President Trump has been a cheerleader for coal miners. But these miners say his administration is failing to enforce limits on a lethal workplace hazard

  • manxu@piefed.social
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    These coal miners didn’t read the fine print: the administration is a cheerleader for coal mining BUSINESSES, not for coal miners. Coal miners, especially sick ones, are just a sunk cost to them.

    • PKscope@lemmy.world
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      As the son of a 30-year coal miner, not reading the fine print is a prerequisite to mining. If they were worried about the finer details the majority of them wouldn’t be there to begin with.

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        I won’t stand for this coal miner slander, they used to be militant unionists agitating for workers’ rights. They were thoroughly crushed and defeated, but not before making major material gains. Efforts have since been made by those in power to make the Appalachian people forget their history, and all that remains of that movement are traumatized and chronically ill elderly folk.

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          It’s a whole 'nother generation and breed of miner, my friend. Those miners understood the power of collective action and the power they held within the nation as a major contributor to the economy and what essentially made the country move.

          Today’s miners, meaning in the last 40-60 years, have been coasting on the battles hard-fought by their fathers and grandfathers. Do you think the miners of today would have fought for unionization or medical benefits? I sincerely doubt it. No, today’s mining culture is a far cry from those who died at Blair Mountain and fought against Pinkertons.

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      Sort of the joke of the industry.

      You bring in some soulless billionaire despot in blue jeans to tell Bari Weis’s CBS that wind farms took our freedom.

      Then a village full of miners get shoved down a big hole when one of them asks about their three month delinquent back pay. This goes completely without mention, except in some Trotsky magazine that your average liberal wouldn’t wipe their ass with.

      The people who get to vote aren’t the ones complaining

  • bthest@lemmy.world
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    Unfortunately dying is the only thing that will keep them from voting Republican.

    It’s just like the COVID-deniers during the pandemic who cried and begged for the vaccine as their lungs filled with fluids, flailing and gasping air like a fish. The tiny few of them who survived the ventilators went right back to voting for anti-vax politicians.

  • TomMasz@lemmy.world
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    What, the anti-worker leader of the anti-worker party is anti-worker? Who would have guessed?

  • ArmchairAce1944@discuss.online
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    I have been saying this for nearly 10 years. How the fuck does Trump do it? Trump has had a lifetime of being a conman, of failing at business, of screwing over his partners and his employees at every turn. Yet for all this he STILL has people who crawl and cower towards him and still act like he is the pinnacle of business success when he is the pinnacle of business failure. His father, Fred Trump, was a grade A asshole (Woody Guthrie even mentioned him in one of his songs) but he actually WAS good at business. All risks that he took were calculated and he planned out his real estate plans very carefully and he absolutely took into account what advisors had to say. He was a terrible boss, yes, and an incredibly racist man, but he still consistently made money off his investments while Trump never did. Even in the 90s when Trump was increasingly becoming a joke there were still people that thought of his as highly successful when he had just gone through a string of embarrassing failures.

    Just how does he do it?

    • fodor@lemmy.zip
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      The underlying problem is that Washington Democrats are largely worthless sleazebags. When you have two parties that both screw over everyone so that billionaires can get richer, often people just throw up their hands and vote for someone, anyone, who might be different. Trump is different.

      And of course many people, tens of millions apparently, love having someone to hate. This is, of course, the underlying motto of today’s Republican party.

    • RunawayFixer@lemmy.world
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      As I understand it, the public perception of Trump was distorted by how he was portrayed on The Apprentice: https://www.psypost.org/new-research-sheds-light-on-the-influence-of-the-apprentice-on-donald-trumps-political-rise/

      The producers at NBC had to jump through a lot of hoops to make Trump appear competent. Their chief marketing officer from that time is very sorry for what he did: https://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2024-10-16/we-created-a-tv-illusion-for-the-apprentice-but-the-real-trump-threatens-america

      Once Trump became the republican candidate, the right-wing media took up the responsibility of filtering and distorting what their audience got to see and hear about Trump.

    • PowerCrazy@lemmy.ml
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      Trumps opponents are gormless democrats who are so out of touch that even when healthcare is the most important issue to 75+% of americans, they will proudly claim that “universal health care will never ever happen.” Or that “Healthcare isn’t their highest priority,” as if 75% of Americans were yearning for bailing out the same banks that they all hate.

      • ArmchairAce1944@discuss.online
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        I was also referring to Trump before he got into politics. Even when he debuted in the 70s and early 80s there were tons of newspapers who pointed how just how full of shit the man was, but there were still others that bought the lie that he was the next Rockefeller when he was absolutely not.

    • null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      Yeah i sure as shit do not know.

      He has no redeeming qualities and seems to make the worst possible choice at every juncture but he inevitably seems to fail upwards.

      I have a few observations.

