Former Democratic Senate nominee claims "Ketchup packets are not available in rural areas."

[GeneralMacArthur]

Isn’t this that crazy woman from the documentary with AOC who tried to primary Joe Manchin?

Yes, she grifted a lot of money from dumb progressives, a great many of whom insisted to me that she was the greatest thing ever and would overperform Joe Manchin, and that I was a corporate neoliberal shill for supporting Manchin.  But just like their other embarrassing failures (Tim Canova, anyone?) they're all busy pretending they've never heard of her.... just looks how many likes her tweets are getting these days, they used to get 10K-100K when the machine was on.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Even if it were true, the fact that this was the best response she could come up with shows how below-average she is.

That people are commenting here by laughing against her as being out of touch and had no idea of food deserts, the 'great ketchup shortage' that was caused by the need to ramp up supply chains with Covid and other related issues, which have been discussed here in multiple threads, or the general poverty in rural areas that might make it far less likely for these places to even get packages of ketchup, and to respond after mocking her mercilessly as 'stupid' or 'out of touch' with "oh, maybe it is true after all" shows how below-average many of the commenters in this thread have been.

Smug arrogance based on ignorance only shows the stupidity of the commenter.  Obviously there is no point in apologizing to Swearingin, but, as a suggestion, how about actually learning about the facts of the situation before making stupid and ignorant comments?

I'm sorry for the minor insults in these comments, but there are few things that anger me more than smug and stupid cynicism.

It's a nonsense poverty fetishism comment.

West Virginia isn't some sprawling wasteland.  Even in the rural parts, there are many little towns, which have grocery stores and diners, which have ketchup packets.  Unless you live in a ski resort, there's nowhere in West Virginia where you're not <20 minutes from the nearest McDonalds, of which there are also dozens in the state.

People think West Virginia is just a bunch of hillbillies living up in the Appalachian mountains.  The Appalachians don't even go through WV.  They're primarily in western Virginia and WV only has the western foothills.

[GeneralMacArthur]

In West Virginia, 14.9 percent of  households were food insecure between 2014 and 2016, on average. This is flat from 2011-2013 but higher than 2004-2006 averages.


https://www.chn.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/West-Virginia-state-report-draft-10.13.17.pdf

Between 2017 and 2018, West Virginia’s poverty rate increased by over a percentage point to 19.1 percent

https://catalyst.independent.org/2019/10/30/the-struggles-of-west-virginia/

This is the same thing people did with Trump where they try to take some absurd, outlandish comment and water it down to something reasonable.

The quote is "ketchup packets are not available in rural areas."  It's not "rural areas struggle with poverty and food security."  That would be a reasonable claim and totally uninteresting.  The claim that rural WV is such a barren desert that it's impossible to find the most basic American condiment is just laughable.  Just like virtually everything else she says.

By the way, she's been on a tear.  There are a couple other gems in her recent Twitter history, and she also dramatically "left" the Democratic Party a few days ago.

[GeneralMacArthur]

FWIW my experience with West Virginia comes from driving through it to get from DC to St. Louis.  It was hilly and rural, but doesn't compare to the Appalachians, which I had to drive through to get to West Virginia.  Apparently there are some parts of the mountain range that do go into West Virginia so I was wrong about that.  In terms of amenities and population it didn't seem that different from Kentucky or Western Pennsylvania.  I'm sure there are locations in West Virginia that are completely isolated, but that's true of almost any state.

But whether it takes 20 or 45 minutes to get to McDonalds from the remotest location in WV, this is all just pettifogging the point, which is, while life sucks for poor people in rural WV, they're not so devastated that it's impossible for them to get ketchup.  That's just misery porn, pandering to what leftists on Twitter want to believe.  In another tweet she wrote that poor people never throw parties.

Also this thread title is a little misleading, yes she's a former Dem Senate nominee but she was basically the Alvin Greene of the race; we didn't run anyone because it was a hopeless contest, so she was on the ballot by default because she was the only one delusional enough to try.  It's not like the party endorses her or anything.  She's not even part of the Democratic Party anymore.

[GeneralMacArthur]

The argument was in regards to a broad claim made by GMA (that WV isn't mountainous/Appalachian, that people aren't poor there

Jesus Christ this website f---ing sucks.  Please, by all means, quote the post where I said there are no poor people in West Virginia, or else apologize for lying.

HOLY CRAP A POLITICIAN SAID SOMETHING DUMB/OUT OF TOUCH!!!! We're gonna need at least four pages of GMac effortposts and Kingpoleon non sequiturs to really get this issued settled.

I've only made 4 posts in this entire thread.  That's 4 out of 58.  It feels like I'm filling up the entire thread because everyone else keeps quoting my posts.