MAGAts be all ...

My neighbor bought a new 64K truck (I know because he constantly mentions the cost) had a lift kit installed for 15K (I know because he constantly mentions the cost) has four kids who are bullies (I know because I see and hear them), and constantly complains about gas prices and property taxes, despite the fact that he is one of two houses in the neighborhood with kids.

Most of property taxes go to fund the public schools, which his children attend. Basically the neighborhood is subsidizing his children's education, but he thinks he deserves to pay less in taxes. I explained this, and he told me I was full of shit, but I think he knew I was right, because he started revving his engine early in the morning the day after that and did it for like two weeks.

Hilariously, he stopped doing it not because I complained -- I'm up early anyway -- but because his wife came out in pajamas and started screaming at him for waking her up. Quite the metaphor for Republicanism.

I gotta get out of this neighborhood.

But you are so close to the action! Set up a camera and make a documentary!
- Sounds like the family in the Intro of "Idiocracy"....
I'd watch a Netflix series based on your life, but I'd be concerned that it would get cancelled without proper closure...

I keep reading shit like that, Gas was too expensive, thanks Biden! Just shifting blame left and right. And hey, I come from the midwest where gas is essential because everything is so goddamn far apart - but I drove a civic.

Oh I'm so sorry you went out, spent way too much on a giant truck, bragged to all your friends how you just have to have a hemi/cummins, did everything you could to reduce efficiency, and now you have to spend even more on gas? What a shame. Just, such a shame.

You don't want to even do a tiny bit of introspection there? I drive an EV now, and they just rage that for a full "fill up" I spend $6. Total. My monthly travel bill (when not riding transit) is now about $15.

"Introspection"??? What are ya some commie professor using nerd words nobody can understand? Move back to Oxford ya daisy sniffer!! 😜
“I’ll have you know that I use this truck once a year to pull something a sturdy station wagon could handle just fine! And what if you need a really shitty version of a U-Haul? Then who are you gunna call?!? I saved $200 moving that one time and all it cost me was an extra $35k and a gas bill with numbers mathematicians are still trying to describe properly.”
Trucks: If you don’t have a fifth wheel RV then you may just be a complete dipshit.
- God I hate the moving argument, the once a year thing. Yeah once a year I need something large from Home Depot. They have trucks I can rent literally there on site, or I go to the uhaul and rent one for $30 for the entire day. That's not "manly" though to them
- Trucks come, or used to anyway, in more reasonable configurations than maga drones get. A carbureted 300 I6 gets like 25mpg but it isn't pointlessly big and loud and it's a 6 so they don't want it.
- Sigh, we need Kei Trucks. Preferably electric ones.
"How can you commute to work with EV that only have a range of 400miles? OP are you lying? I have to travel through mud road through a jungle so you must have too, it's impossible to not drive a diesel tank here."
- "I mean sure most of my driving is only to work and back and I could install a charger at home to charge once a week, but what if I need to drive from Chicago to Dallas?" Uh, you could rent a car? Or like most Americans you probably have... 2 cars? Take the other one?
- To be faire there aren't that many EV that could go 400 miles, and and they aren't that cheap neither. And that without even considering the pain of public chargers. Context : i was about to buy an EV a week ago to travel regularly from Luxembourg to Paris. I gave up after reading how painful it is to 1. Know which charger is available. 2. Whether that charger accepts my payment card. 3. Almost no charger accepts a débit card
- I drove a Nissan Almera (basically altima but with a 1.6 liter engine) on roads worse than most pickups have ever driven.
It's all a manufactured outrage. They supposedly buy these cars because "gas is cheap" and then they lament when gas goes few cents up.
BTW: the gas will likely go up when US will decide to put on the final squeeze on Russia. Currently Russia escapes sanctions by selling their oil through intermediaries. This is purposefully ignored right now to keep the oil prices low.
- Much of Russian oil production is going offline and is never coming back anyways. Since the fall of the USSR they haven’t been training engineers at a rate to maintain their own infrastructure. Many of the engineers they do have are nearing retirement age.
  As a result don’t have the technical expertise to maintain their own infrastructure oil fields in Siberia. Those fields require oil to flow constantly otherwise the oil will freeze and expand and burst the pipes. The last time this happened was during the fall of the USSR and those well heads took 20 years to come back online and required Western expertise to repair.
  They’ve depended on Western companies to build out and maintain those tracts ever since. When those go well heads go offline either through lack of maintenance or through Ukraine attacking storage centers where this oil is kept before its shipped, they won’t come back on again. They will still have tracts of oil fields in the Western part of the country that they can pump, but they will permanently loose a lot of capacity. Your likely to see a Venezuela style gradual drop off in production over the next ten years if they don’t change course and bring back Western expertise.
  It doesn’t really matter to the US, we produce a ton of oil domestically and have been switching over our refineries to process it. Europe, China and India will be the ones to really feel the squeeze when Russian oil goes offline.
"Well I bet your power bill went way up!" Maybe. But not by as much as my gas station bill went down.
- Power bill went up by $15 a month. Gas bill went down by $140.
But that’s the Right? They talk about rights and personal responsibility, but the fact is they only want rights they can use to keep others down, and to hell with personal responsibility. They want to buy their giant-ass gas guzzlers and not be responsible for the fuel costs, they want coal and natural gas (drill baby, drill) wrecking the environment but don’t want to be responsible when a hurricane wipes out their towns. They want their guns but want the rest of society to be responsible for preventing school shootings. Oh, another school shooting? Ain't my problem.

