Another awful law 6 years in the making, all thanks to people being too lazy to go out and vote.
We are going to be feeling the repercussions of that laziness for decades to come.
In today’s world, we can still see the results of Reaganomics and the terrible Reagan administration and what it did to this country some 4 decades later. Allowing Trump to enter the White House 6 years ago has, and will, continue to have a similar profound negative effect on the trajectory of this country for a long, long time.
Riiiight, always with the excuses. Most of those fall flat when you consider HALF the registered voters can’t be bothered to go vote on election day on most elections. Even in heavily trafficked ones, turnout rarely breaks 60 or 70%. Not saying voter suppression or gerrymandering doesn’t exist, but neither of those would swing an election if we had enough people voting. The excuses have long since gotten old.
Gerrymandering is half the reason people don’t vote. If an election isn’t competitive and there’s significant roadblocks put in your way, you might not vote either. Imagine having two jobs and kids and a long ass line at a voting precinct that isn’t within walking distance.
Lazy idiots like you rather come up with excuses than actually go do what you should be doing. You’re the typical “lazy American” stereotype that fascists count on to get into power. Congrats asswipe.
Lazy idiots like you rather come up with excuses than actually go do what you should be doing. You’re the typical “lazy American” stereotype that fascists count on to get into power. Congrats asswipe.
So I guess your voter outreach is nil then.
Keep it up, I'm sure it'll work out great for you and the causes you champion.
And yes, suppression IS a big enough reason to. Who the fuck on an hourly wage has the luxury of driving/transiting to a distant poll station and wait in line for 9+ hours to vote?
But hey, if it makes you feel better to dunk on them as "Lazy", keep at it, that's sure to convince them /s
Edit: Forgot to mention that you assume all these non-voters would vote for your party. Based on research, a very sizable portion would not.
That site didn’t give much info. It says they are hard working people who are underexposed to political info and don’t feel they can decide. Besides that making them fucking morons (sorry), that still doesn’t excuse their inaction.
It says they are hard working people who are underexposed to political info and don’t feel they can decide.
That's not what it said.
Besides that making them fucking morons (sorry), that still doesn’t excuse their inaction.
There's plenty of data there that explains their inaction. Your refusal to read it doesn't make you right.
It all comes down to giving people a reason they can understand to take the time to vote.
Again, asking an hourly wage worker that can barely make ends meet already to travel/transit and then wait 9+ hours in line to vote is completely unrealistic and not something they should be blamed for.
But hey, like the other guy, keep calling them fucking morons, I'm sure it'll work out great. /s
This is a result of a SCOTUS decision. SCOTUS membership is determined by the president and control of the senate at the time of vacancies. Neither of those are influenced by gerrymandering.
At the core of it this comes down to 2016 when a larger than typical number of people on the left lied to themselves and said “eh, they’re all teh same” and tossed their vote at a third party or just didn’t vote at all. Following that, SCOTUS went from a 4-4 tie (with 1 vacancy) to 6-3 conservative advantange.
I wouldn’t blame laziness, but instead a combination of apathy and people who are more interested in ideological purity than in accepting the available-better such that they would rather complain about the unavailable-best.
RBG refusing to retire in 2012-2014 also shares blame. She could have retired then and the court would be 5-4 instead.
Since you actually seem to be asking… There is no gerrymandering at the federal level in the presidential election. You could argue that the electoral voting system is somehow a form of this, but it isn’t the same as intentionally drawing districts to mathematically skew the advantage to the party drawing the map. That said, because electoral votes are based upon congressional representation, they do weigh smaller, emptier states more heavily. US senators are entirely free from gerrymandering as they are directly elected by popular vote. Small, empty states do have more power as a result and by design, for better or worse.
And they have 0 say in the Supreme Court. They have a minor say in creating other courts, but it’s been a long time since anything has meaningfully changed there either.
It doesn’t really matter if a state is “empty”, what matters is the population not the density.
And for what it’s worth: of the ten states with the least population, half generally vote for Democrats (HI, VT, DE, RI, ME). They are often overlooked in these discussions because they are mostly small in area too.