      He lies about everything all the time with no shame. As in, reality doesn’t matter it only matters what people hear you say.

      He’s always the centre of attention. He’s always doing something controversial and is constantly on everyone’s mind.

      He’s offensive. He offends the sensibilities of every rational person. Everything he says makes half the world feel exasperated and frustrated and angry, while the other half chuckles along because hes made the leftards angry.

      He thinks and talks like an uneducated boomer, and that makes other uneducated idiots feel validated rather than feeling stupid.

    • Zink@programming.dev
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      It’s like if you think of all the ways we influence other people and show our worth to others, all of the most immoral and unethical tactics that actually work in the real world seem to come to Trump instinctively. He doesn’t even have to think about it. I think that helps him instantly jump to conclusions (linkedin filter: he’s decisive and a risk taker!) and have the unearned dunning-kruger arrogance to plow ahead (LF: he radiates confidence and stands up for his beliefs!) and wreck the country just to make some numbers go up for people who otherwise want for nothing.

      Or maybe he’s just being controlled by malicious forces. (linkedin: he has high-level connections in the international community!)

  • markovs_gun@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    Given the number of “coal miners for Trump” stickers I see driving around in coal country, good. Fuck em.

  • Sunflier@lemmy.world
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    West Virginia voted for DJT. DJT fucked them over on this. They got exactly what they voted for.

  • Bizzle@lemmy.world
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    That’s fucked up that guys are still digging coal and getting black lung, there’s no way that shit is cheaper than solar or wind

    • crusa187@lemmy.ml
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      They actually consider working the mines to be their cultural heritage. The number these mining companies have done on these families’ heads is astounding.

      • vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works
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        That’s not all that weird all things considered, just look at anyone named Smith, Miller, or Stewart all of them are names based on their ancestors jobs. That only really happens when your job is your heritage and I’d say that takes about 3-4 generations minimum. Mind you doesn’t make it any less fucked up that they prostate themselves to that shit work.

      • CharlesDarwin@lemmy.world
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        I remember all the alt-right asshats trolling journalists that lost their jobs to “learn to code”. I think that originated in the idea of trying to retrain miners…

    • yarr@feddit.nl
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      Ah, but the cost of the miner with black lung is increasingly handled by that individual or their family.

      If you are a coal miner and you think that a man that lives in a gilded apartment can relate to you and has your best interests at heart you are going to be sadly disappointed.

    • CharlesDarwin@lemmy.world
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      I had a great-grandfather that died of black lung. I thought that was wild to hear about when I was a kid, and I’m Gen X. The fact that it’s still happening is crazy.

  • reddig33@lemmy.world
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    Can someone explain to me why in 2025 people are still ending up with black lung? Don’t they wear respirators on the job to prevent inhalation of silica dust?

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      Over the past few years, mine owners cut on safety while Republicans blocked regulatory enforcement funding.

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        From what I’ve read, that has meant more time on the job, increasing potential exposure. But I still haven’t seen anything related to respirators. Do they not wear them? Are they not provided? Do they not work? Are workers not being washed down to prevent dust inhalation before leaving their shift?

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          They are probably a pain in the ass to wear and the company has no incentive to encourage/mandate use… because just protection people from getting terminal illness for profit isn’t a good enough reason…

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        If you’re not going to wear a mask, then don’t come crying when you get sick. 🤷‍♂️

        But seriously — is this why they are still getting black lung???

        • Garbagio@lemmy.zip
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          Dude it’s so fucking hard sometimes to stick to systemic analysis, these people make it so fucking hard. Like yes, there has been a steady growth in the number of black lung victims in recent years due to safety rollbacks by Republicans, lax training and ppe by business owners (supported by republicans), and in general a growing disregard for health and safety due to a variety of socioeconomic, educational factors, all brought about by Republicans.

          But Jesus Christ, it’s 2025. We knew what caused black lung centuries ago. Like fuck antivaxxers, but at least there is active bullshit linking vaccines to autism. There is a lie to believe, even if its a lie. But these fuckheads thought, what, masks caused asthma? Coal has magic medicinal properties? Its so fucking stupid. No one sold you on black lung, you just fucking did that. How fucking stupid.

          • ArmchairAce1944@discuss.online
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            The ‘study’ linking vaccines to autism was not a study. It was literally a paragraph in a paper that basically said ‘some parents think they saw autism like symptoms emerge a few weeks after they got the vaccine’. That was it. It was a hunch and speculation from the get-go. On top of that, Andrew Wakefield, the doctor behind it all, did that ‘study’ on purpose because he wanted to push his own quack medicine against those specific vaccines. It was a moneymaking fraud scheme from the beginning.

            • Garbagio@lemmy.zip
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              I literally said it was a lie. My point was that antivaxxers may be stupid enough to believe a lie, but at least they need a lie. Miners just are that much dumber.