I saw a lady apolozing to Trump for not donating because she had to pay her medical bills and was living in disability. So she was basically giving her disability check to Trump every month. 😖

If you'd see that in a movie it would be a weird comedy where someone's head spins around 360° for no reason so the viewer doesn't know anymore what to believe and what not.
Someone should rerun the Jerry Falwell ad with Trump on the headline

Gas is cheaper right now than it has been in years

It was the cheapest I had seen since 2021 last week for like 36 hours and then overnight jumped up 12%.
It always goes down slowly over a three week period and then hits a low for 1 day and then goes up 10% or more overnight.
- Problem is, when gas is at a low price, everyone wants to fill up their tanks thus increasing the demand. And obviously gas stations and gas companies are greedy people, so they won‘t lower the prices again until it starts hurting their turnover.

I work in a gas station, there is a MAGA regular who is constantly complaining about how broke she is, she buys 2 packs of unfiltered camels a day, that's $14.60 a pack, over $800 a month just for cigarettes cause she buys the most expensive packs in the store.

- At this point, I actually think the meth is more socially acceptable, too.
- Being serious here, but since I moved away from alcohol and started using LSD and MDMA I'm actually saving when going to party. A beer at the club have the same price that an LSD tab!

I find it so funny Americans complaining about gas prices. Where I am in New Zealand, fuel prices are perpetually high because of our location. If my calculations are correct I pay the equivalent of USD$5.67/Gallon for regular (I have to use mid grade). I use a 1.8L Miata infrequently and fuel prices are still pain.

That's still incredibly cheap compared to european gas prices. Here in Germany it's (converted to Freedom Units) around US$8/Gallon.
- That's still really cheap! I'm stationed in Antarctica and here to fill my F150 it's about US15$ per gallon!

Surely the immigrants are to blame??
The Immigrants:
Had a brief conversation with conservative Christian parent where they mentioned "the gays."
I don't care. Doesn't affect me. Ex didn't cheat with same sex.
It will affect you when they're making decisions for you.
In what relevant way?
🤔

$100k watches? I have seen many instances of the pickup truck driving stereotype but I’ve never seen any of them wearing any sort of watch, let alone an expensive one. Is this specific to some country?

