Fizzzzle

It's sad to hear that. No one is above redemption.

They are people who have real problems. You don't get to decide their problems don't matter. Instead of making them feel victimized and villainized (and thus galvanizing their KKK bullshit), let them know that you actually give a shit about their problems. Give them a solution. Give them a reason to hope. Democrats haven't done that. Republicans run on a platform of "IMAGINE HOW WORSE IT WOULD BE UNDER BIDEN." Give them a "here's what we could do for you" platform and the Republicans would crumble. Democrats just haven't gotten the balls to go full on single payer health and other shit because they think it will lose them too many purple states.

you're talking about people who have spent Bush-Obama having no one even acknowledging they exist. These people swing elections, and they fucking matter. That's why I talk about actually giving a progressive plan to get these people to be motivated. Democrats just being like "yeah we're not republicans" isn't enough. Give these people something to hope for, an actual plan that they can latch onto, and you'll create a generation of liberal rednecks. Pretend they don't exist and they'll prop up the Republican minority simply from racism.

Try to convince them that appealing to their views on religion is just gaslighting them to ignore all of the views that make their lives worse. Just don't demonize them. They are people. Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden have never given a shit about rednecks. If they started giving speeches about how they would give medicare to their meemaw, they would have won every election in this century. Poor white people feel ignored, and it's because they are.

OH FUCK OFF YOU SHIT BROWN PERSON FUCK (I'm not actually racist at all, I just thought if i threw "brown person" in there it would have dramatic effect, I honestly have no predeliction towards any people of another race, it was solely for comedic effect, I'm not sure if it worked, though, sometimes my humor gets lost in translation, I think you're a wonderful human being. I just like to pretend to be an asshole sometimes, also I love Vagrant Story).

I mean, it's not wrong, and I would never argue that "LiB ElItEs GeT MoRe VoTeS!" You have one vote, they have one vote. Do you want to spend time putting them down or trying to educate them about why your ideas are better.

I voted for you.

Their votes matter just as much as yours.

Populism finds a base in ignorance and bad faith. Populism leads to fascism. We need to stop treating our people that feel disenfranchised like they're stupid hillbillies. I can tell you that there are a lot of rural americans who feel like "at least Trump is looking out for them" (even though he's not).

The point is Republicans are trying to play your emotions. YoU ThInK ThIS iS BaAd? IMAGINE HOW MUCH WORSE IT WOULD BE!!!!" Redneck americans absolutely have real concerns. They are absolutely ignored by the general elections. I guess I could say it like this... Redneck americans are being gaslit by things like abortion and the death penalty to get them to vote against their own interest on everything else. I suppose my point is that these are still people who are not being heard by the government, and they deserve to be heard. I kind of contradicted myself there. Ultimately rednecks are people, too. Their views don't matter less.

I don't know if you know this, but I come from a pretty white trash family. I may have grown up in Portland, but my mom's side of the family (my dad was an orphan, so that's a different story) comes from Ohio and West Virginia. It's easy to demonize them. Do you know what Trump does that the Democrats haven't done in years? Fucking acknowledge they exist. These are people that have been told that their way of life is fucked for the last couple decades, and Obama was basically like "fuck you guys, this just is what it is." Give the rural midwest an actual fucking plan for job growth and they will flock to the Democrats, I guarantee you. Keep pretending that everything is fine and the Republicans will keep winning like Bernie beat Hillary in 2016. Do you know why they vote for Trump? It's because Trump acknowledges their existence. Hillary called them "deplorables." They're not deplorables, you fucking shrew, they're people in desperate times who are trying to figure out how to pay rent.

*sober from hard drugs Again, I still drink. And I actually am a proponent of psilocybin as a medicine. Oh, and I also smoke cigarettes (why the fuck I still do that is beyond me, I think it has more to do with my ADHD than any kind of nicotine addiction) Cocaine is a fucking cancer, though. There is no situation where I think it did anything positive for my life. The parties are fun until they're not. My youngest brother is 17. I've started to try to "impart wisdom" to him. One of those pieces of wisdom is that I wish I never did cocaine. I fear that his take from my cocaine stories is "ThAt SouNdS FuN!!!" I try to be like "dude, I could have ended up dead or in prison any number of times." I guess there's really no getting through to youth.

Don't get me wrong, I still drink. And I actually haven't talked about it before, at least on here.

Dude.. cocaine is a hell of a drug. The only thing that got me to stop was having a moment where I just came to. There was just this moment where I kind of had a moment of clarity in my living room. I'm not sure if I was asleep or just blacked out. I just remember sitting in my living room, in a brief moment of clarity, surrounded by people who were fucked up. I remember realizing I was so fucked up I couldn't go to work (I was supposed to be at work in a couple hours, so I had to call in sick). I guess I thought that I always had everything under control. This was a wake up call that I didn't. I wish I could say that was the last time I did cocaine, but it's not. I got fired from that job (I wasn't the only one doing cocaine, we would start racking up lines in the kitchen as soon as the boss left), but it was the first time I thought in my head "what the fuck am I doing." I'm something close to two years clean form cocaine, except for when my mom died. I pretty much let anything up my nose that day.