Population density absolutely matters, because when an ignorant person looks at an electoral map, by county, it looks like a couple small blue dots in a sea of red. If the wrong person shows them that map, it can become pretty simple to convince them that Democrats are cheating them because, “just look at all that red!”
It is also about how districts in larger, more empty states, use that mostly empty area to gerrymander their blue population centers. You can’t do that in smaller, highly dense, states.
I was responding to someone who said that “empty” states have disproportionate power in the electoral college and Senate. Their emptiness does not give them undue power, regardless of what ignorant people think.
Hawaii isn’t in the ten least populous states and Maine isn’t a blue state. It’s not a straight sort, but Republicans far and away benefit from the unequal representation of the Senate and Electoral College.
Maine has voted for the Democratic candidate in every presidential election in the past 30 years. It’s true that it has a Republican Senator, but if that means it’s a battleground state then by the same logic so are Montana and West Virginia. Those incumbents are popular despite their party, but when they finally leave the Senate they will be replaced by someone in the opposite party.
But you’re right that Hawaii is not one of the ten smallest. It’s eleventh. However, I left out New Hampshire, which voted for the Democratic candidate in every presidential election in the past 30 years except one. So of the eleven smallest states, six consistently send Democrats to the electoral college.
While it’s still arguable that Republicans have unfair representation in the Senate and EC, the issue is more complicated than simply blaming the small states. Or for that matter the big states: the top ten include three red (FL, TX, OH), three blue (CA, NY, IL) and four battlegrounds (GA, NC, MI, PA).
it’s still arguable that Republicans have unfair representation in the Senate and EC
LOL, wut? There’s nothing arguable about that. Republicans very definitely have an unfair senate and electoral advantage entirely related to being more popular in less populated states (which, with the notable exceptions you’ve highlighted, tend to also be more rural).
You’re cherry picking top ten and bottom ten like the whole swath of states in between don’t also have unfair allocation and thus don’t matter, while being pretty inconsistent with your battleground state definitions to suit your sorting needs (NH is blue because it only voted R once in 30 years, while every battleground you listed has the same history, and red Florida and Ohio have been 50/50).
While your point about population vs. density is correct, everything else seems to be trying to muddy the waters about the EC rather than just point out an interesting factoid or offer a pedantic correction. There’s no serious argument that the EC isn’t unfair from an individual voter perspective and biased toward one side from a national perspective.
First, I’m using the common definition of battleground states, which is states that are currently considered winnable by both sides. That doesn’t include New Hampshire, or any of the smallest states.
Second, arguable means you can make a good argument for something, so I think you just proved that it’s arguable. It is not a slam dunk.
The only advantage of less populated states is that they get two “free” electors regardless of their population. This effect is strongest in small states, where it helps both parties equally.
Looking at all the states, the maximum advantage to a presidential candidate is the difference between the number of states they won times two. For example, if both candidates win 25 states, then the two “free” electors per state will cancel out and the electoral college will be determined solely by the number of representatives in the states that each side wins. Or to put it differently, if the Constitution were “fixed” so that electors were strictly awarded by population, then the winner would never change in a 25 to 25 split.
Of course, if one candidates wins 26 states and the other wins 24 states, then the first candidate could potentially get four “unfair” electors by winning more small states. But historically, the electoral college is won by much larger margins. The only modern candidate who might have won if the Constitution were “fixed” would have been Gore, and that was a highly unusual election. Otherwise, the small state advantage hasn’t made a significant difference in our lifetime.
You’re arguing that the EC’s unfairness is unimportant, not that it’s fair. And ignoring the senate imbalance where just a couple extra votes is a massive change.
So since it’s unimportant, let’s change it to be fair. Except I don’t think you really feel it’s unimportant and actually care very much about those two extra votes.
You seem to be implying that I don’t want Democrats to win, but I can assure you that’s not the case. I still do think that the extra votes in the EC are unimportant, and we should focus our efforts on things like voter suppression that have an actual impact.
I am especially concerned when Democrats are defeatist about elections (ie “The Constitution is hopelessly stacked against us in the EC”). Fair or not, the presidency is very winnable. So is the Senate: when was the last the time the GOP held a supermajority? They may have a rural advantage, but we have other advantages, including educated voters and women.
And I can think of two or three amendments that I would work towards (cough, Second Amendment!) before worrying about the EC.
