that information we’ll just have to see.
Hard to imagine any of them who continue to be insulated from their mistakes are going to change tack, but I would expect anyone who hasn’t gone full Jonestown to be getting increasingly nervous as Dear Leader does his best to make it clear he’s a walking disaster area that cares only for himself.
But even best with the best case scenario of enough getting a clue to matter, that’s a ruinously expensive education for people who had no excuse not to know better.
jl
I have seen and heard enough pissed off commentary by GOPers and their pundits on these dang Dem wimmins and young people, that is permeated with suppressed rage, that I am beginning to think that these people have an attitude problem. Warren and AOC have put a real dent in the monopoly that reactionary savvy conventional wisdom has in the corporate media. And it has these rich white none-to-bright ignoramuses in a rage.
These jackasses are coming close to yelling that some young punk guy, or women, or whomever, needs to shut their mouths. Some old white GOPer consultant said AOC needs to stop running her mouth, or something like that. But, funny thing is, these serious daddy GOPers are ignorant as fence posts.
So, I seen enough clips. and going to sleep. The spectacle is, by turns, infuriating, disturbing, and hilarious.
This time tomorrow we may be in some bogus state of emergency (or maybe not). Let’s see what happens. I hope Trump is not stupid enough to try it. I read a tweet from a reporter earlier today that the Trumpsters think declaring a bogus state of emergency, that would clearly be an impeachable offense, would ‘rattle’ Trump opposition. Can they really be that stupid? I guess unfortunately that they can, but let’s hope they don’t go there.
Edit: by corporate media standards, these rich white GOPer are actually being unacceptably uncivil and rude, but for some mysterious reason, they are allowed to rave on as much as they want and are never called on it.
smike
@jl:
Cognitive dissonance comes to my mind. The nazis hate the jews, evangelicals hate everybody, and tRump praises Israel and lusts after his Orthodox Judaism converted daughter while boosting her husband, and on and on…
And they furrow their brows in deep thought and proclaim, “But he’s one of us!” Never a second thought.
Chetan Murthy
@Noskilz: I wish you were right, that even -some- of them will learn something. The experience of Nazi Germany is not encouraging on this. I remember reading Milton Mayer’s _They Thought They Were Free_ (about 10(?) Nazi Party members he interviewed in a small town in 1955) and they remembered the Nazi time as the best time of their lives. And this, after all the destruction of the war. The best time of their lives. B/c they really felt like they mattered. And then there’s the documented history that basically Germany only came to terms with its Nazi past as the war generation aged-out, and were replaced by their children and grandchildren. It took several decades. There’s a film that comes to mind, _Nasty Girl_ about Anna Rosmus (born 1960), exploring her work and the resistance of her hometown against it. Even by 1994, it wasn’t so good: she moved to the US b/c of all the threats and harassment.
It’s all pretty dour. I for one believe the only solution is to outbreed them. We need all the undocumented and documented migrants we can find.
Chetan Murthy
@Chetan Murthy: I remember looking her up around the 2016 Apocalypse. I wondered what she made of all this. Still do.
jl
@smike: Among the leadership, I think a lot of antisemitism is the same divide-and-conquer strategy used for political control. Find a scapegoat, blame them, get people you want to control to fighting each other. Get the larger group to get their aggression out and distract them by convincing them that they need to beat up on a smaller group.
I’ve heard stories that indicate, the leadership of these movements are quite cynical about it. No cognitive dissonance needed, just depravity and bottomless cynicism. There is a famous story I’ve read several times about a mayor in the Thrid Reich who was a viciously antisemitic, but a number of Jews were among his closest associates. When asked about it he replied “Look, I decide who’s a Jew and who’s not.’
Chetan Murthy
@jl: That may be. There’s also the famous story about Himmler where he’s gotten one more letter from a German about some “good Jew” who should be spared. He says something like “enough with these pleading letters about the <<good Jews>>; there are no good Jews!”
smike
@jl:
I agree about the leadership. They know exactly what they are doing. I was thinking “followers” in the cognitive dissonance category.
