Do you know any poor white people?

[James Bond 007]

Everyone knows poor people of all races. It's not something to use in politics.

[James Bond 007]

I'm related to some. Accidentally voted no.

I like your picture.  What all does it entail?

[James Bond 007]

Oh God, I hate these comments and the poor white-hating done.

Yes, absolutely.  This is plain ignorance.  This is why Democrats have no hope of winning West Virginia.  This is why Matt Bevin is governor of Kentucky.  This is what is the matter with Kansas.  This is why George W. Bush won in 2000.   

The fact that someone calls themself a "progressive" would make fun of Appalachians the way people in this thread did is pretty amusing.  It goes to show how tribalistic much of our politics is.

Yes it's like the so called "tolerance" crowd who tolerates everything until someone disagrees with them. Democrats doing this and name calling should be ashamed.

[James Bond 007]

I see this forum's oddly specific boner for poor white Appalachian "populist" men (but not really populist, just generic right wingers) and making them "see the light"/vote Democratic is alive and well. Some things never change I guess.

What do you mean?

[James Bond 007]

Oh God, I hate these comments and the poor white-hating done.

Yes, absolutely.  This is plain ignorance.  This is why Democrats have no hope of winning West Virginia.  This is why Matt Bevin is governor of Kentucky.  This is what is the matter with Kansas.  This is why George W. Bush won in 2000.   

The fact that someone calls themself a "progressive" would make fun of Appalachians the way people in this thread did is pretty amusing.  It goes to show how tribalistic much of our politics is.

Yes it's like the so called "tolerance" crowd who tolerates everything until someone disagrees with them. Democrats doing this and name calling should be ashamed.

I had to grow up around this.  NPR and MSNBC were the news 24/7.  Poor whites who voted Republican were "those stupid, stupid people", "the Republicans have lied to them so much that they vote against their own interests and don't even realize it", "there are just a lot of bigoted, backwards people in this world" and other such things.

I'm sorry to hear you had such a childhood.  May I ask how you saw the light and weren't scarred for life?  It sounds like you came around to realize rhetoric for what it is my good friend.

[James Bond 007]

I see this forum's oddly specific boner for poor white Appalachian "populist" men (but not really populist, just generic right wingers) and making them "see the light"/vote Democratic is alive and well. Some things never change I guess.

What do you mean?

I see you're new here. Many of the lefties/Democrats on this forum have some odd fascination with poor white Appalachian men, and are desperate to get them to vote Democratic by any means necessary. It's quite an odd phenomenon. As I said earlier, it would be like the GOP constantly pining for the days when Vermont was a red state. Granted, we do have a few of those here, but not anywhere near the scale of the former. Times have changed and coalitions have changed, get over it already. The GOP already has.

Also, per Atlas leftie rules, poor white Appalachian men are the only people immune from criticism and should be treated with the utmost respect. But you can bash blacks all you want for voting for the she-devil, and are free to hold positions viewing gays and illegal immigrants as less than human. That's just respectful political disagreement after all.

You mean we have to tolerate everyone except those who don't see their ways and if someone doesn't see their ways, then they should be humiliated.  There's more to voting than whoever is going to "do a better job" for the economy too.  I think their stance on guns for the past 25 years has really hurt them and that's broken a connection they once had with the Appalachian region.  Unions are also much less significant.  Parties and issues have certainly changed since then. 

[James Bond 007]

Oh God, I hate these comments and the poor white-hating done.

Yes, absolutely.  This is plain ignorance.  This is why Democrats have no hope of winning West Virginia.  This is why Matt Bevin is governor of Kentucky.  This is what is the matter with Kansas.  This is why George W. Bush won in 2000.   

The fact that someone calls themself a "progressive" would make fun of Appalachians the way people in this thread did is pretty amusing.  It goes to show how tribalistic much of our politics is.

Yes it's like the so called "tolerance" crowd who tolerates everything until someone disagrees with them. Democrats doing this and name calling should be ashamed.

I had to grow up around this.  NPR and MSNBC were the news 24/7.  Poor whites who voted Republican were "those stupid, stupid people", "the Republicans have lied to them so much that they vote against their own interests and don't even realize it", "there are just a lot of bigoted, backwards people in this world" and other such things.

