edit: seems like some people interpret “full of” as a mathematical majority which, while it may or might not be true instance to instance, isn’t my intent in posting
feel free to swap in “has a lot of” if that’s more familiar language to you :)
Eh… I live in the cousin-fuckingly-deep South. In a city, and I work in a hospital, so I think it’s pretty safe to say this is one of the more left leaning bubbles within a hundred miles. …and there are still a fuckton of Nazis here.
There are absolutely decent people trapped here, but we’re legit outnumbered. It isn’t just gerrymandering or some shitty system at fault: the majority of southerners are just fucking evil.
There’s always some thinly veiled excuse - “We don’t hate women, we just want to protect the babies!” “We don’t hate immigrants, we just want to protect our jobs!” “We don’t hate trans people, we just want to protect our bathrooms!” but when you hear them talk amongst themselves about those people it’s pretty clear they really do just hate them.
Most southerners are sincerely not good people.
yep. had a convo with a friend I’ve known since 2nd grade about why he would vote for a prezzo who vows to ban all muslims (half my family) he had no clear answer just sputtered that he didn’t think he’d actually do it. And if he did he’d protest it.
I told him to shove his fake concern up his ass and he blocked me on all media. These people veil their hatred and pretend we can’t tell.
There are absolutely decent people trapped here, but we’re legit outnumbered. It isn’t just gerrymandering or some shitty system at fault: the majority of southerners are just fucking evil.
This. I remember moving from a conservative area in a border state, to the South for a short time, and being absolutely floored by the things that were quite openly said and laughed about. And I was no wilting violet, I was already quite used to hearing vile shit.
“Every population is secretly filled with our allies!” is delusional.
“Exceptions to the rule” were so ingrained in every one when I lived in the south that it was impossible to have a decent conversation about anything.
My gay cousin is fine, but gay people…
My best friend from high school, who is black, is fine, but black people are…
My abortion was necessary but abortion at large is wrong…
My trans child needs gender affirming care but…
My Latino workers are upstanding people but Latinos are…
My EBT/Snap benefits are deserved but people on welfare…
My drug use is fine and doesn’t harm anyone but…
I mean, I know this is a general human trait, but it felt almost institutionalized to a point where people could say incredibly horrible shit about people and then deftly sidestep the contradiction when called out. It really did feel like being in a fever dream (and not from the crippling humidity and heat).
They do not consider their trans kid an exception to anything but the idea that parents should let their children live with them.
Oh God. In my border state conservative area, growing up, that was the constant refrain. I’m borderline having flashbacks, lmao
Apologies for the memories.
What really made my head spin was encountering the self-loathing types who would argue against their own interests. I recall listening to a man, who had lived with another man for about 20 years, tell me that gay marriage was wrong but that he wanted his partner, who was a few decades younger, to be taken care of when he eventually passed.
That was when I truly realized that something was wrong with everything.
As someone who relocated to the south after being born and raised outside the south, I can confirm that the majority of people here are truly fucking evil. This place is horrific.
I’m so sorry and thank you for sharing. I hope you can be a light to your community while also keeping safe and healthy. We’re with you homie ✊❤️
(edit: i came to an understanding with the person im responding to and i was not happy with how this comment was worded so deleting it because it wasn’t contributing)
I mean for sure it’s the entire country, with only depressingly slight variations in concentration one way or the other - but your image is about southerners specifically, so that’s what I addressed.
…and honestly, it scales up as high as you want to take it - for the most part, humans are just evil sacks of shit.
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There ya go. I fully agree with you here. 👍 Sending love to you as “one of the good ones.” (Sorry that sounds mean but I don’t know how to put it XD)
[Again apologies if my initial comment came off as abrasive. My entire post is a reaction to some crowds cheering on the recent tragedy in Texas and it’s clear now you are not anywhere near a part of that crowd and I misread the situation.]
No worries at all. Typing is a shitty medium for this kind of conversation: tone is mostly lost. I’m guilty all the time of making posts that sound 10x angrier than I intended. …or angry at all: usually I’m bouncing somewhere between numb, depressed, or caffeine-induced mania. I’m not really ever mad or aggressive; but then I’ll re-read a post I made the day prior and realize it comes off as absolutely pissed which is pretty much never the intention at the time of posting.
