No, but it is a problem when you talk to any random black person and inevitably find out they have been pulled over more times in 6 months than you have in your entire life.
This is the symptom of the problem.
Cops believe that "black people commit more crimes", so they pull over more black people just to make sure they aren't criminals and they are so jumpy because of this "fact" that they often shoot first.
It's the same story all over. White Nationalists hear that omg we're being invaded by rapists and criminals. Islamic terrorists hear omg the westerners are destroying our religion and our values! Christian terrorists hear that omg the muslims are destroying our religion and our values.
People are being radicalized against each other. Due to the guy we have in the White House, y'all queda terrorism is on the rise all over the globe. This will incite more violence as the people who are targeted by terrorism will want to strike back because their radicals will tell them look we're being attacked.
People are getting killed because leaders and opportunists find it convenient to gain power by exploiting people's fears of the "others".
I'm not going to fault someone for condemning terrorism. Saudi Arabia is the primary funder of terrorism today, by far. I don't care if the person who says it is Donald Trump or Ilhan Omar; it's still true. Saudi financing is the ONE reason the modern jihadi ideology even exists; the whole thing is spread by Saudi-funded madrassas. They have their ideological justifications in relation to Israel and the United States, but the main reason the philosophy exists is because the Saudis have been pouring money into jihadi schools all across the Middle East. Why do you think jihadi ideology is so rare in Indonesia and other Muslim-heavy countries outside the Middle East? It all comes from jihadi madrassas, and Saudi Arabia is the primary source of their funding.
Ilhan Omar is pointing out a dirty secret that politicians have been afraid to say aloud for decades. Isn't that what we need from politicians today, to speak out about injustice and where it comes from?
I'm not going to fault someone for condemning terrorism. Saudi Arabia is the primary funder of terrorism today, by far. I don't care if the person who says it is Donald Trump or Ilhan Omar; it's still true. Saudi financing is the ONE reason the modern jihadi ideology even exists; the whole thing is spread by Saudi-funded madrassas. They have their ideological justifications in relation to Israel and the United States, but the main reason the philosophy exists is because the Saudis have been pouring money into jihadi schools all across the Middle East. Why do you think jihadi ideology is so rare in Indonesia and other Muslim-heavy countries outside the Middle East? It all comes from jihadi madrassas, and Saudi Arabia is the primary source of their funding.
Ilhan Omar is pointing out a dirty secret that politicians have been afraid to say aloud for decades. Isn't that what we need from politicians today, to speak out about injustice and where it comes from?
It is utterly astounding given our foreign policy over the last 15 or so years, in which we have gone to war in Afghanistan, Iraq and are CLEARLY itching for a confrontation with Iran by ripping up a successful nuclear deal, that Saudi Arabia, who is arguably a bigger problem than ALL of those countries is given not only a free pass, but we are signing new weapons deals with them. How does one ostensibly fight Islamic terrorism and IGNORE Saudi Arabia in that equation?? The vast majority of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudi, yet the 3 aforementioned countries above are the ones who have received the lion's share of our attention?? Why?? The answer is, to quote Ms. Omar, "the benjamins".
Also, not for nothing, but when Elliot Abrams, who somehow crawled out of his neo-con crypt and was appointed by Trump to be the envoy in the Venezuela situation, appeared before Congress, Ilhan Omar was the ONLY person on that House committee who called him out for what he was, which was someone who helped directly facilitate war crimes in Central America in the '80s, and who would to this day be a convicted criminal in regards to Iran-Contra if he had not been pardoned by Poppy Bush.
Like I said, there is something DEEPLY disturbing about what is going on in the darkest corners of the internet. Let's assume this is, again, all for the "lulz". What is humorous about it?? If it's a joke, what is the punchline??:
Does anyone think that if this was a Islamic terrorist attack and these kind of tributes were popping up on Steam that authorities wouldn't immediately start tracking the IP addresses of the posters and putting them on some kind of terrorist watch list?? What are the chances that is happening here??
This movement has grown to the place we are at today because EVERYTHING is excused with a wink and a nod to "irony" or "humor", but those moments of "bro, I was just kidding" are nothing but a fairly pathetic attempt at trying to attain fake plausible deniability for things that you ACTUALLY believe, but don't actually want to take social responsibility for.
The degeneracy of the human race has taken a sharp nose dive lately. I blame social media and a materialistic society for it, my opinion of course.
A Hero is someone who stands up to the tyrant and helps those who cannot help themselves. In this day and age the Anti-Hero is glorified and given praise. This has been methodically introduced and carried out over the last two decades and has been accelerated by social media. Today (meaning the last four years) we are only seeing the beginning and the worst is yet to come. If we continue to allow countries like Saudi Arabia, Russia and Israel to push propaganda that destroys the faith we have in our Nations and peoples in them, we will destroy ourselves from the inside and they will not even have to fire a shot.
The USA is the test subject, Trump is also doing what he is suppose to, cause chaos. You can't have serious discussions about Health Care and Climate Change if you are continuously fighting to keep your, and the ones around you, sanity.
The degeneracy of the human race has taken a sharp nose dive lately. I blame social media and a materialistic society for it, my opinion of course.
