Comment by [deleted] on 15/10/2018 at 03:44 UTC

I am equally glad that their personal senses of dignity and self worth will likely be decimated as well, adding the psychological anguish of hopelessness, worthlessness, and an inability to financially support their families to the physical pains of poverty.

You do realize that this scenario is a text-book breeding ground for extremism, right? Like, those miners aren't just going to suddenly disappear and everything will be better. And y*ou might* feel a few moments of satisfaction at their misfortune, but that pales in comparison to the negativity that is imbued into the society we all share as the result of that suffering. They will not suddenly realize that Trump and the GOP was lying to them, because they didn't realize it before when it was blatantly obvious, which has been the entirety of this nightmare. They will not suddenly have an epiphany that this is what they actually voted to have happen to others, or to themselves. They've likely been denied an education that would empower them to identify such a situation as 'poetic justice'. And when they get desperate enough, at least one will pick up a gun because they've grown up in an environment in which it is culturally understood that guns = power (and I'm talking America as a whole here, not just WV), and they'll have people like you on record calling them enemies and looking forward to their suffering. It won't even be propaganda, at this point (unless, of course, you are actually an agent provocateur, which is possible here on reddit but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt because I have no real evidence to point to that, other than the fact that you sound like the most spiteful liberal I've ever encountered).

But they likely won't find you. That would be too fitting for you two to just be able to lash your shared resentment-fueled dominance fantasy at each other. No, instead, they'll find some energetic young student that heads a liberal campus group who doesn't give a shit about taking political control, who is just sick of seeing their grandparents' friends families go thousands of dollars into debt for bills, sick of seeing their classmates fall to heroin, sick of seeing us break up families at the border, sick of us polluting the Earth and sick of our minds being polluted with lies and hatred. They'll be just what we probably agree this country needs, policy-wise, and our "enemy" the disenfranchised miner is at this point so far off the deep end after being continually accused as being responsible for climate change or racism or Donald fucking Trump that when they see this student walking door-to-door in his trailer park with voter registration forms, the guy goes and blows this kid's brains out thinking that the student represents some type of liberal Marxist conspiracy to overthrow the government and force multiculturalism on us in an effort to hijack the country away from the whites, or maybe thinks climate change is all a hoax (after being denied any real science class their entire life) and that this poor student either represents or is somehow actually responsible for (the difference really means nothing to people this far off the deep end) the miner's current employment status and future job prospects. Or any number of shit that they read on the internet and that not only validates their existence when everybody else blames them, but puts them to work in a very important capacity: as a soldier.

I'm all for holding fascists accountable for their actions, but in order to do that responsibly you must first be certain that whomever you are punishing was in fact responsible for a fascist act. That is what keeps the whole operation on the up-and-up morally. *That is the line between what you are and what fascists are.* What you are suggesting is that these people who have likely been robbed of a decent education, who have been "left behind" as their youths all either left home in search of better opportunity or got wrapped up in drugs, who have grown up in an area without many opportunities to see *anything* other than the life they and the 3000 people in their town live, to include anything that might be seen as liberal propaganda by everyone around them since the day they could process thought (which is a lot)... you want to see these people suffer for no other reason than to give you "sweet satisfaction".

We *know* that propaganda is dangerous because it makes it impossible to discern reality from fiction. Subjects of propaganda are *victims* of it. We know how effective it can be in making people see the world differently, and how it results in people making irrational decisions. We know it manufactures hate into previously (and in other ways continuously) loving people. We know it works especially well when people are isolated from the world around them. And until anybody actually commit a crime, they shouldn't be treated as criminals legally or morally (ie, they deserve the suffering they give). As far as I'm concerned (and I think it's a sober stance, given what we know about how conservative media has worked since Nixon and how consistent conservatives are with educational funding or a lack thereof) their power as voters has essentially been hijacked by the GOP and its entire apparatus. The fault lies not with our fellow citizens, but with the people who have molded them into who they are through decades of propaganda, philosophical indoctrination, economic manipulation, and educational suppression. You know, the same people who have a history of voter suppression and gerrymandering in an effort to disenfranchise the voters that they cannot control through ideology.

