They're not unsalvagable, but they won't be the vanguard either. They will come when the tide starts to turn, so efforts need to be put at tide turning. Expect local efforts. Local efforts are critical everywhere.
this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2025
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People can forget that when it comes to the South, this is a real old front.
We're tired, and all this ride or die republicanism is because we're still here. We need the help
My opinion is that we are all people and the southerners have been steeped in racist and capitalist propaganda for a very long time. Their media environment is turning them racist and afraid to the point where the effort needs to turn them around would be extreme. We don't need to abandon our Southern brothers and sisters, but one we get power we should begin reconstruction reeducation. And just accept that a lot of them are too far gone for saving.
Those regressive polices many wright off the south for exist in the rest of the country, but in different forms better suited to the context of the area. They come across as particularly brutal and overt to other areas simply because they’re not tailored to be hidden from them.
As someone living in the heart of South Louisiana.
The Southern States are lost and we need to focus on trying to get people out instead of trying to change the minds of a bunch of xenophobic hicks.
I'm 100% for breaking up the union and expelling the Republican states.
I am 100% against giving Republicans political sovereignty and adjacent territory.
We don't need to be changing the minds of xenophobic fucks but we do need to take their political power. Red state governments can and will cause problems for you no matter where you live.
Idc I'm not American I just want you guys to collapse so each state is its own country and maybe have a European union style relationship with each other so that y'all stop being so internationally inflammatory. Stg the main reason for considering learning a language other than English is to enter a conversation that defaults to excluding Americans.
That would just multiply the amount of inflammatory incidents we would start by fifty
People who cheer when southern kids die in a natural disaster because it will hurt their parents, who might have voted Trump: why won’t these stupid fucks vote for my team?
They vote for Trump to own the libs. Dont make it more complicated than it is.
People do that? That is insanely sad and nonempatheic.
No, it's hyperbolic misrepresenting of a generalized statement as being all-encompassing instead of understanding that exceptions to the statement exist.
"You get what you voted for" is obviously directed at those who voted for Trump, not the children or those who voted otherwise.
Unfortunately, people are prone to tie their identity to arbitrary concepts, so when people say things like "People from [Insert State here] get what they voted for", they take offense at having something they identify with be associated with something they don't approve of instead of understanding that they aren't the people being mentioned by the statement.
Bruh just this MORNING, on Lemmy, under an article about Kerrville rejecting emergency management funding from the Biden admin, there was this comment:
"Children of Republican parents grow up to become Republican voters"
YES it was in context with the Camp Mystic deaths. YES it had upvotes.
And it was so fucking disgusting to see.
"You get what you voted for" is still a horrendously fucking ghoulish thing to say in the aftermath of a natural disaster. Even with all your piss poor excuses. Be better.
I'm not from that area. I'm not a Republican. I'm a grown ass adult and parent voting Democrat, living in a blue state. My frustration with this shit ass take has nothing to do with "misunderstanding the target". You, and others saying this shit right now, are being shit human beings.
Are we going to argue that Obama drone striking civilians in the Middle East, or the absurd expansion of the surveillance state under his watch also falls under "get what you voted for"? What about Trump's "drain the swamp" that clearly didn't happen? The point being that politicians lie, gerrymander, and do all sorts of other bullshit that makes things more complicated than "vote for right person, experience no hardships or problems ever".
Are we going to pretend that Republicans winning in that area somehow means that every single adult living there voted Republican?
Go get your scope zeroed in properly. Go after the politicians directly responsible for this mess, not the poor fucks dealing with the aftermath and dead children.
Because what a lot of people read when you say "You get what you voted for" is "dead children are a cause for gloating when it happens in a Republican controlled area". It's explicitly what you folks are doing, so stop pretending you mean anything fucking respectable.
This wasn't a common talking point/repeated phrase (sentiment showed up from time to time, but this specific phrase? No) in these conversations until these kids died. So this "we're not gloating about dead kids" shit doesn't ring true to a lot of people.
Don't bother with your mental gymnastics to try and excuse your shit on my account. I've heard it all already and it doesn't make what you all are doing ok.
Sadly yes, I kept running into it on Lemmy in the immediate aftermath of the Texas floods. I wish it was hyperbole, but if you look in threads about any natural disaster in southern states before mods do clean up it’s all ‘get what you voted for’, like children and people who voted for what you wanted (or even can’t legally vote!) aren’t also dying.
Not even just natural disasters, either. I've seen people(across the 'net and, sadly, in person) lump Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama together like we all voted the exact same way, like it's our faults that laws and restrictions get made.
So many of us have fought, tried changing minds, voted in our own favor, fucking tried, and guess what we got? Told it's our faults. Told by our "leaders" that we're practically better off dead in their eyes. Watched them fight to make us as miserable as possible, every way they can, and have had to etch our own niches wherever we can.
It's absolutely demoralizing. People on both sides want to keep screaming you're doing it wrong when all we're trying to do at this point is fucking survive long enough to maybe get to smile once as ourselves before we die.