A Hero is someone who stands up to the tyrant and helps those who cannot help themselves. In this day and age the Anti-Hero is glorified and given praise. This has been methodically introduced and carried out over the last two decades and has been accelerated by social media. Today (meaning the last four years) we are only seeing the beginning and the worst is yet to come. If we continue to allow countries like Saudi Arabia, Russia and Israel to push propaganda that destroys the faith we have in our Nations and peoples in them, we will destroy ourselves from the inside and they will not even have to fire a shot.
The USA is the test subject, Trump is also doing what he is suppose to, cause chaos. You can't have serious discussions about Health Care and Climate Change if you are continuously fighting to keep your, and the ones around you, sanity.
I agree the chaos is the point, but specifically in regards to this online culture, where did this start, what caused it?? In the early-2000s (when I was in my early-20s), we all had video games, we all had internet access. We also (like all young kids) had no money and shitty jobs. Nothing like this existed. The biggest controversy was music piracy.
If I told you that 4chan and the like are cesspools for the CIA and Mossad, would you believe me?
I mean, I'm not trying to get into conspiracies here, I'm just trying to pinpoint what started us down this road online. People always says "anonymity" but I think that doesn't explain nearly as much as people think it does, especially if you see some of the stuff that is posted right out in the open on Facebook.
From my understanding when someone uses the word conspiracy it means they are not ready to go down that rabbit hole, yet. I totally understand it and would love to have that conversation with anyone when they are ready.
I wouldn't use anonymity either, a few keystrokes and you can find anything on anyone nowadays. Maybe fear of repercussions or the lack thereof? Take Facebook, you can join the groups you like and that keeps you in an echo chamber until you believe the shit that your groups are spewing. You then venture forth into the World Wide Web thinking that it's ok to say certain things or talk a certain way until you meet resistance. Now you go back to your groups and tell them what you had to deal with in the wild and come to the conclusion that it's better to stay inside your echo chamber so no NPC can corrupt you. Or you start to think that everyone else is wrong and only you and your groups are correct so the only way to combat that is with hate, vitriol and shitposting. Wash, Rinse and repeat.
If I told you that 4chan and the like are cesspools for the CIA and Mossad, would you believe me?
If you told me that I'd say I have no idea if they do or not but either way I'm not interested in 4channing or 8chaning or 12channing or whatever.
If governments are radicalizing people then that's a problem.
It does kind of ring true in the "offer crime and catch criminals" kind of way that cops have been known to do like inciting crime where there was none before then using that excuse to continue catching the operation to catch more crime. It becomes a self fulfilling prophecy type thing. At a certain point, it's just cops offering crime, right. Anyway, having cia and moussad in 4chan sounds something like a honeypot or sting type operation.
At any rate, if it is a counterintelligence 4 dimensional chess anti-crime thing it sure seems like the law enforcement aspect of it isn't working good.
There are plenty of problems mentioned in this article, but the major one is this:
The bill would also require public university students to indicate on a new form if they will stay in Iowa after graduation. If they say they are leaving, the state would cancel their voter registration.......This provision only applies to students at UI, ISU and UNI—not students at private colleges in Iowa. Smith said lawmakers could look at changing that.
This is absurd. If you are going to college, you are either going to use your old address (likely your parents house) to vote, or you are going to change your residency to where you are living while in college. As long as you are only voting at ONE place, and not both of them, it's none of the state of Iowa's goddamn business if you plan to "stay there after graduation". What about the kids who are attending school from out of state?? This option would basically require them to sign a loyalty pledge to the state of Iowa, or possibly have to travel home (which could be hundreds or thousands of miles) if they want to vote.
And let me ask this question: since Republicans in Iowa think college students who don't plan on staying there shouldn't be able to vote while they ARE there, are they still obligated to pay state taxes, or are you going to exempt them from that too?? Because I think we know what the answer to that question is. Moreover, you'll notice it is only the 3 PUBLIC schools this is applying to. Private (translation: schools for rich kids) colleges are not included.
And this doesn't even get into the needless restrictions being placed on mail-in ballots, no early-voting on campus, and this continuous insistence on "exact match" signatures (as I have said before, I haven't signed my name the same way twice in over 15 years, and it is usually nothing more than an illegible scribble).
Shit, at this point, why do we even bother letting groups of people who are more likely to vote Democratic cast ballots at all?? Let's just put our cards out on the table here. Republicans in state after state after state continue to prove time after time after time that they simply do not believe demographics that tend to vote Democratic have any right to do so, because they keep trying to implement impediment after impediment to make it as hard as possible to do. There are no such efforts ANYWHERE being undertaken by Democrats against Republican-leaning demographic groups. I have asked time after time for anyone to present a single example, and no one has ever been able to do so. So seriously, just put it in your party platform that one of your main goals is to do everything possible to limit access to the ballot for people who tend to voted Democratic. At least then we'll be having an honest conversation. This kind of BS is why the HR 1 bill Democrats passed and Mitch McConnell predictably mocked on the Senate floor is THE most important issue facing this country. Which is that one political party no longer believes in democracy at all.
