Welcome to politcal memes!
These are our rules:
Be civil
Jokes are okay, but don’t intentionally harass or disturb any member of our community. Sexism, racism and bigotry are not allowed. Good faith argumentation only. No posts discouraging people to vote or shaming people for voting.
No misinformation
Don’t post any intentional misinformation. When asked by mods, provide sources for any claims you make.
Posts should be memes
Random pictures do not qualify as memes. Relevance to politics is required.
No bots, spam or self-promotion
Follow instance rules, ask for your bot to be allowed on this community.
No AI generated content.
Content posted must not be created by AI with the intent to mimic the style of existing images
edit: seems like some people interpret “full of” as a mathematical majority which, while it may or might not be true instance to instance, isn’t my intent in posting
feel free to swap in “has a lot of” if that’s more familiar language to you :)
Eh... I live in the cousin-fuckingly-deep South. In a city, and I work in a hospital, so I think it's pretty safe to say this is one of the more left leaning bubbles within a hundred miles. ...and there are still a fuckton of Nazis here.
There are absolutely decent people trapped here, but we're legit outnumbered. It isn't just gerrymandering or some shitty system at fault: the majority of southerners are just fucking evil.
There's always some thinly veiled excuse - "We don't hate women, we just want to protect the babies!" "We don't hate immigrants, we just want to protect our jobs!" "We don't hate trans people, we just want to protect our bathrooms!" but when you hear them talk amongst themselves about those people it's pretty clear they really do just hate them.
Most southerners are sincerely not good people.
As someone who relocated to the south after being born and raised outside the south, I can confirm that the majority of people here are truly fucking evil. This place is horrific.
(edit: i came to an understanding with the person im responding to and i was not happy with how this comment was worded so deleting it because it wasn’t contributing)
I mean for sure it's the entire country, with only depressingly slight variations in concentration one way or the other - but your image is about southerners specifically, so that's what I addressed.
...and honestly, it scales up as high as you want to take it - for the most part, humans are just evil sacks of shit.
Since 2013 we’ve seen disenfranchisement in Alabama in real time. Require strict new voter id, then close the DMVs in black and left leaning areas. Combine polling places in democratic leaning areas so they are further away and have long lines. Move polling places so they are no longer accessible by bus. Those are just the obvious ones, but the Republicans’ strategy has been to do anything they can to stop people from voting.
i would love so hard some legislation that requires voting ids on contingency that independent local sources find that access to ids are hugely increased
which means it will never happen but hey a girl can dream
i guess, but they voted for that too
the voting rights act was only in 1965. in a significant number of cases, no they did not
the 19th amendment was in 1920. in a significant number of cases, no they could not
it is demonstrably harder to vote if you are poor and harder to vote informedly if you are poor and uneducated all the way through 2025. no they did not vote for this.
thank you for proving exactly why this post needs to exist. class consciousness, not culture war.
Those examples are from 105 and 60 years ago.
There are ways to make the point you're going for, but invoking legislation that old doesn't do it.
Am I sympathetic to people who are ignorant and so voted against their own interests? Sure, a bit. A lot of southerners would take issue with trying to defend them with cries of "don't blame them, they're too stupid to agree with me!” though.
Am I sympathetic to people who have been systematically disenfranchised and economically abandoned? Of course, I'm not a monster.
The fact remains that a lot of people in red states earnestly believe in what they vote for. You can talk about class consciousness all you want, but the people fighting the culture doing so because of manipulation by the rich or powerful in a class war does fuck all to help the people loosing said culture war. I'm sure the suicidal trans kid takes great comfort that the people voting to make them illegal are just misled.
They've had every opportunity to inform themselves. Maybe eventually they'll hurt themselves enough to stop fighting the culture war you don't want others to fight.
60 years isn’t even close to life expectancy. so we are talking less than a lifetime ago. MLK’s daughter is alive, 62 years old (younger than most people in government) and posting on instagram about the same struggles her father fought.
plus did you even read the part about ongoing class disenfranchisement in 2025 (poor people being kept from voting)?
not even reading the rest of your comment since you couldn’t do the same for me. thanks for being such a genuine participant in this conversation.
I solve this by not liking anyone anywhere.
that’s totally okay! this is the politics community not the “who do we like” community lol
I don't care about the color of your skin, your gender identity, your sexual identity, your political identity, what country your from, or your legal status here, I hate all humans equally, I just want to be left alone.