I had never heard that story before, but it illustrates the thinking well.
Mnemosyne
@jl:
I think you vastly underestimate how prevalent anti-semitism still is, and how much evangelical churches feed into it. In Michael Lind’s book Up From Conservatism, he talks about how one of the things that made him leave the evangelical world was “editing” one of Pat Robertson’s books from the 1970s, which mostly consisted of removing the word “Jewish” from in front of phrases like “Jewish bankers” and “Jewish global conspiracy.” The belief never changed, it just became prudent to remove the actual word when Robertson and other Republicans were trying to attract conservative Jews to the party.
I’ll bet you that mayor never blinked an eye when his “favored” Jews had served their purpose and were hauled off to the camps. They mistook utility for friendship, more fools them.
Chetan Murthy
@smike: Hell, we have documented cases here in Trumpistan: Trump supporter regrets vote after undocumented husband is deported
The husband was undocumented, from Mexico. IIRC the wife was originally undocumented from Greece, but got regularized. She voted Trump.
AndWhen a Trump supporter’s wife is deported
I mean, there’s a well-understood phenomenon, long [long, long] predating the rise of Shitlord — the “you’re nothing like those other {{X}}; you’re one of the good ones”. I’ve heard “X” mapped to Chinese, Jewish, South-Asian. I bet it gets mapped to every damn ethnicity in America today.
And these people are otherwise just as stone racist as any other Trumpist.
Chetan Murthy
@Mnemosyne: Yes, and then there’s the well-known way in which evangelicals support Israel not because Jewish people live there and need our support, but because for the End Times to come, some massive calamity must come to Israel, and for that, well, Israel has to damn well exist. And the red heifer and all. I’m sure not up on all that millennialist claptrap (I’d rather gargle drano) but it’s pretty clear that their idea of “support Israel” is “they need to exist for our Revelations scenario to happen”.
[begin shitbird thinking]After all, it ain’t like the Jews are gettin’ into Heaven, they’re just collateral damage at the end of the day.[end shitbird thinking]
JoeyJoeJoe
@trollhattan: They may never vote for Democrats, but if they’re pissed and just don’t vote, it works out pretty well for Democrats too
Brachiator
@James E Powell:
Interesting stuff. I’m not sure I understand how someone is trying to provoke a strike. I have not been following the news on this, but what I hear on radio news suggests that teachers are eager to strike.
And what about all the stories about the state or county threatening to take over because of supposed financial problems in LA schools?
Lastly, I thought that Broad was supposed to be a good guy? I remember some local liberals trying to get him to buy the LA Times and run it as a more progressive media operation.
Betty Cracker
@JoeyJoeJoe: Yep — that’s my goal with my rural FL Trumpster relatives: demoralize them to the point where they go back to not bothering to vote. Persuading them to vote for Democrats isn’t an option. They’re too hopped up on resentment and lies.
Sister Golden Bear
@Ladyraxterinok: Back in the day that was often the reason — Manzanar, and the former Club Fed in Boron, CA were located there in respective locations explicitly because they were in remote desert areas.
These days, a big factor is that remote rural towns often seek prisons as a source of steady jobs. Years ago, one of the town in Inyo County, CA was trying to recruit a prison that very reason. Inyo County, home to about 18,000 people, is on the eastern side of the Sierras and really doesn’t have much going for it except some farming and ranching, but mostly living off the tourist trade of the city folk they despise. The prison was supposed to be a way to keep young people from moving out of the area, since most of them left to find any sort of opportunity. Naturally it’s hard core Republican.
NotMax
@Chetan Murthy
Operates in all directions. Have had people of Native Hawaiian ancestry who were heavily into the Hawaiian sovereignty movement tell me to my face not to be concerned, that I’ll get to stay because I’m “one of the good haoles.”