This guy is starting from absolutely zero name recognition, but everything he has done leaves me more and more impressed. He needs to be on the debate stage with the bigger names. If nothing else, I could get behind this guy running against Donald Trump as a litmus test of whether we are actually worth saving as a nation, because if THIS kind of empathy lost to Trump's rhetoric, then there is really nothing worth preserving. I'd venture that I am halfway to voting for this guy just on these two things alone. This guy seems like the genuine article:
There are plenty of problems mentioned in this article, but the major one is this:
The bill would also require public university students to indicate on a new form if they will stay in Iowa after graduation. If they say they are leaving, the state would cancel their voter registration.......This provision only applies to students at UI, ISU and UNI—not students at private colleges in Iowa. Smith said lawmakers could look at changing that.
This is absurd. If you are going to college, you are either going to use your old address (likely your parents house) to vote, or you are going to change your residency to where you are living while in college. As long as you are only voting at ONE place, and not both of them, it's none of the state of Iowa's goddamn business if you plan to "stay there after graduation". What about the kids who are attending school from out of state?? This option would basically require them to sign a loyalty pledge to the state of Iowa, or possibly have to travel home (which could be hundreds or thousands of miles) if they want to vote.
And let me ask this question: since Republicans in Iowa think college students who don't plan on staying there shouldn't be able to vote while they ARE there, are they still obligated to pay state taxes, or are you going to exempt them from that too?? Because I think we know what the answer to that question is. Moreover, you'll notice it is only the 3 PUBLIC schools this is applying to. Private (translation: schools for rich kids) colleges are not included.
And this doesn't even get into the needless restrictions being placed on mail-in ballots, no early-voting on campus, and this continuous insistence on "exact match" signatures (as I have said before, I haven't signed my name the same way twice in over 15 years, and it is usually nothing more than an illegible scribble).
Shit, at this point, why do we even bother letting groups of people who are more likely to vote Democratic cast ballots at all?? Let's just put our cards out on the table here. Republicans in state after state after state continue to prove time after time after time that they simply do not believe demographics that tend to vote Democratic have any right to do so, because they keep trying to implement impediment after impediment to make it as hard as possible to do. There are no such efforts ANYWHERE being undertaken by Democrats against Republican-leaning demographic groups. I have asked time after time for anyone to present a single example, and no one has ever been able to do so. So seriously, just put it in your party platform that one of your main goals is to do everything possible to limit access to the ballot for people who tend to voted Democratic. At least then we'll be having an honest conversation. This kind of BS is why the HR 1 bill Democrats passed and Mitch McConnell predictably mocked on the Senate floor is THE most important issue facing this country. Which is that one political party no longer believes in democracy at all.
There are plenty of problems mentioned in this article, but the major one is this:
The bill would also require public university students to indicate on a new form if they will stay in Iowa after graduation. If they say they are leaving, the state would cancel their voter registration.......This provision only applies to students at UI, ISU and UNI—not students at private colleges in Iowa. Smith said lawmakers could look at changing that.
This is absurd. If you are going to college, you are either going to use your old address (likely your parents house) to vote, or you are going to change your residency to where you are living while in college. As long as you are only voting at ONE place, and not both of them, it's none of the state of Iowa's goddamn business if you plan to "stay there after graduation". What about the kids who are attending school from out of state?? This option would basically require them to sign a loyalty pledge to the state of Iowa, or possibly have to travel home (which could be hundreds or thousands of miles) if they want to vote.
And let me ask this question: since Republicans in Iowa think college students who don't plan on staying there shouldn't be able to vote while they ARE there, are they still obligated to pay state taxes, or are you going to exempt them from that too?? Because I think we know what the answer to that question is. Moreover, you'll notice it is only the 3 PUBLIC schools this is applying to. Private (translation: schools for rich kids) colleges are not included.
And this doesn't even get into the needless restrictions being placed on mail-in ballots, no early-voting on campus, and this continuous insistence on "exact match" signatures (as I have said before, I haven't signed my name the same way twice in over 15 years, and it is usually nothing more than an illegible scribble).
Shit, at this point, why do we even bother letting groups of people who are more likely to vote Democratic cast ballots at all?? Let's just put our cards out on the table here. Republicans in state after state after state continue to prove time after time after time that they simply do not believe demographics that tend to vote Democratic have any right to do so, because they keep trying to implement impediment after impediment to make it as hard as possible to do. There are no such efforts ANYWHERE being undertaken by Democrats against Republican-leaning demographic groups. I have asked time after time for anyone to present a single example, and no one has ever been able to do so. So seriously, just put it in your party platform that one of your main goals is to do everything possible to limit access to the ballot for people who tend to voted Democratic. At least then we'll be having an honest conversation. This kind of BS is why the HR 1 bill Democrats passed and Mitch McConnell predictably mocked on the Senate floor is THE most important issue facing this country. Which is that one political party no longer believes in democracy at all.
How is that legal??
It's probably not based on this Supreme Court case, but the make-up of that court has changed a WHOLE LOT since this was handed down:
It's legal if Trump and McConnell keep putting up more crooked judges like Bart O'Kavanaugh or Ellis III who view the Constitution as optional in their war to make America a Conservative hellhole where Conservative criminals don't face justice.
Here's the NZ shooter flashing the white power symbol.
In 11 states now, assuming the wording of this applies to them all, your vote for the President literally doesn't matter anymore.
