“It’s breaking me. And there’s nothing that can be done for it, unless the president does something,” Michalski said about her skyrocketing power bills, adding she no longer supports Trump. “And I don’t see him doing it. He’s had plenty of time.”
There it is.
And the article reads as a sad story of people from rural West Virginia who have such a hard life, so few resources for their needs, but continue to vote against their interests.
Against theirs and those of many people of marginalized communities, because of an incredible lack of empathy in the latter case, it seems to me.
you can have empathy or be fascist, not both. oligarch christotechnofascists know this. eliminate empathy (which entails deliberately dismantling education, particularly the humanities) in the bottom third of the population, and they’ll vote for you because they want to hurt people they don’t like–even if that means hurting themselves also
I don’t think that was always the case, most often people are only involved in politics on the financial level, how it directly affects them and aren’t educated enough on the subjects to know when someone’s fleecing them.
However recently you’re absolutely correct they are rooting out empathy and forcing people to engage with it on a social level. That is to say are you willing to disappear your neighbor over ideological differences.
The first step of the campaign was getting the average person to hate “politics” “the government” “Washington dc” etc., vague ideas instead of specific people and policies
Then it’s easy to sell people on the basic idea that “the government is too dumb and evil to help anyone even if it tried, but it can punish your enemies pretty good”
There it is.
And the article reads as a sad story of people from rural West Virginia who have such a hard life, so few resources for their needs, but continue to vote against their interests.
Against theirs and those of many people of marginalized communities, because of an incredible lack of empathy in the latter case, it seems to me.
https://www.npr.org/2025/03/22/nx-s1-5321299/how-empathy-came-to-be-seen-as-a-weakness-in-conservative-circles
you can have empathy or be fascist, not both. oligarch christotechnofascists know this. eliminate empathy (which entails deliberately dismantling education, particularly the humanities) in the bottom third of the population, and they’ll vote for you because they want to hurt people they don’t like–even if that means hurting themselves also
I don’t think that was always the case, most often people are only involved in politics on the financial level, how it directly affects them and aren’t educated enough on the subjects to know when someone’s fleecing them.
However recently you’re absolutely correct they are rooting out empathy and forcing people to engage with it on a social level. That is to say are you willing to disappear your neighbor over ideological differences.
The first step of the campaign was getting the average person to hate “politics” “the government” “Washington dc” etc., vague ideas instead of specific people and policies
Then it’s easy to sell people on the basic idea that “the government is too dumb and evil to help anyone even if it tried, but it can punish your enemies pretty good”