        • hateisreality@lemmy.world
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          It should be the companies responsibility to keep the employees safe…I would suggest forced liability because companies can’t be bothered to care

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      The head of Health and Safety at my previous job used to work at a mine, and he said that gains in PPE were basically a victim of their own success, in his opinion. Wearing your respirator and other PPE will go a long way towards mitigating these risks, but they’re not the most pleasant things to wear for hours on end. He told me that lots of younger guys would come in, start working and see all the old guys at it with their respirators on, but they’d opt not to wear them whenever they thought they could get away with it, since they didn’t personally know people who developed black lung in the field. That’s just what he had told me, so I couldn’t say how accurate it really is, but given the attitudes I’ve seen from guys in other fields towards wearing all their PPE, it wouldn’t really surprise me if it were largely true.

      • CharlesDarwin@lemmy.world
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        The head of Health and Safety at my previous job used to work at a mine, and he said that gains in PPE were basically a victim of their own success, in his opinion.

        Sounds a lot like the general population when it comes to vaccine efficacy, too. I cannot tell you how many people have told me, since about the 90s, when the denialism really started to get underway, that “I didn’t vaccinate my kids and they never got sick!”

        /facepalm

        I remember talking to my retired grandmother, who worked her entire life as a nurse, about these experiences while she was still alive, and she had zero fucking patience for that shit, since she was of a generation that saw the effects of many of these diseases. It positively enraged her, if you want to be honest. And she was very right to be mad.

        This PPE thing is rather exasperating to hear about, too, but at least people are not putting others, including their own children, at risk, I guess…

          • TronBronson@lemmy.world
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            That’s what I keep reiterating. This is like some weird teenage rebellion from the boomers. They’re like “finally the sane people have died. We can be Nazis now.” All of this is just some way to piss on my grandparent’s grave.

            • CharlesDarwin@lemmy.world
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              People keep referencing that Fourth Turning stuff. People say it’s been largely “debunked”, but I do wonder if there is not something to it…I think the larger problem is not so much the boomers, though. Taco is not even a boomer and he definitely should have known better on the Nazi stuff, but his brain is broken and I doubt his generation has very much to do with it.

              The young males all bro’ing out online, bitching about the dating scene, calling themselves incels, listening to Rogan and Benny Johnson and joining up with nonsense like the Proud Boys are most definitely NOT boomers.

              As a Gen Xer I remember a boomer lecturing me on wearing a shirt from The Cult - the had made use of the Iron Cross and he was concerned I had fallen in with the skinhead stuff. Gen X and certainly boomers had quite a bit of that drilled into our heads about the dangers of fascism. I think it stuck with most of us. As fewer and fewer olds are around to keep that cultural memory alive though, I do wonder…the problem is that even with the people that do know about the dangers of fascism, I think few are really aware that it won’t take the same form as it did in Italy or Germany in the 1930s.

              • TronBronson@lemmy.world
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                I guess I have different experiences where I do see the GenZ kids have all fallen into blatant Hitler worshiping Nazism. But I see a lot of boomers who were proud veterans and sons of veterans who have drank the Koolaide. Also, like who was the one raising these Hitler worshiping GenZ kids? Who raised the JD Vance millennials? These people spawned from somewhere and this world view was fostered for decades…. Who do we blame for all this?

        • ArmchairAce1944@discuss.online
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          You beat me to it. People flocked to that stuff when everyone knew someone who had been afflicted with a preventable malady, but once many of those problems are solved you eventually have a group of people who grew up not knowing anyone who had them and it is easy for them to question why the regulations that prevented them in the first place are needed.

          I mean I heard of things like tuberculosis, and measles and other diseases as a kid, but I never knew anyone who had them… because where I was living everyone was aggressively vaccinated for them and it was seen as a disease of the past. We even had widespread smallpox vaccines even though smallpox was literally extinct in the wild almost a decade before I was born.

          • CharlesDarwin@lemmy.world
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            I remember some of the science/skeptic type of podcasts/blogs I listened to/read in the mid-00s often referencing the fact that vaccines are truly the victims of their own success. I think they are quite right from what I see and what is easily explainable human nature when it comes to risk assessment.

            Sadly, I think it might take something like the current measles outbreak to disabuse these people of their lunacy. I’m Gen X, so I don’t know that too much of this really took root with most of us, though we didn’t really see much of these diseases first-hand either, but we did hear horror stories from older family members (I mentioned my grandmother elsewhere in this thread, but my mother was also a nurse and thought the antivaxxer phenomenon was sheer insanity, too). Though Jenny McCarthy is Gen X, sooooo…it seems at least some of our generation fell for it.