"Gov. Jared Polis signed a law Friday that would allot the state's electoral college votes to whichever candidate won the national popular vote. The Washington Post previously reported the law's signing."
Just think about that for a second. Every single vote in that state could go to a particular candidate, and if that isn't the what the national popular vote currently is your votes literally don't matter anymore, because the state is going to represent the opposite candidate despite the will of the entire state they are supposed to be representing.
It was bound to happen though. It's not surprising that every one of them is a democratic state. They don't like the philosophy of representation this country was founded on because it doesn't grant them permanent power and so they will just change the game and deny their own states any actual representation at all. If the votes of the state align with yours, it is purely by coincidence of the voting patterns of others and not because your vote matters.
In 11 states now, assuming the wording of this applies to them all, your vote for the President literally doesn't matter anymore.
"Gov. Jared Polis signed a law Friday that would allot the state's electoral college votes to whichever candidate won the national popular vote. The Washington Post previously reported the law's signing."
Just think about that for a second. Every single vote in that state could go to a particular candidate, and if that isn't the what the national popular vote currently is your votes literally don't matter anymore, because the state is going to represent the opposite candidate despite the will of the entire state they are supposed to be representing.
It was bound to happen though. It's not surprising that every one of them is a democratic state. They don't like the philosophy of representation this country was founded on because it doesn't grant them permanent power and so they will just change the game and deny their own states any actual representation at all. If the votes of the state align with yours, it is purely by coincidence of the voting patterns of others and not because your vote matters.
That is an interesting way of looking at it but recall that the current system is broken and millions of people were disenfranchised by it. And look at how bad things are right now for America that a con man got foisted upon us despite receiving fewer votes than the other candidate.
You are right some people's votes don't count and this is merely correcting this injustice that gave us a con man President who was the loser of the national vote. We need to stop this tyranny of the minority system that we currently have that the founding fathers did not want.
Actually, if you care to look up how stupid the idea of "electors" actually is, you'll find out just why the entire idea is so antiquated. Because it is really nothing more than 538 individual peope who are bound to vote one of two ways: a.) by whatever State law dictates or b.) basically however they want. These are not just numbers, these are actual people who have the real power, long after election day. And if those individuals aren't bound by state law, they are, ostensibly, free to vote for whoever they choose. If enough electors from enough states that don't bind them to vote a certain way were to meet in secret and decide to throw their votes, they could deny ANYONE who won the electoral college or popular vote the Presidency. Aside from the stupidity of it in modern times to begin with, the entire thing is ludicrous. We have an election, and then the entire thing is turned over to 538 people to cast the votes that actually matter, and many of them are free to do whatever they want.
Nevermind the fact that one of the places that is choosing to do this (Washington DC) literally has NO representation in the House or Senate, even though their population is equal to that if of least 3 or 4 small states. Besides, in the unlikely event that Trump again wins the college and loses the popular vote, he has already indicated that the police, military, and biker gangs are "on his side" (against whom one wonders) ready to carry out street justice if things don't go his way that night. But your beef is not with any individual states, but with the very system you are defending that has from day one thrown the real power to a miniscule number of actual people.
And it isn't even remotely true that these votes "wouldn't count". Every one of them of them would count toward the total popular vote in the country that these particular states (because Federalism, right??) have decided will be the barometer of how their electors are bound. You are acting like the result is preordained, when it fact is is contingent on winning a vote, it just happens to be the national vote and not the state one. They still count in every way, shape, and form. They would simply not be using the same metric as other states that don't. Again, the very system you are defending to the death is what allows this in the first place. There is no uniformity, it's 538 people bound either by the whims of the laws of 50 separate states or, literally, nothing at all.
The system was working exactly as intended, there isn't any injustice to correct. Every state represents the people of that state. Those states have a vote, and the winner of the vote in that state is supposed to be who that state supports. That is the state representing you, and what you voted for.
If the state isn't taking your vote into account, and electing whomever regardless of what the voters in that state wanted, this is just straight disenfranchisement in an electoral system.
I'm not going to relitigate the merits of the Electoral system, as i've stated many times I find it a perfectly valid, arguably the best known method of representation for a large nation of many different subcultures, needs, and beliefs as this one. Anyone who wishes to debate that particular point can look at my earlier statements.
Regardless of how you feel about the electoral system, this objectively takes the Presidential voting power out of the hands of those states voters in this system. It makes their vote all but irrelevant.
There is a bill being introduced in Missouri that would REQUIRE residents to not only own a gun, but specifically own an AR-15:
A lawmaker wants most residents between the ages of 18 and 35 to own an AR-15 type rifle. The bill filed by Rep. Andrew McDaniel, R-Deering, would require residents to own such a weapon by August 2020. The bill specifies an AR-15 as "any semi-automatic rifle that is modeled on the AR-15 rifle design by ArmaLite, Inc." McDaniel's bill applies to people who are 18 years and older - but under 35 - and are "not prohibited by law or court order from possessing a firearm." The bill it titled the "McDaniel Militia Act." It has not yet been assigned to a committee.
Requiring people to own a gun?? And in this case, a specific TYPE of gun?? How would this be any different than requiring people to eat Kraft Macaroni and Cheese on Tuesdays and Thursdays?? The actual wording of section 3 of this bill says, verbatim, "Every resident of this state shall own at least one AR-15".