I do tend to use profanity pretty casually… maybe it’s that?
But yeah, when in doubt, read an internet-stranger’s post in the voice of Eeyore. Sometimes the words alone just don’t do the trick.
(Personally for me it was the “cousin fucking” language that gave me the wrong impression. Not to tone police, that’s just kind of how I got to where I was because that’s very common in circles that tend to do dehumanizing .)
With the victory of the current administration, you are applying a description of unequivocally the entire nation and relagating it only to those of the lowest income, those closest to historical slavery, and those with the fewest educational opportunities.
As another person who works in a hospital of one of the poorest and most conservative states in the union…I don’t think you really know what you are talking about.
First of all, there is no such thing as a basic definition of what makes up good people and bad people. You can be good to your family and your neighbors and be incredibly racist, bigoted, or just unempathetic towards anyone else outside your daily life.
What I notice about the South the most is the inability to be compassionate to anyone who isn’t right in front of them.
think if you engage more thoughtfully with historical realities you might begin to come to a different understanding.
Historical realities can negatively shape culture… What about the Souths history leads you to believe that most of southerners are “good people” and how exactly do you quantify good?
No offense, but do you live in the South? And if so…are you a person of color or another minority, because if not you may not be getting the full experience.
most of southerners are “good people”
Strawman, reread the entire post bud.Looks like they just misunderstood.“The south is full of good people” (verbatim quote from my post, objectively true, yes from my own experience and yes minorities) DOES NOT mean “most of southerners are good people” (verbatim YOUR bad-faith interpretation of my post).Feel free to try again but as a principle I don’t defend positions I never said in my life.Strawman, reread the entire post bud.
I think that’s a pedantic dispute considering you’ve made rebuttals against people claiming that good people were out numbered. Plus, what does “full of” even mean when it comes to judging the general morality of southern people? I think the generalization of the south being full of good people reads quite a bit differently than there are some good people in the South.
objectively true, yes from my own experience and yes minorities)
Generalities cannot be objectively true… Implying that something is full of good people implies a majority, as in a glass fullof milk, is not also full of water.
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sounds like a regional misunderstanding which you unintentionally misconstrued.
Maybe it’s a regional thing…but I don’t think I’m the only one who interpreted it that way.
But yeah, there are plenty of decent people in the South, I wouldn’t argue against that. I would argue it’s a smaller minority than in some of the other places I’ve lived though.
but I don’t think I’m the only one who interpreted it that way.
i recognize that! good to know for the future and i also put an edit to the OP to clarify
🤝
It probably sucks being trapped in a red state while having empathy.
Hopefully, enough of them gather and enact tangible change.
Otherwise nothing will change.
We try. We get shot & forgotten.
It definitely does suck very incredibly bad. I think there are things non-Southerners can do to help too of course but it’s more indirect.
Do explain how gerrymandering affects the presidential election. All votes are counted for the entire state.
I get that it affects local elections. That is obvious.
That’s actually easy.
The shape of the district gets decided based on the concentration of votes for one party. The goal is to make enough districts with enough concentration of your voters that you always win those districts, and make the rest of the state have few enough districts with enough of a mix of of voters for both parties that A) the for-sure districts can’t be lost and B) the not-for-sure districts can never oppose the for-sure districts as long as they remain under your party’s control.
So all the rigging party needs to do is campaign enough in the for-sure districts that they can’t lose, and campaign enough in the not-for-sure districts that their opponent can’t win. And then because of the Electoral College, all of the states votes go to the rigged party.
??? But as the OP said that’s not how Presidential elections work. Gerrymandering does not affect presidential elections at all.
As he already said, it affects local elections like Congressional districts.
*with the exception of Nebraska and Maine, who use proportional allocation of electoral votes based on districts.
Not proportional. FPTP per district.
Indirect influence versus direct consequence
Gerrymander secretary of state race
Geryrmander governor race
Gerrymander state Senate and house races
Pass disenfranchisement rules and laws
…?