Chetan Murthy
@NotMax: Got a friend from Hawaii who explained to me that, growing up, white people were most definitely in the minority — that asians and Hawaiians were the majority and knew it. There’s a saying by somebody (I wanna say Matt Yglesias, but can’t find a cite): “It’s a Red State world”. By which the author meant, well, that everyplace in the world, you’ll find natives who think everybody else is an invader, smelly, dirty, etc, etc, etc. And usually it’ll turn out that those same people A, if they move to some other place, will be mistreated by the same “red staters” B in that new place, mistreated the same as those folks A would have mistreated the folks B, if the tables were reversed.
Lotta bigots in the world. Man, you should see the Hindu mationalists in India. Wowsers, such bigots. [I’m of Hindu descent, but shit, no way I’m ownin’ those fuckers.]
Thing is, none of them are right. They’re all wrong, and for the same reason, eh?
SWMBO
@James E Powell: I wonder what Steve in the ATL would say about this.
Cermet
@The Moar You Know: No, that IS a typical amerikan christian’s world view. An amerikan right wing poor-middleclass-wealthy fake (a-)moral (not) majority in a nut shell.
NotMax
@Chetan Murthy
A more readily understandable construction might be to call it the commonality of bigotry.
OzarkHillbilly
@James E Powell: It’s a big deal.
bjacques
@Chetan Murthy: (@85)
Oh, it’s a lot worse than that. The End Times narrative had it that in the final battle of Armageddon, all but 14400 Jews would die, and the survivors would convert to Christianity. So, basically, End Times Jesus would finish the job Hitler started.
One of the signs of the End Times was the rebuilding of the Temple of Solomon. Since one side of the ruins comprises the Wailing Wall and another area includes the rock from which Muhammad (PBUH) supposedly ascended bodily to Heaven, said reconstruction would have required bulldozing the latter. In the 1980s, some US preachers were agitating for that very thing, while the Middle East was a possible flash point for (nuclear) WW3. Of course, that didn’t go anywhere, but nice people, hey?
In the 1970s, well before Tim and Beverly LaHaye’s “Left Behind” novels, there appeared a lurid double novel 666 / 1000 by Salem Kirban. Illustrations from that and various Jack Chick tracts provided a rich vein of imagery for the Book(s) Of The Subgenius and myriad publishers of zines and punk show flyers.
OzarkHillbilly
@Chetan Murthy: @NotMax: Gotta hate the right people.
Anne Laurie
@Ladyraxterinok:
Nah, prisons were always a leading NIMBY cause — nobody with any political clout wanted those people in their neighborhoods. So the bigger the prison, the more likely it would be relegated to the arse end of nowhere, since there would be fewer protestors and those less likely to succeed.
Of course, starting under Tricky Dick’s anti-negro-and-hippie drug laws, and increasing with geometric speed when St. Ronaldus got shoved into the WH, the prison-industrial complex has actually made big human holding facilities attractive to resource-starved local governments. But the same Drown the Gubmint inna Bathtub boosters who sold their towns into penal servitude are now discovering that what the GOP ‘giveth’, the GOP will eventually take away. Weird analogy to the War on Drugs: towns like the one in the NYTimes article have become entirely too dependent on the ‘benefits’ of being a prison-industrial company town, so when there isn’t a steady inflow of new prisoners, well…
raven
Snoop also vented about federal employees “being treated fucking unfairly” during the shutdown. He added that “punk motherfucker” Trump, who has said the shutdown may continue for months or years if Democrats do not cave to his demands for federal funding for a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, didn’t care.
“Look what he do. He just don’t give a fuck. Y’all honest, blue-collar hard-working people and suffering,” said Snoop.
In November, Snoop conducted a mini-protest against Trump when he smoked a blunt in front of the White House:
Aleta
JR
Not everyone in that article is a dipshit:
“We can handle a month or two, but if it gets much longer than that, I’m going to look for another job — a job in the private sector”, Ms. Sims said of working without pay.