Regardless of how you feel about the electoral system, this objectively takes the Presidential voting power out of the hands of those states voters in this system. It makes their vote all but irrelevant.
The states voters votes will actually count. Right now it doesn't for a lot of voters, millions as a matter of fact. In the current system, some states are special snowflakes and their votes count for more than others, this corrects that imbalance.
We'd argue adjusting the system would move power from arbitrary lines on a map and give it back to the actual voters.
I've gone over this a 100 times. The math doesn't lie. In regards to Presidential elections the voters of Wyoming get an electoral vote for roughly every 166,000 residents of that state. The voters of California get one for every 727,000. Which means that voters in Wyoming are 4.3x more powerful in Presidential elections than voters in California.
Moving on to the Senate is even more egregious. Wyoming gets a Senator for every 250,000 people. California gets a Senator for every 20 million people. A person in Cheyenne has 80x as much Senate voting power as a person living in Sacramento. That is not a typo. 80x more.
The House is supposed to be where things supposedly even-out, as it is ostensibly based on population. But since there is a hard cap of members, it doesn't. It would ONLY be fair if the baseline for how many House reps each state gets is based on the number of people in the lowest population state, which is of course Wyoming. It has roughly 500,000 and one House Representative. California has 40 million people and 53 reps. Again, basic math tells us that California is only getting a rep for every 750,000 people. Which means that California is under-represented in the House by a full 27 seats. So even in the ONE place where things are supposed to be even, Wyoming voters still have a 1.5x more powerful vote for the House of Representatives.
So, let's recap, again, based on basic math:
Presidential votes: 4.3x more powerful
Senate votes: 80x more powerful
House votes: 1.5x more powerful
And people have the unmitigated gall to say we need to protect the rest of the country from California from making all the decisions. All available mathematical evidence tells us that it is California who needs to be protected from the rest of the country. You can make the argument all day about how our system is just protecting the rights and views of rural voters in low-population states. Fine, it is DEFINITELY doing that (in spades). But in order to facilitate that, you have to create literal super-citizens who have votes that are MANY TIMES more powerful than those who live in more populated ones. The argument on one side is "one person, one vote". It isn't inherently unfair in any way. You can crow all day about media markets and where candidates would or would not visit, but that is all subjective nonsense that isn't tangible in any way. What we KNOW is that the side that argues for the current system is, in every way, asking for people who live in small states to not only be protected from this so-called "tyrannical majority", but you are, by default, making the voters in those states INFINITELY more powerful than those in the larger states we are supposed to be worried about. Only one of these systems is in any way "unfair". Small state voters are receiving more affirmative action in their voting power than any minority could ever HOPE to achieve by way of getting a job or getting admitted to a college. These people are by every statistical measure MORE important than those in larger states. They have more rights because their vote has more power and weight. It isn't even debatable.
Translation, we can't get out shit together, we stupidly voted to leave, but please bail us out anyway because we're incapable of dealing with the shitstorm we unleashed on ourselves. It's about time the EU just says "go pound sand".
This is what happens to countries when nationalism kicks in. Because the irony is that the nationalists of one country seem to be sufficiently narcissistic that they forget everyone else has national interests too... and Britain managed to book itself a handicap match vs Ireland with the rest of the EU in the other corner.
Churchill: "How is it that the great English parties are shaken to their foundations, and even shattered, almost every generation, by contact with Irish affairs?" Answer: because they didn't take Ireland seriously till they choked on it.
I'm not going to relitigate the merits of the Electoral system, as i've stated many times I find it a perfectly valid, arguably the best known method of representation for a large nation of many different subcultures, needs, and beliefs as this one. Anyone who wishes to debate that particular point can look at my earlier statements.
It's also, arguably, the worst. I agree with @jjstraka34, the idea that the power of a single vote is not equally distributed among all those who can cast a vote is inherently undemocratic in nature.
The current system is almost indistinguishable from saying that African American's votes should only mean half as much for electing the president as white people's. Replace African American with Californian, and white people with Wyomingite.
The only difference is theoretically, you could move from California to Wyoming - but it's hardly ever that simple. No one should ever be compelled to move from a state simply because they're voting power has been disenfranchised.
I'm not going to relitigate the merits of the Electoral system, as i've stated many times I find it a perfectly valid, arguably the best known method of representation for a large nation of many different subcultures, needs, and beliefs as this one. Anyone who wishes to debate that particular point can look at my earlier statements.
It's also, arguably, the worst. I agree with @jjstraka34, the idea that the power of a single vote is not equally distributed among all those who can cast a vote is inherently undemocratic in nature.
The current system is almost indistinguishable from saying that African American's votes should only mean half as much for electing the president as white people's. Replace African American with Californian, and white people with Wyomingite.
The only difference is theoretically, you could move from California to Wyoming - but it's hardly ever that simple. No one should ever be compelled to move from a state simply because they're voting power has been disenfranchised.
This isn't even mentioning the fact that the OTHER branch of government, the Supreme Court, is voted on by the Senate (well, sometimes they vote, other times they just refuse to until the guy constitutionally given the power to make the pick is out of office), which is where California is, by far, the most disadvantaged. So this idea that California and "San Francisco values" are going to run roughshod over the rest of the country is so far from the actual truth as to be farcical. If anything, we have made the average voter in this state about as powerful as a piece of tumbleweed in Montana.