I think they have a good point though. Sure, at a basic level, you can’t gerrymander a senate election. But you start with the state, draw the district lines. Now the state is gerrymandered, often packing dense districts with democrats. Now your state legislature (gerrymandered as hell) passes a law that says 2 voting machines per district. You bet your ass that affects national elections. Ol’ Jim-Bob has to share his two voting machines with 150 other people, whereas a city dwelling Democrat has to share theirs with a few thousand.
That 1 vacancy should have been Obama’s pick. It was fucking stolen from him, and now we’re paying the price of “decorum”.
Of course, Republican hypocrites shoved another conservative justice on the bench before RBG’s body was even cold, even after Trump lost the election (not to mention impeached).
It wasn’t just 4 years of Trump that we had to endure, it’s now three lifetime conservative appointments to the supreme court. So progressive legislation is stalled for another 30+ years. Our generation will be as old as the fucking Boomers are now before we get another chance at kicking out the conservatives, whose ideology is literally killing the planet. Gen Z and the generation that follows them will rightfully blame us for our inaction.
Or instead of giving up we could make court expansion and reform a litmus test in future Democratic primaries. And/or normalize the idea that judicial rulings need to be enforced by someone else and they too have agency.
Because allowing this to continue for much of our remaining lives is also decorum. We live in an unjust system, but it’s not just how life has to be for the next 30 years.
I don’t entirely disagree, but I’d like to see an actual roadmap for how such changes would be implemented. Voting for somebody who promises court expansion and reform, but doesn’t have the support of either the legislative or judicial branches and doesn’t have a concrete method of implementing it, seems like they are set up to fail.
I want to see more ruthless politicians on the left as well, but not if they can’t actually follow through with their promises.
Pass law changing the number of justices on the court
Support from the legislature is all that’s important. If the justices say “you can’t do it”, then ignore them because clearly they can. The constitution says very little about the supreme court and its size has been changed multiple times before. This is just doing history again.
ML? I don’t know what that stands for, but I did see the absurdity of Bernie and so-called progressive subs that were trying to convince people that a vote for Trump would further Bernie’s agenda more than a vote for Hillary. They also were trying to convince people to “stick it to the DNC” and simply sit out the vote.
So the foreign agents running those subs were trying to flip some votes and push voter apathy onto others. Doesn’t take much to change an election and the stuff I saw was clearly just a teeny, tiny part of their larger misinformation campaign. A few key votes here or there and that would easily explain Trump’s victory.
There is no way this stuff isn’t happening on Lemmy now. In fact, I guarantee it is.
China cannot win against Taiwan. (win = gaining control of the nation with its chip fabs still operational)
But that will not stop them from trying.
China is falling off a demographic cliff thanks to two generations of the one child policy. In a decade it will not have enough fighting age citizens to even attempt it.
But Xi wants to be remembered as the great re-unifier of China and he turned 70 this year, so time is running out to do so.
The 21st National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party will be held in 2027.
I expect China and Xi to force the issue before then.
Honestly this next election is shaping up to be a shit show… again. My prediction is that the Republican party puts forth another candidate who has his potential pool cannibalized by Trump running independently and Biden campaign come under question due to his old age and low approval rating leading to a push for a different blue candidate.
Drafts should be considered a war crime against your own people. If you can’t defend your country without a draft, it doesn’t deserve to be defended because there are obviously not enough people willing to fight for it. Turning your citizens into slaves and sending them into the meat grinder makes you a monster.
I have the opposite view. A country at war should have the draft, and there should be no exceptions, so that the politicians who send other people’s children off to fight also have to send their own.
Most soldiers in a “professional” army are there because their families are poor and they have few other options to make a living.
Make declaration of war a mandatory vote for every citizen. Anyone who votes “yes” (or illegally abstains) gets registered for the draft. Anyone who votes “no” is unregistered.
I know it’s not really feasible because governments need to be able to react swiftly in times of war. But these days with computers and cell phones, there’s very little reason that the government couldn’t push a “go download our secure voting app/visit this link to cast your vote” notification via the emergency alert broadcasting system.
How do you reckon it would work when it comes to age? Is the vote limited just to people of military age? Does this mean that whether or not to declare war effectively falls in the hands of ~18 - 30 year olds?
