lingua_avium
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User ID: 2848
lingua_avium
9mo ago
As muscle mass increases, the probability of finding off the rack clothes that fit approaches zero.
To work around it, you buy oversized and cut down. Unfortunately, if you're spending that much time lifting, you don't learn much about tailoring. The end result is that you cut to a length that "looks right", but you forget that the fabric will pull up after you cut the hem and it ends up too short.
lingua_avium
9mo ago
At least in my circles, it all comes down to Unions.
Appalachia skews old - old enough that many blue collar workers were able to get Union jobs before both the Companies and the Unions closed off those means of employment. For people still working those jobs, most of their political information gets filtered by (and for) the Union. Since Unions skew Democrat, so do low information voters who are members.
After that, the next most common person is the person who is not union, but is steeped in Union culture from birth. They'll tend to vote like their parents and neighbors do, which is straight ticket democrat, if they vote at all.
There used to be an entire category of socially conservative Democrats who had this voting bloc locked down tighter than a duck's asshole. Today, though, Joe Manchin is really the only one left.
lingua_avium
10mo ago
I'm pretty sure a lot of it is "Hatred", but I'm not sure which direction the Hate Flows.
Most of my family comes from Mountain Stock. Up until about 2020, they've always been staunch conservatives who voted straight ticket Democrat 100% of the time. Since Biden took office, many of them have been direct targets of new regulatory stances that have completely fucked their livelihoods. I'll list a few below.
- One relative runs a dairy farm down on the Piedmont. There is a drainage ditch on the land. In 2021, the EPA sent a letter indicating that they had "determined" that the "drainage" ditch was a waterway, and threatened fines and jail time if they did not halt all use of the adjoining fields. After asking around, he learned that the Biden admin had directed its people to "reinterpret" the definition of several common words in such a way that they could enforce laws in novel and broad directions. This novel interpretation just happened to mostly impact small farms while leaving massive Cargill-style operations alone. This nationally came to a head in Sackett v EPA, but my relative's case is still winding through court.
- A second relative works as a gunsmith and has his FFL. In 2022, the ATF ran an inspection of his records. While going through all of his records page by page (and photographing them in violation of the law), The agents found that on one of the records, my relative had transcribed the name "Keith" as "Kieth". At that point, the agents declared that he was in willful violation of federal law. They said he could no longer due business and that they were seizing his inventory as he could no longer legally possess it. He's currently still working through the system with lawyers, but it's due to a widespread attack by the Biden administration wherein they redefined "willful" as "any". Their justification for this is that they posted a new page on the whitehouse site (under a sign saying beware the leopard) saying "don't do that".
- Out in the sticks, there is also more bad blood over COVID policies and the vaccine mandates than I think anyone in the NYC/SF/LA/Boston bubble can possibly imagine. I have a cousin up in PA who's business got shut down for months by the Democrat Governor, despite another business in the same field, that just happened to be owned by the governor, getting exempted. No amount of "We need a Pandemic Amnesty" think pieces are going to salve those kinds of wounds.
Since Biden got in office, there have been repeated attacks on the livelihoods of an entire class of blue collar people. I've watched entire branches of my extended family go from straight-ticket blue voters to people who are so furious about what Biden is doing that they will gladly vote for Trump just to see Biden lose in the most humiliating, soul-destroying, morale-breaking manner possible. They don't care that it might not be great for them either. They're rednecks; they're used to getting the shit-end of every trade. They're accustomed to being the target of America's hate for the last 30 years. All they know is that they think they can weather the disaster better than the Biden people can, and they'll gladly suffer that pain if it means they can watch their enemies hurt worse.
Other than assuming command of the national guard, what other federal entity would have a statutory mandate in this circumstance?
I know the obvious retort is "it doesn't matter and he'll just invent a legal fig leaf", but I'm interested in what existing options might exist that don't require novel legal theories.
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