Cocaine was such a staple of life for a few years. You know the saying "cocaine is a hell of a drug?" It's true. Everything seems reasonable when you're on cocaine. And it's a rabbit hole. No one likes to do cocaine alone, so once you start hanging out with people who do it, it's everywhere. I would get tipped at the bar in cocaine. The things I would get up to... One time I let one of my best friends (still one of me best friends, don't get the wrong idea) cum on my butt because we were high as shit. I got a job because I was a coke connect and the boss didn't have one. One time I ordered an 8-ball, forgot about it, so I ordered another 8-ball from someone else, then didn't have the cash to pay him. I was technically his boss at the time so he let it slide until I could pay him. Basically 2015-2018 was a wild time for me. And don't do cocaine.

Literally the worst. The best I can say is that you guys missed most of my cocaine years. I don't even want to imagine what I would have said on a semi-anonymous internet forum while twacked out on booger sugar at 4am on a Tuesday.

I will say, I absolutely voted democrat for the national elections.i happen to live in a state where (at least where I live) republican isn't an option. For down ballot things, I voted green party for a few things. Fuck democrats, fuck Joe Biden, fuck Kamala Harris, fuck the fucking fucks who pretend everything is fine. It's not fine (ironically I have a tattoo on my wrist that says "everything's fine"). I hope that if the democrats win, they realize they need to swing MORE left, not right. They can't keep running on "we're not as bad as them" or else we're fucked long term.

We need @Tofurkey to start the drama train rolling. IS SHE STILL WITH DGH? IS BEERHAM OKAY? (of course he's okay, he's a handsome skilled white man that probably has some salt and pepper growing in his beard, fuck you and your good looks you fuck) HOW HAVE HER FAKE BOOBS HELD UP?

Cat allergy gang. My girlfriend's cat is a sweetheart but I never even touch her unless I'm ready to wash my hands immediately after. Weirdly, in the last place I lived, my roommate had a cat that I was totally not allergic to. I'm not sure what the difference is.

I don't know why we fucking do this anymore.

I actually like Hayes. He was a decent president. But like, man... talk about a pyrrhic victory.

Hayes (1876) actually lost the popular vote AND the electoral vote (maybe, it was disputed), but the Democrats agreed to let the Republicans have it if they pulled federal troops from the south, effectively ending reconstruction and dooming the south to nearly a century of Jim Crow laws. I mean, I don't always know when something was fucked, but that was pretty fucked.

Can you imagine if the election of 1824 happened today? America at the time was essentially a one-party state. You had four candidates from the same party end up on the ticket (Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, and... someone else I can't remember), no one got a majority of votes and the election ended up being decided by the House of Representatives. They ended up choosing JQA, even though he got fewer votes than Jackson in the election. Basically everyone in the House agreed that Andrew Jackson was a cunt and didn't want him as president. Oddly, this created a scenario where Jackson was all but guaranteed to win the next election, which he did, quite handily. But he was still a cunt. I think Jackson would be Trump in this scenario. Jackson was a populist, racist, fuckface (he was like a hipster populist, he liked it before it was cool and it sounds better on vinyl), but the establishment dickheads conspired to keep him out, even though that is what the people voted for. But, by ignoring the will of the people, they all but guaranteed Jackson would win next time. I'm starting to feel that's how the Democrats are operating. They absolutely refuse to actually offer a progressive platform that people can actually believe in, and every time they do it they're just guaranteeing they'll keep losing. You can only run on a platform of "we're not Republicans" for so long, and they've been doing it since 2004. Republicans run on FEAR. THEY'RE COMING FOR YOU! THEY'RE TAKING YOUR JOBS! YOUR GUNS! YOUR DAUGHTERS! VOTE REPUBLICAN OR YOU'LL BE ASSFUCKED TO OBLIVION!!!!! That's powerful. That moves people. Democrats, so long as they refuse to adopt an actually progressive platform, are basically running on "we're not as racist as them." Like, get some fucking balls, man. Adopt a platform that actually inspires people and doesn't make people hold their nose while voting. #BernieWouldHaveWonIn2016

I would agree. I think that if the election is reeeeally close, Trump will try to drag it out and force it to the courts, but if it comes down to millions of votes, there won't be too much trouble. Early polling numbers almost certainly skew in favor of Biden, so we'll see how much of a surge Trump gets on election day.

I had this really strange moment where I thought "why does the white house need a wall around it?" and then I was like "oh yeah..." It was kind of a blissful moment.