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Honestly charity stuff is great and horrible at the same time and you can criticize a lot of it.
But Dolly is not to blame for the system and within that system, dolly seems to be a fucking Staint. Thanks Dolly!
In her entire life, I have seen no evidence that she has EVER said anything as disgusting as Vance does every single time he speaks. In fact, you are hard pressed to criticize her at all. The only thing I have is that she has said she never wants to comment on politics and I just hope that is not because she secretly has bad views but just wants to keep her image despite that. Who knows.
Even if her views didn’t align to mine, the fact that she does not go around espousing it at every turn (just like her faith), is still reason enough to respect the hell out of her. So she could be secretly batshit crazier than Vance, and I’d still respect her.
I mean, if she is secretly a trump supporter I’m pretty sure her reason to keep it a secret would be entirely selfish so I couldn’t agree there. Better than if she shared that view sure but I don’t see it being altruistic. I refuse to think she is a trumper though because if she is, then nothing can be pure in this world.
If she’s actively trying to help educate people, she’s no secret Trump supporter.
I don’t know why I’m getting pushback to a hypothetical that I’ve clearly stated I don’t want to be true and I don’t believe is true. The only reason I even have this as a possible idea is that she keeps her views secret, so it’s not on me either way. It is natural to sometimes be curious about people’s motives even if you think they’re probably a great person.
My theory as someone from Appalachia is that she’s a left leaning centrist trying to bring class consciousness back to the coal mining areas (y’know, where they shot their bosses in literal battles to establish worker unions previously), but she also depends on those local economies to get resources to do this and has to play both sides.
She’s made it her life’s mission to improve the education and literacy rate of the region and has to appear homey and down to earth to the folks living in the south as she doesn’t want to compromise her image. She says things in a vague enough way to not be accused of being a dirty lefty commie (their words, not mine).
I don’t think you deserve pushback, just offering an alternative explanation.
Yup. She wants to help her people and the most effective way of doing it is by educating the kids.
Giving books to children is a super effective way to spend the money. They can educate themselves out of the hole.
It’s actually really subversive. Smart lady. She plays the game quite well. She can’t take an open liberal stance as she would be marginalized, but educating children is difficult to attack.
I have no doubt that she’s a closeted liberal in the south. It’s often how you have to be to survive.
I could easily imagine her as either conservative or liberal or somewhere in between or somewhere outside of that whole spectrum. I can’t imagine that she is a Trumper.
I expect that her reason for not sharing her political beliefs is at least somewhat selfish. She has fans across the political spectrum, different segments of whom would certainly be upset by any political position she espoused. It could even be that she’s concerned about fans being angry and violent depending on what her views actually are.
Regardless, the fact that she doesn’t use her popularity to influence politics makes me respect her all the more. I my opinion, it’s both a smart decision for her, personally, and shows moral character.
Nothing and nobody is perfect, we live in a broken imperfect world and sanity is a myth made up by averages. Demanding she be anything so you can think of her as perfect ignores nuance and her as a person.
No one will ever agree with you on everything but if their actions are good and align with yours then that should be enough.
Seems you entirely missed my point
No I’m calling you out for trying to force your own desires of perfection on someone else. That your sense of morality is black and white and not helpful to anyone.
I didn’t miss it, I didn’t like it.Way to prove you understood nothing, but confidently believe the opposite.
Also way to admit you’re a trump supporter. Since if you weren’t it’d probably be really easy to get the point
Says the person who went to find another of my comments to send a unrelated personal attack based on nothing other than your feelings cause you demand that everyone falls in line with you and agrees on all stances.
Get lost.
Impressive, let’s see Jolene’s Appalachia.
It’s gotta be beyond compare.
Don’t take my country just because you can.
With her no one could compete.
My god, it even has an auburn watermark.
I think it might be relevant to add:
Dolly Parton worked her ass off, GOT LUCKY AND ACKNOWLEDGES IT, to get where she is.
That kind of honesty is early always the way with people from regular etc. backgrounds who made it. Probably because they’re surrounded by people who worked just as hard as they did but, through no fault of their own, never stood a chance of making it through bad luck.
But then you’ll get some nepobaby, whos had over a million spent on their education, claiming to be a genius for earning a million in their lives, despite only (at best) breaking even.
Or worse, somone like Elon who was given enough free capital that he didn’t need to spend on loving to keep spread betting until he got lucky acting like it was all down to him alone and no one else could have done what he did.
They say money unmasks people. She’s a saint.
So she’s like many of the other childless cat ladies I know.
We get the dolly parton books in the mail and they’re great. I read at least one of them every day.
Favorites are “grandpa and Jake” “the rabbit listened” and the most recent one “a book for bear.” The from last month is about sending you octopus to school, but it’s not as popular in our house. It has a lot of factoids about octopi, it’s really for an older audience like 6-8
My younger sister got books from Dolly’s programme. We lived in a shitty little council estate in the North of England, and my little sister got to grow up with more books than I did because of a US country music star. It always blew my mind.
I didn’t know they did it outside the US! That’s awesome!
octopodes or octopuses
Octopeople
It’s strange.
I didn’t think any US politician could be less popular than Hillary Clinton, but the lad’s going for it.