She blamed Mr. Trump for the shutdown, a point on which she disagreed with her husband and most of her colleagues. “This definitely is making me more political than I have been in the past” … “My stance is that if there’s a wall, they’re going to find a way to get past it — legal or not”.
Procopius
@bjacques: The thing about those End Times fanatics that always strikes me — it never seems to occur to them that what they’re doing is trying to force God to change his plans to suit their convenience. Just seems a little arrogant to me. Of course they don’t see it that way, but I’m not a Christian so I don’t have an emotional involvement in it.
Barbara
@James E Powell: I saw it in NYT yesterday.
Skepticat
@rafaelh: This was my first, pained thought. I’m hardly surprised, but it says everything.
rikyrah
@Cheryl Rofer:
We told you this is who they are, but the MSM, has been writing endless stories pretending otherwise.
rikyrah
@tobie:
Why do you think that they are located in the middle of nowhere.
low-tech cyclist
@KithKanan:
Jeez, we’re coming up on the 10th anniversary of John Cole’s classic “tire rims and anthrax” post.
The scary part is, though it was already true then, it’s WAY more true now.
Matt
I fucking cheer for it. Decades of “we don’t need no gubmint but Jeebus and Colt” has consequences.
kindness
I don’t take joy at Trumpie’s displeasure. I do take joy that they have no clue they brought this on themselves and yet they will no doubt blame (me) others. Fuck ’em. Where are the Acme Anvil’s to toss to the drowning?
Barbara
@tobie: Yes, indeed. As the crime rate has fallen and as states have finally begun to grapple with the financial consequences of harsh prison sentences, some prisons have actually been closed. Basically, putting prisons in rural locations was another way that blue areas subsidized red areas of states. Housing detained immigrants was Plan B for many of these institutions.
sherparick
@RandomMonster: By people who need to be hurting, besides African-Americans and Hippie Environmentalists, I expect she means the hundreds dying and the thousands in internment camps for being Brown/Hispanic/NativePeoples caught along our Southwestern Frontier. Francisco Cantú essay at: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/01/17/has-any-one-of-us-wept/
Order his book “The Line Becomes A River”
Also, as Matt Yglesias stated on twitter, the article is almost a case study on how Cultural Backwardness and Conservatism, which leads to racial oppression and loathing of learning and education lead to economic decline.
Tenar Arha
@James E Powell: I don’t know. It’s a big deal if it happens. The news should at least be covering it in brief but statewide in California, & top of the hour/fold in L.A. If they’re not, every news director in your state is falling down on the job.
I’ll be honest, the national news covered teacher strikes last year, but only eventually. (& I also do wonder if that’s because they were happening in West Virginia, Arizona, and Oklahoma rather than a big coastal city). Until the gas explosions in Lawrence & Lowell happened, they weren’t exactly covering the National Grid strike in my back yard of Massachusetts. There was a massive hotel strike last year, that wasn’t exactly well covered, because sports teams kept on booking the wrong hotels & crossing the pickets in Boston too.
Ruckus
@randy khan:
They get more pissed at the people they hate?
If they turn on drumpf what will that mean? He’s going to change? How, by getting even worse?
Ruckus
@Gozer:
No, it’s exactly like that.
Their addiction is the hate/blame for all the people they think are the root of all their problems. If they would look in a mirror, with a picture in the corner that says – Republican Policies, they would see the entire cause.
Michael Bersin
@TriassicSands:
David Sedaris in The New Yorker, October 28, 2008:
Undecided
jl
@Mnemosyne: (and other commenters who responded) I was talking about the leadership, not the followers. Of course that mayor did not blink an eye if later he decided to send his inner circle of Jewish associates to their deaths. That is where the ‘depravity’ and ‘bottomless cynicism’ come in.
akryan
@Ladyraxterinok: I think the bigger thing was that property values in rural areas is a whole lot cheaper. Hard to build a supermax in downtown anywhere when you look at the cost of putting it a few hundred miles away. You can get the land cheaper and you can get the labor cheaper. The difficulty in escaping is just a bonus.