I'm sorry to hear you had such a childhood.  May I ask how you saw the light and weren't scarred for life?  It sounds like you came around to realize rhetoric for what it is my good friend.

If you're being serious, it was all the identity politics that really turned me off from the left as a group or personal identity (I always questioned individual foreign and domestic policies and tuned out extreme rhetoric).  The left started going deep into "Republicans are racist, sexist, homophobes, whereas we democrats will agree to whatever any activist group promoting race/sex/LGBT issues demands of us" in 2012.  I started noticing, for example, that The Daily Show wasn't making fun of racist hicks in Mississippi or the Westboro Baptist Church anymore, it was making dishonest arguments against normal people or blowing up non-issues to try to burn down a strawman.  People were posting things from Salon or other left-wing sites on my Facebook feed that were totally misleading or attacked me (mostly as "doomed to ignorance") just for being a straight white man.  I ran two public-speaking-related organizations on campus and in 2013 freshmen started coming in who would try to make these ridiculous, dramatic arguments about how they were shaken to their core by some man at the grocery store who said "work hard, play hard, that's the American way" (I remember this speech vividly) or other such things (they weren't called "microaggressions" yet).

After a while, anything I heard out of left-wing sources I automatically started to reject, and I started seeing things from the other side's perspective.  Sometimes I found myself agreeing with the right on issues, other times I would reject the left initially, think about it a while, and then find myself agreeing with the left.  For the most part my positions on issues I've put thought into never changed, only my perspective and the way I took the positions of the democratic party for granted.

I can't agree with you more on liberal sites, how Democrats are a rubber stamp for any group that votes for them, and that white men are attacked just for our race and gender unless we're gay.  It's making America a more dangerous place like your campus of freshmen know it alls.

[James Bond 007]

I know white people with rats all over their house.  In fact there's trash and dog crap everywhere too.  One time I visited and the dog peed upstairs and it dripped onto me when I walked in.  Their pipes are frozen at times in the winter even when they let the faucets drip.  It constantly smells like cigarettes and weed.  There's no insulation either so they run their furnace non-stop in the winter just to keep it 55 degrees inside.  In fact they had to sell their son's Scooby Doo movies just to be able to afford cigarettes.  Their washer works but their dryer is broken so they have to hand their clothes all over the railing of the stairs.  This makes their house smell even worse.   There was another time I came over to help them drain their tub.  For 6 months straight, they had to empty it with a bucket because their drain was clogged.  Finally their landlord fixed it by digging up their son's room and pulling out a hairball the size of a basketball.  It makes sense too because one of their mothers began staying there.  She's hairy and shaved in their shower a lot. Around the time it clogged she moved in there along with one of their brothers, a homeless guy who knew the mother, a dealer from a few blocks over, his girlfriend, and her son.  Most of the time if I visited for dinner, I'd politely offer to bring things because they didn't have much food due to the fact they spent almost all of their food stamps on weed.  Perhaps the worst was when the girl cheated on the guy every night and would come home late leaving him to look after her son while she hooked up with a guy from work and did dusters.  When she got home he screamed at her and squeezed the head of one of the rats until its brains popped out and told her she's next if it happens again.  Weird thing is she just laughed and called her 4 year old son into the room to look at how cool it was to see a rat's brains.  Her mom who clogged their shower drain from shaving told her she's going to get her ass beat and she deserves it.  Their soon always asked to come with us when we left.  Fact of the matter is all of these people were perfectly content with these things going on and no transportation because they had Direct TV, cell phones, wifi, and weed. 

At least they weren't as bad as the family across the street who had to cook their dinner with hotdogs on sticks in front of a manmade fire because they had no electricity.  This family had a 2-3 year old daughter who would just wander blocks away with no clothes on because no one paid attention to her.  They also had several dogs die constantly.  Each time I'd visit they'd have a different dog and a weird story about how they died.  I'll say this is in a different state than mine to explain the freezing temperatures and pipes freezing but that also goes for this family.  Where they were it was 4 degrees and damp and they left their dog outside barking all night.  How they were able to sleep is beyond me.  The next day I called the dog over to my car and took him to a better home.  I think it was more than justified.  Lastly, for those of you who think all poor people should vote Democrat, all of these people were conservatives who disliked Obama as much as I do and didn't believe a word he said.