Thats an oddly popular politician to use. Basically a pretty high bar vs trump, palin, bush jr., cheney, nixon at the end, stefanik.
Clinton’s highest approval ratings were always when she wasn’t interacting with the general public. She had a unique kind of anti-charisma; an ability to come off as an out-of-touch patrician whenever she tried to ‘connect’ with normal people. By contrast, in her role as an apparatchik, she enjoyed high approval ratings because she wasn’t expected to court the public and was able to simply project an air of professionalism, which the electorate generally sees positively.
oh yeah. this is spot on. still my whole original reply point was she is still a high bar for vance to be under and there are so many lower bars to use. I am in no way saying she was super popular like her husband or obama or harris. Ill actually never forgive her for the corporate drug benefit giveaway. The whole forcing a yearly figuring out a complex task in folks losing the ablitity to do so is just crazy.
All those people were at least pretty popular with their own side. Nobody was really excited to vote for the wife of a sex-pest former president in the same way they were to vote for a fat racist orange man or a dumbfuck who could barely string a sentence together but he sure did like blowing up Muslims.
I mean up until the whole democratic insider bernie thing she was pretty popular and even post that it does not compare to those I listed. I mean trump is pretty popular with his own people to but its a small subset of the whole. All politicians who have ever won have some sort of set of their own side where they are pretty popular.
Dolly Parton likes Taylor Swift while the orange felon hates Taylor Swift.
Is this about Hillbilly Elegy?
JD “Appalachians are just lazy welfare leeches” Vance
I fucking hate Appalachia as only someone who grew up there can hate it, but God, what a dogshit fucking take from someone else who grew up in that shithole and should know better. Of all the many sins that can be laid at Appalachian regional culture’s feet, ‘lazy’ and ‘welfare leech’ do not feature.
But it was condescendingly paternalistic enough to please liberals and victim-blaming enough to please conservatives, so it was so highly fucking praised when it came out.
Goddammit.
I thought it was about that. I listened to the episode of “If Books Could Kill” on it. And holy shit, JD’s full of shit lol
Michael Hobbs reading the bit where JD questions his sexuality cracks me up.
Thanks for the new podcast recommendation.
You’re welcome lol. I first heard about it here on Lemmy too
Yeah, both I and my father grew up in Appalachia before finally moving away, and I’m not saying it’s a bastion of intellectualism, but that grifting piece of shit doesn’t represent us.
I’m a proud Appalachian. We have some solid history. It’s a shame what’s become of the place. I still live here in West Virginia. Didn’t that lying sack of shit grow up in a suburb of Cincinnati though?
I love and am proud of the history in the place. But as for living there? Man, I was born after right-wing talk radio started inundating the airwaves. Unfortunately, it was never been a pleasant social environment for me to exist in.
Rare case of the past actually being better in some small detail. Bring back labor radicalism in the mountainfolk, please
I fucking hate Appalachia as only someone who grew up there can hate it
As someone who grew up in Florida, this resonates with me so fucking much, lol.
My family traveled quite a bit when I was a kid, and I often found myself riding through Appalachia, and honestly I loved the area around Chattanooga, I genuinely think it’s the most beautiful part of the country, in spite of the kudzu. But it’s probably the only place I could have moved to in the US that would be definitively worse than the place I left a decade ago.
What are the lowest starting and median wages of her employees at Dollywood?
Glassdoor says average pay is $14.90/hr. I don’t know if it is trustworthy or not.
Yeah, at least halfish of her employees are struggling to live. As cheap as the midwest is generally, Pigeon Forge has high property values and high taxes. I know a couple of her employees, they have five people in a shitty two bedroom apartment.
It gets cheaper further away, but then you have commute in the abysmal traffic… so pick your poison.
East Tennessee is not “the Midwest”
The closest thing Ms. Parton ever did to sin was Rhinestone, and that is still one of my favorite movies of all time.
He gets Appalachia totally wrong anyway. I’ve started to wonder if he ever left his grandparents’ home while he was there.
As a skeptic, I went looking to see if if I could find some fault in her fortune. I found that she genuinely is a good person.
Didn’t she finance the research for one of the COVID vaccines as well?
I’m OOTL here. Is Dolly running for VP?
I’m guessing Vance said something insulting about Appalachia.
Vance first rose to prominence a decade ago writing a memoir about growing up in Appalachia, and how the inhabitants were just lazy, violent peons who didn’t know how to pull themselves up by their bootstraps like he managed to do.
Now, let me tell you - I grew up in Appalachia. I can give you a long, LONG fucking list of problems with Appalachian regional culture. It’s not some idyllic paradise; it’s not even ‘normal’ by the low standards of American society. I was glad to escape. But Vance’s memoir, or at least the conclusions he drew from his experiences, was absolute dogshit with very little relation to reality.
It got turned into a movie and everything. Very irritating.
Yeah I don’t get why the meme exists either, but I agree she’d be a better pick than Vance, and by all appearances is an actual good human being
oh definitely no contest, just not sure why anyone is comparing a shiny pearl with a literal turd if there’s no reason to place them in the same room.
As an Appalachian, we have to defend Appalachia’s honor from this turd. We aren’t all cretins, I swear