            I think it might be the mid/younger Gen X/millennials that this kind of thing really began with. I doubt too many boomers or older X’ers really fell completely for the anti-vaxxer stuff, at least when raising their kids. I think not seeing first-hand, or at least hearing about, some of the terrors of these diseases from relatives you trust really does have an effect. Sometimes seeing something really does have an impact.

            To compare it to something else - I remember older people and teachers telling us kids about 17 year cicadas. I think I didn’t exactly disbelieve them, but it seemed really, really hard to imagine it to be the scale they claimed. It seemed like the older generations were exaggerating or maybe pulling your leg just a bit. Really? These things are everywhere, making all this noise? Until it happens.

            There is little that can really prepare you for something like that, until you live through it. I think a lot of things in life might be like 17-year cicadas, including the fact that horrifying, awful diseases lie just beyond, waiting for the day when vaccination levels are not sufficiently high to keep herd immunity…and that younger generations sometimes have to actually listen to older generations.

            • TronBronson@lemmy.world
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              Negative captain, they taught the polio epidemic in schools. The problem is we had a history channel growing up and these kids have alt-history YouTube. It’s the internet that did this. Boomers were very attracted to antivax too.

            • ArmchairAce1944@discuss.online
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              I don’t think even an outbreak will necessarily bust people out of their shells. What is going on now is a propaganda apparatus like we have never seen. You mentioned reading through stuff during the mid-00s… and that brought back a memory I had of that time as well, but it more related to religion than medicine (but the topic related). A lot of Islamophobic people (and I am highly convinced that a lot of the people who wrote online about that stuff on line were happily huffing on their own farts) that while the ‘rational’ West does have its share of kooks and fools, they are a tiny minority, while the Islamic world has those people in charge (they don’t… as a general rule anyway).

              The one thing I wish I could go back and say is that it is actually irrelevant if the number of stupid people is tiny or not. What really matters is their proximity to power. I should point out a video by knowing better that showed how even the smallest religious minority influencing policy can have ruinous consequences for generations. In that video towards the 2 hour mark, you’ll see that one of the biggest reasons why the US didn’t enact universal healthcare when many developed countries were doing so is because of the influence of one person belonging to a Christian denomination that didn’t believe in going to the doctor’s office.

              In today’s world you’re also seeing the same shit happening. RFK Jr. is certifiably insane. His beliefs are extreme beyond extremes, but he is the one who is fully in charge of US healthcare, and we are already going to see millions of people die as a result of his actions and who knows if it will be undone.

              Another example is one that happened during Covid-19. South Korea had its lockdowns go well and the pandemic was about to be fully contained… but a small Christian sect in the country refused to abide by any of the regulations… and they were responsible behind most of the outbreak (I need to get the source on that), and I think they might be the ones who mourned Charlie Kirk after he got shot (Also I need to research it).

              • CharlesDarwin@lemmy.world
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                A lot of Islamophobic people (and I am highly convinced that a lot of the people who wrote online about that stuff on line were happily huffing on their own farts) that while the ‘rational’ West does have its share of kooks and fools, they are a tiny minority, while the Islamic world has those people in charge (they don’t… as a general rule anyway).

                I think it’s fine to take strong issue with fundamentalist strains of Islam as being a threat to any hope of continuing the Enlightenment. Much like my feelings about the other two Abrahamic religions and their fundamentalists - I really don’t have much patience for any of them meddling in the American experiment. It’s one of history’s ironies that Islam actually preserved a lot of Western culture, though. Another irony is that you’ll find extreme right wing xtians here concern-trolling about extreme right wing Muslims being homophobic, misogynist, etc. The reality, as you point out, though, is that they don’t really pose a threat to our way of life in the United States, but the fundamentalist xtians operating under plots like the Seven Mountains Mandate do.

                In that video towards the 2 hour mark, you’ll see that one of the biggest reasons why the US didn’t enact universal healthcare when many developed countries were doing so is because of the influence of one person belonging to a Christian denomination that didn’t believe in going to the doctor’s office.

                Watching this now. I didn’t know Christian Science was more than just a fringe even among xtians…

                In today’s world you’re also seeing the same shit happening. RFK Jr. is certifiably insane. His beliefs are extreme beyond extremes, but he is the one who is fully in charge of US healthcare, and we are already going to see millions of people die as a result of his actions and who knows if it will be undone.

                Couldn’t agree more, including what you said about the numbers of kooks. The hardcore antivaccine fringe don’t have a whole lot of numbers (yet), and no one voted for this jackass to be in that position, but here we are…

                but a small Christian sect in the country refused to abide by any of the regulations… and they were responsible behind most of the outbreak

                Sigh. Assuming this is true.

                • TronBronson@lemmy.world
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                  Ya Christian Science appears in many different sects and churches. They all have weird rules about health somewhere, some don’t abide by them, but you will find a lot of strange, religious views mixed in with healthcare across this country and world