Comments
This is the symptom of the problem.
Cops believe that "black people commit more crimes", so they pull over more black people just to make sure they aren't criminals and they are so jumpy because of this "fact" that they often shoot first.
It's the same story all over. White Nationalists hear that omg we're being invaded by rapists and criminals. Islamic terrorists hear omg the westerners are destroying our religion and our values! Christian terrorists hear that omg the muslims are destroying our religion and our values.
People are being radicalized against each other. Due to the guy we have in the White House, y'all queda terrorism is on the rise all over the globe. This will incite more violence as the people who are targeted by terrorism will want to strike back because their radicals will tell them look we're being attacked.
People are getting killed because leaders and opportunists find it convenient to gain power by exploiting people's fears of the "others".
Waiting for anyone to call her Islamophobic because she mentioned Saudi Arabia and money in the same sentence. I suspect I'll be waiting a long while.
Ilhan Omar is pointing out a dirty secret that politicians have been afraid to say aloud for decades. Isn't that what we need from politicians today, to speak out about injustice and where it comes from?
It is utterly astounding given our foreign policy over the last 15 or so years, in which we have gone to war in Afghanistan, Iraq and are CLEARLY itching for a confrontation with Iran by ripping up a successful nuclear deal, that Saudi Arabia, who is arguably a bigger problem than ALL of those countries is given not only a free pass, but we are signing new weapons deals with them. How does one ostensibly fight Islamic terrorism and IGNORE Saudi Arabia in that equation?? The vast majority of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudi, yet the 3 aforementioned countries above are the ones who have received the lion's share of our attention?? Why?? The answer is, to quote Ms. Omar, "the benjamins".
Also, not for nothing, but when Elliot Abrams, who somehow crawled out of his neo-con crypt and was appointed by Trump to be the envoy in the Venezuela situation, appeared before Congress, Ilhan Omar was the ONLY person on that House committee who called him out for what he was, which was someone who helped directly facilitate war crimes in Central America in the '80s, and who would to this day be a convicted criminal in regards to Iran-Contra if he had not been pardoned by Poppy Bush.
https://kotaku.com/valve-removes-over-100-steam-tributes-to-suspected-new-1833328548
Does anyone think that if this was a Islamic terrorist attack and these kind of tributes were popping up on Steam that authorities wouldn't immediately start tracking the IP addresses of the posters and putting them on some kind of terrorist watch list?? What are the chances that is happening here??
This movement has grown to the place we are at today because EVERYTHING is excused with a wink and a nod to "irony" or "humor", but those moments of "bro, I was just kidding" are nothing but a fairly pathetic attempt at trying to attain fake plausible deniability for things that you ACTUALLY believe, but don't actually want to take social responsibility for.
The degeneracy of the human race has taken a sharp nose dive lately. I blame social media and a materialistic society for it, my opinion of course.
A Hero is someone who stands up to the tyrant and helps those who cannot help themselves. In this day and age the Anti-Hero is glorified and given praise. This has been methodically introduced and carried out over the last two decades and has been accelerated by social media. Today (meaning the last four years) we are only seeing the beginning and the worst is yet to come. If we continue to allow countries like Saudi Arabia, Russia and Israel to push propaganda that destroys the faith we have in our Nations and peoples in them, we will destroy ourselves from the inside and they will not even have to fire a shot.
The USA is the test subject, Trump is also doing what he is suppose to, cause chaos. You can't have serious discussions about Health Care and Climate Change if you are continuously fighting to keep your, and the ones around you, sanity.
I agree the chaos is the point, but specifically in regards to this online culture, where did this start, what caused it?? In the early-2000s (when I was in my early-20s), we all had video games, we all had internet access. We also (like all young kids) had no money and shitty jobs. Nothing like this existed. The biggest controversy was music piracy.
If I told you that 4chan and the like are cesspools for the CIA and Mossad, would you believe me?
I mean, I'm not trying to get into conspiracies here, I'm just trying to pinpoint what started us down this road online. People always says "anonymity" but I think that doesn't explain nearly as much as people think it does, especially if you see some of the stuff that is posted right out in the open on Facebook.
From my understanding when someone uses the word conspiracy it means they are not ready to go down that rabbit hole, yet. I totally understand it and would love to have that conversation with anyone when they are ready.
I wouldn't use anonymity either, a few keystrokes and you can find anything on anyone nowadays. Maybe fear of repercussions or the lack thereof? Take Facebook, you can join the groups you like and that keeps you in an echo chamber until you believe the shit that your groups are spewing. You then venture forth into the World Wide Web thinking that it's ok to say certain things or talk a certain way until you meet resistance. Now you go back to your groups and tell them what you had to deal with in the wild and come to the conclusion that it's better to stay inside your echo chamber so no NPC can corrupt you. Or you start to think that everyone else is wrong and only you and your groups are correct so the only way to combat that is with hate, vitriol and shitposting. Wash, Rinse and repeat.
Just a theory.