It's a reference to the 100k Trump watch. So still specific to the US
- Oh okay that makes sense. I hope we see a story about some tool like that buying a shitty $100k Trump watch and getting their comeuppance. This is definitely someone who would complain about gas prices because there’s no way they could afford a watch like that without feeling hardship.
People who like to be flashy with their money do buy expensive watches, but I only see them in the hundred TO thousand range. Anyone flashing a hundred-thousand dollar watch is out of their mind complaining about fuel prices.
The rest of the meme tracks in suburban Kentucky.
- $100-1000 watches are not being flashy with their money. Almost everyone I see with a watch has a watch in that range. Flashy watches are usually 2K absolute minimum. Apple watches are like 300-700 and they're everywhere.
  I had a friend who was REALLY into watches. He had a 7K watch he loved to show off, and he would research watches literally every day and knew tons about them. Walking around with him was wild because we would walk by some random dude in a tshirt and he would suddenly lean over and whisper "he's wearing a Goobly-Gluk Goober FX367, that's a 25K watch!"
  Really expensive watches often don't look it. Look up a Patek Phillipe Nautilus. 1.5M. Looks (to me) like a casio or something.
  I don't care about watches at all.
- In my mind, the $100k watch sterotype fits more with one of those pimped out Hummers than a $70k pickup truck.
  I doubt those guys complain about fuel prices either.

I personally have pity for rank and file Republican voters.

They were simply easy marks our education system intentionally failed to teach critical thinking and reason to because obedient laborers don't need that, and were then spoonfed sensationalist lies that appealed to their fears and anxieties, the easiest avenues for indoctrination, for the last half century under the guise of being "news" for the private profit of private shareholders and to turn them into useful idiot dependable votes for those same private shareholders to effectively capture their regulators and government that was once meant to protect us from them.

As just one in an ocean of examples, Fox "News" has been telling these poor sad bastards that "man made climate change is a hoax for scientists to sell books!"

So what you're saying is, you don't hate the fools, you pity them.
That's not why.
They are taught that education is bad because the Bible teaches them everything they really need to know, and focusing on their weird version of 'Christianity'^tm makes them better than all those academic eggheads in their luxurious ivory towers while the people who actually run things make sure no help ever actually gets to them.
And now, in the most (mo)ironic twist ever, they are saying hurricane Helene was intentionally created to lower republican turnout in the election. No, seriously.
- I've heard shit that it was moved by the left with weather control machines so they could clear out areas to mine lithium

And all this with the dirt cheap gas prices in the US. In comparison to Europe, gas in the US is nearly free...

Sorry to hijack your comment, but seeing that "my grandchildren are in my daughters' ovaries post" right above this one and your comment made me wonder:
Why is gas so damn cheap in the US while saying "healthcare is expensive" is a giant understatement.
Compared with Europe, where gas prices are regulated (and gas stations still seem to be doing just fine to the point that new ones keep popping up around where I live at an astounding rate) while it's the healthcare that is subsidised and made availiable to all.
How come? Why aren't gas companies in the US be as greedy as hospitals and pharma there? Why aren't European gas stations few and far between, continuing to barely hold on, fail and ultimately closeleaving Europe gasless?
- In the EU, fuel is heavily taxed and most people drive smaller fuel efficient automobiles. The fuel prices in Europe never bothered me, but I start laughing at the Americans who complain about $4.00 a gallon and drive gas guzzlers carrying fucking air.
- As an American: because gas has to compete. You can’t ask to go to the cheap hospital, they don’t even usually tell you the price before administering medicine. So hospitals charge what they’d like and that’s that. Gas prices are highly competitive and we’re one of the world’s primary oil producers and refiners. Additionally the Biden administration has been using our strategic oil reserves to stabilize gas prices.
- They are greedy, but oil isn't really found in Europe proper so they have to get it from other countries, which means transport, tariffs, losing money to that country via trade deficit, etc.
- They are greedy
  U.S. fossil fuel subsidies stretch across the U.S. tax code, which makes detailing their costs complex. The IMF estimates they stood at $760 billion in 2022, a figure topped only by China.
  However, that quote isn't entirely fair to China.
  Also it's Reuters, so kilo of salt.
My conservative Christian, formerly maga parent recently raised the point and I had to remind them fossil energy is heavily taxpayer subsidized. Again.

" . . . and an RV and a garage full of boats and jet skis."

