Humna, humna,
One of the greatest lies about the American Revolution is that the Americans did it by themselves.
England had a reckoning at that time and her enemies made sure she paid it.
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It was the French what won it. Without them, you’d still be speaking English.
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We don’t have a seriously right wing electorate. We have a barely red electorate and a lot of billionaire money that rushed in after Citizens United. The only thing that’s keeping them in power now is gerrymandering, voter suppression laws and that billionaire money.
And, of course the credulousness and caprice of the “moderate” white people in the Raleigh and Charlotte 'burbs who now decide every election.
Now the electorate that was here when I moved to this State in the mid-80’s, that was a seriously right wing electorate. Beginning in 1980 with the completion of the Great Sorting of the bigots into the GOP.
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One thing the Internet and social media have done is to overinflate white supremacists’ sense of power and influence. Because they get “a lot” of support on various web forums, they believe the country is a power-keg ready to pop, like they are/have, but in reality there really isn’t any widespread support for a race war.
They didn’t learn anything from the pre-Internet Oklahoma City bombing, which was supposed to start the race war too. John Locke and other political philosophers point out that true governmental change is always hard because inertia keeps things the same until conditions are truly abhorrent and force change. Most people just want to live and let live and changing that dynamic only really happens when too many are truly destitute and have no option except to fight. And we are no where close to anything like that in the U.S.
But “race warriors” build themselves up by seeing only what they want to see, so of course, they will continue to believe they are one domestic terrorist attack away from the war breaking out. If it weren’t so tragic and dangerous, it reminds me of Calvin (and Hobbes) trying to build a robot to make Calvin’s bed and spending/wasting 10x more effort than if he had just made the bed in the first place. These people would be absurd if they didn’t have such easy access to high-powered weaponry.
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Of course many of them do vote…I think the R’s tend disproportionately toward the anger response, especially with a media empire designed to cultivate it. I’m just addressing the apathy problem, which is usually chalked up to some American flavor of shallowness, moral vacuity, or “kids today” selfishness.
If we re-linked election results to concrete outcomes that affect people, as we just saw with Dobbs, a lot of that apathy might evaporate. Of course, the main way out of that death spiral is…voting.
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A combo of the two.
Though the war ended at Yorktown, the occupation continued for nearly 3 years.
Also, Yorktown is a blessing, please refer to the attempt to retake Savannah.
Get out the vote? I mean, what else is there to do?
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He didn’t say that
I think the “FO” phase of “FAFO” will be an unpleasant surprise to these “patriots” - if they disturb the cow-like torpor of the average American by, say, mildly inconveniencing them for more than 30 seconds, their support will vanish instantly.
Shoot up a few transformers during the Superb Owl and see how much support that gets you.
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I would argue that it is not rational, but justified, meaning people can justify why they don’t/didn’t vote, but that justification is still voting against your best interests.
Every vote matters, even in a losing cause. Elections aren’t sporting events, I know, alert the media!, so close does count. The elected officials, in theory, represent the interests of all the people in their jurisdiction, not just the ones that voted for them, they’re supposed to consider their needs as well, think how best to serve the interests of all the people they represent.
52-48 is much different than 54-46 in an election, in theory. And so long as the media and the politicians think winning is a mandate to run roughshod over everyone who didn’t vote for you-votes for the other person(s), minors and unregistered voters, documented and undocumented et al-we will continue to get bad results, like Boebert, bad governance like McCarthy and Jordan in the House.
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They’re also too stupid and steeped in their own stew of bullshit to comprehend that liberals know how to shoot too. And we fucking will. In decades to come you’ll be able to tell what side people fought on because every fascist dickhead will have at least one bullet wound in their fat ass, earned while running away from liberals who fought back.
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Of course you gloss over the whole point, that there won’t be a fight. Unless and until too many people in the US are really fighting for their lives, starving and destitute, normalizing factors will push people away from fighting against each other. Opportunists and the unhinged will lash out, but there is ultimately no appetite for whole-sale war writ large.
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The primary is something like the 22nd of this month (I get back to WI on the 18th, with just enough time to return my ballot).
Then the actual election is in April, which I’m staying in WI just long enough to cast my final vote there.
The problem is, the primary is 2 best of 4. We have two progressive and two conservative candidates. If the Right wants to keep the court, they have to depress non-Right vote turnout, which won’t be hard to do, since not much else is on the ballot.
I don’t know how this is going to turn out.
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When I’m copying photos for here, I do a right-mouse click and copy the image.
Then, right mouse click here to drop it in the box.
Sometimes, I will have to save it to my desktop and then click the icon above:
to upload it from my desktop. Less common.
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I prefer happy thoughts n my fingers are crossed.
Must be awkward to type (or play piano).
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We proved it with the Spring primary in 2020 when Robin Vos famously stood outside a polling place in the heart of the COVID pandemic in full hazmat regalia and insisted it was absolutely safe to vote in person.
We fixed his wagon in that primary (and subsequent general) and elected a progressive justice to replace a conservative hack. That hack went on to weigh in on a couple of crucial decisions in his last days on the bench as an F-U to voters who sent him home.
The new justice, whomever it may be, won’t be seated until August from an April election result.
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I can’t, for the life of me, figure out how gerrymandering is legal. I know it’s cliche, but it is literally the politicians picking the voters, not the other way around as it should be.
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Well you need a source of law to make it illegal, and there mostly isn’t one. Personally, I would find it in the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment. But SCOTUS currently doesn’t see it that way. So states get to draw their districts however they want to so long as they (and this is also Equal Protection) contain more or less the same number of people.
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