Or is it open to everyone and even some old warhawk could be drafted? Are handicapped people not allowed to vote? Women that don’t meet combat standards?
There is always the option to draft them into some sort of non-combat role. But if you knew you were only going for a non-combat role, it could be a lot easier to vote “yes”.
There will always be exceptions, for example for disabilities or medical conditions. Most of those exceptions will be more accessible to wealthy or influential families that can afford to pay off doctors than poorer families.
Trump and Biden both avoided the draft with “1-Y” (medical) exemption. Keep in mind that more than half the 27 million eligible males were exempted or disqualified for some reason, so it’s not as if this was something only politicians did.
Lack of a draft is almost directly and solely responsible for the current quagmire of the US military - when we had a draft, normal people were pulled and had to serve with other normal people. They had real lives to go back to. They had family and friends who would listen to them and write their representatives to complain if the use of those human resources was inappropriate. Seeing body bags flying home and a televised razing of a foreign jungle turned a lot of people off from war. And they made their voices heard.
Now, the only people being asked to pay attention are career military professionals. They often do not have a job or life outside of the military to tie them to normal life. They've also gotten smarter about where they fly corpses in, so the news can't provide a solid day-by-day count of the wasted lives. These folks aren't pushing back against the worst excesses of the military, because their college benefit or their pension require them to shut up and just do what they're told.
There's a great documentary called Sir! No, Sir! about the vibrant protest movement from within the military, driven mostly by draftees during Vietnam.
I don't disagree with your initial reasoning, but there's a different take that says that what we have allowed is for the worst of us to control the policy for all of us, with nearly no external oversight.
This is a difficult problem to solve for a society though. The army is needed, because it’s what allows your country to exist. In time of peace, draft is really not optimal, because people are taken a year of their life for absolutely nothing. But the army need to keep its structure alive and functioning, or there’ll be nothing when it’s needed.
The army of professionals is a good solution, and they do a hard job to keep an important piece of the state alive when no one cares about it.
Ultimately I think it’s better if poor people make the core of the army because it means ultimately the safety of the nation is in their hands. Still, culture of the military men should be better taken care of, and elitism of the command structure should be fought.
Making education so expensive that the only way for some to pursue education is to die for their country is a crime. If majority of your citizen view being part of army is only for poor people, your country does not deserve to be protected because obviously not enough people willing to fight for it. Turning your citizens into slaves and sending them into the meat grinder makes you a monster.
The problem is that it isn’t a separate issue, it’s the same body (Congress, with WH support) that imposes these problems and then offers “solutions” to the impacted population in exchange for acting as a jackbooted thug overseas.
I would be more likely to go the other way starship troopers style only those with the character to defend their country should have the right to vote in that country. Those leeching off the system and letting others doing the difficult things shouldn’t be rewarded
First thing was that no draft is stupid and even something like starship troopers needing to serve the country in some way to be worth of a vote isn’t the worst idea in the world so it’s better than that. You don’t think there is anything at all in having some means of people that are willing to do more for their country be it military or otherwise should have more of a vote than those that do nothing and would leave it the second it isn’t doing enough for them? Some people want to make their country and the world a better place, why should they get less than someone that does nothing.
I’m not arguing that Turing should have been on the front line or that the Bevin Boys weren’t serving their country and willing to do everything possible to help their country and should have equality. Just those trying to escape when things go bad shouldn’t have the same rights when things go well off the backs of others.
Dude “You should have to provide service to the abstract idea that is ‘the nation’ in order to get your human rights” is just fascism, no matter how you try to spin it.
starship troopers the movie was a literal send-up of fascism and you are sitting here arguing that we should do fascism so absurd it is the realm of actual parody
or you’re advocating for the book’s straight up fascism. either way, you should eat a bullet, nazi.
Heinlein was a fascist, full stop. Verhoeven didn’t even finish the book before he directed the movie because he hated the fascist ideology in it and tried to satirize it in the movie but both the actors involved and a lot of audience members missed the satire.
Absolute state of the world that the view that people should defend their country is facism. I’m sure the allies didn’t see themselves as fascist in WW2
You don’t think the allies out people in jail for not helping with the war effort?