If you told me that I'd say I have no idea if they do or not but either way I'm not interested in 4channing or 8chaning or 12channing or whatever.
If governments are radicalizing people then that's a problem.
It does kind of ring true in the "offer crime and catch criminals" kind of way that cops have been known to do like inciting crime where there was none before then using that excuse to continue catching the operation to catch more crime. It becomes a self fulfilling prophecy type thing. At a certain point, it's just cops offering crime, right. Anyway, having cia and moussad in 4chan sounds something like a honeypot or sting type operation.
At any rate, if it is a counterintelligence 4 dimensional chess anti-crime thing it sure seems like the law enforcement aspect of it isn't working good.
https://www.iowapublicradio.org/post/republican-senators-advance-wide-ranging-changes-iowa-election-laws#stream/0
There are plenty of problems mentioned in this article, but the major one is this:
The bill would also require public university students to indicate on a new form if they will stay in Iowa after graduation. If they say they are leaving, the state would cancel their voter registration.......This provision only applies to students at UI, ISU and UNI—not students at private colleges in Iowa. Smith said lawmakers could look at changing that.
This is absurd. If you are going to college, you are either going to use your old address (likely your parents house) to vote, or you are going to change your residency to where you are living while in college. As long as you are only voting at ONE place, and not both of them, it's none of the state of Iowa's goddamn business if you plan to "stay there after graduation". What about the kids who are attending school from out of state?? This option would basically require them to sign a loyalty pledge to the state of Iowa, or possibly have to travel home (which could be hundreds or thousands of miles) if they want to vote.
And let me ask this question: since Republicans in Iowa think college students who don't plan on staying there shouldn't be able to vote while they ARE there, are they still obligated to pay state taxes, or are you going to exempt them from that too?? Because I think we know what the answer to that question is. Moreover, you'll notice it is only the 3 PUBLIC schools this is applying to. Private (translation: schools for rich kids) colleges are not included.
And this doesn't even get into the needless restrictions being placed on mail-in ballots, no early-voting on campus, and this continuous insistence on "exact match" signatures (as I have said before, I haven't signed my name the same way twice in over 15 years, and it is usually nothing more than an illegible scribble).
Shit, at this point, why do we even bother letting groups of people who are more likely to vote Democratic cast ballots at all?? Let's just put our cards out on the table here. Republicans in state after state after state continue to prove time after time after time that they simply do not believe demographics that tend to vote Democratic have any right to do so, because they keep trying to implement impediment after impediment to make it as hard as possible to do. There are no such efforts ANYWHERE being undertaken by Democrats against Republican-leaning demographic groups. I have asked time after time for anyone to present a single example, and no one has ever been able to do so. So seriously, just put it in your party platform that one of your main goals is to do everything possible to limit access to the ballot for people who tend to voted Democratic. At least then we'll be having an honest conversation. This kind of BS is why the HR 1 bill Democrats passed and Mitch McConnell predictably mocked on the Senate floor is THE most important issue facing this country. Which is that one political party no longer believes in democracy at all.
How is that legal??
It's probably not based on this Supreme Court case, but the make-up of that court has changed a WHOLE LOT since this was handed down:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symm_v._United_States
Here's the NZ shooter flashing the white power symbol.
"Gov. Jared Polis signed a law Friday that would allot the state's electoral college votes to whichever candidate won the national popular vote. The Washington Post previously reported the law's signing."
https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/16/politics/colorado-presidential-vote-electoral-college-law/index.html
Just think about that for a second. Every single vote in that state could go to a particular candidate, and if that isn't the what the national popular vote currently is your votes literally don't matter anymore, because the state is going to represent the opposite candidate despite the will of the entire state they are supposed to be representing.
It was bound to happen though. It's not surprising that every one of them is a democratic state. They don't like the philosophy of representation this country was founded on because it doesn't grant them permanent power and so they will just change the game and deny their own states any actual representation at all. If the votes of the state align with yours, it is purely by coincidence of the voting patterns of others and not because your vote matters.
That is an interesting way of looking at it but recall that the current system is broken and millions of people were disenfranchised by it. And look at how bad things are right now for America that a con man got foisted upon us despite receiving fewer votes than the other candidate.
You are right some people's votes don't count and this is merely correcting this injustice that gave us a con man President who was the loser of the national vote. We need to stop this tyranny of the minority system that we currently have that the founding fathers did not want.
Nevermind the fact that one of the places that is choosing to do this (Washington DC) literally has NO representation in the House or Senate, even though their population is equal to that if of least 3 or 4 small states. Besides, in the unlikely event that Trump again wins the college and loses the popular vote, he has already indicated that the police, military, and biker gangs are "on his side" (against whom one wonders) ready to carry out street justice if things don't go his way that night. But your beef is not with any individual states, but with the very system you are defending that has from day one thrown the real power to a miniscule number of actual people.
And it isn't even remotely true that these votes "wouldn't count". Every one of them of them would count toward the total popular vote in the country that these particular states (because Federalism, right??) have decided will be the barometer of how their electors are bound. You are acting like the result is preordained, when it fact is is contingent on winning a vote, it just happens to be the national vote and not the state one. They still count in every way, shape, and form. They would simply not be using the same metric as other states that don't. Again, the very system you are defending to the death is what allows this in the first place. There is no uniformity, it's 538 people bound either by the whims of the laws of 50 separate states or, literally, nothing at all.