ProfitRead a bit of the Kemp wiki and found this unrelated gem:
“Georgia was one of 14 states that used electronic voting machines that produced no paper record, which election integrity experts say left elections vulnerable to tampering and technical problems”
Well. I see no problems that could arise from that 😑
I mean, technically still not any gerrymandering in the presidential elections. Just making sure we understand what the word means. Otherwise we can extend the meaning to say something like: poverty leads to zoning of the empoverished which leads to gerrymandering. That doesn’t mean that poverty = gerrymandering
Reminder that most states, while the majority may have gone for one candidate or the other, were still mostly under a 60/40 split
The States with the most landslide victory for trump where all northern states, Wyoming, West Virginia, and North Dakota, and even those were just 70/30 splits.
Thats many people who did not want this president. The South is not some unanimous bloc
Sometimes seeing the numbers is the most meaningful! Even in a 70/30 state that’s still 3 in 10 people who didn’t ask for this—maybe more if, as is sometimes found, Democrats gain more votes when polls become more accessible.
Thanks for sharing!
I feel less sympathetic for many conservative states than this image would encourage, but even though gerrymandering doesn’t impact presidential elections directly it does impact state legislatures who then control the rules around presidential elections.
Every vote is counted, which is why there’s focus on voter suppression. If your legislature decides to make it harder to vote in liberal or more densely populated areas, voter turnout will naturally skew conservative. Same for shifting requirements to focus on criteria less often met by demographics that don’t support you, or changing the criteria for purging the voter registry and making it harder to register.The fact that Hillary Clinton can get nearly 3 million more votes and lose in 2016, and how Al Gore won the popular vote against George W. Bush in 2000 and somehow Florida, where the governor at the time was Jeb Bush, held significant power in deciding who the next president was going to be, is kinda fucked.
technically the electoral college and gerrymandering are not the same thing, but yeah i would honestly totally agree that the EC belongs in the list of oppressive forces in the meme (i stole the post otherwise i would edit it lol)
no one claimed gerrymandering affects presidential elections, not directly certainly. but local regressive policies and disenfranchisement also hurt oppressed people daily; that’s why all three are up there.
(one could make some pretty valid connections between local elections and lobbying money going towards national campaigns, so we can discuss that if you want but just to keep it accessible and evidence based for now)
Do explain how gerrymandering affects the presidential election. All votes are counted for the entire state.
Do explain how disenfranchisement works.
Also, if you don’t understand gerrymandering, here is a great article.
Different word, different meaning.
You can replace “south” with “US” and it’s just as true.
honestly very correct. someone else pointed out that even the worst of us states were only 70/30 maga.
call me a bleeding heart lib but i don’t celebrate the suffering of 10 people just because 7 of them asked for it. 🙃
The ones who voted for it, however…
I adovacte for their survival, recovery, repentance, and penance in proportion to the weight of their crimes.
Sounds reasonable.
That’s what we did after the Civil War, and look where that got us. 🤌🏼
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Thafuq are you on? Their “crimes” were downplayed and hardly anyone was executed for the endless list of subhuman behavior they only too gleefully perpetrated.
Whose crimes were downplayed?
either u are being sarcastic or u 180 degree misinterpreted my comment, we are saying the same thing? /confused
Food for thought. If youre a working adult youve invested in this country. You have every right to expect something in return. Like the expectation that your investment hasn’t been squandered for the purpose of evil.
i thought it was human nature for my paycheck to go to bomb apartment buildings several oceans away while my neighbors die of preventable diseases??? im confused
I solve this by not liking anyone anywhere.
that’s totally okay! this is the politics community not the “who do we like” community lol
I don’t care about the color of your skin, your gender identity, your sexual identity, your political identity, what country your from, or your legal status here, I hate all humans equally, I just want to be left alone.
<freeze frame>
Narrator: And that children was the prophet who taught us to hate equally and mind your damn business.
im a progressive because i want nazis to have healthcare
and im a liberal because i want them to need it
Since I can’t tell if OP is a fed or not, given by the moderation here, I’ll just repeat a famous quote by Reverend Charles Frederic Aked:
It has been said that for evil men to accomplish their purpose it is only necessary that good men should do nothing
Time to do something OP, evil neighbors need not to persist.
Busted 😆 I’m actually a fed, raking in thirty bucks a comment just to…
(checks notes) express solidarity with folks in deep red areas so they know they’re not alone out there.