Right tell me how every example of “you need to do something for your country to get citizenship” is fascism? Plenty have people have argued that you need to be educated to vote or to have land to vote or whatever. They are shit systems yes but they aren’t fascism.
You’re just using an over used internet buzzword. It’s going to lose all meaning eventually.
Obviously not read starship troopers thet make it very clear that anyone can serve and will be accommodated. And they make it very clear that being in the military isn’t the only way to serve.
It’s just above providing for your country and earning the right to vote.
draft is precisly because of that necessary , its put a general price on “Imperial adventure” while proffessional army will recruit itself from the lower classes and can be spend easly (they choose soo ) , its a bad as its forces the underprivledge to die for an empire whos fruits the privledge eat , while avoiding the blood…
The elites will just dodge the draft anyway. At least without a draft, a sufficiently unpopular war is more likely to be shut down by people refusing to enlist. Also, you can’t advocate for slavery by arguing that it solves some other problem.
Volunteer service means wars are waged outside of public consciousness now. The Afghanistan war went on for 20 years and was essentially invisible to most people in the US. The Fed openly trying to increase unemployment is at least partially motivated by the military recruitment issues going on right now. Volunteer wars are fueled by the lives of desperate poor people.
I’m not sure there are no situations in which draft’s are permissible. If we were in a socialist society and a fascist government invades and I were Commissar of War you bet your ass the ex-bourgeois are getting drafted.
100% agree. Me presenting it as a choice by a single Commissar for War is more tongue-in-cheek. The answer whether or we should do it is contextual but my point is that there are clear cases which I can imagine in which drafting would be clearly justified, even if of only certain groups.
But responding to a question of whether or not we should do something by saying it would be decided democratically is evading the actual question of what you would put forward or support as appropriate policy in such a scenario. If everyone one responded that way then nothing would be decided.
In this hypothetical wouldn’t the boogies and Kulacks would be in Gulags already? A bunch would be willing to sign on if it meant they might get an early release after the war. No draft necessary.
I’m really not convinced that they would normally prefer to fight fascists on the front lines than to stay in a gulag, uncomfortable as the latter might be.
Yeah that would work on it, but what I did was try to use AyyyyyOC-big which due to some mess up is no longer big. Instead it’s just more saturated haha
MANILA, Aug 10 (Reuters) - Analog chipmaker Texas Instruments (TXN.O) is planning to invest up to $1 billion to expand its Philippine facilities, the Southeast Asian nation’s presidential communications office said on Thursday.
Texas Instruments is set to submit in two weeks an application covering the expansion of its sites north of the capital Manila, the presidential office said.
being a merchant seaman on a job in that area takes major balls, your life is essentially in the hands of a probably drunk and definitly unfriendly Russian captain, all over nothing
BEIJING, Aug 13 (Reuters) - China’s northern region of Inner Mongolia reported two cases of bubonic plague on Saturday, following a previous infection that was detected on Aug. 7, the local government said.
The two people infected are the husband and daughter of the previous case, the government said in a statement on its website.
All close contacts have been quarantined and have shown no abnormal symptoms, according to the statement.
Cases of bubonic plague infection, a highly infectious disease that is spread mostly by rodents, are low in China, with most found in Inner Mongolia and northwestern Ningxia region in recent years.
Bubonic plague is the most common form of plague, which can be fatal if not treated in time, according to the World Health Organization.
So this is really "silly season" when it comes to news and that apploes to political news like this.
The primary season hasnt even started and they're already saying trump has won. It's nonsense. People can build and lose momentum over the course of the race. All that's happened so far is the obvious challenger DeSantis has imploded. But it's a big race and anyone could gain attention and votes in the primarys.
Wenl just need to look back to previous races to see the bookies favourites not winning. Trump himself was an outside chance. Bill Clinton came back to win the nomination. The idea anyone has a clue what is going to happen in this race is nonsense.
The question to be asked though is is there anything Trump can realistically do to make him lose support among Republicans? Because it doesn't seem to be happening.
An the others in the field arent going to win anything at under 10%. Desantis is closes at 14% vs Trumps 50% so yah unless the devil shows up and runs, it aint happening...
reuters.com
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