Oil Industry Guy When Gas Prices Go Up: "Oh no! It costs so much money to drive my big truck and cool my enormous house and afford business class airplane tickets and now I can't afford my Carnival Cruise to Florida! This is the fault of the Evil Communist Green Party Democrats! Only Republicans can fix it!"
Oil Industry Guy When Gas Prices Go Down: "Oh shit! Oh fuck! I'm unemployed, broke, foreclosed on, and drowning in debt! This is the fault of the Evil Communist Green Party Democrats! Only Republicans can fix it!"
Oil Industry Guy When It's Time To Form A Union: "Fuck you, you fucking socialists. I don't need the government to do anything for me. I can pull myself up by my own bootstraps!"
- But during all those scenarios...RECORD PROFITS FOR OIL INDUSTRY
...And a large and expensive gun collection, and tons of NASCAR paraphernalia.

Okay the 70k lifted truck is valid. But I don't think maga people are out there buying 100k watches

Recently Trump was selling $100K gold watches; I'm assuming it was mostly maga folks who bought them
- It was almost certainly a way to hide "donations" (bribes), from multimillionaires and billionaires, not random maga poor people
- Not the people that can't afford gas, what the post is about. They don't have 100k to spend on a watch.
OK, substitute the NFTs and testosterone pills

Forgot to include giant flags, which I guess you can include as maga merch.

Man. I stopped on the side of the road the other day to help a guy with a "need gas" sign. I'm not exactly well off myself, but I figured I could give him a ride. "I ain't got no cash, but thanks for stopping!" Dude's driving a pristine pavement princess. Priorities, man...

Crazy. Plenty of people on the corners panhandling in my town, but none of them can afford rent much less a gas guzzling truck.
- That's why I stopped, primarily. I don't have a lot to give, but I can give some time, so I figured I'd help out how I could. Knowing it's probably just a ploy for money is annoying, especially considering all of the other panhandlers around that do actually need help.

Same, but I ride my bicycle. The fuel is food which I cannot afford.

We are not the same.

In anglo Canada we have our own version of this that includes at least 1 oversized Canadian flag, at least 1 “FUCK 🍁 TRUDEAU” and 1 “FREEDOM” optionally also on flags or decals, something sloppily painted in white complaining about coronavirus mandates, and getting more common is something insulting Jagmeet Singh.

They have maga and Trump merch as well
It’s very confusing how they can fly a Maple Leaf and not know what country they’re in

Obsolete Biden stickers! Lol I hope they have boxes of these dishonest attacks on a candidate who's not running anymore...

dont forget donating shit tons to trump campaign

7 political signs in their yard, always wears a ua fReEdOm t-shirt, a hat with a flag on it, and their wife looks absolutely miserable all the time.
- Dude just described half my neighbors. Except it's hard to tell how miserable the wives look because they're always wearing those huge sunglasses.

15 mpg means roughly 15.7l/100km for the sane folk

That's such awful mileage in 2024. God damn, there's excavators with better numbers 😂
- Listen how can I get a quart of milk from the store without also taking two chairs, a loveseat, a sound system, my heater and air conditioning unit, some steel armor plating, and a storage unit?

Change watch to guns and you nailed it

Even if you drive a small car being forced to pay about 15% of your total income just to get to work is still fucking expensive. And no, public transport or bike isnt a suitable option for everyone.

And no, public transport or bike isnt a suitable option for everyone.
So we need to build infrastructure for it. And more electric cars charged with greener fuel sources.
- K. I want you to look at somewhere like rural WV and imagine what public transit infrastructure or bike infrastructure that would actually be useful would look like. Preferably that wouldn't cost more than the entire state budget to run and would be useful for people to use to get to work and to at least one major grocery store and one place to get appliances or furniture.
  Say, Powelton, WV. Or Dry Branch, WV. Or Webster Springs, WV. Or Amma, WV. And these aren't even the hardest examples in the state, but they're ones I know well enough to likely be able to comment on your answers.

hey! you leave beer and cigs out of this!

Tbf, those are symptoms of despair, in most cases, regardless of income.
- ok man. i'll be over here having a good time.

Whilst voting against addressing any issues that would improve their situation at every given opportunity.