Narrator: And that children was the prophet who taught us to hate equally and mind your damn business.
Most folks in the south are good, honest, hard-working people - but the levels of propaganda aimed at keeping them ignorant and blaming minorities for systemic issues are hard to overstate. That coupled with a crumbling education system, poverty, and voter suppression is what keeps the south voting against the best interests of the majority of people.
The average Southern voter is just trying to do the right thing with the information they have access to. Doesn't make them any less wrong, but it does make the situation more morally complex.
It always makes me sad when I see people in Left spaces saying things like "it serves them right" etc etc when disasters occur. Sure, the majority of voters may have voted for policies that caused these things, but they are ignorant and have been lied to their whole lives. Not to mention all the folks who have been disenfranchised by the system.
Edit: for those responding: most. Most people. Like 40% of people don't vote. And another 25+% vote Dem. Of the remaining 30-35% that decide elections for Republicans, most of those are extremely misled, either thinking Dems are to blame for Rep policies that harm them, that Dem policies will make it impossible for them to make a living, etc. etc. A subset of those 30-35% are just outright evil and either want to throw everyone under the bus for a few tax breaks or are just rascists/bigots. But, that is not most people. Note, I don't lime the Democrats, but their policies are significantly less harmful than Rep policies. If you actually talk to people in the South, you would understand that. Some are out-and-out ghouls, but most people are miseducated, poor, and have been told who to blame by the powers that be.
BS, unless they're illiterate. They voted for the disaster and worse yet, Project 2025. "It serves them right," and they can continue to eat shit.
So? When the Internet exists to easily see the proof of reality, they are not blameless for taking in lies
So what you're saying is they can vote to fuck up the country and suppress other peoples freedoms. They can vote to instill pain fear and chaos in other peoples lives. But when the consequences of their vote bites them in the ass all of a sudden we need to have empathy and grace? Libs like you are why we are in this mess with fascism to begin with.
No. Hard stop NO. Ignorance is no longer an acceptable excuse. They all have access to the same internet as the rest of us and all have the ability to verify the things they see and hear. Most choose not to.
I'll accept gerrymandering and some other hard physical barriers but ignorance and lack of education is no longer acceptable.
Critical thinking skills are essential for that, and they stopped teaching that a long time ago. It's not enough to have access to information, you have to have the skills to judge and interpret it. This is why misinformation is such a problem, people literally don't have the skills to distinguish between it and actual facts
It isn’t the schools’ responsibility to give you every damn skill necessary to be a functioning adult. We keep trying to put the blame somewhere where it doesn’t belong.
Nobody ever taught me that either but I figured it out. I wish this didn't need to be taught at all.
I lived in VA. From 2nd to 9th grade pre-internet. Now VA. Is South but it's not west va., Mississippi, or Tennessee south. Even back then, you could spend an afternoon in a library and alleviate yourself of a lot of bad information unintentionally just by looking up that information. I know because I did. I'd hear grownups around me say sketchy shit and look into it. It's even easier to do so now. Just the act of seeking clarity can bring some small pieces of enlightenment. A lot of people didn't bother then and wouldn't now.
What's happening is post-truth BS. People just choosing to believe whatever the fuck they want, often without any verification.
Are some people being led astray? Absolutely. But they're also allowing themselves to be. People have been trying to convince southerners (and others) for decades, of not a century, that they're being screwed over and the people they vote in are doing the screwing but many just flatly refuse to look into it at all and just keep going on blind faith. What happened to personal responsibility and self-agency? Not to mention that some people are just dumpster fires given human form and those people definitely deserve to reap what they sow.
I don't wish hardship on anyone but if a person continually brings hardship on themselves through their own, thoughts, votes, and actions, while ignoring all the warnings being handed out like candy at Halloween, I don't find it surprising that others feel less inclined to be sympathetic let alone empathetic with their plight.
It's because most people are intellectually lazy.
It's far easier to believe trusted sources than look things up yourself.
While that may be an explanation. It's no excuse.
Obviously not. Why would you feel the need to say that?
It's just hard to swallow that people choose to ignore reams of facts they have access to because they "disagree" with them.
Yeah, someone told me yesterday that the people in Kabul deserve to have no assistance, "because they chose the Taliban".
I mean, that's certainly a perspective.