Nearly 40 percent of South Dakota residents said Gov. Kristi Noem’s (R) shooting of her dog was justified after the governor faced backlash over sharing the story in her new memoir, according…
I was curious just how many people actually live in South Dakota, just so that I could have a point of reference for the 37.8% statistic. Basically, it's roughly the same amount of people as the population of New Orleans or half the population of Washington DC that agree with her. What an empty state.
It’s all in how you interpret the story. Animals that endanger humans and can’t be redeemed do need to be dealt with. The stories do talk about attacking humans and in particular the goat being aggressive toward children.
However, it seems minimized: I’m not getting anything about actual danger nor irredeemable behavior. Dogs are dogs, especially with insufficient training: there’s a huge difference between a warning bite and one intended to hurt, and I don’t see references to damage or hospitalization. Is the dog sufficiently trained for the intended role or did she just assume she can take prey out of its mouth with no objection? Certainly the first response to a rented goat not serving the needs should be to return it, potentially with a complaint.
Could 40% of South Dakotans be interpreting this as endangering humans, and with no better options?
I’m going to take the position that misinformed actions or stances still make a trashy person. I understand animals harming humans needing to be put down, however that does not seem to be the case (?)
She killed a dog because it pissed her off. It was a poorly trained dog. I also understand dogs that won’t listen pissing you off, but I know if I killed a dog in the same way my farmer/country friends would crucify me.
This is a story you don’t state with pride. She stated this story with pride which is baffling, but it makes a little more sense if you take the reductionist view that she’s stating, with pride, that she is willing to kill things that don’t listen, work her desired way, or are untrained and “irredeemable.”
Coming from someone with ambitions to be a fascists VP, that’s horrifying.
My extremely objective sample size of the single South Dakota resident I have talked to about this thinks that she is a laughable disgrace.
We talked for a bit about how basically any idiot should know that it takes a while, as in years and years, to properly train a hunting dog.
And also executing a puppy, and a goat, is fucking insane.
According to her the goat was not really even Noem's goat. It was apparently a goat that was being basically rented, primarily as an au naturale lawn mower.
Anyway, then this 50+ year old white lady proceeded to laugh for 3 minutes straight about how bad you have to fuck up to get banned from every native reservation in the state, a full 1/5 of the landmass of the territory you govern.
Kristi Noem is a despicable cunt. I hope she trips over a stack of her shitty unsold books, falls into a deep gravel pit, and sinks beneath a pile of rocks while passerby point and laugh.
Generally, in politics, a 60% disapproval rate is considered high. But South Dakota is heavily disenfranchised, particularly in counties with high native populations. So you get a lot of white nationalist types winning statewide, particularly in the primaries, because turnout is deliberately depressed
She won last time with 61.98% of the vote. That doesn't even count those who voted against her, but agree with her on this issue. Was my number high... probably a little bit. Was it insanely high? No.
Almost 40% of South Dakotans have not critically evaluated Noem
FTFY. I refuse to believe that 40% of anyone would see what she did as justified. The only reason you would is if you want to kill dogs yourself, you don't know what really happened, or you don't understand why it's bad and are giving her the benefit of the doubt.
I think some rural people do things a lot of non rural people don't understand or identify with. Also, I worked with someone who had an adamant position that animals didn't have souls, so punishing people for animal abuse made no sense. When we brought up that animal abuse is a potential indicator for abuse of humans as sell, he said they should be consequence free until they hurt a human. He was also a "but if you don't worship God what's to stop you from doing bad things?" type.
That just tells me that she is a psychopath who is only held back from killing humans by the fact that God might punish her for it. As an atheist, I don't kill humans because I don't want to. It would be extremely emotionally scarring for me. Apparently for her, it's just a matter of "God would hurt me if I did".
I never really put too much stock in polls, but did you all see the Michael Cohen testimony today? He admitted to skimming money off the top of some payments that Trump was making to a company called RedFinch to bump up his poll numbers through bots. I'm kind of surprised that admission in court wasn't bigger news.
I went to find the article, thank you for posting it. But while I agree it should be a bigger news story simply because it's another story showing just how awful Trump is, but that's why we're not seeing more of it. People are tired of hearing, yet again, that Trump is an insecure cheating narcissist - but keep banging that drum because people need to go vote.
But... I don't think it's as big as you're trying to spin it. This isn't presidential election polling that he botted - and the polling that is being done, while flawed in many ways, is less vulnerable to botting like this. This was a news channel poll on the Internet about the "most notable businessman" or something like that - Internet polling is, extremely frequently, botted.