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maplehill @lemm.ee
Posts 0
Comments 25
A fired federal worker grapples with her vote for Trump in Michigan
  • Pretty much all of outstate MN and WI is like this (elsewhere too, I'm just from this area so I can testify firsthand). Working poor. Reliant on food banks (govt grants), Medicaid healthcare, subsidiaries for their healthcare insurance, government grants for housing starts or multi family housing, government funding for low income childcare and preschool, government jobs, and on and on.

    But these people read at a sixth grade level and do math lower than that. Younger people only get information from TikTok. Older people from Fox News or Facebook. Most have never earned a post secondary degree or even attended college. Most adults haven't read a book since highschool. Many have never traveled more than 150 miles from home their entire lives.

    It's like the absolutely perfect group to be duped again and again by propaganda and ruled by robber barons. When viewed as a group, it's easy to say, "haha get fucked." But interacting with many of these leopard victims, especially the young ones, I just kind of feel bad for them. Unpopular take here I know, I enjoy the schadenfreude as much as the next person.

    Yet, I usually end up talking to someone at a bar or somewhere and we talk about a lot of other things first, animals usually or kids or the weather. And I think, "hey that's cool... they adopted 3 shelter dogs and are volunteering at the school and so on." But then the political shoe will drop and I'm like, "Really? You too? Don't you know x, y, or z are all the things you, well, need to survive?"

    They're just ... Well... Dumb. Dumb in the way little kids are dumb. Naive and unable to tell truth from fiction, mentally and emotionally stunted people who will never grow out of it. Lied to and taken advantage of so many times they eventually become diehard bigots and lonely assholes.

    Sigh...

  • People who live in functional and safe countries, how happy are you?
  • I have high school aged children so all of the sabre rattling is unsettling to me. I would love my kids to maybe explore degree programs outside of the US because I don't see things getting better anytime soon. I don't want them sucked into some bullshit conflict started by that guy.

  • Trump spending freeze sticks Iowa farmers with millions in bills for conservation work
  • I don't live in Iowa but have a small farm and live surrounded by farmers and ranchers. You have to understand that these people have the tiniest of perspective to the world. They spend almost their entire lives on one property, rarely go anywhere due to the nature of farming, and constantly have right-wing radio on in the truck and the barn and fox news on at home. You combine that with limited education across multiple generations and you have a group of people perfectly suited to consistently buy into propaganda and almost never able to identify things that will eat their face in the end.

  • 2/15/2025 - Keeping Education Accessible and Ending Covid-19 Vaccine Mandates in Schools
  • I work in a K12 school and no school in our state mandates COVID vaccines. While we keep track of any/all vaccinations and report them to the state health department per state law, a parent can also submit exemption paperwork for individual vaccinations to not get them or not report them.

    Whatever brainworm guy says at the federal level doesn't mean shit because it's state law. However what it does accomplish is getting dumb fucks riled up with misinformation and propaganda so they frequently call or email schools to harass and threaten school employees. This happens frequently in my school and neighboring schools. It serves as a useful distraction while various government funding streams and programs are cut.