Even in the dystopian world of The Hunger Games District 12 is widely considered the shittiest place to live.
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I can just imagine the angry groups of people railing against the automobile, when their job of cleaning up tons of horse shit was disapearing.
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Things are really weird when Schwarzennegger starts making sense.
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“Indeed I am Trump, one might almost say. Trump as he should have been”
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You know, I never thought about it that way.
https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Great-Horse-Manure-Crisis-of-1894/
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I’m honestly surprised he’s still trying to do something to shore up coal, after his initial efforts - I figure he would have declared victory (actually, I guess he did) and leave it at that, like with most other things. Instead he’s decided to really screw them over - by the time the total collapse comes, it’ll come that much more quickly, and coal industry workers and the region as a whole will have done nothing to prepare for it. (If we’re lucky, just in time for a Democrat to come into office and get blamed for it.)
Even that’s not true - if, when we talk about “coal,” we’re actually talking about “coal jobs” (which I think we often are). If you compare your chart, which shows peak coal industry employment in 1923, to charts showing coal production, peak demand actually occurred decades later. That is, in the early '20s a tipping point was reached where automation meant that the number of workers needed was decoupled from the amount of coal that was produced; greater demand actually resulted in fewer workers. Trump, ironically, made that worse with his deregulatory efforts - allowing environmentally destructive practices like mountaintop removal means that they need fewer workers to produce more coal.
So yeah, creating a new market would increase coal company profits, but do little to nothing (or worse) for all those workers who voted for him.
Given the almost total support Trump has in the Republican party, and the extreme lengths to which his supporters go in order to deny reality and defend him, I think the argument that there’s no point in even trying to reach them has a lot of merit. For a variety of reasons, Trump’s support is impervious to argument or evidence. Witness Trump supporters at the Harley Davidson factory who are getting laid off entirely due to Trump’s tariff tiff - they still support him and his policies. The very act of attacking Trump, however politely, causes them to reflexively defend him, even if they had previously been thinking that what Trump was doing was kind of dumb.
Yeah, there are more yoga instructors. But, you know, coal mine owners have a lot of money and the president’s ear.
The thing is, it’s not just coal miners - coal mining is highly regional, and the whole community is reliant, indirectly, on those jobs. Often there’s no community without them, ultimately. All Trump is doing is giving people false hope about a future that looked like the past, so no one will be prepared for what’s to come. There won’t be any industries looking to move to an area with untrained workers and severe pollution, so there’s no hope. Things are bad there now, but they’re going to get so much worse.
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Get to the common-sense choppah!
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Say what you will about the tenets of Trumpism, at least it’s an ethos…
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It’s shocking to me that I would rather have Ahnold as president.
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looks like arnie will take a tumble before goes and gets right back up… again
He’s also against gerrymandering.
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For the coal miners who are left, mining is a pretty good middle class living in the semi-rural places where they live. What you’ve got here is a bunch of jobs which
- are unionized
- pay enough to raise a family and own a home and a decent car or truck
- require only a high school education
and the Democrats are basically saying to them “your productive lives are gonna be over, and as a nation we need to hurry that along. So sad…”
So there is really no need to say
because they’ve already gotten that message, loud and clear.
It’s true that coal has to go. But expecting the miners and mining communities to vote that way is really, really stupid.
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hmm… he’s gotta help to coal industry at least a little… I mean, I need my New Haven pizza…
Certainly if your attempts to reach them are resulting in them denying reality and doubling down and you don’t know how to make that stop happening, you should stop talking. That’s just good strategy; don’t fall prey to motivated (un)reasoning.
I would argue, though, that he has less support from the party rank and file than you think. If your approach is to refer to the President contemptuously or point out his failings, that’s self defeating, you will lose them, you will harden them in their support for him. But I’ve had some success talking to Trump voters, personally, and I use methods very similar to Mr. Schwarzenegger’s.
There are some Trump voters who are bigots in the true, happy-to-join-in-a-lynching sense, and I don’t think there is much to be done there.
But there are a lot of other Trump voters who are bigots in the “occasionally say something that might get you suspended from boingboing” sense. Not quite the same thing, and reachable.
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It’s not just the US. Michael Gove said something I agreed with the other day, for fucks sake.
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It’s all they’ve ever done, and all they know how to do. They have no other skills. The ones with skills and/or money, and/or incentive, have already moved to California.
On a tangent, all these stories about small towns in West Virginia/Pennsylvania/Ohio where everyone is unemployed and on opioids, keep in mind that these are the worst of the worst in these towns. For the most part, the good folks have seen the future and moved to where it is. For the most part.
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Nor do they want any other skills, apparently.
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I’m not speaking personally here. (I know better than to talk to Trump supporters.) I’m talking about polls that show ever-increasing Republican support for Trump - now at 90% - including his most heinous policies. That simply reporting on what he’s done results in angry defenses by supporters. I’m talking about polls that show huge shifts in the accepted reality of his supporters because they uncritically buy into what he and right wing media say, even if it’s the opposite of a position they held a few years ago.
That literally precludes any kind of fact-based discussion of Trump. Schwarzenegger is pointing out his failings. But you’re right - Trump supporters don’t want to hear that.
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