(Checks notes) Are the evil neighbors gone?
covers suspiciously evil neighbors-shaped belly
no
i guess, but they voted for that too
the voting rights act was only in 1965. in a significant number of cases, no they did not
the 19th amendment was in 1920. in a significant number of cases, no they could not
it is demonstrably harder to vote if you are poor and harder to vote informedly if you are poor and uneducated all the way through 2025. no they did not vote for this.
thank you for proving exactly why this post needs to exist. class consciousness, not culture war.
Those examples are from 105 and 60 years ago.
There are ways to make the point you’re going for, but invoking legislation that old doesn’t do it.Am I sympathetic to people who are ignorant and so voted against their own interests? Sure, a bit. A lot of southerners would take issue with trying to defend them with cries of "don’t blame them, they’re too stupid to agree with me!” though.
Am I sympathetic to people who have been systematically disenfranchised and economically abandoned? Of course, I’m not a monster.The fact remains that a lot of people in red states earnestly believe in what they vote for. You can talk about class consciousness all you want, but the people fighting the culture doing so because of manipulation by the rich or powerful in a class war does fuck all to help the people loosing said culture war. I’m sure the suicidal trans kid takes great comfort that the people voting to make them illegal are just misled.
They’ve had every opportunity to inform themselves. Maybe eventually they’ll hurt themselves enough to stop fighting the culture war you don’t want others to fight.
60 years isn’t even close to life expectancy. so we are talking less than a lifetime ago. MLK’s daughter is alive, 62 years old (younger than most people in government) and posting on instagram about the same struggles her father fought.
plus did you even read the part about ongoing class disenfranchisement in 2025 (poor people being kept from voting)?
not even reading the rest of your comment since you couldn’t do the same for me. thanks for being such a genuine participant in this conversation.
I did actually read your comment, I just didn’t entirely agree with you you condescending ass.
MLKs daughter never voted without the civil rights act. You forgot to add 18 to the age someone would need to be to have voted before the act passed.
Most of the southern electorate is neither 78 or older, or even 60.
The point was that it’s not a convincing argument, not that someone isn’t alive who was impacted.I’m not sure what class disenfranchisement has to do with the part you’re angry about. Maybe if you actually read what I said you’d have seen where I mentioned it for the rest of the comment.
If you’re not even going to read what people say, you have no grounds to complain that people aren’t “being a genuine participant”.
thanks for the personal attack i guess lol you are so cool online wow so cool
still you act like 60 years is some kind of insurmountable gap in history and that’s so cringe. the echoes of slavery and native american genocide echo from before 1776 through today. MLK didn’t magically die and then fix every barrier Black people suffered in life. that’s pretty basic history lol.
I’m not sure what class disenfranchisement has to do with the part you’re angry about.
all of it you silly goose. disenfranchisement means “depriving someone of the right to vote.” when the poor are depreived of the right to vote (not directly by law, but indirectly by systemic barriers), it means shocker they don’t vote. this entire thread is in response to someone saying “i guess but they voted for that too.” that’s the context you butted into, i operate on the pretty fair premise that you knew that and read the thread. :)
Who said the lingering effects of slavery didn’t have an impact? You said the voting rights act and universal suffrage being recent meant that a lot of people in the south were disenfranchised before them, hence they couldn’t vote for the way things are. Most people in the south did not have their voting rights impacted by policy before those to effect because they weren’t alive.
That’s why I didn’t say systemic racism doesn’t exist, or that economic or political disenfranchisement doesn’t exist, I said that those aren’t compelling evidence to make the valid point you’re going for. I then proceeded to talk about other stuff related to your post, which you would know if you bothered to read instead of assuming that anyone that didn’t entirely agree with you must be disingenuous.hence they couldn’t vote for the way things are
and still can’t. voter repression still happens. in 2025. said it before. you ignored it. brought it back up again. you called me an ass. said it a third time, and you called me bad faith.
i gave a timeline of problems (A B C) and you ignored the most recent, most relevant, date in the timeline (C) three times. three times you ignored C. just to be clear. my point is C. the current ongoing crisis is C. C is the issue i am concerned about in making this entire post. C is proof that the progress of A and B has not come to fruition.