Those are the people who should be held accountable for the state of our country, not the poor people who had the bad luck of being born and raised in coal country without the means to escape. All this shit about you wanting to see these people suffer only betrays your ability to oversee basic human decency in the name of petty vengeance, at the risk of costing who knows what. I don't know how you've personally been affected by the current state of affairs, and it's quite reasonable for *a lot* of people from all sorts of backgrounds to be extremely angry at the situation in general, but understand that your words matter. You know how many people read these comments? This shit is visible for a majority of the world. Most won't stumble into this thread, but there's a ton of people whose perception of what constitutes America (to both foreigners and people here), liberals, Democrats, etc... is being shaped by the sentiment in these comments. As a liberal who gets agitated when conservatives that I know are good people with good hearts don't call out their party leaders and co-conservatives on what are clearly literal open mockeries of anything that resembles what might have maybe once been in contact with something that can be loosely associated with 'ethics', please unfuck your heart. You aren't doing any American a favor by calling other Americans enemies simply for voting a certain way. That shit fuels extremism and leads to terror attacks and possibly civil war. I don't know if you've ever actually seen a war, but I have, and I'll be god-fucked if I'm going to let someone who I feel knows enough (or should know enough, if we are holding you to the same standard as you hold these miners) about the current state of things to know that one of Putin's primary objectives is to fracture American trust in itself call their fellow people "enemies" without it at least making it known directly below that the stance and rhetoric you're using right now is certified 100% your own childish response to anger and not any kind of reasonable, productive, mature, and/or responsible way to deal with what I agree is at its core a righteous anger.

Redirect it at the people responsible for creating bad policy and distributing propaganda. Get out and vote. Go out and try to inform people about the lies that the GOP spreads without second thought. Talk to your conservative family members. Use what I call the 'Scout Finch' approach: highlight the good parts of their personalities, and once you assure them that you agree that they are innately good, have them try to reconcile those good parts of them with their support of generally bad things. It won't work on all of them, but even if you talk to 100 people and you can only convince 1, it's worth it. The reality is that we're gonna need to put in effort if we want the next 25 years to look anything like it does today, especially if we want any change to be improvements on things like our systems of democracy and justice. The propagandists sure haven't slept a wink in the past few decades, and just calling people "enemy scum" in an undeclared crypto Civil War II for voting a certain way is just giving up on what we've all come to agree are the sacred virtues of this whole American experiment: freedom of voice, equality democracy, and justice, and is doing so in the name of a short-term personal victory at the expense of the nation's claim to those virtues.

Comment by johnchapel at 15/10/2018 at 18:50 UTC

7 upvotes, 1 direct replies

Hey I wonder why America isn't aligned with you guys anymore. At the end of the day, do you guys just consistently forget that to accomplish anything, you actually need voters, and voters don't like assholes who point and laugh at their misfortune?

God, you guys are the best thing to happen to republicans since the Cold War.

Comment by [deleted] at 15/10/2018 at 21:05 UTC

3 upvotes, 1 direct replies

The party of love and tolerance right here everyone lol

Comment by [deleted] at 15/10/2018 at 20:14 UTC

2 upvotes, 1 direct replies

the left's message folks...we hope people lose their jobs

Comment by [deleted] at 15/10/2018 at 20:21 UTC

5 upvotes, 1 direct replies

"I am so fucking glad these untermensch lost their jobs and are now struggling"

HoW COuLd TruMp HaVe WoN???

Comment by [deleted] at 16/10/2018 at 16:26 UTC

1 upvotes, 1 direct replies

You should turn off your TV and see a shrink.

Comment by john2kxx at 16/10/2018 at 01:03 UTC

0 upvotes, 1 direct replies

This is disturbing, spiteful, and it deserves to be seen by more people, so I'm glad it's making the rounds.

This comment is everything that people find disgusting about the left. Elitist, bitter, and spiteful. I hope extreme progressives continue to flush themselves down the toilet.