I get where you're coming from and it's probably one of the biggest things that alienates me from the left.
Don't get me wrong, I still vote for and support leftist policies, but I personally find many of the people who also vote for leftist policies to just be generally terrible people when you put them into a group.
For some reason they tend to go crabs in a bucket and start hating on and shitting on everything and only really rejoicing when people on the right suffer, And while I can comprehend why that happens, I can't ally myself with that portion of the left.
For me, the most annoying thing is when something gets a little bit better.
Inevitably, a leftist will pop out and complain how it's not perfect, how it's not good enough, and how stupid it is. It's the most annoying thing on the planet.
When things got better, and things are on the mend, like, celebrate the successes, fuck.
I’ve wanted to do an effort post on this but I’m both unsure of where to put it and not sure I have enough coherent thoughts to justify it. But to me it comes off like a lot of the people you’re describing are either young (grew up under the prosperity and social acceptance of the Obama admin) or have never lived in a conservative area. They have no real metric for what trying to get the vote out and get people registered is actually like in an area where you’re up against a Good Ol’ Boy network that goes back over a century and hamstrung at every corner by gerrymandering, regressive laws, and sometimes the actual state government just straight up overturning whatever you voted into law.
I can only hope it’s that they are deeply ignorant of the realities of it, because the alternative is that they swallow the just world fallacy hook, line, and sinker; ‘my state isn’t Republican because we’re morally superior, their state is Republican because they’re inferior and deserve what happens to them.’
And because of having never had to confront or fight the way these Republicans are now operating at the national level, they have no idea how to deal with it. They have never had to, on a social and political level, hunker down and endure. They have no idea how to deal with despair and grief or to find joy and calm when everything sucks. And if you stay like that for too long, it will kill you.
Exactly: Things got worse slowly, then quickly. Why can't they get better that way too?
Exactly: Things got worse slowly, then quickly. Why can't they get better that way too?
They do.
Look at the rise of gay rights. It happened very slowly, then suddenly. Now most Republicans accept gay people’s existence.
The thing is, there’s never not something to progress on. We can always improve society. And the people trying to hold that back will always fight back. So it sometimes feels like we don’t make progress.
But we absolutely make progress. It isn’t always smooth, it isn’t always consistent, but lots of hard data shows human existence getting better. Millions fewer children died in 2024 than in 1984. A smaller percentage of humans starved to death. A smaller percentage of humans died of treatable diseases.
Don’t let despair take you. Keep fighting, and society marches on.
Because a lot of people do not share the same criteria for what counts as "getting better".
The state apparatus making concessions to the working class while failing to restructure ownership over the means of production, essentially keeping them reliant to the system that is exploiting them and thus complacent to the demands of the owning class less they risk losing what little they have, is not what a leftist would call "progress"
A slave is still a slave even in a gilded cage.
Because nobody's killing the bastards making them worse.
Edit: and they can't/won't be negotiated with.
I won't say the left doesnt, but that's more a lib thing.
If you know what I'm talking about then the specific (left/liberal/whatever) label isn't as important. It's that group of people who have a general idea that things should be fair and equal for everyone but have clearly defined groups of people that are more equal than others.
Its those people who treat middle aged and older white guys like shit online and cheer when bad things happen to them as soon as they find out they are wealthy or republican. They laugh when a person gets deported because their spouse voted for trump. They dogpile on the shitty comments and hateful rhetoric as soon as someone says something that identifies that person as not being in line with the current politic and cheer when well intentioned potential allies who made an oopsie get destroyed.
I get it, it's revenge, its personal outrage with a good reason leaking out of people who have been hurt, but it's too indiscriminate and unable to attempt communication before condemnation.
Like the outrage over Hilary Clinton calling trump supporters a basket of deplorables. They are, and I hate them, each and every one of them, with a passion. I would gladly watch them all drown knowing that I am in arms reach to save them like a Phil Collins song.
But... Hillary did not have the communication skills, the charisma, the charm, or the backing of the people to pull that off in a meaningful way. She hit a hornets nest with a stick when she should have left it alone. Now, 10 years later they still proudly call themselves deplorable and intentionally do deplorable things in part because they have accepted the moniker.
Hillary didn't cause the problem, but she gave it a name and a banner and a rallying cry from a position of untouchable smugness with a personal feeling of superiority and we have been paying for that one sentence for a decade now with no sign of it stopping.
This is beside your very well made point, but: I avoid using the word “deplorable” specifically because of the connotation Hillary gave it.
It does a bit? I havent seen a lib who doesnt do it, tankies are pretty divided. Trots are overwhelmingly not into it, anarchists and democratic socialista will someti-
Oh i thought you were talking about hating on innocent people because of where they live, not the guilty or their intimates. Like celebrating a maggot's wife behing deported, even if you're sad for the lady who got disappeared to a federal rape dungeon.
hilary clinton
Okay i need to read further to know if I'm gonna laugh or be outraged, but those are the only reasonable responses to her. Looks like cringe. My fault; forgot about cringe.