thank you for your time.
me: lists evidence of voter suppression in 1920, 1965, and today
you: THAT WAS OVER 60 YEARS AGO
me: i don’t think you saw the part where i said “today”
you: name calling
i love this website so much
Yeah, you’re not a good faith conversational actor. Go back and reread what I initially wrote. So far you’re responding more to being called an ass for being rude than to “ignoring a culture war means dead trans kids”.
yeah :( exactly. this conversation was about voting suppression and somehow you immediately jumped to the assumption that me recognizing that there’s an oppressed minority of good people (INCLUDING TRANS FOLKS BY THE WAY) who have by and large been kept from democratic self-determination through systemic forces means…
(shuffles chronically online internet argument deck)
that i want to ignore trans rights?
for the record, no, i believe the opposite. i believe that my trans neighbors (and family, fyi) in the south exist and are worthy of recognition and support, in spite of the voting bloc they are surrounded by and historically been kept from engaging with.
i hope this is informative and corrects your misconstruals. you are shadow boxing against a position that i don’t think anyone here has. feel free to ask any questions as i am willing to give the benefit of the doubt that this was an honest misunderstanding.
people are changing the gerrymandering lines at some regularity and those people and their changes are quite specifically put in place on purpose and the voters continue to go down that road because they want the result of having more voting power. so yeah, they voted for it
partially false, you rightfully fault government officials for allowing gerrymandering but voters are never given the choice. the majority of voters oppose gerrymandering.
U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said Saturday it was difficult for forecasters to predict just how much rain would fall. She said the Trump administration would make it a priority to upgrade National Weather Service technology used to deliver warnings.
Sure, Kristi. I’m sure you’ll say anything for headlines
During a news conference early Friday morning, Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly said he didn’t know why the camps hadn’t been evacuated, but that the county did not have an early warning system or outdoor sirens to alert people to flooding conditions.
“We’ve looked into it before … The public reeled at the cost,” Kelly said.
Democracy, but stupid people are making your voting decisions
i have no narrative or conclusion here, just sharing a thing i found, Kelly seems maybe to be lying?
there’s record of a system being installed here. very bare in details, but only a decade ago. seems like a system could last that long right? idk it’s past my bedtime
https://www.kens5.com/article/news/local/kerr-co-launches-emergency-alert-system/273-264106461
Kerr County said the National Emergency Notification system ‘CodeRED’ will deliver pre-recorded, emergency telephone messages to residents that sign up.
Those emergency alerts on phones would’ve also worked so this systems seems redundant. With the exception of traditional telephones, this wouldn’t be too useful.
I’m with you. I live in a red state in the north, in a small island of blue, but if I drive for a few minutes in any direction it’s trump signs & bigotry.
I feel like I’m surrounded by idiots. They’re bringing my state down with them. It’s horrifying.
Sending love ❤️ I truly hate to see would be-“progressives” laughing at the senseless deaths and violence just because some 30% of them voted a certain way.
It’s one of the ways that capital keeps the culture war lit, I find. Breed hatred and dehumanization for a people group while gleefully stripping that people group from self-determination at every opportunity.
I’m seeing a very ugly side around Lemmy the last couple of days. It’s nice to see posts like this!
If something is despicable when your adversary does it, then it is despicable when you do it.
We are not immune to propaganda! ❤️ It’s on all of us to help each other out, finding our blind spots.
It’s been around in related forms, for a while; the reactions to just any comment where someone points out or mentions eugenics usually are good ones (arguably, the argument that’s caught on around here that brain damage is literally conservativism is a great example of that general thinking and eugenics-adjacent (and ablism-directly!)).
Who’s laughing at senseless deaths? You mean people are laughing at the flood victims??
I saw some comment (since been removed by mods) about 'You get what you vote for!" on an article about the teenagers who got caught in the flood. Basically, liberal blue-maga behavior instead of leftist solidarity among us poors.
Yeah, I can’t stand that stuff. Like when Michael Moore was celebrating the Texas grid failures and the ice storm. I’m like, the whole reason I’m against traitor lunatic policies is because they are harmful.
The only time I’m down with “have the day you voted for” type thinking is when it’s a rich person losing their business or something.