If the state isn't taking your vote into account, and electing whomever regardless of what the voters in that state wanted, this is just straight disenfranchisement in an electoral system.
I'm not going to relitigate the merits of the Electoral system, as i've stated many times I find it a perfectly valid, arguably the best known method of representation for a large nation of many different subcultures, needs, and beliefs as this one. Anyone who wishes to debate that particular point can look at my earlier statements.
Regardless of how you feel about the electoral system, this objectively takes the Presidential voting power out of the hands of those states voters in this system. It makes their vote all but irrelevant.
A lawmaker wants most residents between the ages of 18 and 35 to own an AR-15 type rifle. The bill filed by Rep. Andrew McDaniel, R-Deering, would require residents to own such a weapon by August 2020. The bill specifies an AR-15 as "any semi-automatic rifle that is modeled on the AR-15 rifle design by ArmaLite, Inc." McDaniel's bill applies to people who are 18 years and older - but under 35 - and are "not prohibited by law or court order from possessing a firearm." The bill it titled the "McDaniel Militia Act." It has not yet been assigned to a committee.
Requiring people to own a gun?? And in this case, a specific TYPE of gun?? How would this be any different than requiring people to eat Kraft Macaroni and Cheese on Tuesdays and Thursdays?? The actual wording of section 3 of this bill says, verbatim, "Every resident of this state shall own at least one AR-15".
The states voters votes will actually count. Right now it doesn't for a lot of voters, millions as a matter of fact. In the current system, some states are special snowflakes and their votes count for more than others, this corrects that imbalance.
We'd argue adjusting the system would move power from arbitrary lines on a map and give it back to the actual voters.
Moving on to the Senate is even more egregious. Wyoming gets a Senator for every 250,000 people. California gets a Senator for every 20 million people. A person in Cheyenne has 80x as much Senate voting power as a person living in Sacramento. That is not a typo. 80x more.
The House is supposed to be where things supposedly even-out, as it is ostensibly based on population. But since there is a hard cap of members, it doesn't. It would ONLY be fair if the baseline for how many House reps each state gets is based on the number of people in the lowest population state, which is of course Wyoming. It has roughly 500,000 and one House Representative. California has 40 million people and 53 reps. Again, basic math tells us that California is only getting a rep for every 750,000 people. Which means that California is under-represented in the House by a full 27 seats. So even in the ONE place where things are supposed to be even, Wyoming voters still have a 1.5x more powerful vote for the House of Representatives.
So, let's recap, again, based on basic math:
Presidential votes: 4.3x more powerful
Senate votes: 80x more powerful
House votes: 1.5x more powerful
And people have the unmitigated gall to say we need to protect the rest of the country from California from making all the decisions. All available mathematical evidence tells us that it is California who needs to be protected from the rest of the country. You can make the argument all day about how our system is just protecting the rights and views of rural voters in low-population states. Fine, it is DEFINITELY doing that (in spades). But in order to facilitate that, you have to create literal super-citizens who have votes that are MANY TIMES more powerful than those who live in more populated ones. The argument on one side is "one person, one vote". It isn't inherently unfair in any way. You can crow all day about media markets and where candidates would or would not visit, but that is all subjective nonsense that isn't tangible in any way. What we KNOW is that the side that argues for the current system is, in every way, asking for people who live in small states to not only be protected from this so-called "tyrannical majority", but you are, by default, making the voters in those states INFINITELY more powerful than those in the larger states we are supposed to be worried about. Only one of these systems is in any way "unfair". Small state voters are receiving more affirmative action in their voting power than any minority could ever HOPE to achieve by way of getting a job or getting admitted to a college. These people are by every statistical measure MORE important than those in larger states. They have more rights because their vote has more power and weight. It isn't even debatable.
This is what happens to countries when nationalism kicks in. Because the irony is that the nationalists of one country seem to be sufficiently narcissistic that they forget everyone else has national interests too... and Britain managed to book itself a handicap match vs Ireland with the rest of the EU in the other corner.
Churchill: "How is it that the great English parties are shaken to their foundations, and even shattered, almost every generation, by contact with Irish affairs?" Answer: because they didn't take Ireland seriously till they choked on it.
It's also, arguably, the worst. I agree with @jjstraka34, the idea that the power of a single vote is not equally distributed among all those who can cast a vote is inherently undemocratic in nature.
The current system is almost indistinguishable from saying that African American's votes should only mean half as much for electing the president as white people's. Replace African American with Californian, and white people with Wyomingite.
The only difference is theoretically, you could move from California to Wyoming - but it's hardly ever that simple. No one should ever be compelled to move from a state simply because they're voting power has been disenfranchised.
This isn't even mentioning the fact that the OTHER branch of government, the Supreme Court, is voted on by the Senate (well, sometimes they vote, other times they just refuse to until the guy constitutionally given the power to make the pick is out of office), which is where California is, by far, the most disadvantaged. So this idea that California and "San Francisco values" are going to run roughshod over the rest of the country is so far from the actual truth as to be farcical. If anything, we have made the average voter in this state about as powerful as a piece of tumbleweed in Montana.