Yeah, fuck those guys.
If you’re celebrating mass death you are a problem full stop.
"They chose this"
Ah yes, the drowned children and the women carrying ectopic embryos and the detainees all down to a man chose this by voting. Sure.
There's an empathy shortage on this planet and its gonna drive us extinct. People on this site delight in the suffering of faceless unknown Americans like my grandparents delighting in Christendom's pillaging of the heathen Middle Eastern countries because "they chose wrong," that choice being non Christian and non-white.
Yeah, folks need to remember collective punishment is a war crime for a reason.
Agreed. The generalized FAFO needs to stop. Only 20% of Texans voted for Trump. Natural disasters don’t discriminate.
Only 20% of Texans voted for Trump.
17.5 million people can potentially vote in Texas.
6.3 million voted Trump.
4.8 million voted against Trump.
Leaving 6.4 million who are fine with Trump.
So, 12.7 out of 17.5 are either supporters or totally OK with it. That's 73% who didn't want to oppose this.
That still doesn't mean the other 1 in 4 deserves this, of course. But the "20%" number is bullshit.
Leaving 6.4 million who are fine with Trump.
Fucking incredible that nobody in Texas had their vote suppressed. 🙄
Texans means people of Texas, which is ~31.3M. Natural disasters don’t care if you’re a registered voter.
At this point I'm just hoping for reduced federal influence over blue states and measures to help out refugees from the places whose own state governments are working against them.
My only problem with the point this image is making, is that it doesn't matter if we are supportive or dismissive.
They're still, as a whole, as a group, going to be terrible people.
Compassion fatigue is a real thing, and while I don't want anything bad to happen to anyone, you can only save somebody from themselves so many times before you realize they're going to do bad things and nothing can stop them.
I don’t think we’re responsible for anywhere near enough compassion to be fatigued by it
Fuck this.
Let's be real bare bones about this.
In Tennessee, 2 million people voted for Trump.
1 million voted for Harris.
The vibe is, "Those 1 million people can't fix their situation so they should be just as fucked as the other 2."
And that's wrong. It's wrong to condemn whole swaths of humanity based on where they live, but even if you're dick enough to say "FAFO" when real humans suffer, you shouldn't be willing to throw your own allies under the bus based on arbitrary lines on the ground.
And I'm a first responder, don't talk to me about compassion fatigue, it's not an excuse not to help someone who needs it.
I hear you. But if you are a medical professional then you must also know about the concept of Triage.
Agreed, they are people just like us. They have been turned so racist that they vote against their own interests. It wasn't their choice to be turned racist, but now that they are, there isn't much we can do. You can't use logic move them from a position they didn't use logic to get to.
The vibe is, "Those 1 million people can't fix their situation so they should be just as fucked as the other 2."
No, the vibe is that the population literally chose to do this to themselves. Which is true. 2 million Trump voters and 1.5 million nonvoters all decided this was something they were cool with. And now it's happening. It sucks for the ~20% who did oppose this, but the overwhelming majority literally were fine with this.
it's not an excuse not to help someone who needs it.
And how should you be helped? Because you literally can only help yourselves.
and 1.5 million nonvoters
Remember when Georgia unexpectedly voted Biden in 2020? Turns out the South has a whole hell of a lot of voter suppression going on.
I want to add that these people usually vote R because they're told it's the right thing to do, not because they actually understand what they're voting for or against. When asked about policy, they generally agree with leftist policies. If we get the chance to show them that leftist policies actually work and what they are, we may stand a chance to change their minds.
That's why I think the NYC mayoral election is pretty important. If he's elected he can actually do good things that Democrats and Republicans have told people to be scared of. He can show that people have been lied to and it's actually good. The problem will be getting this information to the uninformed voters. They'll hear about it, but it'll mostly only be that it's bad, actually, and they won't hear about the victories.
Here's an idea: focus your attention on your community. Join an organization and build coalitions locally. Do the work to improve the material conditions of those around you, acting in good faith with solidarity toward your neighbors.
Then, when you've realized how inane and pointless it is to generalize about populations numbering into the millions, mind your own fucking business and quit wishing ill on people you will never meet. Compassion fatigue is your problem, and calling the population of an entire state terrible is just bullshit no matter which way you cut it.
We don't need your kindness, we don't need saving, we need cooperation and community. If that's not in your wheelhouse, then keep to yourself.
Signed, a "terrible" floridian who's fed up with dipshit northerners telling me that I deserve to die in a hurricane because my governor sucks.
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I've written off the entire states as unsalvageable (unless broken up) as someone from the northern Provinces
My neighborhood is better because of street tacos and public transit and little/no pedophilia.
Craft breweries and brick oven pizzas have nothing to do with it.
Your bbq is lovely, but street tacos are better.
I will stuff my face with pizza and wash these tears down with a cold one