It’s so sad. Voting age in the US is 18 for the record so even if we ignore the historic systemic voting barriers for older people and across generations, it’s also transparently malicious to blame teens, most of whom never voted once, for their deaths.
Hell even if they were an actual adult who very much voted the wrong way and fully drank the cool aid, death is not okay and seeing people online celebrate it because they’re “the bad guys” kinda makes me sick.
One of the reasons I got off reddit was any time a video from Ukraine came up the comments were just full of insults and jokes about the Russian soldier who died. And yeah, there is no redeeming qualities of Russia invading Ukraine and they could stop the war just as easily as they started it, but come on guys. That’s some guy, a guy who had family and friends and desires and dislikes and now he’s dying a slow and painful death in a field somewhere.
You can not like the “other side” but you gotta hold onto your humanity.
Truth! And, if my understanding of history and sources are correct, Russian citizenry had even less say in their government or precipitating invasion than the average American.
Russian elections are like, crazy rigged. I’m sure our president is jealous.
Yes. :( Fortunately the mods and general vibe here are okay but Instagram and Reddit are rife with it. Twitter is… even worse.
Just wanted to put some love and acknowledgement out there in the face of that insanity. :)
Hm. My guess is Indiana.
Since 2013 we’ve seen disenfranchisement in Alabama in real time. Require strict new voter id, then close the DMVs in black and left leaning areas. Combine polling places in democratic leaning areas so they are further away and have long lines. Move polling places so they are no longer accessible by bus. Those are just the obvious ones, but the Republicans’ strategy has been to do anything they can to stop people from voting.
i would love so hard some legislation that requires voting ids on contingency that independent local sources find that access to ids are hugely increased
which means it will never happen but hey a girl can dream
It’s clearly not full of them though. It’s full of human scum who do horrible shit on a daily basis and actively harm everyone in the process.
i think some people interpret “full of” differently and that’s a fair gripe to have with this post
as i said in the body text, feel free to swap in “has a lot of” if that’s more familiar language to you :)
Ah, if only the MAGAts could read.
Why? So they could say you wish liberal cuck?"
Correct me if I’m wrong, but it sounds like someone grunted those words into your mouth over and over and over so you could dribble them out after from the corners of that sycophantic, yearning smile, no? 🤷🏼♂️NM. My bad. Misread. 😜
Really fucking tired of hearing that excuse
It excuses nothing.
I can’t do shit about that in Pennsylvania. You’d think there would have been more an effort to disprove the allegations or fix the problems sometime between 1865 and now.
Guess what! People in the south frequently can’t do shit about it either. If you would like to blame this on the people who live there for not voting correctly, please explain to me what you think ‘gerrymandering’ and ‘disenfranchisement’ mean, and what the average person living in the south is supposed to do about this shit being greenlit by SCOTUS.
Both things can be true: vote manipulation measures and voters choosing horribly.
The victims of the vote manipulation aren’t a random accident, it’s mostly leaving Republican voters standing by design. If legislation swept through other states that put the same voting requirements and gerrymandered districts as a lot of southern states have in place, they would probably also start to become real Republican shitholes without anyone’s values or voting patterns changing.
I’m not sure what you mean but I still stand behind people having choice while also they’re being pushed to choose poorly.
And every time a city tries to do something good, the state steps in and stops it. This happens daily in Birmingham, Alabama where the state is constantly overturning things the city has passed or the state takes the ability away from the city.
They got guns, don’t they?
You are maybe being sardonic but you’re touching on a real poignant issue that’s worth investigating.
Notice how the NRA conveniently backs the oligarchic state? The average NRA member owns something like 17 guns. That is, they can afford 17 guns. NRA members are wealthy.
This is not an accident. Poverty has been weaponized to keep the majority-white, upper to middle class the ones that are armed, while the working class, the people of color, queer people, women, migrants, tend to be less armed and less able to organize.
Of course these are all trends, or tendencies, not hard and fast rules (plenty of Black or Queer Texans own guns), but on the whole, and especially in combination with a militarized, capital serving, police force it had a real dampening effect on ability to resist oppression.
There are rights organizations that work across state borders for these causes. Not trying to shame, just putting out there that there are outlets for your talents, time, money, or even just verbal support.
