this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2026
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Leopards Ate My Face
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Shh, nobody tell them about the entirety of Appalachia.
Uh...
https://www.socialexplorer.com/home/post/political-explorer-counties-with-largest-increases-in-food-stamps-since-2010-went-for-trump-in-2020
Who do you think voted for trump?
In most of those rural counties, everyone is on food stamps.
And because it's almost always state wide standards and they have much lower cost of living than urban areas, they think that don't need it can just sign up and get it, and that it's more than it takes to feed a family.
To justify taking it when they don't need it, they need to invent a "them" who needs it less, then taking the social program they're entitled to becomes a "I'd be stupid not to" and we end up on people poor enough for it thinking they'd be financially better off if it didn't exist.
Like, people shit talk them falling for it all the time, but no one ever stops and talks about why the propaganda works. And how the easiest way to beat it, is give it to fucking everyone.
Fund it plain and directly, and when people file their tax returns have it say "you paid X and you received Y". For the vast amount of Americans that math will always be favorable no matter how many social programs we have.
They report this as "despite", but it is very explicitly intentional. Poisoning people against their own best interests has been a strategy among AnCaps and Conservative Libertarians since the Coolidge Administration.
Young people are told pensions are a form of theft. Old people are told education is a waste of money. Middle income people are told any kind of unemployment relief or public employment is corrupt and misused by some cultural or ethnic other.
As often as not, liberals get fed this toxic stew as conservatives. Which leads liberals to embrace Means Testing over universal programs and to be smug when a conservative state denies something like Medicare expansion rather than fighting for people on the other side of a state line.
How the Hillary Clinton campaign deliberately “elevated” Donald Trump with its “pied piper” strategy
I know so many people who said they voted for Trump in the primary because he was the weakest candidate in the GOP field.
Eliminate the social security tax cap. Make the tax progressive. Apply the social security tax to capital gains. Do that, and social security will not only be permanently solvent, but we can start incrementally lowering the benefit age until it becomes a UBI program instead of a retirement program.
It works because they're stupid. Yes, there's other contributing factors but none of them would matter if they weren't dumb. That's the most fundamental problem at play and they deserve to be mocked for it.
I think a word is missing or something, I can't figure out the meaning. Can you please check.
it works because they're stupid, see #3. Then think about #4
These are Cipolla's five fundamental laws of stupidity:
Always and inevitably, everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.
The probability that a certain person (will) be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.
Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular, non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places, and under any circumstances, to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake.
A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.
The only thing dumber than believing that when he said it, is believing it 50 years later
so you are saying you never saw or experienced any of those assertions to have any validity? it is not stupid to purposefully cause other people harm when it harms yourself, too? stupidity does not cause harm to potentially large groups of people? you know no stupid people who are also successful or charismatic?