I drive a small 4 cylinder Honda. Gas mileage is amazing. If anything, gas is so cheap compared to groceries I'm thinking about getting a Costco membership even though I have to drive for almost an hour and a half. A week's worth of groceries at Kroger is almost $100 for one person. It costs me $65 to fill up my gas tank which lasts me 2-3 weeks. I might as well just drive the extra distance and buy bulk.

But they already have plenty of gas.

LOL! The MAGA idiots fail to realize healthcare costs are far worse than fuel prices.

I'm so happy that Magats caught on after all these years.

Even my parents call them Magats now I love it.

Leave my beer and cigarettes alone.

How many magas can afford 100k watches?

Hey now, beer and cigarettes are necessities.

That's not true.
I'd say more beer and more cigarettes are necessities.

dont forget they're still paying off a divorce

15mpg

Did you mean: 592457,142660 ft^-2?

I just love the fact that this is a real thing you can do with math.

So, as long as I’ve been on lemmy, I may have come across maybe 2 certified Trump supporters, yet… there are 36 downvotes on this post.

I wonder who the 34 other cowards are that refuse to stand and be counted. Also, I wonder how many of the bad-faith both-sides “leftists” we all know and love are amongst them.

I downvoted it because conservatives constantly make this exact same "joke" about how poor people actually deserve to be poor because they pay for Netflix or clothes or anything that isn't food or rent. It's not funny when they do it and because I'm not a hypocrite I don't find it funny when leftists do it either.
Normally I would have just downvoted and moved on with my day, but apparently that makes me a "coward that refuses to stand and be counted". Because attacking people for downvoting a joke they didn't like is apparently 100% okay with Lemmings and totally not toxic behavior. Does not liking literally all of the comedy that comes out of the left make me a 'bad-faith both-sides “leftist”'? If so, guilty as charged. I do not see the left as a monolith and feel no shame in criticising or disagreeing with what other leftists say.
- Sooo… I’m not a leftists and I don’t think it’s a leftist meme. Democrats/liberals are actually staring to actually fight back for a change. And it’s working. They’re finally trading punches with the always-on-the-offense far right, and they’re kicking their fucking asses- and you’re going to play both sides in this?
  Yeah. You’re a coward.
- They're fucking hypocrites. That why it's been upvoted so much. People detest hypocrisy.
Its the people who have lift kits and like beer and cigarettes. I need to get a lift kit but that has to do with the fact that some roads in my area are somehow worse than dirt roads and off roading.
I didn't downdoot it but it's pretty mean-spirited and probably doesn't reflect the majority of Trump supporters' finances.
- From my perspective, it’s spot on accurate. I know people exactly like this.

For a more nuanced discussion of this topic, please see my friend Bjarne Knausgarde's blog "Notes From Disgraceland." There, he discusses:

The political subject of late fascism is an updated version of the old one. The industrial worker- citizen, the authorized emblem of post-utopian depoliticized post-war modernity, now appears in the guise of the forgotten men, the non-synchronous people of the political present[10]. He encapsulates the virtues of petro-masculinity: A patriarchal, weapon-carrying and 2 amendment-worshipping male, defined by manufacturing, motoring, his tie to fossil fuel presents a particularly uncomfortable configuration in the light of climate change and urgency for reducing or eliminating dependency on conventional energy sources, which creates an urgency to imagine a new barricaded lebensraum for the heteronormative family protected from the deviant other, which bundles together economic, geopolitical, religious, racial, and genital into a comprehensive crisis of order and allows fascism to emerge as a candidate for its restoration.

Link to the post: https://notesfromdisgraceland.wordpress.com/2024/05/06/fraudulent-ideology-of-fascism-other-tales-of-revolt-against-reason/

That is one of the worst-written things I’ve ever read in my entire life. It reminds me of reading Jordan Peterson, like the author thinks they derive authority from how obtusely they can phrase simple concepts.
Maybe some people think this kind of writing is clever or impressive, but it just reeks of insecurity to me.
hmm yeah words

Inaccurate.

$30k truck $300 Suunto watch Don't smoke or drink 25 mpg

I'm doing ok.